The Telephone Booth Indian (20 page)

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 true. In that year he said he did not believe the shares of any theater corporation would ever be listed on the Stock Exchange. Times and the Shuberts' minds changed, and in 1924 the brothers organized the Shubert Theatre Corporation, with 210,000 shares of common stock. This was duly listed on the Exchange, and during the first five years the corporation consistently reported earnings of over one million dollars. In organizing this enterprise, the Shuberts turned over to it many of their theaters but withheld certain valuable properties, which included the Winter Garden, Shubert, Broadhurst, Booth, Plymouth, Cort, and Daly theaters as well as the Sardi Building and considerable other nontheatrical real estate. They explained that they had partners in these holdings who were opposed to entering the corporation. The brothers still own or have long leases on these personally held properties, which never became involved in the ups and downs of the corporation.

In 1933, two years after the receivership, Mr. Lee, with his brother as partner, bought in all the assets of the defunct corporation for four hundred thousand dollars, a price which barely covered the costs of the receivership. The creditors were glad to receive even that small amount, however. They had discovered that the leasehold on a theater is practically worthless in the eyes of bankers, who know neither how to produce a play nor how to put such a property to any other profitable use. The Shuberts lumped together all that could be salvaged from the Shubert Theatre Corporation in a new company called the Select Theatres Corporation. They kept fifty per cent of the stock of the new organization for themselves and distributed the rest among those who had held stock in the old corporation. The Select stock never has paid dividends, either to the Shuberts or to anybody else.
Through Select, the brothers maintain their control over a large number of theaters, and this protects their strategic position in the industry. Among the theaters now owned by Select are the Barrymore, Ambassador, Hudson, Maxine Elliott, Fortysixth Street, Golden, Longacre, Imperial, Morosco, and Majestic. Lee is president of Select, and J.J. is general manager. The overhead costs of all Shubert enterprises, including the salaries of Lee and J.J., are charged to Select and the Shubert personal holdings; each Shubert production is a new corporation in which Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. usually own all the stock. The precise financial status of the Messrs. is one of the thousand and one topics of idle speculation in Broadway taverns. Recently, from Mr. William Klein, who has been their attorney for thirtyseven years, came the nearest thing to an official statement yet heard on the subject. “Neither of the Messrs. Shubert,” he said, rubbing his hands together vigorously, “will ever be buried in potter's field.”

The brothers have great confidence in each other's integrity; one never questions the other's drafts on the joint Shubert cash account. On the other hand, they are seldom in agreement about business policies and twice a year they meet in Mr. J.J.'s apartment atop the Sardi Building for a formal dinner and argument. They are attended by attorneys on these occasions. During the rest of the year they lead separate social existences. Mr. J.J. lives in his apartment alone except for a cook and maid, and he seldom goes out at night. The living room, which runs the whole width of the building, is adorned with lighting fixtures from the old Hotel Knickerbocker and with a great deal of Louis XIV furniture. All of the furniture, he likes to assure visitors, was bought especially for the apartment—none of the pieces are leftovers from shows. At the west end of the room there is a wroughtiron door from a Venetian palace, on which the most noticeable adornment is a female figure with six breasts. The door weighs
three and a half tons. The space behind one of the diningroom walls is hollow and filled with a large supply of liquor which Mr. J.J. acquired at reduced prices during prohibition and which he has as yet barely sampled. He isn't much of a drinker, but he never could resist a bargain. The dining room has Syrian furniture inlaid with motherofpearl and ivory, and on a terrace in front of the living room there is a fountain from the Knickerbocker lobby. Despite these and other attractions of his apartment, Mr. J.J., when he's at home in the winter, spends most of his time in the bathroom, reading in an armchair which he has installed there. This is because the bathroom is the only comfortably warm room in the place. The heat in the Sardi Building, above the first floor, is turned off at seven o'clock in the evening and all day on Sunday. Since it is impossible to warm the apartment on the top floor without heating the whole building, Mr. J.J. retires to the bathroom, which he has fitted up with an elaborate battery of electric heaters. He does all his playreading there. When he occasionally goes out, it is usually to Lindy's for a cup of coffee at about midnight. He also likes to sit through double features at fourthrun movie houses. Mr. J.J. prefers to lunch in his apartment, but when he has to talk business with someone at noon, he eats with the person at Sardi's, on the first floor of his residence. Vincent Sardi, the proprietor, used to be a captain of waiters at the Little Club, a night place that the Shuberts owned many years ago. He is a good tenant now, and the Shuberts always believe in patronizing people who do business with them.

Mr. Lee almost invariably lunches at Sardi's. Actors who want him to notice them eat there too. Lee often convinces people who work for him that they also should live in the Century Apartments, where he lives and in which the brothers have an interest.
Hellz a Poppin
had hardly become a hit when Mr. Lee induced
Chic Johnson, one of its stars, to take an apartment in the Century. Both the Messrs. Shubert like to say that they “never learned to play—never had time,” but Mr. Lee at least gets about a good deal. He says he does so to maintain contacts. “Maybe I would like to play,” he says plaintively, “but there is no one around I care to play with.”

Mr. Lee's office in the Shubert Theatre Building is in a turret and therefore circular—not more than twelve feet in diameter. Into it is squeezed the desk he has used ever since he came to New York, a chair, a sofa, a gilt statue of a nymph and faun, and an autographed photograph of Colonel Lindbergh. A short passageway leads from Mr. Lee's office to that of his secretary, Jack Morris, which in turn opens into the waiting room, a bleak place with Frenchgray furniture grouped around a snake plant, and two unchanging, disregarded signs—“No Smoking” and “No Casting until August.” The gray chairs usually are occupied by a queue of petitioners waiting to see Mr. Lee. It is a point of pride with him that he never refuses to see anybody who is willing to wait a few hours. The passageway between Mr. Lee's office and his secretary's has an extra door leading directly into the waiting room, but only the experienced understand this door's significance. When Mr. Lee is ready to grant an audience, he pops out at the Morris end of the passageway and beckons to the man who has advanced to the head of the queue. This hopeful comes forward, thinking that Mr. Lee is going to conduct him into his private office. Mr. Lee takes him by the arm, leads him into the passageway, says, “I'm sorry, I can't do anything now,” and steers him out through the extra door and into the waiting room again. This maneuver is known in the trade as the Shubert brushoff.

Nothing confuses Mr. Lee more than to be caught without anything to do. “It just happens you catch me at a time when
everything is very quiet,” he will apologize, scratching his head energetically with a paper cutter. When his embarrassment becomes extreme, he scratches himself under the armpits and behind the ears. “You should have seen it yesterday. I didn't have a minute to myself.” On summer afternoons when there are only a few persons waiting to see him, he has been known to sneak out of his office, go downstairs to his limousine, and so off to the baseball game, returning when a queue of more flattering length has formed. “Business won't wait,” he says when reproached for spending most of his time in the vicinity of Shubert Alley even during the dog days. During intervals of quiet, Mr. Lee often plays rummy with Peters, his valet. If Harry Kaufman, the ticket broker upon whom Mr. Lee relies for companionship as much as for advice, is available, they change the game to threehanded pinochle. Peters reads Mr. Lee's personal correspondence as a matter of duty and answers it. Mr. J.J. sometimes refers to Peters as “the Crown Prince.”

Mr. Lee's insistence upon running all the Shubert theaters himself, even down to the smallest detail, is a carryover from a period when theater treasurers and house managers consistently robbed their employers. Larceny was considered a perquisite of their jobs. The house manager would issue “complimentaries,” and the treasurer would sell them. It was the Shuberts who devised the present method of accounting for tickets. Under this system, there are separate racks for unsold tickets, for the stubs of tickets that have been paid for—known in the trade as “the hardwood”—and for stubs of complimentaries, or “deadwood.” Every seat in the house must be accounted for in one or another of the racks; by deducting unsold seats and deadwood from the house capacity, the theater owner knows exactly what should be in the cash drawer. The only subordinate who can issue complimentaries in the whole Shubert organization here is the publicity
chief, Greneker, and he is exceedingly frugal with them. Most passes to Shubert shows are signed by Mr. Lee himself. Many Shubert employees have been with the elderly Syracuse boys for a long time. Mr. Lee has faith in them but can't get over his distrustful nature. Some years ago, he recalls, he was standing in Shubert Alley when a Negro walked up carrying a pair of shoes. The Negro asked him for a wardrobe woman who worked for the Shuberts. The Negro complained that the woman had sold him the shoes, which he was returning because they were misfits. They were Shubert shoes. The incident proved to Mr. Lee that a man of property must be on the alert all the time.

Just as the Shubert empire has two chiefs, so it has two heirs apparent. One is Mr. J.J.'s son, John, who, the father likes to remind Lee, is “the only directline Shubert of his generation.” On Mr. Lee's side of the firm, the young hope is Milton Shubert. Milton, however, is not “direct line.” He is a nephew who adopted the avuncular name for business reasons, and he is the only member of the family who has shown any interest in moving pictures. He used to be head of the Shubert dramatic department in New York, but now spends most of his time in Hollywood, where he is helpful in directing Shubert affairs on the West Coast. Milton's mother was a sister of Mr. Lee's and Mr. J.J.'s; his father was named Isaacs. John, who is very tall for a Shubert—five feet ten inches—is thirtyone and lives at the Hotel Astor in a suite overlooking Shubert Alley. Milton, short and small, is fortytwo; he stays at hotels when he is in New York. John is supposed to take charge of Shubert interests in New York when both Mr. Lee and Mr. J.J. are out of town, but this has happened only once since John left the University of Pennsylvania twelve years ago. His regency lasted for two weeks. At least twenty other Shubert relatives, of various degrees of consanguinity, are employed in lesser jobs in the organization.

Because of their fear of assuming responsibility, Shubert employees in general are the most literalminded attaches of the American theater. Their attitude has given rise to some famous yarns of niggardliness. When the cast of
You Can't Take It with You
was rehearsing in the Booth Theatre, the supply of drinking cups at the house's water cooler gave out, and Sam Harris, producer of the play, called for more. He got them, with a bill for $1.15. A representative of the Shubert auditing department pointed out that the contract of rental did not 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.”