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142 THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT
skirts, noting how actors and directors produced their effects, studying lights and scenery. Now and then, he buttonholed an actor or a mechanic and asked a condensed, pointed question. ... Of nights, he got out his old favourites of classical literature, like Pilgriin s Progress or The Three Musketeers^ and experimented with turning them into moving-picture scenarios.
Frank Meyer had come on from St. Louis to direct a film agency in Fourteenth Street. The Comedy was one of the best customers. For two years, he thought that A1 Kaufmann owned the house. Then one day the little man who really owned it came out of his den, introduced himself, began subtly to cross-examine him.
Still further: Zukor spread his education to include the “legitimate” theatre. His partnership gave him the entree to the busy Broadway offices of William A. Brady; eventually, he had uptown desk-room there. When Jessie Bonstelle sold her stage version of Little Women to Brady, Adolph Zukor bought a moderate partnership in the production.
“I felt that the play would go,” he says, “and it did. But I was really investing the money in my education.”
He took small shares in one or two other Brady ventures which did not do so well. But he achieved his main object. He was studying the spoken theatre, with its background of three centuries; drawing on the accumulated experience of its managers in pleasing and alluring the public. And he was comparing it with the