The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [67]
The manufacture of operetta companies for the road became a mechanical process with the Shuberts, like making new prints from the negative of a moving picture. Operettas had the advantage of sound effects, which the movies of 1925 hadn't. A man named Jack C. Huffman, who, before he retired in 1929, was the Shuberts' favorite director, staged the No. 1 productions. Two subordinate directors rehearsed the road companies, retaining all Huffman's stage business. The road units went out at intervals of about two weeks. It was customary to give each Student Prince cast a single breakin performance at the Jolson Theatre, where the No. 1 company played. No audience ever objected to the substitution, if any even noticed it. This gave the road companies selfassurance and permitted them to be billed as coming “direct from Broadway.” Each Student Prince unit required forty male and twentyfour female choristers. Blossom Time and My Maryland called for less choral singing but increased the strain on the supply of prima donnas, ingenues, and presentable male singing leads. The Shuberts' musicalcasting director, a motherly little man named Romayne Simmons, combed the chorus of the Metropolitan and the glee clubs of every police department in the land for recruits. Fortunately, Simmons says, the costumes worn by ladies in the earlynineteenthcentury and Civil War eras, with which the operettas were respectively concerned, covered the figure from neck to ankle, so that the Shuberts did not have to worry much about the figures of the singing women they drafted. Friends at the Met sent Simmons young people who had tried out there but whose voices were not quite good enough for grand opera. There were even sinister rumors of singers waking up on the train to Toronto with a No. 5 company when the last thing they remembered was taking a drink with a Shubert representative at Hughie McLaughlin's bar on Fortyfifth Street.
It was during the time when Lee and his brother Jake, who now prefers to be known as J.J., were the most important men in the American theater that a type of humor classified as the “Shubert story” attained its vogue in the way that similar anecdotes have since automatically become part of the life and works of Samuel Goldwyn. There are three possibilities about the origin of any Shubert story. The incident may have involved a Shubert; it may have involved a less widely known producer and been credited to the Shuberts to make it sound funnier; and it may have been invented out of whole cloth at the bar of the Players Club or some less exclusive loitering place of actors.
One of the favorites is the story of the actor walking up Broadway, shaking his head and repeating aloud, “The rat!” Another actor stopped him and said, “So is his brother Jake!” A subtler variant concerns the actor at the Players who was hanging over the bar and ranting about the Shuberts when a confrere interrupted him. “They're not so bad,” the second actor said. “No?” said the first actor. “Then why do they call them Shuberts?” A bit of counterpoint to this is the true anecdote about the Shubert press agent who warned Mr. Lee that a certain interviewer was inclined to be tart. “What can he possibly think of bad to say about me?” Mr. Lee asked earnestly.
Concerning the Shubert appreciation of the arts, there is the story of how Mr. J.J. attended a rehearsal of a musical show and thought the orchestra played too loudly. “Very softly!” he told the violins. “Play only on one string!” The quotation is accurate, but the attribution is wrong. It was Erlanger who said it at one of his rehearsals. On the same pattern is the tale of an actor in a Shubert drama who read a line beginning, “I am Omar Khayyam.” “You don't know anything,” Mr. Lee is supposed to have told him. “You should say, 'I am