Part 8

"That hundred-dollar bill looked bigger than any sum of money I have ever had since."

* * *

It was late in 1885 when Charles returned from the disastrous Wallack's Theater tour, bankrupt in finance but almost over-capitalized in courage and plans for the future. Up to that time he had no regular office. Like many of the managers of the day, his office was in his hat. Now, for the first time, he set up an establishment of his own. It required no capital to embark in the booking business in those days. Nerve and resiliency were the two principal requisites.

The first Frohman offices were at 1215 Broadway, in the same building that housed Daly's Theater. In two small rooms on the second floor Charles Frohman laid the corner-stone of what in later years became a chain of offices and interests that reached wherever the English language was spoken on the stage. The interesting contrast here was that while Augustin Daly, then in the heyday of his great success, was creating theatrical history on the stage below him, Charles Frohman was beginning his real managerial career up-stairs.

Frohman's first associate was W. W. Randall, a San Francisco newspaper man whom he had met in the Haverly's Minstrel days, in the mean time manager of "The Private Secretary" and several of the Madison Square companies on the road. He was alert and aggressive and knew the technique of the theatrical business.

Charles Frohman's policy was always pretentious, so he set up two distinct firms. One was the "Randall's Theatrical Bureau, Charles Frohman and W. W. Randall, Managers," which was under Randall's direction and which booked attractions for theaters throughout the country on a fee basis. The other was called "Frohman & Randall, General Theatrical Managers." Its function was to produce plays and was directly under Charles's supervision. The two firm names were emblazoned on the door and business was started. Their first employee was Julius Cahn.

These offices have an historic interest aside from the fact that they were the first to be occupied by Charles Frohman. Out of them grew really the whole modern system of booking attractions. Up to that era theatrical booking methods were different from those of the present time; there were no great centralized agencies to book attractions for strings of theaters covering the entire country. Union Square was the Rialto, the heart and center of the booking business. The out-of-town manager came there to fill his time for the season. Much of the booking was done in a haphazard way on the sidewalk, and whole seasons were booked on the curb, merely noted in pocket note-books. Two methods of

## booking were then in vogue: one by the manager of a company who wrote

from New York to the towns for time; the other through an agent of out-of-town house managers located in New York. It was this latter system that Frohman and Randall began to develop in a scientific fashion. Charles's extensive experience on the road and his knowledge of the theatrical status of the different towns made him a valuable agent.

Frohman and Randall at that time practically had the field to themselves. Brooks & Dickson, an older firm which included the well-known Joseph Brooks of later managerial fame, had conducted the first booking-office of any consequence, but had now retired. H. S. Taylor had just established on Fourteenth Street Taylor's Theatrical Exchange, destined to figure in theatrical history as the forerunner of the Klaw & Erlanger business.

Despite the high-sounding titles on the door, the Frohman offices were unpretentious. Frohman and Randall had a desk apiece, and there was a second-hand iron safe in the corner. When Frohman was asked, one day soon after the shingle had been hung out, what the safe was for, he replied, with his characteristic humor:

"We keep the coal-scuttle in it."

As a matter of fact there was more truth than poetry in this remark, because the office assets were so low that during the winter the firm had to burn gas all day to keep warm. When asked the reason for this, Frohman said, jocularly:

"We can get more credit if we use gas, because the gas bill has to be paid only once a month. Coal is cash."

Indeed, the office was so cold during that season that it came to be known in the profession as the "Cave of the Winds," and this title was no reflection on the vocal qualities of the proprietors.

It was during those early and precarious days when Frohman was still saddled with the debts of the Wallack's tour that one of the most amusing incidents of his life happened. One morning he was served with the notice of a supplementary proceeding which had been instituted against him. He was always afraid of the courts, and he was much alarmed. He rushed across the street to the Gilsey House and consulted Henry E. Dixey, the actor, who was living there. Dixey's advice was to get a lawyer. Together they returned to the Daly's Theater Building, where Frohman knew a lawyer was installed on the top floor. They found the lawyer blacking that portion of his white socks that appeared through the holes in his shoes.

Frohman stated his case, which the lawyer accepted. He then demanded a two-dollar fee. Frohman had only one dollar in his pocket and borrowed the other dollar from Dixey.

"This money," said the lawyer, "is to be paid into the court. How about my fee?"

Frohman fumbled in his pocket and produced a ten-cent piece. He handed it to the lawyer, saying: "I will pay you later on. Here is your car-fare. Be sure to get to court before it opens."

Frohman and Dixey left. Frohman was much agitated. They walked around the block several times. When he heard the clock strike ten he said to Dixey:

"Now the lawyer is in the court-room and the matter is being settled." In his expansive relief he said: "I have credit at Browne's Chop House. Let us go over and have breakfast."

At the restaurant they ordered a modest meal. As Frohman looked up from his table he saw a man sitting directly opposite whose face was hid behind a newspaper. In front of him was a pile of wheat-cakes about a foot high.

"Gee whiz!" said Frohman. "I wish I had enough money to buy a stack of wheat-cakes that high."

As he said this to Dixey the man opposite happened to lower his paper and revealed himself to be the lawyer Frohman had just engaged. He was having a breakfast spree himself with the two dollars extracted from his two recent clients.

* * *

Business began to pick up with the new year. The first, and what afterward proved to be the most profitable, clients of the

## booking-office were the Baldwin and California theaters in San

Francisco. They were dominated by Al Hayman, brother of Alf, a man who now came intimately into Charles Frohman's life and remained so until the end. He was a Philadelphian who had conducted various traveling theatrical enterprises in Australia and had met Frohman for the first time in London when the latter went over with the Haverly Mastodons. Hayman admired Frohman very much and soon made him general Eastern representative of all his extensive Pacific coast interests.

Hayman was developing into a magnate of importance. With his assistance Charles was able to book a company all the way from New York to San Francisco. Charles made himself responsible for the time between New York and Kansas City, while Hayman would guarantee the company's time from Kansas City or Omaha to the coast.

Frohman and Randall made a good team, and they soon acquired a chain of more than three hundred theaters, ranging from music-halls in small towns that booked the ten-twenty-thirty-cent dramas up to the palatial houses like Hooley's in Chicago, the Hollis in Boston, and the Baldwin in San Francisco.

It was a happy-go-lucky time. If Frohman had ten dollars in his pocket to spare he considered himself rich. Money then, as always, meant very little to him. It came and went easily.

* * *

While the booking business waxed in volume the production end of the establishment did not fare so well. Charles had this activity of the office as his particular domain, and with the instinct of the plunger now began to put on plays right and left.

Just before the association with Randall, Frohman had become manager of Neil Burgess, the actor, and had booked him for a tour in a play called "Vim." A disagreement followed, and Frohman turned him over to George W. Lederer, who took the play out to the coast.

A year after this episode came the first of the many opportunities for fortune that Charles Frohman turned down in the course of his eventful life. This is the way it happened:

Burgess, who was quite an inventive person, had patented the treadmill mechanism to represent horse-racing on the stage, a device which was afterward used with such great effect in "Ben-Hur." He was so much impressed with it that he had a play written around it called "The County Fair."

Burgess, who liked Frohman immensely, tried to get him to take charge of this piece, but Frohman would not listen to the proposition about the mechanical device. He was unhappy over his experience about "Vim," and whenever Burgess tried to talk "The County Fair" and its machine Frohman would put him off.

Burgess finally went elsewhere, and, as most people know, "The County Fair" almost rivaled "The Old Homestead" in money-making ability. The horse-racing scene became the most-talked-of episode on the stage at the time, and Burgess cleared more than a quarter of a million dollars out of the enterprise. Charles Frohman afterward admitted that his prejudice against Burgess and his machine had cost his office at least one hundred thousand dollars.

* * *

Frohman and Randall now launched an important venture. McKee Rankin, who was one of the best-known players of the time, induced them to become his managers in a piece called "The Golden Giant," by Clay M. Greene. Charles, however, agreed to the proposition on the condition that Rankin would put his wife, Kitty Blanchard, in the cast. They had been estranged, and Frohman, with his natural shrewdness, believed that the stage reunion of Mr. and Mrs. McKee Rankin would be a great drawing-card for the play. Rankin made the arrangements, and the Fifth Avenue Theater was booked for two weeks, commencing Easter Monday, 1886.

The theater was then under the management of John Stetson, of Boston, and both Frohman and Rankin looked forward to doing a great business. In this cast Robert Hilliard, who had been a clever amateur actor in Brooklyn, made his first professional appearance. Charles supervised the rehearsals and had rosy visions of a big success. At four o'clock, however, on the afternoon of the opening night, Charles went to the box-office and discovered the advance sale had been only one hundred dollars.

"I tell you what to do, Randall," quickly thought out Frohman, "if Stetson will stand for it we will paper the house to the doors. We must open to a capacity audience."

When Frohman put the matter before Stetson he said he did not believe in "second-hand reconciliations," but assented to the plan. Frohman gave Randall six hundred seats, and the latter put them into good hands. The _premiere_ of "The Golden Giant," to all intents and purposes, took place before a crowded and paying house. In reality there was exactly two hundred and eighty-eight dollars in the box-office. Business picked up, however, and the two weeks' engagement proved prosperous. The play failed on the road, however, and the Frohman offices lost over five thousand dollars on the venture. Rankin had agreed to pay Frohman forty per cent. of the losses. That agreement remained in force all his life, for it was never paid.

In Charles's next venture he launched his first star. Curiously enough, the star was Tony Hart, a member of the famous Irish team of Harrigan and Hart, who had delighted the boyhood of Frohman when he used to slip away on Saturday nights and revel in a show.

Tony Hart, during the interim, had separated from Harrigan, and in some way Charles obtained the manuscript of a farce-comedy by William Gill called "A Toy Pistol."

Charles had never lost his admiration for Hart, and when he saw that the leading character had to impersonate an Italian, a young Hebrew, an Irishwoman, and a Chinaman, Frohman said, "Tony Hart was the very person."

Accordingly, he engaged Hart and a company which included J. B. Mackey, F. R. Jackson, T. J. Cronin, D. G. Longworth, Annie Adams, Annie Alliston, Mattie Ferguson, Bertie Amberg, Eva Grenville, Vera Wilson, Minnie Williams, and Lena Merville.

This production had an influence on Charles Frohman's life far greater than the association with his first star, for Annie Adams now began a more or less continuous connection with Charles Frohman's companies. Her daughter, the little girl whom Charles had met casually years before, was now about to make her first New York appearance as member of a traveling company in "The Paymaster." Already the energetic mother was importuning Charles to engage the daughter. His answer was, "I'll give her a chance as soon as I can." He little dreamed that this wisp of a girl was to become in later years his most profitable and best-known star.

Charles was, of course, keenly interested in "A Toy Pistol." He conducted the rehearsals, and on February 20, 1886, produced it at what was then called the New York Comedy Theater. It failed, however. The New York Comedy Theater was originally a large billiard-hall in the Gilsey Building, on Broadway between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets, and had been first named the San Francisco Minstrel Hall. It became successively Haverly's Comedy Theater and the New York Comedy Theater. Subsequently, it was known as Hermann's Theater, and was the scene of many of the earlier Charles Frohman productions.

* * *

Charles now became immersed in productions. About this time Archibald Clavering Gunter, who had scored a sensational success with his books, especially "Mr. Barnes of New York," had written a play called "A Wall Street Bandit," which had been produced with great success in San Francisco. Frohman booked it for four weeks at the old Standard Theater, afterward the Manhattan, on a very generous royalty basis, and plunged in his usual lavish style. He got together a magnificent cast, which included Georgia Cayvan, W. J. Ferguson, Robert McWade, Charles Bowser, Charles Wheatleigh, and Sadie Bigelow. The play opened to capacity and the indications were that the engagement would be a success; but it suddenly fizzled out. On Sunday morning, when Charles read the papers with their reviews of the week, he said to Randall, with his usual philosophy:

"We've got a magnificent frost, but it was worth doing."

This production cost the youthful manager ten thousand dollars.

* * *

Frohman still had control of "time" at the Standard, so he now put on a play, translated by Henri Rochefort, called "A Daughter of Ireland," in which Georgia Cayvan had the title role. Here he scored another failure, but his ardor remained undampened and he went on to what looked at that moment to be the biggest thing he had yet tried.

Dion Boucicault was one of the great stage figures of his period. He was both actor and author, and wrote or adapted several hundred plays, including such phenomenal successes as "Colleen Bawn," "Shaughraun," which ran for a year simultaneously in London, New York, and Melbourne, and "London Assurance." There was much talk of his latest comedy, "The Jilt." Frohman, who always wanted to be associated with big names, now arranged by cable to produce this play at the Standard. Once more he plunged on an expensive company which included, among others, Fritz Williams, Louise Thorndyke, and Helen Bancroft.

For four weeks he cleared a thousand a week. Then he put the company on the road, where it did absolutely nothing. Charles, who had an uncanny sense of analysis of play failures, now declared that the reason for the failure was that theater-goers resented Boucicault's treatment of his first wife, Agnes Robertson. Boucicault had declared that he was not the father of her child, and when she sued him in England the courts gave her the verdict. Meanwhile Boucicault married, and in the eyes of the world he was a bigamist. This experience, it is interesting to add, taught Charles Frohman never to engage stars on whom there was the slightest smirch of scandal or disrepute.

At Montreal Boucicault refused to continue the tour, and this engagement, like so many of its predecessors, left Charles in a financial hole. Despite all these reverses he was able to make a livelihood out of the booking end of the office, which thrived and grew with each month. Nor was he without his sense of humor in those days.

One day he met a certain manager who had lost a great deal of money in comic opera. Frohman said to him that he heard that there was much money in the comic-opera end of the business.

"So there is," replied the manager.

"You ought to know," responded Frohman, "for you have put enough into it."

This remark, often attributed to others, is said to have originated here.

* * *

Frohman was now an established producer, and although the tide of fortune had not gone altogether happily with him, he had a Micawber-like conviction that the big thing would eventually turn up. Now came his first contact with Bronson Howard, who, a few years later, was to be the first mile-stone in his journey to fame and fortune.

Howard's name was one to conjure with. He had produced "Young Mrs. Winthrop," "The Banker's Daughter," "Saratoga," and other great successes. Charles Frohman, yielding, as usual, to the lure of big names, now put on Howard's play, "Baron Rudolph," for which George Knight had paid the author three thousand dollars to rewrite. Knight gave Frohman a free hand in the matter of casting the production, and it was put on at the Fourteenth Street Theater in an elaborate fashion. The company included various people who later on were to become widely known. Among them were George Knight and his wife, George Fawcett, Charles Bowser, and a very prepossessing young man named Henry Woodruff.

"Baron Rudolph" proved to be a failure, and it broke Knight's heart, for shortly afterward he was committed to an insane asylum from which he never emerged alive. It was found that while the play was well written there was no sympathy for a ragged tramp.

Whether he thought it would change his luck or not, Charles now turned to a different sort of enterprise. He had read in the newspapers about the astonishing mind-reading feats in England of Washington Irving Bishop. Always on the lookout for something novel, he started a correspondence with Bishop which ended in a contract by which he agreed to present Bishop in the United States in 1887.

Bishop came over and Frohman sponsored his first appearance in New York on February 27, 1887, at Wallack's Theater. With his genius for publicity, Frohman got an extraordinary amount of advertising out of this engagement. Among other things he got Bishop to drive around New York blindfolded. He invited well-known men to come and witness his marvelous gift in private. All of which attracted a great deal of attention, but very little money to the box-office. Frohman and Bishop differed about the conduct of the tour that was to follow, and M. B. Leavitt assumed the management.

While at 1215 Broadway Charles Frohman established another of his many innovations by getting out what was probably the first stylographic press sheet. This sheet, which contained news of the various attractions that Frohman booked, was sent to the leading newspapers throughout the country and was the forerunner of the avalanche of press matter that to-day is hurled at dramatic editors everywhere.

* * *

The booking business had now grown so extensively that the office force was increased. First came Julius Cahn, who assisted Randall with the

## booking. Al Hayman took a desk in Frohman's office, which, because of

Hayman's extensive California enterprises, had a virtual monopoly on all Western booking.

Now developed a curious episode. Charles, with his devotion to big names, used the words "Daly's Theater Building" on his letter-heads. This so infuriated Daly that he sent a peremptory message to the landlord insisting that Frohman vacate the building. Frohman and Randall thereupon moved their offices up the block to 1267 Broadway.

Charles Frohman made every possible capitalization of this change. Among other things he issued a broadside, announcing the removal to new offices, and making the following characteristic statement:

_Our agency, we are pleased to state, has been an established success from the very start. We now represent every important theater in the United States and Canada, as an inspection of our list will show, and we will always keep up the high standard of attractions that have been booked through this office, and we want the business of no others. Mr. E. E. Rice, the well-known manager and author, will have adjoining offices with us, and his attractions will be booked through our offices. We transact a general theatrical business (excepting that pertaining to a dramatic or actor's agency), and are in competition with no other exchange, booking agency, or dramatic concern. Neither do we have any desk-room to let, reserving all the space of our office for our own use._

Attached to this announcement was a list of theaters that he represented, which was a foot long. He was also representing Archibald Clavering Gunter, who had followed up "A Wall Street Bandit" with "Prince Karl," and Robert Buchanan, author of "Lady Clare" and "Alone in London."

Frohman and Randall stayed at 1267 Broadway for a year. Shortly before the next change Randall, who had become extensively interested in outside enterprises, retired from the firm. His successor as close associate with Charles Frohman was Harry Rockwood, ablest of the early Frohman lieutenants.

Rockwood was a distinguished-looking man and a tireless worker. The way he came to be associated with Charles Frohman was interesting. His real name was H. Rockwood Hewitt, and he was related to ex-Mayor Abram S. Hewitt of New York. He had had some experience in Wall Street, but became infected with the theatrical virus.

One day in 1888 a well-groomed young man approached Gustave Frohman at the Fourteenth Street Theater. He introduced himself as Harry Hewitt. He said to Frohman:

"My name is Hewitt. I would like to get into the theatrical business."

Gustave invited him to come around to the Madison Square Theater the next day, and asked him what he would like to do.

"Oh, I should like to do anything."

Frohman then gave him an imaginary house to "count up."

Rockwood, who was an expert accountant, did the job with amazing swiftness. Whereupon Gustave Frohman telephoned to Charles Frohman as follows:

"I've got the greatest treasurer in the world for you. Send for him."

Charles engaged him for a Madison Square Company, and in this way Rockwood's theatrical career started. It was the fashion of many people of that time interested in the theatrical business to change their names, so he became Harry Rockwood. In the same way Harry Hayman, brother of Al and Alf Hayman, changed his name to Harry Mann.