hing. He had come, a boy, from one of those
middle-western towns with a high-falutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or
something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the
profession which he was to dominate in America. There's no record of his
having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it,
indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally
controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing
in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It
had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized
in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was,
at that time, at the zenith of his career--managing, writing, directing,
producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy
with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don't know that Sid
Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever
said to himself in so many words:

"I'm going to be what he is. I'm going to concentrate on it. I won't let
anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I'm going to
be. But I know.... And you've got to be selfish. You've got to be
selfish."

Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in
the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination
running through the whole fibre of his being could have been
crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that.

By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than
Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them
even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood
behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But
taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of
the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world.

He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early
love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved
what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as
though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions.
Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by
people who did not know that he was responsible for them than a popular
east-side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with
make-believe stage characters, and directing them, s