The Telephone Booth Indian (22 page)

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 embarrass the boys like a visit from a hometown cousin, and, among the Manhattan newspaper critics, only the native and uninhibited Walter Winchell dared to risk an outright plug for the show. Winchell plugged it so hard and so often that a rumor started that he owned the production. He didn't, of course, but when the show
became a hit he began to think of himself as a major prophet. Olsen and Johnson are abjectly grateful, but it is probable that
Hellz a Poppin's
success helped Winchell as much as Winchell helped
Hellz a Poppin.

Life began for John Sigvard Olsen and for Harold Ogden Johnson when they met in the professional department of a music publisher's office in Chicago in 1914. They had existed, after a fashion, as individuals, but neither had as yet found his groove. Olsen and Johnson had come to the publisher's office in search of music for their respective acts. Olsen was with the College Four, a quartet of musicmaking comedians who played beer halls and rathskellers. He had been graduated from Northwestern, at Evanston, Illinois, in 1912 and was the only member of the College Four who had even been near a college. Ole played the violin, sang with illustrated slides, and did a bit of ventriloquism as his contribution to the act. Johnson was primarily a ragtime piano player, but he had a funny face. He was doing a twoact in smalltime vaudeville with a girl named Ruby Wallace. Both the boys had had serious musical ambitions. Olsen's pattern, in his boyhood days in Peru (pronounced Peeru), Indiana, had been Jan Kubelik, the Czech violinist. Johnson had gone out into the world from Englewood, Illinois, to eclipse Paderewski. Olsen's parents were born in Norway, Johnson's in Sweden. Chic and Ole immediately saw each other as great men. “I knew as soon as I saw him that Ole was a genius,” Johnson, the less articulate, says today. “He wore high yellow bulldog shoes that buttoned up the sides, and he was the first man I ever heard imitate a busy signal on the telephone. I knew I had to have him as a partner.” Olsen experienced a similar recognition of destiny. “Chic had the most powerful right hand I ever heard on a piano,” he says reverently. They could not sever their old associations
right away, but they played a few dates together at the North American Cafe on State Street—violin, piano, ventriloquism, and harmony. They played together the following season and got a booking on the Pantages time. History does not record what became of Ruby Wallace or of Ole's three associates of the College Four.

Pantages shows were booked intact, a combination of five acts traveling together all season. Two of the four acts that traveled with Olsen and Johnson in their first year together were Victor Moore and Emma Littlefield, and William Gaxton and Anna Laughlin. A vaudeville act in those days grew gradually, the way a folk play or a legend does; it was not a static thing, like a play that a man writes on a typewriter. After the manner of a human body, it discarded dead cells and built up new ones. The more it was apparently the same thing, the more it changed. An act started with half a dozen gags; at the end of the first season, a couple of them might be dropped in favor of some experimental material. Some acts, while retaining their basic characters, changed all their material in the course of a few years. In others, one particularly strong comic bit would stay in for twenty or thirty years and become a kind of trademark. Olsen and Johnson still do a ventriloquist bit that was in their first act in vaudeville—the interlude in which Johnson sits on Olsen's knee. They dropped it for about fifteen years, then picked it up when Charlie McCarthy brought ventriloquism back. In their first act on the Pantages time, the curtain rose with Johnson seated at the piano, on which there was a telephone. The telephone rang, and Johnson, answering it, said, “Mr. Olsen? Is there a Mr. Olsen in the house?” Olsen entered and picked up the telephone. When he picked it up, the cord dangled free, and the audience could see that it was not connected. That was a sure laugh. Olsen sang
into the telephone, “Hello, Frisco, Hello,” with Johnson pounding the piano. Then Ole pretended to talk to someone on the telephone, producing the replies by ventriloquism. The bit included his immortal imitation of a busy signal. Olsen and Johnson got two hundred fifty dollars a week during their first season and then were booked on the Orpheum time, a more important circuit. The Orpheum was the Western division of the KeithOrpheum system, the Big League of vaudeville, and their joint salary rose until it hit twentyfive hundred dollars. Orpheum acts that wanted to come East for the first time had to accept a cut in salary until they made themselves drawing cards here. The same thing was true of Eastern acts wishing to establish themselves in the West. So Olsen and Johnson stayed west of Chicago most of the time. Occasionally they accepted temporary cuts just for the glory of playing the Palace, but they never felt sure of themselves in New York. On one of their last Palace engagements, they brought along a 1912 Hupmobile with a Negro chauffeur. They would drive from the Palace to the Hotel Astor to buy a couple of cigars, and every time they got out of the old car the chauffeur would run before them and lay a ragged red Turkey carpet across the pavement for them to walk on. The Palace
cognoscenti
remained unimpressed by these high jinks, preferring the subtler comic style of entertainers like Frank Fay and Bea Lillie. When the great circuits cracked up and Olsen and Johnson had to take to the road at the head of their own units, they were compelled to widen their territory. Movie houses that will gamble on a stage show nowadays are sometimes far apart. Running out of big towns to play, Olsen and Johnson once tackled the onenight stands of the South, playing sixtyfive nights, as Olsen elegantly expresses it, “in cow barns and illuminated outhouses.” They made money. On a similar divagation from the beaten track, they acquired the title for their present show. The beaten track, for
Olsen and Johnson, includes Phoenix, Arizona, and while they were playing there in the fall of 1937, they were waited on by a delegation from Buckeye, Arizona, which is far afield, even for them. The delegation sought successfully to engage their unit as the chief feature of the annual Buckeye Cotton Carnival. This sagebrush Mardi Gras is always called “Helzapoppin,” with one “l.” The partners adopted the name of the Arizona festival for their 1938 unit, but they put a second “l” into it.

Offstage, Olsen and Johnson are serious types, resembling the European circus performers who reserve their eccentricities for the ring and remain solid
petits bourgeois
outside. The partners save their money; they rarely drink; they are good family men. They are in the European tradition, too, in that they make their enterprises a kind of family affair. Olsen has been married for many years and has a son, John Charles Olsen. He is a lank youth with cavernous cheeks and sad eyes, and he is quite the busiest stooge in the show. He acts as his father's dresser between his own cues. John Charles went to Ohio State and the University of Southern California, his father says, “in order to wind up as a shot offstage.” He fires at least fifty rounds of pistol ammunition during the evening. Chic's wife, Mrs. Catherine Johnson, is the apparently suburban woman who wanders in the aisles of the Winter Garden during the show, yelling, “Oscar!” The Johnson were married twentyone years ago and have a daughter who is an ingenue in Hollywood. Mrs. Johnson used to play in stock in St. Louis, and her husband says she can yell “Oscar!” better than any woman they ever tried in the role. The inspiration for the Oscar gag was a woman Johnson saw five years ago wandering up and down the aisles at a boxing match in Hollywood looking for her husband and getting in the fans' line of vision. Olsen has a home at Brentwood, California, near Hollywood, and another at Malverne, Long Island. He bought the Malverne
house sixteen years ago, and it comes in handy now that he is working in the East. He lives there and commutes to the Winter Garden. Johnson has a house at Santa Monica, California, and a farm at Libertyville, Illinois, which he uses mostly for shooting. He likes to hunt and fish; he also likes to talk about his health and is addicted to chiropractors. “My health comes first,” he often says. He has never missed a show on account of illness. In town, the Johnsons live at 25 Central Park West, an apartment house largely populated by successful actors.

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.”

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 fantail was draped in red, white, and blue for the Willkie cruise, and Mrs. Howard, a plump, pleasant woman,
who looks a little like the first Mrs. Jimmy Walker, wore seagoing togs of the same colors. Howard stuck to an ensemble of bright green suit, shirt, tie, and hatband. He adopted loud clothes as a trademark when he first went to work nearly forty years ago, believing that they would prevent superiors from forgetting him. The clothes serve no practical purpose now, since he has no superiors, but they have become a habit. Barton, an old friend, explains them by saying, “When a product is going well, you don't change the package.” Soon after Willkie arrived on the
Jamaroy
, newspapermen who came aboard with him to say goodby discovered that Helen Worden, a reporter on Howard's
WorldTelegram
, was on the yacht as a guest. Fearing that Miss Worden might write a series of exclusive feature articles, possibly entitled “Wind, Waves, and Willkie,” the other reporters kept complaining to the candidate until he gave in and ungallantly asked Howard to order her ashore, which the publisher did. Howard thought of this as one more instance of the unjust suspicion with which other journalists sometimes regard him. He is extremely sensitive.