That was Sid Hahn.
I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black cigar--unlighted--in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include!) knew all about Sid Hahn--and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those middle-western towns with a high-falutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the profession which he was to dominate in America. There"s no record of his having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it, indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was, at that time, at the zenith of his career--managing, writing, directing, producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don"t know that Sid Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever said to himself in so many words:
"I"m going to be what he is. I"m going to concentrate on it. I won"t let anything or anybody interfere with it. n.o.body knows what I"m going to be. But I know.... And you"ve got to be selfish. You"ve got to be selfish."
Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination running through the whole fibre of his being could have been crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that.
By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world.
He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other pa.s.sions.
Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by people who did not know that he was responsible for them than a popular east-side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play with real ones, like G.o.d. But always kind.
No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn appeared to be. They all tried their wiles on him: the red-haired ingenues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas. He used to sit there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol while the fair ones burnt incense and made offering of shew-bread. Figuratively, he kicked over the basket of shew-bread, and of the incense said, "Take away that stuff! It smells!"
Not that he hated women. He was afraid of them, at first. Then, from years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly afraid enough. So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had thrown away the key. When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes.
It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the famous Renee Paterne of the incorrigible eyes. She made a fortune and swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs. But when she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he regarded her with what is known as a long, level look. She knew at that time not a word of English. Sid Hahn was ignorant of French. He said, very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as a sort of secretary, "Wallie, can"t you do something to make her stop rolling her eyes around at me like that? It"s awful! She makes me think of those heads you shy b.a.l.l.s at, out at Coney. Take away my ink-well."
Renee had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in French. Sid Hahn c.o.c.ked a quick ear. "What"s that she said?"
"She says," translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, "that monsieur is a woman-hater."
"My G.o.d! I thought she didn"t understand English!"
"She doesn"t. But she"s a woman. Not only that, she"s a French woman.
They don"t need to know a language to understand it."
"Where did you get that, h"m? That wasn"t included in your Berlitz course, was it?"
Wallie Ascher had grinned--that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen face. "No. I learned that in another school."
Wallie Ascher"s early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might almost be a tiresome repet.i.tion of Hahn"s beginning. And what Augustin Daly had been to Sid Hahn"s imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to Wallie"s. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre--if having a tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator"s foil for a mother can be said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre.
He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the upstairs suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers; the kind of office-boy who is addicted to shrill, clear whistling unless very firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless, how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up--up--up he would go, while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high note--took it easily, insouciantly--held it, trilled it, tossed it.
"Now, look here," Miss Feldman would snap--Miss Feldman of the outer office typewriter--"look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain"t a--a--"
"Aviary," suggested Wallie, almost shyly.
Miss Feldman glared. "How did you know that word?"
"I don"t know," helplessly. "But it"s the word, isn"t it?"
Miss Feldman turned back to her typewriter. "You"re too smart for your age, you are."
"I know it," Wallie had agreed, humbly.
There"s no telling where or how he learned to play the piano. He probably never did learn. He played it, though, as he whistled--brilliantly. No doubt it was as imitative and as unconscious, too, as his whistling had been. They say he didn"t know one note from another, and doesn"t to this day.
At twenty, when he should have been in love with at least three girls, he had fixed in his mind an image, a dream. And it bore no resemblance to twenty"s accepted dreams. At that time he was living in one room (rear) of a shabby rooming house in Thirty-ninth Street. And this was the dream: By the time he was--well, long before he was thirty--he would have a bachelor apartment with a j.a.p, Saki. Saki was the perfect servant, noiseless, un.o.btrusive, expert. He saw little dinners just for four--or, at the most, six. And Saki, white-coated, deft, sliding hot plates when plates should be hot; cold plates when plates should be cold. Then, other evenings, alone, when he wanted to see no one--when, in a silken lounging robe (over faultless dinner clothes, of course, and wearing the kind of collar you see in the back of the magazines) he would say, "That will do, Saki." Then, all evening, he would play softly to himself those little, intimate, wistful Schumanny things in the firelight with just one lamp glowing softly--almost sombrely--at the side of the piano (grand).
His first real meeting with Sid Hahn had had much to do with the fixing of this image. Of course he had seen Hahn hundreds of times in the office and about the theatre. They had spoken, too, many times. Hahn called him vaguely, "Heh, boy!" but he grew to know him later as Wallie.
From errand-boy, office-boy, call-boy he had become, by that time, a sort of unofficial a.s.sistant stage manager. No one acknowledged that he was invaluable about the place, but he was. When a new play was in rehearsal at the Thalia, Wallie knew more about props, business, cues, lights, and lines than the director himself. For a long time no one but Wallie and the director were aware of this. The director never did admit it. But that Hahn should find it out was inevitable.
He was nineteen or thereabouts when he was sent, one rainy November evening, to deliver a play ma.n.u.script to Hahn at his apartment. Wallie might have refused to perform an errand so menial, but his worship of Hahn made him glad of any service, however humble. He b.u.t.toned his coat over the ma.n.u.script, turned up his collar, and plunged into the cold drizzle of the November evening.
Hahn"s apartment--he lived alone--was in the early fifties, off Fifth Avenue. For two days he had been ill with one of the heavy colds to which he was subject. He was unable to leave the house. Hence Wallie"s errand.
It was Saki--or Saki"s equivalent--who opened the door. A white-coated, soft-stepping j.a.p, world-old looking like the room glimpsed just beyond.
Someone was playing the piano with one finger, horribly.
"You"re to give this to Mr. Hahn. He"s waiting for it."
"Genelmun come in," said the j.a.p, softly.
"No, he don"t want to see me. Just give it to him, see?"
"Genelmun come in." Evidently orders.
"Oh, all right. But I know he doesn"t want--"
Wallie turned down his collar with a quick flip, looked doubtfully at his shoes, and pa.s.sed through the glowing little foyer into the room beyond. He stood in the doorway. He was scarcely twenty then, but something in him sort of rose, and gathered, and seethed, and swelled, and then hardened. He didn"t know it then but it was his great resolve.
Sid Hahn was seated at the piano, a squat, gnomelike little figure, with those big ears, and that plump face, and those soft eyes--the kindest eyes in the world. He did not stop playing as Wallie appeared. He glanced up at him, ever so briefly, but kindly, too, and went on playing the thing with one short forefinger, excruciatingly. Wallie waited. He had heard somewhere that Hahn would sit at the piano thus, for hours, the tears running down his cheeks because of the beauty of the music he could remember but not reproduce; and partly because of his own inability to reproduce it.
The stubby little forefinger faltered, stopped. He looked up at Wallie.
"G.o.d, I wish I could play!"
"Helps a lot."
"You play?"
"Yes."
"What?"
"Oh, most anything I"ve heard once. And some things I kind of make up."
"Compose, you mean?"
"Yes."
"Play one of those."
So Wallie Ascher played one of those. Of course you know "Good Night--Pleasant Dreams." He hadn"t named it then. It wasn"t even published until almost two years later, but that was what he played for Sid Hahn. Since "After The Ball" no popular song has achieved the success of that one. No doubt it was cheap, and no doubt it was sentimental, but so, too, are "The Suwanee River" and "My Old Kentucky Home," and they"ll be singing those when more cla.s.sical songs have long been forgotten. As Wallie played it his dark, thin face seemed to gleam and glow in the lamplight.
When he had finished Sid Hahn was silent for a moment. Then, "What"re you going to do with it?"