I
STRICTLY BUSINESS
I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You\'ve
been touched with and by actors, and you read the newspaper criticisms
and the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto and the chorus girls and
the long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a condensed list of your
ideas about the mysterious stageland would boil down to something like
this:
Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no
better than your own (madam) if they weren\'t padded. Chorus girls are
inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk
back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable
actresses reserve the comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway
and their step-aunts on the road. Kyrle Bellew\'s real name is Boyle
O\'Kelley. The ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph were
stolen from the first sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe Weber is
funnier than E. H. Sothern; but Henry Miller is getting older than he
was.
All theatrical people on leaving the theatre at night drink champagne
and eat lobsters until noon the next day. After all, the moving pictures
have got the whole bunch pounded to a pulp.
Now, few of us know the real life of the stage people. If we did,
the profession might be more overcrowded than it is. We look askance
at the players with an eye full of patronizing superiority-- and we go home
and practise all sorts of elocution and gestures in front of our looking
glasses.