The Project Gutenberg EBook of I'd Like to Do it Again, by Owen Davis This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you'll have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this ebook. Title: I'd Like to Do it Again Author: Owen Davis Release Date: September 24, 2020 [EBook #63287] Language: English Character set encoding: UTF-8 *** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK I'D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN *** Produced by The Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive) I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN P LAYS BY MR. DAVI S Icebound The Detour The Nervous Wreck and others OWEN DAVIS (Photograph from White Studio) I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN by OWEN DAVIS FARRAR & RI N EHART, I N C O RP O RATED O N MURRAY HI LL - - - - N EW YO RK COPYRIGHT, 1931, BY OWEN DAVIS PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ──────────────── CONTENTS ──────────────── I. FALSE STARTS, 3 II. SELLING THE FIRST ONE, 22 III. THEN AND NOW, 47 IV. “HOLD, VILLAIN!” 77 V. UP FROM MELODRAMA, 108 VI. HOW TO WRITE THREE HUNDRED PLAYS, 146 VII. THE DRAMATIST’S PROFESSION, 171 VIII. HOLLYWOOD, 206 IX. I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN, 231 ──────────────── LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ──────────────── Owen Davis Frontis When he entered Harvard in 1889 4 “Aside from being a fair football player” 5 Gus Hill, Champion Club Swinger 10 Maurice Barrymore 11 Fanny Janauschek as Medea 14 Lawrence Barrett 15 Sally Cohen 20 John C. Rice 21 “O’Neill listened to my reading of the part” 24 Edwin Booth as Richelieu 25 “I took one of my first plays to the Frohman office” 30 Harrigan and Hart 31 “The B’s were led by the name of William A. Brady” 38 “Henry Miller was the greatest teacher” 39 A. M. Palmer 50 “Augustin Daly was a master” 51 “William Winter was the outstanding critic” 60 David Belasco 61 Elizabeth Dreyer 90 Laurette Taylor 91 Joseph Jefferson 120 “I have always admired Augustus Thomas” 121 Robert H. Davis 140 Owen Davis and his two sons 141 Owen Davis, Jr., actor 160 Donald Davis, playwright 161 vii I’D LIKE TO DO IT AGAIN ──────────────── CHAPTER I ◆ FALSE STARTS ──────────────── At the time of my mother’s death some fifteen years ago, we found among her cherished possessions a soiled and tattered old manuscript written in a scrawling school-boy hand, and inscribed in her neat and graceful lettering —“Owen’s first play, when he was just nine years old.” This opus bore the somewhat violent title of DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND OR THE RIVAL DETECTIVES and upon reading it over I was struck by one marked originality—toward the end of the first act only one of the characters remained alive, and as the final curtain fell he committed suicide. I had reached some degree of success long before my mother’s death, and, once or twice, when some friend spoke of one of my plays as “the best thing I ever wrote,” I noticed a somewhat scornful smile on her sensitive lips. She had all of the reticence of the true Yankee and, secure in her possession of the only copy of DIAMOND CUT DIAMOND, she could afford to smile. As a matter of truth, she smiled more frequently than one would expect of the mother of eight children, and her strong and dauntless ambition saw no limits at all to the future of her brood. To those who knew her there is no mystery in the fact that a boy of nine, born in a country town many years before the talking pictures had brought the drama to every hamlet in the world, should have been born with the trick of creating dramatic narrative and the fierce longing to create it. Bangor, Maine, in the early 80’s knew little of the theater. I may have seen UNCLE TOM’S CABIN, Edwin Booth, Joe Jefferson and possibly one or two others, for in those days New York had no monopoly, our great actors played everywhere—but the theater meant less than nothing to my father and little more to any member of our community. Owen Davis when he entered Harvard in 1889 I had been born, however, with the smell of the stage in my nostrils and was as stage-struck before I ever saw a stage as I am to-day after almost thirty-five years, during which I have seen very little else and have bitterly resented the few hours I have passed in any other atmosphere. “Aside from being a fair football player and a very fast hundred-yard sprinter, I did little to distinguish myself.” Winning the 100-yard dash at Harvard in May, 1891. This hunger for the glamorous and the romantic surely did not come to me from the staid New England farmers and lawyers whose lives had been devoted to the stern necessity of grubbing an existence out of the rather stubborn soil of Maine and Vermont; but, on my mother’s side there were certain bold Yanks who had sailed the seas on some of the clipper ships that in those days were built and manned along the coast of Maine. To my mother then, and through her to some adventurer of the deep, I owe the fact that I have never in my life wanted to do, and in truth I never have done, any of the practical, humdrum work of this extremely practical world, but have remained perfectly content to make faces at life and earn my living by drawing pictures on the wall. If I am right in my opinion that these bad habits of mine came to me from my mother, I must absolve her from the blame of not handing me at the same time some of her own stern pains to repress them. Whatever her dreams had been, her realities were practical enough and she was one of the many victims of one of life’s modest ironies—a woman who gave so much of herself that the future of her eight children should be what she wanted it to be that she died, still fighting, instead of ever sharing in the success we owe so greatly to her. Success in life is a difficult thing to estimate. My mother, I am afraid, had little of the thrill of romantic adventure that I knew her spirit craved. Indeed, so far as I know, she had no time and no desire to think of herself at all, and she died before she could be sure that her ambitions for her children would ever be satisfied. Yet I think she was a successful woman. My recollections of these days, stimulated by this message in her faded handwriting, vaguely recall a long line of literary monstrosities of about the same date, and when my own boys, at about some such absurd age, showed symptoms of having been bitten by some wandering bacteria of the drama, I had an advantage over my father and at once recognized the symptoms. Like other dread diseases I knew this one to be incurable, the only treatment being to give the patient plenty of nourishing food, against the time when he will have difficulty in getting it for himself, keep him as cheerful as possible, and hope for the worst. At the time of my first offense I was a member of a flourishing Dramatic Society and I have a very distinct memory of my rage when at length the worms turned and one of my fellow members arose at a meeting and firmly moved the chair that in future the club devote its energies to performing plays written by some one besides Owen Davis. This was my 3 4 5 6 7 first experience of dramatic criticism; my second came some fifteen years later, fifteen years during which I am afraid I had drifted away from the worship of the drama and directed myself with equal enthusiasm to playing ball with such rare and occasional intervals of study as seemed necessary to preserve the peace. The theater seemed very far away. My father at that time was the president of the Society of American Iron Manufacturers and had a small furnace at Kathodin Iron Works, a settlement in the Maine woods about fifty miles above Bangor; and after considerable conflict I was persuaded by my father that I had the makings in me of a great mining engineer. If I had not already stated that my sense of humor came to me from my mother’s side, this would be a good place to bring it in. When I was about fifteen, my father’s business took him to the Cumberland Mountains in the southern part of Kentucky and he took my mother and the younger children with him, sending my elder brother to Massachusetts Tech and me to Harvard. In 1889 there was no School of the Drama in Harvard, but I can’t recall that there was any great yearning on my part for one. For some queer reason the memory of the years I spent there is vague and shadowy. I was not old enough at the time to get the benefits of a great university, and, aside from the fact of being a fair football player and a very fast hundred-yard sprinter, I did little to distinguish myself. I was a wretched scholar; neither at that time nor at any other have I ever been able to do anything unless it happened to be the one thing I wanted to do, and I can’t recall that a high grade in any of my studies was at any time one of my ambitions. I went to the Boston theaters whenever I had money enough to get there and I saw all of the great plays and all of the actors of the day, but I worshiped them from a distance and had long ago ceased to hope that my life could in any way be devoted to anything aside from mining engineering. But as I have never been able to understand the simplest scientific problem and still retain a bland uncertainty as to how many times three goes in nine, I doubt if the engineering profession lost much when I later reverted to type. My only adventure in the theater during these years was as a member of what was called “The Society of Arts” which was, I think, the very first art group to undertake to elevate the drama in America. For some reason I have a perfectly distinct recollection of this weighty and august group, although I can’t for the life of me remember what I was doing in it. The society was organized by Harvard professors and the distinguished group of men of letters who at that time brought glory to Cambridge and Boston. A large sum of money was raised, a fine company of actors engaged, and a month’s rental of the Hollis Street Theatre, Boston, secured. We produced four plays, not written by ordinary playwrights but the product of real literary masters; one by William Dean Howells, one by Frank R. Stockton and the others by famous writers of equal standing. The company was headed by Maurice Barrymore and his wife, and everything was done to attract the “lovers of a better drama” in Boston. But the “lovers of a better drama” in Boston were as scarce in 1890 as they are to-day, and the venture was never a success. GUS HILL Champion Club Swinger MAURICE BARRYMORE (Photograph by Sarony. From the Messmore Kendall Collection) It was a long time ago and my memory is vague as to the merits of our performances, but I do recall one passing comment. Toward the end of the third week the head usher came to me with the news that “all the ushers have quit, and I don’t know what we’ll do about showing people to their seats, if there are any people to show to their seats.” I asked him the reason for this sudden desertion on the part of our ushers and he informed me curtly that “they couldn’t stand the —— —— shows!” I don’t remember that I greatly mourned the passing of America’s first art group in the theater and I loafed along pleasantly enough during my years in Cambridge, winning some glory on the running track and trying to make up for my lack of age and weight, both of which at that time told heavily against me on the football field. By some odd freak I took few of the courses in English and wrote nothing at all, my only advance in any of the fine arts being a training as a draw-poker player, an accomplishment I have never ceased to be grateful for to the great university where I secured so solid and lasting a technique. I was tremendously influenced at this time by Phillips Brooks, who still stands in my memory as the greatest American I have ever known, and I grew so fond of Professor N. S. Shaler, a grand figure both as a man and a scientist, that I took every one of his courses in paleontology without ever gaining the most remote idea of what they were all about. Quite without ambition and with no definite objective at all I drifted along until, in the summer of 1903, I found myself working for a coal mining company in which my father was interested, in the Cumberland Mountains. I was even a worse mining engineer than I had ever hoped to be and was extravagantly overpaid by my salary of forty dollars a 8 9 10 11 12