Then the storm broke. By ‘phone, by letter and by telegram every one of the managers whom I had given until Monday noon to buy my play sent messages that they would produce it, and it took me about five years to square myself.
As a matter of fact I have never been able to see the justice in the trade custom of never submitting a play to more than one manager at a time. If I own a house and want to sell it, I give that house to more than one agent, and the grocer who displays a particularly fine melon on his stand doesn’t consider it the property of the first customer who admires it. Before it’s anybody’s but his some one must pay good money for it. Experience has taught me that any manager who wants a play never lets an author out of his office until he has signed a contract, and he is crazy if he does. I have been roused from my bed at four o’clock in the morning and forced to promise a play to an excited manager before he allowed me to crawl back under the bedclothes, and any less ardent expression of willingness has grown to be very suspicious in my eyes.
ROBERT H. DAVIS (_Photo by F. X. Cleary_) ]
I first learned of the fact that ICEBOUND had won the Pulitzer Prize from Al Woods, who called me up and told me the news. He was, I think, as much excited as I, and perhaps he knew better than any one else what a far cry it was from our old Bowery melodramas to the winning of the prize for the best play of 1923. A lot of water had flowed under the mill in those twenty-five years, and to throw so completely aside a hard-won method and adopt another so radically different was a very difficult thing. Since then I have served several times on the committee to award the prize, and I have never voted to give it to a dramatist without recalling my own pleasure in listening to Al Woods’ voice over the ‘phone when he called up and said: “Listen, sweetheart, who do you think cops the Pulitzer Prize this year?—you’d never guess—neither would I—a guy told me—it’s you!”
Owen Davis and his two sons, Donald and Owen, Jr. (_Photograph by Atlantic Photo Service_) ]
During the run of ICEBOUND Bob Davis ruined a golf game by telling me about a new story he was about to publish. It was, so he told me, written by E. J. Rath, but, as a matter of fact, it had in all probability sprung from his own amazing mind, as have literally hundreds of other stories that have appeared under the names of our most famous writers. Bob has been for many years the dry nurse of American fiction and responsible for the present fame of more successful novelists and short story writers than any one man who has ever lived. This story that he called _The Wreck_ bored me very much and quite ruined my game, as Bob usually saves his loudest and most startling statements until I am at the top of my back swing; so to keep him quiet I told him to shut up and I’d read the fool thing if he would send it to me. When I read the proof sheets, all I could find there was a very amusing character, but urged on by Bob I finally agreed to try my best to make a play out of it. The play was THE NERVOUS WRECK, probably one of the most successful farces of the last twenty years.