The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [64]
Sam Shubert left such an impress on Mr. Lee that the latter has even taken over some of his brother's idiosyncrasies. One of these is his fast walk, with head thrown forward. Another is a custom of giving alms to every panhandler who accosts him. It was more than a custom with Sam; it was a compulsion. If he had no change in his pocket when approached by a beggar, he would hurry into a store to break a bill and then return to look for the man. Lee feels this compulsion too. He was walking up Broadway with a subordinate one day a year or so ago when a downandouter asked the underling for the price of a cup of coffee. “You asked the wrong man!” Mr. Lee shouted indignantly, almost pushing his employee off the sidewalk in his eagerness to get to the tramp. The Shuberts are always being approached by theatrical veterans hoping to make a touch. They are the only managers still active on Broadway whom the troupers of the period from 1900 to 1910 know personally, and both brothers are rated as generous. Their loyalty to aging chorus girls, who appear in Shubert shows year after year, has occasionally furnished firstnighters with material for humorous comment, but it has been a lifesaver for the girls.
The biliousness with which Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. regarded the world during their struggle with the Syndicate was not assuaged by the newspapers. True, the Shubert press department hornswoggled a great many favorable editorials out of provincial journalists, but it was harder going here. The Morning Telegraph, at that time the great theatrical trade paper in New York, once ran a headline asking, “Why Is Lee Shubert and Wherefore?” The Syndicate, in the beginning of the controversy, had a much larger volume of theatrical advertising to place than the Shuberts, and that, in those days, determined the Telegraph's news policy. When Sam Shubert first came to town, he had hired one of the Telegraph's critics as his subrosa publicity man. This unscrupulous fellow took Sam's money and puffed his shows. The Telegraph's subsequent reversal of policy left the Shuberts with a Continental slant on newspaper ethics. Mr. Lee ordered all Shubert advertising out of the Telegraph and kept it out for almost thirty years, although the newspaper changed hands several times in the interim. The Telegraph of that era referred to A. Toxen Worm, who had succeeded Wilstach as the Shubert press agent, as “Lee Shubert's vermiform appendix.” As a medium for rebuttal, the Shuberts founded their own weekly trade paper, the New York Review, in 1910 and kept it up until 1931. “That newspaper which is bounded on the north by a saloon, on the south by a saloon, and facing a carbarn” was one of the Review's more flattering references to the Telegraph. “The Shuberts, who evidently are trying to pile up a world's record of theatrical disaster, have added one more attraction to the long list of companies which have brought their tour to an end for lack of patronage” was a Telegraph comment on the demise of a Shubert show, and again, “This paper will never libel the Shuberts. It would be as cruel as unnecessary.”
The Telegraph took particular pleasure during the hostilities in calling Shubert shows salacious, and hinting that they should be raided. Mr. Lee was particularly sensitive on this point; he felt black despair one November night in 1911 when he heard that the patrol wagons were being backed up to the curb in front of the Maxine Elliott Theatre, a Shubert house that had been rented to George C. Tyler and the Abbey Players of Dublin. The American premiere of Synge's Playboy of the Western World was taking place there, and Mr. Lee must have suspected that the show included something like a Dance of the Seven Veils. What the trouble really was, as any historian of the theater knows, was an oldfashioned Irish riot. Irishmen here resented Synge's “slander” on an