Baby Mine
By Margaret Mayo
Even in college Alfred Hardy was a young man of fixed ideas and high ideals and proud of it.
His friend, Jimmy Jinks, had few ideas and no ideals and was glad of it, and before half of their first college term had passed, Jimmy had rid himself of all such worries as making up his mind or directing his morals. Alfred did all these things so much better, argued Jimmy, furthermore, Alfred LIKED to do them—Jimmy owed it to his friend to give him that pleasure.
The fact that Jimmy was several years Alfred’s senior and twice his size, in no way altered his opinion of Alfred’s judgment, and through their entire college course, they agreed as one man in all their discussions—or rather—in all Alfred’s discussions.
But it was not until the close of their senior year that Alfred favored Jimmy with his views on matrimony.
Sitting alone in a secluded corner of the campus waiting for Alfred to solve a problem in higher mathematics, Jimmy now recalled fragments of Alfred’s last conversation.
“No twelve-dollar shoes and forty-dollar hats for MY wife,” his young friend had raged and he condemned to Jimmy the wicked extravagance of his own younger sisters. “The woman who gets me must be a homemaker. I’ll take her to the theatre occasionally, and now and then we’ll have a few friends in for the evening, but the fireside must be her magnet, and I’ll be right by her side each night with my books and my day’s worries. She shall be taken into my confidence completely; and I’ll take good care to let her know, before I marry her, just what I expect in return.”
“Alfred certainly has the right idea about marriage,” mused Jimmy, as the toe of his boot shoved the gravel up and down the path. “There’s just one impractical feature about it.”
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Margaret Mayo
Margaret Mayo, born Lillian Elizabeth Slatten, was an American actress, playwright, and screenwriter.
Life and career
She was raised on a farm near Brownsville, Illinois. Later, she was educated at the Girl’s College in Fox Lake, Wisconsin; the Convent of the Sacred Heart in Salem, Oregon; and at Stanford University. In her teen years, she traveled to New York City to pursue an acting career. She won a small part in a play named Thoroughbred at the Garrick Theatre.
She met her future husband, fellow actor Edgar Selwyn, in 1896. The same year, she began her writing career. She and Selwyn married in 1901.
She worked as many things: adapter, actress, film company founding partner, playwright, and writer. Until about 1917, Mayo averaged about a play per year. Her earliest successes were adaptations of novels: The Marriage of William Ashe (1905) and The Jungle (1907). However, Mayo is best remembered as the author of more original plays such as Polly of the Circus (1907), Baby Mine (1910), Twin Beds (1914), and Seeing Things (1920), written with Aubrey Kennedy. Her work utilized parody and satire to talk about social issues.
She adapted several of her plays for the silent screen. Her play Polly of the Circus became the first film produced in 1917 by the Goldwyn Company, of which she was a founding member. After a year as head of the scenario department, she left to go overseas and entertain the troops.
In 1919, Mayo and Selwyn got divorced. Afterward, Mayo changed her name to Elizabeth Mayo and moved to New York to live with her mother. In 1926, she signed the Agreement of American Dramatists, a document that led to the foundation of the Dramatists Guild. She also began selling real estate.
As she got older, she began to write about the spiritual world. Mayo was instrumental in making housing arrangements for Indian spiritual teacher Meher Baba at Harmon, near New York City, during his first visit to America in 1931. She owned and provided the stone house retreat where he stayed on this trip.
Death
Margaret Mayo died on February 25, 1951, in Ossining, New York. She is buried in St. Francis of Assisi Cemetery in Mount Kisco, New York.
Margaret Mayo
