The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  The Stork Club concession was rented for $15,000 to a syndicate of employees. The proprietors of “21” long ago presented their concession to Jimmy, a doorman who is said to have saved them from infinite grief during the prohibition period. Renee Carroll, the redhaired girl at Sardi's, pays nothing for her concession, because the management values her gift for remembering the names of movingpicture publicity men and making them feel like celebrities.

  The most conservative concessionaires operate in hotels. A painfully sedate and now defunct graduate doorman named J. Bates Keating had the concessions at the Astor, the Pierre, and the Edison for many years. He liked to talk about the unobtrusiveness of his service—no vulgar, obstreperous flower or cigarette girls pushing sales. Cigarette girls in hotels work for the lessee of the stand in the lobby. The Waldorf retains its own checkrooms, but pays ten per cent of the gross receipts to the manager, an experienced concessionaire.

  The strangest feature of the hatchecking business is the complete absence of tangible merchandise or a fixed charge. The stock in trade consists of cardboard checks, worth two dollars a thousand wholesale, and the customer is not allowed to retain even the check when he leaves. A patron who takes his hat and walks out, paying nothing to the check girl, is liable to no pursuit, physical or legal. In reputable resorts, the contract between concessionaire and proprietor specifies that no patron is to be caused embarrassment. Yet less than one per cent of the people who use checkrooms omit the tip.

  Shortly before the war, there was a national crusade against tipping. The shocking discovery that many tippees turned over their take to a third party spurred the crusaders. Governor Charles S. Whitman of New York was a leading antitipper, and the city had a Society for the Prevention of Useless Giving. A man named William Rufus Scott, of Paducah, Kentucky, wrote a book called The Itching Palm which urged the human race to give up tipping. Scott said that the psychological basis of tipping was one part misguided generosity, two parts pride, and one part fear of being unfavorably noticed. The last motive is unquestionably important. During the hours when checking is desultory, the patron walking up to the counter feels that he has the undivided attention of the cloakroom staff. He probably tips a quarter. When patrons are leaving in a hurry at the close of a floor show, men sneak in dimes. The more efficient concessionaires keep hourbyhour graphs that prove this.

  “A tip is what one American is willing to pay to induce another American to acknowledge inferiority” was another of Scott's dicta. Largesse exalts the ego of the tipper in almost exact ratio to the inconsequence of the service. Heralds in the Middle Ages had a nice living in gratuities from feudal landlords who would hang a peasant for holding out a ducat of rent. The state of Washington once passed a law against tipping, but repealed it after a couple of years because people tipped anyway and juries wouldn't convict.

  The most plausible hypothesis of modern tip motivation was promulgated by Louis Reverdy, a French lawyer, in his thesis, “Le Pourboire,” for the Doctor of Laws degree of the Sorbonne in 1930. Reverdy says that men first tipped for display. Now, he thinks, they tip from a sense of duty, since they realize that the tips constitute the tippee's means of livelihood. This is true even when the customer knows that the cloakroom girl works for a concessionaire and when he feels that it is the duty of the restaurant to check his coat free. For he knows that the individual girl will lose her job if nobody tips her. By withholding his tip, he would sacrifice an amiable individual to a cold principle. The chances are that he is inspired to even greater sympathy if the girl happens to be comely. Concessionaires, of course, are aware of this and pick their girls accordingly, but they place no premium on actually beautiful girls. “A girl who's a real knockout gets herself a guy in a couple of weeks,” Abe Ellis once explained, “and then you got to break in another girl.”

  The contemporary tipper gets little positive pleasure from tipping. Less than one per cent of the patrons at the French Casino tipped fifty cents, and there was no significant correlation between the amount patrons spent in the restaurant and the size of the tips they gave in the lobby. Most men oscillate between the dime and quarter levels, the average tip at a large Broadway place being sixteen cents. Girls report that at East Side clubs like El Morocco there may be a slightly higher ratio of quarter tippers to dime tippers. But fiftycentplus tippers are as rare on the East Side as on Broadway. Perhaps twice a week, in any club doing a large volume of business, eccentric patrons tip girls five dollars or more. The recipient is allowed to keep half of any tip in this class, turning the rest in to the concessionaire.

  Men in the hat-check business admit that the customers don't enjoy tipping. But, they say, nobody ever went to an unpopular place merely because of free hatchecking. And conversely, when people want to attend a certain club, they don't stay home because of the cost of checking their hats. They are fond of telling how the Cafe Savarin on lower Broadway once abolished tipping, only to have the patrons force the money on the girls, and how the Hotel Algonquin had the same experience.

  At private banquets in the Astor, hosts sometimes stipulate there shall be no tipping of cloakroom attendants. Keating, the concessionaire, used to cite one such affair attended by the late Nathan Straus, the freemilk man. Mr. Straus gave the girl a dollar. She handed it back to him. The thwarted philanthropist threw the dollar behind the counter and walked out. The experience of the Hotel Pennsylvania conflicts with these happy reminiscences of concessionaires. The Pennsylvania and all the other Statler hotels abolished hatcheck concessions and hatcheck tipping in 1933. Far from resenting this change, the Statler people say, patrons now check thirtythree and a third more articles per capita than they ever did before. At the restaurants Longchamps, where the hatcheck tip is included in the tenpercent service charge, most patrons seem content to let it go at that.

  The most skilled operatives of the concession business are not the young women of the cloakroom or the hangers who work behind the counter but the cigarette and novelty girls. They need salesmanship to maintain their level of sales and tips, and tact to avoid arguments with customers. If a girl is the subject of a complaint to the management, she generally loses her job. The worst sin a girl can commit is to recognize a man accompanied by a woman and remind him of a previous visit. The woman may be his wife and his previous companion may not have been. Standard brands of cigarettes sell for twentyfive cents in night clubs, and a girl's tips are expected to equal her gross sales. In the large Broadway clubs, the girls are sometimes demure, but at East Side places, the girls say, “A girl has got to talk very direct.” “If you want to sell cigarettes to those guys,” one girl reported, “you got to say things that would shock a mediumclass man.” The business of being a cigarette girl is so complex and requires so much ingenuity that a star can sometimes command thirty dollars a week.

  “A good cigarette girl,” Abe Ellis has said, “is far and in between. She has got to know just when to lay off and when to knock the customer down. And selling stuffed dogs to grownup women is an art in itself.”

  The chief technical problem of the hatcheck industry since its inception has been the safe conveyance of the customer's quarter to the pocket of the concessionaire. The girl receiving a tip can seldom conquer the atavistic notion that it was meant for her personally. Even hiring a watcher for each girl would not preclude collusion. Since there are no fixed rates of tipping, it is impossible to tell from the receipts on any given evening whether the girls have held out anything.

  When the Susskind brothers ran virtually all the concessions in town, they used a commonsense personalconfidence sort of system which kept their help from robbing them too flagrantly But since they obtained their leases cheaply, they could afford a good deal of tip leakage. Competitors, bidding against the brothers, reduced the margin of profit. Consequently they worked harder to protect their receipts, putting the girls in tight, pocketless uniforms and making them drop their tips through a slot in the counter as soon as they got them. Under the counter was
a locked box.

  Modern concessionaires, more efficient, use a variation of the Bedaux System. They keep charts from which they establish a norm of production for each girl and location. The concessionaire knows, when he goes into a new restaurant, approximately what to expect. If there is a minimum charge of $1.50, for example, the tipping should compare with that at the old Paradise. He will then expect, from each hundred tippers, a return of about thirteen dollars. The first crew of girls he puts in his new concession are reasonably safe if they approach that standard. The girls do not know exactly what their boss expects, so the assumption is they will try hard to make a good showing. After a few weeks, the concessionaire switches the girls to another place and brings in a new set. If the receipts fall off noticeably, he suspects the replacements. If receipts rise, he suspects the first group. He shifts individual girls in the same way. If a hypothetical Billie, checking hats at a certain club for a month, turns in an average of eleven cents a customer, while an equally hypothetical Mamie over a similar period averages sixteen cents, he bounces Billie. By continued shifts, he establishes an average for the place. This may not turn out the same as the average at the Paradise, however. The new club may get a high ratio of Southern patronage, which brings the average tip down, or of “collegiates,” notoriously poor tippers, or of racetrack men, notoriously good ones.

  After each tour of the house, a cigarette girl turns in all the cash she has received. In this way she has no chance to hoard her tips for the evening. She might decide, if they were unusually good, that she could safely knock down a dollar for herself. Even at that, most cigarette girls manage to keep some part of their tips. Concessionaires never know exactly how much, but if the girl is a “producer,” they don't care.

  “Better a kid who takes ten in tips and knocks a buck,” a pillar of the industry once said, “than a dummy who gets half the tips and turns in all she gets. But please don't use my name, because on such a question I hate to quote myself.”

  • The Boys from Syracuse •

  ommonly, when a family achieves such fame that it has a street named in its honor, it moves to a better part of town. There are no Roosevelts on Roosevelt Street, no Astors within blocks of Astor Place, and no Vanderbilts on Vanderbilt Avenue except when Brigadier General Cornelius Vanderbilt pays an occasional visit to the Yale Club. Lee and J.J. Shubert, however, live almost entirely in, above, and around Shubert Alley, which runs from Fortyfourth to Fortyfifth Streets between Broadway and Eighth Avenue. The Alley, although it has a sidewalk and a roadway for automobiles, is a private street, part of the property rented to the Shuberts by the Astor Estate in 1912 on a lease which still has sixtynine years to run. The rest of the leased area is covered by the Shubert, Booth, Plymouth, and Broadhurst theaters. Lee Shubert's private office is in the turret at the southeast corner of the Shubert Theatre building. His desk is directly above the “u” in the theater's sign. J.J., who long ago conceived a seignoral disdain for his given name of Jacob, lives just across Fortyfourth Street, on the tenth floor of the Sardi Building, which the Shuberts own; the sixth floor is given over to his offices. J.J. often says that he likes to live upstairs from his business. Lee has an apartment adjoining his offices on the fifth floor of the Shubert, but he seldom uses this suite except for shaves and sunray treatments, both endured in a barber chair which he has had installed there. He prefers to sleep in the Century Apartments, on the site of the old Century Theatre on Central Park West. Even there he is not outside the Shubert sphere, for the brothers hold a second mortgage on the apartment building.

  The Messrs. Shubert have been the largest operators in the New York theater for so long that only a few persons remember that they were once boy wonders in Syracuse, where both of them were running theaters before they had reached their twenties. City records in Syracuse show that Lee was born there sixtysix years ago and J.J. five years later, but the brothers still have the brisk and querulous quality of two combative small boys who feel the teacher is down on them. A few years ago they addressed a manifesto to New York dramatic editors, insisting that they be referred to by the collective designation of “the Messrs. Shubert.” “Lee and Jake,” they felt, sounded much too flippant. Lee takes a quiet pride in being known as the fastest walker on Broadway. He walks fast even when he doesn't know where he is going. J.J. is distinguished for his bitter vehemence at rehearsals. “There is only one captain on this ship,” he once shouted while rehearsing a musical, “the director and me!”

  When Lee, in his office in the Shubert Theatre, wishes to communicate with J.J., in the Sardi Building, he summons Jack Morris, his secretary, and says, “Take a letter to Mr. J.J.” When J.J. wishes to communicate with Lee, he says to his secretary, “Take a letter to Mr. Lee.” This custom has given rise to a theaterdistrict legend that the brothers are mortal enemies and do not speak at all. The legend is not founded on fact. When either of the Shuberts is really in a hurry to discuss something with the other, he walks across the street to do so. An even more fanciful theory has it that the story of animosity between the two has been fostered for business reasons by the Shuberts themselves. The exponents of this theory contend that when Lee wants to get out of a deal, he says that J.J. will not allow him to go through with it, and that when J.J. wants to get out of a deal, he blames Lee. Actually there is no overt hostility between the brothers. Mr. J.J. says that it was the intention of the Messrs., when they collaborated in the construction of the Sardi Building in 1926, to move all their executive offices there from the somewhat constricted quarters on the upper floors of the Shubert Theatre. That summer, Mr. J.J., who sometimes explains a predilection for foreign musical shows by saying, “I am more dynamic and Continental than Mr. Lee,” made his annual trip to Europe to inspect the new vintage of operettas. When he returned, he found that his office furniture had been moved into the new building, but that Mr. Lee had treacherously remained in the Shubert Theatre. The Shubert enterprises have been a twoheaded organism ever since, with Mr. Lee's casting department and executive staff on the north side of Fortyfourth Street and Mr. J.J.'s on the south side. The publicity and auditing departments are on Mr. J.J.'s side of the street; the realestate, theaterbooking, and financial departments are on Mr. Lee's. The balance of power is worked out to the last milligram: Mrs. Lillian Duffy, the plump, whitehaired receptionist in Mr. Lee's office, has the authority to hire all girl ushers for Shubert theaters; Mrs. Loretta Gorman, Mrs. Duffy's practically identical sister, is Mr. J.J.'s receptionist and hires all the theater charwomen. But the brothers, like most twoheaded creatures, have a single life line. All their real estate is held in common, and they have a joint checking account. The separateoffice arrangement resembles one of those dual households advocated by married female novelists. The Shuberts retain community of interests, but avoid friction; each produces shows without interference from the other. Failure of one of Mr. J.J.'s shows is made easier for Mr. Lee to bear by the knowledge that it was Mr. J.J.'s idea. Success is sweetened for Mr. Lee by the reflection that he will share in the profits. Things work out the same way on the other side of the street.

  The brothers' chauffeurs amicably share the parking facilities of the Alley, which are also made available to producers and stars of companies playing the Shubert Theatre if the shows are hits. Katharine Hepburn, for instance, parked her car there regularly during the many months The Philadelphia Story filled the theater. Mr. Lee has three automobiles, all of them foreign—a RollsRoyce, a HispanoSuiza, and an IsottaFraschini. Mr. J.J. favors American cars. Mr. Lee explains that he has never owned any but European automobiles because when he is in this country he is too busy to go shopping. He finds his only moments of relaxation during cruises and trips abroad, when he sometimes has half an hour to spare. It was during one such trip that he signed up Carmen Miranda in Rio de Janeiro and brought her to New York to star in The Streets of Paris.

  Mr. Lee comes to work every day shortly before noon. He leaves his desk to go home to the Century Apartments at thr
ee or four o'clock in the morning. When people ask him why he works such long hours, he says, “I am not a loafing kind of boy.” The habit goes back to the days of the great commercial rivalry which existed for fifteen years between the Shuberts and the firm of Klaw & Erlanger. Abe Erlanger was an early riser. Once he told a friend, “I am up and at my desk while the Shuberts still are sleeping.” Mr. Lee decided that the only way to beat Erlanger was to stay up all night. Erlanger and Marc Klaw, his partner, are now dead, but Mr. Lee still can't sleep nights. J.J. attributes his brother's outrageous workday to the fact that Lee has always been a bachelor. Although J.J. himself has not had a wife since he was divorced in 1918, he says that the experience of marriage, no matter how far in the past, so changes a man's metabolism that he never again wants to work more than twelve hours at a stretch. Shubert employees—house and company managers, play readers, and publicity men—have the sympathy of their professional colleagues, because they must remain virtually on call until Mr. Lee decides to go home. The Shubert playreading department gets about fifty manuscripts a month throughout the year and filters the best ones through to Mr. Lee's office. Authors of these promising works are sometimes summoned at a grisly hour shortly before dawn to read their scripts aloud. Mr. Lee never reads a play himself; he merely looks at synopses drawn up by his readers. During an author's reading, Mr. Lee sometimes appears to fall asleep. This is a frightful experience for the playwright, who is afraid to offend the producer by awakening him and, in desperation, continues reading. Mr. Lee always maintains that he has heard every word. The concentration of the Shuberts on their business is looked upon by most theatrical people as unsporting. If the brothers were going to work so hard, these critics think, they should have taken up a trade instead of the theater. Mr. Lee's incessant activity, even though some of it is undoubtedly superfluous, has served him well during his fortytwo years on Broadway. He has simply outworn most of his opponents.