The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [62]
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