WHISPERS FROM THE WINGS

Acton Davies

(EDITOR'S NOTE: Mr. Acton Davies, for many years the dramatic critic of the New York Evening Sun, and one of the cleverest and best informed of American writers on the stage, has lately transferred his affections to the New York Tribune. His daily news and reviews of plays will hereafter be published in the Tribune, but his monthly criticisms, reviews, paragraphs and anecdotes will appear in the pages of

Vanity Fair)

NO one who ever knew the late Richard Mansfield can fail to get the humor of this story. Shortly after the actor's death his beautiful home on Riverside Drive was sold by Mrs. Mansfield to W. A. Brady, who presented it as a birthday present to his wife, Miss Grace George.

One morning some months ago there was a ring at the Brady door bell and Miss George's fourteen-year-old son, who happened to be passing through the hall, answered the door. On the doorstep stood two young lads in their earliest teens. One of them, the younger of the two, introduced himself as Gibbes Mansfield, his father's son, and asked permission to take his young friend over the house.

Young Master Brady, nothing loath, acted as cicerone, and conducted them formally from room to room.

The changes which Mrs. Brady had made in the rooms and their decorations seemed to distress young Mansfield a good deal, but he refrained from making any comment until they arrived at Mrs. Brady's bedroom, which in the old days used to be his mother's room. Here his pent-up feelings got the better of the youngster.

"It's too bad—too bad. Really it is. Why you'd never know it for the same room. It should have been left exactly as it was— an historic spot like this—"

This was too much for Master Brady.

"Well, I guess my mother's got a right to fix up her own room as she wanted to, hasn't she? What makes this room historic anyway, I'd like to know?" cried young Brady bridling up.

Young Mr. Mansfield turned on his host with a look of withering scorn. Then he remarked:

'7 was born in this room."

HAVE only spoken to an actress twice in my life, and I shall always regard each occasion as a red letter day. It was the same actress I spoke to on each occasion, but there was more than a quarter of a century between these auspicioases."

The speaker was one of the head officers of a famous metropolitan dime savings bank.

"When I was a youngster twenty-five years and more ago there was only one actress in the world for me, and that was Miss Ada Rehan. Those were the days when at Daly's during the season they revived an old comedy every Tuesday night, and every Tuesday night found me with fifty cents' admission fee in hand clamoring for admission at the gallery entrance.

"Then one never-to-be-forgotten day when I was on duty at the receiving teller window Miss Rehan, accompanied by Augustin Daly, walked in and announced that she wanted to open an account.

She deposited a hundred dollars and seemed as proud as Punch over it. After she had gone I happened to look at her signature and saw that she had signed herself Ada Crehan. That fact continued to puzzle me for twenty-seven years — until yesterday morning, in fact, when I spoke to Miss Rehan for the second time.

"She never came to the bank again, and as far as I know never made another deposit. The other day as I was sitting in my private office I happened to overhear one of my clerks, whose business it is to keep track of our depositors, exclaim in speaking of some bad financial investment say, 'Oh Lord! That's as dead as Ada Crehan.'

"The moment the name struck my ears I got curious. I sent for the clerk and asked him what he meant by that remark. He laughed and explained it was a stock phrase in the office because Ada Crehan was one of our oldest depositors and no one has been able to find any trace of her for twenty-seven years. She had given her address as the old Artie Brunswick, and as that building had been pulled down years and years ago, there was no way of finding her address.

"Instantly it all came back to me. I looked up Miss Rehan's house address and asked her to call at the bank.

"Yesterday she came and you never saw a woman so pleased and delighted in all your life. She had forgotten all about the money and when I handed over to her in full amount of her twenty-seven years' interest I wish you could have seen her face.

"Afterwards, as we sat chatting, she explained to me, what everybody else in the world has known for ages, I suppose— about her name.

" 'Of all the printed stories about me this one about my name is one of the very few that is true,' she explained laughingly.

" 'My name is Crehan, but the night of my first appearance in Mr. Daly's company by a misprint my name appeared on the program as Ada C. Rehan. Consequently it was Miss Rehan and not Miss Crehan who got the good notice next morning, and Mr. Daly persuaded me then and there to drop the C for good and all.' "

CNLOSE on the heels of Charles Frohman's announcement that he is to bring pretty Marie Lohr to this country this season comes word from Manager George Tyler that he has put Phyllis Neilson Terry under contract and will present her here in a new play some time before the new year. These two young women are quite the most fashionable theatrical beauties of the moment in London. Miss Lohr has had the wider stage experience of the two. In London she has usually played the same roles as Billie Burke has played under the Frohman management in this country, but as Miss Burke's contract has still some time to run with Mr. Frohman there is probably no truth in the story that Miss Lohr is being brought here to step into Miss Burke's place. Phyllis Neilson Terry is the daughter of Lord Terry and Julia Neilson, and seems from all accounts to have inherited a happy combination of her father's charm and her mother's beauty.

As actresses neither of these young women have as yet achieved any widely notable success, but in any event it will be something of a novelty to have two women stars from England who are really young.

THE night before she started on her long automobile trip to Cape Breton a friend sent to Mrs. Fiske an old-fashioned bouquet— one of those archaic arrangements with a paper rim which were all the rage thirty years ago.

"I never see one of those bouquets," laughed the actress, "without its reminding me of the one and only time that I almost had two young men come to blows over me. I had two beaux to my string on that occasion with a vengeance. It was away back in my Minnie Maddern days, the first year that I had ceased to be considered a child actress and was regarded as a grown-up star. It was in Boston. The play was "Fog's Ferry," I think, and I remember distinctly that we had a very bad house that night. Before the curtain went up my manager had told me that he had just engaged a new advance agent for our company and also that he had brought on a young playwright from New York to see what he could do to improve our play. They were both to be in front that night, and as he told me where their seats were I took the first opportunity to put my eyes at the peep hole in the curtain to get a look at them. The advance agent was a chubby, round-faced, very young man who looked the soul of good nature; the playwright had a lot of fuzzy black hair and looked to me much more like a young priest than a dramatist.

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"Just before the end of the first act the advance agent, who was sitting in the aisle, rose and hurriedly left the theatre. A moment after he had gone, the playwright rose and hurried away, too.

"It was a warm night, so the window of my dressing-room which looked out on the alley leading to the stage entrance was open. Presently, as I was making up for the next act, I heard voices in loud altercation in the alley, and looking out saw the advance agent and the dramatist glaring at each other as though about to come to blows. Apparently the only thing which prevented them from hitting each other was the fact that each was holding behind his back one of these old-fashioned bouquets. From their remarks I soon discovered that I was the cause of their quarrel and that each of the bouquets was intended for me.

"Each was furious with the other for extending his delicate attention to me. So presently, like another Juliet, I leaned from my wndow and flabbergasted them both by saying:

" 'Gentlemen, gentlemen, please don't come to blows on my account. You'll ruin all those pretty flowers.'

"That settled the matter. After that there was nothing left for Charles Frohman and David Belasco to do but make up and present me from the alley with their individual bouquets."

" DEAR Old England!" exclaimed Miss Alison Skipworth, whose success as the bridge-playing fiend in "The Marriage Game" at the Comedy last season has induced Manager John Cort to send her out on a tour of the country in the same play in September. "Until this spring I hadn't been home for over two years, and when I arrived there it was to find that all my women friends and school fellows had become either rampant anti-suffragettes or raging militants. Talk about the she-devils and the deep sea! Well, I don't like to call myself names, but I certainly felt like one or the other of them. Then to make matters worse, while I was the guest of a rabid anti one of the most rampageous militants insisted upon giving a dinner in my honor. Poor dear! As she had just come off her third hunger strike I could quite understand her wanting to give a dinner to some one—but I had much rather it had been anyone else but me. And the worst of it was that she notified me that I should be expected to address her guests on the Suffrage Question in America, a subject of which I knew far less than I did of the bulls and bears of Wall Street, because I once lost quite a lot of money down there.

"However, I wasn't going back on an old pal if I could help it, and, on the other hand, I certainly wasn't going to hurt the feelings of my anti-suffrage hostess. So I accepted the invitation and even succeeded in making my hostess go along with me. She was a woman, like Kipling's elephant, of most insatiable curiosity, and the only reason on earth why she agreed to go to that dinner was that she might see with her own eyes and hear with her own ears on which side of the Suffrage fence I was going to put my dinner. Meanwhile, like Brer Rabbit, I had been lying low. I remembered reading somewhere in a newspaper a little squib called 'The Double Standard.' I have a sort of feeling it was written by Upton Sinclair, except that its writer assuredly had a sense of humor. I boiled it down and re-edited it to my own satisfaction, and I rendered it at the dinner and managed to keep in the good graces of both the militants and antis.

"Any woman who is ever placed in such a position as I was, can use it with a certainty that she will successfully avoid both Scylla and Charybdis. Here it is:

"THE DOUBLE STANDARD"

MANY thousands of years ago a man and woman were married, and the man said to the woman: "I love all women, I need a great deal of love."

The woman said to the man:

"I love all men, I too need a great deal of love." And the man said to the woman:

"If you talk like that I'll bang'you over the head with a club."

And the woman said:

"Forgive me, Lord and Master!"

A thousand years passed away.

And the man said to the woman:

"I love all women, I need a great deal of love."

And the woman said:

"I love all men; I, too, need a great deal of love."

And the man said:

"If you talk like that I'll divorce you. You can't earn your living you know and you'll find it pretty hard to get on by yourself."

And the woman said:

"You are a brute!"

And another thousand years passed away.

And the man said to the woman:

"I love all women; I need a great deal of love."

And the woman said:

"I love all men; I, too, need a great deal of love, and, as you know, I can earn my own living."

And the man said:

"Humph! Oh, well, of course if you're going to talk like that I shall have to behave myself."

And the woman said:

"At last!"