It was noon and I was hungry, so, with my remaining manuscript tucked into my overcoat pocket, I dropped into the grill room of the old Knickerbocker Hotel for lunch. During lunch young Max Gordon, whom I had known since his boyhood, sat down for a moment at my table for a friendly chat. Max Gordon and Al Lewis had been successful vaudeville agents and had recently owned interests in several plays, but as yet had made no productions under their own names. Max was always of an inquiring turn of mind and very little escapes him. One glance at the yellow envelope sticking out of my overcoat pocket was enough. “How’s your new play?” was his first start. His second was to calmly stretch out his hand and take my last manuscript out of my pocket and transfer it to his own. “I’d like to read it,” he blandly observed, and in spite of some protest on my part he walked out of the room with it in his pocket. I had already covered the three managers who, aside from Mr. Belasco, had seemed to me to be best fitted to produce this play and I went home. The next day being Saturday, I went up to St. Andrews for my usual week-end game of golf with my golfing partner, Bob Davis, Bob being no blood kin of mine but a very dear friend of many years’ standing. Sunday morning the bell of my apartment rang and Mr. Max Gordon walked calmly in and dropped a thousand dollars on my table and blandly announced that “we are going to produce ICEBOUND.” Questioned as to the “we” part of it he replied that Sam Harris and Al Lewis had read the play and that Mr. Harris had offered to put it out under his trade mark with Lewis and Gordon as silent but active partners. Sam Harris could then, as he could now, have anything of mine he wanted, so I promptly shook hands and called it a trade. Then the storm broke. By ‘phone, by letter and by telegram every one of the managers whom I had given until Monday noon to buy my play sent messages that they would produce it, and it took me about five years to square myself. As a matter of fact I have never been able to see the justice in the trade custom of never submitting a play to more than one manager at a time. If I own a house and want to sell it, I give that house to more than one agent, and the grocer who displays a particularly fine melon on his stand doesn’t consider it the property of the first customer who admires it. Before it’s anybody’s but his some one must pay good money for it. Experience has taught me that any manager who wants a play never lets an author out of his office until he has signed a contract, and he is crazy if he does. I have been roused from my bed at four o’clock in the morning and forced to promise a play to an excited manager before he allowed me to crawl back under the bedclothes, and any less ardent expression of willingness has grown to be very suspicious in my eyes. [Illustration: ROBERT H. DAVIS (_Photo by F. X. Cleary_) ]