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SILK HAT AND TAILS
personally acquainted with many circus people, including a couple of ringmasters— which was true, for I had met numerous circus performers at the restaurants my father had owned in Cleveland, Ohio.
"The studio will furnish you with riding boots and white riding breeches, " Wally informed me, "but you will have to supply your own dress coWt and silk hat. Do you have any wardrobe?''
"Everything," I asserted, with an all-inclusive gesture.
Wally then ordered me to report the next morning no later than eight-thirty for a picture entitled The Man behind the Door. The camera would start turning promptly at nine. I left the studio with a piece of paper clutched in my hand attesting to the fact that I was an actor at a salary of five dollars a day. It seemed to me like a tremendous stipend— more than I earned in my father's restaurant. But there was one catch: I had no dress coat or silk hat.
So as soon as I got back to Manhattan I began canvassing my friends for these articles that were to make me an actor. I had no trouble borrowing a dress coat from our landlord's son, but the silk hat was more of a problem. Nobody seemed to own one that fitted me. I began to get panicky, for my career as an actor hung on the procurement of a hat. I even considered buying one, but that was only wishful thinking, for I didn't have enough money.
A few years later I was to own more silk hats than one man could use in a lifetime, but on that day I couldn't even borrow one. Finally someone suggested that I might rent a hat. Somehow that simple solution had never occurred to me.
Relieved to think that I would not have to give up that five dollars a day for lack of a silk hat, I hurried down to Seventh Avenue and found one of those places that rent complete wardrobes for formal occasions. The proprietor led me to an array of scrofulous silk hats and announced that their rental price was from fifty cents to a dollar a day.
"Why is there a difference?" I inquired.
"This one for a dollar formerly belonged to John L. Sullivan.