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SHOWMAN
with undying devotion. That cramped Tooker's style. But the tradition was going great guns by that time— and the matinee idol, in the shape of Kyrle Bellew, Maurice Barrymore, Charles R. Thorne and McKee Rankin, was a standard figure from then on.
There's nothing new under the sun. The present system whereby a radio or movie-star can arrange with an agency to have himself written 50,000 fan-letters in three months— at a price— is just an adaptation of the Commodore's fine Italian method. If Corbett had needed the build-up of phony fan-mail, I'd have cheerfully supplied it. But he didn't. It came of itself.
Still the public took a lot of educating before it would swallow the idea of a champion prize-fighter being a gentleman on the side— or vice versa if you like. The ordinary matinee-idol didn't go in for the down-the-cellar-and-throw-the-key-away stuff — not so you could notice it. The English, being the most conservative race on earth, were particularly tough— we never did get the idea over to them. When we took "Gentleman Jack," Corbett's play, to London, we roused more alarums and excursions than had been seen there since Pocahontas had landed. The English conception of a prize-fighter was, if anything, even lower than the American. At the National Sporting Club in London, the scene of all the important boxingcontests, the fighter himself was the lowest of the low. He could come and see the fun when his colleagues were in the ring, but he and his handlers had to sit in
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