The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [68]
Such stories have never bothered the Shuberts. They have never pretended to any rich cultural background and they know that their shrewdness in affairs of the theater is often underestimated because of their lack of polish. They see business as a form of combat. Mr. Lee recently said, “I like to take a play and bet my money against it.” Money, Mr. Lee thinks, is the best measure of success in the theater. There is no doubt that the brothers, beginning at the bottom, have made more money out of the legitimate stage than any other two men who ever lived. Mr. Lee acknowledges, however, that they have lost a great deal of it in bad realestate investments and in the stock market.
When there was a European theater of consequence, the Shuberts liked to buy shows that had already succeeded abroad. They would sometimes buy by cable without having seen the script. Afterward they would Americanize their purchases by introducing James Barton into the second scene as an American sailor who had lost his way in the grand duke's palace. “The advantage of a play that you bought in Paris,” Mr. Lee says now, “was that it was usually a German play that had been translated into French, so that by the time you had it translated into English, you got the services of three great authors on one script.” He is sorry that because of the collapse of the Central European theater it is now usually necessary to start from scratch. Even CzechoSlovakia, he reminds friends, was occasionally the source of a play. “Bill Brady got one there,” he recalls, “the bug play.” By this Mr. Lee means The Insect Play, which was produced here as The World We Live In.
The Shuberts, to quote Mr. Lee again, have never been loafing boys. The brothers, as nearly as he can remember, built the Fortyfourth Street, the Lyric, the Shubert, the Booth, the Broadhurst, the Plymouth, the Morosco, the Bijou, the Ritz, the Fortyninth Street, the Nora Bayes, the Ambassador, the Forrest, the Jolson, and the Maxine Elliott theaters. They converted a horse exchange, where New Yorkers used to buy carriage horses, into the Winter Garden. The Empire is the only theater now showing legitimate plays in New York which was in business before the first Shubert came here. Shubert competitors built the rest of the local theaters, so Mr. Lee in a way feels responsible for them too. Once, riding on Fortysixth Street in his IsottaFraschini, he said, “If I hadn't built all these theaters, they would be dark today.”
The brothers made two invasions of England—the first in 1904, when they built the Waldorf Theatre in London, which they had to abandon two years later, and the second in the early twenties. They acquired six London houses on their second try, but again they lost out. London was the only city in the world that rejected The Student Prince. British critics said it was proGerman. The Messrs. Shubert also made two attempts to break into vaudeville, in 1906 and in 1921, and both were expensive failures. A kind of recurrent stubbornness is a Shubert trait. They retreat, but they come back for more. In the early thirties they tried a show called A Trip to Pressburg three times with different stars. It never got further than Pittsburgh, but the Shuberts still own it, and someday it will reappear.
The resilience of Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. is magnificently illustrated by the tangled affairs of the old Shubert Theatre Corporation, which vanished as a result of receivership proceedings in 1931. The Shuberts might have been spared this financial embarrassment if a prediction made by Mr. Lee in 1910 had come