The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [65]
Mr. Lee concedes grudgingly that newspapermen today are probably honest, but he cannot for the life of him see why a hundreddollaraweek employee of a publisher should be allowed to impair a Shubert investment of fifty thousand dollars in a show. This does not prevent him from exploiting to the full any favorable reviews that accrue in the course of a season. He feels newspaper reviewers are naturally perverse, and admiration is wrung from them only by the supreme artistry of a particularly great production.
The Shuberts' feeling against the critics came to a head in 1915, when the brothers ordered the doormen of their theaters to bar Alexander Woollcott, the reviewer for the Times. Woollcott, then twentyeight, had said about a farce called Taking Chances, “It is not vastly amusing.” To the Shuberts the remark was evidence of violent animosity. They ordered the Times to send another reviewer to their attractions. The Times replied by throwing out all Shubert ads and Woollcott, backed by his bosses, applied to the United States District Court for an injunction restraining the Shuberts. He said he was being prevented from earning his livelihood as a critic. It was a glorious day for William Klein, the Shubert lawyer, who filed a brief listing all Woollcott's unfavorable criticisms of Shubert shows, with dissenting reviews by Woollcott's colleagues. Woollcott filed an equally long brief with concurrent opinions by the colleagues. The court ruled, to the astonishment of everybody, that the critic's fairness had nothing to do with the case; if the Shuberts wished to bar a man from their property, they had a right to do so. Admission to a place of amusement, the court found, is not a civic right but a license granted by the owner and revocable upon refund of the admission price. on the basis of this decision, the one sort of critic a theater may not bar is a Negro, because when a Negro is refused admittance there is a presumption that he has been so treated on account of race or color and he can sue the management for damages. Woollcott was white. Always realistic, the Shuberts soon made friends with Woollcott and the Times, which they had found the best medium for theatrical advertising.
A dozen years later, the Messrs. Lee and J.J. barred Walter Winchell, then dramatic reviewer for the Graphic, for writing “flip reviews.” Presently Winchell began to write a Broadway column. Mr. Lee feels that Winchell's promotion was the result of their row and often reminds him that he should feel grateful. Three years ago, Winchell, by his ecstatic plugging of Hellz a Poppin, a Shubert enterprise, counteracted the almost unanimous scolding which the other daily reviewers gave the show and had a good deal to do with turning it into the hit it is. Mr. Lee refused to be inordinately thankful. “Winchell has roasted some very good shows,” he said.
The Shubert relations with actors, as with reporters, have been subject to frequent emotional disturbance. “The actor is a person so naturally conceited as to become unconsciously ungrateful,” Lee once pronounced officially. “In most cases what passes for art is unmitigated selfassurance. It is a difficult thing to explain briefly how much the actor owes to the manager.” It is hard to reconcile this low estimate of the actors' art with what the Shuberts said for the record about Joe Smith and Charles Dale of the Avon Comedy Four, who tried to break a contract with them. Attorney Klein's brief stated, “Defendants are novel, unique, and extraordinary. At every appearance they are received with long, loud, and practically continuous applause.” The court ruled that Smith and Dale were irreplaceable. The Shuberts won a case on similar