"Max, if I gave you a kiss for a box of candy then, I'll give you one for nothing now!"
Memories are crowding upon me, and I find there is much still to be said about the Academy of Music, and the operatic folk whom it housed between 1854 and 1886. Just now the incidents which have been narrated about the banquet given in honor of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Adelina Patti's début recall other characteristic anecdotes of Colonel Mapleson, who managed the Academy of Music from 1878 to the end of the disastrous season of 1885-'86. When Mapleson and Abbey were drawing up their forces for the battle royal between the Academy of Music and the Metropolitan Opera House in 1883, one of the New York newspapers reported Mme. Patti as saying: "Colonel Mapleson comes here when he wants me to sing, and he calls me 'My dear child,' and he goes down on both knees and kisses my hands, and he has, you know, quite a supplicating face, and it is not easy to be firm with a man of such suavity of manners." I have often thought of this in connection with the outcome of the disastrous rivalry between the two houses and their managers. When Colonel Mapleson let himself down so gracefully upon his knee and pressed the prima donna's hand to his lips, the act was not all unselfish adoration. It used to be said that there was no manager alive who had succeeded in becoming debtor to Adelina Patti. It was golden grain alone that persuaded this bird to sing. The story is old of how her personal agent once hovered between her dressing room and the manager's office, carrying the message one way: "Madame Patti will not put on her slippers until she is paid," returning the other way with a thousand dollars; coming again to the manager with: "Madame has one slipper on, but will not put on the other till she has her fee"--and so on. Doubtless apocryphal and yet only a bit fanciful and exaggerated. Yet it was known in the inner operatic circles in 1885 that Colonel Mapleson had succeeded in getting himself pretty deeply into her debt. How he did it the anecdotes of the reception and Mme. Patti's interview serve to indicate. In sooth, the persuasive powers of the doughty colonel were distinctly remarkable, and it was not only the prima donna who lived in an atmosphere of adulation who fell a victim to them. I have a story to illustrate which came to me straight from the lips of the confiding creditor. He was a theatrical costumer, moreover, and one of the tribe of whom it is said that only to a Connecticut Yankee will they lower the flag in a horse trade.