by Lillian Ross
1927
MUSIC MAKERS — James Thurber
WE were fortunate enough to be seated a few rows behind Rachmaninoff the other night in the Plaza ballroom when Theremin, the young Russian scientist, produced strange sounds, then tunes, and finally played Scriabin and Saint-Saëns by waving his hands gently at antennae on a box. Rachmaninoff was in his seat, an uncomfortable chair about fifteen rows back, many minutes before the strange concert began. As the curtains parted and revealed a lot of curious electrical apparatus, the pianist sat up straight and put on a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles.
But when an assistant immediately began to read an explanation of what was going to happen, Rachmaninoff took off his glasses and lapsed into reading several pieces of literature on the subject. These were spread out on his lap. He put on his glasses and took them off again every few minutes during the evening.
His interest was casual until Theremin produced the first semblance of a melody. Then Rachmaninoff turned around and smiled and lifted his eyebrows at some friends behind him. He applauded but twice, once after the playing of Rubinstein’s “Night” and once when the concert was finished. His applause was brief, soft-handed and unemotional. Although the long program and its final monotony caused about half the audience to depart before it was over, Rachmaninoff stayed till the last and did not appear restive. At the beginning he had crossed his left leg over his right and he did not shift this position. When, as often happened, something went wrong musically, he showed no annoyance. His intervals of intense interest were comparatively few, but one of them was when Theremin and his pupil, Mr. Goldberg, played together Glinka’s “Elegy.” On one occasion he raised his right hand and imitated the motions Theremin was making with his left. These were the open-fingered motions of a hand playing the piano. During one composition, however, he read apparently all the way through a sketch of Theremin’s life. When at one point the scientist caused the music to sound from the rear of the hall, Rachmaninoff was one of the few who did not turn around and stare.
The concert over, Rachmaninoff was surrounded. More people seemed in fact to know him than anyone else there. As one excited woman who, speaking in Russian, apparently attempted to fire his enthusiasm for the concert with her own, he shook his head two or three times unsmilingly. He did smile when a very young lady at his side began shouting “Bravo!” and “Magnifique!” to the bowing scientist. He patted her gently on the shoulder, and said “Sh-h.” Then finally, still smiling, he said in French, “You exaggerate.”
1928
POTTER’S FIELD — E. B. White
NEW YORK’S pauper dead are buried in a sandy hill on the north end of Hart’s Island in Long Island Sound, a mile from Execution Light. They lie in big graves, tier on tier, unclaimed. It was blowy the day we went out there to see the field, and the low storm-swept island looked particularly weather-beaten. Michael Breen, warden of the island prison, met us, smiling broadly, glad of a visitor.
Twice a week the boat comes up from Bellevue. The prisoners bury the dead, solemnly and without ceremony, one hundred and fifty to a grave, one white headstone for the lot. It is a beautiful spot—the sweep of the Sound, the restless clang of the bell buoy at the point. An incongruous spot, too, for directly across the water are the homes of the millionaires, Hearst’s place on Sands Point, the broad lawns and grandeur of Great Neck.
On the cemetery hill are the frame houses which served as barracks in the Civil War. Now they house ancient prisoners who are too feeble to require iron bars for their detention: old beggars, cripples, panhandlers, old men who hang magazine pictures of beautiful girls above their iron cots. In the centre of the island are the dog-eared brick buildings where the regular prisoners live and work, making clothes, making brooms and shoes, snatching a little sleep on the sea-wall, in the sun, between jobs. At the extreme southern end is a house formerly owned by a negro, who ran a negro resort there until a year ago when the City acquired the property.
But nothing much interested us except the field for the dead. Even the statistics seemed important—two hundred and sixty-six thousand persons in that small hill. Mr. Breen allowed us to look at the record books, and we glanced at a few entries: a baby found in the parcel room of the Penn Station, a man picked up in the Fifth Avenue sewer, page after page, six thousand a year. There is a single monument to honor them—a small cross bearing the inscription: “And He shall call His own by name.”
As we stood there a gull wheeled and circled above our head. From the far side of the island the wind brought the smell of tide flats, the incessant sounding of the bell. And rather vaguely we heard the fine Irish voice of Michael Breen: “Thim horsechissnut trees will be all full o’ blossoms soon—pretty as a picture!”
1928
HARRIETT — E. B. White
OF all the orchids at the Orchid Show, we liked Harriett—she was so rare. Other orchids had exotic backgrounds, but only Harriett had a gold case lined with black, in front of which her lover, Mr. Louis Burk, paced up and down. We talked to Mr. Burk about Harriett and she is indeed his passion. He brought her here from Philadelphia in his private car, and every night during the show Harriett went home with Mr. Burk’s gardener to his hotel room.
In color and size, she is not such an orchid. But she is the only one of her kind in the world, and she is thirty-eight years old, with a strange waxen beauty. Two white, star-shaped blossoms, pink in the centre, are her present charm, and a third bud is coming, which Mr. Burk is not going to allow to mature—it would weaken Harriett. Even the existing two flowers weaken her and will be removed before they wither. She is not for sale, and although there are no other orchids like her, there will be!
“Due to a certain accident,” said Mr. Burk, “I have another plant coming along.”
“What certain accident?” we asked. And then Mr. Burk told us Harriett’s story. She used to belong to Mrs. George B. Wilson, the orchid queen of Philadelphia. That was fifteen years ago when Harriett was young. When the war came, coal became scarce, Harriett grew cold and seemed about to die. In desperation Mrs. Wilson let Mr. Burk take her, and he nursed her back to health. It was the custom, in the Burk greenhouse, to place her over a water mote so that no insects could attack her. But one night this precaution was neglected, a slug invaded the pot and a certain accident happened—the slug ate Harriett’s new growth of roots, all round and about. Mr. Burk’s heart bled, but when he found that Harriett—instead of dying—was putting out a side-shoot, a surgical operation was performed, and now Harriett has a child (for which somebody offered a thousand dollars the other day and received from Mr. Burk only a smile).
That was how it was. At home, Mr. Burk keeps his love in a certain place in his greenhouse, right where he can see her whenever he comes in. He says he moved her once to a place that seemed more favorable, but that she began to fail and had to be returned immediately to the old location. Her complete name, Mr. Burk says, is Phalaenopsis Harriettae, but we won’t go into that. She will live forever, God willing.
OTHER things we learned at the Orchid Show were that most of the orchids for New York City consumption are grown in Westchester, Jersey, and Long Island; that an orchid seed-pod contains one hundred million seeds; and that if you are not scared to try, it is really possible to grow a common orchid plant in a window, as one does a geranium.
1928
DANCING COUPLE — James Thurber
THE career of the Astaires, as it has been told to us, is worth making some record of. Particularly since, April rumor has it, this year may be their last together. They are of course really brother and sister. They were born in Omaha. Adele is thirty and Fred is twenty-nine and they have been dancing together since she was six and he was five, professionally since they were nine and eight respectively. Their father’s name was Fred Austerlitz and he was a Viennese and a brewer. Being from Vienna he didn’t scoff when an excited lady who wrote pieces for a paper in Omaha announced in her columns that the two children—whom she had seen per
form at an ice cream social or something— were clever and would surely go on the stage. Mr. Austerlitz looked his children over himself the next time they did their little dance together and decided the lady was right.
The reason this season may be their last together, after twenty-two years in which they have never appeared separately, is because Adele expects to be married and will live in England and raise Scotch terriers. Fred also yearns to get away from the amber spot and out in the open. His ambition is to produce, but he also wants to own a great stable of horses some day. Knowing this, the management of “Funny Face,” in which the pair are now appearing, presented Mr. Astaire (and probably sighed as they did so) with a Copenhagen China horse and jockey the night the show opened. He keeps it on his dressing-room table.
Their first appearance in this city was in 1907. They did a clog dance in a vaudeville house until the Gerry Society objected. In those years they were forced to play in Shamokin and Passaic and places like that in order not to be molested by societies who knew that dancing was terrible for children.
Their first real chance in New York, after they got old enough to be let alone, came at the old Fifth Avenue Theatre and their hearts were high with hope. On the same bill was Douglas Fairbanks. He got over very well but after the first show the Astaires sadly noted that their names had been scratched from the call-board, which meant the management had given them, as Mr. James Gleason would say, the works. You couldn’t daunt the children, however, and they made their first big success not long afterwards in the revue “Over the Top.” Since then they have snapped their fingers at call-boards.
One of their earliest friendships was with George Gershwin, then a piano player for Remick. He used to say he hoped some day to write a score which the brother and sister could dance to. That happened first in the production of “Lady Be Good.” Then came “Funny Face.” We were interested to learn that dancing shoes rarely last the Astaires more than three weeks, which, to coin a statistic, means that each of them has used about four hundred pairs since they began to dance together. Fred is superstitious and on opening nights always brings to his dressing-room and wears a funny looking red and green bathrobe he bought in Bridgeport thirteen years ago. It hasn’t always brought him luck though. For instance, he was selected, not long ago, by a Columbia professor and a cigarette manufacturing company, to be blindfolded and to pick out, as the best of four cigarettes offered him, the kind manufactured by the company in question. He picked the wrong one.
1928
BIG BOY — James Thurber and Harold Ross
THE tall, somewhat paunchy, but still erect figure of Jack Johnson may be seen about Broadway these days. He walks proudly. He never forgets his gloves. His step is a little less springy and his face no longer gleams in the ebony and gold splendor which admiring Londoners compared to a “starry night” almost twenty years ago when he was the rage over there. He might pass for thirty-five. He is fifty-one. People along Broadway recognize him, and wonder why and when he came to town. It is different from the day in 1911 when he sailed in on the Kronprinzessin Cecilie with a white valet, a white secretary, a limousine, a touring car, and two racers, boasting of the prodigious amounts of his weekly hotel bills abroad. The once famous champion and notorious bon vivant has fallen on less glamorous days. He is not broke, but he is not affluent. Wealth he never hoarded. The fifty-one hundred dollars he got for boxing Philadelphia Jack O’Brien before the war, for instance, he spent in four days, on dinners, a ring, and an automobile. Now he is eager to sell stories of his life for money. He holds off on his real biography, for which he hopes to get a hundred thousand dollars. “Ah am a deep and colorful personality,” he says. He lives in Harlem, gets around to the prizefights, takes in the shows. His plans are uncertain, but he may go into a vaudeville act, as he did some years back, or he may fight some more obscure fights as he has been doing off and on for several years, for small profits, in the West and Southwest. He won a match in 1926, but was knocked out the following year by an unknown named Bearcat Wright (colored) of Omaha, tasting the bitter cup that he himself handed to Fitzsimmons in 1907 and the groggy Jeffries in 1910. He still thinks he could lick Dempsey and that Tunney would be easy.
Some people have the notion that Johnson is still legally banned from America. He gave himself up in 1920, however, and served ten months in Leaven-worth for violation of the Mann Act, after evading sentence for seven years, living abroad. He is free to come and go. The churches and the women’s clubs, which made his heyday miserable, have forgotten. The suicide of his first white wife and his subsequent marriage to another white woman, chief witness for the state in his trial and conviction, are vague memories. Proof of this was given not long ago, when Johnson was cheered by the clergy at a general conference of the Methodist Church in Kansas City at which he denounced liquor, saying, “To serve God, you must train the mind as well as the soul.” His Café de Champion in Chicago was padlocked some years ago.
Johnson enjoys recalling the old times. He loves to talk of his favorite city, Budapest, and of the time at the start of the war when the Germans did not molest several trunks containing his wife’s sables. During the war he says he did secret-service work in Spain, at the request of a Major Lang, U. S. A., paying half his expenses. Of his “deeper life” he is proud and sensitive. “Ah am,” he says, “a very tendah man.” He likes to display his hands and face to show how unscarred they are by battle. There is no mark on his head. His skull was X-rayed in San Francisco eighteen years ago. It took five and a half minutes to get the rays through, as against the customary five to fifteen seconds. The bone was found to be from a half to three-quarters of an inch thick, which is thicker than the skull of an ox. Surgeons said that a blow which would fell a steer would simply jar Mr. Johnson. He doesn’t admire Tunney as a man. He enjoys the books of Richard Harding Davis. He has never met Paul Robeson. He is stopping now at 148th Street. Once he lived here in an apartment which was approached by stairs spread with a crimson plush carpet. On rainy days crash towels were put down to protect the plush.
1929
NEWSREEL — Robert M. Coates
THE big question now about the newsreel theatre is, who thought of it first? Probably everybody has had the idea at one time or another. It is on record that five years ago an enterprising Frenchman actually tried it out in Paris, in a theatre so small it didn’t even have seats. His idea was that people would drop in for a few minutes between appointments, glance at the newsreel as they would at the headlines of a newspaper, and saunter out again. He failed. The present venture at the Embassy Theatre is done with much more elegance. They have snappy usherettes, a gleaming doorman, and a sign in the lobby which says: “The thirst for news may now be quenched, so drink thy fill of Knowledge.” So far about fifty thousand people have attended the theatre weekly. Such a success is it, that they are talking of a country-wide string of newsreel theatres.
Everybody concerned is pretty much up in the air about the idea, rushing cameras here and there, and talking about revolutionizing the movies. When that unfortunate flier crashed into the side of the Y.M.C.A. building they had a cameraman on the spot within twenty minutes. Four hours later they were showing the film together with a short talk by Mr. Robert Baillie, the passenger who jumped by parachute and survived. That evening Mr. Baillie dropped into the theatre to see and hear himself.
The actual news part of the program—news, as distinct from human-interest stuff—is made up from the four regular weekly newsreels the Fox people put out. It represents a culling from one hundred and fifty thousand feet of film sent in every week from all over. Two projecting-rooms are going almost constantly, running off the film, while editors, caption-writers, sound experts, etc., sit at a row of desks in the back of the room, making notes. The staff also thinks up the human-interest features. It has been found that audiences like to see and hear other people talking—Mrs. Byrd telling Commander Byrd, by radio, that she drives her own car now; Miss Shilling, of Baltimore, exp
laining why she offered to marry any man who would give her five thousand dollars. The audience wept when Mrs. Fall said that she still believed Albert Fall innocent. It hissed at Senator Sheppard boosting prohibition. Animal pictures go well. They are the hardest to get. Last year somebody in the Fox company got the idea of making a picture of two cats fighting on a fence, with sound. Cameramen worked three months on it, using over two hundred thousand feet of film. Finally, when they got the picture, it ran a minute and a half.
1929
CALDER’S CIRCUS — Robert M. Coates and James Thurber
CONVERSATION lagging one night at a dinner party in Paris some three years ago, Mr. Alexander Calder amused his table companion by making a chicken out of a piece of bread and a hairpin. A success story has grown from that idle bit of modelling. Mr. Calder’s kangaroo is now one of the heaviest-selling gadgets in the Christmas toy lists; his bear, bull, and dog are also popular numbers. He has also had an enormous succès d’estime with a wire, felt, and beaver-board circus. These raw materials he took up when he abandoned bread and hairpins. The Calder circus is in town now. You can’t buy tickets to it, but people who have seen it say it is worth getting a bid to a private showing. The circus is held in the drawing-room, or kitchen, of some friend. Mr. Calder sits on the floor, beside a miniature tanbark ring, and is very busy. He keeps seventy performers doing incredible things with their wire joints and felt bodies—trapeze artists, high-divers, bareback riders, clowns, lions, horses, and dogs. The tricks are often ingeniously contrived. For example, the horses are mounted on a disc which Mr. Calder can whirl madly, by turning the handle of an old eggbeater. At the proper moment, a spring or something is released, a bareback rider in ballet skirts flies through the air, bursts through a hoop, and lands astride a horse. People scream. Calder seldom misses. For faint hearts, a net is spread beneath the trapeze performers. Clowns tumble about the ring, poodles sit up, a hoochie-coochie dancer brings down the house. It all lasts about two hours, and nobody ever walks out or even gets restive. Jean Cocteau, who is easily bored, saw the show in Paris at the studio of Foujita, the Japanese painter, and was enthusiastic. He wants to put it on the stage somehow.