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SHOWMAN
of the outfit went in for whipped cream and spun sugar musical shows for another market. The Haymans and Klaw and Erlanger were the cold-blooded works behind the front, contrasting sharply with the Frohmans' genuine love of the theater and ability to make plays worth while.
It was easy to see what would happen. The same thing was happening at the same time in steel and oil. But steel and oil are straight business. The theater is flesh and blood, too. The syndicate's raids on talent had more than anything else to do with the breaking up of the grand old tradition of all-star stock companies established by Augustin Daly and A. M. Palmer. In time, out of sheer dog-in-the-mangeriness, the syndicate was forcing no less an immortal than Sarah Bernhardt to troupe the United States under canvas in a circus tent, because their high mightinesses wouldn't allow her in a theater. They made Mrs. Fiske play school-houses and lodge-halls, as if her company had been a fly-by-night troupe with only six rags of scenery and too broke to pay its way to the next stand. That was their style. The effects still last. When the American theater does come back— as it will— hard times will have finally purged it of the syndicate's legacy of crass commercialism.
I fought and got away with it. Belasco started out by playing ball with the syndicate in New York and did fine for a while. But then they turned him loose and it looked like curtains for a while. He lacked my
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