My own story (1934)

Record Details:

Title:
My own story
Date:
1934
Publisher:
Boston : Little, Brown, and Company
Volume:
My own story
Leaf #:
000158
Language:
English
Subjects:
Motion Pictures, Motion pictures--Biography
Collection:
Books
Format:
Books
Contributor:
Niles Essanay Silent Film Museum
Sponsor:
Media History Digital Library
Coordinator:
Media History Digital Library
Description:
Date Added:
May 30, 2024
Something wrong or inaccurate about this page? Let us Know!

Thanks for helping us continually improve the quality of the Lantern search engine for all of our users! We have millions of scanned pages, so user reports are incredibly helpful for us to identify places where we can improve and update the metadata.

Please describe the issue below, and click "Submit" to send your comments to our team! If you'd prefer, you can also send us an email to mhdl@commarts.wisc.edu with your comments.




We use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) during our scanning and processing workflow to make the content of each page searchable. You can view the automatically generated text below as well as copy and paste individual pieces of text to quote in your own work.

Text recognition is never 100% accurate. Many parts of the scanned page may not be reflected in the OCR text output, including: images, page layout, certain fonts or handwriting.

MY OWN STORY and in the face of much opposition accepted it. My friends all warned me that this was a step backward. "You'll never play Broadway again," they predicted dolefully. An immediate result of the plunge into vaudeville was an engagement of ten weeks straight at Proctor's Fifty-Eighth Street Theater, a run which broke all existing records. It was at Proctor's that my acquaintance with Mrs. Stuyvesant Fish began. In my act, I carried a basket of onions. All at once it seemed to me an excellent idea to throw them playfully at the spectators. The biggest one of the lot landed squarely on Mrs. Fish's head. When I saw what had happened, I was paralyzed with fright for Mrs. Fish's reputation for arrogance was no secret. Imagine my surprise when a few days later, I received a note from her secretary, asking me to appear as a paid performer at one of Mrs. Fish's famous parties. I accepted. When I reached her house on the appointed evening, her secretary asked me if I would mind singing my songs at intervals instead of all at one time. Of course, I said that I should be delighted to work as Mrs. Fish wished. I learned that the week before, she had made the same request of a European light-opera star whom she was paying a huge sum of money to entertain her guests. The artist had haughtily refused. 132