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SHOWMAN
"That will cost you some money, young man," he said. "Something like $20,000 in advance"— cough— "on twenty percent of the gross."
Such terms as that were unheard of then or now. But I had all the cash in the world, so I wrote him out a check and walked out, leaving him gaping at it and obviously wondering if any check that size could possibly be good. In no time I had six road companies taking Svengali and his beautiful stooge all over the smaller places in the United States. Palmer's big city company coined money, but the spots I played didn't cotton at all to Svengali's hypnotic wiles and, for a while, it looked as if I'd sold myself a pup again. But the string I had on Palmer's further exploitation of "Trilby ' saved the day. When he wanted to take his company to San Francisco, he had to play a route all the way from St. Louis west to get there— and I owned the rights every step of the way. He had to cut me a large slice of pie to get me to bow out in his favor. And then, when I discovered that "Trilby" was not copyrighted in England and the colonies, the old gentleman had to give me fifty percent of the gross in Australia to keep me from taking my own company out there, playing Svengali myself. First and last I got some $50,000 out of my $20,000 investment.
Threatening to play Svengali myself was no bluff. I'd already been doing it, since I was still a good trouper in emergencies. Shortly after they went on tour, one of my road companies wired me from North Adams,
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