It all began as a simple bet between good friends.
In late September 1893, Oscar had taken a train to Boston to scout out the possible booking of A Trip to Venus, written and produced by his good friend the composer Gustave Kerker. Once back home, Oscar and Gustave met at Marcus Meyer’s office in the Fromme Bros. law firm, talked shop, and fell into their usual conversation about the general dearth of native, creative talent. They moved on to assess the relative merits and flaws of their own recent productions of Venus and Champagne. Kerker bemoaned that Venus had eaten up an entire year of his efforts.
Oscar Hammerstein
This tidbit dumbfounded Oscar. Hadn’t Kerker merely tried to cash in on the success of the previous season’s A Trip to Chinatown with his own Trip to copycat show, one of many that followed in Chinatown’s wake? After all, these entertainments were pure froth; an assemblage of vaudeville talents tethered to a wafer-thin plot; a revue posing as a comic operetta. This was hardly a fusion of song mit story, after all. How could it possibly have taken a year to produce?
“A composer of real musical genius ought not require more than a few days to reel off a comic opera or operetta. I could write one myself in a day or two,” Oscar chided. Kerker just laughed at him. Oscar pulled out a $100 bill and declared that he could write music, book, and lyrics for a one-act operetta in forty-eight hours. Gus eagerly matched the bet.
They agreed to recuse themselves from the verdict and quickly assembled a jury of professionals in the field, led by playwright Charles A. Byrne, the writer and theatre manager A. M. Palmer, New York Herald managing editor and critic J. I. C. Clark, writer and critic Leander Richardson, and theatrical jack-of-all-trades Jessie Williams. Each man was to judge thumbs-up or thumbs-down on a specific aspect of the work. Palmer would judge lyrics; Richardson, dialogue; Clarke, literary merit; and Williams, music. They alone would deem whether Oscar’s effort merited his claim.
So as not to allow Oscar the opportunity to access any previously composed materials hidden beneath the top hat, so to speak, it was to be Kerker who would supply Oscar with the subject matter of the comic opera. Upon receiving his topic, Oscar would be escorted directly to the nearby Gilsey House and locked inside suite 49—which did not have a fire escape—and would be supplied only a piano, musical-score paper, a quill, and ink. Adjoining rooms 48 and 50 were immediately booked and materials were secured. Room 50 would house the piano.
After Oscar had scrawled his signature on the contract, the entire group set forth down to the Gilsey House café, where Kerker offered up a toast to the wager. Oscar refrained, exclaiming, “Oh, no you don’t! I want that hundred dollars!” The mob then followed Oscar to his rooms to wish him all the best and to see him padlocked in. Before Kerker left, he gave Oscar the subject matter and name for the operetta: The Koh-i-noor Diamond.
Bookie Al Smith offered 100-to-1 odds against Oscar but had no takers.
Into Oscar’s suite was wheeled a piano and composition materials. A guard was stationed outside, tasked with keeping Oscar in and all visitors, especially reporters, out. (Later in the proceedings, Oscar’s gatekeeper would add another category to the unwanted visitor list: women—of all ages, shapes, and sizes—wanting but a moment with the impresario to share whatever various talents they possessed.) Oscar was diligently sequestered throughout.
By 3:20 p.m., Oscar had changed into his crimson silk pajamas and matching skullcap and was now alone at his piano. He had no sooner begun noisily summoning his musical muse than he became distracted by the tinny sounds of an organ-grinder making his way slowly down the street playing a medley of Kerker tunes.
At first Oscar threw coins down at the man, but this seemed only to spur further tunes. Oscar then grabbed a water pitcher and held it, arms outstretched, threateningly above the organ-grinder. He retreated across the street and safely out of throwing range. Oscar summoned his guard and hastily arranged to be moved to two rooms higher up and facing away from the street.
Before long the streets below the hotel were filled with organ-grinders—and reporters. With editors Clark and Palmer on the judgment committee, news of the bet had traveled fast. Before its halfway mark, the bet had become the talk of the country. Every major New York paper covered every detail in their morning and evening editions. What did he eat? Steak. When did he sleep? Rarely. What did his room look like? A tornado of crumpled paper. Who visited him? No one! Letters swamped newsrooms rooting for Oscar to win.
Despite the long odds, theatre managers in Chicago, Philadelphia, St. Louis, and Boston had all telegrammed Oscar wanting to talk terms. Hit or flop, Oscar’s Diamond would soon be seen by everyone.
Oscar, cotton balls in his ears, cigar clutched in his teeth, banged away at his upright, night and day. He stopped only to wolf down sandwiches, light the next in an endless chain of cigars, and take the rare catnap.
The howls that emanated from Oscar’s room throughout the two days made it loud and clear that he had taken to his task seriously. This was not to be a gussied-up revue with catchy, commercially detachable tunes, no sir. This was to be a comic opera in the operatic tradition. And Oscar had much to marshal for this task that Kerker had failed to consider. Oscar had received a comprehensive musical education as a boy in Berlin, he had written and produced straight plays as a young cigar man, and in recent years he had composed a fair number of tunes—mostly ballet waltzes, “coon” songs, and Irish ballads—on an as-needed basis for various shows. He credited himself as composer but quite often let his nom de plume, Rudolph Jackson, take the bow, or blame, for the lyrics. (Lyric writers got no respect!) This challenge had put all his theatre-writing experience to use.
At two o’clock in the morning of the second day, within hours of the deadline, a weary, unkempt Oscar emerged from his room, woke up his jailor, and declared, “It’s over.” He poured himself a generous cocktail, downed it, stubbed out his cigar, and passed out.
He rose within the hour, wolfed down a hearty breakfast of ham and eggs, and washed it down with a pot of hot coffee; then he lit a fresh cigar and set to the task of refining his overscrawled efforts. Then, for his benefit alone, he played and sang his masterpiece from beginning to end. The organ-grinders grinded on below, but to no avail. Oscar had mined his diamond in the rough right on schedule.
So did he win the bet?
No. The split jury issued this statement:
We, the undersigned committee, appointed to decide a wager between Oscar Hammerstein and Gustave Kerker, agree that under the strict terms of the wager Mr. Hammerstein has lost. In so deciding the committee wishes to place on record its unanimous opinion that the feat performed by Mr. Hammerstein stands unparalleled in all known competitions of the kind; that he actually did in the space of forty-eight hours construct, write, and compose a work of art which, although deficient in meeting all the requirements of the wager, has shown a versatility and ingenuity worthy of sincere admiration.
The show ran six weeks at Koster & Bial’s before being transferred up to the Harlem for another six. It was reported in the papers that Oscar blew most of his profits by letting it run two weeks too long up in Harlem. But Oscar wasn’t stupid. He knew how to read the box office receipts. He must have just been too happy about it to close it.
Koster & Bial profited nicely from Diamond early in its run, but they were consumed with foreboding. They still read their name on the marquee and paid for ads that displayed their name in every paper. But in the show reviews, critics began casually referring to the place as Hammerstein’s. In the eyes of the press and the public, Oscar ran his own place once again. Koster & Bial steamed. But in one year’s time it would be Oscar who would boil over.
Almost one year later, at ten o’clock on the night of September 24, 1894, Mademoiselle Di Dio, billed second to last on the program, came onstage at Koster & Bial’s to sing her songs. Throughout the prior week, Oscar had tried furiously to keep this thin act off his stage. In his capacity as booking agent, he had been able to adapt, even thrive, within the format demanded by his partners. But this was different. Koster & Bial had inserted this act without consulting him and had summarily ignored his objections.
Oscar presumed Mademoiselle Di Dio’s presence was the direct result of her association with George Kessler, a liquor distributor for Moët & Chandon champagne. Koster & Bial had eagerly comped box seats to Kessler and an entourage of his business cronies. Oscar stewed in the adjacent box.
At the conclusion of Mademoiselle Di Dio’s turn, Kessler and company whistled and clapped furiously to drum up an enthusiastic response for their girl. Oscar stood up, turned toward Kessler’s box, and let fly a loud hiss. At first it could not be heard over the applause. But as the clapping subsided, the audience heard the rude protest. When they realized that it was coming from one of the theatre’s owners, their jaws dropped as one.
Kessler rose. “What does this mean, Mr. Hammerstein? Your conduct is remarkable. I doubt if an artist was ever before hissed in any theatre by the manager of the house.”
The Koh-i-noor engagement at the Harlem Opera House and the Koster & Bial’s Music Hall “programme” with Mlle Marietta Di Dio, chanteuse internationale
Hammerstein responded with a volley of epithets that brought cries of “Shame!” from the gathering crowd. Kessler withdrew to the promenade; Oscar followed, vociferously declaring a manager’s right to do as he so chose, and ordered Kessler out of the theatre. Bial countered with cries for Oscar’s removal. Since the encircling crowd seemed to be in unanimous agreement with Bial, Oscar flew down the stairs, grabbed the arm of Police Officer Petrosini, who had been detailed outside the theatre door, and marched back up to confront the wine merchant. Unable to effect Kessler’s removal, Oscar inexplicably took a swing at him, which missed its mark and spun him into the arms of Petrosini, who firmly held him in a viselike grip.
After hearing both sides, the policeman declared no interest in throwing any of the parties out the door and Oscar took the opportunity of the brief lull to beat a hasty exit into a side room.
Moments after Petrosini returned to his station, and as a visibly ruffled Kessler was making his exit, Oscar flew out the side room and renewed the epithet-laced confrontation. Impatient with the pace of Kessler’s removal, Oscar repeated his first effort and this time punched Kessler square in the chest.
Before his successful career in the employ of Moët & Chandon, the tall, obese but muscular George Kessler had enjoyed notable success as a professional boxer and hammer thrower; he was an athlete through and through. Kessler instinctively countered Oscar’s blow with a straight-armed punch that sent Oscar flying across the marble floor. Up he popped, turned on his heels, and charged Kessler again. Another blow sent Oscar sprawling. Up, once again, Oscar charged. Again he tasted the marble. After this third attempt by Oscar to attack Kessler, the crowd forcefully separated the pair, and Kessler made his exit as the crowd heaped its denunciations upon Oscar’s bleeding brow.
Were that it were over. The stage footlights had blinded Mademoiselle Di Dio to the source of the humiliating hiss. But as news of its owner and the ensuing fracas filtered back to her, she swooped down the stairs to confront the errant manager.
Oscar’s pride had been hurt by Koster & Bial’s trumping of his booking prerogatives, but judging by the direction in which Oscar hissed, his quarrel was not with Di Dio but with Kessler, the perceived source of his humiliation. And so Oscar penitently accepted and endured a barrage of unprintable German expletives from the French songbird.
As bad luck would have it, back in popped Kessler, with the mob and Patrolman Petrosini in tow.
“It seems,” said Kessler, “that I have arrived in time. I returned fearing that a man who could hiss a woman and a stranger might even strike her.”
At this point, Kessler demanded that Di Dio slap Oscar for his insolent behavior and further demanded the immediate satisfaction of a duel. These words had barely escaped Kessler’s lips before Oscar had Kessler by the arm and was attempting to steer him out the door.
The beleaguered patrolman Petrosini stepped into the breach before further fisticuffs could break out, and upon mutual complaint, hauled both Oscar and Kessler to the Thirtieth Street Station. Koster & Bial followed close upon their heels and immediately made Kessler’s bail, while leaving Oscar to stew for a few hours.
How a night in jail concentrates the mind!
Oscar immediately filed a motion to dissolve his partnership with Koster & Bial. In the ensuing court proceedings, Oscar obtained access to Koster & Bial’s books, something he had unsuccessfully tried to do in the past. The books revealed what he had long suspected—the theatre partnership was buying liquor, food, and tobacco products at greatly inflated prices from K&B Incorporated. Oscar suspected that the missing profits had most certainly been used to buy off lawyers, judges, and police, who had turned a blind eye to off-the-books Sunday shows, to say nothing of the “entertainment” occurring inside some of those curtained boxes.
Oscar’s presumptions of malfeasances proved correct: the courts affirmed his accusations but declined to assess damages to Oscar. He was able to wrest some measure of fair compensation—$70,000— for the sale of his stake in the Koster & Bial partnership by holding daily press conferences describing every deliberation by the court. A little public light went a long way in this case. Oscar would receive $300,000 more for the sale of the theatre itself a few months later, and thus would permanently sever his financial connection to the theatre he had built.
Now Oscar would have his revenge.
With little thought to cost, Oscar bundled and sold all the cigar patents that he still held interest in and drastically refinanced both of his Harlem theatres. In doing so he amassed enough assets to leverage a loan with New York Life Insurance Company. With money from these many sources, Oscar purchased three lots along the east side of Seventh Avenue, between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth streets, in the heart of what was then called Longacre Square.
This muddy and dangerous intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue had a split personality. By day, harness makers and carriage repair shops plied their trade at the street level; by night, upstairs brothels and betting establishments plied theirs. Earlier in the century, the square had served as a resting spot for cattle on their way to the slaughter houses downtown—the original Broadway “cattle call.” While the area no longer catered to transients and cowboys, vice and prostitution had made a permanent home in its shadows. Electric streetlights and Victorian morals had, until now, faded out north of Forty-second Street. Oscar’s plans spurred a sudden, upward valuation of real estate in the area and made people in both the horse and skin trades very happy indeed. Oscar had made the move that many a theatre producer had contemplated but none had done. The Longacre was now in play.
When asked by reporters about his future with Koster & Bial, Oscar retorted, “Who? By the time I’m finished with them, the world won’t know they ever existed. I will build a new house the likes of which has never been seen in the whole world.”
Given Oscar’s reputation as a man for whom nothing was impossible, not one reporter doubted the declaration, though some expressed skepticism about his choice of location. Oscar assured them, “It’s not where the theatre is; it’s what you give the public.” He’d done it in Harlem. He’d do it again here.
A costly game was now afoot. Both Oscar and Koster & Bial quickly dispatched scouts to Europe to tie up talent. Oscar sent his brother-in-law Henry Rosenberg to secure the appearance of famed chanteuse Yvette Guilbert. He hired the theatre manager Ted D. Marks to secure German talent, and he sent the Colonel himself, Henry Mapleson, the former impresario of the “old money” Academy of Music, to scout operatic talent in France and elsewhere.
Word of this bitter contest for variety talent spread quickly. Increased demand by the theatres caused the performers to raise the average fee roughly threefold. Of greater consequence for both sides was that this bidding war would later sour the important relationships that both parties had with a largely cordial and cooperative fraternity of theatre managers. On both sides of the pond, managers were now paying larger sums for their acts, for no reason other than that two among them were at each other’s throats. Revenge had trumped reason and the whole industry now paid the price.
By February 1895, workers had cleared the entire Longacre Square property of rubble and debris. By June, an immense foundation had been set. By July, the stone and iron work had been put in place. By August, the largest girder ever made in the United States had been swung into place to hold the weight of the roof. Throughout, Oscar stood on the sidewalk across the square, watching the masons and stone setters at their work and barreling over to make suggestions as he saw fit.
A thousand workmen labored night and day to bring the Olympia Theatre to completion. On the talent front, Oscar’s booking scouts had returned from Europe with signed contracts for 180 acts, some of whom were booked as far ahead as the 1897 season.
The Olympia Theatre under construction, 1895
The trapezoidal building, located on the east side of Broadway, between Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth streets, occupied the entire block front. Within its faux-nautical, porthole-bedecked granite walls resided an entertainment complex adorned in a style that would have done Louis XIV proud.
The Olympia housed three spacious auditoriums—the Olympia Music Hall, the Olympia Theatre, and, sandwiched between them, the Olympia Concert Hall. These were spaces devoted nightly to three separate and distinct entertainments: legitimate theatre, music hall variety, and “operett-ic” fare, all available for one fifty-cent admission fee. (For an additional fee, one could reserve a box seat.) No other manager had ever stacked so much entertainment into one building.
Oscar multitasks
The space was generously sized on both sides of the curtain, was equipped with the latest in theatrical technology, and housed a wide array of generic backdrops suspended in a rigging loft eighty feet above the stage. Sculptural flourishes adorned boxes, panels, ceilings, and arches. Life-size statuary stood out prominently in the lobby. Seating capacity was ample and included eighty-four boxes—more than all but the largest opera houses had.
Oscar Hammerstein, 1895
Oscar had worked around the clock for over a year to create an opening night of pandemonium, the likes of which had never before been seen in New York City. And he had spent in excess of $3 million—all of it his own. Of greater significance to his theatrical legacy, all four of his boys were still involved in the business. Harry worked the box office. Arthur oversaw construction. Willy assisted with booking and management. Abe scouted talent in Europe.
The paint was not yet dry when the first patrons entered through the main doors of Oscar’s mammoth entertainment complex. Carpet nails jingled in Oscar’s pockets. Paint of different colors blazed across the back of his Prince Albert coat. Revenge would be sweet indeed.
The crowd grew throughout the afternoon, jamming up traffic in the square. The theatre seated six thousand, but Oscar had sold ten thousand tickets on the assumption that the crowd would flow uniformly, and without incident, through, and out of, his enormous Olympia Theatre. But a steady downpour of rain halted the orderly procession. No one would leave. The house bulged as drenched ticket holders tried to force their way in. When the police tried to drive them back, they adopted football tactics, storming the doors en masse in wedge formations, launching surprise blitzes, and mud wrestling throughout the night. The morning headlines rang with news of the mob scene within and without the theatre. The theatre district that would become Times Square had been born with a bang!
Unfortunately, despite its dramatic beginnings, the Olympia did not prosper. The architect McElfatrick had warned Oscar of the impracticality of building a one-size-fits-all entertainment mecca. By trying to put all entertainment under one roof, Oscar had completely misjudged his audience. The mostly male audience wanted variety in every sense—different shows, different restaurants, even different brothels—and wanted variety in their variety, something Oscar’s mammoth theatre could hardly provide.
Like the proverbial fat man at the picnic, the Olympia had hoarded the goods, increased demand, doubled costs, and angered other theatre managers around the city. Oscar had upset the talent-to-venue balance of New York’s variety entertainment. He couldn’t fill the place or profit. He had built a white elephant. McElfatrick’s dire prediction for the Olympia’s demise slowly but surely came true.
There was an upside, however: perhaps the high points of the Olympia’s short existence were the performances of two actors, named Joe Weber and Lew Fields. As Mike and Meyer, they had invented their own “Dutch” comedy routines, which consisted of knockabout, slapstick antics coupled with an equally rough, Yiddish mangling of the English language. They were the comedic predecessors of Abbott and Costello and the Three Stooges.
WEBER AND FIELDS
Dirt-poor, young Joe Weber and Lew Fields started out entertaining Bowery street crowds for spare change. Here, they burnished their comedy routines. As their venues improved from saloons to vaudeville houses, Weber and Fields established a highly talented company, managed their own theatre, and produced their own shows with whimsical names like Fiddle-Dee-Dee and Whoop-Dee-Doo. While their first acts typically consisted of their usual vaudeville buffoonery, their second acts achieved Broadway legend as they warmheartedly burlesqued other current Broadway plays. Their popularity spanned all socioeconomic classes. Countless imitators followed, but they were Broadway’s first clown princes.
Weber and Fields had first played at the Harlem in 1894. Oscar had absolutely loved them and offered them a four-week stint at the Olympia. Audience reaction convinced Oscar to extend them another four weeks. He moved the act to “the spot”—the coveted first-act closer position—the spot immediately before the intermission.
But then, in week seven, Oscar bumped Weber and Fields into the second act to make way for Leopoldo Fregoli, the world-renowned, lightning-change artist that Oscar had booked for a rumored whopping $1,000 a night.
Fregoli was certainly a one-of-a-kind performer. He played fifty separate characters, among them a ballet dancer, an ingenue, an aging singer whose voice has fled, an impresario, a spoof of the magician Alexander Herrmann, a debunker of magic, a multi-instrumentalist, and a parade of well-known orchestra conductors and entertainers. With a running time of over one hour, he was a night of vaudeville all by himself—or at least an entire first act.
Weber and Fields howled at being tossed into the second act with the songbirds and midget revues. Oscar replied, “You boys are so good, they’ll wait for you all night if they have to.”
Weber and Fields hatched a plot. With the aid of a brother and brother-in-law of Lew Fields, who acted as doubles for them, they secretly wrote and rehearsed a burlesque of Fregoli’s main dramatic skit. Their doubles would allow them to both one-up Fregoli and skewer the whole quick-change genre.
When quick-change artistry was an art, Leopoldo Fregoli was its master.
Four days later, the curtain rose at the beginning of the second act to reveal the same set used for Fregoli’s first-act performance. Weber and Fields entered as their familiar characters, Mike and Meyers, dressed in their familiar “German senator” outfits. They lampooned Fregoli’s grave Italian drama with their trademark slapstick and malapropisms. On cue they exited stage left and—courtesy of their secret doubles—suddenly reappeared stage right dressed as Fregoli’s fat lady and comic soldier characters. The audience was stunned by the lightning-fast transformations. Weber and Fields heaped a half dozen more impossible exits and entrances. At the conclusion of the burlesque, Mike and Meyer came out for their bows to robust applause as well as some hysterical laughter. On their fourth bow, they signaled offstage and their fat lady and comic soldier doppelgängers came onstage, arm in arm. The audience finally realized that the spoof was on them. They happily went wild.
And here’s another kind of wild.
The Cherry Sisters were the worst act in the world. Without a glimmer of self-awareness, sense of humor, or talent, the sisters thumped out pro-temperance ditties and endlessly harangued the audience for their enslavement to demon rum. Oscar, in a perverse mood, plucked them out of their tent-show-county-fair Bible Belt circuit and put them on the Olympia stage, saying, “I’ve been putting on the best talent, and it hasn’t gone over … I’m going to try the worst.”
The Cherry Sisters
Oscar presented the sisters with a twist—so old, it was new again. A rope net was rigged above the proscenium. Arthur engaged the local fruit and vegetable pushcart vendors to sell their old and rotten goods to the audience on the way in. At the beginning of the Cherry Sisters act, the rope net was lowered. As they launched into their first song, Arthur, stationed in the balcony, sailed a piece of fruit hard into the net. The audience happily picked up their cue, and a sensational, audience-participation act of flinging rotten fruit and vegetables was reborn.
Oscar reassured the confused sisters that the tossing was an expression of generous approval, and the sisters, cluelessly pleased that their message was now reaching a wider audience, continued night after night to plunk away on piano and drum in the face of this barrage of produce and perceived approval.
Oscar then revisited his talent for writing musicals on a deadline with his own variation on the Faust legend, titled Marguerite. In Oscar’s version, Faust is a married artist who is enticed to sell his soul to the devil—here, an agent for a beguiling array of artist’s models—in exchange for the talent to paint the perfect nude. With this new effort, Oscar used the threadbare rationale that nudity is art to mount a series of “artful,” ethnically spiced tableaux vivants, or living pictures, based on risqué, dance-related themes.
Oscar and his sons were summarily tossed into jail for this display of nudity but were sprung by none other than President of the Board of New York City Police Commissioners Theodore Roosevelt. Roosevelt recognized that the scantily clad tableaux vivants for which the Hammersteins had been arrested was a re-creation of a painting he personally owned. How could that possibly be indecent?
Theodore Roosevelt, ca. 1896
Marguerite was a smash, and Oscar celebrated its fiftieth performance by distributing to the audience souvenirs: miniatures of his own composition titled “Come Back,” printed on silk.
Marguerite played for fourteen weeks—an impressive hit by light opera standards. As a result, Oscar decided to write another opera. Santa Maria again employed tableaux vivants, this time combined with aerial ballet; the models were supplied by the preeminent aerial ballet troupe the Flying Grigolatis. Critics highly praised the wondrous visual spectacle, if not the plot.
A silk souvenir of Oscar Hammerstein’s waltz song “Come Back,” from his play Marguerite
The story was as follows. An heirless king of Holland has a dilemma: divorce his barren wife and remarry, or find the bastard son of a former dalliance. He chooses the latter. The handsome, young lieutenant given the task of finding the son instead discovers a vixen of a daughter, whose ironic nickname, Santa Maria, provides the title. The lieutenant disguises her as a boy and smuggles her back to Holland, where they fall in love. He becomes the king and she becomes somewhat more saintly.
Unfortunately, Oscar’s Santa Maria failed to repeat the box office success of Marguerite. He let it run for too long and lost money—a prerogative he too often indulged. To be fair, nothing Oscar did could compensate for the simple, painful fact that his Olympia was just too damn big to run profitably.
Over the next year Oscar’s finances zigzagged ever downward. By 1897, he had to sell the Harlem theatres to keep the Olympia afloat. Said Oscar ruefully, “There’s no limit to the number of people who will stay away from a bad show.” The vultures of “honest” finance—other managers—circled above.
The straw that broke Oscar’s financial back was, of all people, Florenz Ziegfeld. In the years between his representation of strongman Eugene Sandow and his successful Follies—and Show Boat—Ziegfeld produced shows for, and toured with, his then girlfriend, Anna Held of milk-bath-beauty fame. Oscar booked Ziegfeld and Held’s current theatrical concoction, La Poupée, but was unwilling to extend Held’s engagement and instead replaced her with his own mistress of the moment—but she had neither the talent nor the notoriety to fill the seats. The show bled money.
Anna Held and Florenz Ziegfeld
By 1897, Oscar’s creditors came calling. His bank offered attractive refinancing options, but Oscar responded with cocky arrogance: “I am in receipt of your letter, which is now before me, and in a few minutes it will be behind me. Respectfully yours, Oscar Hammerstein.” New York Life Insurance Company took possession of the Olympia and picked clean Oscar’s Harlem home, taking everything but the upright piano. Daughter Stella recalled Oscar playing it in the empty apartment on the day all the newspapers trumpeted his bankruptcy, as if he hadn’t a care in the world.
Santa Maria sheet music, 1896
To top it all off, Oscar broke a court order and stole into the Olympia Theatre one dark night to fetch $400 he’d stashed in his mattress. He was caught and thrown in jail. At his court date, Oscar gave a speech:
Your Honor, I have lost millions in my efforts to entertain the New York public. Thirty-six years of labor have gone for naught. Strangers are in possession of all its fruits. Your Honor, you can hardly realize the tension under which a music-hall manager such as I have been must do his work. Through years of sweat and toil I had acquired enough to build a great amusement palace. Now they have the right to say to me, “Get out! Touch a pin in this place, I will have you arrested!” They have taken possession of my thirty-six years of labor.
Oscar exaggerated with the thirty-six years. It had been only a decade. But one may assume that he saw his whole life as one long service to the greater good of theatre in general and opera in particular. The judge took pity, threw out the trespassing charge, and let him keep the cash.
