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SHOWMAN
My wife, Grace George, early developed a taste for wandering round the waste places of the theater. There is still nothing she enjoys more than an evening in a small vaudeville house or workmen's theater or at a third-rate failure— any language, any location, are all the same to her. Every now and then she returns from one of these expeditions with news of an unknown performer who is worth looking up. Where other ladies shop for antique glass or old prints, she shops for talent, like a scout for a big club doing the minor leagues. And experience has taught me that her eye in such matters is to be taken very seriously indeed. Others know it too. One Christmas not so long ago, I remember, I bought the American rights to "What Every Woman Knows" and presented them to my wife in honor of the season.
"That's not for me, dear," she said. "I could never get round the Scotch dialect. But I know who should do it for you— Helen Hayes. I'd go a long way to see her in it."
I thought that over and began to agree with her. I wasn't worried about my wife's versatility— such varied triumphs of hers as Shaw's "Major Barbara," "Divor^ons," "The School for Scandal," and the recent "Kind Lady" would have made that nonsensical. But her kind of comedy wouldn't fit very well with the qualities of Barrie's heroine in "What Every Woman Knows." She excels at the fast-building, vivacious, chin up and tongue-sparkling sort of thing, with wit and
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