Quotes

The secret of my success? I speak in a loud clear voice and try not to bump into the furniture.

[on the eventual demise of vaudeville] There were a great many in vaudeville - people who never quite came through. But they had their place and they filled it. They kept theatres open. Those pan-timers, those interstate-timers, those four-a-dayers, those six-a-dayers - they were an integral part of that endearing merry-go-round called vaudeville. Their sincerity was greater than their artistry. Their eagerness to please was beyond their capacity to please. But they gave their hearts and their lives and it was not their fault that it was not enough. God bless them, everyone.

One sketch was was called 'Ashes'. I played the role of the man with whom Mrs. Langtry was in love. Insasmuch as she, at that time, was sixty-three and I was twenty-one, audiences were inclined to be somewhat bewildered. Usually they began by thinking that I was her son, so it must have seemed a little odd to them when I suddenly began to make violent love to her.

I remember one week in Winnipeg when Lady DeBathe - that would be Mrs. Langtry, the Jersey Lily, for it was she who gave me the opportunity to see and know the work with these amazing people of vaudeville by engaging me as a 'leading man' for her vaudeville sketch - shared honors with Fink's Mules. Mrs. Langtry thought the combination entirely irreconcilable. She told the booking office so in notes that probably should have been written on asbestos than hotel stationery. I never could understand why. The mules, it seemed to me were unusually talented. They behaved admirably about the whole business. They made no objection at all to her sharing their billing.