Barrymore, mother of Ethel and Lionel and Jack, as leading woman at the then very large salary of one hundred and twenty-five dollars a week. As a vehicle we chose the Mormon thriller, "One Hundred Wives", written for us by two Chicago newspapermen, Colonel Pierce of the Inter-Ocean and J. B. Runnion of the Tribune. Two seasons of "One Hundred Wives", despite the support of Georgie Drew Barrymore and a generally excellent cast, disposed of what was left of my heritage and I returned to Broadway to look for a job on my merits—in the theater, of course.
In these four years we played the road as far south as New Orleans, west to Kansas City and north to Montreal, week stands in the larger towns, one-night jumps in between. This was routine in the theater from the time when the railroads first pushed West to the Missouri River until labor and transportation costs and the movies virtually destroyed the legitimate stage in all save a handful of the greater cities. Hundreds of actors of the first rank did not play New York at all, or for no longer than a week or two in a season. The road was the theater and the theater the road until about 1910. Plays customarily were financed and cast in
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