Upon David Belasco’s ability as an actor I can give no judgment, never having seen him act: he seldom appeared on the stage after 1880, and he did not come to New York until 1882. He played more than 170 parts between 1871 and 1880, and it is obvious that his early, continuous, and practical experience in acting and in observation of the dramatic methods and the stage business of many actors, of all kinds, as well as of the practice of some of the best stage managers ever known in America, must have largely contributed to the brilliant efficiency in direction for which he was remarkable. No more capable, resourceful mechanician has appeared in the modern Theatre....
Belasco was a great stage manager because he possessed a comprehensive knowledge of human nature and human experience and an equally comprehensive knowledge alike of scenery (including stage lighting) and of acting; a dramatic temperament; clear insight; almost inexhaustible patience; ability to impart knowledge, and the rare and precious faculty of eliciting and developing the best that was in the actors whom he directed. It was the latter attribute that made him unique among stage managers of the last twenty years or so: the general custom of that pestiferous animal “the stage producer” is to thrust upon actors an arbitrary ideal of character....
Belasco possessed, moreover, exceptional understanding of the traits of actors: he knew their vanity and sometimes almost intolerable conceit, their often paltry purposes and petty ways; likewise he knew and deeply sympathized with their fine and lovable qualities,—the noble ambitions by which sometimes they are actuated, their often forlorn hopefulness, their courage under disappointment, their restless impulse toward expression, their honest longing for opportunity and recognition, their peculiarities, foibles, and sensibility, and he possessed and exercised extraordinary judgment, consideration, and tact in the control of them....
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Being human, Belasco possessed faults and made mistakes: being successful, he never lacked for censurers to point out the one or, with gleeful malice, to celebrate the other. He was weak by reason of an inordinate craving for approbation and by reason of an excessive amiability: rather than inflict the pain of immediate disappointment he sometimes foolishly temporized in dealing with importunate persons, thus, at last, incurring their bitter resentment and enmity because of what they mistakenly though naturally deemed his insincerity. But, in every respect, his virtues far exceeded his faults, his strength his weakness, and his rectitude his errors: he was an extraordinary man, worthy of public esteem and honor, and, in private, most loved by those who knew him best. As the years speed away and the great place he filled in the Theatre of his time, and the great void which his passing must make, become rightly appreciated, those whose detraction followed David Belasco may admit their injustice:
“They that reviled him may mourn to recover him,—
Knowing how gentle he was and how brave!
Nothing he’ll reck, where the wind blowing over him
Ripples the grasses that dream on his grave!”
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Much has been written, first and last, about Belasco’s utter absorption in artistic matters and his ignorance of business affairs. It is true that, first of all, he was an artist and that in his theory of theatrical business the keystone of the arch was the Art of Acting. But it cannot be too strongly emphasized that he was one of the few managers who united in himself a profound knowledge of the drama, all the methods and expedients of histrionic art, the history of the Theatre and entire familiarity with its contemporary conditions. He was, in short, one of the most shrewd, sagacious, far-sighted, hard-headed managers that ever lived. He early saw the futility of trying to attend, himself, to every detail of a great and complex organization and so he employed capable and vigorous men, able and willing to work under his direction and to carry out his orders. But anybody who supposes that David Belasco was not perfectly well and intimately aware of everything that was going on around him and was not at all times the master of his own destiny in the Theatre is cherishing a delusion!
Most conspicuous among the men associated with Belasco throughout his long career in management was Benjamin Franklin Roeder, his general business representative and close personal friend, whose name is here fittingly linked with commemoration of the chief whom he so long and faithfully served. Mr. Roeder, originally, aspired to be a dramatist, and during the early days of Belasco’s activity in New York, while connected with the Sargent School of Acting, he obtained an introduction to him from Franklin Sargent. Roeder had made a dramatization of the novel of “St. Elmo” (a subject which was successfully introduced on the stage many years later) and desired that Belasco should read his play with a view to its possible production. Belasco, pleased by the manner and address of the young writer, agreed to consider the matter and made an appointment to meet him and discuss it at the School office at one o’clock on the following Sunday afternoon. In the stress of business he forgot that appointment, but an urgent errand taking him to his office at eleven o’clock on the night of the specified day he found Roeder seated on the doorstep, asleep. He had been waiting there ten hours. “When I asked him why he had waited,” said Belasco, telling me of this incident, “he answered, ‘You said you might be late—and to wait.’ I made up my mind then that there was surely a place for a boy so tenacious and that he was just the fellow for me. I took him on, at first as my secretary, and he has been my business assistant, sometimes my bulwark, always ‘my friend, faithful and just to me,’ ever since.”
Members of the theatrical profession are almost without exception indiscreet and garrulous; secrecy, which often would be invaluable in that profession,—as in any calling in which success frequently depends on priority in exploitation of ideas which cannot be protected from imitation,—is almost unknown in it. Roeder unites in himself not only fidelity to his