Author: A. J. Liebling
Category: Cook books
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Mr. Lee is a short man whose appearance is so ostentatiously youthful that he is usually suspected of being very old. His face is a deep copper red all year round, a result of the sunray treatments and sun baths which he takes whenever he gets a chance. A musicalcomedy director, strolling near the Mazzini statue in Central Park one morning, saw Mr. Lee asleep in the open tonneau of one of his automobiles with his face turned toward the sun. Mr. Lee's chauffeur, also asleep, lolled in the front seat. Before the invention of the sunray lamp, it was customary for writers to mention Lee's “midnight pallor.” Because of his high cheekbones, narrow eyes, and lank black hair, it was also customary to say that he looked Oriental. Now that he can take sunray treatments, his upturned eyebrows and the deep wrinkles at the corners of his eyes make him look something like a goodnatured Indian—Willie Howard, perhaps, in warchief makeup. Mr. Lee always wears conservative, wellfitted suits made for him by Gray & Lampel, on East Fiftythird Street, at $225 each, and he has a liking for thicksoled, handmade English shoes and pleated shirts, which he wears with stiff collars. He admires his extremely small feet. There is a sedulous avoidance of flashiness in his dressing, but nothing pleases him better than a compliment on his clothes. Joe Peters, Mr. Lee's valet, shaves him at eleven in the morning and at seven in the evening. When Mr. Lee needs a new valet, he goes to the Hotel Astor barbershop and hires a barber. It was there he got Peters and Peters' predecessor. He has had only three valets in thirtytwo years. Mr. Lee takes good care of his figure. He often lunches on half a cantaloupe and an order of sliced tomatoes.
In contrast to his older brother, Mr. J.J. seems dumpy and rumpled. While Lee's hair is preternaturally black and lank, J.J.'s is gray and wavy. Although he is a small man, there is something taurine about the set of his neck and head, and there is a permanent suggestion of a pout on his lips. Mr. Lee's voice has an indefinable foreign intonation; he is always polite, tentatively friendly, and on guard. Mr. J.J., who has no trace of accent, can be an unabashed huckster, choleric and loud, but he can be warmer and more ingratiating than his brother when he wants to.
It is pretty nearly impossible to make a living in the American theater without encountering the Shuberts because they own, lease, or manage twenty of the fortyodd legitimate theaters in New York and control about fifteen theaters in other cities, a very high percentage of the total theaters, considering the low estate to which the road has declined. As theatrical landlords, the Shuberts have practically no real competitor in New York City, although Sam Grisman occasionally gets his hands on two or three theaters at a time. Theaters not owned or controlled by the brothers are for the most part in the hands of independent producers. Since the producer of a play usually turns over at least thirtyfive per cent of the gross receipts as theater rent, the Shuberts, even if at any given time they had no show of their own running, could still conceivably be sharing in the profits of twenty attractions. This would give them by far the largest single take in the success of any theatrical season. In point of fact, however, they do produce shows. Like the moviemakers, they have to schedule their product with an eye to the number of theaters they must keep busy. If they have six theaters empty and only one manuscript of promise, they must go ahead and produce six shows anyway.
To make tenants for Shubert theaters, Lee, who is more active in theater management and real estate than his brother, will often finance another producer by lending him Shubert money on condition he brings his show into a Shubert house. The Shuberts have backed such disparate enterprises as the Group Theatre production of Success Story and a jaialai tournament at the late Hippodrome. They supplied most of the money for The Children's Hour and Shadow and Substance, both earnest plays that the public would consider out of the Shubert line. Several years ago Mr. Lee backed Olsen and Johnson, a pair of vaudeville comedians, in expanding their seventyminute unit show into a knockabout entertainment called Hellz a Poppin, which is still keeping the Shuberts' Winter Garden comfortably filled. When the Messrs. were sounded out on the production of a musical comedy for the World's Fair, Mr. Lee's reply—“Why should I make competition for my own houses?”—was typical. His creative instincts are weighed down by several thousand tons of concrete and twenty longterm leases. Inevitably the Shuberts make more bad bets than good ones. This does not mean that they lose money. “If we could hit one out of three,” Mr. J.J. says very reasonably, “we would be doing fine.”
When the Shuberts produce shows on their own account, they are likely to fall back on formulas that have served them well in the past. The Student Prince is typical of the Shubert tradition—the darling of the firm in retrospect and its present ideal. It made more money than any other show the Shuberts ever produced. When, in the season of 192526, there were nearly a dozen road companies of The Student Prince out, covering North America and Australia, the production sometimes grossed as much as $250,000 a week. Yet The Student Prince was only a musical adaptation of a German play that had already served the Shuberts well. On the first occasion, in 1903, they produced the play done into English and called Old Heidelberg, at the Princess Theatre. It was not conspicuously successful. Then they changed the name of the show to Prince Karl, got Richard Mansfield to play the title role, and put it into the Lyric, where it became a very remunerative hit. After the war a musical version of the original play appeared in Germany. The Shuberts commissioned Sigmund Romberg to write another score for the American edition. The late Dorothy Donnelly did the American book. Even today The Student Prince is not dead; he merely slumbers. The costumes for ten complete Prince companies hang in the Shubert storerooms at 3 West Sixtyfirst Street. In the Shuberts' opinion, The Student Prince is still a great show. Lee thinks it is not yet quite the time for a revival. He says that the time has to be right for any kind of show and that if the time is right for it, any kind of show is likely to catch on. “The trouble with a lot of producers,” he has been known to explain, “is they have a couple of hits because the time is ripe for that sort of a show, and then they think they are geniuses, so they do the same sort of a show right over again, and it flops.” A piece like Hellz a Poppin, for example, is not so much an innovation as a type of fast, unsubtle comedy which had been absent from Broadway so long that by 1938 it was new to a whole generation of playgoers. The Shuberts, true to form, followed through by having Olsen and Johnson more or less repeat themselves by working out gags for The Streets of Paris. If the brothers accept Mr. Lee's own advice, however, they won't attempt the same thing again—at least not right away.
The Shubert cliches are like an assortment of dry flies on which they try the public periodically. They don't expect a strike every time. J.J. is strongly committed to operettas, even though, as a concession to modernity, he will accept Cole Porter lyrics and an interpolated dance by the Hartmans now and then. Lee is more susceptible than his brother to current influences, because he gets around more. He takes advice from Harry Kaufman, a blocky, Broadway sort of chap with a wide, shining face, who began in the cloakandsuit business and progressed into ticket brokerage. Kaufman, now in his middle forties, is active in the Tyson and Sullivan theaterticket agencies, but he has a desk conveniently across the hall from Mr. Lee's in the Shubert Theatre. He divides his time between the agencies and Mr. Lee. Kaufman, through his ticketselling connections, keeps his patron informed of boxoffice trends. “Mr. Shubert is the greatest affection of my life,” says Kaufman. “He built the entire midsection of town, which is a weighty accomplishment. There is a bond of affection between us, and we have certain mutual ideas which we believe to be mutually sound, and in the long run we hope it will win.” Kaufman serves as a scout for new talent. He saw some young people giving an impromptu Sundaynight revue in a camp at Bushkill, Pennsylvania, one summer and suggested to the Shuberts that it would be an inexpensive way of filling one of their theaters. Mr. Lee agreed, brought the show to New York as The Straw Hat Revue, and made a reasonably successful production of it. Kaufman also acts as a buffer between the Shuberts and stars alread
y under contract to them. Kaufman has been known to send flowers to a sulking comedienne at his own expense. He is always the first to suggest that the star or the director of a Shubert company accept a cut in pay because the business is falling off. In one busy evening, Kaufman will go to dinner at a Broadway night club, where he hears a singer do a single number; to a play, to catch the big scene, and to a prize fight, timing his arrival to coincide with the round that promises the most action. In the intervals between these high spots he will stop in backstage at a couple of Shubert shows to see how things are running.
After such an eclectic three hours, Kaufman will return to Mr. Lee's office to play pinochle with him. Toward midnight, Mr. Lee's conferences with press agents and company managers begin. He often sandwiches hands of pinochle between conferences. When he has seen the last of his visitors, he and Kaufman sometimes make excursions to new night clubs to watch performers. Mr. Lee drinks very little—perhaps one brandy in the course of an evening—but he gets a certain stimulation from seeing lots of people around him. He returns to his office at three, to look at telegrams giving the receipts at theaters on the Pacific coast, where the time is three hours behind ours. Mr. Lee and Kaufman sometimes wander about the streets even after that, with a Shubert limousine trailing a short distance behind them. They wind up at Reuben's, on Fiftyeighth Street, where Mr. Lee usually drinks three cups of black coffee before heading for bed. These nocturnal walks have long been a habit of Mr. Lee's, and Kaufman is not the first of his walking companions. In former years, it is said, Mr. Lee on these walks paced off the dimensions of sites he intended to assemble for theaters. Now, at any rate, he walks just for exercise.
It was Kaufman who introduced Vincente Minnelli, the young designer and director, to Mr. Lee. Some of Minnelli's revues at the Winter Garden, like At Home Abroad, in 1935, and The Show Is On, in 1936, called for an investment entirely alien to the conservative Shubert tradition and shocked Mr. J.J.'s sensibilities. Mr. J.J. persists in preserving costumes and props, as well as ideas, from old productions. He sometimes escorts parties of contemporary chorus girls to the Sixtyfirst Street storerooms to try on the high headdresses and sequined pseudoOrientalia of the 1913 Winter Garden show.
The Messrs. have entirely different styles of behavior at rehearsals. Mr. Lee is undemonstrative but insistent. Upon seeing a rehearsal of a play, he often commands the author to make the second act the first, the first act the last, and put the third act in the middle. This sometimes improves a play immeasurably. In theatrical matters, Mr. Lee has a tender heart. The late Sam Shipman once wrote a play about a boy brought up by his mother, whom the boy supposed to be a widow. In reality the mother was a divorcee. The brutal father returned and won the boy's sympathy. The boy deserted the mother at the end of the second act, before discovering what sort of cad the father had been. In the third act, of course, son came back to mother. Mr. Lee wouldn't stand for the boy's being away from the mother during the intermission. He made Shipman arrange to have the reunion before the second act ended. “What will I do for a third act?” Shipman asked him. “That's your business,” Mr. Lee said. “I have a lot of other things to think of.”
Mr. Lee often acts out bits in backstage corners for the benefit of his directors. “Look,” he once told one of them, “anybody can play Cyrano. See?” He turned a chair around and straddled it, arms folded on the back, legs thrust out stiffly, as if in jack boots. Then he leaped lightly to his feet, flung an imaginary cape over his left shoulder, took two or three long strides, and jumped to en garde, an imaginary rapier in his right hand. “Da dill deda,” he said, thrusting briskly at an imaginary opponent. “Deedle dee dum! That's the way Mansfield used to do it. An actor like Everett Marshall can't miss!” When Mr. Lee feels that something is lacking in a musical show, he often says, “What we need here is a song that goes like this: 'Da, dum, dedumdum—dada, dada, dedum, dedumdum.' “ The tune always turns out to be “Sing Something Simple,” but he never says so. Mr. Lee admires good actors, although he has spent the better part of his life trying to conceal that fact, because he does not want to pay them more than is necessary. Once, discussing actors, he said, “They are not an everydaygoing class of people. They are very conceited, but the intelligence is still above the conceit.” His respect for actors is tied up with his inability to picture himself as one. “Myself,” he says, “I can't make an afterdinner talk even to half a dozen people. I must have some kind of complex.”
Mr. J.J. screams at the chorus people in the shows he produces; to principals he is often polite. He has always admired tall women, and his shows are the last stronghold of the statuesque type of showgirl. No matter how engrossed he may become in the difficulties of putting on a show, he never forgets that he is first of all the owner of the theater. At the dress rehearsal just before the opening of You Never Know at the Winter Garden a couple of seasons ago, he was violently excited over the jerkiness of the production. “Such a stupid people,” he repeated mournfully as he wandered, an incongruous little figure, among the ranks of showgirls, most of them six feet tall in their high heels. The chorus people were in costume; Mr. J.J., in his wrinkled gray suit, looked like a comedian about to liven up the scene. “Walk around some more!” he shouted. “Don't I get any use out of these dresses?” All at once he stopped the rehearsal and pointed in horror to a seat in the third row on which a Shubert underling had left a wet overcoat. Then he scrambled down off the stage, grabbed the coat, and held it aloft for the assembled cast to see. “Ruining my beautiful theater!” he howled. Shows come and go, their fate a matter of almost pure chance, but theater seats are the foundation of the Shuberts' fortune.
II
Before the Shuberts rose to eminence, the American theater was governed in totalitarian fashion by an organization known as the Syndicate, headed by Marc Klaw and Abe Erlanger. In 1905, when the Shubert brothers—Lee and J.J.—first defied the Syndicate, there were 5000 legitimate theaters in 3500 American cities. The Syndicate controlled the bookings of 1250 of these theaters; its list included almost every house that a firstclass attraction could play with profit. The theaters were variously owned, but the Klaw & Erlanger booking office was the clearinghouse for shows, so Klaw & Erlanger could put any owner out of business by refusing to send him productions. They could put a producing manager out of business by denying him a route. The Shuberts fought this “malign octopus” (as the Shubert press agents usually referred to the Syndicate) until they had built up a benign octopus of their own, including nine hundred theaters that got shows through the Shubert office. Naturally, Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. feel that the theater owes them a debt of gratitude for thus destroying a monopoly, but since few of the younger men in the trade remember the Syndicate, they are likely to consider the Shuberts themselves rather tentacular. This makes for what the Shuberts consider misunderstandings. During the jihad, or holy war, between the Shuberts and Klaw & Erlanger, the moving pictures gradually destroyed the legitimate theater in the provinces. Then the depression put a terrific crimp in it in New York. The theater in recent years has become a minor form of enterprise localized on Manhattan. But even though their army has shrunk to a squad, the Shuberts comport themselves like field marshals of industry. They have never taken to moving pictures. Mr. Lee says that the cinema is “a kind of makebelieve.”
The Shubert preoccupation with the theater dates back to 1885, when Sam, the eldest brother, now dead, made the only recorded appearances of a Shubert on the American stage. He was eleven years old, and his part was a walkon in the first act of a Belasco production called May Blossoms, which at the time happened to be playing the Wieting Opera House at Syracuse. May Blossoms, a treacly thing, called for the engagement of four child actors in every town the company visited; this was much cheaper and less troublesome than taking children on the road. The company manager had picked Sam Shubert out of his classroom in the public school nearest the theater. The boy received a dollar a performance for a whole week, and the entire Shubert family, i
ncluding tenyearold Lee and fiveyearold Jake, attended every night, on passes. The boys were entranced by this factitious world, so unlike the Seventh Ward, where the Shuberts and most other poor Jews in Syracuse lived. David Shubert, the boys' father, peddled notions, underwear, and sundries among upstate farmers, riding out to the country on a train from Syracuse and then trudging from door to door with his wares on his back. May Blossoms gave Sam, Lee, and Jake their first intimation that there might be a pleasanter way of making a living. It was such a milestone in the Shuberts' lives that they later devised two operetta titles from that of the Belasco show. The operettas were Maytime and Blossom Time, both illustrious moneymakers.
Sam was a precocious, imaginative boy. Since his death in 1905, the surviving brothers have agreed to consider him the family genius, and a portrait of him hangs in the lobby or lounge of every theater they operate. Soon after his dramatic debut, Sam became program boy at the Grand Opera House, the secondbest theater in Syracuse, at $1.50 a week. Immediately his younger brothers' ambitions switched from the artistic to the commercial side of the theater, where they have been ever since. Sam was still wearing short pants when the manager of the Grand promoted him to assistant treasurer, which meant relief ticket seller. He had to stand on a box to reach the ticket window. When Sam moved over to the more elegant Wieting Opera House, at a higher salary, Lee succeeded him at the Grand. Lee, in his early teens, already had been an apprentice cigar maker and shirt cutter, and a haberdasher's clerk. The haberdasher was named Jesse Oberdorfer, and he, too, had theatrical inclinations. He was destined to be the first in a line of Shubert bankroll men which since then has included George B. Cox, a Cincinnati millionaire; Andrew Freedman, Samuel Untermyer, and Jefferson Seligman. Syracuse had four legitimate theaters in the nineties. A job in a good provincial theater was the best possible introduction to the profession, for stars spent most of their time and earned most of their money on the road. Sam and Lee Shubert met actors like Richard Mansfield, Nat Goodwin, and Joe Jefferson in Syracuse. Before Sam and Lee were twenty, they rented road companies of A Texas Steer and A Black Sheep from Charles H. Hoyt, the authormanager, guaranteeing him a fixed return for the use of the productions which he had assembled and trained. The boys managed the companies, sent them wherever they could get a profitable booking, paid the actors' salaries, and made money on the deal. The formative years of the Shuberts resembled a piece by Horatio Alger or the editors of Fortune. They ran a stock company in Syracuse, cornered all four theaters there, and added houses in nearby Buffalo, Rochester, Albany, Troy, and Utica, and in Portland, Maine. Of these cities, only Buffalo and Rochester have so much as one legitimate theater now.