CHAPTER TWENTY SIX

TWENTY SIX
It was the light that drew me to the theater as
a way of life. The idea that night could be changed
into day, first by whale oil and tallow candles, then
with gaslight, followed eventually by electricity, was
irresistible when it was coupled with story and music.
Melodrama, operetta, comedy, tragedy, classics – I
loved everything and anything the theater offered.
I would watch the same shows night after night
without tiring of the material or the performances. I
loved it all.

David Belasco, once our existences intersected,
insisted that I be more discerning in my tastes.
Of course, as it would develop, he was sometimes
anything but. Nonetheless, he took it upon himself
to educate me, to instill a theatrical sensibility and
critical values that soon enabled me to determine
what was dreck thrown together to separate the rubes
from their money and what was the magical spider
web that could capture human mind and emotion
and grip an audience’s attention through an evening’s
entertainment, the difference between the soporific
and the soaring; and I took it upon myself to make
David the Bishop of Broadway, the sobriquet with
which he was dubbed by the theater community and
the newspapers of his day; though I had no idea that
my revelation would provoke him to adopt the habit, so to speak, of always dressing as a priest. Perhaps I should explain.
David Belasco embodied the theatrical ethos of his day with absolute abandon and with a completeness that exceeded anything by any other producer or playwright or actor whom I have witnessed since the master passed from the mortal plane. Even his rampant seductions of legions of actresses were each pieces of stagecraft, if you will.
When David and I first met, in 1892, he was already a major figure in the world of New York theater. In 1880 he came to Manhattan at the behest of the Mallory Brothers, who lured him away from his native San Francisco, where he ran that city’s foremost opera house as well as its leading theater, before the age of twenty. He was the genius son of Sephardic Jews and he put three thousand miles between himself and his roots and blossomed into America’s greatest theatrical personality of all time.
By this juncture, my features were those of a pale white man. In the early part of the Nineteenth Century I spent six months among the early Amish and Mennonite settlers in western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, garnering myself blond hair and freckle free white skin in the process. The people there thought that some sort of epidemic had descended upon their communities. It was only me, feeding to change my appearance.
Now in New York, I dressed like a young nabob each evening to enjoy this or that entertainment of the moment. I could not observe enough of the art of dramaturgy, it seemed, anymore than one night’s hunt could fulfill my eternal blood hunger. I saw everything that appeared on the boards in Manhattan.
The theater district of that time was located downtown, existing for the most part from Twenty Third to Fourteenth Streets. Once the final curtain fell on whatever show enraptured me of an evening, before setting out on my blood hunt, it was my custom to pass some time in Delmonico’s, a well-appointed saloon that was frequented by show people and other colorful personalities. Diamond Jim Brady, Lillian Russell, Dion Boucicault when he was in New York from London, and of course Belasco himself, were among the many that frequented Delmonico’s back then. In less than a decade, the scene would move uptown to Rector’s Lobster Palace. That was to become the Elaine’s of its day. Meanwhile, it was at Delmonico’s that David introduced himself to me one night.
“Hello. I’m David Belasco. Do you mind if I sit down?” he said as he settled into a chair at my customary table.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Angus Windham,” I said, taking his hand and shaking it.
“A pleasure, Gus. I see you in here pretty often. Are you in show business?” he said, getting right to the point and bestowing upon me a diminutive that is still in use to this day, more than a century later.
“Only as an audience member, I’m afraid.”
“Audience members are the most important part of the theater, my friend. Where would any of us be without audiences? Though I sense that there’s a creative spirit in you; maybe it’s those dark tinted glasses you always wear. Do you ever take them off? You must while you perform your duties as an audience member, right?”
“No. I wear them all the time. I suffer from a rare affliction that makes normal light appear much more powerful than it is, blinding even. Without these glasses, in addition to inducing a state of near blindness, the visual effect of unfiltered light is accompanied by extreme physical pain capable of transforming me into a crumpled mass crying out for surcease, for help.”
“Geez, I’m sorry to hear that, Gus. I never heard of such a thing. By all means, keep those spectacles perched right there on your nose.”
“Thank you. I shall. As I said, the affliction is very rare.”
Everything about David in those early years fascinated me. His energy and devotion to the theatrical craft seemed boundless. Soon, though, I discovered that he was cultivating me.
He came on like a gambler, a two-fisted saloon fighter, and a prospector who knew with certainty the location of a vast bonanza, the mother lode of gold, who only needed a stake to transform it into coin of the realm. David was in the process of transition from the position of well paid employee to powerful employer.
He took me under his tutelage. Once he educated me to his theatrical sensibility, it was a short step to my backing his vision of himself.
In a world of raging ego, he set the standard by which others came to measure themselves. There might not have been a Flo Ziegfeld or George White or Chauncey Olcott or any of the major impresarios of the first half of the twentieth century if David Belasco had not come along first to establish a tradition of the talented outsize personality capable of doing it all.