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Cheerful, By Request
by
During those agonized months she had received from the others in the company such kindness and generosity as only stage folk can show–flowers, candy, dainties, magazines, sent by every one from the prima donna to the call boy. Then the show left town. There came a few letters of kind inquiry, then an occasional post card, signed by half a dozen members of the company. Then these ceased. Josie Fifer, in her cast and splints and bandages and pain, dragged out long hospital days and interminable hospital nights. She took a dreary pleasure in following the tour of her erstwhile company via the pages of the theatrical magazines.
“They’re playing Detroit this week,” she would announce to the aloof and spectacled nurse. Or: “One-night stands, and they’re due in Muncie, Ind., to-night. I don’t know which is worse–playing Muncie for one night or this moan factory for a three month’s run.”
When she was able to crawl out as far as the long corridor she spoke to every one she met. As she grew stronger she visited here and there, and on the slightest provocation she would give a scene ranging all the way from “Romeo and Juliet” to “The Black Crook.” It was thus she first met Sid Hahn, and felt the warming, healing glow of his friendship.
Some said that Sid Hahn’s brilliant success as a manager at thirty-five was due to his ability to pick winners. Others thought it was his refusal to be discouraged when he found he had picked a failure. Still others, who knew him better, were likely to say: “Why, I don’t know. It’s a sort of–well, you might call it charm–and yet–. Did you ever see him smile? He’s got a million-dollar grin. You can’t resist it.”
None of them was right. Or all of them. Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call boy, press agent, advance man, had a genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive, artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, Sid Hahn, with the eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a comic ol’-clo’es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to a vice.
In September he had come to Atlantic City to try out “Splendour.” It was a doubtful play, by a new author, starring Sarah Haddon for the first time. No one dreamed the play would run for years, make a fortune for Hahn, lift Haddon from obscurity to the dizziest heights of stardom, and become a classic of the stage.
Ten minutes before the curtain went up on the opening performance Hahn was stricken with appendicitis. There was not even time to rush him to New York. He was on the operating table before the second act was begun. When he came out of the ether he said: “How did it go?”
“Fine!” beamed the nurse. “You’ll be out in two weeks.”
“Oh, hell! I don’t mean the operation. I mean the play.”
He learned soon enough from the glowing, starry-eyed Sarah Haddon and from every one connected with the play. He insisted on seeing them all daily, against his doctor’s orders, and succeeded in working up a temperature that made his hospital stay a four weeks’ affair. He refused to take the tryout results as final.
“Don’t be too bubbly about this thing,” he cautioned Sarah Haddon. “I’ve seen too many plays that were skyrockets on the road come down like sticks when they struck New York.”
The company stayed over in Atlantic City for a week, and Hahn held scraps of rehearsals in his room when he had a temperature of 102. Sarah Haddon worked like a slave. She seemed to realise that her great opportunity had come–the opportunity for which hundreds of gifted actresses wait a lifetime. Haddon was just twenty-eight then–a year younger than Josie Fifer. She had not yet blossomed into the full radiance of her beauty. She was too slender, and inclined to stoop a bit, but her eyes were glorious, her skin petal-smooth, her whole face reminding one, somehow, of an intelligent flower. Her voice was a golden, liquid delight.