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SHOWMAN
ter of somebody's old friend. I knew Ziegfeld was in desperate need of an ingenue for a play called "The Turtle," and this fair-haired, blue-eyed little creature was just the type. I hardly bothered to ask Kelly if she'd ever been anywhere near a theater. As a matter of fact, she had had some barnstorming experiencebut I just shot her over to Ziegfeld regardless and, evidently agreeing with me, he engaged her at once at $35 a week. Thirty-five per and dress yourself, mind you. Dressing yourself for a Ziegfeld production was no joke by the time he got through specifying materials and design and dressmaker. Besides that dismaying expense, her father had to borrow $200 to pay commission to a casting agent— for doing nothing at all— before she could go on and play the part.
It was a fine day's work for me. Four months after "The Turtle" opened, its inexperienced but thoroughly charming ingenue became Mrs. William A. Brady. Inside a couple of years she was a star in her own right. And I mean in her own right.
Between getting married and losing Corbett and working farther into the legitimate theater, I was out of the fight game for a while. My wife felt— and on the whole it was a very sound point of view, as I already knew from experience— that the more chance the theatrical world had to forget that I'd first come to national fame as a fight manager, the better off I was. But it was difficult to wean me altogether. By that time boxing was flourishing right in my own backyard. In
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