tences, which read:

"_Jane won't go._"
_Of course not._
_She's come to stay._

From that time on the piece grew in popularity and receipts and became a
success.

* * *

In summing up the qualities that made Frohman great, one finds, in the
last analysis, that he had two in common with J. P. Morgan and the other
dynamic leaders of men. One was an incisive, almost uncanny, ability to
probe into the hearts of men, strip away the superficial, and find the
real substance.

His experience with Clyde Fitch emphasized this to a remarkable degree.
Personally no two men could have been more opposite. One was the product
of democracy, buoyant and self-made, while the other represented an
intellectual, almost effeminate, aristocracy. Yet nearly from the start
Frohman perceived the bigness of vision and the profound understanding
that lurked behind Fitch's almost superficial exterior.

In common, too, with Morgan, Roosevelt, and others of the same type,
Frohman had an extraordinary quality of unconscious hypnotism. Men who
came to him in anger went away in satisfied peace. They succumbed to
what was an overwhelming and compelling personality.

He proved this in the handling of his women stars. They combined a group
of varied and conflicting temperaments. Each wanted a separate and
distinct place in his affections, and each got it. It was part of the
genius of the man to make each of his close associates feel that he or
she had a definite niche apart. His was the perfecting understanding,
and no one better expressed it than Ethel Barrymore, who said, "To try
to explain something to Charles Frohman was to insult him."

XIX

"WHY FEAR DEATH?"

And now the final phase.

The last years of Charles Frohman's life were racked with physical pain
that strained his courageous philosophy to the utmost. Yet he faced this
almost incessant travail just as he had faced all other
emergencies--with composure.

One day in 1912 he fell on the porch of the house at White Plains and
hurt his right knee. It gave him considerable trouble. At first he
believed that it was only a bad bruise. In a few days articular
rheumatism developed. It affected all of his joints, and it held him in
a thrall of agony until the end of his life.

Shortly after his return to the city (he now lived at the Hotel
Knickerbocker) he was compelled to take to his bed. For over six months
he was a prisoner in his apartment, suffering tortures.