Tag: Sidney Skolsky

Times Square Tintypes: Roxy

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In this chapter from his 1932 book, Times Square Tintypes, Broadway columnist Sidney Skolsky profiles Samuel L. “Roxy” Rothafel, the impresario who was responsible for the legendary New York movie palace that bore his nickname.
Roxy also was one of the men behind Radio City Music Hall, a theatre he intended to be a live performance space but which quickly came to be used, for the next 47 years, as a grand and glorious movie palace. The Music Hall opened late in 1932, the year Skolsky’s book was published, which explains the fact that it isn’t mentioned in this profile.
 
 

“HELLO, EVERYBODY”

 
He wanted a monument, so he built the Roxy Theatre and called it, with his usual simplicity, “The Cathedral of the Motion Picture.”

It is a living tribute to a great man. It oozes his personality. It is so great that it has even absorbed the man. He lives in his monument. Has an apartment adjacent to his business office on the sixth floor. The man—oh, yes, Samuel Lionel Rothafel. Everybody calls him what he calls his theater, Roxy.
He averages eighteen hours a day in the theater. When asked to make a speech on, “What I Do With My Leisure Time,” he was obliged to change the subject.
His favorite food is hamburger steak chopped very fine with onions. His favorite delicacy is hot dogs.
He has clothes in four places. At the theater, at home and at two golf clubs. Recently it took two men four weeks to make a complete inventory of his clothing.
In the motion picture industry his position is unique. He is the leader of presentations, the originator of the atmospheric prologue. Also, institutional movie houses, introducing staff uniforms and military ushers.
Has a habit of putting a final touch to a discussion by saying, “Applesauce. Bunk. Baloney.”
The first movie house he ever owned seated two hundred fifty people. The chairs were removable. Every time there was a big funeral there wasn’t any show. They needed the chairs.
Calls everybody by their first name or not at all.
His mascot is a black cat called “Lindy.” The cat walked in from the street the day Lindbergh hopped off for Paris. In has been there ever since.
He speaks with a lisp. Always has a sob in his throat. It’s a great radio voice. “Hello, everybody!”
His favorite eating place is a lunch wagon.
Every Thursday he spends the entire night rehearsing next week’s show. During rehearsals he is a fiery dynamo. Exhorting. Scolding. Unreasonable. Demanding the impossible and getting it. He always refers to his actors and stage crew as “My Children.”
In his apartment at the Roxy he has a valet, a chef and a butler.
His ushers are put through drills by a “Devil Dog” every morning.
His favorite exercise is handball. Is very proud of the fact that he plays well enough to beat Benny Leonard.
The orchestra pit is so large that Arthur Hopkins once remarked to him: “Don’t let the Shuberts see it or they’ll want to build a theatre there.

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Times Square Tintypes: George Gershwin

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In this chapter from Times Square Tintypes, Broadway columnist Sidney Skolsky profiles George Gershwin, who then cast one of the longest shadows over Broadway.
By 1932, when this book was published, Gershwin had written most of the orchestral works that remain so celebrated today, including Rhapsody in Blue (1924), Piano Concerto in F (1925), An American in Paris (1928), and The Second Rhapsody (1931), and had experienced great success on Broadway with such shows as “Oh, Kay!” (1926), “Strike Up the Band” (1927), “Funny Face” (1927), “Girl Crazy” (1930), and “Of Thee I Sing” (1931).
 
 

“STRIKE UP THE BAND”

 
A man of note. George Gershwin.
He loves to go shopping. Is always buying presents for friends.
Suffers from indigestion. Every night before retiring he takes agar-agar, a new medicine.
Was born in Brooklyn, September 16, 1898, and came to this country at the age of six weeks. Has two brothers, Ira and Arthur, and one sister, Frances. As a youngster he was the champion roller skater of his neighborhood.
Smokes a cigar out of the side of his mouth and wears a high hat gracefully. He didn’t start to smoke until he was twenty.
His father, Morris, because of his unconscious humor, is the life of his Gershwin parties. Morris has been designer of fancy uppers for women’s shoes, owned several cigar stores, owned a billiard parlor, owned a Turkish bath place and was a bookie. Morris also entertains by imitating a trumpet.
Took his first piano lesson when he was thirteen. At sixteen he was working for Remick’s. His boyhood idols were Jerome Kern and irving Berlin.
The thing he values most is an autographed photograph of King George of England. It bears this inscription: “From George to George.”
He wrote his first song when he was fourteen. It was a nameless tango. His second composition (now he had learned to title them) was “Since I Found You.” It was never published. His first published song, “When You Want Them You Can’t Get Them And When You’ve Got Them You Don’t Want Them,” he sold to Harry Von Tilzer for five dollars.
Twice a week he visits an osteopath.
Hates cards. His favorite game is backgammon. Occasionally he shoot craps.
He once worked as relief pianist at Fox’s City Theatre. Was fired because an author complained that he didn’t know how to play the piano.
An English publisher sends him copies of rare and first edition of such authors as Galsworthy, Shaw and Barrie in return for an occasional song.
His first piano teacher, whose memory he cherished, was Charles Hambitzer. His present teacher is Mme. Boulanger in Paris. The first time he went to Paris to study he came back with a trunkful of shirts and ties. On his last trip he returned with a $10,000 organ which he has yet to unpack.
Hard liquor doesn’t appeal to him. He likes a glass of real beer. After more than one cocktail his eyes begin to shine.
The first long piece he ever wrote was not “The Rhapsody in Blue.” But one called “135th Street.” It was performed by Paul Whiteman in the Scandals of 1921 for one performance only. It was taken out because it was too sad.
He is very particular about his clothes which are made to order. Even when he made only $25 a week he spent $22 for a pair of shoes.
Writes whenever the mood seizes him. He may have just returned home after a party and still attired in his evening clothes he will sit down at the piano. Or he may compose wearing pajamas, or a bathrobe—or even nude.
He is physically very strong. Especially his arms which are powerful. He is a swell wrestler.
His brother Ira writes the lyrics for his songs. Before, Irving Caesar and Buddy De Sylva had the honor.
“The Rhapsody in Blue” was played for the first time, February 12, 1924, at Aeolian Hall. It took him three months to write it. It took him eight months to write “An American in Paris.” His first real popular hit was “Swanee.” This was written for the revue that opened the Capitol Theatre.
Is bashful about playing the piano at parties. He has to be coaxed. Once he starts, however, you can stop him. He says, “You see the trouble is, when I don’t play I don’t have a good time.”
In the volume called Great Composers As Children he is the only living composer listed.
One evening the family discussing the new Einstein paper. George expressed his surprise at the compactness of the scientific vocabulary. He said: “Imagine working for twenty years and putting your results into three pages?” “Well,” said Papa Gershwin, “It was probably very small print.”

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Times Square Tintypes: David Belasco

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In this chapter from Times Square Tintypes, Broadway columnist Sidney Skolsky profiles David Belasco, an eccentric producer who towered over Broadway in the early part of the twentieth century.
 
 

“THE GREAT WIZARD OF 1888”

 
David Belasco is America’s oldest producer. He was born July 25, 1853, in Howard Street, San Francisco. Eight hours after his mother had arrived from London.
His parents were of Portuguese-Jewish descent. Centuries ago the name was “Valasco.”
Claims he feels as spry today as he did at the age of twenty-one. If you doubt it, he’ll race up and down the corridor to prove it to you. His one great wish is to die in harness.
He is five foot three. His shoulders droop inward. His eyesight is good, but he rambles a bit when talking. In conversation each succeeding word grows fainter and the last half of his sentences is inddistinguishable. Yet the listener understands every word by watching his hands and eyes.
It is his custom to open all his plays on a Tuesday night.
When he is greatly pleased with someone, he quickly digs into his pocket and rewards the party with a nickel or a dime.
Has been at different times in his career a messenger boy, a chore boy in a cigar factory, a clerk in a bookstore, a free-lance reporter, a bareback rider in a circus, a declaimer and a necktie saleman. Somewhere among these various occupations he managed to write his first play. He was only twelve at the time and the opus was called Jim Black or The Regulator’s Revenge.
The now famous clerical collar can be traced back to his youth, when his idol was Father McGuire. It was hero worship that first led him to imitate the Father in the manner of dress. Later he probably realized that a saint in the theatrical profession would be a novelty.
His collars and ties are made especially for him. Generally wears blue shirts. His shoes are long, pointed, black and buttoned. His hat, a square derby, is also made to order.
He once played Uncle Tom in Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Never smokes and seldom drinks. Three sips are enough to make him feel gay.
Actors will work for him cheaper than for any other producer, because they believe he will bring out their hidden talent. He so impressed his feminine office help that they work for him for twenty-five dollars a week in preference to working elsewhere for fifty dollars weekly. At the office they call him “The Governor.” He refers to himself as “D. B.” His mother’s pet name for him was “Wandering Feet.”
One of his most famous statements is: “Introduce me to a girl and I’m positively bashful. Bring me an actress and I’m her master.”
Blanche Bates laid the cornerstone for the present Belasco Theatre, December 15, 1906. It was first called the Stuyvesant Theatre. He renamed it because he wanted a monument.
He enters his office from the stage door. Ascends to it by means of a private elevator. The office is a studio room on the third floor of the Belasco Theatre. There is another entrance on the third floor—an unnoticed door protected by a burglar alarm. Entering this door, you walk through a room filled entirely with glassware. Then comes the Napoleonic Room. Then the Gothic Room. Then a library. Then an indoor garden with a spraying fountain. And then the office proper. His desk is merely a table given to him thirty-three years ago by his mother. It is held together by strings. He also has a sunken Roman bath in the building and spends a great deal of time in it every day.
He is a firm believer in the supernatural. The idea for The Return of Peter Grimm, so he states, was given to him in a dream by his mother after her death.
Lives in a hotel in the East Fifties. His home is similar to his office and contains many curios. In one of the clothes closets he has built a miniature cathedral. Many antique clocks decorate the living room. No two of them telling the same time.
He has produced more plays than any other person in the world. Not counting his amateur productions, the figure is three hundred seventy-two. Has never had a penny of outside money in any of his shows. The investment is his own, as are the profits and losses.
Is much interested in electrical effects. In one play, The Darling of the Gods, a lighting effect alone occupied the stage for seven minutes. One of his most important contributions to the theater is the hidden footlights.
His favorite color is baby blue. He hates shiny objects. He never has his shoes shined.

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Times Square Tintypes: Florenz Ziegfeld

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Sidney Skolsky was a former Broadway press agent turned columnist who made his living writing profiles he called “tintypes” of Broadway figures like Flo Ziegfeld (see below), Eddie Cantor, and Irving Berlin. In 1932, he moved west to Hollywood, where he continued as a columnist and became a movie producer as well (some claim it was Skolsky who first nicknamed the Academy Award “Oscar”).
But his book Times Square Tintypes, which was published in 1932, collected his Broadway columns, and like In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Sardi’s Hat Check Girl to the Stars, Renee Carroll, it’s a great time-capsule look at an exciting era in New York City cultural history.
The introduction that precedes the book’s first chapter below was written by Gilbert Wolf Gabriel, who worked with Skolsky at the Evening Sun. Gabriel went on to write for Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and many other publications. He eventually became a drama critic of some note.

INTRODUCTION

I am not here to introduce Mr. Skolsky, the author of these subsequent sketches. Like all true biographers, Mr. Skolsky has a passion for self-effacement. He will hiss me for disclosing him in even the most general terms.
It is my theory that all good Broadway columnists—a race apart—are small of frame, soft of voice, racy with all the sophistication of the naïve-at-heart, with eyes that are incurably big with the wonder and glee of what they see in that fabulous district, the vicinity of Times Square. Mr. Skolsky is a favorite Broadway columnist, and he looks his likable part.
On The Sun, we used to leave Mr. Skolsky to his own sly devices. It would be better fun to wait and see what new personality he’d choose to lightning-sketch and pin up on the New York sky line each succeeding week. He was—still is, in his new-found quarters on The News—inexhaustible about that business. His world brims with possibilities for his peculiar sort of portraiture. His asylum of the great and the near-great will never run empty. He will always, I”m sure, greet every up-and-coming understudy with her literary tintype before she is six paces on her way to stardom.
The charcoal with which Mr. Skolsky draws is a native product. It can be made out of nothing else than Broadway’s compressed soot. And he wields it with a hand grown exceedingly quick and sure in the nervous racket of Broadway crowds. His wit has the telegraphic tempo which insures clean and telling strokes, and I have yet to see a single smudge of dirtiness in any of his shadows. More astounding still, he does without malice . . . in a territory where malice is both the coin and the curse of the realm.
I cannot remember that any of the ladies, proverbially famous for vanity, took exception to their Skolsky portraits. One, perhaps two, inordinately modest gentlemen did. Why, I can’t guess. He did them most merciful justice, and for his kindness was once imprisoned in a slowly descending elevator with a subject so indignant that Mr. Skolsky was momentarily expecting a shove to the bottom of the shaft. Broadway has its battlefields and its war crosses. Columnists must sign their ease and prepare to be first casualties.
But the larger, more constant embarrassment of this gallery of well-knowns must have been, not indignation, but, on the contrary, supplication. No sooner was Mr. Skolsky’s series a pronounced success—and it was such a success much sooner than it was a series—than the coy requests began to pour in. He was invited, advised, urged, begged to grow staccato concerning the semi-private lives of almost every semi-private person in New York.
He had me always wondering how he escaped wasting time and space on opaque and uninteresting third-raters. Until I saw that the fun lay all in Skolsky himself, and that he has his own happy way of turning kithen-maids into Columbines and dullest dogs into blue-ribbon wonders of the Broadway age.
GILBERT W. GABRIEL

*   *   *   *   *

A GIRL SCOUT

Florenz Ziegfeld. That’s his real name. His father was Dr. Florenz Ziegfeld, founder of the Chicago Musical College. His mother, Rosalie de Hez, a French girl. He was born in Chicago, March 21, 1869.
His telephone bill is $10 a day.
Likes to munch sweets. Generally carries a small box of candy in his pocket.
Can’t sleep after six in the morning. Starts his day’s work in bed. With a masseur working on him, he dictates telegrams. Only one-third of the telegrams he writes are actually sent.
Talks with a nasal tone. Which is mimicked by some of his stars behind his back.
Whenever he goes on a long trip he takes along his own chef and his own food in a special car.
His theatrical fame and fortune really started on July 8, 1907. It was then he produced his first Follies. It was presented in the theatre now known as Loew’s New York Roof.
Knows more ways of escaping process servers than any other man in the world.
He can’t keep a secret.
Wears lavender-colored shirts, pointed perforated shoes, usually brown, and a hat that costs $40. In the winter he always wears a heavy beaver coat. He hates evening clothes and seldom wears them.

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In Your Hat, pt. 12

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In Chapter 12 of In Your Hat, the 1933 tell-all memoir by Hat Check Girl to the Stars Renee Carroll, she reveals what various celebrities wrote in her collection of autograph books, and she follows that with tales of what the stars of the day liked to eat when they patronized Sardi’s.

If you took a rabbit out of those suckers’ hats
They would squawk just the same:
They all have two strikes on them
When they are born.

TEXAS GUINAN

THAT’S an autograph left in my book by Tex. I’m not quite clear as to its meaning, and I don’t think she is either. But vaguely, it’s Broadway’s philosophy. If somebody pats you on the back, he’s only locating a spot for the knife thrust. If you give a sucker a break, he’s liable to shove his hand in and rip it apart.
Of course, all this is only sentimental hooey, and the boys and girls on Broadway are just as maudlin about one another as boys in an English boarding school. They all want to appear like awful, terrible “bad mans” with no hearts at all. The visage is stern, but the head and heart are made of mush, and it oozes through your fingers when you squeeze it.
I’ve got three books full of autographs. Perhaps a glance at some of them might throw an interesting light on the writers. I particularly like that of Frances Williams, whose cheeriness and glibness is not limited to her appeareances on the stage.

“May every hat check bring you a fat check—and may no meanie neglect my Renee—who never wrecks hats each time she checks hats—Frances Williams.”

Most of the celebrities pore over the book, seeking inspiration in the lines already written. Very few show any originality at all. Al Jolson, in one of his brighter moments, scribbled:

“Oh, look, I am in your book—thanks for letting me.”

And Louis Sobol, the Journal‘s columnist, wrote:

“To Renee, who expects something clever from me but won’t get it.”

Russell Patterson, the artist, who very rarely wears a hat, said as much, regretfully, with:

“To Renee, from her worst customer.”

Tony Canzoneri, the prize fighter, dragged his trade in by the teeth when he inscribed:

“To a real and sweet girl, with loads of knockouts.
                                           Tony Canzoneri,
                   Lightweight Champion of the World.”

The professional gate crasher, Tammany Young, waxed philosophical and wrote:

“To Renee—
   “Who takes what you give graciously. All life is a game of give and take. For what she takes she gives in a return a smile, a cheerful greeting and your belongings. May you go a long ways and prosper. Keep smiling Renee, it’s what we all go for.”

I think George Jessel‘s autograph amusing:

“To Renee—
            Duchess of Sardi,
               from
               Baron George Jessel,
               Colonel of the Bronx Grenadiers
               And Vis-count of Brownsville.”

Sidney Skolsky, the paragrapher, gave me away with:

“You’ll always be Miss Shapiro to me—one of my best yarns. Sidney Skolsky
               P.S. She sleeps in the raw!”

If you can remember Herbert Rawlinson, you’ll remember his signature, too:

“My hat’s off to you. (Get it?) Je parle français aussi. (I hope that’s right).”

And Jesse Crawford noted:

“My autograph I here inscribe,
A member of the organ tribe
               Jesse Crawford,
               Poet (?) of the Organ.”

The little movie star, Marian Marsh, gave me a a straight tip with:

“Keep your face towards the sun and the shadows will fall behind you.”

And Reri who starred in F.W. Murnau‘s Tabu and was brought to American by Ziegfeld, wrote in the only language she knew:

“A mon amie Renee en souvenir des Ziegfeld Follies 1931.”

I offer the inscription of Sam Shipman, the playwright, because it is more or less typical of Broadway sentiment and ways of thinking:

“A hat girl who has more in her head than all the brains those hats cover. A little princess on a door mat—An oriental pearl in a suffocating shell—a ruby in a musty purse, but watch her.”

And Everett Marshall, the lusty-voiced baritone, dropped this:

“To Renee. In memory of my first daughter of four kilos.”

While Faith Baldwin, the author of Self Made Woman, wrote simply:

“Because I like red-heads.”

I’ve got lots of drawings, too, by famous artists, all of them too risqué for reproduction, and in some cases too combustible for safekeeping. Some of our best known illustrators have garnished the pages of my little books with drawings that would make those paintings on the bathroom walls of old Pompeii quiver with shame.
But not all the good things happen in autograph books or at penthouse parties. I have a lot of laughs right in the restaurant.

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