About 1911 I saw the fate of the popular-priced game, and got out of it before the final crash, as did Sam Harris, Al Woods and a few of the others. I started to look about for a new way of earning my living. I had made money at the game and was in no danger from that source, but I was then, in 1910, only thirty-seven years old and had trained myself to the habit of almost constant work, a habit I have never as yet been able to break.

My name, as the author of literally hundreds of bloodthirsty melodramas, was a thing of scorn to the highbrows of the theater, used as a horrible example to young authors and to frighten bad children. The very thought of my being allowed to produce a play in a Broadway theater was quite absurd, as my friends all assured me. I kept on writing, however, for the same reason that keeps me at it now, because I love to write plays, no matter whom it hurts. For a year or two I had a tough time, but I managed to find a market among the road stars and the one night stand companies, and I wrote a few comedies and dramatized several novels. They were successful enough in the towns where they were played but were never heard of in New York. At this time, also, I developed a trick of writing plays directly for stock companies and by good salesmanship built up quite an income from this by-product. I was absolutely bound to break into the New York game and in spite of many rebuffs I kept knocking at the doors of the New York managers.

The doors of New York managers, however, were closely guarded, even in the comparatively far-off days of which I am writing, and in the season of 1910 the best I could manage to do, aside from my usual flock of road shows and my growing list of plays popular with the stock companies at that time successfully scattered all over the country, was to secure a couple of matinÉe performances. As a matter of fact, a matinÉe performance of the play of a new author is simply a public announcement by the manager of his lack of faith and neither of these efforts of mine came to much. The first of these, THE WISHING RING, was produced by Lee Shubert at Daly’s with Marguerite Clark and a supporting company thrown together from the cast of a musical play at that time current in the theater. Marguerite Clark was charming in the part and later made use of the play on the road and produced it for a short run in Chicago. THE WISHING RING was directed by Cecil De Mille and was, I think, the last thing he did before he left New York and threw in his lot with the picture people.

The second of these half-hearted matinÉe productions was made for me by Daniel Frohman at the Lyceum and gave Laurette Taylor one of her first chances to show her very extraordinary talent. This play, LOLA, was a queer sort of fish, part crude melodrama and part a very real and very fine example of good play writing, but it was one of those plays of which one must say it is either great or absurd. My shady reputation and the hasty and careless production made only one answer probable. In fact, it was many years before the name of Owen Davis was much of a help to a play, and it would probably have taken me at least a thousand to establish a trade-mark as a serious dramatist had the public known that aside from the crimes committed under the name of Owen Davis I must also answer to many others. I had fallen into the playful habit of inventing other names to hide my evil deeds. At one time I used so many assumed names that the mere invention of them became a task and Al Woods used to help me out by calmly borrowing the name of one of his clerks or stenographers and writing it down as author of my latest thriller.

When CONVICT 999 was first produced in Pittsburgh, the dramatic critic of the largest of the morning papers said in his review of the play: “Here at last is a fine melodrama and heaven be praised. Here, in the person of John Oliver, a new writer, we have at last found a man who knows more about how to write a play of this kind than the irrepressible Owen Davis ever knew.”

William A. Brady was the first to give me a regular Broadway production with a first class company and in doing so, although he little knew it at the time, he started an association that lasted for many years. Mr. Brady is a strong man and had he been able to foresee what was in store for him the day on which we signed our first contract, it is highly probable these confessions would never have been written. With great confidence, however, Mr. Brady commanded me to write him a big melodrama and as a result Doris Keane and William Courtney appeared in a direful thing called MAKING GOOD. The title of this play turned out to be a god-send to the New York critics and if I had put as much wit into my play as they put into their slaughter of it, Mr. Brady and I would have been happier even if they had been deprived of a great pleasure. As a matter of fact, I should be a very popular man with the critics. Several of them owe their standing as humorists almost entirely to me and at least one of the finest of them, Frank O’Malley, won his place in the ranks of humorists over my dead body.

In later years Mr. O’Malley confided to me that he often journeyed miles to get to a play of mine, a compliment that at the time I quite failed to value at its true worth.

Twenty-four hours after the first New York production of MAKING GOOD I was safely hidden in the country with my still loyal wife and two small sons, luckily at the time too young to know their shame. At once I started out, quite undismayed, to write another. One old habit that still clings to me: if I have a failure, to sit down at my desk before I have so much as slept on it, and write at least part of the next one; as a matter of fact, most of the good plays I have written have been started at such a time. Here then, in the wilds of Westchester, I stuck to it until I finished THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, much the best thing I had done up to then, and a play that might very well be a success if produced to-day. The manuscript of this play I sent at once to a play-broker with instructions to offer it for production with no author’s name on the manuscript. A few days later the broker called me up with the startling information that he had sold my play to William A. Brady—rather dread news as, following what the New York critics had said about MAKING GOOD, Mr. Brady had thrown me out of his office and practically forbidden me its sacred ground.

It seemed, so my broker said, that Mr. Brady had paid good money for an option on the play and was very curious as to the identity of the modest author. When he learned it, he had something very like a stroke, but in time he forgave me.

All the years I worked with Mr. Brady were punctuated by terrible fights between us that always ended in a renewal of friendship and affection. He is by far the most colorful figure in the American theater and even when one disagrees with him, which is apt to be rather often, his strength and his complete belief in his own opinion cause his opponents awful moments of doubt. If Mr. Brady really set out to convince me that a red apple was a yellow one, I should at once go and order a new pair of glasses.

Mr. Brady, David Belasco and Daniel Frohman are the last of the old guard and, each in his different way, has written his name boldly on the pages of our drama. Different as these three men are they have one thing in common: a great and abiding love of the theater and its people.

Mr. Brady and I together did THE FAMILY CUPBOARD, SINNERS, FOREVER AFTER, AT 9.45 and many others. FOREVER AFTER was Alice Brady’s first big part; partly owing to its simple, straightforward love story and partly to her fine performance, it turned out to be one of the best money-makers I have ever had. These plays were at the moment my idea of one step up from the NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL of the Al Woods days.

At about this time the Actors’ Equity Association was formed and pulled a real battle for their rights against the absurd and vicious standards of the business. That they won that battle is well-known and that they deserved to win it is fully admitted by fair-minded and honest managers of the Sam Harris type—although, of course, if all managers had been of his type no fight would have been necessary.

The actors’ strike at this time closed all the theaters and, as usual, the author, who wasn’t in the fight at all and had nothing to win whatever the outcome, lost much more money than any actor and rather resented the row being pulled in his front yard. Most authors were in sympathy with the actors but I know that for one I wished they had chosen to fight with some other weapons than my three plays, the runs of which were interrupted and from which I had been drawing a very considerable royalty.

Hit in the dramatist’s tenderest spot, we met and organized and from that day to this many of my hours have been given up to service to the authors’ societies. I was at that time the last president of the old Society of American Dramatists and Composers and a member of the Authors’ League. With the help of a handful of ardent spirits, I brought all the active dramatists of the day into the old society and merged it with the Authors’ League as the Dramatists’ Guild of the Authors’ League of America. A group of strong men and women came to the front and served faithfully on hundreds of committees and through long hours of conferences. Among the most active of these were Augustus Thomas, James Forbes, Gene Buck, Rupert Hughes, Channing Pollock, Edward Childs Carpenter, Percival Wilde, Rachel Crothers, Ann Crawford Flexner, Jules Goodman and Montague Glass; then later Arthur Richman, George Middleton and William Cary Duncan and a number of others.

I remained as president of this group until I resigned to take up the presidency of the Authors’ League and gave, as all these others gave, a very considerable part of my life for many years. At present, thanks to our efforts, the dramatists are as well organized as the actors and like the actor eager at all times for a battle, but we are unfortunately quite without an adversary, one of the peculiar things about the manager being that he is unable to agree to anything whatever that any other manager thinks would be a good thing.

At meetings of the managerial society one man will frequently say: “I don’t know what Mr. Blank wants to do about this problem, but anything he thinks I think different.” It is a truly tragic thing that the men who should be the leaders of the great institution that the American theater should be have been incapable of enough business foresight to bind themselves firmly together to protect their interests. Always we have been out-generaled by the motion picture men, bled white by the ticket speculator and discriminated against by the railroads, the labor unions, and even the newspapers, who are by rights our natural allies and our traditional friends. If the theater is the cultural and the educational force I have always claimed it was, surely it has a right to public loyalty and support and I must always think that, if we have in large part lost that support, it is because the dignity and the importance of the drama has been hidden by the lack of dignity and the lack of importance of many of our leaders.

I thought these things in the time of which I am now writing, 1912-1913, but naturally I had neither the independence of age nor circumstance at that time to dare to fully express myself. Just before the war I had begun to be impatient of the machine-made plays I had been writing for so long and began to listen to my wife’s pleadings to cut down the quantity and try to improve the quality of my work. She had been begging me to do this for ten years or more, and like other good husbands I rather like to do any little thing my wife asks of me—after she has been asking it for ten years. I really think I wanted to please her, but I also think that I had by this time outgrown the sentimental comedy-drama as once before I had outgrown the cheap melodramas. Naturally enough as soon as I lost my own belief in my form of expression I was no longer successful in it.

Let no man go unchallenged who in your presence talks of purposely “writing down” to an audience, or of “giving them what they want” or any other fish-bait of that description. I am here to tell you that no man ever successfully wrote or produced any play, or any novel below his own mental level at the moment. When I wrote NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL, I was honestly deeply moved by the lady’s many misfortunes or I couldn’t have put it over, and when I wrote the comedy-dramas that followed it I truly believed in them or no audience in the world would have sat through them. This is always true, I think, of writers or of managers. We are entirely emotional people and our work reflects us. I know of several supremely successful producers who made great fortunes selling the piffle they loved and who, as soon as their money brought them contacts that resulted in an increase in their taste and knowledge promptly appointed themselves judges of the drama and even more promptly went broke.

You may well afford to laugh at the faker who boasts of skill great enough to assume a mood and color different from his own. The next time he tells you of how he “wrote down to the boobs” simply tell him he is either a liar or a fool—probably both. For surely, if he is not a liar, he must be the greatest fool on earth to use for a cheap success a genius great enough to have brought him a real one.

If then, about fifteen years ago, I wanted to write a higher form of drama it was for no nobler reason than because I had begun to be bored by the sort of work I was doing and because it bored me it had begun to bore my audiences. Several times in my life I have been driven to an advance of this sort and always because of the fact that I found my old occupation gone. As time goes on, I have come to believe that if I could live two or three hundred years I might develop into quite a playwright. In any case I once more threw my box of tricks away and sat down quietly and tried to study out a new method. In this I was helped by the change that had begun to come over the drama. I was influenced as all our writers were at the time by the Russian and Hungarian dramatists who had discarded the artificial form of the “well-made play” and were writing a new form of photographic realism that tempted us all to follow in their footsteps.

As a result I wrote THE DETOUR, which remains in my mind the example of the best work I have done for the theater. Of all my plays the DETOUR, THE GAMBLER OF THE WEST (one of the old melodramas of the Al Woods days) and THE NERVOUS WRECK are my pets. THE DETOUR was produced by Lee Shubert at the Astor Theatre in the early fall of 1921 and, although it was never a money-maker, it gave me what I wanted and made my wife very happy. As she had stuck around by this time for some fifteen years waiting for something like this to happen, it was, to say the least, no more than she deserved.

In the production of THE DETOUR I was fortunate enough to be able to secure Augustin Duncan to play the principal part and to stage the play. He more than justified the confidence I had in him. To me Mr. Duncan is a great artist and by far the most sincere example of the man who puts his art above his pocketbook I have ever met. I suppose more rot has been spilled out by men and women who pose as “devoted to their art” than by any other set of posing hypocrites since the world began. We all of us play the tune we know and to rebuke us for that tune is as silly as it is to praise us for it. To use what talents we may have to earn a decent living for ourselves and those dependent upon us is, to a man of any philosophy, a far finer thing than to sit in a Greenwich Village attic and mouth jealous platitudes about the baseness of commercial art.

This statement of my opinion is neither a defense nor an alibi. I myself, as these confessions of mine are describing to you, have always written for the love of the theater rather than from any art impulse and I am the first to admit that my love of the theater has always been more compelling than my love of the drama, if you follow me in the distinction.

As a practical man, born of a practical line of hard-headed Yanks, I have studied my own small talents and developed them and tried to make up for a lack of the real fires of genius by an honest admission of that lack and a true enthusiasm for the work that at the moment came nearest to expressing my attitude. The true genius, the true artist, is very rare, but Augustin Duncan is distinctly of that number. He is quite as incapable of doing any work that doesn’t seem fine to him as I am of writing anything at all unless I am going to be paid for it, and he is as firm in his refusals as I am. And in my life, during which I have written several million words, I doubt if I have written five thousand without practical reward.

Max Gordon, one of the managers with whom I have been associated, looked at me in troubled amazement one day lately when I had made some mildly humorous comment and said: “That’s the first time I ever heard you say anything funny for less than ten percent.” Max Gordon, like many others of my acquaintance, assumes this attitude of mine to be founded on a desire for money, but as a matter of fact I care very little about money or the things that money stands for. Any man who can make good can always make money, but the fun is in the making good, in the thrill and the sense of power that comes from activities sanely thought out and successfully accomplished. Under Mr. Duncan’s fine direction THE DETOUR was molded into shape and ready for its first performance. Not one word of my original manuscript was changed from the day I wrote it, which fact is most amazingly to his credit rather than to mine. He is so fine a director that he molded his company to my play, rather than my play to his company—the true duty of a director, although few of them have the sense to know it. To the picture director an author’s play is a sort of clover field in which he loves to kick up his heels and romp about at his own sweet will, making any changes at all that his fancy may dictate, most of them being made for the very simple reason that he doesn’t quite grasp the meaning of what is on the written page in front of him. Even in the theater there are few managers who realize the value of one man’s unbroken line of thought. “Plays are not written, they are re-written” is a motto often repeated to writers and in the old days these wise words were proudly framed and hung over the desk of one of our greatest producers. This musty old truism has been used to slaughter plays during all the years since Dion Boucicault first uttered it, and like most other truisms its principal fault lies in the fact that it isn’t true. When I was in Harvard I met Mr. Boucicault in a barroom on Bowdoin Square in Boston and, as I looked at him in awe and homage, I had little thought of ever being bold enough to challenge any of his theories. Dion Boucicault was a great playwright of the eighties, a man of sound knowledge of his craft, but like the best of us there were occasions when he talked nonsense.

Plays are written by their authors. They are good plays or bad plays depending almost wholly upon the degree of talent of the author plus his accident of choice of a subject. This goes for pictures as well as for stage plays. The germ of success is put in only by the original author in spite of Mr. Boucicault and the combined opinion of the Managers’ Association and the motion picture industry. I am stating here an important fact upon which I have a great deal of special information. I doubt if any man alive has ever been called in as a play doctor more frequently than I, and for the good of my soul I am willing to admit that I have very rarely saved a patient. I have often seen plays helped by careful and skillful revision but I have never once seen a play built into a real success unless the germ of that success was firmly planted by the author in his first manuscript.

Frequently I have seen, so frequently as to have learned to be in dread and horror of the practice, sensitive and beautiful plays and picture stories so coarsened and debased by the rough hands of managers, directors, supervisors and other quacks, that all hope of success has been dosed and purged out of them. I am stoutly of the opinion that if no changes at all in original manuscripts were ever made the percentage of success both in plays and pictures would be infinitely higher. This does not in the least mean that I think the author is always right. Of course he isn’t. Play writing is the most difficult form of all the forms of literary expression, and no man ever wrote a perfect play. But I think the trained writer knows more about his business than any one else can hope to know, and I think it is as silly for an outsider to meddle with his work as it would be for a kind neighbor to write a few helpful words in the middle of the prescription you have paid a physician to prescribe for your sick child.

Every one in the world is, I suppose, a potential story-teller. I am constantly being asked to read plays written by elevator boys, maid-servants, policemen and taxi drivers, and it is not surprising that when a man finds himself in power over a writer he should at once demand a share of the joy of the creator. But to me play writing is and scenario writing ought to be a definitely understood and carefully studied profession; and the outsider without special knowledge or special talent who undertakes to turn out a masterpiece is in exactly the same position to do good work as the Irishman who had never tried to play the violin but had always thought he could do it.

Even in editorial rooms, where a higher class of intelligence is usually found in authority over the story departments, one notices this instinctive urge to get a finger into the pie and the theater is cursed with it; as the picture business is superlative in all things this very human failing may be found here in its fullest flowering. Just as Tom Sawyer’s young friends all wanted a turn at whitewashing the fence so do the picture executives—supervisors, directors, script-girls, cutters, film-editors, messenger boys, stage-hands and scrub-women—all yearn to make just the least little bit of a change in a story to satisfy some instinctive lech to be an author. I have seen so many plays and screen stories ruined by this enforced collaboration that I honestly look upon it as the major evil that threatens a young writer’s success.

In the first place it’s a silly custom because once the author surrenders the integrity of his story he is helpless to even be a fair judge of the hybrid product that takes its place, and as plays and stories do not succeed on account of their structural perfection but by virtue of their spiritual and inspirational qualities, it is obvious that no man without a creative talent has any right to mess about with them.

Duncan knew the folly of all this and his skill and instinct resulted in a fine and sensitive performance.

Again a play of mine was to have its first performance at a holiday matinÉe and again, as had happened to me during the first matinÉe of THROUGH THE BREAKERS, I was to be given the benefit of an honest lay opinion of my talents. We opened in Asbury Park, New Jersey, famous among people of the theater for drawing the prize boob audiences of America. An audience at any seashore resort is a terrible thing, but in Asbury Park for some reason its reactions are amazing. Good plays die and terrible plays are heralded as great, so that the wise author simply sits in suffering silence with cotton in his ears. Personally as I sat with my wife through this first performance of THE DETOUR I had been very happy, so happy in fact that I neglected the cotton, and on my way out of the crowded theater I heard the first critical opinion of this, the first attempt on my part to write of life simply and honestly. “Do you know,” remarked a very pretty young woman as we passed, “I think I could write a better play than this one myself.” In spite, however, of this completely honest expression of opinion THE DETOUR gave me a new standing as a writer of serious plays. Another rusty old saw of the trade is the one about all the great plays resting in closets, trunks and unread in managers’ offices, plays so fine that, were they to be produced, a new drama would spring full grown into being. I have been looking for one of those for twenty years, but so far it has escaped me. In all the hundreds of these neglected manuscripts that it has been my sad fate to have read I found just one real play. When I demanded a hearing for it and got one, it turned out to be just fair. There is a real utility about a great play that sooner or later will bring it to the stage; some one will see it and rave about it and it will get its chance. It isn’t so difficult to tell a really great play when one reads it, or a really bad play, it’s the in-between it is difficult to judge, the degree of badness or of value that means failure or success. Careful reading of these supposed masterpieces will usually prove rather a shock. I’ve read a thousand, and I am not the man I was.

The Great War was over by this time and the changes it had brought about in our moods and our standards was being sharply reflected in the theater. The motion pictures, successful as they had grown to be, had not as yet challenged our right to existence and we had begun to produce something in the nature of an American Drama. Eugene O’Neill had written several fine plays. Arthur Richman’s AMBUSH, Gilbert Emery’s THE HERO and my THE DETOUR and ICEBOUND were at least a step toward a true folk play and the rise of the Theatre Guild and of Arthur Hopkins, who to me has always seemed the great man of the theater in my time, gave fine promise of fine things.

The Great War had disturbed and sobered me. I was about forty-two years old at the time America entered it, fat, near-sighted and cursed with a gouty constitution. Quite obviously I couldn’t fight, and yet, like all men who stood just across the border line from heroic action, I had my moments of longing and resentment; here was a big thing and I couldn’t be part of it. I had been a sort of adventurer all my life and yet when the greatest adventure of all time was going on I must stand on the side lines.

Fate had decided that I was to have no real connection with the war. I was too old, and my two boys were too young. The nearest I came to the feeling of personal participation was when my youngest brother, Colonel, then Major, Robert P. Davis, sailed with his regiment for France. My peace of mind received one slight shock, however, when my oldest son, Donald, then not quite fourteen, slipped away from Yonkers, where we were living at the time, and enlisted in the Navy. Exactly what might have come of that I never will know, for when the young man was marched with a squad of volunteers to the Battery and lined up before the keen eye of an officer, he was rudely yanked out of line and sent home to me with a stern warning which frightened me very much but made no dent at all in the culprit’s armor. He felt no repentance at all but furiously cursed the United States Navy for not knowing a good man when they saw one.

After the war a writer faced a new world. The changes in the form of play writing speak volumes of the change in our mode of thought and our standards. When I had written my first plays in the early nineties, asides were freely spoken. I had frequently written scenes in the old days in which the lovely heroine sat calmly in a chair, violently struggling to pretend not to hear the villain and his fellow conspirators who plotted her undoing in loud voices at a distance of six feet. The soliloquy was also in good usage, that marvelous aid to the clumsy craftsman by which all necessity for a carefully reticent exposition could be laughed aside. I used to start a play, for example, with a lady alone on the stage as the first curtain rose. She would perhaps turn sadly away from the window and looking the audience firmly in its composite eye would exclaim: “Poor John; I wonder if he knows that I have been untrue to him.” This naturally saved a lot of time and had a distinct advantage from the audience’s point of view. They had very little excuse for not knowing what the play was all about.

Deeper, however, than any change in the shifting methods of play writing was the change in the point of view of our audiences. The “Prodigal Son” story, the “Cinderella” story, and the “Magdalen” story seemed to have lost their power; the old one about, “My son shall never marry a daughter of the Hoosis’s” no longer bit very deep, and the poor dramatist had to learn all over again.

I can best explain the change that twenty years had brought by telling of an experience I had with a play called DRIFTWOOD. I wrote this play in 1905 and read it to a famous star of that time; the lady liked the part and urged her manager to produce the play, but after long reflection he decided against it on the grounds that the heroine of my play had made in her youth what the French writers so politely describe as “a slip,” and in his experience it was out of the question that any audience could ever be willing for her, no matter how deep her repentance, to marry a decent man. Twenty years after I dug this old faded manuscript out of a trunk and was struck by some scenes of what seemed to me to be of real power and truth, and again I took it to a great woman star, whose verdict was “It didn’t seem to her to be about anything worth making such a fuss about.” And she was as right in her opinion as the manager of the old days had been in his.

After the production of THE DETOUR I attacked my work from a slightly different point of view, and my next job was the very pleasant one of making for my old friend, William A. Brady, the American adaptation of THE INSECT COMEDY, which was produced as THE WORLD WE LIVE IN. I followed this with ICEBOUND, which won for me the Pulitzer Prize in 1923 and caused me to be selected as a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.

I had some adventures with ICEBOUND before I got it on the stage and got myself into a terrible mess that grew deeper as its success grew more assured. David Belasco had seen THE DETOUR and had written me that if I could write another play as good he would gladly produce it at once. I sent him the manuscript of ICE BOUND as soon as I completed it, and in a few days had a telegram from him saying that he liked it very much and asked me to see Mr. Roder, his manager, and arrange the details of a contract. The next day I called on Ben Roder, whom I had known for many years, and he offered me a contract containing a clause giving Mr. Belasco the right to produce the play at any time during the next two years. Mr. Belasco was away with David Warfield’s production of THE MERCHANT OF VENICE and Mr. Roder was a bit impatient of my objection to the clause I have mentioned. I have always been in a hurry all my life, and I had caught from Al Woods during my long association with him his ardent desire to see a play on the stage the very moment he falls in love with it. Neither yesterday nor to-morrow ever meant very much to me; to-day has always been the right time to produce any play that I had faith in. This fact is so well known to the men with whom I do business that it is no longer necessary for me to tell them that if they want to do a play of mine at all they must start casting it the very hour after they have first read it. Mr. Roder, however, was not quite used to my rather stormy manner, and the result of our talk was an angry outburst on my part.

“Mr. Belasco,” I said, “will give me a contract before noon on Monday for an immediate production or he can’t have the play.” Such language is all out of line in the Belasco office, and Mr. Roder smiled a kindly and tolerant smile as I walked out of his office, merely remarking that he didn’t think I was quite crazy enough to turn down a Belasco production. I have always been a free lance in the theater and perhaps a bit militant in my stand for an author’s rights and his prerogatives, and I made up my mind to go through with my bluff unless Mr. Belasco came to my terms. On Monday I would sell my play to some one else. With this in view I took all four of my remaining manuscripts under my arm, and by noon I had placed three of them with managers of good standing, in each case saying that the play must be purchased by Monday noon or not at all, in each case walking out of the office followed by an exact duplicate of Mr. Roder’s tolerant but unbelieving smile.

It was noon and I was hungry, so, with my remaining manuscript tucked into my overcoat pocket, I dropped into the grill room of the old Knickerbocker Hotel for lunch. During lunch young Max Gordon, whom I had known since his boyhood, sat down for a moment at my table for a friendly chat. Max Gordon and Al Lewis had been successful vaudeville agents and had recently owned interests in several plays, but as yet had made no productions under their own names. Max was always of an inquiring turn of mind and very little escapes him. One glance at the yellow envelope sticking out of my overcoat pocket was enough.

“How’s your new play?” was his first start. His second was to calmly stretch out his hand and take my last manuscript out of my pocket and transfer it to his own. “I’d like to read it,” he blandly observed, and in spite of some protest on my part he walked out of the room with it in his pocket. I had already covered the three managers who, aside from Mr. Belasco, had seemed to me to be best fitted to produce this play and I went home. The next day being Saturday, I went up to St. Andrews for my usual week-end game of golf with my golfing partner, Bob Davis, Bob being no blood kin of mine but a very dear friend of many years’ standing. Sunday morning the bell of my apartment rang and Mr. Max Gordon walked calmly in and dropped a thousand dollars on my table and blandly announced that “we are going to produce ICEBOUND.” Questioned as to the “we” part of it he replied that Sam Harris and Al Lewis had read the play and that Mr. Harris had offered to put it out under his trade mark with Lewis and Gordon as silent but active partners. Sam Harris could then, as he could now, have anything of mine he wanted, so I promptly shook hands and called it a trade.

Then the storm broke. By ‘phone, by letter and by telegram every one of the managers whom I had given until Monday noon to buy my play sent messages that they would produce it, and it took me about five years to square myself.

As a matter of fact I have never been able to see the justice in the trade custom of never submitting a play to more than one manager at a time. If I own a house and want to sell it, I give that house to more than one agent, and the grocer who displays a particularly fine melon on his stand doesn’t consider it the property of the first customer who admires it. Before it’s anybody’s but his some one must pay good money for it. Experience has taught me that any manager who wants a play never lets an author out of his office until he has signed a contract, and he is crazy if he does. I have been roused from my bed at four o’clock in the morning and forced to promise a play to an excited manager before he allowed me to crawl back under the bedclothes, and any less ardent expression of willingness has grown to be very suspicious in my eyes.

I first learned of the fact that ICEBOUND had won the Pulitzer Prize from Al Woods, who called me up and told me the news. He was, I think, as much excited as I, and perhaps he knew better than any one else what a far cry it was from our old Bowery melodramas to the winning of the prize for the best play of 1923. A lot of water had flowed under the mill in those twenty-five years, and to throw so completely aside a hard-won method and adopt another so radically different was a very difficult thing. Since then I have served several times on the committee to award the prize, and I have never voted to give it to a dramatist without recalling my own pleasure in listening to Al Woods’ voice over the ‘phone when he called up and said: “Listen, sweetheart, who do you think cops the Pulitzer Prize this year?—you’d never guess—neither would I—a guy told me—it’s you!”

During the run of ICEBOUND Bob Davis ruined a golf game by telling me about a new story he was about to publish. It was, so he told me, written by E. J. Rath, but, as a matter of fact, it had in all probability sprung from his own amazing mind, as have literally hundreds of other stories that have appeared under the names of our most famous writers. Bob has been for many years the dry nurse of American fiction and responsible for the present fame of more successful novelists and short story writers than any one man who has ever lived. This story that he called The Wreck bored me very much and quite ruined my game, as Bob usually saves his loudest and most startling statements until I am at the top of my back swing; so to keep him quiet I told him to shut up and I’d read the fool thing if he would send it to me. When I read the proof sheets, all I could find there was a very amusing character, but urged on by Bob I finally agreed to try my best to make a play out of it. The play was THE NERVOUS WRECK, probably one of the most successful farces of the last twenty years.

As soon as I finished this play I took it to Sam Harris, who read it promptly and told me it was terrible. As I fully agreed with him, we decided to have it tried out on the west coast, figuring that the further we got it from the sight of our friends the better. Mr. Harris had at that time some business relations with Thomas Wilks of Los Angeles, and the play was announced for production by him. After the first rehearsal Mr. Wilks’ stock company went on strike and refused to play the thing, saying that it was without a doubt the worst play ever written by mortal man. It was only after a battle that they were forced to continue.

Mr. Edward Horton who first played the part has since told me that he was never in his life so startled as he was by the screams of laughter that followed his first scene, and he and the leading lady got together after the first performance and hastily learned their lines, a thing that up to that time they had not thought it worth while to do. The farce played in Los Angeles for twelve weeks to enormous business, but Mr. Harris and I were still a bit doubtful and rather reluctantly started to put together a cast for an eastern tryout. We put it on in Atlantic City with Mr. Horton and Miss Frances Howard, now Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn, in the leading parts. After the first performance Mr. Harris confided in me that he had always thought it the worst play he had ever seen and that now he was sure of it. I had very little if any more faith than he had, and we returned to New York together in disgust. But to our amazement the fool thing did a big week’s business and we decided to see it once more during the following week in Long Branch. At Long Branch we saw it before a half empty house and decided we would close it up, and that I would work on it at my leisure.

I re-wrote it completely seven different times, and each time Mr. Harris liked it just a little bit less. It kicked around the office for a year before Al Lewis picked it up in an idle moment and insisted on our once again tempting fate with it.

The third cast we selected for this outcast of ours was headed by Otto Kruger and June Walker. Otto said it was terrible and almost walked out on us, but at last we got it on in Washington, where Mr. Harris said he would come to see it with an unprejudiced eye. This time he only remarked that he’d be damned if he knew why he had ever bothered with the thing, but if it was any fun for me to mess about with such truck he had no objection to my seeing what I could do. Messing about with a farce isn’t exactly fun, and I almost killed myself working over it.

During the next week in Baltimore, Mr. Harris wired me that a failure at his New York theater was leaving his house dark, and that he had booked THE NERVOUS WRECK to open there the following Monday. By that time I had the play in pretty good shape. Al Lewis, Sam Forrest and I had been at it night and day, but I had no last act at all. A farce without a last act is a pretty sad affair, and one night in desperation I remembered a hot comedy scene I had in an unproduced farce called THE HAUNTED HOUSE. I promptly pulled the scene bodily out of one play and stuck it into another.

This scene, the examination of some cowboys on a ranch by a young eastern highbrow who used the methods of laboratory psychology, made the play’s success, but left me in an awful mess when the time came to produce THE HAUNTED HOUSE, which was now without any last act at all. One act, however, has always been a little thing in my life, and I stuck something in the hole left by the missing scene, and with the late Wallace Eddinger in the leading part, THE HAUNTED HOUSE did well enough for a season.