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Luck and Frank Bacon
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play his original part. His trunk was packed. Then they discovered that the actor who was to have my part couldn’t get away. So the managers said — I heard the story two years after, and Sam Harris didn’t deny it when I one day brought it up — the managers said, ‘Oh, let ’em both stay!’
“Hull and I happened to be the only ones of that outfit who lived to see their names in electrics — but never forget to figure luck! If I’d lost that chance I might never have had another; and I’ve often wondered what my next move would have been. I had come East with a small-time vaudeville sketch ; I wanted to get a small position in the big time; I had no idea of trying for the legitimate. And when I got to New York about the only person I knew there was Jimmy Montgomery. You know Jimmy?”
“Yes,” I said, refilling my pipe with imported tobacco, the first fatal taste of which was furnished me by the author and proprietor of “Irene” ; “he’s the millionaire who taught me to smoke beyond my means.” “He wasn’t much of a millionaire when I first knew him ; he was,” said Bacon in that gum-shoe way of his, “leading man at the Central Stock Company in San Francisco, and used to board with ‘mother* and me — many’s the time I’ve gone into the kitchen and found Jimmy pressing his pants. Well, I looked Jimmy up in New York. He had a little part in ‘The Fortune Hunter,’ and he said, ‘Frank, I think I can get you a good part for the Chicago production.’ He went down to the Cohan and Harris office and insisted I was the fellow. . . . More luck.”
“Frank, did you ever feel in the old days that you were a big actor needing only the chance?”
“No, I bonest-to-God didn’t. I think ‘mother*