g manager evidently enjoying the performance. The
mentors of public taste were so impressed that they praised the farce
and started "The City Directory" on a career of remarkable success.
Frohman and Howard were repaying the good turn that Potter had done for
"Shenandoah."

* * *

Charles Frohman now had a money-making success. "Shenandoah" was the
dramatic talk of the whole country; it did big business everywhere, and
its courageous young producer came in for praise and congratulation on
all sides.

The manager might well have netted what was in those days a huge fortune
out of this enterprise, but his unswerving sense of honor led him to
immediately discharge all his obligations. He wiped out the Wallack's
tour debts, and he eventually took up notes aggregating forty-two
thousand dollars that he had given to a well-known Chicago printer who
had befriended him in years gone by. What was most important, he was now
free to unfurl his name to the breezes and to do business "on his own."

* * *

Charles immediately launched himself on another sea of productions. The
most important was Gillette's "All the Comforts of Home," which he put
on at Proctor's Twenty-third Street Theater. Frohman had just acquired
the lease of this theater. Already a big idea was simmering in his mind,
and the leasehold was essential to its consummation. On May 8, 1890, he
produced the new Gillette play, which scored a success.

This production marked another one of the many significant epochs in
Frohman's life because it witnessed the first appearance of little Maude
Adams under the Charles Frohman management.

Frohman had seen Miss Adams in "The Paymaster" down at Niblo's and had
been much taken with her work. He had been unable, however, to find a
part for her, so it was reserved for his brother Daniel to give her the
first Frohman engagement at thirty-five dollars a week in "Lord
Chumley." Subsequently Daniel released her so that she could appear in
the same cast with her mother in Hoyt's "The Midnight Bell."

While trying "All the Comforts of Home" on the road there occurred an
amusing episode. Frohman, who had been watching the rehearsals very
carefully, said to Henry Miller, who was leading man:

"Henry, you are something of a matinee idol. I think it would help the
play if you had a love scene with Miss Adams."

Accompanied by Rockwood, Frohman visited Gillette at his home at
Hartford, got him to write the love scene, and then w