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SHOWMAN
Its beginnings were queerly casual, way back when Joseph R. Grismer, the man who taught me the theater business, was playing in the Baldwin Theater stock company in San Francisco. The Hayman brothers, Al and Alf, later king-pins in the syndicate set-up, were manager and treasurer of the Baldwin respectively. At the same time Dan and Charles Frohman hit town with Callender's minstrels, a troupe which, for a novelty, carried real negroes instead of black-face white men— Dan managing the outfit, Charles going ahead of the show as advance man and occasionally beating the bass drum outside the theater to bring in business. I can see him yet, whaling away at the thing, red-faced, puffing and worried. Neither outfit was doing well, so Dan Frohman suggested a combination of forces, using the negro troupe for background in the plantation and steamboat stuff of a production of that old stand-by, "The Octoroon.' ' That put the Haymans and Frohmans in the same boat. When the Haymans came east and hooked up with Klaw and Erlanger, then just inconspicuous New York booking agents, the fatal combination was all set. Steadily, cold-bloodedly, they reached out and reached out until within ten years or so they had every big theater in every big town either sewed up tight or scared to death.
It was a neat and versatile layout. The Frohmans were the highbrow, swanky side of the picture, an invaluable front of well-deserved prestige, producing pretentious drama for one market while the other end
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