YES, MR.DEMILLE (1959)

66 yes, Mr. DeMille The distance from the home in Pompton, New Jersey, to Chester was ninety miles, a good day's ride by coach. This Mrs. DeMille rejected. Instead, she and Cecil climbed on their bicycles and took off down the coach road, arriving late that day. Enrollment over, the petite, spirited young widow said good-by to her son and pedaled off in the dusk down the dusty road toward Pompton. The DeMille boys got their first taste of drama early in life. Through Dan Frohman, Henry DeMille teamed up with David Belasco, a struggling young Barnum soon to be crowned the Rialto's first great showman. Belasco sparked with ideas and Henry DeMille reduced them to writing. Each day they would call in Mrs. DeMille and read to her what had been put down on paper. The two young men worked in a small first-floor room in the DeMille home and evenings were quite often devoted to play conferences, with the family usually being called in for the readings. It was sometimes difficult to get Cecil to sit still that long. The future spectacle-maker was not inspired by what his father and Belasco were dreaming up—intimate social exercises such as The Wife, The Charity Ball, Lord Chumley and Men and Women. Despite little Cecil's marked disinterest, the plays helped start a new era for playgoers of that day, for the domestic drama was something new to American audiences. During one of these family gatherings DeMille's attention wan- dered to a cat that had, quite miraculously it seemed to him, strolled down the side of a barn. The boy who was one day to stage such cinematic miracles as the siege of Acre and the Exodus uttered a squeal of delight and for this outcry his father banished him from the scene. On another occasion Cecil, having slipped away from a conference, attacked a stand of Jerusalem artichokes which his mother was grooming in the backyard. Cecil was a fair knight, his stick was a sword, and the artichokes were the enemy. The affable malfeasance may