Mad Mahout

(See pictures, pp. 40 & 41)

An elephant paraded in Manhattan's Wall Street last week. All over the city billboards broke out in a rash of promises that New Yorkers would soon see something BIGGER THAN A SHOW--BETTER THAN A CIRCUS. The Hippodrome was boarded up behind signs which warned: SHHH! To a stranger, all this might have seemed strange indeed. But to Broadway its meaning was perfectly simple. Billy Rose was about to open his JUMBO.

As the decade's most extraordinary theatrical whatnot went into the final frenzy of rehearsals, Producer Rose had a man on a downtown stage practicing a high-dive into a cage of lions and tigers while a swarm of acrobats and jugglers put the last pat of perfection to their acts and a crew of stagehands struggled with a spangled, 40-ft. jack-in-the-box which pops out of something no bigger than a suitcase. In a Brooklyn riding academy, 16 acrobatic dancers were in training for an equestrian ballet. Inside the Hippodrome the enormous stage had been extended to include a circus ring, and upon it 400 animals, among them a white horse from Sweden which claps its hoofs, were doing their tricks to the tootling of Paul Whiteman's band. Everywhere at once, Producer Rose, who stands 5 ft. 3 in., was barking directions, conferring heatedly, taking unintelligible notes in shorthand.

Billy Rose (ne Rosenberg), one of the brightest boys ever graduated from New York City's Public School No. 44, has brooked very few failures in his 34 years. As his biographer, Alva Johnston, has pointed out. Rose has become one of the shrewdest characters in the cut-throat life of the metropolis by sheer quickness of thinking. He won grade-school medals for sprinting by learning to jump the starter's gun without detection. Later Rose's instinct for what pleases the masses made him one of the most successful song writers of the times, turning out the words for such tunes as Barney Google, You've, Got to See Mama Every Night, Without a Song. After he became Comedienne Fanny Brice's third husband in 1929, he was spurred on to greater feats to keep his personality independent of his wife's fame. He produced a razzle-dazzle revue called Crazy Quilt, toured the country with it and, under the pressure of terrific ballyhoo, made himself a quarter of a million dollars. Then, says Billy Rose, "One day I discovered that there was a show called the circus which had a daily overhead of $18,000 and still managed to make a profit of about $2,000,000 a year. . . . I decided that was the business I wanted to be in."

Mr. Rose has chiefly distinguished himself in the show business by his ability to buy five cents worth of entertainment, sell it for a dollar. With characteristic shrewdness he knew that the kind of show he wanted to put on would take months of rehearsal, that to pay a large cast during this period would break him. So he managed to get his production outside the straitjacket supervision of Actor's Equity. Result is that while Jumbo has been steadily in the making since July, and while its premiere has been postponed every week since Labor Day, he has yet to pay his actors a cent.

But Jumbo is no cheap production. Mr. Rose got the peerless team of Rodgers & Hart to write his score, able Albert Johnson to do his sets and to refurnish (cost: $40,000) the fusty interior of North America's best-known show house (rental: $104,000 a year). He hired actors like Jimmy Durante, Arthur Sinclair, Blanche Ring for his star parts. And, catching them when they needed money, he contracted with Playwrights Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur to write a libretto on which he could string his circus acts, stars and tunes. Messrs. Hecht & MacArthur repaired for a fortnight last winter to Suite No. 21, Villa Marguerita, Charleston, S. C., the exact spot where they turned out their memorable Front Page and 20th Century.

All that Mr. Rose now needed was someone to put up another $125,000 to match his. This he got through Pioneer Pictures from its chief, John Hay Whitney, generous angel of the amusement industry. Last week Mr. Whitney and his aristocratic wife, clad mostly in black sequins and carrying a lap dog, were having the time of their lives shuttling between the three widely separated places where Jumbo was taking final form.

Meanwhile, the extravaganza's ballyhoo was reaching its shrill peak, the work of Pressagent Richard Maney, a character twice as big and almost as fantastic as Mr. Rose. Ballyhooligan Maney's stock in trade is emphasizing his employer's lunacy, inventing alliterative nicknames for him in the Press. He has had little trouble on the first score, for even Mrs. Rose is convinced that her impetuous little man has taken leave of his senses. But the best nicknames the pressagent has been able to think up for his boss so far have been "The Rasputin of the Rathskellers," "The Mad Mahout of 42nd Street." "Next year," predicts Mr. Maney, "Rose takes over the Yale Bowl."

Another thoroughly vital figure who finds himself appalled by irrepressible Billy Rose is Playwright MacArthur, husband of Actress Helen Hayes. Rollicking around rehearsals last week Mr. MacArthur greeted Angel Whitney with "Hello, sucker!" every time they met, forecast: "This thing is either going to be the most fabulous success or the most fantastic failure that ever hit New York!"

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