showed up for the first performance, along with less than a third-full house of casual first-nighters.

People wandered out stunned. A substitute drama-critic from the Times looked me up after the show, and there were tears of gratitude in his eyes. "My review of this play will establish my reputation," he told me. "If the boss had had any notion of what you were pulling, he'd have been here himself. But what about the author? I thought you were going to have to call the police when you failed to produce the author."

It had been rough. The skimpy crowd had milled about for a half hour screaming "Author, author!" Meanwhile, I was too choked up after the last heart-wrenching scene to get up and make a speech.

Everything had gone perfectly. Even the brief rehearsal time failed to leave any rough edges. Crawley and Pennington were so carried away with their parts that they easily doubled their considerable dramatic stature that first performance. The supporting cast caught fire, too, and, well—the likes of it is rarely seen anywhere.

The lines seemed to come out of the actors' hearts, not their mouths. Cue-lines blended with the dialogue interplay, the artificiality of stage-sets, costumery and make-up disappeared, and the simple, yet profound drama unreeled like a bolt of vividly printed silk, flowing smoothly, strongly, absorbingly to the tragic-comical climax that left the emotions reeling from the suspense and warm with relief.

Two days later I looked at the figures on advance ticket sales and could find only one conceivable complaint. Parodisiac would make Hillary Hardy so much money that not even taxes could force him to produce another for a great while.

What promised to be a major irritation, fending off the press from Hardy and protecting his anonymity, was converted into a master publicity-stroke by Hec Blankenship. He swore the few of us who knew about Hardy's youth and whereabouts, to complete secrecy, then he proceeded to build his publicity around the "mystery-author."

"But he's got a past!" I objected when Hec first presented the scheme. "Old friends and relatives will spill the beans."

"Have you really looked into Hillary's past?" Hec asked.

I confessed I hadn't. Hec said that he had. It developed that Hillary Hardy was not our boy's real name. In his passion for anonymity he had been changing his name every time 

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