Actorviews (1923)

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268 Actorviews “God, no! My first job as leading man was with a stock company at South Norwalk, Connecticut. I lasted eight weeks and nearly died of pride and gin fizzes. Then I went to the stock company at Union Hill, New Jersey, where Jane Cowl was stock star, and for the first time in my life I could say that I was working in and about New York.” “Leading man?” I persevered. “That wasn’t my contract. I went as juvenile and expected to wear the beards. But Eugene O’Brien was suffering some mental shock or something and couldn’t learn his part in ‘Old Heidelberg’; so I got it letter perfect in twelve hours — with a pot of coffee and a quart of whisky. They apologized for me before the first curtain went up, but after the second came down they announced me as the leading man for the rest of the season. It was champagne for me that night. . . . And this is where my little history ceases to be interesting, for I was soon in New York, playing the lead in ‘Oh, Boy!’ — it’s only the climb, the bumps, the is-he-man-or-wax, that’s interesting.” “How’d you come to get permanently sober?” “Because I couldn’t get any more fun out of being permanently drunk. I was being marked as irresponsible. Managers were giving me warnings. I’d stay straight a couple of weeks, then I’d meet up with a couple of ball players and it would be all off. I became a traveling souse ; I’d come to in strange places. I woke up once in Montreal, once in Hot Springs, Virginia, another time in New Orleans; and each time I thought I was waking up in New York. I got to palling around with the dwarfs, those midgets that inhabit the foots of beds and take their exercise on the chandelier — those midgets that once sent Nat Goodwin to a hospital,