The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [6]
Rogers was born in the Brownsville region of Brooklyn, but for the last fifteen years he has made his headquarters in the Hotel Sherman, a business and theatrical hotel in the Chicago Loop. He finds people out there more compatible. Dufour, however, lives in an apartment in Forest Hills. Between fairs the partners keep in touch by air line and longdistance telephone.
Lew Dufour is tall, sallow, and bland, and wears his dark clothes with a sort of mortuary elegance. Superficially, he does not resemble Rogers. “Mr. Dufour,” a subordinate once said, “is a mental genius. Mr. Rogers is an executive genius.” When Rogers fails to overwhelm an opponent in a business argument, Dufour takes up the task and wheedles him. It is a procedure used by teams of detectives to make criminals confess. As a unit, Lew and Joe are nearly irresistible. On propositions requiring dignity and aplomb, Dufour makes the first approach. At Chicago in 1934, however, Lew failed to impress General Charles G. Dawes, who was chairman of the finance committee for the Century of Progress. The partners had had a successful first season at the Fair, but the management wished to shift their “Life” show—an earlier edition of “We Humans”—to a less favorable site for the reprise of the Fair. When Dufour failed to move Dawes, Rogers leaned forward, pincered the general with his intercepting eyes, and shouted, “You can't do this to us, General! We are good concessionaires. We made a lot of money for the Fair.” The general said, “How much did you make for yourselves?” “Oh,” said Rogers, suddenly vague, “we made lots and lots.” Rogers says he could hear the famous pipe rattling against the general's teeth from the force of the general's curiosity. “And what do you call lots of money, Mr. Rogers?” Joe's voice became a happy croon. “What I call lots of money, General, is lots and lots and lots.” General Dawes permitted them to keep their old site. Presumably he hoped Rogers might relent someday and tell him. “I just worked on his curiosity,” Joe says, “like I wanted him to come in and see a twoheaded baby.” The partners had made $111,000 on the “Life” show
A favored type of investment among world'sfair concessionaires is an aboriginal village. Eskimos, Filipinos, or Ashantis usually can be hired at extremely moderate rates to sit around in an appropriate setting and act as if they were at home. The city dweller's curiosity about exotic peoples, built up by a childhood of reading adventure books, is apparently insatiable. Providing suitable food is not such a problem as it might seem once the concessionaire has learned the fact, unreported by anthropologists, that all primitive peoples exist by preference on a diet of hamburger steak. Dufour derives from this pervading passion a theory that all races of man once inhabited a common Atlantis, but Rogers does not go so far. He just says he is glad they do not crave porterhouse. Once engaged, the aborigine must be encouraged and, if necessary, taught to perform some harmless maneuver which may be ballyhooed as a sacred tribal rite, just about to begin, folks. This is ordinarily not difficult, as the average savage seems to be a good deal of a ham at heart.
Dufour & Rogers' debut as practical ethnologists was really caused by a large captive balloon that blew away from its moorings at the Century of Progress. The balloon had been one of the sights of the midway, and its taking off left a large site vacant. So Lew and Joe, who already had a couple of other shows, leased the space for a tropical village, which they called Darkest Africa. Some of the partners' acquaintances say they opened with a cast of tribesmen from South State Street, which is in the Chicago Black Belt, but Lew insists that he came to New York to engage them all. “Naturally, there was no time to go to Africa for performers on such short notice,” he says, “but you