Mr. Edward Horton who first played the part has since told me that he was never in his life so startled as he was by the screams of laughter that followed his first scene, and he and the leading lady got together after the first performance and hastily learned their lines, a thing that up to that time they had not thought it worth while to do. The farce played in Los Angeles for twelve weeks to enormous business, but Mr. Harris and I were still a bit doubtful and rather reluctantly started to put together a cast for an eastern tryout. We put it on in Atlantic City with Mr. Horton and Miss Frances Howard, now Mrs. Samuel Goldwyn, in the leading parts. After the first performance Mr. Harris confided in me that he had always thought it the worst play he had ever seen and that now he was sure of it. I had very little if any more faith than he had, and we returned to New York together in disgust. But to our amazement the fool thing did a big week’s business and we decided to see it once more during the following week in Long Branch. At Long Branch we saw it before a half empty house and decided we would close it up, and that I would work on it at my leisure. I re-wrote it completely seven different times, and each time Mr. Harris liked it just a little bit less. It kicked around the office for a year before Al Lewis picked it up in an idle moment and insisted on our once again tempting fate with it. The third cast we selected for this outcast of ours was headed by Otto Kruger and June Walker. Otto said it was terrible and almost walked out on us, but at last we got it on in Washington, where Mr. Harris said he would come to see it with an unprejudiced eye. This time he only remarked that he’d be damned if he knew why he had ever bothered with the thing, but if it was any fun for me to mess about with such truck he had no objection to my seeing what I could do. Messing about with a farce isn’t exactly fun, and I almost killed myself working over it. During the next week in Baltimore, Mr. Harris wired me that a failure at his New York theater was leaving his house dark, and that he had booked THE NERVOUS WRECK to open there the following Monday. By that time I had the play in pretty good shape. Al Lewis, Sam Forrest and I had been at it night and day, but I had no last act at all. A farce without a last act is a pretty sad affair, and one night in desperation I remembered a hot comedy scene I had in an unproduced farce called THE HAUNTED HOUSE. I promptly pulled the scene bodily out of one play and stuck it into another.