Publisher's Synopsis
I suppose you know all about the stage and stage people. You've been touched with and byactors, and you read the newspaper criticisms and the jokes in the weeklies about the Rialto and thechorus girls and the long-haired tragedians. And I suppose that a condensed list of your ideas aboutthe mysterious stageland would boil down to something like this: Leading ladies have five husbands, paste diamonds, and figures no better than your own(madam) if they weren't padded. Chorus girls are inseparable from peroxide, Panhards and Pittsburg.All shows walk back to New York on tan oxford and railroad ties. Irreproachable actresses reservethe comic-landlady part for their mothers on Broadway and their step-aunts on the road. KyrleBellew's real name is Boyle O'Kelley. The ravings of John McCullough in the phonograph werestolen from the first sale of the Ellen Terry memoirs. Joe Weber is funnier than E. H. Sothern; butHenry Miller is getting older than he was.All theatrical people on leaving the theatre at night drink champagne and eat lobsters until noonthe next day. After all, the moving pictures have got the whole bunch pounded to a pulp.Now, few of us know the real life of the stage people. If we did, the profession might be moreovercrowded than it is. We look askance at the players with an eye full of patronizing superiority-and we go home and practise all sorts of elocution and gestures in front of our looking glasses.Latterly there has been much talk of the actor people in a new light. It seems to have beendivulged that instead of being motoring bacchanalians and diamond-hungry loreleis they arebusinesslike folk, students and ascetics with childer and homes and libraries, owning real estate, andconducting their private affairs in as orderly and unsensational a manner as any of us good citizenswho are bound to the chariot wheels of the gas, rent, coal, ice, and wardmen.Whether the old or the new report of the sock-and-buskiners be the true one is a surmise thathas no place here. I offer you merely this little story of two strollers; and for proof of its truth I canshow you only the dark patch above the cast-iron of the stage-entrance door of Keetor's oldvaudeville theatre made there by the petulant push of gloved hands too impatient to finger theclumsy thumb-latch-and where I last saw Cherry whisking through like a swallow into her nest, ontime to the minute, as usual, to dress for her act
