The Telephone Booth Indian

by A. J. Liebling

  III

  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 Yorke
rs 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.”

  The brothers made two invasions of England—the first in 1904, when they built the Waldorf Theatre in London, which they had to abandon two years later, and the second in the early twenties. They acquired six London houses on their second try, but again they lost out. London was the only city in the world that rejected The Student Prince. British critics said it was proGerman. The Messrs. Shubert also made two attempts to break into vaudeville, in 1906 and in 1921, and both were expensive failures. A kind of recurrent stubbornness is a Shubert trait. They retreat, but they come back for more. In the early thirties they tried a show called A Trip to Pressburg three times with different stars. It never got further than Pittsburgh, but the Shuberts still own it, and someday it will reappear.

  The resilience of Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. is magnificently illustrated by the tangled affairs of the old Shubert Theatre Corporation, which vanished as a result of receivership proceedings in 1931. The Shuberts might have been spared this financial embarrassment if a prediction made by Mr. Lee in 1910 had come true. In that year he said he did not believe the shares of any theater corporation would ever be listed on the Stock Exchange. Times and the Shuberts' minds changed, and in 1924 the brothers organized the Shubert Theatre Corporation, with 210,000 shares of common stock. This was duly listed on the Exchange, and during the first five years the corporation consistently reported earnings of over one million dollars. In organizing this enterprise, the Shuberts turned over to it many of their theaters but withheld certain valuable properties, which included the Winter Garden, Shubert, Broadhurst, Booth, Plymouth, Cort, and Daly theaters as well as the Sardi Building and considerable other nontheatrical real estate. They explained that they had partners in these holdings who were opposed to entering the corporation. The brothers still own or have long leases on these personally held properties, which never became involved in the ups and downs of the corporation.

  In 1933, two years after the receivership, Mr. Lee, with his brother as partner, bought in all the assets of the defunct corporation for four hundred thousand dollars, a price which barely covered the costs of the receivership. The creditors were glad to receive even that small amount, however. They had discovered that the leasehold on a theater is practically worthless in the eyes of bankers, who know neither how to produce a play nor how to put such a property to any other profitable use. The Shuberts lumped together all that could be salvaged from the Shubert Theatre Corporation in a new company called the Select Theatres Corporation. They kept fifty per cent of the stock of the new organization for themselves and distributed the rest among those who had held stock in the old corporation. The Select stock never has paid dividends, either to the Shuberts or to anybody else. Through Select, the brothers maintain their control over a large number of theaters, and this protects their strategic position in the industry. Among the theaters now owned by Select are the Barrymore, Ambassador, Hudson, Maxine Elliott, Fortysixth Street, Golden, Longacre, Imperial, Morosco, and Majestic. Lee is president of Select, and J.J. is general manager. The overhead costs of all Shubert enterprises, including the salaries of Lee and J.J., are charged to Select and the Shubert personal holdings; each Shubert production is a new corporation in which Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. usually own all the stock. The precise financial status of the Messrs. is one of the thousand and one topics of idle speculation in Broadway taverns. Recently, from Mr. William Klein, who has been their attorney for thirtyseven years, came the nearest thing to an official statement yet heard on the subject. “Neither of the Messrs. Shubert,” he said, rubbing his hands together vigorously, “will ever be buried in potter's field.”

  The brothers have great confidence in each other's integrity; one never questions the other's drafts on the joint Shubert cash account. On the other hand, they are seldom in agreement about business policies and twice a year they meet in Mr. J.J.'s apartment atop the Sardi Building for a formal dinner and argument. They are attended by attorneys on these occasions. During the rest of the year they lead separate social existences. Mr. J.J. lives in his apartment alone except for a cook and maid, and he seldom goes out at night. The living room, which runs the whole width of the building, is adorned with lighting fixtures from the old Hotel Knickerbocker and with a great deal of Louis XIV furniture. All of the furniture, he likes to assure visitors, was bought especially for the apartment—none of the pieces are leftovers from shows. At the west end of the room there is a wroughtiron door from a Venetian palace, on which the most noticeable adornment is a female figure with six breasts. The door weighs three and a half tons. The space behind one of the diningroom walls is hollow and filled with a large supply of liquor which Mr. J.J. acquired at reduced prices during prohibition and which he has as yet barely sampled. He isn't much of a drinker, but he never could resist a bargain. The dining room has Syrian furniture inlaid with motherofpearl and ivory, and on a terrace in front of the living room there is a fountain from the Knickerbocker lobby. Despite these and other attractions of his apartment, Mr. J.J., when he's at home in the winter, spends most of his time in the bathroom, reading in an armchair which he has installed there. This is because the bathroom is the only comfortably warm room in the place. The heat in the Sardi Building, above the first floor, is turned off at seven o'clock in the evening and all day on Sunday. Since it is impossible to warm the apartment on the top floor without heating the whole building, Mr. J.J. retires to the bathroom, which he has fitted up with an elaborate battery of electric heaters. He does all his playreading there. When he occasionally goes out, it is usually to Lindy's for a cup of coffee at about midnight. He also likes to sit through double features at fourthrun movie houses. Mr. J.J. prefers to lunch in his apartment, but when he has to talk business with someone at noon, he eats with the person at Sardi's, on the first floor of his residence. Vincent Sardi, the proprietor, used to be a captain of waiters at the Little Club, a night place that the Shuberts owned many years ago. He is a good tenant now, and the Shuberts always believe in patronizing people who do business with them.

  Mr. Lee almost invariably lunches at Sardi's. Actors who want him to notice them eat there too. Lee often convinces people who work for him that they also should live in the Century Apartments, where he lives and in which the brothers have an interest. Hellz a Poppin had hardly become a hit when Mr. Lee induced Chic Johnson, one of its stars, to take an apartment in the Century. Both the Messrs. Shubert like to say that they “never learned to play—never had time,” but Mr. Lee at least gets about a good deal. He says he does so to maintain contacts. “Maybe I would like to play,” he says plaintively, “but there is no one around I care to play with.”

  Mr. Lee's office in the Shubert Theatre Building is in a turret and therefore circular—not more than twelve feet in diameter. Into it is squeezed the desk he has used ever since he came to New York, a chair, a sofa, a gilt statue of a nymph and faun, and an autographed photograph of Colonel Lindbergh. A short passageway leads from Mr. Lee's office to that of his secretary, Jack Morris, which in turn opens into the waiting room, a bleak place with Frenchgray furniture grouped around a snake plant, and two unchanging, disregarded signs—“No Smoking” and “No Casting until August.” The gray chairs usually are occupied by a queue of petitioners waiting to see Mr. Lee. It is a point of pride with him that he never refuses to see anybody who is willing to wait a few hours. The passageway between Mr. Lee's office and his secretary's has an extra door leading directly into the waiting room, but only the experienced understand this door's significance. When Mr. Lee is ready to grant an audience, he pops out at the Morris end of the passageway and beckons to the man who has advanced to th
e head of the queue. This hopeful comes forward, thinking that Mr. Lee is going to conduct him into his private office. Mr. Lee takes him by the arm, leads him into the passageway, says, “I'm sorry, I can't do anything now,” and steers him out through the extra door and into the waiting room again. This maneuver is known in the trade as the Shubert brushoff.

  Nothing confuses Mr. Lee more than to be caught without anything to do. “It just happens you catch me at a time when everything is very quiet,” he will apologize, scratching his head energetically with a paper cutter. When his embarrassment becomes extreme, he scratches himself under the armpits and behind the ears. “You should have seen it yesterday. I didn't have a minute to myself.” On summer afternoons when there are only a few persons waiting to see him, he has been known to sneak out of his office, go downstairs to his limousine, and so off to the baseball game, returning when a queue of more flattering length has formed. “Business won't wait,” he says when reproached for spending most of his time in the vicinity of Shubert Alley even during the dog days. During intervals of quiet, Mr. Lee often plays rummy with Peters, his valet. If Harry Kaufman, the ticket broker upon whom Mr. Lee relies for companionship as much as for advice, is available, they change the game to threehanded pinochle. Peters reads Mr. Lee's personal correspondence as a matter of duty and answers it. Mr. J.J. sometimes refers to Peters as “the Crown Prince.”

  Mr. Lee's insistence upon running all the Shubert theaters himself, even down to the smallest detail, is a carryover from a period when theater treasurers and house managers consistently robbed their employers. Larceny was considered a perquisite of their jobs. The house manager would issue “complimentaries,” and the treasurer would sell them. It was the Shuberts who devised the present method of accounting for tickets. Under this system, there are separate racks for unsold tickets, for the stubs of tickets that have been paid for—known in the trade as “the hardwood”—and for stubs of complimentaries, or “deadwood.” Every seat in the house must be accounted for in one or another of the racks; by deducting unsold seats and deadwood from the house capacity, the theater owner knows exactly what should be in the cash drawer. The only subordinate who can issue complimentaries in the whole Shubert organization here is the publicity chief, Greneker, and he is exceedingly frugal with them. Most passes to Shubert shows are signed by Mr. Lee himself. Many Shubert employees have been with the elderly Syracuse boys for a long time. Mr. Lee has faith in them but can't get over his distrustful nature. Some years ago, he recalls, he was standing in Shubert Alley when a Negro walked up carrying a pair of shoes. The Negro asked him for a wardrobe woman who worked for the Shuberts. The Negro complained that the woman had sold him the shoes, which he was returning because they were misfits. They were Shubert shoes. The incident proved to Mr. Lee that a man of property must be on the alert all the time.