“How easy is it for a man to get into the chorus?” was my next query.
“If he has a good second bass or high tenor voice, it’s a cinch.”
I then discovered that physique counts more than it used to, not good looks, for make-up will cover freckles or sallow skin, but a fellow must be well-built, and know how to hold himself.
The other chap, also from Chicago, used to be in the electric business, but with his brother he happened to belong to a lodge of the Order of the Maccabees. They could both sing and dance, and at an entertainment of the lodge did so in public. This put the stage bee in the head of the younger, and through cheek and shameless recitations of utterly fictitious engagements he had already filled, he procured a chance to do Pish-Tush in a “Mikado” company that stranded after two performances.
Prevarication, in fact, seems to be the order of the day in the theatrical business, so that I cannot for the life of me make out why one member of the profession should ever believe what the other says, knowing the rule of the road, as it were, and what he would say himself under similar circumstances.
This Earl Stanley (the grandiloquent stage name my second chorus friend chose for himself) knew nothing about making-up and learned it by deftly following the motions of the man he was assigned to dress with, who actually remarked on the newcomer’s aptness in the art.
“You two fellows,” I observed, “were lucky to get an all-summer engagement with ‘The Governor’s Son’ on the roof, after ‘George Washington, Jr.,’ closed. All the chorus men were not held over, by a long shot.”
“All the good ball players were,” replied Lisle, and then it came out that Cohan is a baseball fiend, and to play good ball, all other things being equal, assists a man in getting a job in his companies, each of which sports its nine.
Oh, as to a chorus man’s pay, it ranges from eighteen to thirty dollars a week, all costumes being furnished by the management.