LO, THE PRESS AGENT

By many names men call me
Press agent, publicity promoter, faker;
Ofttimes the short and simple liar.
Charles A. Dana told me
I was a buccaneer
On the high seas of journalism.
Many a newspaper business manager
Has charged me
With selling his space
Over his head.
Every one loves me
When I get his name into print
For this is an age of publicity
And he who bloweth not his own horn
The same shall not be blown.
I have sired, nursed and reared
Many reputations.
Few men or women have I found
Scornful of praise or blame
In the press.
The folk of the stage
Live on publicity,
Yet to the world they pretend to dislike it,
Though wildly to me they plead for it, cry for it,
Ofttimes do that for it
Which must make the God Notoriety
Grin at the weakness of mortals.
I hold a terrible power
And sometimes my own moderation
Amazes me,
For I can abase as well as elevate,
Tear down as well as build up.
I know all the ways of fair speaking
And can lead my favorites
To fame and golden rewards.
There are a thousand channels
Through which press agency can exploit
Its star or its movement
Never obvious but like the submarine
Submersible beneath the sea
Of publicity.
But I know, too, of the ways
That undo in Manhattan.
There are bacilli of rumor
That slip through the finest of filters
And defy the remedial serums
Of angry denial.
Pin a laugh to your tale
When stalking your enemy
And not your exile nor your death
Will stay the guffaws of merriment
As the story flies
Through the Wicked Forties
And on to the “Road.”
Laughter gives the rumor strong wings.
Truly the press agent,
Who knows his psychology,
Likewise his New York
In all of its ramifications,
And has a nimble wit,
Can play fast and loose
With the lives of many.
Nevertheless he has no great reward,
And most in the theatre
Draw fatter returns than he.
Yet is he called upon to make the show,
To save the show,
But never is he given credit
Comparable to that which falls
Upon the slightest jester or singer or dancer
Who mugs, mimes, or hoofs in a hit.
Yet is the press agent happy;
He loves his work;
It has excitement and intrigue;
And to further the cause of beautiful women,
To discover the wonderful girls of the theatre,
And lead them in progress triumphal
Till their names outface the jealous night,
On Broadway, in incandescents,
Is in itself a privilege.
That compensates
For the wisdom of the cub reporter,
The amusement of the seasoned editor,
Shredding the cherished story
And uprooting the flourishing “plant”;
Makes one forgive
The ingratitude of artists arrived.
They who do not love me
I hope to have fear me;
There is only one hell,
And that is to be disregarded.

FIRST NIGHTS

August heat cannot weaken nor flivvers stale
Our first-night expectance when the new season opens.
Come on, boys and girls, the gang’s all here;
The Death Watch is ready in orchestra chairs
Still shrouded in summer’s cool slip pajamas,
And the undertakers of stage reputations
Are gathered to chatter about author and players,
And give them and their work disrespectful interment
By gleefully agreeing in that sage Broadway saying:
“Oh, what an awful oil can that piece turned out to be!”
It’s hard when the Chanters of Death-House Blues
Have to turn to each other and reluctantly murmur:
“I’m afraid it’s a hit the poor fish is lucky.”
First-nighters are the theatre’s forty-niners,
Making the early rush to new dramatic gold fields,
And usually finding them barren.
Often must it madden the playwright to offer his ideals
To an audience whose personnel would for the most part
Regard an ideal as a symptom of sickness;
To show sweetness and beauty and color
To those whose knowledge of tints is confined
To the rouge and the lip stick on dressers;
To pioneer in playwrighting, to delve deep into mind,
When all that the first-nighters ask is plain entertainment.
How much of the great, wholesome public, hard-working and normal,
To whom the final appeal must be made
Frequents our first nights on Broadway?
Costumers, friends of the author, and critics,
Scene painters, all of the tradesmen concerned,
Kinsfolk of mummers even to the third generation,
Wine agents, hot-house ladies, unemployed players,
Hearty laughers or ready weepers “planted.”
Most of them there prepare for a funeral;
Their diversion is nodding to friends and acquaintances,
And he or she who nods the most times
Is thereby the greatest first-nighter.
Some managers open to hand-picked audiences,
Others strive to escape the regulars;
But the majority seek for the standardized premier faces
That really mean so little in the life of the play.
Listen to the comments during intermission:
“It doesn’t get over!” “It’s a flop!”
“What atmosphere!” “An absolute steal!”
“Such originality!” “Not a bit life-like!”
“That author has a wonderful memory!”
“He copped that lyric from Irving Berlin!”
“He’s as funny as a crutch or a cry for help!”
“They grabbed that number in London!”
“She’s one of his tigers!”
“From a Lucile model, my dear, but home-made!”
“I can’t hand him anything on this one!”
“Some heavy-sugar papa backed the production!”
“Isn’t my boy wonderful!”
“Yes, but my girl is running away with the piece!”
“If you like this, you’re not well!”
“What could be sweeter!”
“What large feet she has!” “His Adam’s apple annoys me!”
“She must get her clothes on Avenue A!”
“They say she was born there!”
“What an awful sunburn!”
“Best thing in years!” “The storehouse for this one!”
“Did you catch her going up in her lines?”
“Yes, and he’s fluffing all over the place!”
“Splendidly produced, don’t you think?”
“I think the stage direction is rotten!”
So I suggest the old Roman fashion of presenting,
The artists, like gladiators crying:
“We, who are about to die, salute you!”

THE DRAMATIST

I’ve put one over at last!
My play with the surprise finish is a bear.
Al Woods wants to read all of my scripts;
Georgie Cohan speaks to me as an equal
And the office boy swings the gate without being asked.
I don’t care if the manager’s name is as large as the play’s
Or if the critics are featured all over the ash cans.
I’m going to get mine and I’m going to live.
A Rolls-Royce for me and trips “up the road,”
Long Beach and pretty girls, big eats at the Ritz
And the ice pitcher for the fellows who snubbed me.
How the other reporters laughed
When I showed my first script and started to peddle!
“Stick to the steady job,” they advised.
“Play writing is too big a gamble;
It will never keep your nose in the feed bag.”
I wrote a trunkful of junk; did a play succeed,
I immediately copied the fashion;
Like a pilfering tailor I stole the new models.
Kind David Belasco, with his face in the gloom,
And mine brightly lighted, said ministerially:
“Rather crude yet, my boy, but the way to write a play
Is to write plays from sunrise to sunset
And rewrite them long after midnight.
Try, try, try, my boy, and God bless you.”
Broke and disgusted, I became a play reader
And the “yessir man” to a manager.
I was a play doctor, too.
A few of my patients lived
And I learned about drama from them.
How we gutted the scripts!
Grabbing a wonderful line, a peach of a scene,
A gem of a finish
Out of the rubbish that struggling poor devils
Borrowed money to typewrite and mail to us.
It’s like opening oysters looking for pearls,
But pearls are to be found and out of the shell heaps
Come jewels that, polished and set by a clever artificer,
Are a season’s theatrical wonder.
Finally came my own big idea.
I wrote and rewrote and cast and recast,
Convinced the manager, got a production.
Here am I young and successful,
And Walter and Thomas and Selwyn have nothing on me.
Press agents are hired to praise me.
Watch for my next big sensation,
But meanwhile I hope that that play-writing plumber,
Who had an idea and nothing else,
Never sees this one.

TYPES

They’ve got me down for a hick, bo,
Sam Harris says I’m the best boob in the biz,
And that no manager will cast me for anything else.
Curses on my hit in “’Way Down East”
That handcuffs me forever to yokels,
And me a better character actor than Corse Payton!
That’s how it is they’re stuck on types,
And the wise guy who plays anything
Isn’t given a look-in.
Listen to me, young feller, and don’t ever
Let ’em tab you for keeps as a type.
It’s curtains for a career as sure as you’re born.
Why, there’s actors sentenced to comedy dog parts,
To Chinks, to Wops, to Frenchmen and fluffs.
There ain’t no release for them.
The producers and managers can see only one angle,
And you may be a Mansfield or Sothern.
It’s outrageous that’s what it is, that make-up
And character acting should be thrown in the discard.
You can sit in an agent’s office for months
Before a part comes along that you fit without fixin’.
This natural stuff puts the kibosh on art
And a stock training ain’t what it used to be.
Say, if ever I rise to be hind legs of a camel
Or a bloodhound chasing Eliza, I’ll kick or I’ll bite
The type-choosing manager.

GEORGE M. COHAN

Blessed be Providence
That gave us our Cohan;
Irreverent,
Resourceful, prolific, steady-advancing
George M.
Nothing in life
Better becomes him
Than his earliest choice
Of Jerry and Helen
For father and mother;
Bred in the wings and the dressing room,
The theatre alley his playground,
Hotels his home and his schoolhouse,
Blessed with a wonderful sister,
And in love with a violin.
From baby days used to the footlights,
With infrequent teachers of book lore
In the cities of lengthy engagements
Showing him pages of learning
That he turned from to life’s open volume,
Acquiring indelible lessons,
Loyalty, candor, clear seeing,
Sincerity, plain speaking, love of his own,
Passion for all things American.
From Jerry, his father,
Came Celtic humor, delight in the dance,
And devotion to things of the theatre;
From Helen, his mother,
Depth, Celtic devotion to things of the spirit,
Fineness of soul.
Early he turned from his fiddle
To write popular songs
And tunes so whistly and catchy
That the music of a child
Enraptured the nation.
Then followed comedy sketches,
Gay little pieces that made public
And player-folk chatter of Cohan.
Later, essaying the musical comedy,
He wrote “Running for Office,”
To be followed by that impudent
Classic of fresh young America,
“Little Johnnie Jones.”
One followed another in rapid succession;
His name grew a cherished possession,
And ever his dancing delighted.
His manner of singing and speaking
Provoked to endless imitation.
His personality became better known
Then the President’s.
Always he soared in ambition
And, becoming a lord of the theatre,
He ventured on serious drama,
And out of his wisdom and watching
Wrote masterful plays,
Envisaging the types of our natives.
Truly a genius,
Genius in friendship, genius in stagecraft,
Genius in life!
Even in choosing a partner
He fattened his average,
Batting four hundred
By taking a kindred irreverent soul,
Graduated out of the whirlpool
That wrecks all but the strongest,
Born on the eastern edge
Of Manhattan,
Sam H. Harris, man of business,
Who to the skill of the trader
Adds the joy in life
And the sense of humor,
Coupled with pleasure in giving
And helping
That Cohan demands of his pals.
Together they plan wonderful projects,
And the artist soul
And the soul of commerce
Are an unbeatable union.
Best of all about Cohan
Is his congenital manliness.
He sees Americans
As our soil and our air and our water
Have made them;
Types as distinct as the Indian.
He follows no school,
Knows little of movements artistic.
A lonely creator,
His friends are not writing men,
Reformers, uplifters or zealots.
He writes the life he has lived
So fully and zestfully,
And over it all plays like sheet lightning
A beneficent humor.
Growth is his hall-mark,
Hard work his chief recreation;
Not Balzac could toil with labor titanic
More terribly.
George M. Cohan,
Excelling in everything
Beloved son, brother, father, partner, friend,
Our best-beloved man of the theatre.

DAVID BELASCO

King David of old slew the Philistines;
Our David has made them admirers and patrons;
He has numbered the people
Night after night in his theatres.
Will he ever, I wonder, send forth for the Shunammite?
Many there be who would answer his calling,
For he has shown ambitious fair women
To acting’s high places.
As Rodin in marble saw wondrous creations
To be freed by the chisel,
So Belasco in immature genius and beauty
Sees the resplendent star to be kindled
At his own steady beacon.
Too varied a mind for our comprehension,
Too big and too broad and too subtle
To be understood of the bourgeois American
Whom he has led decade after decade
By a nose ring artistic.
Capable of everything, he has worked
With the ease of a master, giving the public
Marvelous detail, unfailing sensation and poses pictorial;
Preferring the certain success to arduous striving
For the more excellent things of the future.
Like David his forebear, a king but no prophet,
Amazingly wise in his own generation.
A wizard in art of the everyday,
Lord of the spotlight and dimmer,
But nursing the unconquerable hope, the inviolable shade
Of what in his dreams Oriental
He fain would do, did not necessity drive him.
His the fascination of a great personality.
Who knoweth not him of the clerical collar?
Hair of the sage and eyes of the poet,
Features perfectly drawn and as mobile
As those of the inspired actor;
With speech so much blander than honey
And insight that maketh his staged stumbling in bargains
Cover the shrewdness of a masterly trader.
None better than he knoweth the crowd and its likings,
As to using the patter of drama artistic,
That’s where he lives.
With incense and color and scenery
He refilleth the bottle of art so that the contents
Go twice better than in the original package.
Thanks be to David for joy in the playhouse.
Wizard, magician, necromancer of switchboards,
He hath woven spells from the actual,
Keeping ideals and ideas well in the background.
Like Gautier, these things delight him:
Gold, marble and purple; brilliance, solidity, color.
He can stage Tiffany’s jewels but not Maeterlinck’s bees.
Deep in his soul there are tempests
Revealed in the storms of his dramas
Sandstorm and snowstorm, rainstorm and hurricane.
That nature revealed in its subtle reactions
Would show in its deeps the soul of an Angelo
Subdued to success and dyed by democracy.
Opportunism hath made him
An artistic materialist.
One work remains for David Belasco,
And that is to stage with patient precision
A cross section in drama of his own self-surprising,
Making the world sit up and take notice
With what “masterly detail,” “unfailing atmosphere,”
“Startling reality” he can star David Belasco.

LO, THE HEADLINER

I was not raised for vaudeville.
Father and mother were veteran legits;
They loved the Bard and the “Lady of Lyons.”
I was born on a show boat on the Cumberland;
I was carried on as a child
When the farm girl revealed her shame
On the night of the snowstorm.
The old folks died with grease paint on their faces.
I did a little of everything
Even to staking out a pitch in a street fair.
Hiram Grafter taught me to ballyhoo
And to make openings.
I stole the business of Billy Sunday
And imitated William Jennings Bryan.
I became famous in the small towns.
One day Poli heard me
He’s the head of the New England variety circuit.
“Cul,” he said, “you are a born monologist.
Where you got that stuff I don’t know,
But you would be a riot in the two-a-day.
Quit this hanky-panky
And I’ll make you a headliner.”
Well, I fell for his line of talk
Like the sod busters had fallen for mine.
Aaron Hoffman wrote me a topical monologue;
Max Marx made me a suit of clothes;
And Lew Dockstader wised me up
On how to jockey my laughs.
I opened in Hartford;
Believe me, I was some scream.
I gave them gravy, and hokum,
And when they ate it up I came through
With the old jasbo,
Than which there is nothing so efficacious
In vaudeville, polite or otherwise.
The first thing I did I hollered for more dough,
And Poli says:
“That’s what I get for feeding you meat,
But you are a riot all right, all right,
So I guess you are on for more kale.”
I kept getting better.
I got so’s I could follow any act at all
And get my laughs.
And he who getteth his laughs
Is greater than he who taketh a city.
At last the Palace Theatre sent for me
And I signed up for a week.
They kept me two.
I am a headliner;
I stand at the corner of Forty-seventh Street
And Little Old Broadway;
Throw out my chest,
Call the agents and vaudeville magnates
By their first names.
I am a headliner with a home in Freeport.