WHEN Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show folded its tent, when P. T. Barnum's museum closed down, when the Ziegfeld Follies put their feathers and bangles away, when the "legitimate theater" was pushed off gay, white Broadway into the dusky sidestreets of Manhattan, when the movies killed vaudeville and when the movies in turn were nearly killed by TV--each time, the gloomy mourned the past and doubted the future of show business. Yet each time, show business continued brighter, gayer, more interesting than before. Each phase of its irrepressible evolution reappeared in the next: the theater had more than its share of Barnum, the movies committed more Follies than Florenz Ziegfeld, and TV is in effect bringing vaudeville back to life. Today, show business is bigger, richer, more fascinating than ever. To report the world of show business is the aim of a new section TIME launches this week.

Show business is the common--and uncommonly interesting--denominator of the immortal and the merely diverting, the sublime and the corny, the Greek amphitheater and the burlesque runway. It includes Bernard Shaw and the TV gag writer, Laurence Olivier and the Las Vegas chorus girl --as well as their audiences. TIME'S new section will report "Show Biz" in all its phases. It will include news, trends and personalities of movies, theater, television, nightclubs, pop music. It will report on the more offbeat corners such as carnivals and beauty contests. And it will cover the vast supporting cast of pitchmen--the Madison Avenue mills that turn out commercials, as well as the Hollywood moguls who create new stars. While TIME'S regular THEATER and CINEMA sections will continue to review new plays and movies, SHOW BUSINESS will report the news of big and little theaters, of slick Broadway productions and progressive university workshops, will range from the facts of financial life to a poet-playwright's latest experiment, from Tin Pan Alley's latest ditty to a nightclub comedian's newest routine. For the new section's first effort, see this week's cover story on TV Showman Jack Paar (LateNight Affair) plus news on a dance group's comeback from disaster (Ballet from the Ashes) and trouble about the female figure (What the Public Wants?). In this and following weeks, the new section is dedicated to the proposition that (as has been said) "Everybody has two businesses--his own and show business."

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