After the rise to power of the “syndicate” Charles Frohman kept close to a definite standard, but Booth, Jefferson, Hoyt, Palmer, Harrigan and Daly were gone, and in their places rose up a new crop of managers, men of my time, most of them friends of mine, who were more or less timidly knocking at the door at about the time I was trying to break in. Sam Harris, when I first knew him, was Terry McGovern’s manager; Al Woods was an advance agent ahead of a sensational melodrama and known as the best man in the show business to draw a big opening to a bad play. Archie Selwyn was an office boy for a firm of play-brokers. Edgar Selwyn was trying to get a start as an actor and often reminds me of the fact that when I was casting my first play he came to me for a job and was met by a very cold reception. If Mr. Selwyn is telling the truth about this, as he probably is, although I can’t in the least recall the incident, it goes to show that I still had a lot to learn, because he was a very good actor, much better, I am sure, than any one I chose above him. These young men came into the theater and took important places in it and rode to fortune on the wave of prosperity that was at its height during these years. They were joined in time by a younger group, the Theatre Guild, Arthur Hopkins, and later still Jed Harris, all of whom had as definite a thing to say as the old group of managers a full generation before them. In saying it they started the change in popular taste that meant the end of the commercial theater, and the birth of what before long will be a theater of taste and intelligence. Men like George Tyler, Dillingham, Winthrop Ames, Ziegfeld and William A. Brady had gone on producing their particular type of play and keeping a little apart from the rest. Way back, however, in 1898, all managers were mighty men in my eyes, and the least of them was sacred. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ──────────────── CHAPTER IV ◆ “HOLD, VILLAIN” ──────────────── Gus Hill and I, started so prosperously with THROUGH THE BREAKERS, kept up a very pleasant association for several seasons, and whenever I meet him now after the passing of more than twenty-five years I am conscious of a feeling of good will and something that is almost affection. I wrote several plays for him and one of them, LOST IN THE DESERT, brought about my meeting with Elizabeth Breyer, a young actress who had been playing with E. H. Sothern. I with some difficulty persuaded her to become a member of the LOST IN THE DESERT company, and a few months later and with much more difficulty persuaded her to become a member of the Davis family. The last engagement has lasted some twenty-five years longer than the first and has been much more successful.