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SHOWMAN
threw a Svengali in Poughkeepsie that still cheers me to think of. It's a fine, fat part and the chief reason why "Trilby" has been movieized more than probably any other story in the world.
I still get some cream out of it even now. A little later I sank $1500 buying the rights to the acting script when Paul Potter, its author, needed cash. His script is the only actable play ever made out of the book's scanty material so, every time they make another movie out of the old campaigner, they have to settle with me.
No, I didn't always get stuck in these experimental days. I got cash as well as satisfaction out of paying off Charles Frohman for a fast one he pulled on me once when I needed help— nothing really out of the way, you understand, just a matter of Frohman's forgetting an informal promise at an inconvenient moment— but enough to make me lay for him. My chance came when a one-act play called "The Cat and the Cherub" turned up on the variety bill at Hammerstein's Olympia with Holbrook Blinn in the leading role. It was a nice little thing, the first piece ever to use the business of propping a dead man up against a wall so naturally that the cop walks by swinging his club without noticing anything wrong. That gag has since been developed in all kinds of directions, including the Apache dance-hall business where the murderer fools the law by dancing with the girl's corpse.
A couple of weeks after "The Cat and the Cherub"
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