Actorviews (1923)

246 Actorviews collar, as rippling as his everlasting Windsor tie. He hunches comfortably in his first chair since dinner — if he remembered to dine — and I, in a manner of speaking, spill the salt by mentioning ticket speculators. Now he’s off : “I take Hammond’s and your advice to cut the Chicago prices of ‘Mecca’ a dollar lower than New York — I really want to do something decent for the city that put me on my feet with ‘Aphrodite’ — and along come the speculators and try to charge more than I’ve cut. Don’t you see? — they try to defeat my cut price. Without risking a dollar they try to suck the blood of my enterprise. I’m not against decent brokers who charge fifty cents extra. But when they charge ten, twenty times that, as they did for ‘Aphrodite’ and are attempting to do for ‘Mecca,’ I can’t discriminate between decent brokers and sure-thing bloodsuckers; the good have to suffer with the bad. “I know ticket speculating as well as I know the stage,” he goes on, his mouth firm now, his eyes sparkling. ‘‘I was a stage ‘clearer’ for twenty-five cents a day — and I know when a stage is swept. And I was a ticket speculator — and I know that it takes a thief to catch a thief. I might have been a ticket speculator now, fattening on the gambles and imaginations of gamer men, if Mr. Hammerstein hadn’t one day called me in off the street and said, ‘Young fellow, you’re too smart for this; I want you to go to Europe and pick artists for me.’ I never thought then I’d see the day I’d sew up four hundred and eight thousand dollars of good borrowed money and more than four hundred and eight quarts of blood in one show.” ‘‘Is ‘Mecca’ the last of your big ones?” I ask him. “I thought it was — the conditions, the expense, were heart-breaking; I thought I was through. I