Blue-grass and Broadway
looms of her great-great-great grandmother by that lady's slaves,
crowned this toilet with the floppy hat covered with crushed roses she
and Miss Lindsey and Mr. Farraday had purchased, and reported herself
about an hour late at the rehearsals of "The Purple Slipper," whose
authorship she had repudiated. She seated herself in the dusk of the
left stage-box and bared her breast for blows. They came fast and
furious, but other breasts and heads beside her own suffered. Mr.
William Rooney was in full action. The entire company was on the stage
in the midst of the last ensemble bit in the first act, all talking and
acting with blue booklets of lines in their hands.
"Here you, Mr. Kent," roared Mr. Rooney as he rose from behind his
table, at one side of which sat faithful Fido annotating his copy of the
manuscript, "make up to that old lady like she was the last ham
sandwich extinct and you knew you were going to be fed on alfalfa the
rest of your life. Get her going, man, get her going! She's an old fool,
and you know it, but you've got to have her plantation and slaves. You
can keep a chorus-girl car in the garage if you just get her well
fooled. Fool along, fool along!"
"'I will write the message to your son, Madam Carrington, and dispatch
it forthwith by one of my own black boys. Is my hand not ever ready for
your service and my wit--and also my heart?'" declaimed Mr. Kent with
satisfactory fervor, as he kissed Miss Herne's fat white hand.
"Now blob, Miss Herne, blob!" directed Mr. Rooney, coming entirely from
behind the table. "You are the fool of this show and don't let anybody
get that away from you."
"'I pray a blessing on your excellent friendship, Judge Cheneworth, and
I will rest me content in--'" Miss Herne answered in a most excellent
imitation of the helplessness of an old grand dame.
"Break in there, Miss Lindsey, break in!" raved Mr. Rooney. "'Content
in' is your cue. Grab it. Remember you are just the sister and only in
the play to swell the list of actors on the program, so grab and keep
a-grabbing if you want a place on the salary list. Now, everybody on at
Miss Lindsey's lines and break up this drivel between the old birds."
"'Mother, Rosalind bids me say to you that--'"
"Crowd on everybody, crowd on, and keep things going! It will be nine
o'clock by now, and we'll have to begin to feed the audience the hugging
by a quarter to ten or they will go out and look elsewhere.--Say, Mr.
Leigh, are your feet mates? You don't handle 'em even."
Miss Adair rose and stole from the box to the stage-door, and looked up
and down the street to see if Mr. Vandeford was approaching. She felt
that she could not stand more alone. He was nowhere in sight, and she
decided to walk around the block and see if the sun at ninety degrees
would warm her chill. After this journey she returned to her post and
found the box still empty. Mr. Vandeford had not arrived nor had Mr.
Farraday, but she seated herself resolutely. She was just in time to
witness a pitched battle between Miss Hawtry and Mr. Rooney.
"If you are determined to walk through the scenes, Miss Hawtry, do it
awake and not asleep!" stormed Mr. Rooney.
"Very well," answered Miss Hawtry, but Miss Adair's heart warmed to her
as she noted the contemptuousness in her manner directed toward her
stage-manager.
"Now see here, Height, you know that you want to get away with this
woman before her husband gets back. You can't do it with kid gloves on.
Spit on your hands, man, and grab her by the hair. You say: 'Rosalind, a
strong man's love is a weapon which a woman can easily turn against
herself with deadly outcome,' like you were begging her to go with you
over to Ligget's for an ice-cream soda with crushed strawberries. Say it
this way." And as she sat astounded Miss Adair heard a line that she had
written in a sympathetic fervor of imagination and which was perhaps her
favorite in the whole play, uttered by Mr. William Rooney with the most
exquisite and manly feeling, while his homely, vulgar face and body were
transformed into the same exquisiteness. A breathless happiness
descended upon her, and she waited in it to hear the beautiful Mr.
Gerald Height give utterance to it with the same art. Miss Hawtry
brought her to earth.
"Mr. Rooney," she said with an utter lack of appreciation or
comprehension of the bit of high art that had flashed upon her, "it is
in my contract with Mr. Vandeford that I rehearse my scenes alone with
my support until the dress rehearsal."
"Yes, I might have judged that from 'Miss Cut-up,'" Mr. Rooney answered
her with a blow straight from his shoulder. "Give little sister her
cue, Height, and let her run on to rescue you. God knows you need it!"
"Mr. Rooney, I'll have you understand--" Miss Hawtry came to the center
to continue her tirade, when Mr. Rooney struck the decisive blow.
"Everybody on and begin the scene over!" he commanded right past the
enraged star. "Take it up, Kent, with Miss Herne at 'I will write the
message to your son,' and get her going, get her going!"
At this forceful command the machinery of "The Purple Slipper" was set
in motion, and swept Miss Hawtry off center and into her place for the
time being.
And despite herself Miss Adair was fascinated in watching the machine
grind away, with now and then a spark from Mr. Rooney that took fire in
the very core of her heart or brain or solar plexus--wherever "The
Renunciation of Rosalind" had been conceived. Miss Adair did not know
what it was that thus affected her, but she had got hold of her end of
the psychic cord along which the author feeds the hostile stage-manager
in such a manner that on the first night of a successful play they can
say to each other with clasped hands and wet eyes, "Well done!"
And while Miss Adair sat under the spell of Mr. Rooney, Mr. Vandeford
sat in his big chair in his office and fought a battle for "The Purple
Slipper" that resulted in a draw that filled him with anxiety.
"I can find only one open booking in New York for October first, Mr.
Vandeford, sir," Mr. Meyers was saying, with trouble settled in a cloud
upon his broad brow. "I have it fairly good for the road for 'The Purple
Slipper' until October first, and then it is a jump to Toronto or
Minneapolis, which is into the grave."
"I suppose that one opening on Broadway is Weiner's New Carnival
Theater," Mr. Vandeford asked as though the question were useless.
"You have it right," answered Mr. Meyers. "Still, Mr. Vandeford, sir, it
is always failures that leave Broadway openings into which road shows
can jump."
"Until last year, yes, Pops, but now New York is so full of people with
munition and war-contract money in their pockets that any show, no
matter how rotten, that gets in a Broadway theater plays to capacity and
stays. They'd go to 'The Old District Skule' because the doors were open
and there is no other place to go. What are we going to do?"
"I advise that you see Mr. Breit and trust to some very big failure to
give you a place. It is that he will always give you a preference,"
answered Mr. Meyers with little hope, but determination.
"Yes, Breit will let me in if there is a squeezing chance, but Breit
doesn't own a theater, nor do I, or you, Pops; and I don't blame the
fellows who do own them for filling them with their own cheap companies
and plays so as to get their buckets under the whole golden stream. Why
give money away to any independent producer?"
"Mr. Breit said that he had news that Mr. Weiner would open that New
Carnival with a Hilliard show, name not given," Mr. Meyers added to the
information already prepared for Mr. Vandeford.
"I'll see goose-grease frying out of him in Inferno before he gets it,"
said Mr. Vandeford, coolly. "I know that is his game, but I'll put
across this 'Purple Slipper' with Hawtry and keep my 'Rosie Posie Girl'
until I get good and ready to let her play it. Then I'll produce it to
the tune of a half-million dollars and not Mr. Weiner. I've never been
squeezed, and I'm not going to have this rotten game beat me. I'll go
over and see Breit and he'll jockey me a corner on Broadway, somehow.
Back at three." And Mr. Vandeford walked out of his office as coolly as
though not sizzling inwardly with anxiety.
"I've got you next on the booking of about four-fifths of the theaters
on Broadway, Van," said Mr. Breit, the booking king, as he and Mr.
Vandeford smoked leisurely cigars in his big, cool office. "You should
worry! E. and K. and S. and Z. are bound to pick some flivvers and in
you go. Loaf on the road and lose money like a little man."
"My contract expires with Hawtry if I don't present her on Broadway by
September fifteenth."
"That _is_ a bit of a pickle! But she won't have any show to jump into,
and she'll compromise with you; won't she?"
"She'll have to," Mr. Vandeford declared. "Coming down to Atlantic City
to see 'The Purple Slipper' open two weeks from Monday, September
twenty-third?"
"I'll be there. Rooney says it is a go; says little genius amateur wrote
it and Grant Howard 'pepped' it. That right?"
"Yes. By!"
An hour later, in the coolness and seclusion of the grill room of The
Monks, Mr. Vandeford was imparting his predicament to his partner in
the venture and adventures of "The Purple Slipper."
"And you are worrying about whether Miss Hawtry will stay by us for the
few weeks we'll have to loaf on the road or even close while waiting for
the New York opening?" questioned Mr. Farraday. "Say, aren't you a bit
unjust in your judgment of her, Van?"
"I know the whole tribe of actors, and you don't, Denny," answered Mr.
Vandeford, over a tall glass of iced tea he was drinking; he didn't know
exactly why, but the habit had grown on him lately.
"Then why not try to put her under contract for those few indefinite
weeks?" suggested Mr. Farraday, over his cup of hot coffee.
"You talk as though we were dealing with sane people," answered Mr.
Vandeford. "She's got us and she'll keep us guessing up to the last
minute, and then put some kind of screws on. I have got to figure out
the likely ones, to see what I can do to jam them."
"Well, anyway, ask her. I think she'll stand by us. I know she will,"
said Mr. Farraday, with both faith and conviction in his voice. "You do
her an injustice, I say!"
"I'm not going to make her any request or offer, Denny. I can't," said
Mr. Vandeford, as he looked at the ice floating in his glass of tea.
"Of course," assented Mr. Farraday, with pained sympathy in his big
voice. "Would you like me to sound her out?"
"It's half your show; go ahead. She probably knows the situation and has
made her plans for the squeeze or double-cross, but you might try her
out," consented Mr. Vandeford, with a shrewd glance at Mr. Farraday.
"But I wish you wouldn't, Denny," he added, with a sudden glow of
affection in his eyes. Then he was restrained from further remonstrance
with Mr. Farraday by the thought of the author of "The Purple Slipper"
and her plucky sticking by the play through the thick and thin of her
disapproval of it. Again he offered up his big Jonathan as a sacrifice
in hopes of improving the prospects of "The Purple Slipper."
Mr. Farraday took Miss Hawtry into his confidence about the predicament
of finding a New York theater for his play, "The Purple Slipper," that
very evening, out on the veranda of the Beach Inn, where he had motored
her by request for dinner after her fatiguing rehearsals, which she had
made still more fatiguing for Mr. William Rooney.
"And Van sent you to ask me if I was going to stick by?" she asked, with
an effective quaver in her voice.
"He felt that we had no right to--to tie you up for indefinite weeks,"
said Mr. Farraday, constructing and temporizing at the same time.