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Jack and John Barrymore
65
yearned to spend them. So I converted them into money, and left New York for Atlantic City, and lived for a few brief hours like a prince.
“I had reached the end of my tiny roll. I had no return ticket. I wondered if my shoes would last to Philadelphia. I went into a cafe and ordered a dish of soup as pink as the wig of Peter Ibbetson. I can see that soup now, and smell it ; I think it was shrimp.
“Well, I was dallying with this plate of pink soup and meditating on the drawbacks of a life of crime, when Mort Singer came into the place and sat down across the table from me. He asked me how I would like to go into a musical comedy.
“I said yes. I would have said yes to Barnum and Bailey. I was critically broke. The last of the lapis lazuli was represented by a bowl of shrimp-pink soup.
“ ‘How much would you ask to come to Chicago and play in a musical comedy?’ says Mr. Singer.
“I got as far as the sibilant sound of the ‘s’ that
starts the ‘seventy’ in ‘seventy-five dollars’
“ ‘S-s-s ,’ says I, and Mort Singer cuts in with :
“ ‘Would four hundred a week do — for a start?’ “And the way in which I said it would do, and at the same time contrived not to fall into the pink soup, was the most magnificent piece of acting of which I have ever been guilty. He didn’t know it, but that was the best acting I was ever going to do for Mort Singer.”
“So that’s how you came to the Princess Theater and ‘A Stubborn Cinderella’?”
“Yes, that’s how.”
“And how does it feel to be back on the same
stage, playing Peter and poetry and ?”
“I’d never thought of it being the same stage,”