The Bishop of Broadway: the Life & Work of David Belasco by Craig Timberlake; Library Publishers, 1954

Writing of his experiences, he observed that "there is scarcely a page in the history of Virginia City before the fire [ 1875] that would not make lurid melodrama too strong for the palate of the Theatre-goer today [ 1914]."

Actually the community was not so "disorderly, dissolute and disreputable" as he and William Winter have portrayed it, but the latter's comments are worth noting in so fat as they defined the influence of this environment on the budding dramatist: "In Virginia City he saw much more of that lawlessness, recklessness and savagery which had already colored his thoughts and served to direct his mind into the lurid realm of sensation melodrama." Nevada historians have taken issue with this point of view. They assert that "the towns on Sun Mountain early reached social stability, and life there was no more wild and woolly by 1870 than it was in New York ." In justice to Belasco and Winter it might be added that, as late as 1871, the "601" vigilantes strung up a murderer named Perkins to the rafters of Piper's Opera House, where McKee Rankin and Annie Adams, Maude Adams' mother, were playing at the time. They then filled his dangling, dead body with lead, and the shots ringing out in the opera house must surely have had the desired salutary effect on the criminal element of the "socially stable" community. There is no record of similar undertakings in the East at Niblo's Garden or the Union Square Theater, but perhaps, then as now, New York dealt with its criminal element in more subtle and devious ways.

In the busy summer of '79 Belasco had been at work on yet another play, one intended for James O'Neill and Lewis Morrison, leading men of the Baldwin. He elected instead to collaborate with Herne and prepare the play for the actor and his wife, "Little K. C." ( Katharine Corcoran). Following Lotta's engagement, the play, Chums, was produced at the Baldwin with the Hernes, Annie Adams and little Maude Adams, seven year-old veteran of the San Francisco stage. A large and enthusiastic first-night audience applauded the realistic details of the piece which included a real cat, a baby, the ingredients of a meal and real water for the rain effect, which heretofore had been represented by shot poured over a drum head. The Chronicle of September 10 found "the stage appointments. . . in some cases too elaborate for convenience." The critic further noted that "while the crudities of the piece may be original the profounder motives owe their being to some remote and by no means contemptible dramatic art." Belasco had indeed based his play on an earlier drama, The Mariner's Compass, by Henry J. Leslie -- a fact which he neglected to confide to Herne.

THE ELUSIVE Charles Frohman had remained quietly aloof from the bitter brawl between Belasco and the Syndicate in the persons of Klaw, Erlanger and Nixon. "All I ever got out of the Syndicate," Frohman often said, "was trouble," and, he scarcely needed to add, money. When, in November, 1905, he offered at the Empire that elfin personality, Maude Adams, in James M. Barrie Peter Pan , Belasco's final tribute to the profession's leading manager appeared in the newspapers on May 8:

I am broken-hearted. My dear old friend. My nearest and dearest friend. It is horrible to think that a man who was held in universal esteem and affection, who had the warm, open heart of a child, who gave employment to hundreds should have gone to death by such sheer brutality. There was and is only one "C. F." He did more for the theater than any other man. He was in touch with the authors of the universe. He took America over to England and brought England back to us. He filled a unique position in all countries and belonged to the whole world which will grieve for him as I do now. My heart goes out to his brothers and sisters and to Miss Maude Adams and all those associated with him, because his place can never be taken and they must forever mourn his loss. If a long night's vigil and tears could bring him back Charlie would be with us now. If this be war, to needlessly take a life so useful and so precious, then I would like a chance to put a musket to my shoulder and shoot down the mad fiend who conceived the vile idea.

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