“He either fears his fate too much Or his deserts are small, That puts it not unto the touch To win or lose it all.”
To that touch Belasco and Mrs. Carter determined to put her fate at the earliest possible moment, yet not altogether without preparation for the ordeal through which she was to pass. Belasco’s method of instructing her was the only practical one: he treated her as if she had been the leading woman in a stock company, under his direction, in circumstances which made it peremptory that she, and only she, should act certain parts, and with whom, accordingly, he must do the best he could. His experience as a teacher was onerous and often discouraging, but he and his pupil persevered. “Mrs. Carter,” he writes, “had no idea of the rudiments of acting. In Chicago she had been a brilliant drawing-room figure. Very graceful in private life, she became awkward and self-conscious on the stage. Our first lessons included a series of physical exercises, to secure a certain grace and ease of motion.” During the period from April, 1890, to about June, 1891, according to Belasco’s statement to me, Mrs. Carter, under his direction, memorized and rehearsed (sometimes on the stage of Palmer’s Theatre, sometimes in private rooms) more than thirty different parts, in representative drama, ranging from _Nancy Sikes_, in “Oliver Twist,” to _Parthenia_, in “Ingomar”; from _Camille_ to _Lady Macbeth_; from _Julia_, in “The Hunchback,” to _Mrs. Bouncer_, in “Box and Cox,” and from _Leah the Forsaken_ to _Frou-Frou_. Meantime, however, Belasco had a wife and children to support, as well as himself; his resources were little and day by day were growing less; Mrs. Carter and her devoted mother were no better off, and it was essential that the hopeful but harassed adventurer should add to his income, derived from miscellaneous private teaching and coaching for the stage, to which precarious expedient he was, at this period, compelled to revert, to eke out his slender revenue. At this juncture his friend Charles Frohman, who had bought Bronson Howard’s war melodrama of “Shenandoah” and had prospered with it, and who had undertaken to provide dramatic entertainments for Proctor’s Twenty-third Street Theatre, applied to him for a new play.