[In the following excerpt, Mantle comments on Biggers's early stage career.]

Earl Derr Biggers figures that he is one of the luckier playwrights. He quit writing novels and plays and took to writing motion picture scenarios when both the quitting and the scenario market were at their peak.

It was his last summer in New York that cured Biggers. He had had some success with plays. He had written, as far back as 1912, a comedy called If You're Only Human which Rose Stahl wanted to buy but which her manager, Henry B. Harris, could not see. And when If You're Only Human was later produced in stock Mr. Biggers met George M. Cohan. As a result of that meeting George M. bought the dramatic rights to Mr. Biggers' novel, Seven Keys to Baldpate, and nearly everybody knows of the success that followed that purchase. Cohan did the play, made a vast amount of money with it and entered upon his most productive phase as a serious dramatist.

Biggers had also written a war play, Inside the Lines, that went fairly well in New York. Later it was played for five hundred nights in London. Then he collaborated with William Hodge on a comedy, A Cure for Curables, which Hodge played for two years.

"There was one line of mine in A Cure for Curables when it reached the boards," Earl Derr wrote from California in telling me about his adventures as a playwright, "but after careful consideration Hodge removed it."

Then came the hectic summer and the cure. Two of the Biggers' plays were on the way that summer, See-Saw, a story made into a musical comedy for the late Henry W. Savage, and a farce, Three's a Crowd, chiseled from a Christopher Morley story called "Kathleen."

The rehearsals of these two plays overlapped, I gather, and the days were exciting for the young playwright. In one case he had a producer whose custom it was to stride the stage and roar his conclusions as to what he thought should be done with the play. In the other he had one whose companions at the moment were slinking fellows who looked like bailiffs. Looked like bailiffs because, in fact, they were bailiffs.

This latter producer was from time to time selling partnerships in the Biggers' show to outsiders, hoping thereby to raise the costs of production and make secure the hotel accommodations upon which his hold was precarious. And as each new purchaser often per cent or five per cent came in he naturally demanded that the play be rewritten to suit him.

Between these experiences the Biggers' blood pressure mounted with the Biggers' disgust. And when the experiences were over the playwright sought the twin balms of California—the climate for his health, the motion picture factories for the re-establishment of what once had been a bank account.

To add the facts of life to the record, Earl Derr was born in Warren, O., in 1884, was graduated from Harvard with an A.B. in 1907, and became a newspaper man himself the year following. On the Boston Traveler he ran a humorous column and was later promoted, or at least transferred, to the drama desk. That is where he, quite naturally, became imbued with a desire to improve the drama. Many drama critics suffer the same urge but few have ever been able to do more than relieve the suffering temporarily.