The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [63]
The youthful Shuberts interpreted the refusal as a challenge. They announced the opening of an independent circuit of theaters that would play any man's show. The public had not yet forgotten the Boxer Campaign, and the Shubert press agent, J. Frank Wilstach, revived a slogan that John Hay had made popular in those days, “The Open Door.” As a nucleus for their enterprise, the Shuberts had leases on three theaters in Manhattan and eight more upstate, and they had found a few other theater owners who were angry enough to pull out of the Syndicate with them. The brothers filled their circuit by renting vaudeville and burlesque houses in a number of towns and using them for legitimate shows. They had two principal allies among the producers in their campaign. One was Harrison Grey Fiske, the husband of Minnie Maddern Fiske. He had already offended the Syndicate, and for years his wife had been refused road bookings, although she was so great a star that she had been able to play steadily in New York. The other Shubert ally was David Belasco, who accused Abe Erlanger of muscling in for half the profits of his success The Auctioneer. The new combination wasn't much competition for the Syndicate at first, but after the Shuberts had confounded predictions by staggering through one season, they began to get more support. Any theater man could see the advantage of maintaining a competitive market.
At the beginning of each theatrical season during the great war for the theatrical Open Door, newspapers in every city in the land carried reports that the local playhouse was “going Shubert” or “staying Syndicate.” It was a question of enormous import in onetheater towns. If the house went Shubert, the town might see David Warfield, Mrs. Leslie Carter, and Mrs. Fiske. If it stayed Syndicate, the matinee girls would be permitted to ogle William Faversham and the young men would have a chance to gape at Anna Held. Within a very brief time the boys from Syracuse became national figures. As underdogs, antimonopolists, and employers of a succession of good publicity men, they had public sentiment with them. Editorial cartoonists usually drew them as three very small Semitic Davids (Jake, twentythree, was by now almost an equal partner) squaring off to a corpulent Goliath labeled “Syndicate.” To offset the Shubert good will, the Syndicate had most of the material advantages. Klaw & Erlanger had seldom built theaters, for they had been able to control enough of the houses already existing. The Shuberts had to build theaters in cities where they could not otherwise get a foothold, and they had to find financial backing for these theaters. Cox, the moneyed gentleman from Cincinnati, was one of their principal standbys in this phase of the fight. Lee Shubert has always had phenomenal success in raising money when he really needed it.
Sam Shubert was killed while trying to add a link to the chain of “opendoor” theaters. The Shuberts wanted the Duquesne, in Pittsburgh, to break the jump between Philadelphia and Chicago, in which cities they already had good houses. Sam was on his way to Pittsburgh with William Klein, who is still the Shubert lawyer, when the train they were on collided with a car full of dynamite outside Harrisburg. It was one of the worst wrecks in railroad history. Sam Shubert was so badly burned that he died two days later. For a time after this, Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. called every theater they built the Sam S. Shubert Memorial Theatre. That was the official title of the Shubert here, too, until the brothers found that the funereal connotation was bad for business. Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. have never traveled together since Sam's death. They take no chances on the extinction of the firm. If they have to go up to Boston to watch a show break in, Mr. Lee leaves New York