At nine o'clock the stage manager of "The Babes and the Baron" was sent around to recognize Miss Wilbur. It was he who had challenged her courage, and, alarmed at her failure to report for the performance, he had hastened to pick up the clue given him by the evening papers. Miss Wilbur's identity was established in the presence of a score of reporters and photographers, none of whom seemed to suspect anything. "At the hour of going to press" we all felt certain that we had "pulled off" the biggest theatrical "fake" known to history.
Every paper in town had the story the next morning--but it was the true story. A City News Association man had recognized my bright journalist, at that time passing himself off as a brother of Miss Wilbur, and the net result of our fortnight's toiling and moiling was some six columns of ridicule.
These confessions would be incomplete if I did not admit here and now that this story was the most ill-advised of my career. It brought discomfit and discredit to a dozen persons, it involved an attempt to deceive some of my best friends, and it put me in a bad light at the very time that the approaching premiere of a play from my pen made that most undesirable. A great many city editors have never forgiven me my part in this particular "fake," although the owner of an evening paper wrote me the next day: "I was fooled from first to last. You're a wonder. Congratulations."
Another bad mistake was my story regarding the willingness of the management to pay $50 a week for exceptionally beautiful chorus girls to appear in "Mexicana." The story was printed all over the world, but it caused critics to stamp as ugly one of the most attractive ensembles ever brought to New York. "If any of these girls," said _The Sun_, "gets $50 a week her employers are entitled to a rebate." I cannot place in the same catalogue Madame Bernhardt's appeal to the French Ambassador at Washington to protest against her exclusion from playhouses controlled by the so-called Theatrical Syndicate. Madame denied this over her own signature, but, from a press agent's point of view, it was an exceedingly creditable falsehood.
It is possible to discuss at endless length the real value of the "fake" and its place in theatrical advertising. Perhaps no one ever went to a theater merely because one of the performers at that theater was supposed to have bathed in milk or to have stopped a runaway horse. On the other hand, I am sure that no one ever went to a theater because he or she had seen the name of the play acted there posted conspicuously on a bill-board. The mission of the bill-board is to call attention to the fact that there is such-and-such an entertainment and that it may be seen at such-and-such a house. There is no question in my mind but that this much is done for a production by "fake" stories concerning it. In rare instances, where the story accentuates the importance of the presentation and its success, or awakens interest in some member of the presenting company, the service performed may be even greater. At all events, the average manager expects this kind of advertising from the publicity promoter to whom he pays a salary, and, naturally, the publicity promotor feels that it is "his not to reason why." The press agent realizes that to any failure on his part will always be attributed the misfortunes of the management with which he is connected. Productions do a good business because they are good productions, and a bad business because they have bad press agents.