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By Root 503 0

floor of the building has at least one bookmaker, who hangs in the hall. “In winter, the bookmakers complain because we don't heat the halls better,” the beleaguered Morty Ormont says. A dollar is the standard Jollity Building wager. The accepted method of assembling it is to drop in on an acquaintance and say, “I got a tip on a horse, but I'm short a quarter.” One repeats this operation until one has accumulated four quarters. It sometimes takes a long time, but there is always an oversupply of that. This system reduces the risk of betting to a minimum. On the infrequent occasions when some momentarily prosperous tenant bets important money on a race—say, five dollars—two or three of the hall bookmakers get together and divide up the hazard.

A stranger would be puzzled by some of the greetings exchanged by performers wandering between agents' offices. “Why, Zasu Pitts!” a gaunt young man wearing suede shoes and an overcoat of mattress filling will shout at a girl younger, twenty pounds heavier, and obviously poorer than Miss Pitts, whom she doesn't even faintly resemble. “Clark Gable!” the girl will shout, throwing her arms around him. “I haven't seen you since I thumbed a ride from that crumb in Anniston, Alabama!” The man and woman are not talking this way for a gag; they are survivors of a Hollywooddouble troupe, a form of theatrical enterprise that has replaced the Uncle Tom show in outoftheway areas of the United States. In a double troupe, which usually travels in a large, overcrowded old automobile, all the members are supposed to be able to imitate Hollywood stars. They play in movingpicture theaters or grange halls, usually for a percentage of the receipts. Members of these companies seldom know each other's real names, even when they have heard them. In recounting their wanderings, they are likely to say, “Mae West was driving, see, and she goes to sleep. And only Ray Bolger seen the truck coming and grabbed the wheel, we would of all landed in some brokendown hospital in Henderson, North Carolina.” The Hollywood doubles earn less and eat worse than the barnstormers of fifty years ago, but they have the pleasure of identifying themselves with the extremely wealthy. Some players are able to impersonate two or even three Hollywood stars to the complete satisfaction of an audience in Carbondale, Illinois. Sleeping on dressing tables, the doubles dream that they are lolling at Palm Springs, like in the Daily Mirror. A boy who impersonates Ned Sparks and Jimmy Durante once told Jerry Rex that he was downhearted only once in his mimetic career. That was at a county fair in Pennsylvania where some doubles were performing on an openair stage under a hot sun. “I give them everything I had,” the boy said, “and them appleknockers just sat there from sorrow. They never even heard of Jimmy Durante or Ned Sparks. They broke my heart.”

Summer, which used to be the dead season for entertainers, is now the period during which they eat most frequently. There are several rehearsal rooms in the Jollity Building, and throughout June they are full of uproar as the performers prepare for their migration to the Catskill Mountains resorts. “Up there the kids work for pot cheese,” Jerry Rex says. “Here they don't even make themselves a chive.” In the Catskills, a personable young man who can act as master of ceremonies, tell funny stories, give lessons in the conga, perform card tricks, direct amateur theatricals, do a screamingly funny eccentric dance, and impersonate stars of screen and radio can earn twentyfive dollars a week and room and board for ten consecutive weeks, provided he has a sensational singing voice. Performers at various hotels add to their incomes by uniting for occasional benefit shows, the beneficiary always being the entertainer at the hotel where the show is staged. “If a guy does not shoot crap with the guests,” Jerry Rex says, “he has a chance to save himself a buck.” Returning from the mountains after Labor Day, bloated with pot cheese, the actor sometimes survives until October, Jerry says, before developing