San Jose kid. Fourteen years old, he’s working a sheep ranch. Three years of dirt, animals, isolation. Then he apprentices with a photographer in San Jose. Learns the trade, opens his own studio. Four years of portraits, making people look good for posterity.
Gets bored. Moves into newspapers. San Jose Mercury News. Then buys The Napa Reporter. Starts The Mountain View Register. Tries running for public office a couple times. Loses. Nobody wants him.
Newspapers and politics aren’t doing it. So he goes back to San Jose, joins a stock theatre company. His words: “turned respectable and became an actor.”
What followed was decades of grinding. Stock. Repertoire. Vaudeville. Seventeen years at the Alcazar Theatre in San Francisco, over 700 parts. Seven hundred. Different character every week, sometimes multiple in a night.
1921, someone asks him about his acting theory. He says: “I don’t know anything. Learn all about acting and then forget it. Be natural. Believe in yourself.”
1906 earthquake hits. San Francisco’s done. He moves to New York.
Fourteen years later, he’s 54. Lightnin’, a play he’d been writing for forty years, finally gets produced. He stars in it himself.
It breaks every record. Eclipses everything Broadway’s ever seen. 1,291 consecutive performances. Three years and a day. George M. Cohan calls him America’s greatest character actor.
When it closes to go on the road, President Harding congratulates him. The mayor of New York and the U.S. Secretary of Labor lead a parade with the Police Band. Hundreds of actors escort him to Penn Station. They give him a championship belt, seriously… the world champion of playwriting and producing.
1922. 58. Dead.
His manager said it best: “A kindly man, of simple tastes, who gave much to the public and asked little in return. He really died on the Saturday night when he gave his last performance—and his greatest.”
Forty-four years of work. Four years of glory. That’s the ratio.