Nora
“Mr. Hazlett, shake hands with Jerry Morris and Frank Moon. I guess you’ve heard of the both of them.”
The speaker was Louie Brock, producer of musical shows, who had cleared over half a million dollars in two years through the popularity of Jersey Jane, tunes by Morris and lyrics by Moon.
They were in Brock’s inner office, the walls of which were adorned with autographed pictures of six or seven of the more celebrated musical comedy stars and a too-perfect likeness of Brock’s wife, whom he had evidently married in a dense fog.
“Mr. Hazlett,” continued Brock, “has got a book which he wrote as a straight play, but it struck me right off that it was great material for a musical, especially with you two fellas to do the numbers. It’s a brand-new idear, entirely opposite from most of these here musical comedy books that’s all the same thing and the public must be getting sick of them by this time. Don’t you think so, Jerry?”
“I certainly do,” the tunesmith replied. “Give us a good novelty story, and with what I and Frank can throw in there to jazz it up, we’ll run till the theatre falls down.”
“Well, Mr. Hazlett,” said Brock, “suppose you read us the book and we’ll see what the boys thinks of it.”
Hazlett was quite nervous in spite of Brock’s approval of his work and the fact that friends to whom he had shown it had given it high praise and congratulated him on his good fortune in getting a chance to collaborate with Morris and Moon—Morris, who had set a new style in melodies and rhythms and whose tunes made up sixty percent of all dance programs, and Moon, the ideal lyricist who could fit Jerry’s fast triplets with such cute-sounding three-syllable rhymes that no one ever went to the considerable trouble of trying to find out what they meant.
“I’ve tried to stay away from the stereotyped Cinderella theme,” said Hazlett. “In my story, the girl starts out just moderately well off and winds up poor. She sacrifices everything for love and the end finds her alone with her lover, impoverished but happy. She—”
“Let’s hear the book,” said the producer.
Hazlett, with trembling fingers, opened to the first page of his script.
“Well,” he began, “the title is Nora and the first scene—”
“Excuse me a minute,” Morris interrupted. “I promised a fella that I’d come over and look at a big secondhand Trinidad Twelve. Only eight grand and a bargain if there ever was one, hey, Frank?”
“I’ll say it’s a bargain,” Moon agreed.
“The fella is going to hold it for me till half-past three and its nearly three o’clock now. So if you don’t mind, Mr. Hazlett, I wish that instead of reading the book clear through, you’d kind of give us a kind of a synopsis and it will save time and we can tell just as good, hey, Frank?”
“Just as good,” said Moon.
“All right, Mr. Hazlett,” Brock put in. “Suppose you tell the story in your own way, with just the main idear and the situations.”
“Well,” said Hazlett, “of course, as a straight play, I wrote it in three acts, but when Mr. Brock suggested that I make a musical show out of it, I cut it to two. To start with, the old man, the girl’s uncle, is an Irishman who came to this country when he was about twenty years old. He worked hard and he was thrifty and finally he got into the building business for himself. He’s pretty well-to-do, but he’s avaricious and not satisfied with the three or four hundred thousand he’s saved up. He meets another Irish immigrant about his own age, a politician who has a lot to say about the letting of big city building contracts. This man, Collins, had a handsome young son, John, twenty-three or twenty-four.
“The old man, the girl’s uncle—their name is Crowley—he tries his hardest to get in strong with old Collins so Collins will land him some of the city contracts, but Collins, though he’s very friendly all the while, he doesn’t do Crowley a bit of good in a business way.
“Well, Crowley gives a party at his house for a crowd of his Irish friends in New York, young people and people his own
