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AVARICE AMONG THE AVOCADOS 71 Belasco's office and while DeMille was reading his play a stenographer was behind the curtains taking down every word. Belasco wasn't going to put DeMille's name on the program as author until DeMille threatened to sue, and then it showed up in very fine print." In a New York Tribune interview in 1935, David Warfield was coaxed into breaking his silence over the Grimm puzzle. "Well, Belasco was looking for a play to do when he ran across one Cecil DeMille had sent him. DeMille was hard up at that time and needed money, so he had taken an old story called 'Old Lady Mary/ published in Blackwood's Magazine way back in 1875, and made a play out of it. Belasco saw pos- sibilities for it and offered to buy it. DeMille agreed, and Belasco bought it outright for a small amount. He mulled over his new property for a while, fixed it over a little and produced it. That's the story of Peter Grimm. We opened in Baltimore in 1911, then went to Chicago and finally came to New York with it, afterward going on tour. But it didn't draw very well- people didn't seem to take to it. In 19211 became ambitious, fiddled with the thing for a time and was determined to try it again. So I did, and the revival was remarkable—it went like wildfire." With the collaborator still Belasco, Bill DeMille added some luster to the family name by writing plays like The Warrens of Virginia, and The Genius. It remained for his brilliant daughter Agnes, after much struggle, to have the joy of a per- sonal conquest of Broadway some thirty years later. The ballets conceived by Agnes DeMille for Oklahoma!, One Touch of Venus, Carousel and others were gay, dazzling—and new. Her choreography introduced an art form in the period of the musical comedy's greatest vigor, and quite a number of her ad- mirers today happily salute her as the most sensitively creative of all the DeMiUes. Cecil was nineteen when Dan Frohman gave him $20 a week and eight lines in his new play Hearts Were Trumps, a