and Nevada, and he has afforded me the following interesting bit of random recollection. “Wallace was held dear in every Western mining camp. He was a banjoist, and when the miners heard him coming down the road, singing the old ’49 songs, there used to be a general cry of ’Here comes Wallace!’ and work would stop for the day. In ’The Girl of the Golden West’ [1905] I introduced a character in memory of the ’Jake’ Wallace of long ago; I gave him the same name, made him sing the same songs, and enter the poker-saloon to be greeted in the same old hearty manner. When negotiations were under way between the great composer Puccini and myself for ’The Girl of the Golden West’ to be set to music, I took him to see a performance of the play. As we sat there, I could feel no perceptible enthusiasm from him until Jake Wallace came in, singing his ’49 songs. ’Ah!’ exclaimed Puccini, ’there is my theme at last!’”
Of Mrs. Bates and her ill-fated husband he gives this reminiscence: “Both Mrs. Bates and her husband were sterling actors [they were players of respectable talent, well trained in the Old School—W.W.]. Mrs. Bates was a slight little woman, full of romance and for the greater part of our acquaintance much given to melancholy. I look back on her prime, and I know of no actress who gave a more satisfactory interpretation of Camille than she did. Her Marie Antoinette was also very impressive. Mr. and Mrs. Bates soon left for Australia, but before they went, as a token of friendship, I was given many manuscript plays and costumes which the two would not need. Soon after Mr. Bates was mysteriously murdered. Many months passed, and I heard that Mrs. Bates was again in San Francisco, staying at the Occidental Hotel. So I called upon her. ’I only have Blanche to live for now,’ she said, and while we sat there she called for her little daughter to come to her. That was my first meeting with my future star. Thereafter little Blanche was put to school, and I went on the road with Mrs. Bates, playing Armand Duval to her Camille. Then I lost sight of her for some time until at last one day I was walking with ’Jimmie’ Barrows, when he began to tell me of a famous actress who was boarding at his house. ’Her name is Mrs. Bates,’ declared ’Jimmie,’ and when I went home with him I found my old friend again. Blanche had pulled out, like a fast growing flower, blithesome and gay; but her mother seemed to have parted with the last drop in the cup of her happiness, and during our entire tour showed the nervous strain she had experienced during the awful times in Australia. ’It is so difficult for me to go back to the different theatres and tread the stages we played on so often together,’ she would say. ’I seem to see Frank’s face everywhere, in the shadows of the wings and out in the cold empty spaces of the auditorium when we are rehearsing. I wonder who struck him down.’
“I felt a great sympathy for her, and she and I became almost like brother and sister. Never shall I forget those days and the long walks we used to take under skies that held all the warmth and splendor of southern Europe, along roads that wound their tree-embowered way through the hills to the little monastery nestling above. At night we could hear the ringing of far-away bells, and sometimes through the stilly air the sound of voices was wafted to us across the silence. In this atmosphere Mrs. Bates would sit and talk to me of the East, and I would dream dreams of things to be. There was a popular song of the time in San Francisco called ’Castles in the Air,’ and invariably our talks would end with a laugh and by my humming that tune.
“It was Mrs. Bates’ ambition to see Blanche doing literary work; for she did not want her to enter the theatrical profession, but later she said: ’I fear the child will go on the stage after all, and what is more, I feel that she is going to have a future. Perhaps, who knows, some day you may be able to do something for her,’ and I promised her that I would, if luck ever came my way.”
Writing to me about other actors of that far-off time, Belasco has mentioned: “I remember, with special pleasure and admiration, John E. Owens, though I don’t remember that I ever acted with him. He produced a play at the Bush Street Theatre [error: more probably at the California?], the name of which I have forgotten, but it was all about ’a barrel o’ apple sass’ [strange that Belasco should have forgotten the title,—“The People’s Lawyer,” sometimes billed as “Solon Shingle,”—because he several times acted in it, with Herne and others], and I was so impressed that I wrote a play for him, called ’The Yankee.’ Owens very kindly listened to my reading of it, but told me he had no intention of putting aside a long tried success. However, he liked some of the speeches in my piece and paid me $25 for them.”
“One of my most valued teachers,” he also writes, “was ’old man Thorne’ [Charles R. Thorne, Sr.]. I did much work for him as copyist, prompter, etc., and attended to all sorts of details,—hiring of wigs, arms, costumes, etc., for the minor parts and for supers in productions which he put on,—so that often he used to say to me, ’My dear Davie, I don’t know what I should do without you!’ Once, when Thorne produced ’King Richard III.,’ in a tent, in Howard Street, I took part and fought a sword combat with him on horseback. He was always very kind to me, taught me much and gave me pieces of wardrobe, feathers, belts, swords, &c. Another early favorite of mine was Mary Gladstane. I copied parts and scripts for her, at the Metropolitan and elsewhere, and whenever she played Mary Warner in San Francisco I cried over her performance so much that she was delighted and gave me a copy of the prompt book. There were no streetcars in those days, and often I walked with her to and from the theatre.”
Belasco was absent from San Francisco from about the middle of January, 1875, until the following May. A Miss Rogers, who had been a school teacher, who is described as having been “very beautiful,” and who became infected with ambition to shine as a dramatic luminary, obtained sufficient financial support to undertake a starring tour and Belasco was employed by her as an agent, stage manager, and actor. The tour appears to have begun, auspiciously, in (Portland?), Oregon, and to have been continued, with declining prosperity, in small towns along the Big Bear and Little Bear rivers. The repertory presented comprised “East Lynne,” “Camille,” “Frou-Frou,” etc., and “Robert Macaire.” “I always liked to play Macaire,” Belasco has told me, “and whenever I got a chance to make up a repertory I included that piece in it.” The tour lasted as long as the financial support was continued: then the company was ignominiously disbanded. Belasco and Miss Rogers, however, continued to act together for several weeks, presenting a number of one-act plays—such as “A Conjugal Lesson,” “A Happy Pair,” “Mr. and Mrs. Peter White,” etc.,—which require only two performers. Belasco also gave recitations. “One of my ’specialties,’” he has told me, “was ’The Antics of a Clown,’ in which I gave imitations of opera singers and ballet dancers—using a slack rope instead of a taut wire. I also gave imitations of all the well-known actors, and I had a ’ventriloquist act,’ with dummies. I made my own wigs and costumes and, altogether, I worked pretty hard for a living!”
On February 15, 1875, Augustin Daly produced his authorized adaptation of Gustav von Moser’s “Ultimo,” at the second Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York, under the name—once known throughout our country—of “The Big Bonanza.” Its success was instant and extraordinary. R. H. Hooley, of Chicago, presently employed Bartley Campbell (1844-1888) to make another version of that play,