Tribal Custom

THE MAN FROM KANGAROO LAND IS STILL HOPPING ALONG.

SAM ROWLEY KIND REGARDS TO ALL FRIENDS.

AUSTRALIA'S LITTLE COMEDIAN.

A COMEDIAN WITH A BIG VOICE.

DIRECT FROM THE ANTIPODES.

-- Variety, Nov. 23, 1907 The personal squibs that once filled pages of the self-styled "Bible of Show Business" also filled a real need: without them a performer might be forgotten.

Today the battle for bookings is usually fought on other fronts, but self-advertise ment in Variety and other trade papers survives, a kind of tribal custom to which just about everybody in the business succumbs at least once a year. And it still fills a real need: without it the trade papers might go broke.

Last week that ancient advertising rite was celebrated in Variety's 53rd annual anniversary issue, a hefty (2 lbs., 6 oz.), 290-page publishing phenomenon (457 different ads) representing the combined efforts of ten operatives who spent a hectic six weeks putting the bite on showfolk.

The entries ranged from Irving Berlin's "best wishes" and signature on an other wise white page (price: $500) to a fifth-of-a-page, rear-end view of Actress Shirley MacLaine ($110).

Bulletin Board. The anniversary issue was hardly must reading on Broadway (as weekly Variety usually is), even for the advertisers who had subsidized it. In Hollywood, just a few months before, many of them had felt a similar bite for the 28th anniversary issue of the Hollywood Reporter (384 pp.) and the silver jubilee issue of Daily Variety (436 pp.). Some of them were beginning to wonder if the publicity was worth the price. Purred Actress Faye Emerson: "Whenever I open in anything, the very next day a woman calls from Variety and says. 'Did you see our nice review? Oh, by the way, we have a special edition coming up. Wouldn't you like to take an ad?' Usually I can think of ways I'd much rather spend my money. As a matter of fact, I don't read Variety. I'm not all that interested in all the economic stuff they run. It's a kind of a weekly bulletin board where they put up who's doing what and where you leave messages. Besides, it rubs off on white gloves."

Despite such occasional complaints, no one seriously suggests that placing an ad or failing to place one can influence Variety's reviews. For the most part, the paper's salesmen run into surprisingly little sales resistance. In the old days, before the show-business community decided that honest sheets such as Variety deserved a little support, Variety salesmen were forced to practice the hard-sell, often found it even harder to collect. Many a buck-and-wing team was trailed from Times Square to Peoria before its bill was paid.

Bread & Butter. Speaking for the large majority of those who willingly shelled out, Musicman Meredith Willson (full-page picture, no name) explained: "I shudder to think of the hole in show-business life if there were no Variety. I know how much money I'm making in Denver, what hotel my people are staying in, when they are coming in where, how the competition is in New Haven, the ratings of my songs. My bread and butter is all right there, and this is my way of saying 'Thanks.' "

Not all the advertisers in the anniversary issue had to pay for their ads. Dozens of bylined articles were donated to the cause by literate or semiliterate types from all the stages of show business. Determined readers could dip into an essay on sin in the cinema by a translator of foreign subtitles named Herman Weinberg ("Surely, it is not sophistication to revel in bosoms and behinds"). They could sample Playwright William Saroyan at his most incomprehensible ("Squawking is futile unless it's something else at the same time, such as art, which is also futile unless it is something else at the same time, such as willing"). But for all its words, what the weighty issue added up to was a catalogue of who is solvent--and who is sharp enough to look solvent--in the world of entertainment. It was something for everyone, from Hollywood producers to hall-room has-beens, to leaf through during their idle hours until the next anniversary issue rolls off the presses.

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