In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

By the late summer of 90, Irene’s campaign had begun: she was fond of Vernon and found him an agreeable, amusing companion, but at this stage he was mostly a step up the show business ladder.“He was very nice about it, but, as I remember, he showed no particular enthusiasm,” she admitted. In the fall of 90, Vernon returned to his duties in The Midnight Sons and had less time to spend with Irene in New Rochelle.Dr.and Mrs.Foote vacationed in Mexico, still hoping the warm, dry air would be good for the doctor’s tubercular lungs. Sister Elroy was studying at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, living in a small flat on Columbus Avenue in Manhattan. Despite her longtime problems with Elroy, Irene moved in with her to be closer to her new beau. Nagged insistently by Irene, Vernon in turn insistently nagged Lew Fields till an audition was arranged. On the stage of the empty, cavernous Broadway Theater, a nervous Irene asked for more light and went into her act. “I had come in from New Rochelle with a pianist, who feebly accompanied me in the huge dark theater.I danced with castanets a sort of Spanish tarantella.” Even Irene confessed that she sounded “like a very tired horse crossing a wooden bridge.”Lew Fields sighed heavily and offered her a small part in a touring company of The Midnight Sons, which Irene turned down, not wanting to endure a road tour for such a minuscule role. Fields wanted nothing more than to send this amateur out on tour and get her away from Vernon. In his thirty-some years as an actor and producer, Fields had seen his share of ambitious girls (and boys) doing what they could to get into the show business.This Irene Foote was nothing special that he could see: just another spoiled debutante who thought she could act, or sing, or dance. Pretty, but too young and skinny and untrained . The fact that she could put one over on his adored Vernon Castle was disappointing. ZOWIE,“THE MONARCH OF MYSTERY” CHAPTER SIX  34 VERNON AND IRENE CASTLE’S RAGTIME REVOLUTION The Summer Widowers took off on tour in October 90, after 40 performances on Broadway.When it arrived at Brooklyn’s Majestic Theater in mid-November, Irene joined the cast, in her professional stage debut. She was given a tiny walk-on role, as “Mrs. Lamb,” and a dressing room to share with little Helen Hayes—the jealousy flared violently. When Hayes found there was indeed something going on between Irene and Vernon, “the drums of doom started to beat in my heart....I’m afraid I made backstage life pretty unpleasant for Irene.” The Summer Widowers closed at the end of 90, and Irene had her first New York credit under her belt, even if it was Brooklyn and not Broadway. The next Lew Fields extravaganza, The Hen-Pecks, opened on February 4, 9, at the Broadway Theater. This show contained a star-making role for Vernon and would prove to be Fields’s most successful production in several years.It starred Fields as rural farmer Henry Peck,whose daughter Henoria (Gertrude Quinlan) runs off to the big city, bedazzled by the glamour of Zowie, “the Monarch of Mystery, the third and last attraction of the season at the Cove’s Temple of Amusement, Melodeon Hall.”Zowie was played, with great panache and a red wig, by Vernon. The surprise hit of the show occurred when twenty-year-old Blossom Seeley, as Henella Peck, climbed on a table, sang “Toddling the Todalo,” and danced a wild, syncopated Texas Tommy (the dance was first popularized by a black dance team,Johnny Peter and Ethel Williams,in San Francisco , around 909). Vernon also got a nice specialty number, “It’s Not the Trick Itself but It’s the Tricky Way It’s Done,” in which he utilized not only his comic talents but his old magic routines, polished at St. George’s Hall back in London. Another high point occurred in act 2, with a scene that hearkened back to the glory days of Weber and Fields—but this time it was Vernon who partnered Lew Fields. The routine was set in a barbershop, where Henry Peck, hiding from his wife and daughters, has disguised himself as an Italian barber; in comes his archnemesis, the home-wrecking magician Zowie. For the next ten or fifteen...

Share