The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [66]
Consistency has never hampered the Shuberts. They have had many wrangles with actors, but they were among the first managers to sign a closedshop agreement with Equity in 1924. Approximately four times a year, during the busiest period of his life, Mr. Lee used to issue a statement that the time was ripe for the emergence of American dramatists; four times a year, just as regularly, he would announce that the theater was doomed unless the playwrights agreed to reduce royalties. Whenever the owner of a string of onenight stands quit the Shuberts during the Syndicate war, either Mr. Lee or Mr. J.J. would declare that firstclass attractions could not play onenight stands profitably. When the same man returned to the Shuberts, one of the brothers would tell the press that the onenight stands made all the difference between a profitable tour and an unprofitable one. Once, when Chicago newspapers complained about the quality of the shows sent there, the Shuberts' Review announced, “Chicago does not realize she is in the position of a beggar who ought to be happy for every penny dropped in her tin cup.” A couple of years after that, Mr. J.J. said that Chicago was the best theater town in the country and that he was going to make it the dramatic center of America. Selfconsciousness is not a Shubert trait either.
III
By the midtwenties, a quarter of a century after the first of the Shubert brothers came to New York from his home in Syracuse to do battle with the forces that were monopolizing the theater, the enemy, personified by the Klaw & Erlanger Syndicate, was groggy. The Shuberts owned or had long leases on about 150 theaters, and they controlled the booking of 750 more. They didn't have enough dramatic attractions to go around, even though two thirds of the important producing managers were now booking their shows into Shubert houses. A weakness of drama on the road is that provincial audiences demand the original Broadway casts. Operettas, on the other hand, are not so dependent on individual talent and get along all right on the road without firststring stars. The operetta, therefore, became the favored art form of the Shubert Theatre Corporation. Those were the days and nights when the Shuberts' publicity office never closed. Claude Greneker, their press agent, employed a lobster shift of assistants who went to work after midnight and pounded their typewriters until the day men began to come in. Time was beginning to help the Shuberts in their fight. Marc Klaw and Abe Erlanger, the Syndicate leaders, had been mature men in 1903, when the struggle started, while the Shuberts had been prodigies in their twenties. Now, as their rivals aged, the Shuberts were just hitting their stride. Klaw retired in 1926, and Erlanger died in 1930. Erlanger at his death was regarded as a wealthy man, but his estate, as it developed, consisted of two million dollars in assets and three million dollars in liabilities.
The operetta industry reached an alltime high in the winter of 192526. During that lush season, the Messrs. Shubert had ten companies of The Student Prince on tour in North America and one in Australia. The paths of the Prince companies often crossed those of five companies of Blossom Time, another Shubert operetta, which had been produced in 1921 and was hard to kill. By 1927 there weren't so many companies of The Student Prince and Blossom