Nichols & Dimes

"We'll buy the babies A box at 'Abie's Irish Rose'; I hope we live to see It clo-o-se. ..." --OLD SONG

Like popular songs, good business women appear often in the U. S. There are so many of these women, smart and well-to-do, making money as brokers, bankers, milliners, writers, politicians, decorators, that, like the dapper melodies that reflect the trends of the times, they have become a national tradition. But there are not many women whose earned income exceeds $10,000 a year. Here and there one finds a woman capitalist like Mrs. Edward Harriman, who last week received the honorary degree of Master of Letters from New York University. Mrs. Harriman is a discerning patron of the arts and sciences, an elderly, slender and competent person who helped her famed husband in his ventures and is now the sole executrix of $140,000,000, the largest fortune controlled by any woman in the world. But since this fortune derived originally from her husband, his widow cannot take rank among those women who made their money by their own unaided efforts. Most commentators therefore give the title "most successful business woman in the U. S." to a very different sort of lady who last week also appeared in the news.

Miss Anne Nichols is always in the news. If nowhere else, her name is on the theatre page where a brief notice states that her play, Abie's Irish Rose, is to be seen on Broadway. It is also to be seen in Philadelphia, in Chicago, in Fort Smith, Ark., in Pueblo, Col., in Augusta, Me., and in Sydney, Australia. Next April an eighth company opens in London. Last week the Manhattan company, with its 2,000th performance, equaled the world's record for consecutive performances.* Abie's Irish Rose has run for four years and eight months on Broadway, has been seen there by 1,750,000 people, has earned there gross receipts of $3,000,000. The total gross. receipts from the play, including the road companies, playing to 7,000-000 more people, are about $20,000,000, of which Miss Nichols' personal profit has been $5,000000./- And last week, after four years of bickering, a deal for the moving picture rights was completed. The terms were not made public. The Famous Players-Lasky Corp. supposedly gave Miss Nichols a huge cash payment and a percentage of receipts.

Sitting, in her Manhattan office, in front of a desk as big as a bungalow, Miss Nichols talked to reporters. Once more she told how she grew up in Dale's Mills, Ga., how she ran away from Ogontz Seminary, Pa., with $36 and a bundle to go on the stage. The girl who lived next her in a Manhattan rooming-house was already an actress. She had a parasol with an extraordinarily long handle and when she talked she rested it upright beside her chair, swaying it from the knob with an air at once languid and haughty. She said that she had played Camille. Miss Nichols, in her first interview with a theatrical agent, said so too. The agent offered her a black-face part. She toured with The Shepherd King, then wrote a vaudeville skit which had some success. Ultimately, she wrote Abie's Irish Rose, which she thought would please the Jews because it made fun of the Irish, and please the Irish because it made fun of the Irish, and please the rest of the public because it made fun of the Jews and because it was full of jokes that would remind them of their childhood. Every manager in Manhattan refused it. Oliver Morosco produced it in Los Angeles where it ran for 42 weeks. Miss Nichols brought it to New York and put it on at her own expense. It is not true that critics unanimously damned it.*

For ten weeks it ran at a loss. Then the subway public told their friends about it. When it had run for three years it ceased to be a joke. The cognoscenti went to see it for fear of missing a classic. It was the smart thing in Manhattan last spring to take your dinner party to Abie's Irish Rose. Brander Matthews called it "a perfectly constructed and played comedy. . . ."

Miss Nichols asserts that to get local color for her masterpiece she talked with peddlers in Manhattan's ghetto, ate with tenement families on Manhattan's East Side. The dialogue and action of the play, however, seem first to have under gone a thorough seasoning in vaudeville. The plot consists of the efforts of an orthodox Jew to keep his son from marrying an Irish girl and the efforts of the Irish girl's parents to keep her from marrying an orthodox Jew. The artistic virtue of the play is that its lines are so stale that they are almost sublime. A great author, setting himself to create this play, would have arrived at almost Miss Nichols' result by an opposite method, that is, he would have had his characters, simple, human, dictate their own dialogue, instead of suggesting human characters, as Miss Nichols does, by the accidental use of very old taglines. Whatever her shortcomings as a literary artist, Miss Nichols remains an energetic business woman, a healthy soul, a multimillionaire.

*Previously held by the London production of Chu Chin Chow (2,000).

/-She has paid $3,000,000 in stage salaries, $1,250,000 for advertising, some $800,000 for traveling, rentals and other expenses, not including the large item of division of profits with owners of theatres in which the play has run on a percentage basis.

*The World: "Nothing . . . quite as bad as a bad play." The Tribune: "something in a perambulator, brandishing a loud rattle." But the Times: "We hope to be present at Rebecca and Patrick's second birthday."