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Actorviews
Mansfields, and was on the point of leaving the Drama supinated, when along came the veracious Minnie Maddern Fiske and the credible Nat Goodwin to show me that I had not been disrelishing Mr. Mansfield’s arch histrionism in vain (of course I am here compacting my eloquence into fewer, if longer, words).
“Nat Goodwin!” She echoed the name thrillingly. “He was the spirit of acting !”
“Ah! so that’s where you got your inspiration!” “I saw him act when I was very young — out in California — and straightway asked him to let me play any part so’s to be on the same stage with him. He told me to look him up if I ever came to New York. I went to New York; I wrote him that I was on my way; I thought he’d meet me at the station with a part. I found him, and got a part — that big.” She measured it on her thumb.
“Oh, well,” I said, “with that start no wonder you’re what and where you are! I only marvel you didn’t arrive sooner.”
“But I played the part so badly,” she said — and said as though it might have been played only yesterday — “that he said I was absolutely incompetent, hopeless. He sent me home.”
“And I saw that man barter golden manuscripts to get Maxine Elliott away from T. Daniel Frawley’s stock company ! He sent you home ?”
“Yes; but I wouldn’t stay sent. I caught up with him again, and he made me Edna Goodrich’s understudy. For one thing or another she was frequently out of the bill — he was playing repertory — and I had a chance to play her parts in her clothes, six sizes too big for me. I got twenty-five a week, and some weeks I earned it.”