Information on Charles Frohman from American Heritage, April, 1972.

Initially I wasn't going to include information on Charles Frohman since my main focus of interest is Maude Adams. However, I found some items on him which I felt were too fascinating to leave out.

From the magazine article:

At the height of his career, just before he perished in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, Frohman controlled six theatres in New York, more than two hundred throughout the rest of the United States, and five in London. He personally managed the careers of twenty-eight leading stars and paid out more than thirty-five million dollars a year in salaries to the ten thousand people on his payroll. Yet perhaps because he resembled an amiable frog in a starched collar, he was painfully shy. He would dart down a side street to avoid meeting one of his resplendent actors in public. He could not bear the strain of opening nights and almost never appeared at them, preferring to stay in a hotel room or a nearby restaurant while runners brought him word of the audience's reaction.

Frohman had become a producer to reckon with in 1889, when he scored a smash hit by staging a historical pageant play called Shenandoah, complete with an actor playing General Sheridan atop a live horse. Frohman believed implicitly that "a play really requires a star artist, man or woman-woman for choice." Frohman usually selected his actors and then cast about looking for something in which to show them off.