Six floors above street level, over the stage flies of the Belasco, he had fitted up a private gallery housing the spoils of the ages--tapestries, paintings, rare furniture, Venetian glass, armor, snuffboxes, statues, miscellany. Beside it was a complete living suite, practical but furnished with antique plunder. There he often lived while in the pangs and ecstasies of conception, preparation, and consummation of his plays. Few ever penetrated that sanctum. He had another private retreat on the balcony level, walled in off the nave. There he received esoterically but with broad hospitality, with a steward to serve drinks and tidbits. In that room, one night, while a hit play was in action below, he got word from his stage manager that a feminine principal had fluffed some lines. He sent for her after the act. In the presence of one of your authors, he berated her as a gold-bricker and an ingrate. "I gave you everything you ever had," he shrilled. "And the first thing I ever gave you was a bath!" She bitched up no lines in the next act. The next season another beauty gave him the romantic interest he required for a later success. At the height of its run, he was stricken with pneumonia. His amazing constitution and will licked it, though he had passed his 76th birthday. Weakened as the great Belasco was, the soul of the great lover still burned within him. He had been in retirement for weeks. The girl, a blonde this time, was young, and, he feared, fickle. As long as he was on his feet, none of his mistresses dared stray around. But he had been laid up for weeks. The inamorata of the moment was ensconced in a private three-story residence not far from the Gladstone Hotel where he lived. Because of his family she could not come to see him during his illness. He did not tell her when he would be allowed out again. And, the first night he could ambulate, he decided to spy on her. He set up his post across the street, where, from behind a light-pole, he could look up and over. A sudden rainstorm poured out of the sky, and with it a cold wind. But he had seen a shadow--of a man and woman, it seemed to him. And with the consuming zeal and drive with which he did everything, he remained there, drenched and shivering, ignoring everything but those windows. He found out nothing. But the exposure resulted in a second attack of pneumonia. That tawdry anticlimax ended the life of the genius at whose feet Broadway had bowed--a martyr to suicidal jealousy at his advanced age--jealousy over a run-of-the-mill gal whose name no one would remember on the street that will never forget him. a.--_Give My Regards to Broadway_ When Georgie Cohan penned his crude classic, New York's Main Drag ran from Herald Square at 34th Street, on Broadway, to Times Square at 43rd Street, with tentacles precariously reaching northward a few blocks and a few outposts of the Tenderloin's last frontiers stretching southward.