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SHOWMAN
with a new success would sow the house with bouncers whose job it was to throw out members of the audience who were seen taking notes. I remember one occasion, with "Way Down East" in Chicago, when I had a patrol-wagon backed up and waiting at the lobby-entrance to stow pirates in as fast as we spotted them. But there was no beating the system, so long as the barnstormers' demand for illegitimate scripts kept up. The pirates could always bribe the prompter to copy them off a version, complete with scene-, prop and lightplots, to be broadcast throughout the land. Even when a new hit wasn't directly bootlegged, the professional plagiarists would steal the feature idea of the play and run it into the ground with flagrant imitations. The first appearance of a fire-engine on the stage in "The Still Alarm," the candles round the corpse in "La Tosca," the moving-platform and buzz-saw business in "Blue Jeans," the big tank in "The Dark Secret," into which the villain threw the heroine— real water and a highly realistic splash— were immediately snapped up and played all the way across the board. This bootlegging went out when the movies began to replace the old barnstorming troupes, but there are vestiges of it left even now. Tent and boat-shows are still known to produce Broadway successes without the author's knowledge, merely altering the title, the names of the characters and a line or two.
A large collection of these mutilated scripts of the most famous plays of the period was quite an asset way
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