The Telephone Booth Indian (19 page)

Mr. Lee concedes grudgingly that newspapermen today are probably honest, but he cannot for the life of him see why a hundreddollaraweek employee of a publisher should be allowed to impair a Shubert investment of fifty thousand dollars in a show. This does not prevent him from exploiting to the full any favorable reviews that accrue in the course of a season. He feels newspaper reviewers are naturally perverse, and admiration is wrung from them only by the supreme artistry of a particularly great production.

The Shuberts' feeling against the critics came to a head in
1915, when the brothers ordered the doormen of their theaters to bar Alexander Woollcott, the reviewer for the
Times.
Woollcott, then twentyeight, had said about a farce called
Taking Chances
, “It is not vastly amusing.” To the Shuberts the remark was evidence of violent animosity. They ordered the
Times
to send another reviewer to their attractions. The
Times
replied by throwing out all Shubert ads and Woollcott, backed by his bosses, applied to the United States District Court for an injunction restraining the Shuberts. He said he was being prevented from earning his livelihood as a critic. It was a glorious day for William Klein, the Shubert lawyer, who filed a brief listing all Woollcott's unfavorable criticisms of Shubert shows, with dissenting reviews by Woollcott's colleagues. Woollcott filed an equally long brief with concurrent opinions by the colleagues. The court ruled, to the astonishment of everybody, that the critic's fairness had nothing to do with the case; if the Shuberts wished to bar a man from their property, they had a right to do so. Admission to a place of amusement, the court found, is not a civic right but a license granted by the owner and revocable upon refund of the admission price. on the basis of this decision, the one sort of critic a theater may not bar is a Negro, because when a Negro is refused admittance there is a presumption that he has been so treated on account of race or color and he can sue the management for damages. Woollcott was white. Always realistic, the Shuberts soon made friends with Woollcott and the
Times
, which they had found the best medium for theatrical advertising.

A dozen years later, the Messrs. Lee and J.J. barred Walter Winchell, then dramatic reviewer for the
Graphic
, for writing “flip reviews.” Presently Winchell began to write a Broadway column. Mr. Lee feels that Winchell's promotion was the result of their row and often reminds him that he should feel grateful.
Three years ago, Winchell, by his ecstatic plugging of
Hellz a Poppin
, a Shubert enterprise, counteracted the almost unanimous scolding which the other daily reviewers gave the show and had a good deal to do with turning it into the hit it is. Mr. Lee refused to be inordinately thankful. “Winchell has roasted some very good shows,” he said.

The Shubert relations with actors, as with reporters, have been subject to frequent emotional disturbance. “The actor is a person so naturally conceited as to become unconsciously ungrateful,” Lee once pronounced officially. “In most cases what passes for art is unmitigated selfassurance. It is a difficult thing to explain briefly how much the actor owes to the manager.” It is hard to reconcile this low estimate of the actors' art with what the Shuberts said for the record about Joe Smith and Charles Dale of the Avon Comedy Four, who tried to break a contract with them. Attorney Klein's brief stated, “Defendants are novel, unique, and extraordinary. At every appearance they are received with long, loud, and practically continuous applause.” The court ruled that Smith and Dale were irreplaceable. The Shuberts won a case on similar grounds against Gallagher and Shean. The comedians argued forlornly that they were terrible and that the Shuberts could hire any sort of turn to take their place. For a while after that, Shubert actors' contracts used to carry the clause, “I now admit I am unique and extraordinary.” Mr. Klein says proudly that these cases, like the one against Woollcott, created legal precedent. He thinks that the Shuberts have had a considerable part in the development of American jurisprudence. Mr. Klein has been the Shubert lawyer for thirtyseven years and he says, in endorsement of his clients, “Nobody can show me a single case in which the Shuberts have failed to pay a judgment against them.”

Consistency has never hampered the Shuberts. They have had
many wrangles with actors, but they were among the first managers to sign a closedshop agreement with Equity in 1924. Approximately four times a year, during the busiest period of his life, Mr. Lee used to issue a statement that the time was ripe for the emergence of American dramatists; four times a year, just as regularly, he would announce that the theater was doomed unless the playwrights agreed to reduce royalties. Whenever the owner of a string of onenight stands quit the Shuberts during the Syndicate war, either Mr. Lee or Mr. J.J. would declare that firstclass attractions could not play onenight stands profitably. When the same man returned to the Shuberts, one of the brothers would tell the press that the onenight stands made all the difference between a profitable tour and an unprofitable one. Once, when Chicago newspapers complained about the quality of the shows sent there, the Shuberts'
Review
announced, “Chicago does not realize she is in the position of a beggar who ought to be happy for every penny dropped in her tin cup.” A couple of years after that, Mr. J.J. said that Chicago was the best theater town in the country and that he was going to make it the dramatic center of America. Selfconsciousness is not a Shubert trait either.

By the midtwenties, a quarter of a century after the first of the Shubert brothers came to New York from his home in Syracuse to do battle with the forces that were monopolizing the theater, the enemy, personified by the Klaw & Erlanger Syndicate, was groggy. The Shuberts owned or had long leases on about 150 theaters, and they controlled the booking of 750 more. They didn't have enough dramatic attractions to go around, even though two thirds of the important producing managers were now booking
their shows into Shubert houses. A weakness of drama on the road is that provincial audiences demand the original Broadway casts. Operettas, on the other hand, are not so dependent on individual talent and get along all right on the road without firststring stars. The operetta, therefore, became the favored art form of the Shubert Theatre Corporation. Those were the days and nights when the Shuberts' publicity office never closed. Claude Greneker, their press agent, employed a lobster shift of assistants who went to work after midnight and pounded their typewriters until the day men began to come in. Time was beginning to help the Shuberts in their fight. Marc Klaw and Abe Erlanger, the Syndicate leaders, had been mature men in 1903, when the struggle started, while the Shuberts had been prodigies in their twenties. Now, as their rivals aged, the Shuberts were just hitting their stride. Klaw retired in 1926, and Erlanger died in 1930. Erlanger at his death was regarded as a wealthy man, but his estate, as it developed, consisted of two million dollars in assets and three million dollars in liabilities.

The operetta industry reached an alltime high in the winter of 192526. During that lush season, the Messrs. Shubert had ten companies of
The Student Prince
on tour in North America and one in Australia. The paths of the
Prince
companies often crossed those of five companies of
Blossom Time
, another Shubert operetta, which had been produced in 1921 and was hard to kill. By 1927 there weren't so many companies of
The Student Prince
and
Blossom Time
as there once had been, but five road companies of
My Maryland
had joined the survivors and the nation was still filled with song. The coffers of the Shubert Theatre Corporation were filled with cash, and in 1928 its stock, listed on the Exchange, reached a high of 85¼.

The manufacture of operetta companies for the road became a mechanical process with the Shuberts, like making new prints
from the negative of a moving picture. Operettas had the advantage of sound effects, which the movies of 1925 hadn't. A man named Jack C. Huffman, who, before he retired in 1929, was the Shuberts' favorite director, staged the No. 1 productions. Two subordinate directors rehearsed the road companies, retaining all Huffman's stage business. The road units went out at intervals of about two weeks. It was customary to give each
Student Prince
cast a single breakin performance at the Jolson Theatre, where the No. 1 company played. No audience ever objected to the substitution, if any even noticed it. This gave the road companies selfassurance and permitted them to be billed as coming “direct from Broadway.” Each
Student Prince
unit required forty male and twentyfour female choristers.
Blossom Time
and
My Maryland
called for less choral singing but increased the strain on the supply of prima donnas, ingenues, and presentable male singing leads. The Shuberts' musicalcasting director, a motherly little man named Romayne Simmons, combed the chorus of the Metropolitan and the glee clubs of every police department in the land for recruits. Fortunately, Simmons says, the costumes worn by ladies in the earlynineteenthcentury and Civil War eras, with which the operettas were respectively concerned, covered the figure from neck to ankle, so that the Shuberts did not have to worry much about the figures of the singing women they drafted. Friends at the Met sent Simmons young people who had tried out there but whose voices were not quite good enough for grand opera. There were even sinister rumors of singers waking up on the train to Toronto with a No. 5 company when the last thing they remembered was taking a drink with a Shubert representative at Hughie McLaughlin's bar on Fortyfifth Street.

It was during the time when Lee and his brother Jake, who now prefers to be known as J.J., were the most important men in
the American theater that a type of humor classified as the “Shubert story” attained its vogue in the way that similar anecdotes have since automatically become part of the life and works of Samuel Goldwyn. There are three possibilities about the origin of any Shubert story. The incident may have involved a Shubert; it may have involved a less widely known producer and been credited to the Shuberts to make it sound funnier; and it may have been invented out of whole cloth at the bar of the Players Club or some less exclusive loitering place of actors.

One of the favorites is the story of the actor walking up Broadway, shaking his head and repeating aloud, “The rat!” Another actor stopped him and said, “So is his brother Jake!” A subtler variant concerns the actor at the Players who was hanging over the bar and ranting about the Shuberts when a confrere interrupted him. “They're not so bad,” the second actor said. “No?” said the first actor. “Then why do they call them Shuberts?” A bit of counterpoint to this is the true anecdote about the Shubert press agent who warned Mr. Lee that a certain interviewer was inclined to be tart. “What can he possibly think of bad to say about me?” Mr. Lee asked earnestly.

Concerning the Shubert appreciation of the arts, there is the story of how Mr. J.J. attended a rehearsal of a musical show and thought the orchestra played too loudly. “Very softly!” he told the violins. “Play only on one string!” The quotation is accurate, but the attribution is wrong. It was Erlanger who said it at one of his rehearsals. On the same pattern is the tale of an actor in a Shubert drama who read a line beginning, “I am Omar Khayyam.” “You don't know anything,” Mr. Lee is supposed to have told him. “You should say, 'I am Omar
of
Khayyam.' “ “ 'I am Omar
of
Khayyam,' “ the submissive actor intoned. Later one of the more literate Shubert subordinates apprised Mr. Lee of his error.
Next time the actor said, “ 'I am Omar
of
Khayyam,' “ Mr. Lee stopped him. “Let's cut out the 'of,' “ he said. “The act's a little too long already.” This story might have been told of any producer at any period in history and in a related form was probably familiar to the boys who hung out with Menander in the Athenian equivalent of Lindy's.

Such stories have never bothered the Shuberts. They have never pretended to any rich cultural background and they know that their shrewdness in affairs of the theater is often underestimated because of their lack of polish. They see business as a form of combat. Mr. Lee recently said, “I like to take a play and bet my money
against
it.” Money, Mr. Lee thinks, is the best measure of success in the theater. There is no doubt that the brothers, beginning at the bottom, have made more money out of the legitimate stage than any other two men who ever lived. Mr. Lee acknowledges, however, that they have lost a great deal of it in bad realestate investments and in the stock market.

When there was a European theater of consequence, the Shuberts liked to buy shows that had already succeeded abroad. They would sometimes buy by cable without having seen the script. Afterward they would Americanize their purchases by introducing James Barton into the second scene as an American sailor who had lost his way in the grand duke's palace. “The advantage of a play that you bought in Paris,” Mr. Lee says now, “was that it was usually a German play that had been translated into French, so that by the time you had it translated into English, you got the services of three great authors on one script.” He is sorry that because of the collapse of the Central European theater it is now usually necessary to start from scratch. Even CzechoSlovakia, he reminds friends, was occasionally the source of a play. “Bill Brady got one there,” he recalls, “the bug
play.” By this Mr. Lee means
The Insect Play
, which was produced here as
The World We Live In.

The Shuberts, to quote Mr. Lee again, have never been loafing boys. The brothers, as nearly as he can remember, built the Fortyfourth Street, the Lyric, the Shubert, the Booth, the Broadhurst, the Plymouth, the Morosco, the Bijou, the Ritz, the Fortyninth Street, the Nora Bayes, the Ambassador, the Forrest, the Jolson, and the Maxine Elliott theaters. They converted a horse exchange, where New Yorkers used to buy carriage horses, into the Winter Garden. The Empire is the only theater now showing legitimate plays in New York which was in business before the first Shubert came here. Shubert competitors built the rest of the local theaters, so Mr. Lee in a way feels responsible for them too. Once, riding on Fortysixth Street in his IsottaFraschini, he said, “If I hadn't built all these theaters, they would be dark today.”