The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [60]
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