It Pays to Advertise

It Pays to Advertise (1914), a farce by Roi Cooper Megrue and Walter Hackett. [Cohan Theatre, 399 perf.] Cyrus Martin (John W. Cope) so dominates the soap business that one of his associates remarks, “If he were to go busted, the whole country would go dirty.” But Martin is dismayed at the refusal of his playboy son Rodney (Grant Mitchell) to settle down to work. So is Rodney's fiancée, Mary Grayson (Ruth Shepley). Irked by their disapproval, Rodney joins with Ambrose Peale (Will Deming) to found a rival soap company. He invents a soap that costs three cents a bar to make and which, with proper advertising, they plan to sell for a dollar a bar. They call their soap “#13” and launch a huge publicity campaign announcing “Number Thirteen Soap Is Unlucky for Dirt.” The demand for the new soap overwhelms the men, for they have exhausted their funds in advertising and have no money left to manufacture the product, so the elder Martin buys them out. But Rodney has caught the fever and, as soon as he marries Mary, promises to settle down to business. The Times praised the Cohan and Harris offering for having “something more than the gayety of the average farce” and for humor rich in “genuineness and substance.”