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Sitting, in her Manhattan office, in front of a desk as big as a bungalow, Miss Nichols talked to reporters. Once more she told how she grew up in Dale's Mills, Ga., how she ran away from Ogontz Seminary, Pa., with $36 and a bundle to go on the stage. The girl who lived next her in a Manhattan rooming-house was already an actress. She had a parasol with an extraordinarily long handle and when she talked she rested it upright beside her chair, swaying it from the knob with an air at once languid and haughty. She said that she had played Camille. Miss Nichols, in her first interview with a theatrical agent, said so too. The agent offered her a black-face part. She toured with The Shepherd King, then wrote a vaudeville skit which had some success. Ultimately, she wrote Abie's Irish Rose, which she thought would please the Jews because it made fun of the Irish, and please the Irish because it made fun of the Irish, and please the rest of the public because it made fun of the Jews and because it was full of jokes that would remind them of their childhood. Every manager in Manhattan refused it. Oliver Morosco produced it in Los Angeles where it ran for 42 weeks. Miss Nichols brought it to New York and put it on at her own expense. It is not true that critics unanimously damned it.*
For ten weeks it ran at a loss. Then the subway public told their friends about it. When it had run for three years it ceased to be a joke. The cognoscenti went to see it for fear of missing a classic. It was the smart thing in Manhattan last spring to take your dinner party to Abie's Irish Rose. Brander Matthews called it "a perfectly constructed and played comedy. . . ."
Miss Nichols asserts that to get local color for her masterpiece she talked with peddlers in Manhattan's ghetto, ate with tenement families on Manhattan's East Side. The dialogue and action of the play, however, seem first to have under gone a thorough seasoning in vaudeville. The plot consists of the efforts of an orthodox Jew to keep his son from marrying an Irish girl and the efforts of the Irish girl's parents to keep her from marrying an orthodox Jew. The artistic virtue of the play is that its lines are so stale that they are almost sublime. A great author, setting himself to create this play, would have arrived at almost Miss Nichols' result by an opposite method, that is, he would have had his characters, simple, human, dictate their own dialogue, instead of suggesting human characters, as Miss Nichols does, by the accidental use of very old taglines. Whatever her shortcomings as a literary artist, Miss Nichols remains an energetic business woman, a healthy soul, a multimillionaire.
*Previously held by the London production of Chu Chin Chow (2,000).
†She has paid $3,000,000 in stage salaries, $1,250,000 for advertising, some $800,000 for traveling, rentals and other expenses, not including the large item of division of profits with owners of theatres in which the play has run on a percentage basis.
*The World: "Nothing . . . quite as bad as a bad play." The Tribune: "something in a perambulator, brandishing a loud rattle." But the Times: "We hope to be present at Rebecca and Patrick's second birthday."