Frohman said to him that he heard that there was much money
in the comic-opera end of the business.

"So there is," replied the manager.

"You ought to know," responded Frohman, "for you have put enough into
it."

This remark, often attributed to others, is said to have originated
here.

* * *

Frohman was now an established producer, and although the tide of
fortune had not gone altogether happily with him, he had a Micawber-like
conviction that the big thing would eventually turn up. Now came his
first contact with Bronson Howard, who, a few years later, was to be the
first mile-stone in his journey to fame and fortune.

Howard's name was one to conjure with. He had produced "Young Mrs.
Winthrop," "The Banker's Daughter," "Saratoga," and other great
successes. Charles Frohman, yielding, as usual, to the lure of big
names, now put on Howard's play, "Baron Rudolph," for which George
Knight had paid the author three thousand dollars to rewrite. Knight
gave Frohman a free hand in the matter of casting the production, and it
was put on at the Fourteenth Street Theater in an elaborate fashion. The
company included various people who later on were to become widely
known. Among them were George Knight and his wife, George Fawcett,
Charles Bowser, and a very prepossessing young man named Henry Woodruff.

"Baron Rudolph" proved to be a failure, and it broke Knight's heart, for
shortly afterward he was committed to an insane asylum from which he
never emerged alive. It was found that while the play was well written
there was no sympathy for a ragged tramp.

Whether he thought it would change his luck or not, Charles now turned
to a different sort of enterprise. He had read in the newspapers about
the astonishing mind-reading feats in England of Washington Irving
Bishop. Always on the lookout for something novel, he started a
correspondence with Bishop which ended in a contract by which he agreed
to present Bishop in the United States in 1887.

Bishop came over and Frohman sponsored his first appearance in New York
on February 27, 1887, at Wallack's Theater. With his genius for
publicity, Frohman got an extraordinary amount of advertising out of
this engagement. Among other things he got Bishop to drive around New
York blindfolded. He invited well-known men to come and witness his
marvelous gift in private. All of which attracted a great deal of
attention, but very little money to the box-office. Frohman and Bishop
d