t where there
would be a deadlock, he would say:

"I will see him. Ask him to come down to my hotel."

The next morning he would walk into the office with a smile on his face,
and the first thing he would say perhaps would be:

"I fixed it up all right yesterday; it is going your way."

"You are a wonder!" his associates would exclaim.

"Oh no! I just talked to him," was the reply.

* * *

Frohman disliked formality. He wanted to go straight to the heart of a
thing and have it over with. Somebody once asked him why he did not join
the Masonic order. He said:

"I would like to very much if I could just write a check and not bother
with all the ceremony."

* * *

Although he never spoke of his great power in the profession,
occasionally there was a glimpse of how he felt about it as this
incident shows:

Once, when Frohman and Paul Potter were coming back from Atlantic City,
Potter picked up a theatrical paper and said:

"Shall I read you the theatrical news?"

"No," said Frohman. "I _make_ theatrical news."

* * *

In that supreme test of a man's character--his attitude toward money--he
shone. Though his enterprises involved millions, Frohman had an
extraordinary disregard of money. He felt its power, but he never
idolized it. To him it was a means to an end. He summed up his whole
attitude one day when he said:

"My work is to produce plays that succeed, so that I can produce plays
that will not succeed. That is why I must have money.

"What I would really like to do is to produce a wonderful something to
which I would only go myself. My pleasure would be in seeing a
remarkable performance that nobody else could see. But I can't do that.
The next best thing is to produce something for the few critical people.
That is what I'm trying for. I have to work through the commercial--it
is the white heat through which the artistic in me has to come." It was
his answer to the oft-made charge of "commercialism."

No one, perhaps, has summed up this money attitude of Frohman's better
than George Bernard Shaw, who said of him:

"There is a prevalent impression that Charles Frohman is a hard-headed
American man of business who would not look at anything that is not
likely to pay. On the contrary, he is the most wildly romantic and
adventurous man of my acquaintance. As Charles XII. became an excellent
soldier because of his passion for putting himself in the way of being
killed, so Charles Frohman became a