Cheerful - By Request | Page 5

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.
Josie Fifer, dragging herself from bed to chair, and from chair to bed,
used to watch for her. Hahn's room was on her floor. Sarah Haddon, in
her youth and beauty and triumph, represented to Josie all that she had
dreamed of and never realised; all that she had hoped for and never
could know. She used to insist on having her door open, and she would
lie there for hours, her eyes fixed on that spot in the hall across which
Haddon would flash for one brief instant on her way to the room down
the corridor. There is about a successful actress a certain radiant
something--a glamour, a luxuriousness, an atmosphere that suggest a
mysterious mixture of silken things, of perfume, of adulation, of all that
is rare and costly and perishable and desirable.
Josie Fifer's stage experience had included none of this. But she knew

they were there. She sensed that to this glorious artist would come all
those fairy gifts that Josie Fifer would never possess. All things about
her--her furs, her gloves, her walk, her hats, her voice, her very shoe
ties--were just what Josie would have wished for. As she lay there she
developed a certain grim philosophy.
"She's got everything a woman could wish for. Me, I haven't got a thing.
Not a blamed thing! And