Just how I could have been quite serious in building these old plays I can’t at this moment quite comprehend, but the fact is that I was, just as every man who is successful in his work must be. Even the priceless line of Nellie, the well-known cloak model, was quite gravely written. Nellie was endeavoring to escape from the attentions of a very evil gentleman who from the start of the play showed signs of paying her attentions that were far from honorable. In the first act he pushed her under a descending elevator in the basement of a department store. In Act II he threw her off Brooklyn Bridge and in the third he bound her to the tracks of the elevated railroad just as a train came thundering along. In the fourth act he climbs in her bedroom window at an early hour of the morning and when both modesty and prudence force her to shrink away from him he looked at her reproachfully and said: “Why do you fear me, Nellie?” ------------------------------------------------------------------------ ──────────────── CHAPTER V ◆ UP FROM MELODRAMA ──────────────── About 1911 I saw the fate of the popular-priced game, and got out of it before the final crash, as did Sam Harris, Al Woods and a few of the others. I started to look about for a new way of earning my living. I had made money at the game and was in no danger from that source, but I was then, in 1910, only thirty-seven years old and had trained myself to the habit of almost constant work, a habit I have never as yet been able to break. My name, as the author of literally hundreds of bloodthirsty melodramas, was a thing of scorn to the highbrows of the theater, used as a horrible example to young authors and to frighten bad children. The very thought of my being allowed to produce a play in a Broadway theater was quite absurd, as my friends all assured me. I kept on writing, however, for the same reason that keeps me at it now, because I love to write plays, no matter whom it hurts. For a year or two I had a tough time, but I managed to find a market among the road stars and the one night stand companies, and I wrote a few comedies and dramatized several novels. They were successful enough in the towns where they were played but were never heard of in New York. At this time, also, I developed a trick of writing plays directly for stock companies and by good salesmanship built up quite an income from this by-product. I was absolutely bound to break into the New York game and in spite of many rebuffs I kept knocking at the doors of the New York managers.