Twilight at the World of Tomorrow

by James Mauro

  The smile faded further from Whalen’s lips; the mustache seemed a little grayer. He was a long way from those early days at Wanamaker’s, all those successful parades up Broadway. But no one ever had to pay admission to those. He’d never heard the Lindbergh crowd complain that the speeches and dinners and receptions were too high-hat. If they let Gibson take over, it would be a disaster. Gibson was a notorious tightwad, much worse than McAneny had been. He constantly badgered Whalen about expenses, even over the most ridiculous, meaningless sums. In August 1938, Gibson had written him a letter that Whalen saved as an example of just how petty the banker could be.

  Dear Grover:7

  I received the attached single sheet of paper today as I have on various occasions heretofore, enclosed in a large manila envelope that probably was ten times as heavy as the sheet of paper, with six cents postage on it…. This is a small matter but I am afraid it indicates a good deal of extravagance.

  The president of Manufacturers Trust had taken time out of his day to write and complain about an envelope and six cents postage. What the hell would he do if he was placed in charge of the World’s Fair? Whalen couldn’t bear to think about it.

  But the truth was, they were already taking it away from him. The concessionaires and practically everyone who ran an exhibit in the Amusement Zone were all screaming for prices to be lowered, so the board first initiated a test run for a combination ticket good on weekends only: $1.00 bought you $2.25 worth of value in admission to the Fair (75¢), a choice of five amusement concessions ($1.25), plus a light lunch worth around a quarter. Then they thought it over and canceled it two weeks later. After that, they lowered the admission price to forty cents after nine-thirty at night, when visitors would have only a half hour to tour the actual fairgrounds before heading off to the Amusement Zone, which stayed open until two a.m.

  Finally, on July 31, after long months of harassment, Whalen agreed to take a meeting with the finance and executive committees, as well as representatives of a special committee of exhibitors who were pressing for a lower general admission. The meeting began at three-thirty in the afternoon, and for an hour they listened as David French, chairman of the exhibitors committee, and others ardently pleaded their case.

  After French and his cohorts left, the real fireworks began. Members of the finance committee, including Harvey Gibson, demanded that admission be lowered to fifty cents. Whalen and his management team insisted that they keep it at seventy-five cents. What was the point in lowering it, Whalen shouted, growing exasperated at this ridiculous miscomprehension of simple mathematics? Even if admission totals increased by 50 percent, they’d still only break even on the price reduction.

  Gibson’s team argued just as strongly that more people coming through the gates meant more money that would be spent once they were inside. That’s what the concessions were for, and why didn’t he see that?

  La Guardia stood up to voice his opinion that this ridiculous speculation was actually keeping people away from the Fair. An awful lot of potential fairgoers, he said sternly, were holding back because they were waiting to see if the price would be lowered. If you don’t solve it immediately, he warned them, you’re shooting yourself in the foot.

  La Guardia left the meeting and the Administration Building at six forty-five, looking perfectly pleased with himself and joking with reporters who had been waiting for hours for an announcement. He was hungry, he’d missed his dinner, and he was nibbling on some licorice until he could get something more substantial to eat.

  “Want a chew?”8 He held out a piece to a newsman.

  At eight o’clock, La Guardia was told the meeting was still going on and was surprised to hear it. Whalen must be fighting for his life in there, he figured.

  Finally, about half an hour later, the committee members began leaving in small, segregated groups. Whalen was the last to come out. At eight-forty, he called for Perley Boone to come to his office. Needing to blame someone for the financial mess the Fair was in, he abruptly fired Boone and replaced him with a hard-nosed reporter named Leo Casey. Casey knew how to talk to the masses, and the masses were what they needed if this thing was going to be turned around. Whalen appointed him director of public relations. He liked that title.

  At nine o’clock, Whalen handed out written copies of a statement he had prepared himself. It was the first time he’d refused to speak to the press in person.

  “The finance and executive committee,”9 his statement read, “in joint session, unanimously voted a fifty-cent price of admission on Saturdays and Sundays for the remaining period of the Fair. On other days the price will remain seventy-five cents. This is the final decision of the joint committee.” By which it was taken to mean there would be no more reductions as long as he was president.

  He also announced the “resignation” of Perley Boone.

  When word got around to the exhibitors committee, and eventually spread to the concessionaires and everyone in the Amusement Zone, the reaction was fierce.

  “The announcement10 leaves me dumb and speechless,” said David French. “I cannot understand the mental processes that could lead to such action. The [reduction] should have been applied to the bad days, not to the top days. Our top days have been Saturday and Sunday.”

  “I think the Executive Committee11 ought to resign,” stated Joe Rogers, who was known as “the Mayor of the Midway.” “They don’t know what they’re doing. To think it took them five hours to think up that bright idea. That’s a very funny way of creating good will and bringing the masses to the Fair.”

  Rogers stomped around while an incensed group of amusement operators egged him on. “I wonder if any of those executives ever saw a show,” he fumed. “It’s a cinch they never produced one.”

  Grover Whalen retreated to his office until he was sure that everyone had left the building. Then he returned to the copper-walled sanctum of the boardroom and tried to assess his defeat. It was all so beneath him. Where there had once been filth and garbage, he had built a stately pleasure dome. Where he had once been concerned about what financial failure would do to his reputation, now he worried about what would happen to his Fair if that penny-pinching Gibson got his hands on it. Gibson would sell the copper off the walls if he thought he could get a good price for it. Everything Whalen had worked for seemed suddenly about to slip from his grasp.

  “He had put so much of himself12 into the birth of the Fair that he was psychologically incapable of strangling his own baby,” wrote Sidney Shalett, one of the Fair’s most frequent commentators. And it was true. Whalen’s heart and soul was in the place, and it showed. The sum total of his life was evident in its splendor and in its wonder.

  For the first time since the Fair opened, Whalen considered taking a week off. Next Monday was the beginning of “Farm Week” at the Fair—decidedly not his idea. It was to be a true, down-home “get-together for folk from rural areas.” Kicking it off was a parade including livestock, cows and chickens, and tractors. Farmers were going to be the principal speakers at the Court of Peace.

  From Einstein to Elsie the Cow, Whalen brooded. It was a harbinger of things to come.

  * No U.S. World’s Fair to date, including Chicago’s, had ever charged more than fifty cents admission.

  The Court of Peace in the Government Zone, bordered by the Federal Building (top) and the Lagoon of Nations

  (© Bill Cotter, worldsfairphotos.com)

  21

  THE STORM CENTER OF THE WORLD

  After Alexander Sachs, the man considered to be the next best conduit to deliver Einstein’s letter was Charles Lindbergh. It was an odd choice. There was, among certain circles, the belief that Lindbergh had Nazi sympathies. Only a year earlier, Hermann Goering had presented the aviator with the Order of the German Eagle, on behalf of Adolf Hitler. Perhaps the scientists, being scientists, were unaware of this. But for whatever reason, Einstein complied with Szilárd’s request to write him a letter of introduction to Lindbergh.

/>   “I would like to ask you1 to do me a favor of receiving my friend Dr. Szilárd and think very carefully about what he will tell you,” Einstein wrote. “To one who is outside of science, the matter he will bring up may seem fantastic. However, you will certainly become convinced that a possibility is presented here which has to be very carefully watched in the public interest, even though the results so far are not immediately impressive.”

  Throughout the remainder of July and on into August, however, nothing was heard from either Lindbergh or Sachs. Szilárd grew restive with impatience. Einstein sailed and smoked his pipe.

  Grover Whalen wasn’t done yet. Not by a long shot. At the beginning of August, he began drawing up plans for yet another parade, this one carrying open-topped town cars and celebrities instead of tractors and Farmer Browns. Night after night, he sat at his desk, eschewing the air-conditioning as soon as the air grew cool enough to carry the breezes through his gauze curtains. He enjoyed hearing the happy sounds of fairgoers and fireworks.

  To hell with them, he thought as the rockets continued blazing into the nighttime sky. It was still a damn good show and worth whatever thousands a night it cost. As the second weekend featuring the new fifty-cent admission fee came and went, attendance still didn’t show a significant increase. All they’d done was lower the gate profits by a third. Of course Whalen wasn’t exactly happy that paid admissions on a Saturday night were still under 170,000, but some part of him felt justified that his argument had at least held up in practice.

  By mid-August, it became clear that the Fair knew only two kinds of weather: extreme heat and humidity, or rain. Sometimes both. On Sunday, August 13, the temperature reached ninety degrees as measured on the giant Carrier thermometer positioned just outside its incongruous Igloo of Tomorrow. Then it began to rain, a steady downpour that sent everyone scattering indoors. Then the sun came out again and steamed everyone like a plate of soggy clams.

  A hundred and sixty-seven thousand paid to get in that day. Despite the price reduction, attendance was actually lower, by thirteen thousand, than the previous Sunday. For Whalen, every head that walked through the gates represented not the four bits they’d paid, but the quarter they hadn’t paid. If he’d run Wanamaker’s like that, they’d have been out of business by now.

  The big idea, as Whalen saw it, was to get the Fair employees themselves involved in a drive to sell six hundred thousand tickets in two weeks. He called it “the Jubilee Campaign.” It began the next day, on Monday, August 14, and Whalen got everyone involved—not just the six or seven thousand Fair employees remaining after the layoffs a few weeks earlier, but anyone who was even remotely connected with the Fair’s financial success, including the exhibitors who now considered Grover Whalen their enemy, from the girls who sold doughnuts to the midgets in Little Miracle Town to the lovely ladies who danced nude at the Cuban Village. Whalen felt certain that they, at least, were going to sell some tickets.

  All told, some thirty thousand men and women would take part in the greatest sales campaign Whalen had come up with yet. At eleven a.m., two of the Fair’s “trackless trains” left the fairgrounds carrying three hundred eager young bodies. To top off the show, Whalen added a parade of elephants and camels, plus a long line of swirling, twirling girls from the foreign pavilions, all of them decked out in their native splendor.

  The parade headed up Queens Boulevard to the Queensboro Bridge, then into Manhattan at Sixtieth Street and down Lexington Avenue, then Fourth Avenue and Park Row, until they reached Whalen’s old stomping grounds on Broadway, where they eventually gathered on Wall Street to place a wreath at the statue of George Washington—the spot where Joseph and Jacqueline Shadgen had read the original oath five years earlier. Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, to the delight of the crowd, got out of his car and did a shuffle step, one hand on his hip as he pranced and danced to the accompaniment of the Trytons playing in an open-topped, double-decker bus.

  People jitterbugged in the middle of Broadway, jugglers juggled, the showgirls jiggled, and thousands of Whalen’s ever-present lunchtime crowd gathered around and enjoyed the free show.

  George McAneny, who had yet to be replaced, gave a speech. But since he was a banker at heart, everything he said came out sounding like a father’s admonition to a child who had neglected his chores. Clutching the lapel of his jacket in one hand and a white straw hat in the other, he spoke in the disapproving cadence of a Chautauqua preacher.

  “We want you all to come,”2 he blustered, “and we know that most of you will. But because there are still some slackers among so many thousands, some of the Fair employees have come to tell you a bit more about the Fair.”

  Slackers. After that, the parade reversed its course and headed back up Broadway, traveled over the bridge, and returned to the fairgrounds. In three days, they sold 125,000 tickets. Whalen was elated. Maybe he could turn this thing around by himself after all, even with Gibson licking his chops and waiting in the wings.

  On Wednesday night, Whalen had arranged for a different kind of parade, just to show them that he, too, understood that the common man must be reached in order to bring people into the Fair. He had once given a speech in a Harlem church, promising fairness for all races that wanted to work at the Fair. So once again, he called on Bill Robinson to lead a motorcade of nine cars and fifty Fair employees up through Seventh Avenue to 125th Street.

  The Hot Mikado was still packing them in every night at the World’s Fair Music Hall. Despite the fact that Robinson was performing three shows a night, seven days a week (with a fourth performance on Sunday afternoons), Whalen had pressured him to make this second promotional appearance on the premise that the entertainer owed him one. At a kickoff celebration for the Jubilee Campaign held in the Court of Peace, Robinson, Whalen felt, had openly mocked him.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” Robinson had said, mopping his brow on yet another brutally hot afternoon, “I’m gonna sing a little parody on the World’s Fair, and I think New York people will understand it. I don’t know how the boss Mr. Whalen’s gonna take it, but to me it’s funny.”

  Robinson sang:

  Just a little bit o’ garbage fell, fell off a scow one day,

  and it landed in a place I think they called it the Flushing Bay.

  Then a little more garbage collected, in just a little while,

  and it formed a great big piece of land that looked like Barren Isle.

  Mr. McAneny got a great idea, and Moses thought it was swell,

  so they planted a lot o’ roses just to take away the smell.

  Then they fronted it with a man named Whalen, to give the place a flair,

  now it costs you seventy-five cents to get in—and they call it the World’s Fair!

  The Jubilee Campaign sold a lot of tickets, but it wasn’t enough to stop the bleeding. By the third week of August, the Fair announced it had accumulated around $3 million in what it called “operating profits”—meaning income left over after paying for the daily expenses of running the show. The problem was the Fair currently owed almost $6 million, most of it to contractors, plus another $1.7 million in overdue banknotes whose interest was growing daily. Worse, the Fair had sold about $3.5 million worth of advance sale tickets, so a good many of those heads that were now spinning the turnstiles represented no new cash. And in the wake of the price reduction, some people actually began returning their advance tickets for a refund, arguing justifiably that they had been overcharged.

  Not only couldn’t they get the people to come and spend money, now they were demanding some of that money back. The Fair was moving in the wrong direction financially. Plus, the contractors were threatening to shut down the Fair if they weren’t paid immediately. The dream of the future was rapidly turning into a present-day nightmare.

  As a result, the executive committee felt it had no choice. Gibson, who was enjoying a summer vacation in his native New Hampshire, got an urgent call to return to New York as soon as possible. Together with Baya
rd Pope, who was treasurer of the Fair corporation and secretary of the finance committee, Gibson devised a plan to call on the bondholders for mercy. As part of the original agreement, the Fair had been setting aside a percentage of its daily gate in order to pay off the debentures. To date, that came to around $1.2 million—hard cash the Fair desperately needed to keep the lights on.

  Now Gibson had to convince them to let him have it back and forget about getting any future percentage of anything, probably for the remainder of 1939 and maybe on into 1940. That is, if they could even afford to reopen next season. According to revised estimates, total paid admissions for the 1939 season would be somewhere around twenty-five million—a far cry from the forty million originally expected. Yet by the time the Fair closed on October 31, the corporation would show a surplus of $274,291 after paying off all the operating expenses, all the contractors and other bills, and all banknotes.

  What it didn’t pay off was a single penny of the $28 million worth of debentures that would come due on January 1, 1941. Working his banker magic, Gibson convinced the bondholders to forgo the entire $2.8 million that had been promised to them in 1939, plus lend them back the $1.2 million already set aside for repayment. But it still wasn’t enough. So Gibson then appealed to his banker cronies, who agreed to lend the Fair an additional $750,000.

  Suddenly, in the eyes of the corporation, Gibson was the Fair’s rainmaker and savior. In the ways and means of high finance, he had all but pulled off the impossible—as illogical as it sounded, he had borrowed enough money to pay off most of their debt.

  “The house was now3 heavily mortgaged,” Sidney Shalett noted, “but it was in order. Harvey Gibson went back to New Hampshire.”

  Where, no doubt, he patiently awaited the second call he knew would be coming.