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SHOWMAN
Mrs. Pat Campbell to come to America, years before anybody else succeeded, she only smiled and shook her head and said: "But I hear you handle pugs, Mr. Brady." When I was put up for the Lambs, I was blackballed because some members were afraid I might bring Jim Corbett the prize-fighter into the club. Years later, when Corbett himself was put up for the Lambs, he had more favorable comments after his name than anybody in the history of the organization. But meanwhile we were in the doghouse.
My first effort at crashing Broadway might have suggested that I was trying to get out of the doghouse by way of the menagerie. Several brands of youthful hopefulness blinded and backed me into that one. Niblo's Garden, the old theater at Broadway and Houston Street where "The Black Crook" and Lydia Thompson and her British Blondes had first appeared, had broken out with a play called "Nero," containing Wilton Lackaye as star and, what caught my eye even sooner, a troupe of performing lions. The play wasn't going well. When I got talking business, I acquired the whole production at a very reasonable figure from its discomfited managers. It was partly the lions— I figured lions were a novelty on the stage and something could be done with them— partly my eagerness to have a play, any old play, on Broadway, and partly the fact that acquiring "Nero" would enable me to put a girl named Marie Rene into the female lead. When I first met her she was a "transformation dancer"— did a turn in which
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