“He [Belasco] feels he cannot go on with me unless he is able to make things creditable. He has stuck by me in my struggle against prejudice; he has stood up for me, and given his personal written assurance on every contract I have that things will be creditably and properly done. It is owing to him and his personal influence among theatrical managers that I have succeeded in getting the best route and the best theatres—he has committed himself and will not have failure meet him.
“He has helped me without asking pay—he has given my play—his name—his instruction—he has given up other things—to put me through: he will produce my play—he will answer for my success—he stands sponsor for my first night, and before the entire public—and he does it all without asking pay—ready to wait until I am started for his remuneration—and he did all this on Mr. Fairbank’s promise to see me through....”
In his “Story” Belasco makes this kindly allusion to Fairbank, which indicates that the clash between them resulted from meddlesome interference of persons inimical to him and to his star:
“I never regretted anything more than being forced to bring suit against Fairbank. He was courteous, kind-hearted, mellow, and human. I am sure that when he and his wife started to aid Mrs. Carter it was their intention to see her through. I met him in after years, and in the course of conversation he admitted that all I had done for Mrs. Carter was done wisely. ’It’s too horrible,’ he said. ’I was badly advised by my friends. You should never have been obliged to carry, the matter into the courts.’”
A POVERTY-STRICKEN STRUGGLE.
When Mrs. Carter and Mrs. Dudley, her mother, returned to New York after the demise of “The Ugly Duckling,” in Kansas City (1891), they established their residence at No. 63 Clinton Place. Belasco lodged at No. 126 Waverley Place, and almost immediately he resumed his project of writing, unaided, a new play specially designed for the use of Mrs. Carter. Having no convenient place of his own in which to work, he obtained the use of a room in Mrs. Dudley’s apartment, in which to write his play, and there he completed the first draft of “The Heart of Maryland,” and incidentally continued his tuition of Mrs. Carter. I remember seeing them once at about that period at Delmonico’s old restaurant, Twenty-sixth Street, where I chanced to be dining with Augustin Daly and Ada Rehan, and years afterward, on one of the few occasions when I have personally met Mrs. Carter, she mentioned remembering the same incident, saying it was so unusual for them, in those days of trouble, to visit that pleasant place. They were, she added, celebrating some little favorable turn in their prospects; “I looked at Mr. Daly and Miss Rehan,” said Mrs. Carter, “and whispered to ’Mr. Dave,’ ’Shall we ever “get there” and be, like them, successful and accepted?’” To which, she said, Belasco confidently answered, “Of course we shall!”
Speaking to me lightly of that period of ordeal, which was, in fact, a bitterly afflicting one for him to endure, Belasco said: “But Delmonico’s was not for us in those days: my family were, fortunately for them, in San Francisco, and many a time,—habitually, in fact,—Mrs. Carter and her mother and I ’dined’ at a twenty-five cent table d’hôte on Fourth Avenue—and were lucky to dine anywhere. We had put all we had into launching and exploiting Mrs. Carter, and those two women were hard put to it to keep their Clinton Place apartment. As for me,—well, I had, of course, some income from my plays, and I gave private coaching to beginners and professionals, anybody who would employ me (among others, by the way, Georgia Cayvan, who always liked to have me rehearse her, even after I left the Lyceum), and I kept going, after a fashion; but I had expenses heavier than my resources would meet, and I was most of the time poorer than I like to remember—and all the time I was harassed with anxiety.”
Writing of that same period, he gives this glimpse of a poverty-stricken struggle: