I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You’ve beentouched with and by actors, and you read the newspaper criticisms and the jokesin the weeklies about the Rialto and the chorus girls and the long-hairedtragedians. And I suppose that a condensed list of your ideas about themysterious stageland would boil down to something like this:
Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no better thanyour own (madam) if they weren’t padded. Chorus girls are inseparablefrom peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg. All shows walk back to New York on tanoxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses reserve the comic-landladypart for their mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the road. KyrleBellew’s real name is Boyle O’Kelley. The ravings of JohnMcCullough in the phonograph were stolen from the first sale of the Ellen Terrymemoirs. Joe Weber is funnier than E. H. Sothern; but Henry Miller is gettingolder than he was.
All theatrical people on leaving the theatre at night drink champagne and eatlobsters until noon the next day. After all, the moving pictures have got thewhole bunch pounded to a pulp.
Now, few of us know the real life of the stage people. If we did, theprofession might be more overcrowded than it is. We look askance at the playerswith an eye full of patronizing superiority—and we go home and practiseall sorts of elocution and gestures in front of our looking glasses.
Latterly there has been much talk of the actor people in a new light. It seemsto have been divulged that instead of being motoring bacchanalians and