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By Root 525 0

specifically obligate the Shuberts to provide drinking cups. Harris wrote an indignant letter to Lee Shubert, who had gone to considerable effort to get You Can't Take It with You, a prospective hit, into a Shubert house. He reprimanded his underling for sending the bill. “Before doing a thing like that,” Mr. Lee said, “you should consult me!” Of a piece with this story is the one about Noel Coward. He was playing in Point Valaine at the Barrymore Theatre, and asked to have the paint in his dressing room freshened up. He got a bill for seven dollars for the painting job, again apparently from an auditor drunk with power. Coward vowed never to play another Shubert theater. Even among men who dislike Mr. Lee, few believe him guilty of these small, miserly touches. They are not in his style. “I paid Sarah Bernhardt eighteen hundred dollars a night,” Lee says. “Do you think I need a couple of dollars?” When he is particularly vexed, he sometimes bursts into tears. “How could you do this to me?” he will ask the person who has displeased him. “I would rather have given you fifty thousand dollars.”

Despite such demonstrations, welltrained Shubert subordinates continue at every opportunity to save money for their bosses. There is an interlude in Hellz a Poppin, a show which will probably earn over a million dollars for the Shuberts, in which all the lights go out while members of the cast pepper the audience with dried beans. Olsen and Johnson, the stars of the show, introduced this subtle bit of business long ago, when they were managing their own company in vaudeville. From the beginning, Olsen and Johnson bean throwers had used large paper cups holding half a pint of beans. Shortly after the show opened in New York the comics were approached by the company manager. “If we used ordinary drinking cups to throw the beans out of,” he said, “we would get the cups cheaper, because we buy them in such large quantities for the theaters. Also, with the smaller cups we would use less beans. Altogether, I figure, we would save at least a dollar a week.”

• No Suave Inflections •

n the day that Hellz a Poppin, the refined revue which began its run at the Fortysixth Street Theatre, was scheduled to move to the larger Winter Garden, Ole Olsen and his partner, Chic Johnson, loitered sadly in front of the Fulton Theatre. The Fulton is also on Fortysixth Street, and Oscar Wilde was playing there that season. “It will be a terrible thing for that show when we move,” Olsen said with a wave of his hand. “They been living on our overflow.” Johnson nodded in agreement. Both men were quite serious. This overweening modesty has carried Ole and Chic through twentyfour seasons of show business—as entertainers in a Chicago rathskeller, as a twoact on the Pantages and Orpheum time in vaudeville, and latterly as the proprietors of a “unit show” which has toured the country every year as regularly as Uncle Tom's Cabin used to in the eighteeneighties. Vaudeville has been dead for a decade, but Olsen, the thin partner, and Johnson, the fat one, have never known enough to lie down.

An Olsen and Johnson unit show used to carry about forty people, including musicians and a line of twelve girls. There was always a quartet, members of which doubled in bits of slapstick; there were always a couple of specialty acts, and there were always Olsen and Johnson themselves, working like mad through the duration of the piece, just as they do now in Hellz a Poppin. A unit ran seventy minutes, approximately half the length of a musical comedy, and there was no intermission. Olsen and Johnson and their assistants in the unit would play four or five shows a day, depending on business in the movie palaces where they were booked. When business was good, the house manager would ask the partners to speed up their show so that he could get more customers in and out of the seats. Olsen and Johnson would then rush the performance through in sixty minutes. When the unit was teamed with an unusually short feature picture, the partners would sometimes be asked to extend their