The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [78]
Throughout the last ten or twelve years, Olsen and Johnson have managed to average forty weeks' work a year, earning about twentyfive hundred dollars a week between them. Since they have held on to a sizable share of this, both are welltodo. The Shuberts now meet all the expenses of Hellz a Poppin, and Ole and Chic together collect eighteen per cent of the gross receipts. The show is drawing around thirtyfour thousand dollars a week, so the partners split about six thousand dollars. Besides Olsen and Johnson's six thousand dollars, the show costs around ten thousand dollars a week to operate, stage hands' and electricians' salaries accounting for a good proportion of the total. This leaves a profit of almost eighteen thousand dollars a week for the producers. By risking a little of their own money, Olsen and Johnson might have kept the whole show in their hands, but Ole and Chic say they were never gamblers and profess to be well satisfied with the present arrangement.
In off hours the partners like to sit in Dinty Moore's restaurant at a table plainly visible from the street and there receive the adulation of the profession. If no actors are present, they gladly accept the adulation of the laity, for whom they write innumerable autographs. “It's the ham in us,” Olsen cheerfully remarks. On days when there is no matinee, they sometimes spend all the afternoon in Moore's, drinking coffee and devising new bits of gonk. Or they may pass the time by speaking condescendingly of the hardhearted booker at Loew's State who refused to book Hellz a Poppin, or of Mr. Watts, the supercilious critic from Parkersburg, West Virginia, who is not yet OlsenandJohnsonconscious. Johnson looks in the fulllength mirrors, picks his teeth, and spits on the floor. Olsen invariably wears a large spring of artificial flowers as a boutonniere. One of their favorite subjects of reminiscence is the offstage practical joke, a specialty of the firm, which brightened their dark years in the Rotary belt. One Christmas they sent pregnant rabbits to all the critics in San Francisco.
“No suave inflections,” Olsen says when he tells the story of the rabbits, which is usually interrupted by convulsions of laughter.
“Sure,” says the moonfaced Johnson, picking his teeth. “With us it's a belly laugh or nothing.”
• The Boy in the Pistachio Shirt •
usinessmen like Baron Axel WennerGren, the Swedish manufacturer of iceboxes and antiaircraft guns, and Bruce Barton, the advertising executive, who know Roy Wilson Howard, head man of the ScrippsHoward newspapers, think of him as primarily a Great Reporter. Howard frequently assures them that he would rather cover a good story than do anything else in the world. Most of the newspaper reporters who know Mr. Howard think of him as primarily a Great Businessman, and this misconception, as he terms it, pains him. “I'm still just a newspaper boy,” Howard democratically informed a former employee he met at the Philadelphia convention of the Republican party. He was at the moment waiting for Wendell L. Willkie, who had just been nominated, to pack a spare shirt and join him aboard the Howard yacht, the Jamaroy, for a weekend voyage of relaxation. While waiting, Howard called the exemployee's attention to his green hatband, made of the neck feathers of a rare Hawaiian bird. “You can only use six feathers from a bird, and it takes two hundred birds to make one of these bands,” he said with modest satisfaction. Abercrombie & Fitch sold a total of two or three of these bands for one hundred fifty dollars apiece.
The Jamaroy's