"Popularity", George Cohan's play that afterward became "The Man Who Owns Broadway", was a perfect mine of ill breeding. In the first place, the Fuller drawing room, as shown, was a flaring red, with a piano on which the manufacturer's name was painted in letters two inches high. During the evening there were several callers, whom the Fullers left quite alone for a period of fifteen minutes. The butler atoned for this rudeness by shaking hands with one of the guests, a young gentleman unfortunately crossed in love, and expressing sympathy for him. The young gentleman said he was much obliged. The climax of this singular exhibition was reached when a "matinee idol", dropping in without invitation on Papa Fuller, whom he had never met, lit a cigar, instructed the sympathetic butler to bring him spirituous liquor, and told his host a few things about gentlemen in general and the host himself in particular.
The familiarity of the butler in "Popularity" was as nothing to the behavior of the servants in "Forty-five Minutes From Broadway", where several menials seemed to subscribe heartily to Paul Blouet's dictum that "America is a country in which every man is as good as his neighbor and a damned sight better." The mother in the noisy farce of "Julie Bonbon" who objected to having her son marry a milliner might have improved her own manners in any millinery shop on Fifth Avenue. A chambermaid in "Susan in Search of a Husband" introduced to each other two guests of her hotel; Vida Phillimore in "The New York Idea" received in her boudoir a nobleman who had been presented to her only the day before; Mrs. O'Mara addressed her daughter and ignored the visitor who was chatting with her in "All-of-a-Sudden Peggy." The reception room revealed in "The Daughters of Men" looked like the interior of a jewel box, and served as the abiding place of a wonderful collection of amusingly stiff-backed men and women, representing the smart set as, at that time, it was imagined by Charles Klein.
[Illustration: "_It simply isn't done!_"]
Fortunately, errors of taste in staging society plays become fewer and less conspicuous every day. They are practically obsolete now in theaters like the Empire, the Lyceum, the Hudson, and the Belasco. With them has gone the time in which every fashionable apartment was furnished in exactly the same way and had doors in exactly the same place. The producer who "dresses" a stage today buys precisely as though he had a commission to "dress" the home of a wealthy and intelligent client. Under these circumstances, it is particularly fortunate that the comedy of manners and the drama of the drawing room have come to stay. Cultured people are pleasant companions in everyday life, and doubly pleasant when they have been idealized and super-refined for library or theater. We may be glad of the evident fact that plays may come and plays may go, but the society play goes on forever.