halfway point between the two coasts, and Triangle was the result. The company was incorporated for five million dollars with Aitken as President, Baumann as vice president and Adam and Charles Kessel as secretary and auditor respectively.
Before Aitken could get back to Number 60 Wall Street, Mutual's directors had met, deposed him as president and elected Freuler in his place. Aitken's reply was to begin signing up for Triangle all the available stars of Broadway at Klondike salaries, to lease the Knickerbocker as a Broadway first-run house with Rothafel in charge, to announce a chain of picture theaters nation-wide and of unprecedented pretentiousness, and to predict a two-dollar top scale. Not even he seriously believed that any one would pay two dollars to see his pictures in a day when five and ten cents was the prevailing scale, but it was valuable ballyhoo.
I was playing in Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire at the Forty-eighth Street Theater in the late spring of 1915 when Aitken offered me a picture contract for one year at eighty-three thousand dollars. I had not taken the movies very seriously, but I took the eighty-three thousand and an early train for Hollywood. All
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