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SHOWMAN
at the White House more freely than any politicians in the land, were Joseph Jefferson, Stuart Robson, William H. Crane, Lawrence Barrett— actors all. A hostess who landed Edwin Booth for a dinner party was as set up as if she'd married off her daughter to the Prince of Wales. Something like that situation exists in certain European capitals even now, but it's been dead in America these forty years and more.
It was already on the way out when I started buying my way into the picture, although nobody knew it yet. I was part of the younger generation of producers, along with Belasco and Charles and Dan Frohman, who supplanted the Golden Age of the seventies and eighties. But that isn't quite fair. It wasn't we youngsters as individuals who did the fatal damage. That was the work of the famous theatrical syndicate, formed during this period, which kept a stranglehold on the American theater clear up to the World War and eventually fixed it so the strictly commercial manager, the strictly commercial play and the strictly commercial actor dominated the stage. People lamenting the well-known "decline of the American theater" give you every reason for it, from the introduction of coeducational drinking to the periodic recurrence of sun-spots. As one who saw the syndicate rise and fall and fought it every step of the way, I can tell you that its injection of big business into the theatrical game had more to do with the decline of the American theater than any other ten things you can mention.
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