Author: A. J. Liebling
Category: Cook books
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Sam and Lee drafted Brother Jake into the business when he was fourteen. Sam was not content with prosperity upstate; he wanted to produce plays, and a producer had to have a theater in New York City as a show window. Then, as now, an attraction could obtain few bookings on the road unless it had had a New York run. So, in 1900, Sam Shubert went down to New York, accompanied by the faithful haberdasher Oberdorfer, who had a bank roll of some thirty thousand dollars. Sam leased the Herald Square Theatre, a small, unpretentious house just across Thirtyfifth Street from the present site of Macy's. Lee followed Sam from Syracuse, leaving Jake in charge of the theaters upstate. Sam and Lee cajoled Mansfield into opening their theater for them with his production of Julius Caesar, an event which left little profit for the brothers because Mansfield took virtually all the receipts, but which immediately gave their theater prestige. The brothers followed up by leasing two more theaters and producing Arizona, A Chinese Honeymoon, and Fantana, all highly profitable shows. Old Heidelberg, a Shubert enterprise that looked like a failure at first, became a great success when, after the show had been renamed Prince Karl, Mansfield took over the leading role. The Shuberts, like everybody else in the industry, booked through Klaw & Erlanger.
All the Shubert hits up to this point, as Sam and Lee well understood, had been achieved by sufferance of the Syndicate. Klaw & Erlanger had established their dominion over the theater industry by performing a real service. Before their advent in the late eighties, the business had been in an impossibly confused state. It was then the custom of every house manager in America to come to New York and bargain for attractions with producers, usually in saloons around Union Square. Producers often booked their shows into two theaters for the same week, so that they would be sure to find one theater available when the playing date arrived. Managers just as often booked two shows for the same week, so that they would be sure of having some sort of production in their houses. If both attractions arrived on schedule, the manager would pick the better of the two. If a show had booked two towns for the same week and both theaters were available, the producer would pick the one promising the greater profit. It was practically impossible to enforce a contract. The owner of the Opera House in Red Wing, Minnesota, for example, could not very well abandon his theater and chase out to California to sue a defaulting road company even if the troupe had any assets worth attaching. Nor could the manager of a traveling company abandon his show while he waited upon the slow processes of the law in some Iowa town where the theater owner refused to honor a contract.
The Syndicate changed all this. It offered a steady supply of shows to member theaters and a full season's booking to producers in good standing, and it was in a position to enforce its rulings in case of dispute. By the time the Shuberts arrived upon the scene, however, Klaw & Erlanger had turned their control of the industry into a tyranny. Ordinarily, producers paid the Syndicate seven and a half per cent of their gross receipts in return for bookings, but when Erlanger “asked” the producer for a higher percentage, the producer had to comply or fold up. In the same way, a theater owner who wanted a particularly strong attraction had to pay a high premium to the Klaw & Erlanger office to get it.
The Syndicate, in order to protect its supremacy, had only to see to it that no one built up a chain of theaters powerful enough to support a rival booking office. When it began to look as if the Shuberts might do just that, Erlanger tried to curb them by refusing to route their musical comedy called The Girl from Dixie unless the brothers would agree to lease no more theaters.
The youthful Shuberts interpreted the refusal as a challenge. They announced the opening of an independent circuit of theaters that would play any man's show. The public had not yet forgotten the Boxer Campaign, and the Shubert press agent, J. Frank Wilstach, revived a slogan that John Hay had made popular in those days, “The Open Door.” As a nucleus for their enterprise, the Shuberts had leases on three theaters in Manhattan and eight more upstate, and they had found a few other theater owners who were angry enough to pull out of the Syndicate with them. The brothers filled their circuit by renting vaudeville and burlesque houses in a number of towns and using them for legitimate shows. They had two principal allies among the producers in their campaign. One was Harrison Grey Fiske, the husband of Minnie Maddern Fiske. He had already offended the Syndicate, and for years his wife had been refused road bookings, although she was so great a star that she had been able to play steadily in New York. The other Shubert ally was David Belasco, who accused Abe Erlanger of muscling in for half the profits of his success The Auctioneer. The new combination wasn't much competition for the Syndicate at first, but after the Shuberts had confounded predictions by staggering through one season, they began to get more support. Any theater man could see the advantage of maintaining a competitive market.
At the beginning of each theatrical season during the great war for the theatrical Open Door, newspapers in every city in the land carried reports that the local playhouse was “going Shubert” or “staying Syndicate.” It was a question of enormous import in onetheater towns. If the house went Shubert, the town might see David Warfield, Mrs. Leslie Carter, and Mrs. Fiske. If it stayed Syndicate, the matinee girls would be permitted to ogle William Faversham and the young men would have a chance to gape at Anna Held. Within a very brief time the boys from Syracuse became national figures. As underdogs, antimonopolists, and employers of a succession of good publicity men, they had public sentiment with them. Editorial cartoonists usually drew them as three very small Semitic Davids (Jake, twentythree, was by now almost an equal partner) squaring off to a corpulent Goliath labeled “Syndicate.” To offset the Shubert good will, the Syndicate had most of the material advantages. Klaw & Erlanger had seldom built theaters, for they had been able to control enough of the houses already existing. The Shuberts had to build theaters in cities where they could not otherwise get a foothold, and they had to find financial backing for these theaters. Cox, the moneyed gentleman from Cincinnati, was one of their principal standbys in this phase of the fight. Lee Shubert has always had phenomenal success in raising money when he really needed it.
Sam Shubert was killed while trying to add a link to the chain of “opendoor” theaters. The Shuberts wanted the Duquesne, in Pittsburgh, to break the jump between Philadelphia and Chicago, in which cities they already had good houses. Sam was on his way to Pittsburgh with William Klein, who is still the Shubert lawyer, when the train they were on collided with a car full of dynamite outside Harrisburg. It was one of the worst wrecks in railroad history. Sam Shubert was so badly burned that he died two days later. For a time after this, Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. called every theater they built the Sam S. Shubert Memorial Theatre. That was the official title of the Shubert here, too, until the brothers found that the funereal connotation was bad for business. Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. have never traveled together since Sam's death. They take no chances on the extinction of the firm. If they have to go up to Boston to watch a show break in, Mr. Lee leaves New York on one train and Mr. J.J. follows him on another. After the show they return by separate trains. Each has made one or two trips by plane, but the same rule applies to air travel. They have never flown together.
Sam Shubert left such an impress on Mr. Lee that the latter has even taken over some of his brother's idiosyncrasies. One of these is his fast walk, with head thrown forward. Another is a custom of giving alms to every panhandler who accosts him. It was more than a custom with Sam; it was a compulsion. If he had no change in his pocket when approached by a beggar, he would hurry into a store to break a bill and then return to look for the man. Lee feels this compulsion too. He was walking up Broadway with a subordinate one day a year or so ago when a downandouter asked the underling for the price of a cup of coffee. “You asked the wrong man!” Mr. Lee shouted indignantly, almost pushing his employee off the sidewalk in his eagerness to get to the tramp. The Shuberts are always being approached by theatrical veterans hoping to make a touch. They are the only managers sti
ll active on Broadway whom the troupers of the period from 1900 to 1910 know personally, and both brothers are rated as generous. Their loyalty to aging chorus girls, who appear in Shubert shows year after year, has occasionally furnished firstnighters with material for humorous comment, but it has been a lifesaver for the girls.
The biliousness with which Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. regarded the world during their struggle with the Syndicate was not assuaged by the newspapers. True, the Shubert press department hornswoggled a great many favorable editorials out of provincial journalists, but it was harder going here. The Morning Telegraph, at that time the great theatrical trade paper in New York, once ran a headline asking, “Why Is Lee Shubert and Wherefore?” The Syndicate, in the beginning of the controversy, had a much larger volume of theatrical advertising to place than the Shuberts, and that, in those days, determined the Telegraph's news policy. When Sam Shubert first came to town, he had hired one of the Telegraph's critics as his subrosa publicity man. This unscrupulous fellow took Sam's money and puffed his shows. The Telegraph's subsequent reversal of policy left the Shuberts with a Continental slant on newspaper ethics. Mr. Lee ordered all Shubert advertising out of the Telegraph and kept it out for almost thirty years, although the newspaper changed hands several times in the interim. The Telegraph of that era referred to A. Toxen Worm, who had succeeded Wilstach as the Shubert press agent, as “Lee Shubert's vermiform appendix.” As a medium for rebuttal, the Shuberts founded their own weekly trade paper, the New York Review, in 1910 and kept it up until 1931. “That newspaper which is bounded on the north by a saloon, on the south by a saloon, and facing a carbarn” was one of the Review's more flattering references to the Telegraph. “The Shuberts, who evidently are trying to pile up a world's record of theatrical disaster, have added one more attraction to the long list of companies which have brought their tour to an end for lack of patronage” was a Telegraph comment on the demise of a Shubert show, and again, “This paper will never libel the Shuberts. It would be as cruel as unnecessary.”
The Telegraph took particular pleasure during the hostilities in calling Shubert shows salacious, and hinting that they should be raided. Mr. Lee was particularly sensitive on this point; he felt black despair one November night in 1911 when he heard that the patrol wagons were being backed up to the curb in front of the Maxine Elliott Theatre, a Shubert house that had been rented to George C. Tyler and the Abbey Players of Dublin. The American premiere of Synge's Playboy of the Western World was taking place there, and Mr. Lee must have suspected that the show included something like a Dance of the Seven Veils. What the trouble really was, as any historian of the theater knows, was an oldfashioned Irish riot. Irishmen here resented Synge's “slander” on an ancient race and had gone to the opening to egg the actors. Mr. Lee, who had been attending another opening, rushed down the street to the Maxine Elliott and arrived in a dead heat with a man whom he recognized as a reporter for the Times. “If I had known there was one thing offcolor about this show,” Mr. Lee shouted to the reporter, “I wouldn't have let Tyler have the house!”
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 rea
lize 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.