Broadway Censor

Since 1900, when Sapho got the hook for letting a cocotte be carried to her bedroom in a young man's arms, relatively few Broadway shows have been run off the boards. Last week, after a checkered career, another show joined the blacklist. For two months last fall Dorothy and Howard Baker's Trio struggled--because of its Lesbian subject matter (a young girl enslaved by a French woman professor and at length set free by her love for a young man)--to find a Broadway theater (TIME, Jan. 8). Finally lodged at the Belasco, it played there undisturbed for two months. Then, suddenly, New York's License Commissioner Paul Moss refused to renew the Belasco's license unless Trio closed. Trio closed.

At once a barrage of furious criticism opened up against Moss. The man who had called Trio "lewd, lascivious and immoral" was himself called "dictatorial," "bigoted," "one-man censor."* In the growing uproar, 19 organizations denounced Moss. Some demanded that Mayor LaGuardia fire him.

"Varicose Alleys." The Mayor, who would dearly love to impose his own fussy notions of morality upon all New Yorkers, stoutly defended his Commissioner, weaseled that Moss had not indulged in censorship, but had "only passed on the application for a theater license." Meanwhile Playwright Elmer Rice and Director Margaret Webster resigned from the board of the Mayor's pet project, the New York City Center of Drama and Music, because Moss helps run it.* And Lee Sabinson, producer of Trio, sued Moss for $1,000,000 damages.

Baldish Paul Moss (whose licensing powers extend from pawnbrokers to meat markets and masseurs) had always kept a sharp eye, and sometimes brought down a heavy whip, on the theater. In 1934 he removed the runways ("varicose alleys") from New York's 14 burlesque houses. In 1937 he closed the houses.

Blackface & Blacklists. A confirmed, dapper bachelor, Moss was born in Manhattan 57 years ago, of Austrian parents, quit school in the seventh grade. As a young man, he went into the wool-shrinking business with his brother Benjamin and with the future cinemagnate William Fox. As a young man he was also part of a blackface vaudeville team that played clubs and bazaars. Later the Moss brothers operated a chain of movie houses, and Paul Moss produced several Broadway plays. Rich at 30, Paul Moss retired, lapped up culture by "attending every lecture in town." He was no novice at censorship when LaGuardia appointed him License Commissioner in 1934. For the seven preceding years he had been a member of the National Board of Review, watchdog of cinemorality.

*Asked by TIME: "Do you want to make a statement on why you did not hale them to court?", Commissioner Moss emphatically replied: "No ma'am!" *Last week the City Center itself put on a lusty Frankie and Johnnie ballet which might well have attracted a censor's attention (see Music). Taunted Daily News Critic John Chapman in his review: "License Commissioner Paul Moss last night sponsored a dirty show which had in it bawds, a pimp and a couple of Lesbians." And Columnist Leonard Lyons recalled that Moss once co-produced Noel Coward's This Was a Man, which the Lord Chamberlain banned in England as indecent.

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