by Lillian Ross
When we saw Miss Anderson, she had her foot in a cast and walked with crutches, recovering from a broken ankle; it will be all right by January 20th, she said. She wore an inexpensive-looking gray fur coat and a plain green dress. She has coffee-colored skin, black hair, wide-set eyes, a large and mobile mouth. There’s no trace of a Southern Negro accent in her voice. When she’s talking to you, Miss Anderson frowns a lot, amiably, and once in a while gives you a broad wink. She told us she was born in a Negro neighborhood in South Philadelphia. Her father sold ice and coal, and her mother took in washing; the family lived in a single rented room. They all used to sing spirituals on rainy Sundays, to keep cheerful. When Marian was six years old, she made her first concert appearance; sang a duet, “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” with another pickaninny at a service in a neighborhood Baptist church. When she was eight, she received her first money for singing in public—half a dollar; she was billed as a “baby contralto.” Her father died soon after this, and several Negro organizations advanced money for her to study seriously. In the summer of 1925 she beat three hundred other aspirants in a contest here, and sang at Lewisohn Stadium, accompanied by the Philharmonic. Then she went to Europe to study further, returning in 1931 to give a recital, which won her good notices and enabled her to move her mother and sisters into a better neighborhood. Then her next European tour, from which she has only just returned.
Her repertoire at present includes some hundred and twenty-five songs. She practices when she feels like it—perhaps ten hours one day and not at all the next. She plays tennis, and swims a little, for relaxation. She told us (with a broad wink) that she had followed the career of Joe Louis with great interest, and would like to meet him some time. We sounded her out about superstitions; she said she had none of her own, but once a woman told her it would bring her luck if she always sang with a certain little handkerchief in her hand. Marian, the soul of amiability, tried it, but it didn’t seem to make much difference, and she gave it up.
You might call her cautious as well as amiable. “Who is your favorite composer?” we asked. “I haven’t one,” she said, “but if I had one, it would be Schubert.” “What is your favorite song?” we pursued. “I have no favorite song,” she told us, “but if I did have one, it would be Schubert’s ‘Ave Maria.’ ”
1936
WALTER’S BANKS — Eugene Kinkead
WE happen to be the only journalist ever permitted to see Walter Chrysler’s collection of penny banks, and we’re going to tell you all about them. The hell with whether or not you’re interested. Mr. Chrysler, it seems, has been collecting banks for three years but keeping it pretty much of a secret, because he was afraid too much publicity might interfere with his negotiations with dealers. Now he has almost a thousand banks, and he doesn’t care who knows it. He received us last week in his office on the fifty-sixth floor of the Chrysler Building, and he and his secretary, a Mr. Morrison, told us the whole story. You probably didn’t know about it, but penny banks are now popular as a collector’s item.
The great penny-bank period was from 1870 to the end of the century, and collectors will tell you that the banks, like Currier & Ives prints, reflect their period, ranging in subject from representations of Civil War soldiers in forts to Teddy Roosevelt shooting a bear. There are two sorts of banks, stationary and mechanical: the stationary kind are just more or less elaborately sculptured affairs of cast iron or pottery, with slots for pennies; the mechanical banks all do things when you drop in a penny—a clown does a little dance, Buster Brown and his dog Tige go down a chute-the-chutes, an American gunboat sinks a Spanish ship, and God only knows what else. Mr. Chrysler tries to keep all the banks working perfectly, and when he acquires a bank with a missing part he has a new one made. One of his favorites is the Snapping Bulldog, which snatches a penny out of a man’s hand and gobbles it up. “Watch this,” he said to us, putting a penny in the man’s hand. Nothing happened. “Somebody’s been playing with this,” said Mr. Chrysler sternly. “People sneak in and play with them all the time.” He wound up the bank, and this time it worked O.K.; the bulldog engulfed the penny in a series of well-cadenced gobbles. Mr. Chrysler moved about his office, operating all his favorite mechanical banks. (He keeps them right where he works, on shelves. The stationary banks are in a little side room.) There was Prof. Pugfrog on the Bicycle, Darktown Baseball Battery, Dentist Pulling Tooth from Colored Man’s Mouth, Owl Blinking His Eyes, and a figure called Young Tammany, made in the seventies, who dropped a penny into his poke and waved his hand at you in thanks. Mr. Chrysler keeps a little tin can full of pennies on hand, to work the banks, and never tries to get them back, for fear of breaking something. That’s what wealth does for you.
The Chrysler collection at present lacks only thirty-nine of the rare collector’s items that Mr. Chrysler set out to gather, and he doesn’t expect to have much difficulty with those. For one thing, Chrysler dealers all over the country know that he is interested in banks, and are keeping their eyes open. He is scrupulous about never paying more than he thinks a bank is worth, and has often knocked fifty cents off a dealer’s asking price. Whenever he gets hold of duplicate banks, he trades with other collectors, like a stamp-collector.
There are a couple of famous penny-bank collections in town in addition to the Chrysler collection. One belongs to a Dr. Arthur Corby, a dentist, and the other to the Seamen’s Bank, at 74 Wall Street. The Seamen’s Bank collection is public.
1936
KNOCK OF OPPORTUNITY — Alva Johnston and Harold Ross
WILL ROGERS, in case there’s doubt about it, was started on his literary career by Kermit Roosevelt, the late Frank Munsey, and the late Louis Wiley. Kermit Roosevelt induced Rogers to make a speech in Town Hall on the evening of October 26th, 1922, in favor of Ogden Mills, who was running for Congress from the Silk Stocking District. The speech accidentally caused some journalistic disturbance, and this resulted in a sudden increase in the cowboy’s fame.
The Mills rally was an evening-dress affair. Formal clothes would have been obligatory at a riot in the Silk Stocking District in those days. The decorous patting of kid gloves had rewarded a series of dull speakers who preceded Rogers. When he started, he stunned his audience immediately by saying that Ogden Mills was the brother of Eleanor Mills of the celebrated Hall-Mills double-murder case, which was then in the height of its glory. After dragging Ogden Mills through this scandal for a while, Rogers informed his audience that Mills had been wealthy before getting into politics, but that he had grown vastly more wealthy in office. “I don’t know the man,” added Rogers, “and that is why they have asked me to come here to speak.” After some other insults, he continued, “We need Mills. This country needs a man in Congress that owns his own dress suit. Our candidate,” he added, “is the only man we could send to Congress who could go into a Fifth Avenue home without delivering something.”
Rogers explained that he had consented to make a speech for Mills because Kermit Roosevelt had asked him. “I would make a speech for Harding, if a Roosevelt asked me,” he said. At first the audience was mortified and silent. Finally, somebody thought it was funny and laughed. Soon everybody was laughing. Ogden Mills was the last to break down.
The newspaper reporters who covered the meeting dismissed Rogers with a line or two. It was a law of journalism not to give any free advertising to professional comedians, and Rogers was then doing his rope act in the Ziegfeld “Follies.” The law was broken by the Times because Louis Wiley, then business manager, hurried to the editorial offices after the meeting and told them the speech was the funniest thing he had ever heard. He sat down and tried to give a reporter an account of it, but was so overcome with laughter that he could remember little of what Rogers had said. Between the acts at the “Follies,” Rogers, who had spoken from notes, dictated his speech to the reporter and the Times printed it in full.
Frank Munsey was then owner of the Herald. He was in a towering rage because his paper had not printed the spee
ch. He was still more enraged when he was told that it was not the custom to print the speeches of comedians. Finally, he learned that a woman reporter had represented the Herald at the meeting. He had specifically requested a week before that a good man be assigned to cover the Mills campaign. The explanation that the woman was one of the best reporters in town did not mollify him. He had asked for a good man and he would not let anybody palm off a good woman on him. He then ordered that stenographers be hired to attend every meeting where Rogers spoke and to take down his utterances in full. The Herald would come out every few days with two- or three-column speeches of Rogers. The McNaught Syndicate soon became excited and sent Rube Goldberg around to persuade Rogers to become a writer. The cowboy signed up to do a series of Sunday stories. The McNaught Syndicate sold the New York rights to these to the Times, without offering them to the Herald. Word was shortly circulated through the Herald offices that Mr. Munsey would prefer never to see the name of Will Rogers in the Herald again.
1935
DÉSHABILLEUSE — A. J. Liebling
WHEN Ann Corio opened at the Apollo last week, we went over and interviewed her, considering it no more than our plain duty to be able to tell you something about the greatest strip woman in burlesque. (A strip woman, in case you’ve led a sheltered life, is a beautiful creature with vague talents as a singer or dancer, who climaxes her act by removing, piece by piece, as much of her clothing as the local censors permit.) La Corio, during the forty-odd weeks of her working year, earns a bit over a thousand dollars a week, while run-of-the-mill strip women are lucky to get a hundred. The reason for this disparity had been a mystery to us ever since we’d heard about it, because offhand it would seem that every déshabilleuse has the same stock in trade, but Miss Corio cleared that up right away. “It isn’t what they see that counts,” she told us, with an angelic smile. “It’s what they don’t see. If I ever stripped completely, there would be no curiosity left. Besides, it wouldn’t be modest. So I always wear little panties with embroidery. Like that, a girl has something to follow up with. Only I never do.” She has a sort of Madonna face, oval, with round, deep brown eyes and excellent teeth, and is tall and slim. Talking with her, one understands why the late Justice Holmes never missed a single one of her visits to the Capital.
Miss Corio’s parents were natives of Italy who wound up in Hartford, Connecticut. She broke into show business when she was a senior in a Hartford high school, by winning a Charleston contest. That would have been in 1926. She immediately came to New York to be a musical-comedy star, and within a month was dancing in a Minsky chorus at the National Winter Garden on Houston Street. Before her family discovered that this wasn’t the uptown Winter Garden, Ann was making so much money that it would have been foolish to object. Although most ladies were streamlined back in 1927, the billowy tradition persisted with burlesque dancers. Ann was too slim for effective Oriental dancing, so she began stripping, waiting for applause after each discard. Other ladies have claimed the honor of being the first stripper, but Ann says they were just cootch dancers who took off their clothes. “I make no suggestive motions,” she informed us with calm pride. “No grinding, no bumping, no tassel-tossing.” She’s meticulous about her costumes, because, as she says, “It’s like a box of candy. The package has to be nice or they won’t want to know what’s inside.” Sometimes she sings a song—if possible, to some bald-headed gent in one of the boxes. If he is accompanied by his wife, she always asks her permission. “I always say, ‘Do you mind?’ and they never say they do.”
In private life Miss Corio is the wife of a Mr. Emmett Callahan, manager of the Apollo Theatre. They have a summer place on Cape Cod, and when they are in town live in a hotel on Forty-ninth Street, attending Mass at St. Malachy’s. She has made motion-picture tests and received attractive offers, but nothing as high as she makes in burlesque. “Seventeen hundred dollars for one week in Cleveland,” Mr. Callahan said to us. “That is not hay.” Locally, Miss Corio may not be as well known a strip artist as Gypsy Rose Lee, but she certainly has more of a national reputation, with such solid followings in several large cities that she works on a percentage basis. We mentioned Sally Rand to Miss Corio. “I was introduced to her in Boston,” she said coldly. “She couldn’t get away with that in burlesque for a minute—hiding behind a bubble or a couple of fans. In burlesque they want a good look at you, and that grease she wears all over herself practically amounts to a suit of heavy underclothes.”
1936
DEAD PAN JOE — Fred Wittner
ALL we know about big-league baseball is what our office boy finds time to tell us. He says that the Yankees’ centre fielder, Joe Di Maggio, is likely to be the batting sensation of the World Series. This is Di Maggio’s first year with the Yankees, and he cost them $25,000 and four players. The Yankees needed a colorful hitter to replace the retired Babe Ruth in the hearts of New York baseball aficionados, and he seems to have succeeded: his fan mail weighs about as much as Ruth’s used to, and he has charmed the entire Italian population of the city, bringing a goodly number of them out to see their first baseball game, carrying little Italian flags. In person he is a tall, well-made, rather lazy-looking youth, with none of the off-diamond characteristics of the average ballplayer: he hangs up his clothes and keeps his hotel room neat, dresses quietly, doesn’t drink, answers his mail promptly, and always tries to remember your name (the Babe used to call you Charlie, whatever your name was).
Joe pronounces his name “Dih-mah-jio,” and says it means, in Italian, “of the month of May.” He comes of a biggish tribe of Di Maggios on the coast of California, most of whom follow the trade of crab fishermen. Joe never intended to be either a crab fisherman or a centre fielder. As a boy he played the usual amount of sandlot baseball, but gave it up when he was fourteen. During the next four years he worked as an office boy, and played tennis for fun. His brother Vincent, who was playing with San Francisco in the Coast League, wasn’t satisfied to let well enough alone, however, and one day in 1932, when Joe was eighteen, urged him to come around to the ball park for a tryout. That was Vincent’s mistake, because Joe immediately made the club, and the following year took away his brother’s job in the outfield. He played for two years with San Francisco, batting .399 in 1935; the Yankees were ready to buy him for the 1935 season, but he wrenched his knee just before the deal went through, and they made him play another year with San Francisco to prove that it was all right. One of his brothers stepped in to manage Joe when he was sold, and succeeded in getting for him $6,500 of his purchase price. Joe gave it to his family to buy a fishing boat.
Joe isn’t such a spectacular batter of home runs as Babe Ruth was, but baseball managers say he’s a better all-round batter, showing up especially well in the “runs batted in” column of his record, which is a pretty good indication of a batter’s value. Pitchers haven’t been able to find any predictable weakness in his batting, although, like every other player, he has his good and his bad days. One of his worst days came in July, when he was chosen to play in the all-star interleague game in Boston. He fumbled one hit, missed a fly completely, and came up to bat five times without getting a hit. His fielding is generally phenomenal, though, and he can make throws of three hundred and fifty feet, from deep centre to the plate. (Most players are well satisfied with an accurate throw of two hundred and fifty feet.) In his Coast League days he established a record of hitting safely in sixty-two straight games.
Joe is now getting $8,000 a year, most of which he sends home to his family. Next year he ought to get double that, and it is to be supplemented by the proceeds of a vaudeville tour he plans to make with Vincent. Vincent will furnish the patter, and Joe will bat balls into the gallery—tennis balls, according to his present plans. That’s all we know about Joe Di Maggio, except that Winchell says he’s stuck on a bubble dancer down in the Village, that his friends call him Dead Pan Joe, and that he likes to sit through movies twice—likes to get a thorough understanding of them.
ET TU, SHADOW? — A. J. Liebling
MOILING through the Sunday paper last weekend, we came upon a notice of a radio program scheduled for 5:30 by WOR: “The Shadow, with Orson Welles.” “Orson Welles!” we murmured, astonished. “The same Orson Welles whose modern-dress production of ‘Julius Caesar’ is now playing to packed houses?” Deciding that it must indeed be he, we tuned in on WOR at 5:30. What we heard was a fiendish laugh, the words “The Shadow knows,” in a quavery, gloating voice, then more fiendish laughter. Followed a chilling half-hour (sponsored by a product called Blue Coal) in which a masked maniac named Anton Spivak, who was plotting to blow up people with dynamite, was frustrated by The Shadow. And this Shadow, played to the hilt by Mr. Welles, was a rich playboy named La Monte Cranston who, by night, became invisible and foiled evildoers. You can believe us or not.
The next evening we went backstage at the Mercury Theatre, after the final curtain, to interview Mr. Welles and find out how La Monte Cranston jibed with Brutus. “Did you have to listen to that?” said Mr. Welles. He had just come from the stage and was still in costume, a blue serge business suit. Offstage, he’s still a tall, moon-faced youngster with a baby’s complexion and a mop of brown hair. The only new characteristic we discovered was a sudden giggle. If you read the dramatic pages, you already know that, at the surprising age of twenty-two, he had created history with his productions of “Macbeth” and “Doctor Faustus” even before “Julius Caesar.” Probably you also know the story of how, when sixteen, he left his native Kenosha—“a nasty little Middle Western city,” he calls it—to go to Ireland and paint. Running out of money, he introduced himself at the Gate Theatre as a Guild star on vacation and was immediately presented by the trusting Dubliners with a series of leading rôles. He even made guest appearances at the Abbey Theatre. “I don’t want to sound jaded,” he told us, “but this success here, grateful though I am for it, isn’t a patch on my Dublin success.”