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SHOWMAN
year, and began to wonder if there wasn't a play in it. Its central theme of the incredibly beautiful queen who was eternally young— you remember she kept that way by bathing in an everlasting flame— was thoroughly well suited to the type of sensational staging in which I had been so arduously trained. So, when there was nothing else to do one Sunday morning in Reno, I got a copy of "She," a ream of paper, a pair of shears and a paste-pot— I think I also used a pencil to number my pages— and emerged five hours later with a dramatic version of the novel that looked to me very much like business.
We put it on in Los Angeles with the everlasting flame shooting out of the end of a gas-pipe behind an asbestos screen— a small girl named Maude Adams danced in the ballet. In San Francisco the audience ate it up until, in the final scene, the everlasting flame works too well and the lovely lady is changed into a puling infant. That was Rider Haggard's idea, not mine. It worked fine in the book, but, on the stage, it set the audience into irreverent fits of laughter. Still the critics gave it rave reviews— it occurs to me that they may have left before the end— and the prestige of the book brought the public in flocks. We had a hit on our hands. And that meant just one thing to the coast manager— book it east and end up in New York.
So we started east, as proud as a mother cat with new kittens. We'd got as far as Dakota, with business going great guns, when we learned that there was trouble
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