Chic Sale

HE GOT $49.49 A WORD — FOR A BOOK HE WAS SORRY HE EVER WROTE!
 
There has been only one author in the history of the world who ever wrote a book and made $49.49 profit on every single word in the book. That book was "The Specialist," and its author was Chic Sale.

The Specialist was the first book Chic Sale ever wrote, and he had so little faith in it that he printed only two thousand copies at first; and it took six weeks to sell them. Then suddenly the book caught on and swept over the country like flames leaping and roaring through a pine forest. It sold more copies than "The Good Earth!"
 
You’d think, wouldn’t you, that an author would be mighty proud of writing a book that outsold "The Good Earth?" But Chic Sale wasn’t. He regretted that he ever wrote "The Specialist" — regretted it because its humor has been misunderstood by many people.
 
On the other hand, he was proud of the success it achieved. He was embarrassed when people spoke of the book in his presence, and preferred that no one mention it, especially if he thought the person considered the humor vulgar. Once his daughter actually wept because she felt the book had disgraced the family.
 
Chic Sale became an author more or less by accident. Actually, he was an actor and one of the finest character actors that ever put on grease paint.
 
For that matter, he became an actor more or less by accident too. Years ago, he was a mechanic, working in the railroad shops in Urbana, Illinois. His older sister had stage aspirations, so she went to Chicago and studied at a dramatic school. When she came home for Christmas vacation she gave a program at one of the churches and mimicked country characters.
 
After her performance was over, Chic said, "Why, I can do that without going to school.”
 
She dared him to, so he walked out in the middle of the floor and gave an imitation of the local telegraph operator in Urbana. In a few minutes, he had the natives almost rolling off their chairs.
 
The next week a troupe of actors came to Urbana to put on a show. They had a comedy man who came out between the acts and entertained the audience, but he got sick. Chic Sale heard about it, and applied for the job.
 
The manager of the show was skeptical. But Chic gave him a sample of what he could do, and the manager took him on for the week, paid him ten dollars, and changed Chic’s whole life.
 
Footlights! Glamour! The laughter of five hundred people! The applause of an audience! Why, a log chain and a span of Missouri mules couldn’t have dragged him back to the machine shop after that.
 
Packing up his old telescope suitcase, he dashed off to Chicago, got a job on the stage and went to a cheap rooming house and began rehearsing his stunt. He decided that whiskers would make him look more like an old man; but he didn’t know where he could buy them, so he took some hair stuffing out of his mattress, and made himself a set of whiskers out of horsehair. He used these mattress whiskers on the stage for eight months before he bought a real set of whiskers from a dealer in theatrical make-up.
 
His pay was very small, and every penny was precious. In order to keep himself from eating too much, he would buy cheap candy and nibble on it awhile before dinner. That took the edge off his appetite.
 
Something hurt his stomach. Maybe it was this cheap candy. At any rate, he spent thousands of dollars for operations, and he carried a cook with him wherever he went because he couldn’t eat hotel cooking. He also carried a steel trunk with him, a trunk made into a filing cabinet and filled with thousands of jokes! He had one of the world’s largest collections of jokes, but he never told a funny story in a private conversation.
 
He played in six musical comedies on Broadway; but he couldn’t sing and he couldn’t dance. He was the best known "'horn player” in the United States; yet he couldn’t play a horn. He made $50,000. playing in shows that were about Paris; yet he never saw Paris.
 
He wore the same pair of shoes on the stage for sixteen years. They were the shoes he used when he played the parts of old men. He believed they brought him good luck, so he kept on repairing them and refused to have any others.
 
While playing in vaudeville, he fell in love with a girl from Missoula, Montana, an enchanting creature crowned with an aura of moonlight and flowering jasmine. He wasn’t scared in the least when he faced a thousand people, in the theatre; but when he tried to propose to this girl, he stuttered and blushed and felt miserable. Saying he was ill, he left her and went to his hotel room.
 
When he got there, he proposed to her over the telephone. She accepted, they were married, and had four children.
 
After making so much money out of "The Specialist," Chic Sale wrote another book. It was called: "The Corn Husker Crashes the Movies" and it didn’t bring in enough cash to pay the printing bills!