“‘Let us have a common-sense husband,’ I proposed to De Mille. ’After the husband’s discovery, let him treat his wife in a perfectly sane, human way. Let him say: “You need me. Turn to me, for your protection!”’ I had treated a similar situation in a play which ran in opposition to Bronson Howard’s ’The Banker’s Daughter’ at Baldwin’s Theatre in San Francisco. [The play was “The Millionaire’s Daughter.”]
“Mr. De Mille agreed with me that we should use the idea of this husband as the basis of our Lyceum drama. I knew my ground, for I had gained my knowledge through experience. And, as we were to see, that incident saved ’The Wife’ in its hour of need. It has kept the play alive all these years and made it one of our most popular stock pieces. Before De Mille and I began the play we had virtually written our Third Act, jotting down notes and flashes of dialogue. Then we went to Mr. Frohman with our idea, and in that conference the Lyceum Theatre Company was born. In fact, it came into being before the play, and De Mille and I found ourselves obliged to create characters to fit the personalities of the players Mr. Frohman had engaged. We could not say: ’Here is our heroine. Find an actress to suit her’—for Georgia Cayvan was to be the leading lady, whatever the play might be, and it was for us to see that she had a womanly woman’s part....
“In the early part of May we began our race against time; night and day found us turning out experimental pages of dialogue. Every week we came to the city for a few hours, to see how the scenes of the play were progressing—for that was another condition imposed upon us—to decide upon the location of our acts before they were written. In those days audiences would not have been content with repetitions of scenes such as we now employ.
“With what eagerness did Mr. Frohman wait our visits to the city and listen to the new scenes! Towards the latter part of August we had completed a five-act drama, which we handed in with the understanding that it might be cut, revised and rewritten. We told Mr. Frohman that if it did not come up to expectations there was time for him to look elsewhere for a play.
“It must have been after the reading of the Third Act that Mr. Frohman’s office door opened and he rushed out crying: ’By Jove, it’s fine, it’s splendid!’ De Mille and I didn’t stop. We hurried to the station and were off to Echo Lake for our vacation....”
The play of “The Wife” is in five acts and it involves fourteen persons. Its scenes are laid in Newport, New York, and Washington, D. C., about 1887. Its dialogue is written in that strain of commonplace colloquy which is assumed, with justice, to be generally characteristic of “fashionable society” in its superficial mood and ordinary habit. The influence of Bronson Howard’s example is obvious in it,—that writer’s plan, which had been successful, of catching and reflecting the general tone and manner of “everyday life” and often of distressingly “everyday persons”; persons who, nevertheless, are at times constrained to behave in a manner not easily credible, if, indeed, possible, whether in everyday or any other kind of life. To copy commonplaces in a commonplace manner is by some judges deemed the right and sure way to please the public. That method does often succeed, since, generally, people like to see themselves. This, however, was not the method of the great masters of comedy, such as Molière, Congreve, and Sheridan, who taught, by example and with results of great value, that a comedy, while it should be a true reflection of life and a faithful picture of manners, should also be made potent over the mind, the heart, and the imagination, by delicate, judicious exaggeration, should be made entertaining by equivoque, and should be made impressive by the fibre of strong thought, and sympathetic by trenchant, sparkling dialogue. That old method of writing comedy, although it has been exemplified by the best writers and is still attempted, has, to a great extent, been superseded by the far inferior and much easier method of conventional colloquialism and chatter.
The ground plan of “The Wife,” though Belasco may have thought it a novelty, was, even in 1887, mossy with antiquity. A girl, Helen Freeman, parts from her lover, Robert Grey, in a moment of pique, and weds with another man, to whom she gives her hand, but not at first her heart; she subsequently meets her old flame and finds that she is still fond of him; causes social tattle by being seen
From an old photograph. Belasco’s Collection.
DAVID BELASCO CLAY M. GREENE