With a Feather on My Nose by Billie Noyes Burke, Cameron Van Shipp; Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1949

The one Frohman star that we hardly ever saw was Maude Adams. Ethel and John Barrymore, who had met her years before she became famous, were the only persons aside from Frohman who seemed to know her well. When she would arrive at the Empire for a conference with Frohman, Peter, the sentry who stood outside the stone doorway, would flash the news like a commander announcing a queen, and minions would run to guard the way lest Miss Adams be jostled or approached. C. F. spoke of her as if she were a princess in an ivory tower. His fine eyes would light up with worship that was almost religious.

C. F. was a busy man the season of 1907. He had other fish to fry aside from My Wife, for that year he also produced When Knights Were Bold with Pauline Frederick, The Ranger with Dustin Famum and Mary Boland, The Toymakers, in which Raymond Hackett made his debut, Her Sister, starring Ethel Barrymore, The Jesters, starring Maude Adams, and Father and the Boys by George Ade.

When I came to New York, leaving our little house in Queens Road, St. John's Wood, with every intention of returning to it next season--I had a 48-year lease on that house in London--Charles Frohman was forty-seven years old. He was, with the possible exception of the spectacular David Belasco, the most renowned and certainly the most important producer in the world. He controlled an empire, producing both in London and in New York. He had virtually invented the star system. He had the most gifted and the most celebrated actors and actresses under contract to him, including Maude Adams, who was making more money than any woman in the world had ever made on the stage. If his legs had been just a little longer, someone said, Frohman could have walked across America on the theaters he controlled. Bernard Shaw once said about him: "He is the most wildly romantic and adventurous man of my acquaintance. As Charles XII became a famous soldier through his passion for putting himself in the way of being killed, so Charles Frohman has become a famous manager through his passion for putting himself in the way of being ruined."

And yet--and yet, this man was a pixie. He was playful. His close friend was Sir James M. Barrie, surely the most whimsical literary genius of any day, and Frohman himself, in many of his moods, was Barriesque. He said little, always hurrying off unceremoniously. Conversation with C. F. was like playing Indications. But somehow, you knew what he meant.

How he induced Barrie to give up novel-writing for plays is a mystery, but be did just that. After he came under Frohman's influence near the turn of the century, Barrie never wrote another book; but at Frohman's request, emphasized with his little truncated gestures--"You write me play-- Maude Adams --" he produced The Little Minister, What Every Woman Knows, Peter Pan, and all the other fondly remembered Barrie plays.

Up to 1896 it hadn't occurred to Barrie that he might be a playwright. We all read My Lady Nicotine, A Window in Thrums, Sentimental Tommy (how I wept over Griseldal) and The Little Minister. I suppose today that a great many people have forgotten that The Little Minister, one of Maude Adams's most celebrated plays, ever was a novel, but in '96 it was a best seller. One day a scenario for the dramatization of the book was submitted by a literary agent to the late A. N. Palmer. Mr. Palmer saw little in the story for dramatic production, but on account of the great popularity of the book wrote a cautious note to Barrie asking for his terms.

rie, ever the Highlander, replied that he wanted the usual advance and the usual royalties, but that someone else would have to write the play, he himself being a novelist. Barrie said he was sorry that he couldn't "take a hand in it" himself, but nevertheless, he demanded a playwright's commission. Palmer balked at these terms and it seems quite possible that The Little Minister might never have become a play at all if Charles Frohman, then only thirty-six years old, had not been at that exact time searching for the proper vehicle for his unusual star, Maude Adams.

C. F. might have contributed an important note to dramatic history if he had ever told how he induced Barrie to become a playwright. So far as I know there is no record. All that Frohman ever gave me when I asked him was one of his abrupt little sentences:

"Sent him cables."

At any rate, Frohman didn't haggle. He never haggled. He persuaded Barrie to make his own dramatic version, and The Little Minister had 3,000 performances in America alone, earned a half a million dollars for Barrie and $600,000 for Frohman. All told, Barrie earned $175,000 a year through his association with C. F. They became firm friends.

Frohman hurried to Birrie, heard the play, and agreed to produce Peter Pan at once.

I have set out to explain the paradox of this astonishing man Charles Frohman, who was my manager, friend, protector, adviser and my absolute boss for seven years, but perhaps I have succeeded only in deepening the mystery. He lived alone. Few seemed to know him intimately, though he bad many friends. At one time he controlled in New York the Empire, Carrick, Knickerbocker, Lyceum and Savoy Theaters, and in London the Duke of York's, the Globe, the Comedy, the Vaudeville and the Empire. He was accused, and rightly so, of creating a theater trust in America, of gobbling up theaters to confound competitors, and certainly he was the leading practitioner of the "star system," which George Jean Nathan and other critics attacked as pernicious long before Hollywood began to place such inartistic emphasis on photogenic personalities. And yet this Napoleon of the drama was on the most intimate terms, quite aside from financial considerations, with the two rarest spirits of the theater--probably the two rarest spirits of the times--James M. Barrie and Maude Adams. Frohman was the catalytic agent that brought them together, combined their talents, and exploited them. I am certain, though, that be loved them both. And be was in love with Maude Adams.

When I came to New York that was the report, and it was even believed by many that they were married. But I do not know about that, and I suspect no one knew. C. F. certainly adored Miss Adams, but he adored her in a special way; I think Charles Frohman loved Maude Adams as a hungry spirit loves music and poetry and as a fine boy loves his heroes and their ideals. Miss Adams was to Frohman, I imagine, what she was to everyone else: a sprite.

Paradox heaps on paradox when you try to pin down Charles Frohman. All who worked for him quickly learned to have a protective feeling about him. You felt his integrity and his fineness, you trusted him, and you wanted to please him. It was odd to have this feeling about a man who was considered ruthless in business. And if he looked on Barrie and Maude Adams as out-of-the-worldlings, he also took pains to arrange things very much to their practical advantage.

Barrie and Maude Adams he made millionaires. Under C. F.'s guidance Miss Adams, who seemed to have little more use for money than a child, earned upwards of half a million dollars a year. When she toured in What Every Woman Knows, the Barrie play, she was paid $20,000 a week--and the tour made $125,000 for Barrie and Frohman. From her plays in the Empire Theater in New York alone Miss Adams is reported to have harvested more than a million and a half dollars. When you consider today's taxes, perhaps her income was greater even than that of our highest paid motion picture stars.

I can think of no parallel to this. Is there, or was there ever, such a man as Charles Frohman, who could deal so adroitly with whimsy and so firmly with Mammon?

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