Actorviews (1923)

296 Actorviews interviewed once in San Francisco who played Abraham Lincoln in vaudeville — a fellow named Chapin?” “I should say,” I said. “He wouldn’t see me anywhere but in his dressing room; and although it was Monday and no matinee, I found him there completely made up as Lincoln.” “Chapin went to New York,” Bacon drawled, “and got to wearing a shawl on the street; and a fellow says, ‘That guy ain’t going to be satisfied till he’s assassinated.’ ” Accounting for this success which he carries as lightly as his squint, Bacon warned me not to overlook the element of luck. “If,” he said, “one of Henry W. Savage’s actors — I can’t think of his name for the minute — hadn’t been held to his contract with a piece on the road I shouldn’t be playing Lightnin’ Bill Jones to-day.” “I don’t make the connection, Frank.” “You remember when I played the old inventor here in ‘The Fortune Hunter’ about eleven years ago? You ought to remember it, because you gave me a good notice — the best I ever got from you out on the coast was to be called a gum-shoe comedian, because I was so soft and slow. Not that this good notice was wholly deserved! ‘Mother’ had read it before she came out and saw the performance, after which she says to me: ‘What’s all this talk about? I’ve seen you do lots of things better in stock.’ “But what I started to tell you was that I had been fired out of that part in ‘The Fortune Hunter’ by the managers and was only kept because the actor they wanted to replace me couldn’t get away from a Savage show in time. And Shelley Hull was to have been canned, too. Yes, Hale Hamilton was booked to