Rats Raided

In 1934, when George E. Browne began to rise in the world, Al Capone had been two years in prison and uncaught gangsters were turning from liquor to labor rackets. Mild, mannerly Mr. Browne (no gangster) was a labor careerist who had just been elected president of A. F. of L.'s union for theatre no-collar-men: the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employes. His assistant and bodyguard was one William Bioff, whose record in Chicago included numerous arrests, one conviction for pandering, two efforts to muscle in on Chicago unions, several published references to him as a minor South Side gunman.

Messrs. Browne & Bioff had not long been tops in I. A. T. S. E. before it began to expand. President of a motion picture projectionists' union was a Chicago racketeer named Tommy Maloy. President Maloy was murdered in 1935. Mr. Browne took over the union. One Clyde Osterberg tried to organize a rival union of movie operators. He was murdered. Louis ("Two Gun") Alterie was doing well at organizing theatre janitors when he, too, was murdered. Mr. Browne inherited this union.

George Browne's Willie Bioff appeared in Hollywood, and soon they were mighty figures in cinema. In 1936, Mr. Browne in Manhattan worked out a deal with the Hays office whereby I. A. T. S. E. won a closed-shop bargaining contract for its Hollywood technicians, absorbed and squelched other unions and within 18 months acquired 12,000 members. Last year Willie Bioff admitted (to a grand jury) that after this bargain was struck, he received $100,000 as a loan from a prominent producer.* Willie Bioff, receiving a year's salary and effusive thanks from Mr. Browne, then ducked temporarily out of sight.

Last week the continued rise of George Browne, the continued expansion of I. A. T. S. E., made big news. His union of stagehands having grown until it embraced or claimed nearly everybody except the talent working for legitimate theatres, broadcasters, movie houses and cinemakers, he was out with a kingly plan to enroll the talent as well. He proposed to do nothing less than make I. A. T. S. E. and its subsidiaries one big union, himself a labor tsar for the whole entertainment industry.

This ambition brought Mr. Browne up against "the White Rats." In 1896, before whimsey became a social crime, the first U. S. actors' union worthy of the name was organized as the White Rats of America./- By eventful metamorphosis, including a Broadway strike of actors in 1919 for their right to have a union, that organization is now called Associated Actors & Artistes of America. A sort of union holding company, Four As has eleven affiliates for stage actors, cinemactors, radio performers, vaudevillians, et al. Last week such affiliated Rats as Tallulah Bankhead, Ralph Morgan, Lawrence Tibbett, Edward Arnold, Fredric March, Binnie Barnes, Wayne Morris dashed by plane and train to Atlantic City, N. J., to gnaw back at expansive Mr. Browne.

Stagehand Browne was there as a vice president and executive councilman of A. F. of L., sitting with his fellow councilmen and president, William Green, at their summer meeting to review Federation affairs, deal with such inter-union disputes as this. "It is all a headache," said Mr. Green, who enjoyed elbow-rubbing with stars but had a cold and much confusion in the head.

The Rats had a simple case, which they naively expected the council to treat as a moral problem. Four As, for reasons which it considered good and sufficient, recently threw out the subsidiary American Federation of Actors (vaudeville, night clubs, circus, etc.) and A. F. A.'s Executive Secretary Ralph Whitehead. Alert Mr. Browne promptly rechartered A. F. A. as a subsidiary of his union, with authority to snatch cinemactors from Ralph Morgan's Screen Actors Guild, singers from Mr. Tibbett's American Guild of Musical Artists, stage actors from potent Actors' Equity Association, any & all performers from all other 4-A affiliates. The A. F. of L. constitution expressly forbids just such raiding of one Federation international by another, but has never prevented it.

Required to protest to Mr. Browne's fellow councilmen in private, indignant Rats fumed publicly to the press. Hottest was Tallulah Bankhead: "The action of Mr. George Browne . . . is an outrageous piece of banditry. . . . On what meat does this our Caesar feed? . . . This stock company Hitler should, must be hobbled. . . ." Unhobbled Mr. Browne did not vote, otherwise participated as one union politician among others. The legitimate theatre, the cinema industry, the financial interests involved lobbied fiercely to get the council to settle matters without a jurisdictional strike of Rats on Brownies or vice versa.

Threatened with a wholesale bolt to C. I. O., the council decided this week to give jurisdiction of former A. F. A. members back to the actors, then got down to saving what face it could for Councilman Browne and Secretary Whitehead.

Unhappiest individual in all this was A. F. A.'s oldtime Comedienne Sophie Tucker, 55, who as its non-salaried president stuck by Mr. Whitehead and loyally condoned his switch to Stagehand Browne. For this she was suspended by all-powerful Equity and other subsidiaries of Four As (barring her in effect from stage, screen and radio), pitied by Thespians who concluded that Sophie at last was showing her age.

*In a Los Angeles Superior Court last May, a union counsel asked Bioff if the producer was Joe Schenck. "I don't remember," Bioff said.

/-"Rats" in reverse: star.

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