This was the original cast of “The Wife”,--November 1, 1887:
_Hon. John Rutherford_ Herbert Kelcey. _Robert Grey_ Henry Miller. _Matthew Culver_ Nelson Wheatcroft. _Silas Truman_ Charles Walcot. _Major Homer_ William J. LeMoyne. _Jack Dexter_ Charles S. Dickson. _Helen Truman_, _Mrs. Rutherford_ Georgia Cayvan. _Lucile Ferrant_ Grace Henderson. _Mrs. Bellamy Ives_ Mrs. Charles Walcot. _Mrs. Amory_ Mrs. Thomas Whiffen. _Agnes_ Vida Croly. _Mr. Randolph_ W. Clark Bellows. _Kitty Ives_ Louise Dillon.
“The Wife” was so beautifully set, so perfectly directed, and so well acted that, though at first the dead weight of the play oppressed its representation, the public press, even at the first, inclined to accord it an importance which it did not deserve. Georgia Cayvan’s impersonation of the wife revealed anew the deep feeling and the graceful art that had won her recognition as a favorite actress. Grace Henderson (she was the wife of David Henderson, critical writer and producer of musical extravaganza), who acted the mischief making, jilted woman, _Lucile_, played with discretion and sincerity,--but it was difficult for the spectator to believe that a woman with a face so beautiful and a voice so delicious would ever have been jilted by any man not blind and deaf. Henry Miller was loud and extravagant as _Grey_; Herbert Kelcey was dignified, manly, and fine in feeling and elegant in manner and movement as _Rutherford_, and LeMoyne was delightfully humorous as _Major Homer_.
“The Wife” received 239 consecutive performances. Yet the fate of that play hung, for some time, in the balance. “I knew, even before the production,” said Belasco to me, “that it was too long and too loosely jointed, but I felt it could make good; and Mr. Frohman had faith. De Mille was pretty well discouraged after a week or ten days, and he told me he expected he’d have to go back to school-teaching [De Mille had been a school-teacher before he joined the Madison Square Theatre, where, in 1884, Belasco first met him]. Brent Good, proprietor of Carter’s Little Liver Pills, and also Stickney protested, in a directors’ meeting, that the play was a failure and was losing money and ordered it withdrawn.” The next morning Daniel Frohman instructed Belasco to put the play of “Featherbrain,” by James Albery, into rehearsal and prepare it for production as rapidly as possible. “I felt certain,” Belasco has told me, “that ’The Wife’ could be made a great money-getter, and I resolved it should have a fair trial: I held back on the preparations of ’Featherbrain’ all I could,--and, meantime, De Mille and I altered and cut, day after day, on our play. This procedure was justified by the result. Writing on this subject, Belasco declares: “It seemed to us that for every word we cut from ’The Wife’ we gained a person in the orchestra.” What a pity the necessary pruning and adjustment could not have been done before the production! Then the prosperity of a theatre and of many persons would not have been endangered. The sum of more than $50,000, owed to the Tiffany Studios, was paid in full, out of the profits of “The Wife,” and the directors of the corporation, as also Daniel Frohman, were so well satisfied with the ultimate result that Belasco and De Mille were commissioned to write the next new play required, for the following season, which was to be one constructed as a starring vehicle for Edward H. Sothern, who had been “inherited” by the Lyceum management under a contract with Helen Dauvray.