AB

Author of Four Broadway Successes Now Running

In an interview with LOUIS M. NOTKIN

BOUT sitxeen years ago, a tall, blond, young man, aged twenty-one, reporting for a newspaper in Cleveland, Ohio, decided that he would be a playwright. So he wrote a play about society life which he called "Clothes," and journeyed to New York to find a producer. This young man was Avery Hopwood. At that time, his stock in trade was a genial personality, a keen desire to study human nature, and a large amount of natural determination. While he had made up his mind to chase that subtle will-o'-the-wisp, playwriting, he thought less about the possibility of earning big royalties and seeing his name printed large on posters, than he did about writing something worth while. "Clothes" had all the earmarks of the beginner; but it had a big idea, and young Mr. Hopwood was induced to collaborate with a more experienced craftsman, Mr. Channing Pollock. In such instances, the more experienced playwright receives the larger end of the royalties, but all that Hopwood cared for was to get a start.

"Clothes" proved a success. Mr. Hopwood kept on studying and working. To-day he is the author or coauthor of four successful plays now running in New York City.

This interview which he granted me for THE NEW SUCCESS, is the first he has found time to give. He is a studious, painstaking, hardworking young man, blessed with humor.

"Mr. Hopwood," I said, "I understand that four of your plays are now being produced on Broadway with great success and that a fifth, which you are completing, is about to be accepted?"

Mr. Hopwood smilingly said, "I don't

AVERY HOPWOOD

like to count the chickens before they are hatched. I am only certain of the four plays now appearing on Broadway. I hope Father Time will prove your prediction to be true. At any rate, I shall keep on working. Failure only makes me work all the harder."

"But how do you manage to write so many plays within so short a period?"

"I'

'LL tell you the secret of successful playwriting, but don't put it in your article; I don't want the other playwrights to copy my system; I fear competition too much. I keep a sort of card catalogue in which I file all the ideas that come to me for plays, characters and scenes. Of course, it is not a real card-catalogue, but it resembles one. When I want to write a new play, I look through it in search of an idea. Sometimes, the idea is expressed briefly; sometimes, when it lends itself to easy outline, the whole thing is outlined. I generally keep a few ideas ahead. At present I have what I consider six or eight good ideas for plays and about a hundred fairly good ones.

"In writing, I do not always confine myself to one play, sometimes I work at two at a time

writing one in the morning and one in the afternoon. I don't believe in waiting for the proper mood to write. I try to do four to six hours' work every day, and keep at it even if the things I write each day aren't

good. It is necessary to do that to keep your hand in. When writing a play, I do not dress in my street clothes; for I know there will be the temptation to go out, and once out of the house I might not come back to work.

"Before the actual writing of the dialogue, I have in mind the beginning, middle, and end of the play. I write the whole thing roughly as a story, then divide it into acts, sometimes even into scenes. All this is done before the writing of dialogue begins. It saves a lot of labor. Then you know you have sufficient material, and you won't write two acts and then find you have nothing left for a third. Dialogue is very easy to me. It is in constructing a play that I must take off my coat and fight. A scene is usually right the first time. It may need cutting and polishing; but if the dialogue does not come easily and right the first time, I know something is wrong and that it won't come at all-that I had better try some other motive."

"Since plays like 'Spanish Love' and 'The Bat' were written by yourself and Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart, could you tell me just what method of procedure you adopt when you collaborate?"

"THA

HAT depends entirely on the complexity of plot and the nature of its construction. When a plot lends itself to easy development, Mrs. Rinehart usually writes one act and I write another. We then exchange manuscripts for general criticism. Finally we rewrite the acts in accordance with those criticisms.

"But sometimes a play, because of complexity of plot or difficult problems or obstacles, does not allow such a method of procedure. In that case, we have to fall back on the more usual method of personal contact which permits more opportunity for discussion.

"Mrs. Rinehart lives with her husband and family in Pittsburg. Whenever it is necessary, I go there for a few weeks' stay for the purpose of collaborating or she comes to New York. We get together four or five hours a day for real

work. She sits at one end of the table and I at the other. I usually handle the typewriter. One of us presents an idea for a scene or dialogue and the other criticises and dissects it. By the time we get through we don't know who contributed the most to that scene. After a dozen such meetings, the rough draft of the play is usually completed and needs only a little polish and revision."

"What event in your life suggested your play "The Gold Diggers'?"

"Spanish Love" is Mr. Hopwood's first experience in adapting a foreign play for the American stage, and he found it a difficult task.

"What little humor there was in the original would have been unintelligible to an American audience," he told me. "Mrs. Rinehart and I felt that humor was needed in it. But you can't write humor around Spanish peasants. In other words, as Broadway terms it, we could do no 'wise cracking.' For that reason, we decided to treat it in romantic fashion."

WITH

ITH doubt and dismay you are smitten, You think there's no chance for you, son? Why the best books haven't been written, The best race hasn't been run; The best score hasn't been made yet, The best song hasn't been sung, The best tune hasn't been played yet, Cheer up, for the world is young.

The best verse hasn't been rhymed yet,
The best house hasn't been planned,
The highest peak hasn't been climbed yet,
The mightiest rivers aren't spanned;
Don't worry and fret, faint-hearted,
The chances have just begun
For the best jobs haven't been started,
The best work hasn't been done.

--Selected.

Ο

NCE a year, in spring, Romance fluttered by the desk of Minnie Kenny and tarried awhile. At that time, Minnie forgot that she was small, and thin, and pale, and altogether lacking in that startling beauty which marked the girls who sold gowns and millinery in the thickly carpeted fashion-salon of Crane's. At that time, she forgot that she was merely a bookkeeper on a high chair behind the little grated window where sales were reported and recorded, and she ventured forth into the mirrored buying-room where Josh Merritt came yearly to display his spring line of hats.

At that time, too, Minnie became for a short while, an object of great concern to the sophisticated saleswomen who gave to the Crane establishment its aura of extreme smartness. One by one they would cross to Minnie's window, and in a spirit of light banter, drop a hint or two.

"Remember, Minnie," they would warn, "treat him nice. If you don't, you'll lose him. Tell him how wonderful he is, and that, some day, you feel positive he'll be a millionaire. And don't talk too much. You know you've got that habit, Minnie. You keep quiet for the longest time and then suddenly you let out in a good, stiff lecture. You can't do that with a man. Got to treat 'em gently. The best way is to just sit still, look sweet, and listen. Don't forget, Minnie. That's advice that comes high."

And Minnie Kenny would put down her pen for a brief space and listen to the wisdom of those more experienced women who knew the art of "man-holding" so well that they managed to get someone to wait about and take them home almost every evening. Sometimes there was a tinge of laughter in their voices as they thus counseled her, as if they were making sport of her poor little romance; but their barbed arrows glanced away from Minnie Kenny. Her thoughts were too busy with the day when Josh Merritt would come into the

Crane establishment and ask her to dinner and the theater.

That night she would clear her desk hurriedly and take the car to Mrs. Grew's boardinghouse. Once there, she would fly up to her room, and heedless of the warning bell to dinner, she would dress herself with extreme care. Every little hook and eye would be caught in place, and every silken strand of her shining brown hair would be slicked tidily back, until, when she tripped down the stairs to answer Josh Merritt's bell, she looked like a prim and pruned, sleek, little tulip.

And now again it was spring, and Josh Merritt, tall, browned, blue-eyed, with his same irresistible smile, his same irrepressible good humor, and his same faultlessly pressed suit of blue serge, was standing in the center of the little buying-room, openly admiring the piquant faces of the pretty models who jerked their heads this way and that as they tried on his new sample hats.

66

"W

ONDERFUL!" he cried to Bishop, the buyer. "Aren't they wonderful?” "Well, yes. They are rather exceptionally smart hats."

"Not the hats, man. The girls!"

"Oh! The girls! Yes. They're good-looking." "Good-looking! Is that all? I tell you man, if you'd been traveling all over this little State of ours, making towns where the chief milliner is a dried old crab apple with a green complexion and a sour disposition, you'd appreciate what it is to come into a room like this and see a lot of live faces that actually smile. Wonderful! Wonderful girls, with their sparkling eyes, and wavy hair, and sweet lips. Gee! Bishop. I tell you there are times when I wish like all sorts of things that I had a wonderful girl of my own, in a wonderful house of my own, where I could anchor down and stay set."

"Well? What's to prevent you? I guess there are any number of girls who wouldn't exactly turn you down."

"But what's the use asking them? You ought to know the sort of life a traveling man can offer a woman. One day I'd be home and the next— bingo! Off for three months. Some life, that. Some life-not! What do you say, Old Reliable?" This last was addressed to Minnie Kenny who had tiptoed into the room, an eager-faced, hesitant figure in her plain blue skirt and simple white waist. She had heard his appreciation of the pretty models, and, somewhere in her mind, a tiny voice cried, "You're not pretty, Minnie. Your cheeks aren't red, your eyes don't sparkle, your hair doesn't curl. You're just Minnie Kenny-Old Reliable-a plain, unobtrusive cog in the wheel. You weren't made to try on hats before a beveled mirror. It's your business to see that the charge customers pay their bills on time and

that the creditors get their checks on the first of the month. That's what you're here for, Minnie."

This year her little room would witness unusual preparations. There was a new dress of soft, creamy lace and a drooping, shaded hat to go with it. Minnie had purchased it after it had been rejected by a dissatisfied patron, and only once, before the low, wide mirror of her dresser had she dared to put it on just to see how it looked. After that she had hastily folded it in its tissue paper and

laid it away to wait for the spring and Josh Merritt. There was another box too, in her room-a pink satinlined box with tiny compartments that held a cake of scented soap, an oddly shaped bottle of green perfume, a downy puff, powder, rouge, and a carmine stick such as she often saw the girls in the salon apply to their lips.

Every time Minnie thought of that box, she blushed uncomfortably and took herself to task with strange disjointed sentences.

"Other girls do it. It's not a sin. Just a tiny dab. No air in this office. All cramped up. How could I have color? A bit wouldn't hurt. And I'd dust it right over with powder."

All of which hinted at a new intention and indicated that Minnie Kenny was not exactly satisfied with the fragmentary character of her romance. And it was true. Seven years in the hall-room of Mrs. Grew's boardinghouse had created a great unrest in her heart. What was there to look forward to but the same old stew, the same old prunes, and the same soggy pie? She was growing older, was twenty-five now, and the years ahead looked bleaker and bleaker. Pretty soon, if she didn't act quickly, she would become like Miss Mott in the back parlor-Miss Mott who took her recreation at the free library, reading romances that happened to other women and who went

As Bishop came abruptly down to business, the two models glided noiselessly out of the room to the salon below, and Minnie Kenny tripped back to her high chair and ledger, there to wait until Josh Merritt should turn in the duplicate of his order and ask her as usual: "Is seven o'clock all right?"

"Well, Old Reliable?"

Minnie's heart restrained a beat.

"Early spring we're having this year. And they say we'll have a long, hot summer."

With which he followed Mr. Bishop out into the salon.

Minnie Kenny swallowed hard and sat very, very still. He-he hadn't asked her! He had forgotten! She made a sudden move to get off the high chair and follow him. But the next instant she caught herself, bit her lip, and looked steadily down at the ledger until a blur came before her eyes and made of the figures a hopeless jumble.

All day long, Minnie Kenny sat at her desk and breathlessly awaited the ringing of the telephone. Perhaps he would call. But when six o'clock came and there was still no word from Josh Merritt, she half-heartedly cleared away the books, the bills, and the ledger. As she slipped into her coat two of the saleswomen approached.

"Well, Minnie," cried one, "he's here! It's your fault if you don't have a good time.” "That's right," chirped the other. "It's all up to you. Insist on the best there is, and you'll get it. Make him rattle his coin, Minnie. Don't show him you're not used to a good time. And, above all, pat him on the back. You know what I mean."

"I know," said Minnie Kenny, and forced a smile to her lips. "I know."

Mrs. Grew was preparing the inevitable stew for dinner; and as Minnie opened the hall door, the over-spiced odor wafted up the stairs from the basement kitchen. It made her sick, choky. Hastily she ran upstairs to her own room and threw open the window. There was a chair beside it. She sank into it, leaning far out into the street. Spring! How disturbing it was! Just that smell of melting snow and that woody aroma of sprouting green things. Each year it had brought her a night of thrilled happiness. But now—

Suddenly she went to the dresser and drew forth the tissue-paper wrapper, spreading the dress upon the bed in all its lacy, gauzy glory.

Josh Merritt would never see her in it. And the hat! How it softened the lines of her face! As she looked at her reflection in the mirror, an impulsive whim flashed through her mind, and before it had time to pale and grow cold, she hastily pulled her business clothes off, and dashed into the bathroom at the end of the hall.

Ten minutes later she returned, and feverishly brought from its hiding place the pink satinlined box. With resolute daring, she applied the cold cream, wiped it off, and then dusted with powder. From its tiny compartment, she took the rouge puff and rubbed it across her cheeks. In the flush that it imparted, a sparkle seemed to leap up in her eyes and glow there. She brushed out the silken strands of her hair and recklessly threw them up into a great coil on the top of her head, the way the girls did at Crane's. For a single second, then, she hesitated, arrested by that strange, flushed self that looked at her out of the mirror. But the next instant her lips were set firmly, and she went toward the closet where an altogether frivolous pair of black-satin pumps with rhinestone-studded buckles peeked out at her. There were fine, sheer stockings too; and at seven o'clock, Minnie Kenny sat before her mirror in all her finery, a figure oddly at ends with the almost poor plainness of the room.

Fo

NOR what seemed an eternity, she stared at herself in that mirror. Even as she stared, the tears began to roll down her cheeks until she could no longer see, and she rested her head on the top of the dresser. Softly, whimperingly, with hushed sobs that would not make themselves known to the other boarders, she cried.

In the midst of it all, there came a knock on the door followed by Miss Stern's cheery: "Hello, Minnie! Coming down to dinner?"

Minnie sat very still and stifled a sob. She didn't want visitors. Miss Stern rattled the knob a moment, found it locked, and passed downstairs to the dining-room.

Minnie raised her head from the dresser and went to the window, looking out into the street where the spring eve had fallen. As she did so, a familiar figure passed up the front steps and rang the bell. Minnie held her breath a second and then rushed to her door, opening it in time to hear Mrs. Grew say, "I guess Miss Kenny isn't home yet."

"Yes I am!" cried Minnie, and without waiting, she hurried downstairs to greet Josh Merritt-her face flushed, her hair a bit awry, the carmine of the rouge on her cheeks slightly impaired by the inroad of her tears.