“You ain’t only been on the stage three or four years,” I says. “How did Hitchcock and Ed Wynn and them fellas get by before they seen you?”
“They wasn’t getting by,” he says. “I’m the baby that put them on their feet. Take Hitchy. Hitchy come to me last spring and says, ‘Jim, I’ve ran out of stuff. Have you got any notions I could use?’ So I says, ‘Hitchy, you’re welcome to anything I got.’ So I give him a couple of idears and they’re the only laughs in his troupe. And you take Wynn. He opened up with a troupe that looked like a flop and one day I seen him on Broadway, wearing a long pan, and I says, ‘What’s the matter, Eddie?’ And he brightened up and says, ‘Hello, there, Jim! You’re just the boy I want to see.’ So I says, ‘Well, Eddie, I’m only too glad to do anything I can.’ So he says, ‘I got a flop on my hands unlest I can get a couple of idears, and you’re the baby that can give them to me.’ So I said, ‘All right, Eddie.’ And I give him a couple of notions to work on and they made his show. And look at Stone! And Errol! And Jolson and Tinney! Every one of them come to me at one time another, hollering for help. ‘Jim, give me a couple of notions!’ ‘Jim, give me a couple of gags!’ And not a one of them went away empty-handed.”
“Did they pay you?” ast Ella.
Ralston smiled.
“I wouldn’t take no actor’s money,” he says. “They’re all brothers to me. They can have anything I got, and I can have anything they got, only they haven’t got nothing.”
Well, I can’t tell you all he said, as I was asleep part of the time. But I do remember that he was the one that had give Bert Williams the notion of playing coon parts, and learnt Sarah Bernhardt to talk French.
Along about four o’clock, when they was less than a pint left in the second McAllister bottle, he defied all the theater managers in New York.
“I ain’t going to monkey with them much longer!” he says. “I’ll let you folks in on something that’ll cause a sensation on Broadway. I’m going to quit the Follies!”
We was all speechless.
“That’s the big secret!” he says. “I’m coming out as a star under my own management and in a troupe wrote and produced by myself!”
“When?” ast Kate.
“Just as soon as I decide who I’m going to let in as part owner,” said Ralston. “I’ve worked for other guys long enough! Why should I be satisfied with $800 a week when Ziegfeld’s getting rich off me!”
“When did he cut you $200?” I says. “You was getting $1,000 last time I seen you.”
He didn’t pay no attention.
“And why should I let some manager produce my play,” he says, “and pay me maybe $1,200 a week when I ought to be making six or seven thousand!”
“Are you working on your play now?” Kate ast him.
“It’s done,” he says. “I’m just trying to make up my mind who’s the right party to let in on it. Whoever it is, I’ll make him rich.”
“I’ve got some money to invest,” says Katie. “Suppose you tell us about the play.”
“I’ll give you the notion, if you’ll keep it to yourself,” says Ralston. “It’s a serious play with a novelty idear that’ll be a sensation. Suppose I go down to my suite and get the script and read it to you.”
“Oh, if you would!” says Kate.
“It’ll knock you dead!” he says.
And just the thought of it was fatal to the author. He got up from his chair, done a nose dive acrost the table and laid there with his head in the chili sauce.
I called up the clerk and had him send up the night bellhop with our guest’s key. I and the boy acted as pall bearers and got him to his “suite,” where we performed the last sad rites. Before I come away I noticed that the “suite” was a ringer for Ella’s and mine—a dinky little room with a bath. The “study” was prettily furnished with coat hangers.
When I got back to my room Katie’d ducked and the Mrs. was asleep, so I didn’t get a chance to talk to them till we was in the restaurant at noon. Then I ast Kate if she’d figured out just what number drink it was that had started him being comical.
“Now listen,” she says: “I don’t think that Abbott girl ever met him in her life. Anyway, she had him all wrong. We expected he’d do stunts, like she said, but he ain’t that kind that shows off or acts smart. He’s too much of a man for that. He’s a bigger man than I thought.”
“I and the bellhop remarked that same thing,” I says.
“And you needn’t make fun of him for getting faint,” says Katie. “I called him up a wile ago to find out how he was and he apologized and said they must of been something in that second bottle of Scotch.”
So I says:
“You tell him they was, but they ain’t.”
Well, it couldn’t of been the Scotch or no other brew that ruined me. Or if it was, it worked mighty slow. I didn’t even look at a drink for three days after the party in our room. But the third day I felt rotten, and that night I come down with a fever. Ella got scared and called a doctor and he said it was flu, and if I didn’t watch my step it’d be something worse. He advised taking me to a hospital and I didn’t have pep enough to say no.
So they took me and I was pretty sick for a couple of weeks—too sick for the Mrs. to give me the news. And it’s a wonder I didn’t have a relapse when she
