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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 already 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