It was in the Summer of 1924 that travelers returning from Atlantic City kept bringing to sentimental Broadway the happy tidings that George M. Cohan was writing the story of his life. And great and natural was the rejoicing, for here was an author who had but to tell freely of the things he himself had lived and seen to re-create that exciting glorious era in which the new American theatre really has its fundamental roots.

Twenty years on Broadway—from the beginnings of the century into its third decade! Here, surely, would be the background of a handful of eager, ruthless, tireless, selfish, visionary young men who had carried the American theatre great distances on the surface of a new civilization. Here, beyond doubt, would be the story of how the American theatre had changed in twenty years from a small, imitative, inbreeding actors' tribune to a stage in which there would be room for the dreams and ideas of all, to a stage international and yet passionately American.

The years it took to get there—the years in which the Four Cohans toured tirelessly through the nation's wind-swept halls, ever on the march that was to find its triumphant goal in the George M. Cohan Theatre at Forty-second Street and Broadway, of course, for it could never have been built anywhere else. The years it took to get there—entwined so closely with the rise of an obscure backroom entertainment to the vaudeville that is today one of the leading amusement factors of the country; surely there would be a picture of those days and those struggles.

And now comes the long-awaited book, although those who have been eager for it have already read it in serial form in Liberty. It is unqualifiedly a disappointment.

Mr. Cohan has written a book that could easily have been written by any often thousand hack writers equipped with a memorandum of the important dates in Cohan's acting and producing life and the instruction that the legend of the Cohan ego was to be preserved throughout. Save for one or two inconsequential anecdotes, there is nothing in the book that could not be had from a reading of newspaper files and the exercise of a not necessarily lively imagination.

If it is obvious, then, that there is very little in the book, it is equally obvious that there is a good deal out of the book. Thus, after a few pages of incidental introduction, the actors' strike of 1919 is disposed of in 200 words, centred around the statement that "it isn't up to me to write the real story of the actors' strike of 1919." The minor point that the writing of a book about George M. Cohan's twenty years on Broadway might reasonably be expected to involve the real story of the Cohan attitude in the actors' strike of 1919 is handsomely ignored.

About 75 per cent. of Mr. Cohan's book is devoted to his surface survey of the years it took to reach Broadway, and easily 75 per cent. of this account is devoted to a goodnatured if obvious exposition of the great belief in himself entertained by the young George.

Mr. Cohan, in his book, keeps alive the fiction of himself as a young man battling his way to the top through the forces of dislike and prejudice unleashed as well by his rivals as by the critics of the country. The circumstance that he was one of the famous men of the nation's theatre before he was 25 and the subject of long and laudatory articles before ever Gilbert Seldes let us know that there was a popular theatre he happily ignores.

The criticism, of course, has been of Mr. Cohan's account of his years and not of the way in which he has spent them. For his has been a strenuous and romantic career, and the appraisal of him as actor, playwright and producer, even from the pens of determinedly unfriendly critics, must be such as to put him at the very top of the American theatre.

There are those, of course, who will always remember him confusedly as the young man who sat on a suitcase, in a yellow light, with a derby over his ears, and thanked everybody and said something through his nose about rather being a lobster than being a wise guy. The more profound and the fairer, however, carry with them the realization that this is the man who wrote Seven Keys to Baldpate and the Cohan revues, and it is these unfortunates who ever and again moan wistfully and wonder when the man is going to get down to the work he can and should do.

Among the few interesting contributions Mr. Cohan, in his book, makes to the general stock of knowledge about his activities is the story of how the "Cohan style" of eccentric dancing came to be born.

I had always done a dance in our four-act, to the tune of "Comin' Thro' the Rye," he writes. "I'd always claimed that the dance was all right but that the music killed it, so I asked the orchestra leader one morning if he could substitute some other tune for 'Comin' Thro' the Rye.'"

"What kind of a dance is it?" he asked.

"An old-fashioned essence," I replied.

When we got to the spot in the act for the dance at the matinee that afternoon, I gave the leader the cue and the orchestra started up the music (the new arrangement he had brought from his home). It was the weirdest melody I had ever heard, and the drummer accompanied the tune with a tomtom effect, characteristic of the American Indian. I tried my best to get into the dance, but my sense of rhythm was keen enough to make me immediately realize that the thing broke time and also that the piece did not carry an even number of bars. The melody continued, but instead of dancing I stood dead still in the centre of the stage, trying to figure out just why I couldn't do my essence steps to the music. It suddenly dawned on me that, instead of its being in six-eight time, to which I'd always done this particular dance, the thing they were playing was in two-four time.

A sudden idea came to me—naturally I had to think very fast. Why not try some buck steps? I'd always used two-four melodies for bucking. No sooner thought of than done. I was into my old "Lively Bootblack" routine before I knew it, but without the spread of the jig sand; and, besides, I was in a comedy "make-up." The tempo was very slow, so, in order to make the steps fit, I had to drag them out more or less, and so exaggerated the thing by leaping from one side of the stage to the other, instead of sticking to the centre.

The melody suggested comedy, so I made every move as eccentrically as I could. I did a jump with the "scissors-grinder" step, and threw my head back at the same time. It got a scream of laughter. I repeated this a moment later and got a second big laugh. Every time I threw my head back my hair (which I wore exceptionally long at the time) would fly up and then down over my face, and I'd brush it away and do another throw back and up and down the hair would go again. I faked a couple of funny walks to fit in the spots where I had to eliminate certain steps on account of the slow tempo, and each of the walks got hearty laughs and rounds of applause. I finished with an eccentric walking step, throwing my head back with the hair flying all over my face, and made an exit with the end of the strain instead of ending with the old-fashioned "break."

The dance was a sensational hit. Lucy Daly (now Mrs. Hap Ward) of the famous Daly family of dancers came running back stage after the act and went into ecstacies over the thing.

"That's the greatest eccentric dance ever done on any stage," she declared. It was a golden opinion, coming from her.

For twenty solid years I did this same dance to the same music, and this was the stunt which eventually not only revolutionized American buck dancing, but also set the "hoofers" to doing away with jig sand and letting their hair grow long enough to fall over their eyes.

The "Cohan style" they used to call it. But little did they guess that the thing was nothing more or less than an accident, brought about by an orchestra playing a two-four melody instead of a six-eight.

It is not necessary to recount the Cohan career here. Those people to whom the name of Cohan means anything at all are not unacquainted with the fact that he was one of the Four Cohans; that he wrote Little Johnny Jones and The Yankee Pnnce and such: Get-Ricb-Quick Wilingford and Broadway Jones and such; The Song and Dance Man and such; Little Nelly Kelly and "Mary" and such; and the Cohan revues Seven Keys to Baldpate. And "Over There." Although some grumblers in the A. E. F. were always wondering why the promised visit of Mr. Cohan in one of the entertainment units didn't materialize.

However, Mr. Cohan has had an amazing career, and there is every reason to believe that he will some day write his story over again, earnestly and intelligently that time. For does he not close the present volume with these words:

With these few remarks, I now wish to announce my immediate and permanent retirement from the literary world.