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Until Hellz a Poppin became a hit, producers and managers had considered this type of comedy too corny for presentday New York. “Corny” is a cultural term meaning crude, obvious, and the antithesis of what Noel Coward would do in a given situation. The corn taboo had been so fixed in Broadway minds by a succession of smart musicals, all the way from The Band Wagon through I Married an Angel, that the man who books acts for Loew's State Theatre, where there is a seventyfivecent top, scorned the Olsen and Johnson unit. The partners were playing four shows a day in Philadelphia when the Loew's booker turned thumbs down on them. They were paying all the salaries and other expenses of their unit and would have been willing to bring it into New York for a price of five thousand dollars a week, out of which they would have taken a profit of around twentyfive hundred dollars. During the Philadelphia run, Olsen went to a night club for a steak sandwich and encountered Nils T. Granlund, a New York nightclub operator who is a tenant of the Shuberts. Granlund thought the unit might have possibilities as a longer revue. He got Lee Shubert to come down from New York and look at the strange provincial charivari, and Shubert, who had several empty theaters in New York, rather dubiously agreed to back Olsen and Johnson in a fulllength piece. “If I hadn't gone out for a steak sandwich and run into Granlund, we wouldn't be in New York today,” Olsen says. “Big things always happen to us like that. We are creatures of destiny.” The Shuberts did not invest much money in the show—probably something like fifteen thousand dollars. They provided it with a collection of sets from defunct Shubert musicals such as The Show Is On and Hooray for What, a smattering of secondhand costumes from their warehouse, and exactly three new sets of dresses for the chorus girls. Olsen and Johnson could have easily financed the production themselves, but they have always been frugal. “If we had had to buy everything new, it might have cost us twentyfive thousand dollars,” Olsen says, “and that's not hay. The way it was, we figured that if the show folded in New York, we could open the unit in Baltimore the next week anyway, without having lost anything except our time.”

The curious trade prejudice against a hearty laugh almost spoiled the opening at the Fortysixth Street Theatre. The partners took especial pains to insure the success of their Broadway debut as authoractors. They had even provided a string trio to play in the men's lounge. On the old Orpheum circuit Chic Sale had been their only rival for popularity, and, like him, Olsen and Johnson have always specialized in smokingroom humor. They installed an intricate system of rubber tubing whereby stagehands could blow air under the skirts of the women customers seated in the orchestra. No detail had been overlooked, and the audience laughed incessantly for three hours. This reassured Olsen and Johnson. As they waited up to read the record of their triumph in the morning papers, they kept telling each other that New York was just a department of the sticks. After all, they reasoned, Richard Watts, Jr., of the Herald Tribune, was a native of Parkersburg, West Virginia; John Mason Brown, of the Post, hailed from OlsenandJohnsonconscious Louisville; Brooks Atkinson, of the Times, from a small place in New England; Richard Lockridge, of the Sun, from Kansas City (a great OlsenandJohnson town), and John Anderson, of the Journal & American, from some place in Florida. The critics should have felt at home at Hellz a Poppin. It turned out that no one is so bashful in the presence of the corny as a fugitive from a cornfield.

Mr. Watts, of Parkersburg, wrote, “The greater part of it depended on the mere fact of its madness and didn't succeed in being funny.” Mr. Brown, of Louisville, said, “Its lapses from taste are almost as frequent as its lapses from interest,” and the Floridian Mr. Anderson called Hellz a Poppin “steadily vulgar and anesthetic.” Hellz a Poppin seemed to