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SHOWMAN
"That's just what I mean," I said. Then I made him a proposition. I explained at length that alterations on a considerable scale would be necessary and the process of experimenting with it would be long and costly. So I offered royalties up to $10,000 for permission to change the title and juggle with it until it was theatrically satisfactory.
Mrs. Parker was more than willing. And I knew just the man for the fixing-job. Joseph R. Grismer, the brilliant actor-manager who had taught me the showbusiness out in California, was the finest play-doctor who ever made a spavined manuscript jump through hoops and roll over and play dead. I showed him "Annie Laurie" and he caught fire at once.
But it was a long two years before this play, retitled "Way Down East," began to sit up and smile at us. Some hits arrive overnight; you have to quarry others out of a mountain of successive failures and disappointments. "The Old Homestead" itself, which was made out of Denman Thompson's vaudeville oneacter called "Joshua Whitcomb," had a similar history of lagging disappointment and then of glorious triumph following a decision to throw in a lot of fancy effects and a lot of spare characters to make a big show of it. During the trial-and-error period at one time or another we had used every small town in the United States as dog for "Way Down East," and no two of them ever saw the same version. Mrs. Parker worked like a Trojan on the script when we were readying it
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