Like the proverbial fat man at the picnic, the Olympia had hoarded the goods, increased demand, doubled costs, and angered other theatre managers around the city. Oscar had upset the talent-to-venue balance of New York’s variety entertainment. He couldn’t fill the place or profit. He had built a white elephant. McElfatrick’s dire prediction for the Olympia’s demise slowly but surely came true.
There was an upside, however: perhaps the high points of the Olympia’s short existence were the performances of two actors, named Joe Weber and Lew Fields. As Mike and Meyer, they had invented their own “Dutch” comedy routines, which consisted of knockabout, slapstick antics coupled with an equally rough, Yiddish mangling of the English language. They were the comedic predecessors of Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges.
WEBER AND FIELDS
Dirt-poor, young Joe Weber and Lew Fields started out entertaining Bowery street crowds for spare change. Here, they burnished their comedy routines. As their venues improved from saloons to vaudeville houses, Weber and Fields established a highly talented company, managed their own theatre, and produced their own shows with whimsical names like Fiddle-Dee-Dee and Whoop-Dee-Doo. While their first acts typically consisted of their usual vaudeville buffoonery, their second acts achieved Broadway legend as they warmheartedly burlesqued other current Broadway plays. Their popularity spanned all socioeconomic classes. Countless imitators followed, but they were Broadway’s first clown princes.
Weber and Fields had first played at the Harlem in 1894. Oscar had absolutely loved them and offered them a four-week stint at the Olympia. Audience reaction convinced Oscar to extend them another four weeks. He moved the act to “the spot”—the coveted first-act closer position—the spot immediately before the intermission.
But then, in week seven, Oscar bumped Weber and Fields into the second act to make way for Leopoldo Fregoli, the world-renowned, lightning-change artist that Oscar had booked for a rumored whopping $1,000 a night.
Fregoli was certainly a one-of-a-kind performer. He played fifty separate characters, among them a ballet dancer, an ingenue, an aging singer whose voice has fled, an impresario, a spoof of the magician Alexander Herrmann, a debunker of magic, a multi-instrumentalist, and a parade of well-known orchestra conductors and entertainers. With a running time of over one hour, he was a night of vaudeville all by himself—or at least an entire first act.
Weber and Fields howled at being tossed into the second act with the songbirds and midget revues. Oscar replied, “You boys are so good, they’ll wait for you all night if they have to.”
Weber and Fields hatched a plot. With the aid of a brother and brother-in-law of Lew Fields, who acted as doubles for them, they secretly wrote and rehearsed a burlesque of Fregoli’s main dramatic skit. Their doubles would allow them to both one-up Fregoli and skewer the whole quick-change genre.
When quick-change artistry was an art, Leopoldo Fregoli was its master.
Four days later, the curtain rose at the beginning of the second act to reveal the same set used for Fregoli’s first-act performance. Weber and Fields entered as their familiar characters, Mike and Meyers, dressed in their familiar “German senator” outfits. They lampooned Fregoli’s grave Italian drama with their trademark slapstick and malapropisms. On cue they exited stage left and—courtesy of their secret doubles—suddenly reappeared stage right dressed as Fregoli’s fat lady and comic soldier characters. The audience was stunned by the lightning-fast transformations. Weber and Fields heaped a half dozen more impossible exits and entrances. At the conclusion of the burlesque, Mike and Meyer came out for their bows to robust applause as well as some hysterical laughter. On their fourth bow, they signaled offstage and their fat lady and comic soldier doppelgängers came onstage, arm in arm. The audience finally realized that the spoof was on them. They happily went wild.
And here’s another kind of wild.
The Cherry Sisters were the worst act in the world. Without a glimmer of self-awareness, sense of humor, or talent, the sisters thumped out pro-temperance ditties and endlessly harangued the audience for their enslavement to demon rum. Oscar, in a perverse mood, plucked them out of their tent-show-county-fair Bible Belt circuit and put them on the Olympia stage, saying, “I’ve been putting on the best talent, and it hasn’t gone over … I’m going to try the worst.”
The Cherry Sisters
Oscar presented the sisters with a twist—so old, it was new again. A rope net was rigged above the proscenium. Arthur engaged the local fruit and vegetable pushcart vendors to sell their old and rotten goods to the audience on the way in. At the beginning of the Cherry Sisters act, the rope net was lowered. As they launched into their first song, Arthur, stationed in the balcony, sailed a piece of fruit hard into the net. The audience happily picked up their cue, and a sensational, audience-participation act of flinging rotten fruit and vegetables was reborn.
Oscar reassured the confused sisters that the tossing was an expression of generous approval, and the sisters, cluelessly pleased that their message was now reaching a wider audience, continued night after night to plunk away on piano and drum in the face of this barrage of produce and perceived approval.
Oscar then revisited his talent for writing musicals on a deadline with his own variation on the Faust legend, titled Marguerite. In Oscar’s version, Faust is a married artist who is enticed to sell his soul to the devil—here, an agent for a beguiling array of artist’s models—in exchange for the talent to paint the perfect nude. With this new effort, Oscar used the threadbare rationale that nudity is art to mount a series of “artful,” ethnically spiced tableaux vivants, or living pictures, based on risqué, dance-related themes.
Oscar and his sons were summarily tossed into jail for this display of nudity but were sprung by none other than President of the Board of New York City Police Commissioners Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt recognized that the scantily clad tableaux vivants for which the Hammersteins had been arrested was a re-creation of a painting he personally owned. How could that possibly be indecent?
Theodore Roosevelt, ca. 1896
Marguerite was a smash, and Oscar celebrated its fiftieth performance by distributing to the audience souvenirs: miniatures of his own composition titled “Come Back,” printed on silk.
Marguerite played for fourteen weeks—an impressive hit by light opera standards. As a result, Oscar decided to write another opera. Santa Maria again employed tableaux vivants, this time combined with aerial ballet; the models were supplied by the preeminent aerial ballet troupe the Flying Grigolatis. Critics highly praised the wondrous visual spectacle, if not the plot.
A silk souvenir of Oscar Hammerstein’s waltz song “Come Back,” from his play Marguerite
The story was as follows. An heirless king of Holland has a dilemma: divorce his barren wife and remarry, or find the bastard son of a former dalliance. He chooses the latter. The handsome, young lieutenant given the task of finding the son instead discovers a vixen of a daughter, whose ironic nickname, Santa Maria, provides the title. The lieutenant disguises her as a boy and smuggles her back to Holland, where they fall in love. He becomes the king and she becomes somewhat more saintly.
Unfortunately, Oscar’s Santa Maria failed to repeat the box office success of Marguerite. He let it run for too long and lost money—a prerogative he too often indulged. To be fair, nothing Oscar did could compensate for the simple, painful fact that his Olympia was just too damn big to run profitably.
Over the next year Oscar’s finances zigzagged ever downward. By 1897, he had to sell the Harlem theatres to keep the Olympia afloat. Said Oscar ruefully, “There’s no limit to the number of people who will stay away from a bad show.” The vultures of “honest” finance—other managers—circled above.
The straw that broke Oscar’s financial back was, of all people, Florenz Ziegfeld. In the years between his representation of strongman Eugene Sandow and his successful Follies—and Show Boat—Ziegfeld produced shows for, and toured with, hi
s then girlfriend, Anna Held of milk-bath-beauty fame. Oscar booked Ziegfeld and Held’s current theatrical concoction, La Poupée, but was unwilling to extend Held’s engagement and instead replaced her with his own mistress of the moment—but she had neither the talent nor the notoriety to fill the seats. The show bled money.
Anna Held and Florenz Ziegfeld
By 1897, Oscar’s creditors came calling. His bank offered attractive refinancing options, but Oscar responded with cocky arrogance: “I am in receipt of your letter, which is now before me, and in a few minutes it will be behind me. Respectfully yours, Oscar Hammerstein.” New York Life Insurance Company took possession of the Olympia and picked clean Oscar’s Harlem home, taking everything but the upright piano. Daughter Stella recalled Oscar playing it in the empty apartment on the day all the newspapers trumpeted his bankruptcy, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Santa Maria sheet music, 1896
To top it all off, Oscar broke a court order and stole into the Olympia Theatre one dark night to fetch $400 he’d stashed in his mattress. He was caught and thrown in jail. At his court date, Oscar gave a speech:
Your Honor, I have lost millions in my efforts to entertain the New York public. Thirty-six years of labor have gone for naught. Strangers are in possession of all its fruits. Your Honor, you can hardly realize the tension under which a music-hall manager such as I have been must do his work. Through years of sweat and toil I had acquired enough to build a great amusement palace. Now they have the right to say to me, “Get out! Touch a pin in this place, I will have you arrested!” They have taken possession of my thirty-six years of labor.
Oscar exaggerated with the thirty-six years. It had been only a decade. But one may assume that he saw his whole life as one long service to the greater good of theatre in general and opera in particular. The judge took pity, threw out the trespassing charge, and let him keep the cash.
Chapter 4
THEATRICAL PHOENIX
No one in show biz, least of all Oscar’s competitors, could imagine him being gone from the scene. He was little threat to them. He didn’t dream of theatrical empire—except of the operatic kind. He had no personal use for money. His sons would stick money in his top hat so he’d have trolley fare. Moreover, he was a gambler; a born trailblazer; and a loss leader who could be counted on to leap first into the unknown, with little regard for the likely disaster to follow. His energetic presence in the field was a net plus for other managers primarily because he left theatres in his wake. Other theatre managers reaped what he had sown. Thanks in great part to him, Longacre Square was now a burgeoning theatre district and a decade-old construction site—no longer simply a muddy, gaslit, demimonde of brothels and carriage repair shops.
The managers and producers of Broadway hastily assembled under the leadership of the Morning Telegraph to help Oscar out of his financial straits. On the same day Oscar’s Olympia sold at auction, all of show business hosted a benefit roast at the Garden Theatre to get their favorite crazy impresario back on his feet. The night’s tally was $25,000.
A few days later, while ambling along with his old pal the musical-revue actor Louis Harrison, Oscar regaled Lou with details of his recent, well-publicized fiasco. When they got to Forty-second Street, Oscar stopped, pointed to the stable lot on the northeast corner of Seventh Avenue and Forty-second Street, and said, “Do you see those old shacks? That, Louis, is the best spot in New York for theatre.” He then stared at the site as if he were building it in his mind—seeing into his own future. “Well, good-bye, I am going to Wall Street and I’m coming back in a couple of hours to buy that property and build a theatre.”
With the benefit money in his pocket and bottomless optimism, Oscar persuaded the lot’s owner to agree to a twenty-five-year lease for a mere $25,000 down. Oscar was back in business just like that. Arthur said of his father, “Give him a plush red curtain, and he’ll build a theatre around it.” Willy was chagrined. He had hoped to take advantage of the financial lull by venturing out on his own to build and manage a Coney Island beer garden, but Oscar’s quick reversal of fortune had thwarted that ambition.
As for more money, Oscar’s insomnia still produced cigar machines. Along with the money from these new machines, he took some remaining Harlem properties that he’d put in his wife’s name, transferred them back to himself, and liquidated them. The result wasn’t enough to build a theatre, but it was enough to start.
Eventually Oscar had the funds to build a new theatre. In contrast to the over-the-top architectural extravagance of the Olympia and the Manhattan, Oscar aimed to build a theatre as quickly and as cheaply as possible. Bricks were saved from the demolition of the old stable that had previously occupied the lot. He used chandeliers and carpets that came from various hotels and seats from other, defunct theatres—even the plumbing was scavenged from junkyards. Oscar had half the theatre built when he ran out of money.
Oscar Hammerstein oversees construction of the Victoria Theatre.
One morning Oscar took a trolley ride to mull over his options—a habit of his—when a chorus girl from one of his old shows got on and struck up a conversation. Upon hearing his plight, she marched him off the trolley and into her bank and wrote out a check sufficient to complete the construction. She even insisted that he receive it as a gift, not a loan. It seems she’d left the stage and married well, yet was ever grateful for her old stage memories. Once again fortune had smiled on Oscar’s endeavors.
The Victoria Theatre seating diagram
Despite the savings in materials, the result was what one reviewer called “a big, tinkling pearl—all white and gold.” Its spacious design and relaxed atmosphere made it the perfect place to see a show or just hang out with friends for a drink, a smoke, and a few laughs. Oscar christened her the Victoria Theatre.
On opening night, New Yorkers of every stamp and stripe swamped the theatre, which bulged from the boxes and orchestra stalls and spilled out into the street. The opening-night show was A Reign of Error, by the Rogers Brothers, but no one really cared. As the second-act curtain came down, a prolonged roar of approval called for the real star of the night.
A tearful Oscar finally stepped out onto the apron of the stage and declared, “I believe I shall carry the memory of this night with me to my grave.”
In keeping with his pattern of managing two theatres at once, Oscar quickly built the Republic Theatre right next door to the Victoria. Whether because Oscar had been in an architecturally playful mood or because he had been, as ever, conflicted about the theatre’s purpose, the interior ended up most resembling the contours of a three-layer cake—heavy on the floral icing—as seen from the inside out. The baroque design screamed opera, but the scale could serve only drama—and it lacked an orchestra pit. It stands to this day.
The Republic Theatre
Oscar’s Republic Theatre opened September 27, 1900, and offered a mix of straight plays, travesties, musicals, and minstrelsy. But the Republic’s profits couldn’t match those of the Victoria, and Oscar’s interest in managing the Republic soon waned. In the spring of 1902, Oscar happily signed over the Republic lease to wunderkind writer-producer-director David Belasco. Belasco humbly renamed the theatre after himself and set about putting in the missing orchestra pit. He ended up chiseling through twenty feet of solid granite, cursing Oscar every inch of the way.
David Belasco, actor, writer, and manager
Although he’d leased the Republic to Belasco, Oscar retained the rights to the Republic’s roof. He combined it with the Victoria’s and built his newest venture, Hammerstein’s Roof Garden. Stylistically, the roof garden resembled a French reimagining of a German beer hall—all wrought iron, glass, and mahogany. Before the advent of air-conditioning, roof gardens had traditionally provided entertainment in the summer months, when regular theatres were shuttered.
The Victoria’s roof decor changed often. In the early vaudeville years, Oscar, Willy, and Arthur first constructed and operated a Dutc
h scene, complete with working windmill and Alpine panorama. A few years later that was replaced by a Swiss dairy farm, with real cows and fetching young damsels. David Belasco, who accessed the roof garden from his own theatre, fondly recalled being served hot milk, freshly expressed from a cow and brought to him by a beautiful dairymaid, at the Hammerstein farm on his own roof—five flights up at Forty-second Street and Seventh Avenue. In the later vaudeville years the Hammersteins even installed a popular ice-skating rink on their roof.
Hammerstein Farm illustration
The roof garden entertainment was similar to that of the Victoria’s, downstairs, though it trended more toward “dumb” acts—acrobats, singers, jugglers—that were not word- or plot-heavy and so made no mental demands on the happy, rowdy crowd. In the temperate months of fall and spring, while the roof provided vaudeville fare, the theatre below offered a variety of entertainment.
THE NEW YORK TIMES SQUARE
In 1904, the New York Times Company relocated its main office to a distinctive tower on the tiny triangular block bound by Forty-second Street, Seventh Avenue, and Broadway. Now the area’s largest employer, the paper successfully petitioned the city to name the new subway station under the building Times Square. While it probably was supposed at the time that the square would be but one more stopping point in New York theatre’s ever-northward migration, the Great Depression and the changing economics of theatre intervened. The migration over, the old tenderloin was to become New York theatre’s permanent home—Times Square. In the following two decades, theatres proliferated in the area, achieving a total of more than one hundred.
The Hammersteins Page 4