As time went on I found myself fully versed in all of the troubles that beset a dramatist and armed against all of them but one. I had learned a good substitute for patiently waiting for a production by turning out so many plays that one of them was always on the fire. I had learned, in a measure, to comfort myself for the present failure with the thought of a coming success, but no philosophy of mine has ever taught me what could possibly be done with a dramatist on the opening night of one of his plays. I have, I think, tried everything, and all that I can be sure of is that the last way of passing that dreadful ordeal was very much the worst way I had ever experimented with.

Twenty years ago it was the custom to drag a terrified author before the curtain at the end of the performance and entice him into telling the audience how glad he was that they liked his play, and how grateful he was to the manager, the director, the actors, stage hands, ushers and stage-door-keeper. This gracious speech being received with some applause, the poor author went home thrilled by this assurance of overwhelming success, and woke up the next morning to read that his play was probably the worst catastrophe of a direful season. This custom of writers being part of the first night show has gone out—not, I think, that the authors wouldn’t still be willing to oblige, but because the managers learned that most of the shows were bad enough without any added attraction.

Some of our more dignified authors a generation ago used to sit in the stage box in full view of the audience, but they grew strong men in those days, and I doubt if there is a playwright alive bold enough to follow their example. I have tried sitting in the gallery, staying at home, standing at the back of the theater after the house lights were lowered, hanging around the stage alley, going to a picture show, drinking too many cocktails, and walking around Central Park, but so far I haven’t found a way that wasn’t awful. This night is the climax of six weeks of hard work, to say nothing of all the effort put into the writing of the play; it means a fortune or nothing, fame or something that is almost disgrace, and the poor wretch can do nothing. A forgetful actor, a careless stage hand, or the blowing of an electric fuse can and has spoiled many a good play, and all that he can do is suffer.

There is no second chance for a play; if its first night in New York is a failure it is dead forever. Luckily the first night audience, supposed to be so hard boiled and over critical, is the easiest audience in the world to sweep off its feet and the most generous in their real joy in the discovery of a good play. Tough they are at first, but the moment they get a feeling that something worth while is happening they go along with you with a whoop. I have fallen down plenty of times, but the kick that has come to me when I have put one over is worth a lot. Any way I figure it I am ahead of the game.

This first night audience is a very powerful factor in deciding the fate of a play, and the “thumbs down” of the old Romans was no more final than the harsh laugh that follows some shabby bit of sentimentality or some bit of hooey philosophy. Many authors and managers of late are trying to fill their houses on a first night with a more friendly crowd, thinking, like the well-known ostrich, that they are putting something over, but they forget that mass psychology is a very curious thing, and that if a man puts his doting mother out in front on a first night he is very likely to hear her voice leading the first cry of “Off with his head.”

The whole subject of dramatic criticism, either from a first night audience or from professional dramatic critics, is a very simple one, but for some reason it is very little understood. As a matter of fact neither this audience nor the critics’ notices of the following day have anything at all to do with the real success or failure of a play. In the morning you open your paper and on the dramatic page you read that your favorite critic saw a play the night before and made the remarkable discovery that it was worth seeing—so did a thousand others at the same time—the fact being simply that it was a good play. The critics’ praise did no more toward making it good than did the favorable response of the audience.

Of course many plays are in the balance; some persons like them and some don’t; but there is little doubt in the minds of trained observers about the really fine plays, and even less about the really bad ones. A play comes to life for the first time when it is played before a wise audience, and their verdict is as a rule both just and final. A good play can take care of itself, and any fool knows a really bad one—when he sees it. Any of us, when we go out and buy a dozen eggs, is likely enough to get a bad one, but we are quick enough to gag over it when we try to eat it. The critic is simply a man who knows a little more, and usually cares a little more, about the theater than the ordinary man of cultivated taste, and he has been trained in a proper manner of expressing himself.

What he tells his readers about a new play is first the truth. This in effect you or I could do as well as he does: it was a good play. The modern critic, however, goes beyond that in his influence upon the theater by insisting upon an increasingly higher standard both in writing and in acting, and by pointing out the virtues or the defects in the performance, instructing his public in what may fairly be expected of the modern drama. Naturally there are bad critics, just as there are bad writers and bad actors, and the bad ones do harm, just as the bad actors and bad writers do.

The first night audience in itself, although still picturesque, has changed greatly in the last few years. Twenty years ago opening nights of any importance at all were naturally far fewer in number than they are to-day, and an opening at Daly’s, Palmer’s, the Lyceum and later at the Empire, drew a brilliant audience made up of the real lovers of the theater and the cream of the “four hundred” that then represented New York society. To be on the first night list in those days meant something. The first night audience of to-day is very different. First nights now are rarely social affairs, and the audience is very much more of the profession, actors, managers, critics, writers and all the moving picture crowd. These, together with the dressmakers and play agents and scouts from the various studios on the lookout for screen material, make up a colorful gathering and they know a lot about theatrical values even if they lack a little of the distinction of the old first night crowd.

During the years I have been going to the theater I have seen some thrilling first nights, but I have never really been one of the regulars, as nowadays if one were to try to be present every time a new play opened there would be very little time for anything else. I recall distinctly some of the great nights when I have been present, such as the first performance of THE FORTUNE HUNTER, ON TRIAL, RAIN, WHAT PRICE GLORY, BROADWAY, BURLESQUE, COQUETTE and many more where a wave of enthusiastic cheering swept the play into instantaneous success. We of the theater, I think, when we watch these first nights with an anxious eye, are apt to forget that the reason a play goes over with a bang is because it is a good play, or a novel play, or the sort of play that at that moment is the play the public wants and the play makes the first night enthusiasm. The first night enthusiasm doesn’t make the play.

My years of almost frantic application to my work had by now resulted in a fixed habit and I found myself pounding along at top speed long after the necessity for such effort had disappeared. It is the literal truth to say that for more than thirty years there has been no time in which I have not had a play in some stage of its progress on my desk and in response to long training, my mind continually drops automatically into retrospective revery entirely without conscious direction on my part.

I was not satisfied with the work I was turning out and decided to make an effort to take life more easily than had been my habit. I remember getting quite a thrill out of this evidence of my sanity and prudence. I had not fully realized how fixed the habits of a lifetime may become and soon discovered how impossible it was for me to hope to reform.

Before I admitted defeat, however, I made really quite an honest effort and forced myself to take part in several of the semi-social and semi-political activities of the theater. I had always refused any demands upon my time not connected either with my own work or with the affairs of the Dramatists’ Guild or the Authors’ League, but I now turned deliberately to these rather remote outlets for my energy. For the first time in my life I tried to make myself believe that it is as important to talk about work as it is to do the work itself, an error of judgment on my part from which my sense of humor rescued me before I had gone very far.

The most interesting of these activities was the attempt to establish a National Theatre as it was called, and although the plan failed, I have always thought the failure was unnecessary. The committee to organize this National Theatre was selected from the best men of the theater, the fine arts departments of the leading eastern universities and the leading social and financial groups of New York. We were to produce one play a year with special attention to manners and diction and show this play at moderate prices in all of the larger cities of the country.

At the first meeting at the Astor Hotel, Augustus Thomas was selected as chairman and from the start most of the active work fell upon his broad shoulders. Augustus Thomas is by far the best presiding officer I have ever known, and for years it has been my fate to be obliged to follow him as chairman, president or mouthpiece of countless societies and committees; but on this occasion I was content to remain in the background. I seem to be of use only when there is a very practical issue, and the National Theatre was a rather altruistic, rather visionary scheme that seemed to me to be a little out of my range. To me the thing that helps the theater most is a good show, no matter who writes it or who produces it or where it comes from; and to me a well-written, well-played play, produced by the commercial theater, is far more stimulating than an equally fine performance inspired by some art group. I have always admired Augustus Thomas; when I first came to New York in the early nineties he was the outstanding dramatist, and in fact as a writer of the better type of melodrama no man of my time has equaled him. Aside from his ability as a writer, he is a man of real eloquence and of commanding presence, and his control of any meeting over which he presides always makes me blush at the thought of my own abrupt and rather arbitrary methods.

Upon this occasion, in spite of the great names on the committee, Mr. Thomas was given full charge, and it was decided that the first play to be produced by the National Theatre should be AS YOU LIKE IT, a decision I heard announced with dire misgivings as I have always thought it a particularly dull and silly play. I was naturally afraid, however, to announce any such radical views in that exalted company. A cast was engaged and the production opened in due time before a brilliant audience in Washington.

It is an unfortunate fact that even the plays of Shakespeare that have retained their vitality can only be efficiently done by players who have been trained to play them, and in this particular case the performance was not anything to rave over. In fact the curtain fell on the first performance with that dull thud that always announces failure, and the audience was cold and unresponsive.

Mrs. Thomas, who had been with her husband through many of his own first nights, and who had been trained, as all wives of playwrights are, to give help and comfort to the stricken, hurried backstage as the curtain fell and found her husband sitting sadly amidst the scenery of Shakespeare’s famous masterpiece with his head bowed and a look of deep dejection on his face. Her maternal instinct fully aroused by her man’s agony, she stepped tenderly to his side and putting her arm gently over his shoulder she murmured bravely: “Never mind, Gus, thank God you didn’t write it.”

There was no reason that I could see why the first attempt of the National Theatre should have ended its existence, but the fact remains that from that day to this I have heard no more about it and I turned back to my own work with some feeling of thankfulness. After all, if a man must be mixed up in a failure, why shouldn’t he have the fun of being responsible for all of it? and, since a man with a mind trained to full activity must focus his thoughts on something, isn’t it better after all that the something should be the activity he knows the most about?

I don’t in the least know how long a writer is supposed to last. It may well be that my thirty odd years have been the greater part of my share although I am sure I should enjoy making it an even hundred, but I do know that to keep up with the parade to-day a writing man must keep his eyes wide open and his fingers on the pulse of the public. This is many times more true to-day than it was in the years before the war, but even then the critical sense of the public was growing rapidly.

In the old days a playwright’s plots and characters were accepted about as automatically as the church creeds of the time were accepted, and for about the same reason; the habit of the average citizen of thinking things out for himself had not yet grown to its present stimulating proportion. If both the church and the stage of to-day are placed in a position where they must fight for their life, surely nothing that is fine in either of them is in danger. With the bunk gone the truth will be twice as powerful.

It has always seemed to me to have been Ibsen who sounded the first note of modern characterization in the drama. Good dramatists have always drawn good characters, but the accent upon the character and the character’s propelling force upon the narrative was quite different. Hamlet, Macbeth, Juliet, Portia, Rip, Caleb Plummer, Duston Kirk and hundreds of others were finely drawn characters, but Ibsen’s Nora not only lived and moved but she moved the play with her and her emotional progress marked the progress of the drama.

After the production of THE NERVOUS WRECK I tried very hard to write the play I earnestly wanted to write, but I couldn’t get it. THE DETOUR and ICEBOUND were true plays from my point of view, honest attempts to do the best work I knew how to do. But I had a feeling that the American drama should express a more optimistic note, that it was, or ought to be, possible to write of life as truly as plays of that class were trying to write about it, and yet express the fundamental difference between our lives and the lives of the people of Middle Europe, whose dramatists had given birth to the new school of naturalistic play writing.

I know, as a sane man of middle age, that the lives around me are not always dull, drab, base or unhappy. I was acquainted with a mother, she was in fact a member of my own household, who had given up a career for her children and who was neither heartbroken nor neurotic; her children weren’t idiots, ungrateful brats or headed either for the gallows or an early grave. I had seen her make sacrifices for them that were well made and well worth the making. On the whole in this world I have seen men and women reap what they have sown, and I have looked closely at life with a trained eye for a great many years and found it good.

I wanted to say something like this in a natural, true and unsentimental way and I couldn’t do it. I don’t in the least know why it can’t be done, but so far it hasn’t been. I don’t propose to take all the blame for this. I’ll admit that NELLIE, THE BEAUTIFUL CLOAK MODEL said that virtue always won out in the end, but before Nellie’s time that statement had been made in platitude.

It may be that the sugar-coated play has killed the possibility of optimistic play writing, but I didn’t want to write about life’s being worth living just to trick a happy ending. I simply wanted to say that life was worth living because that is the way I have found it. I have lived fifty-six years very happily. I have been fortunate in having the sort of wife and the sort of children that have added very greatly to that happiness. I love my work and as a result I have never had any trouble in making all the money necessary for comfort and decency. I am strong and well and those I love are well—why should I write of a sorrowful world? Yet for some reason every time I tried to write a true play the note of futility crept into it.

I floundered about for the next year or two, turning out a few plays, most of which I would have described in the far-off days when I had worked for the Kentucky Coal Company as “run of the mine.” LAZYBONES had some good points, THE DONOVAN AFFAIR made money, but always I was trying for that real play that wouldn’t come.

The best work I did at this time was a dramatization of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel THE GREAT GATSBY. The character of Gatsby made a strong appeal to me, and here was another chance to do a play with Mr. Brady, who seemed anxious for me to come in with him once more. The play was really good, and moderately successful, but here was another time when the truth was bitter and cruel and hard for the public to take.

Naturally I knew perfectly well when I read this novel that Mr. Fitzgerald’s ending absolutely killed any hope of real success, but I have my own theories about dramatizing a novel, and one of them is that the dramatist is in honor bound not to cheapen or coarsen the original author’s story. Gatsby was a great lover; for the sake of the girl he loved he raised himself from nothing to wealth and power. To do this he became a thief. She was unworthy of so great a love and he died by one of those absurd ironic chances that saved him from ever knowing her complete unworthiness. Mr. Fitzgerald knew that for Gatsby death was a merciful friend, and I felt that I had no right to manufacture a conclusion that would satisfy a sentimental audience.

As a matter of fact, I do not enjoy working on another writer’s story, but when I make up my mind to do it I deliberately put myself into that writer’s place and absorb his mind and style so that I write, as far as I am able, as he would write rather than as I would write a scene myself. In the case of F. Scott Fitzgerald that was difficult, not only because I had never seen him, but because he was so much younger than I that his whole mode of thought and all his reactions to life were absurdly different from my own. But a faithful dramatist of an author’s work should, I think, assume that author’s personality and should force himself into the completely receptive attitude of the believer who, with his fingers on a ouija board, lets the pencil go where the spirits direct. The result of this collaboration was a good play, but not a real success. I have always known that, if I had cared to do it, I could have made from this material a great box-office hit, but as I have said before, I think that when one takes another writer’s work, there is an implied obligation not to alter the mood of it.

This feeling is the reason, I think, why I have never cared to work on a play with another author, and why I object so strongly to the “story conference” and the group writing of Hollywood. To me a play is so essentially a mood and it is so impossible for two human beings to enter into the same exact mood that all such collaboration is started under a very real handicap. I can understand being in full agreement with another writer upon details of plot and even upon shades of character but the mood that would compel certain reactions from the characters, that must of necessity propel them along the narrative line in a certain way, could not dominate two writers at the same moment.

I have had little experience in collaboration but in the writing of screen stories I do know that no matter how many writers are working on the same job, only one of them is really doing anything, and, as there is no established technical form to screen story writing, all that happens at one of these famous story conferences is that the man with the most authority writes the story and the others sit around and talk about whatever subject, if any, interests them at the moment. I can see how two dramatists might work together to advantage if one were a highly imaginative writer and the other an expert in form and construction, one to dream out the play and the other to build it. In fact I know of several cases where this method has been highly successful but to me all the joy of creating would be gone if I was forced to share it. Good or bad, I want my play to be mine, and the thrill that has come to me on the few occasions when I have been able to look at a play and say: “It is good, and I did it,” has been a rich return for all the hard work I have ever done.

At about this time Mr. Winthrop Ames, as Chairman of a Committee of the Theatrical Managers, offered me the position of political head of their association, the same sort of job as Judge Landis holds in baseball or Will Hays in the motion picture field. I had a feeling that my wide experience in all the branches of the theater gave me some of the qualifications necessary for this work, and for some time I seriously considered it. The actors, through Mr. Frank Gilmour, and the Authors’ League expressed a desire that I should try my luck, but in the end I refused. Mr. Ames promised me full authority, but I could see no way by which this authority could be enforced. I know the managers very well, thank you, and any time I ride hard on those birds I want a big club and the only gun in the outfit. Also I had a strong feeling that the time hadn’t quite come. A little later some better man will take that job and save the day.

In spite of my knowing that I was not doing all I ought to do as a playwright, these were happy and prosperous years. I was very active in the politics of the theater and very happy at home. My boys were growing up. Donald was at Pomfret and Owen at Choate, and Mrs. Davis and I sold our house in Yonkers and came to New York.

Always when I have the least to do I demand the most time in which to do it, just as when I am not writing at all I insist that I can’t live without an elaborate writing room, although I know perfectly well that I have done the best work of my life with a ten-cent pad of paper and the top of a trunk. In any case, I found the ride to Yonkers too long, and we once more joined the ranks of apartment dwellers.

As a matter of fact, I have usually found that about the time a writer starts in surrounding himself with every luxury in the way of an aid to his work he never does very much with his swell equipment besides occasionally showing it off to admiring acquaintances. It is quite probable that the money he earned to pay for his elaborate study he earned by writing a play on the top of a barrel. I myself have worked in all sorts of places, ranging from a three-dollar-a-week hall bedroom to a studio library in a pent house in the Park Avenue section. During the most prolific years of my life most of my work was done at a desk in the living room of an apartment with two small boys playing about on the floor and crawling between my legs. It is, I suppose, because I have always had so much fun with my writing that the members of my family have never stood in any great awe of my labors, and I suppose the boys saw no good reason why I should try to keep an amusing game all to myself, and usually insisted on being let in on it.

Edgar Wallace told me last year that he loved New York and always had a wonderful rest when he came here. It was, he said, the noisiest city in the world and the only place on earth where he couldn’t write. Personally I can write better in New York than I can anywhere else, and although I am afraid I demand more quiet and privacy as the years go past, I am still quite untroubled by anything less than a riveting machine.

Some rather facetious remarks have been made about the volume of my production, but this same Edgar Wallace makes me look like a drone. When I am hard at work I turn out about four thousand words a day, usually in longhand, written with the softest and dirtiest lead pencil that a nickel can buy. Mr. Wallace tells me that on a good day he dictates ten thousand words. I know that twenty-three percent of all the novels sold in England last year were of his writing, and he calmly threw in three or four plays by way of good measure. Ever since I dined with him I have laughed with scorn at any one bold enough to insinuate that I write too much, and I have been filled with good resolutions.

I surely must settle down to work. No matter how much a man may enjoy his job, every writer in the world has times when he thinks he is through. It’s part of the game. We all of us have hours of profound depression when we are afraid of the future and in terror of our own limitations. We are sure that no good story will ever again come to us and doubtful if we would know what to do with it if it did. This is natural enough when a writer has just finished a play or a novel, because, of course, he has put all he had into it and his mind feels empty. But this mood often comes at other times, and the best cure for it is to hang around doing nothing until you happen to read a fine novel that has just been published or see a really good play—the right play always sends me out of the theater walking on air, and I go to bed tingling all over to wake up the next morning with a new hope and a new determination.

The worst disease, however, that comes to a writer who has been at his job for a long time is the awful fear of being “dated.” Of course it’s hard for one of middle age to write of life in any other way than as he knows it, and equally, of course, our lasting impressions do not come to us after fifty. I fussed for a while over the fear of getting to be a back number, and wondered if I could possibly grow to understand what we were pleased to call “the new generation.” I found, or fancied I found, a great change in the old world, until I happened to recall that these changes had been going on since time began. A very careful study of audiences convinced me that they still reacted to an honest emotion, just exactly as they always had done, and that the only difference in the world around me was that the old gods had different names.

To me, with my conviction that as the world goes on it gets better and more worth living in, it makes no difference at all whether it is the custom to say “Hail! CÆsar!” or “Hello, CÆsar,” and I very much doubt if any of our changes are very much deeper than this. We were a sentimental people, as every race of adventurers must be. Now we have become a very practical race, hard boiled, if one prefers to put it that way. A little while ago we slopped over about our emotions because that was the custom; to-day for the same reason we pretend we haven’t any. Of course our emotions weren’t any greater because we made a fuss about them, or any less because we now cover them up. The relationship between men and women has changed during the last ten years, so had it changed in the generation before that, and so on back to the time of Adam, but that relationship then and now was a thing of enormous interest, and a swell thing to write a play about.

It’s the writer’s business to meet the mood of the hour, and all he has to do to meet this mood is to learn to sympathize with it. Just so long as I feel myself a part of the life around me there is no reason why I shouldn’t keep on writing, and at present I most decidedly do feel that. If the time ever comes when I find myself bewildered and afraid of a strange world that I no longer understand, I’ll stop—or rather, on second thought—perhaps I’ll write a play about how hard it is to understand it!

At this time I stepped out of my job as President of the Dramatists’ Guild and took the presidency of the Authors’ League of America. This, as it happens, is not an honorary position, but comes under the head of honest labor, and during the long fight between the Dramatists and the Theatrical Managers’ Association that resulted in the present Dramatists’ contract, I served on all of the many committees in addition to my work as President of the League. I loved the work; the friendships I formed among the members of the fighting committees are among the pleasant and most helpful contacts of my life.

There are about a dozen men and women who mean a lot to me with whom I have worked for sixteen years to bring about decent conditions for writers. There are many more than a dozen now who are working faithfully for the Authors’ League, but often, when I attend one of the meetings and sit at the crowded council table, I catch the eye of one of the old timers and wink pleasantly—we can remember years when there weren’t enough authors around to fill the room with cigar smoke. We used to ask one another if it was worth while to keep on fighting. James Forbes always said that this was positively his last effort, but he always came back; so did the rest of us, all busy men, not one of us needing the help of any one to get decent contracts. We were proud of our calling and wanted to advance its dignity and importance, and I think that in the end our many years of hard work justified itself. The American Theatre is to-day under a temporary cloud. It may be one year or two years or three years before its old prosperity returns, but the Dramatists’ Guild is the strongest and most powerful body of writing men in the world and there are plenty of strong men of half my age who are able and willing to keep it as powerful and as sane and moderate as it is to-day. No matter what you hear don’t for a moment believe that the prosperity of our theater is not going to return,—the theater is safe and it always has been. Just so long as little boys instinctively pick up a stick and become brave knights and gallant soldiers, and as long as a girl child hugs a doll to her breast and becomes a mother, the theater will live. A combination of circumstance, novel inventions, stupidity and greed, plus lack of leadership and the arrogance of organized labor, has resulted in sad days for many of us, but the turn of the wheel is already bringing about changes and sooner than most of you are yet ready to believe better days are coming.

If, when they come, the men who have been the leaders of the commercial theater have learned their lesson, the temporary setback will have been worth what it has cost; if they haven’t, they will be forced to step aside and give up their power to those more worthy to possess it.

The sane, simple and practical way to govern the theater has been pointed out. Three times already I have served on committees whose object was to consolidate the interests of actors, managers and authors, and hand over the authority to a group of twelve, made up from the men of proved integrity among the three groups. We who have made a long study of conditions know that this composite intelligence could find a way to correct the principal evils that have been the cause of our loss of public confidence and support. Those of the public who really prefer to go to the picture houses can of course continue to go to them. Wise men of the theater know that in the end the picture houses are great incubators engaged in hatching out new audiences for us and that in a very short space of time we could have a road circuit beside which the old Stair and Havlin houses couldn’t cast a shadow.

There are, however, some very definite evils in the present state of the theater and every one of them could be corrected or greatly reduced. The regulation of the sale of tickets has been taken in hand by a progressive group of managers and will be corrected if the managers can be controlled, which is a bit like saying we could do away with evil if there was no more sin. The unfair and unwise demands of the unions of stage hands and musicians could be regulated by an honest facing of facts and a fair presentation of present conditions. No organization has the right, or as a matter of fact the power, to go beyond a clearly marked line; the moment any group’s demands become unfair there is very little difficulty in upsetting that group. It doesn’t demand an Alexander, it simply calls for a little common sense.

No one of us really wants to kill the goose who lays the golden eggs. Help from the railroads would follow an intelligent presentation of our case. Clean theaters would promptly follow in the footsteps of a clean administration. Box office reform depends upon six words spoken by the right man with the right authority to back his six words up. Help from the newspapers does not depend, I am convinced, upon the spending of millions of dollars, but would follow an honest request for their assistance based upon the ground of the theater’s cultural and educational value, always provided that we could show some claim to cultural and educational importance.

The revival of the road, until such time as the turn of the tide has made that revival automatic, could be accomplished under wise leadership that would work for, say, forty decent plays, decently produced, underwritten by local subscription lists. Any community of a hundred thousand population will furnish an audience, once they are assured that there is a certainty of their getting adult entertainment. These aren’t day dreams; everybody knows them; several times we have banded together to fight for them. The last meeting called by John Golden of the managerial group actually had a real grip on this problem, only dinner time came around and we all went home. If some one were to call a meeting of a strong group of actors, authors and managers, all instructed to sit there until they accomplished something, I am sure we would at last be under way—provided always that no lawyers be allowed at the meeting and that it be called at a good restaurant.

During my two years with the Paramount Company, my contract reserved half of my time for my own private affairs and I divided this time as honestly as I knew how between my duties to the Authors’ League and my writing. By now my son Donald had finished college and gone to Hollywood as a staff writer, and Owen had walked out on Professor Baker at Yale, horned into the theater when my back was turned and secured for himself the part of the son in THE BARKER with Dick Bennett in Chicago. This action of his, so his mother informed me, was the most dreadful calamity of modern times and would undoubtedly bring her in sorrow to the grave, but if you have ever seen her seated in an audience where this boy is a member of the cast of players, you might possibly read in her deeply absorbed face a certain smug satisfaction that would not, I am sure, make you think of either graves or calamities.

I, being of coarser stuff, never for a moment regretted the fact that these two boys of ours had insisted upon following in our footsteps; how could they do anything else? They were born of two stage-struck parents and had cut their teeth by biting managers who frequented our establishment. If a child learns anything in the home circle, how could they help learning about the theater? Their mother knows a little about things outside its range, but I know nothing else at all, not even enough to be ashamed of the fact. The great happiness of my life to-day is that as we grow older, the four of us, we grow closer together, and that I can talk with my sons of their problems with the authority of one who knows something about them.

In the fall of 1928 I wrote a play called CARRY ON with a fine part in it for young Owen. My intentions were good and I am sure he has quite forgiven me. Later he played in another of my authorship called TONIGHT AT 12, which was one of the sort of plays often described by Al Woods as “all right, but what the hell did you write it for?” In both of these, however, Owen fared better than I, and I knew that he was fairly started.

In 1928 I turned for a change to the writing of musical comedy and helped a little on WHOOPEE, produced by Ziegfeld with Eddie Cantor in the old Otto Kruger part, for WHOOPEE is an adaptation of our old friend THE NERVOUS WRECK, expertly tailored by Wm. Anthony McGuire.

I also fussed about with LADY FINGERS, a musical version of my old farce, EASY COME, EASY GO, and wrote a show called SPRING IS HERE for Aarons and Freedley. SPRING IS HERE, in spite of a good cast and charming score and lyrics by Rogers and Hart, was only so-so. As a matter of fact, Bill McGuire and Otto Harbach need not worry; they can have the musical comedy field so far as I am concerned. Of all the forms of writing I find it the least interesting and the most difficult; to me it remains a trick like putting peas up your nostrils, not at all impossible, but why do it? The mere statement that I soon discovered that the properly concocted musical show must be dominated by its score and not by its book is explanation enough as to why a vain old dramatist can’t rave about this form of expression.