Actorviews (1923)

Luck and Frank Bacon 299 who might appreciate the show, I was wise enough to know he wanted me to get folks in there who could make a noise like applause. I was the wisest feller on Broadway that night. But when I went down to get the passes next morning at eleven, Eddie Dunne told me I couldn’t have ’em because the whole house was sold.” “What’s the smallest salary you ever got, Frank?” “Well, I got thirty the first year at the Alcazar in San Francisco, and then the managers called me into the office and said I’d done such good work they were going to raise me. They gave me thirty-five. But I got less than that when Pershing first saw me.” “General Pershing?” “Yes; he was a lieutenant then, stationed at Fort Baird, N. M., when I played there with a barnstorming company that never had any salary day. We started out with eleven people, and I was number eleven ; but by the time our company was diminished to five I’d been promoted so many times I found mvself leading man. I remember our manager got awfully sore at Fort Baird because we played, as it was called, on credit. That is, we let the soldiers in on tickets given out by a sergeant, the price to be deducted from the soldiers’ next pay. They’d had a pay day just before we arrived, and the manager was sore all the way through when he found thev got their pay only three times a year — because we’d had a good house, two hundred and thirteen dollars, and only thirteen dollars of it was cash.” “But where does Pershing come in?” “Many years later — at a performance of ‘Lightnin’ ’ and a banquet in his honor in New York. I had changed my little curtain speech after the second