whatever she does._

Audiences interested Frohman immensely. He liked to be a part of them.
He had a perfectly definite reason for sitting in the last row of the
gallery on the first nights of his productions, which he once explained
as follows:

"The best index to the probable career of any play is the back of the
head of an auditor who does not know that he is being watched. The
play-goer in an orchestra stall is always half-conscious that what he
says or does may be observed. But the gallery gods and goddesses have
never thought of anything except what is happening on the stage. They
may yield the time before the rise of the curtain to watching the
audience entering the theater, but once the lights are up and the stage
is revealed they have no eyes or thoughts for anything except the life
unfolded by the actors. These people in the upper part of the theater
represent the masses. They are worth watching, for they are the people
who make stage successes."

Frohman had his own theories about audiences, too. Concerning them he
declared:

"An American at the theater feels first and thinks afterward. A European
at a play thinks first and feels afterward. In conversation a German
discusses things sitting down; a Frenchman talks standing up. But the
American discusses things walking about. Therefore each must have his
play built accordingly."

Once Frohman made this discriminating difference between English and
American audiences:

"In England the pit and the gallery of the audience come to the theater,
turn in their hard-earned shillings, and demand much. Failing to get
what they expect, the theater is filled with boos and cat-calls at the
end of the play. This does not mean that the play has failed. It more
nearly means that the less a man pays to get into a theater the more he
demands of the play.

"An American audience is different, because it has a fine sense of
humor. When an American pays his money through the box-office window he
feels that it is gone forever. Anything he receives after that--the
lights, the pictures on the walls, the music of the orchestra, the sight
of a few or many smiling faces--is so much to the good. So keen is the
American play-goer's sense of humor that often when a play is
wretchedly bad it comes to the rescue, and the applause is terrifically
loud. This does not mean that the play has succeeded. It means rather
that the play will die, a victim of the deadliest of all possible
c