Razzle Dazzle Page 4
Belasco was obsessed with realism on stage. One of his plays was set in a boarding house, so he scoured New York for an actual boarding house, bought it, took it apart, and reassembled it on stage. To get the type of scream he wanted from a leading lady, he snuck up behind her at rehearsal and stuck her with a hatpin. When a show wasn’t going well, he’d take out his pocket watch, throw it on the stage, and stamp it to bits in front of the cast. He had a trunk full of pocket watches for just such a display of temper.
But his greatest eccentricity was his dress. He strutted around Broadway in priestly garb, right down to the white collar and rosary beads. No one knew why. Some said that as a teenager he contemplated entering a monastery. Others said he once played a priest and, believing it to have been his finest performance, decided to spend the rest of his life in costume. Cynics said he was an egomaniac who just wanted to draw attention to himself. Another of Belasco’s nicknames was the “Bishop of Broadway.”
Which is not to say he practiced celibacy. He bedded most of his leading ladies. He enticed them to his penthouse above the theater, which was designed like a gothic cathedral, complete with crosses, gargoyles, and a confessional in the front hall. The actress would have to “confess” her sins, removing an article of clothing for each offense.
Belasco was still an up-and-comer when he arrived in Syracuse with a play called May Blossoms. He needed four local boys to fill out the cast. He selected three from a nearby elementary school and found the fourth, little Sam Shubert, working at the Wieting. Sam fell under Belasco’s spell. The acting bug never bit Sam, but watching the charismatic Belasco at work, the producing bug did. With Belasco’s encouragement, Sam went around to some rich Jewish businessmen in Syracuse and raised the money for his very first production, a farce from New York called A Texas Steer by Charles Hoyt. Sam produced it at the Wieting and then toured it in upstate New York and New England.
He had the bit in his mouth now. He brought J. J. to the Wieting as an assistant manager. He produced a couple of long-forgotten plays by Hoyt, but realized that a producer had only so much power. A producer was at the mercy of theater owners. They decided what to book and what to evict. Real estate. That’s where the authority—and the money—were. So Sam, with money from those Jewish merchants who had invested in his first play, took a lease on the Bastable, a second-class theater in Syracuse. He fixed it up and trumpeted his productions as “direct from New York.” The Shubert appetite for theaters was born, and a year later, 1899, he got control of the Grand Opera House, where he’d begun his career twelve years earlier.
Sam installed Lee and J. J. at the Bastable and the Grand, and then, with the backing of many of his original investors in A Texas Steer, snapped up second-rate theaters in Rochester, Utica, Troy, and Albany.
The theaters were second-rate—that is, small and shabby—because the large, sparkling playhouses were already under the control of the Syndicate.
One of the most powerful monopolies in the history of show business, the Syndicate, at the turn of the century, controlled almost every major theater in every major city across the country. It was formed over lunch in 1896 at the Holland House in New York. Five of the most powerful managers in the theater—Abe Erlanger, Charles Frohman, Al Hayman, Marc Klaw, and Sam Nixon—gathered that afternoon and brought order to the chaos of booking theaters in America.
The Syndicate could impose order because its five founders each controlled the best theaters in all the big cities. Together, they had a chain of playhouses stretching from one end of the continent to the other. They could now pick and choose which shows would play where and when. Producers, playwrights, and actors found themselves at their mercy. If they did not abide by the Syndicate’s terms—and they grew more onerous with each new theatrical season—they would be locked out of the best theaters in America.
Abe Erlanger was the dominant force in the Syndicate, which had its headquarters above the New Amsterdam Theatre on West Forty-Second Street. He was a vicious tyrant, who revelled in crushing anyone who defied him. Brooks Atkinson, the gentle, scholarly New York Times critic who never said a bad word about anyone, described Erlanger as a “fat, squat, greedy, crude egotist who had no interest in the theater as an art or as a social institution. He was a dangerous enemy.”4
Erlanger revered Napoleon and stocked his office with actual guns, drums, and swords from Napoleon’s battles. He posed for his official portrait with his right hand thrust into his shirt at his breast.
Erlanger was only vaguely aware of the Shuberts as Sam was building up his little circuit in upstate New York, which by now included the small Baker Theater in Rochester. But when the owner of the Lyceum, Rochester’s best theater, bristled at Erlanger’s terms (the Syndicate wanted 50 percent of the profits from every show that played at the theater), Erlanger decided to anoint the Shuberts’ little Baker Theater as the official Syndicate house in Rochester. Sam agreed to the terms because it meant he’d get all the best attractions from New York. But then the owner of the Lyceum, fearing his theater would end up with second-rate shows, relented. Erlanger preferred the Lyceum and rerouted his productions there. The Shuberts would now get the second-rate goods. They were in no position to fight the double cross—yet. But they never forgot it. And within one year they marched on to Erlanger’s turf—New York City.
• • •
It was inevitable that a producer as restless and ambitious as Sam Shubert would make a run at New York. With at least fifty productions—farces, melodramas, operettas, revues—opening every year in theaters stretching from Union Square to Longacre Square (soon to be renamed Times Square when the New York Times opened its headquarters there), New York was the engine of the American theater. Sam had to be there to see what the latest hits were and bargain for shows to fill his upstate theaters. Because of his connection to Belasco, he met all the major theatrical personalities of the era. He became especially close to a group of powerful actors who had begun to chafe under the dominance of the Syndicate.
Sam arrived in New York in 1900 set on finding his own theater. But the Syndicate controlled the best houses. So, just as he’d done in Syracuse, Sam had to settle for a second-rate house, the Herald Square, which stood directly across from what today is Macy’s department store. His backers were those same Jewish merchants from Syracuse who’d been with him from the start.
Theaters, then as now, had reputations. If something was booked at, say, Charles Frohman’s Empire on Forty-Second Street, audiences knew it would be first-class. The Herald was low-rent. But the truth is there’s no such thing as a bad house—just a bad show. To come up in the world, all a theater needs is a production people want to see. Sam needed a star attraction for the Herald, and that, he decided, would be the great actor Richard Mansfield. Using all his youthful charm as well as generous terms, Sam convinced Mansfield to appear as a supercilious dandy in Booth Tarkington’s Monsieur Beaucaire. Mansfield was delightful in the role, and suddenly the down-at-the-heels Herald shot up in the world. Mansfield returned a year later, and scored another triumph as Brutus in Julius Caesar.
Sam now went on another buying spree, acquiring leases on the Princess, a burlesque house at Broadway and Twenty-Ninth Street, and the Casino, a Moorish palace ten blocks north. And then, once again following in the footsteps of Belasco, he decided to build a theater of his own. He opened the Lyric Theatre on West Forty-Second Street on October 12, 1903. His premiere attraction was his favorite headliner, Richard Mansfield, who starred in the play Old Heidelberg.
Across the street from the Lyric, Klaw and Erlanger had just moved into their new headquarters, the New Amsterdam. From his office above the theater, Erlanger could see little Sam Shubert from Syracuse moving up in the world, Erlanger’s world. Erlanger vowed to destroy Sam Shubert. He summoned Sam and Lee (J. J. was in Syracuse running the theaters upstate) to his office one day and told them, “Go back to Syracuse. There is no place for you in the theatrical business. It belongs to us.”5
But Sam did not flinch. There was only one way to battle Erlanger—acquire more theaters (build them, if necessary) and produce first-rate attractions of his own. Sam spearheaded the strategy with the quiet counsel of Belasco. He had in Lee and J. J. the loyalest of foot soldiers. There were plans to construct Shubert theaters in New York and up and down the East Coast. Sam also headed to London, where the Syndicate had no power, and built the Waldorf Theatre. As Erlanger tightened the noose—some Shubert theaters were sitting dark for lack of product—Sam lined up major stars who’d had enough of Erlanger’s bullying. The actress Minnie Maddern Fiske, who chafed under Syndicate control, inspired Sam. Barred from playing Syndicate houses, she performed in tents. Her shows were sold out. To pry stars away from the Syndicate, Sam offered generous contracts, which sometimes meant the Shuberts might just break even on an attraction—but they would have it in their theater. Fay Templeton and Lillian Russell joined Mansfield in the Shubert stable. Sam also lined up the great Sarah Bernhardt for a farewell tour of America. He offered her the astronomical sum of $1,800 a day for the two-hundred-performance tour. She insisted on being paid in gold before each show. The Syndicate struck back by refusing to book Bernhardt in cities where Sam didn’t have theaters. But Sam had the example of Mrs. Fiske to follow, and he put Bernhardt in tents, town halls, ice-skating rinks, and, in one case, on the side of a hill.
By 1905, the Shuberts had theaters in Boston, Cleveland, Chicago, Buffalo, and St. Louis. Sam had his eye on the Duquesne in Pittsburgh. The Syndicate pressured its owners not to give Sam a lease, and Sam hit back with a restraint of free trade suit. The night before a court appearance, he took the train from New York to Pittsburgh with his lawyer, William Klein, and another associate, Abe Thalheimer. Belasco had planned to join them but canceled at the last minute. Outside Harrisburg, in the dead of night, the speeding passenger train approached a work train parked on a curve in the track. The passenger train nicked one of the cars of the work train. There was a huge explosion. The car was packed with dynamite. The passenger train flew off the tracks, engulfed in flames.
Thalheimer, who was thrown from the train, ran back to the car where Sam and Klein had berths. He found Sam stuck in his berth, which was on fire. Thalheimer pulled him out and saw that Sam’s legs were black and smoking. He then rescued an unconscious Klein. Sam was taken to the Commonwealth Hotel. Third-degree burns covered the lower half of his body. But he was conscious and managed to give a couple of phone interviews to newspaper reporters in New York. “I could feel the flame curling up the side of my berth, and it was eating into my legs,” he said.6
Lee was in London, so J. J. raced to Harrisburg with his mother, sisters, and the family’s personal doctor. When they arrived at the hotel, Sam was in a coma. He died at 9:30 a.m. on May 12, 1905. He was thirty years old. “The serious nature of his injuries was not known here,” the New York Times reported, “and his death was unexpected.”
Sam S. Shubert was buried on May 14, 1905, at Salem Fields Cemetery in Brooklyn, New York. At the start of every new theater season in the fall, Lee and J. J. “reverentially visited the grave of their genius brother,” the Times noted three years later.
In the final year of his life, J. J., the Phantom of the Sardi Building, rarely uttered a word. But every now and then, he would open his eyes and whisper, “Sammy.”
CHAPTER THREE
Mr. Lee and Mr. J. J.
After Sam’s funeral, the question in New York theater circles—and certainly in the Syndicate’s head offices in the New Amsterdam Theatre—was: Would Lee and J. J. carry on? Sam’s death shattered Lee. J. J., who hadn’t strayed too far from Shubert operations in upstate New York, was unknown around Broadway. Erlanger did not press his advantage in the wake of Sam’s death. Despite their battles, he and Sam had still managed to do some business together. The theater was a small world and they were bound to become involved with each other one way or another. A few months after Sam’s death, Lee asked to meet with Erlanger. He told Erlanger neither he nor J. J. had any desire to keep the war going, according to Jerry Stagg, author of The Brothers Shubert. They didn’t even want to expand the empire anymore and would consider selling some of their theaters to Erlanger. Without Sam at the helm, Lee and J. J. were adrift.
The white flag waving across his desk, Erlanger could have reached out and grabbed it. There were just a couple of details to hammer out. Sam had a contract with his beloved friend Belasco stipulating that in some cities Shubert theaters would book upcoming Belasco productions. Lee asked Erlanger to honor the contract.
“I don’t honor contracts with dead men,” Erlanger said.
Lee “turned pale with rage and stalked out,” Stagg writes. Lee told J. J. what Erlanger had said. J. J. replied, “We’ll kill the son of a bitch.”1
And they did, the only way they knew how. They started acquiring and building more theaters—and producing more attractions—with which to crush the Syndicate. Lee had a knack for real estate. He liked to buy whole blocks, so that the only theaters that could be built on them were Shubert theaters. He acquired land between Forty-Fourth and Forty-Fifth Streets behind the Astor Hotel and built the Booth Theatre and the Sam S. Shubert Memorial Theatre (“Memorial” eventually would be dropped because it made the place sound more like a tomb than a theater). A little thoroughfare ran between the hotel and the theaters. The Astor owned one half, the Shuberts the other. In time, the thoroughfare would become known as Shubert Alley, the heart of the Broadway theater district. The Shuberts still own half of it. The other half once belonged to real estate magnate Jerome Minskoff, who tore down the Astor Hotel in 1968 and built One Astor Plaza, which contains the Minskoff Theatre. Shubert Alley is a private street. The Shubert Organization allows pedestrians to cut through the alley, and limousines that ferry Shubert executives around town are parked there.
In addition to building the Booth and the Shubert, Lee also acquired the gigantic Hippodrome on Forty-Third Street and Sixth Avenue. He installed an enormous water tank onstage in which more than a dozen chorus girls swam around dressed as mermaids in a watery spectacle called Neptune’s Daughter.
J. J., meanwhile, wanted a theater of his own. One day he walked past the American Horse Exchange, which had been built by William K. Vanderbilt, on Broadway between Fiftieth and Fifty-First Streets. As horses trotted about the arena, J. J. imagined a theater to house lavish Shubert spectacles. He struck a deal with Vanderbilt—$40,000 a year for forty years, according to Shubert biographer Foster Hirsch—and transformed the horse arena into the Winter Garden Theatre. (Trusses from the horse exchange can still be seen on the roof of the Seventh Avenue side of the theater.) The Winter Garden became home to The Passing Show, the Shuberts’ lucrative response to Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies. The Passing Show, which ran from 1912 to 1924, was, of course, over the top. Each show featured what was always called “a bevy” of scantily clad showgirls who paraded up and down a runway that stretched into the audience. The runway was dubbed “the Bridge of Thighs.” Writers of The Passing Show revues included George Gershwin, Jerome Kern, Irving Caesar, and Sigmund Romberg, who would become something of a Shubert in-house composer.
But J. J.’s most significant discovery was Al Jolson, who appeared in the first Passing Show in blackface singing “Paris Is a Paradise for Coons.” Jolson became a star attraction at the Winter Garden, appearing there (at an ever increasing salary) until 1926, when he left to make movie history singing “My Mammy” in The Jazz Singer.
Lee and J. J. also acquired or built theaters in Chicago,
Philadelphia, New Haven, and Boston, where the brothers would eventually control most of the land around Boston Common. Against the backdrop of this real estate spree, the war with Erlanger raged on. Much of it was fought in newspapers controlled or heavily influenced by the Syndicate, which was a major advertiser. Erlanger’s ink-drenched weapon of choice was the Morning Telegraph, which hounded the Shuberts. Telegraph critics, who were on Erlanger’s payroll, ripped into any production under the Shubert banner. Editorials blasted the Shuberts for putting on smutty shows. Gossip columnists insinuated Lee and J. J. were running their brother Sam’s business into the ground. Fashion writers mocked them for their taste in clothes—Lee, drab and conservative; J. J., an unmade bed.
But as always, the Shuberts gave as good as they got. They started their own newspaper—the New York Review—in 1909 and returned volley for volley. The man who did most of the shooting was the Shuberts’ publicity chief, the fantastically named A. Toxen Worm. Born in Denmark, he was called the “Great Dane” by Shubert Alley wags. He wrote article after article attacking the Syndicate for being a corrupt monopoly. He always referred to Erlanger as “Little Abie.” Aided by Worm’s gift for invective, the Shuberts, as historian Foster Hirsch notes, positioned themselves as Davids against the Syndicate’s Goliath. Increasingly, producers and stars supported them as welcome competition for the Syndicate. They also had youth on their side. Lee and J. J. were only in their twenties; Erlanger and his henchmen were in their fifties. Their time was running out, and by the 1920s the Syndicate was beginning to fray. Charles Frohman went down with the Lusitania in 1915, and three other members—Samuel Nixon, Fred Zimmerman, and Al Hayman—retired. Marc Klaw, Erlanger’s closest crony, turned on him. He accused Erlanger in several lawsuits of financial shenanigans.