Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/70

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN was required to sing a few bars of a popular song offstage. The actor cast for the rôle was no singer, and the bit was given to me. Georgia Cayvan, the leading woman, who had become very fond of my mother, and sympathetic with her boundless ambition for me, asked Colonel John A. McCaull to drop into the theater sometime and hear me sing. McCaull, who had been one of Morgan's guerrillas that harried the Indiana and Ohio shores during the Civil War, then was the great man of comic opera.

He came and heard and offered me a place as first barytone in one of his half dozen companies. I accepted, naturally, but I never sang first barytone for McCaull. Had I done so the probabilities are that I either still would be an obscure barytone at seventy-five or one hundred dollars a week, or that I would have strayed into grand opera. I had studied the operatic rôles of St. Bris in "Les Huguenots", Sparefucile in "Rigoletto", Baldasori in "La Favorita", the basso rôle in "La Juive" and Mephisto in "Faust." My mother was ready and anxious to finance two years' study abroad, which she envisioned as a prelude to stardom at the Metropolitan Opera House.