Not Bad for Delancey Street

CRAZY QUILT

In 1910, Fanny Brice’s debut in the Ziegfeld Follies was cheered as a revelation. “This strange and fantastic young woman of the willowy form and the classic face doesn’t sing her songs at all—she just sort of kind of remembers them,” the San Francisco Chronicle observed in its review. “Her gestures and facial play mark the climax insanity, but she is bubbling with natural fun and life.”1 Nearly twenty years later, Brice was still considered a treasure. “Fannie [sic] Brice represents Broadway less by being its product than a comment upon it,” began a 1929 New Yorker profile. “Her talent, rare in that environment, is to make fakes look ridiculous.”² The Times toasted the Brice of the “slightly crossed eyes, the broad grin and the comic awkwardness of a gawky east side young lady . . . [that] reveal Fannie [sic] Brice playing confidently on the home grounds. Most of us are content to see her at her best. At her best, she is unparalleled.”³ Her ability to wring pathos out of song was not bad either. Brice premiered her signature torch song, “My Man,” at the 1921 Follies. Rose was there to witness the performance of his song “Ain’t Nature Grand” and described her as “thunder in the mountains.”⁴

But when Rose met Brice at the Back Stage Club in 1925, her husband Nicky Arnstein was in prison for his part in the 1920 theft of $5 million in bonds, and the intervening years had taken their toll. In 1923, Brice briefly lost faith in comedy, announced that she desired dramatic roles, and got her nose straightened. Florenz Ziegfeld was furious and Dorothy Parker delighted. “I want Fanny to make ’em laugh—that’s what I pay her for,” said Ziegfeld in a quote nobody remembers. Brice “cut off her nose to spite her race,” said Parker in a pun that has never been forgotten. Disappointing shows followed. David Belasco’s 1926 Fanny was a terrible show that starred Brice as a “Jewish girl out West among the Cowboys,” and in early 1927, she headlined Hollywood Music Box Revue, another flop. In September, Brice divorced Arnstein and sued for custody of their two children: Frances, eight, and William, six. The strain made her look “tired and worn.”5 Brice, at thirty-six, was on the ropes.

Rose, at twenty-eight, was full of bounce. Variety described a confab where Rose, “song writer extraordinary,” was “surrounded by a flock of people and having a great time.”⁶ Everything was going his way. After his Fifth Avenue Club closed, he returned to songwriting and produced standards that elevated his reputation. “Tonight You Belong to Me” appeared in the summer of 1926, and he taunted the publishers that missed out on the evergreen hit. “Rose said he would like to see all the big publishers in line and have each one take a bow” for turning him away. Nobody bowed, but there was likely a gnashing of teeth among those who passed on it, because in March 1927 it sold well even during the Catholic holiday of Lent. The “axiom about the hit songs always selling applies at all times,” explained Variety.⁷

Rose topped that song a few months later with “Me and My Shadow.” Detractors have tried to deny him this standard recorded by Frank Sinatra, Judy Garland, and many others by relying on a biographer’s allegation that Rose changed a single word and on that basis took credit for the song. Unfortunately for the biographer’s posterity, he preserved his interview notes with “Shadow” composer Dave Dreyer. “Billy wrote the words [to] Me and My Shadow. . . . Me and My Shadow was not his title. But he wrote the words,” Dreyer said. Rose bought the title for fifteen dollars from a “titler.” Dreyer’s music was originally written for another song for Al Jolson, but Dreyer felt his tune better matched Rose’s lyric. So when Jolson demanded to hear the song he commissioned, Dreyer and Rose gave him “Shadow.” “Jolson fell in love with the song,” Dreyer said. Rose was the one who put it over. “I played the piano and Billy sang the song.”⁸ Its opening lines capture the solitary’s exclusion from love with the evocative couplet, “Sweethearts out for fun / Pass me one by one.”

In the summer and fall of 1927 Rose wrote sketch material with Ballard MacDonald, a sometime drunk who wrote for Brice. When MacDonald’s sometime occurred in October, Rose stepped in and created the act Brice needed for her November 21 show at the Palace. His songs steered her back to the Jewish material rooted in the “gawky east side young lady” persona that had first made her a success. Rose was primed to write such material because of his recent “Since Henry Ford Apologized to Me.” He also mined his Fifth Avenue Club’s Turkish harem theme and Otto Kahn connection to whip up in two weeks what Brice called “the best act I ever had.”9

In “Sascha, the Passion of the Pasha,” Rose served up a comic Jewish version of the sensual East by imagining Brice as what the song calls one of those “harem dames.” She complains that the sultan mainly “hangs around,” though she does appreciate his amorous attentions. “Oh, how he appreciates a little kosher meat,” Brice sang. And in “Is Something the Matter with Otto Kahn (Or Is Something the Matter with Me?),” Brice again played the unworldly young Jewish woman crashing a foreign land, this time that of the rich German Jews and their love of high culture. She wants Otto Kahn to hire her to sing opera, but what does she know from opera? Finally, in “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach,” Rose wrote a brilliant comic monologue that became a pillar of Brice’s act. Over the course of six minutes, Rose’s Mrs. Cohen unwittingly reveals her loving but overbearing and husband-destroying personality. The influence of Rose’s mother is obvious. Directing her children to play with their shovels and sand buckets Mrs. Cohen inevitably comes to the point. “‘Go on, dig,’ she commands, ‘Dig a hole and bury your father.’”¹⁰ The image also recalls Rose’s childhood terror.

Brice’s show was a winner and a turning point for her, Rose, and their relationship. Variety called her return to the Palace a “Bricean triumph” and the recently divorced woman took stock of Rose. “I think I’ll marry this guy,” she said. “He is clever. He might make life very easy for me.”¹¹ When Brice was on tour in Los Angeles in January 1928 Rose made news by flying to see her. The trip took him through stormy weather, and he was “believed to be the first professional ever to make the trip from New York to Los Angeles by air.” Brice met him when he landed.¹² Rose stayed in California for three weeks and returned again in July, when Brice was in Los Angeles filming her first movie, My Man. Here Rose again proved his value as he demonstrated that his talent for staring down song publishers was transferable to the new talking picture business. When he learned Brice was offered $25,000 for My Man, named for her famous torch song, he did some quick math: if the Warner Bros. film played in ten thousand theaters, that was just $2.50 a house.¹³ Testing figures this way kept Rose from being unduly impressed or blasé about money. “In other words, suppose someone asked him for a $5 a week raise in salary. It sounds like very little. But to Rose it automatically became a $260 a year raise in salary, which is a figure to examine and study,” said the press agent Wolfe Kaufman. More complex computations were also at his fingertips. “I never gamble,” Kaufman recalled Rose saying. “When I bet I want the odds my way.” Kaufman added, “And he gave a whole long and boring list of odds on every sort of gambling to prove that it was always impossible to win.”14 That many were bored by such statistics worked to Rose’s advantage. He persuaded Warner Bros. to pay Brice $125,000 for My Man.¹⁵

Rose’s marriage proposal to Brice could have been lifted from or used in a screwball romantic comedy. “One day he said, ‘Why don’t you and I get married? We’re good for each other,’” Brice recalled. “I thought it over and said, ‘Oh, not yet Billy. I’m not sure.’ He turned around and kicked me because I said ‘No.’ I thought that was funny, so I said ‘Yea, all right.’ There was also a little revenge in my mind too. I thought ‘What will this do to Nicky?’” There were other conditions that made the match less than romantic. “I didn’t love him,” Brice said. “I had great admiration for his talent. I liked him. Later on, Billy told me he felt the same thing.” But there was one stipulation Rose would not abide. “I had a whole lot in common with Billy—everything, but nothing physical. I said to Billy, ‘We’re such good friends Billy, we shouldn’t have any affairs.’”¹⁶ Brice was surely too worldly to expect him to abide by this condition, and it seems her main concern was to avoid the public humiliation of playing second fiddle to a mistress. When Rose broke that rule their marriage ended.

Rose and Brice were married on February 8, 1929, at New York’s City Hall. Mayor Jimmy Walker performed the civil service and also read the Jewish marriage vows in an English translation provided by Temple Emanu-El’s rabbi, Nathan Krass. Rose forgot to buy a wedding ring, so the couple used the one Fanny had handy. “It was a gold carved ring, and inside of it was engraved ‘To my darling Fanny—with love, Nickey [sic].’”¹⁷

Brice’s mother attended the ceremony. Rose’s mother did not. Six months earlier, on August 24, 1928, Rose had purchased a home for her on eighteen acres in Park Ridge, New Jersey, which Fannie Rosenberg imagined she could turn into a resort business.¹⁸ It kept her busy, anyway, and out of Rose’s life in New York. For him, one Fanny was enough.

MAMA’S BOY

Two months after their wedding Rose half-jokingly wrote an associate that he “bulled” Brice into the marriage.¹⁹ Who came out on top was a question inherent to the match. For Brice, Rose was a source of great material and good company. Rose, as usual, insisted he got the better deal. “I wanted to marry her because she was like a medal I could wear,” he said.20 In their wedding photo he does look like a hunter posing with a prize catch. They were not in love, and her stated wish for a sexless marriage made the union a business merger, though the lack of interest in a physical relationship was apparently mutual. “There was no passion in our life,” Brice said. “He never kissed me with any real passion.”²¹ The Oedipal aspect of the relationship defeated ardor. Brice bore Rose’s mother’s name, was his elder, and was more famous. Rose compounded the problem when he created for Brice that great comic portrait of the Jewish mother, “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach.” “I am really Mrs. Cohen at the Beach in that number,” Brice said. “I mean I am with that woman.” Pygmalion created his dream lover; Rose created a substitute mother. Brice’s psychological problem was complementary; she could only love shiftless charmers like Nicky Arnstein, who resembled her father. “If I go to a party,” she said, “and there is one son-of-a-bitch in the room, a no-good bastard—I’d go for him right away.” As a result, said Brice, “I never liked the men I loved—and I never loved the men I liked.”²² She liked Rose. He could not love her either. It was a match made in an analyst’s nightmare.

Yet both shared attitudes toward their lives and work that drew on their Jewish identities and no-nonsense characters. Both pledged allegiance to the Jewish community and fought its critics. Rose lampooned Ford; Brice sent her children to Jewish religious school at New York’s Temple Emanu-El, where daughter Frances stayed until her confirmation in 1934 and son William until a bout of poor health in 1933. She also battled Rose when the coarseness of his early “Ain’t Nature Grand” style crept into his Jewish song material. “Billy said he had an idea and told me about a song called ‘River Side Rose.’ I told him why it was not good. I told him that I never did a Jewish song that would offend the race, because it depended on the race for the joke, so we got into an argument.”²³ Brice won.

Each also knew the value of a dollar. “Tipping like a whore again, eh?” was how Brice chided Gypsy Rose Lee’s extravagance. “They can talk all they want about scrapbooks, but it’s the bankbooks that count.”²⁴ Frugality funded charity, which Brice, like Rose, performed quietly. Rose arranged to get songwriter Chester Conn the copyright to “I Want to Be Loved,” which Conn wanted to reintroduce. “It’s the unwritten law among publishers never to give a copyright away,” Conn said. “No one has ever heard of such a thing. Yet Billy said, I can get the copyright for you.”²⁵ John Murray Anderson had a similar experience. When the director went broke in Hollywood he sent his brother to New York to ask Rose for $5,000. “I’ll make out a check right away,” Rose responded. “Shall I send it over or do you want to pick it up?”26 For her part, Brice helped support Ziegfeld in his last days, “bought a layette for her doorman’s granddaughter, and paid hospital expenses for a wardrobe woman.”²⁷

Perhaps most importantly, the two agreed that profound emotions were reserved for song and stage and the desire to employ deep talk in day-to-day life was the surest sign of a fool. “He had a bitter sarcastic sense of humor that appealed to me,” Brice said.²⁸ A representative sample is Rose’s cynical take on the purported connection between a songwriter’s situation and his work. “At the time I was writing [“Me and My Shadow”],” he recalled, “there was a boisterous party of 35 eating, swilling and necking in my joint on 52nd Street. Alone? Why, I was never alone. I never had less than a dozen guys and gals in my place. Yes, I have heard this theory that a man can be lonely even if he has crowds of people around him, but I do not put any stock in it.”²⁹ Brice was likewise wary of deep ideas. When the novelist Jerome Weidman, a candidate to write Brice’s biography, said he thought she was “a lonesome woman,” Brice quickly sized him up—“Oh, I said to myself, is this the slant?”—and then outlined her own earthy theory of unhappiness to her preferred biographer, the recording executive Goddard Lieberson, who sometimes referred to himself as “Der Schlemiel.” He was the kind of guy Brice could open up to. “Of course, I’m like any other person,” she said. “I’ve laid in my bed and cried at nights, why . . . because, perhaps, I wasn’t pissing enough and every time this would happen to me I would get up and look in the mirror and say, ‘you crazy Jew son of a bitch, go back to bed,’ which I did, let out a big futs, and off to sleep I went, and this you call lonesome?”³⁰

If there was a mismatch between Brice and Rose, it was that she derived greater satisfaction from Rose’s ambition than he did from her fame. Rose was “the man hardly anyone knew when he became the husband of Fanny Brice,” Gilbert Seldes wrote. “People said, ‘Who?’ You do not eclipse Miss Brice, no matter how good you are.”³¹ When asked what it was like to be married to Brice, Rose replied, “It was like being in the shadow of Gibraltar.”³² This drove him to work all the more feverishly to secure his reputation, but it also made him jumpy. Brice remembered that when Rose and she were married, he and Edward Eliscu were writing songs for the stage musical Great Day!

When Billy would be working, he’d come in and say: “Come on in, Fanny—I want you to tell me what you think of this . . . ” And he’d sing the song for me—and I’d say: “I like it. I like everything but this one line . . .” And invariably he’d say: “That’s funny—that’s the best line in the song.” I’d say: “I’m very sorry—but I don’t like that line.” He’d say, “What the hell do you know about song-writing!” And I’d say, “What did you ask me for then? That line doesn’t sound good to me.” There’d be an argument, and he’d go back and work with the guy again—and he’d come out and say: “Listen to it now.” And he’d do it without that line. And I would never say, “See?? I’m glad you took it out.” I would never say that. I’d say, “Gee, I think it’s fine now.” Wouldn’t mention anything about the line.33

The scene smacks of maternal selflessness, tact, and patience. As a Brice biographer wrote, her life was a contest between her roles as child and mother, and “it seems quite clear the ‘mother’ really won.”³⁴ If Brice had to play at being Rose’s mother, it was no burden, as long as Rose was hard at work. Her ex-husband Nicky Arnstein had frustrated her. “That man was just talking and never doing anything,” Brice said. Rose was a welcome change. “You see, what I found thrilling with Billy—I was with a man who was creating all the time—doing something.”³⁵

TEACHER’S PET

The first thing that needed doing was to get Brice another movie deal. In February 1929, just a month after their wedding, Rose and Brice struck a two-picture deal with United Artists, she as the star and he as the writer of songs and story.³⁶ The contract was a testament to Brice’s star power and Rose’s writing talents and business savvy, because My Man, Brice’s earlier movie, was panned by critics and did poor box office. Rose’s contribution offered the film’s only worthy moment. “Miss Brice’s outstanding offering is ‘Mrs. Cohen at the Beach,’” reported the Times.³⁷ Despite the film’s weakness, Rose was able to win Brice another $125,000 paycheck for her next movie. For his writing contribution, Rose secured $25,000.³⁸ In June, Brice relocated from New York to Hollywood to begin work on Be Yourself, and Rose periodically traveled from New York to California to work on the film’s song material, including “When a Woman Loves a Man,” which “has, if anything, a better, more sophisticated lyric than ‘My Man.’”³⁹ The song illustrates that Rose’s hardboiled dismissal of tender sentiment was his way of avoiding the corrupting power of sentimentality. Even Brice was amazed by the dramatic contrast of her husband’s tough and empathic sides. “When I’d hear these lovely words he wrote,” she said, “I couldn’t believe this cold-minded person had written them.”40 “When a Woman Loves a Man” begins,

Mountains snap their fingers at time

Since this old world began

But they’re molehills compared to the mountains she’ll climb

When a gal cares for a man.

At this point in his life, Rose had only received such devoted love from his mother.

Rose also landed writing contracts with MGM and Universal, which in a coup worthy of a rainmaking con man paid him $10,000 for a few hours’ work writing three completely unnecessary new songs for its 1929 film version of Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II’s landmark musical, Show Boat. Only one Rose song appeared in the forgotten film, and he cheerfully considered the job one of his sweetest swindles.⁴¹ Universal, wisely or obliviously, held no grudge. It hired him again in the summer of 1929 and he wrote “It Happened in Monterey,” a song rich in sexy alliteration (“Stars and steel guitars and luscious lips”) that in 1956 became a hit for Frank Sinatra. Rose wrote it for King of Jazz, a 1930 film that celebrated Paul Whiteman, the then-famous bandleader who, among other things, debuted George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue at the 1924 concert “An Experiment in American Music.” The three-hundred-pound Whiteman possessed a musical range and expertise that put him “in his own category,” as did his personal volume. “He would intimidate you,” recalled the musician Larry Neill. “He was big and tall, and he would stand right up next to you, six inches away—invade your space—and talk to you in a booming voice. And so you were automatically in a position of defense.”⁴² In 1935 when Rose produced Jumbo, he hired this talented giant.

In September 1929, Rose returned to New York to write lyrics for a Ziegfeld production called Ming Toy. He turned thirty that month, an age that then especially signified the end of youth. Nick Carraway turns thirty at the end of The Great Gatsby and on his birthday sees ahead of him “a thinning briefcase of enthusiasm.”⁴³ Rose would never suffer an enthusiasm deficit, but the milestone age might have made him decide against trying to start a new career in the movies and stick instead to Broadway, where he had spent ten years making connections, writing songs, and learning the theatrical and nightclub businesses. Unfortunately, it was not a good time for either new beginnings or practiced pursuits. He was in New York in October for the disastrous Broadway premiere of Great Day! Despite excellent songs by Rose and Eliscu, including the frequently reprised torch standard “More Than You Know,” later recorded by female vocalists from Sarah Vaughan to Barbra Streisand, the show opened on Broadway with a “soggy and pointless book” that yielded a “thoroughly routine show.”44 One week later the 1929 stock market crash began with the October 24 meltdown known as Black Thursday. Great Day! closed in November after one month onstage. Ziegfeld’s Ming Toy never opened.⁴⁵

As the Depression took hold, New York came to look “visibly down at the heel,” and the “comfortable middle class began to show faces pitted with worry.”⁴⁶ Rose lived in luxury. Upon his marriage to Brice he settled with her and her two children and the children’s French governess at 15 East Sixty-Ninth Street, an Upper East Side seventeen-story residential hotel just off the corner of Fifth Avenue that was brand new when Brice moved in after her divorce from Arnstein. To accommodate Rose, Brice added two rooms to the apartment, and this addition served as his private quarters.⁴⁷ The couple did not share a bedroom. There was more than enough space in Brice’s next home to continue this arrangement. In the fall of 1930, the family moved to 1111 Park Avenue. The building was one of the few on the tony boulevard that welcomed affluent Jews, and Brice’s fourteen-room apartment was both palatial residence and Rose’s university.⁴⁸ It was where he was home-schooled. “He learned everything from Fanny. How to dress, how to eat,” said Helen Schrank. “I always lived good,” Brice said. “That’s the only thing I spent my money on.”⁴⁹ Starting in 1923, when she purchased and furnished a townhouse at 306 West Seventy-Sixth Street, Brice studied up on art, antiques, china, furniture, and design, and listened carefully to important dealers such as James P. Silo, whose auction house handled estate sales for the Vanderbilts and other wealthy clients. According to Maurice Zolotow, Brice developed “very good taste. Very fine taste in art, decorations, furniture. She played or seemed to be a low type Jewish comic. Actually she dressed superbly, very cultured. She had a magnificent collection of paintings in her home.”⁵⁰ Rose was eager to gain this knowledge and Brice was proud of her clever pupil:

This is one of the things that made Billy Rose very interesting to me—When he was doing his first show he said to me “I’m doing a show and they are talking costumes to me, and when they say satin, taffeta, talk about qualities etc., I don’t know. I don’t like to talk about anything—business, prices—if I don’t know what I am talking about.” He asked me to go around to the stores and get him samples of every material and quality. I went around to the stores for three days until I got a big box of samples of every kind of material in every quality. I sat down with Billy for three or four hours and explained to him how you know satin, how you know taffeta, what makes this quality, etc. He stayed in bed all the next day with that box of material, studying it. When I came home he said, “Sit down here. Take the price tags off.” Then he said, “This is taffeta. This is the cheaper one. This is the good one, etc.” He knew every piece of material, what it should cost and everything.51

Rose also took classes from theatrical producer Jed Harris, who in December 1929 returned to New York after an eight-month stay in Europe. “Harris had sprung out of nowhere with the velocity of a meteor streaking across the sky,” wrote playwright Moss Hart, and he was known as much for his Broadway hits as for his unnerving and intimidating antics, such as receiving visitors in the nude.⁵² Born Jacob Horowitz and almost exactly Rose’s age, Harris in 1926 scored a tremendous commercial and critical success with Broadway, a drama that scuttled the corny theater fare of the day with a production marked by “intricate detail, colloquial language, and modern social ideas” that introduced a new Broadway stage style: “clever, tense, urban, dynamic, and above all, contemporary.”⁵³ It ran for 603 performances, earned $1.2 million at the box office, and in 1928 won Harris the cover of Time magazine. Rose was then still learning the ropes, so when he had the chance through Brice to meet the boy wonder, Rose paid attention. “He went to the public library, after being stimulated by Jed’s discourses, and steeped himself in the classical plays, and he probably read a lot of books that Jed himself had never read, even though Jed talked of them in a very authoritative way,” said Richard Maney, who was first Harris’s and then Rose’s publicity man. “Rose impressed me with his energy and seriousness.”⁵⁴

By May 1930, Harris and Rose became business partners in a musical revue Rose planned to produce starring Brice, but before that show opened, Rose and Harris made another deal that revealed Rose’s grit. For nearly a year, Harris had planned to produce The Vinegar Tree, a comic play one newspaper called “‘quadrangular.’ It deals with an artist, a middle aged woman, her married sister and the married sister’s daughter.”⁵⁵ But when Harris lost interest in it Rose trusted his own judgment, optioned the play, and then sold the option to another producer for a 25 percent share of any future profits. The play proved popular and ran for a year. He netted $30,000. Rose had his own abilities, and he was also Harris’s equal in the hard-as-nails department. In 1927, an actor in Broadway had to stand in front of Harris and demand his pay envelope. Harris handed it over. In 1932, when Harris and Rose’s musical revue became a moneymaker, Harris had to sue to get his share.56

WHISTLING SOFT GODDAMS

“Billy was resourceful. He never gave up,” Richard Maney said.⁵⁷

It took three tries for Rose to generate a return on his and Harris’s $25,000 investment in their musical revue—first called Corned Beef and Roses, then Sweet and Low, and finally Crazy Quilt—and along the way Rose transformed it into an excellent piece of brash American entertainment. “Haphazard, occasionally loutish, almost always strung together with chewing-gum and old kite-string, they not only appeased the vast public hunger for a good three-dollar thump at inhibitions, these revues, but they amassed for the minute Mr. Rose a comfortable and cozy sum of cash,” cheered the Literary Digest. Gilbert Seldes celebrated him: “A good showman. Good? He is wonderful.”⁵⁸

Brice and renowned vaudevillian George Jessel starred in Harris and Rose’s Corned Beef and Roses when it previewed in Philadelphia on October 14, 1930. It was supposed to open earlier and, despite the postponement, was not nearly ready when it premiered. A big problem was that Harris, “while he was highly skilled in the drama, didn’t know anything about [a] musical.”⁵⁹ Jessel, who had been onstage since he was ten years old, a star since 1915, and a hit in 1925 playing the lead in the stage production of The Jazz Singer, offered advice, but Rose and Harris brushed him off. “I was reminded that I was just a performer in this show,” he later wrote.⁶⁰

Corned Beef closed three days after Variety panned it. The paper’s chief objection was a Jessel routine the reviewer deemed not “just off color; it was lower-class, stag-smoker stuff” that if performed in New York would be a “black eye both for Broadway and for the theater in general.”⁶¹ Jessel’s Professor Labermacher sketch, later considered a classic and a favorite of the theater critic George Jean Nathan, who made efforts to see it as many as seven times, featured Jessel playing an old-world lecturer “so near-sighted that he mistakes the lantern slide of a voluptuous hussy for Niagara Falls” and unwittingly gives a comically indelicate talk about the female anatomy.⁶² But the Variety review of the show was far from an outright rejection. It was thrilled with the revue’s opening number, saying that “it looked like the smartest, most original, up-to-the-minute revue of the lot.” David Freeman, Eddie Cantor’s ghostwriter, wrote the script, but the description of it as ultracontemporary suggests Harris’s touch.

The opening also included “plenty of smut, but generally funny,” which reflected Rose’s native roughness that when cowed and made to obey orders rendered up smart, funny, slyly suggestive, and even lovely works. The trick was for Rose to keep his smelly but fertile inner compost heap productive, not stinking. In “Poor Mr. Shufeld,” he managed it. “It is a take-off on happenings in the office of a producer,” played by Jessel. Shufeld was a laugh at the theater-owning Shubert brothers, and the sketch is an example of how theater people frequently found the theater business a great subject for theater. In a scene worthy of Mel Brooks’s The Producers, chorus girls, according to Variety, invade Shufeld’s office dressed in “decorous black gowns and then disrob[e] to demonstrate flashing pink undies, in which they do a wiggle dance in a big way.” Also, Shufeld’s back is killing him because “he has been up all night working on the play.” The nature of this work is clarified by a sign over the couch: “Casting tonight.”63

After the failed show closed, Harris left the scene. Rose reworked the revue as Sweet and Low and in less than a month opened it on Broadway. The losses at this point came to $36,000 and Rose would be $150,000 in the hole before he recouped almost all of it with a nearly six-month run.⁶⁴ Sweet and Low retained Jessel’s Professor Labermacher sketch and Rose won a victory over Variety’s dire predictions when the Times enjoyed it as “a highly amusing, if considerably less than immaculate interlude.”⁶⁵ True to its vaudeville roots the revue’s entertainments ranged from smart songs that became popular hits, such as “Cheerful Little Earful,” by Ira Gershwin, to Brice as “Babykins,” a Rose inspiration that heralded her later “Baby Snooks” act, and Borrah Minevitch and His Harmonica Rascals, a high-energy act of “semi-midgets playing the harmonica” that was a top act in the twenties and one appreciated by Sweet and Low’s opening night crowd.⁶⁶

Rose managed to keep the show open until April, despite the financial panic making the 1931 theater season “the worst in Broadway history.” The achievement was considered heroic. “In this day and age a show that runs 22 weeks is regarded as something more than a success. Producers will be only too happy to tell you that it’s something in the nature of a miracle,” wrote the columnist Mark Hellinger.⁶⁷ Desperation was the mother of this miracle. If the show failed, Rose knew he would go “back to being Fanny’s husband again, and I was a mite tired of that.”68

When Sweet and Low closed in mid-April, Rose in just three weeks again reworked and reopened the show under a new name. Crazy Quilt premiered in New York on May 19, 1931. The title first appeared as a phrase in January 1915, when George M. Cohan employed it to describe his musical revue, Hello, Broadway. Jessel borrowed it later that year for his act, “Two Patches from a Crazy Quilt.” The coinage captures the vaudeville formula that allowed for “everything: from the puritanical to the licentious. . . . High art, low art, and no art stood cheek by jowl.”⁶⁹ Rose’s production followed that formula, and his persistent reinvention paid off. The revue was better than ever. “There is a piling zest to this show,” reported the New York American’s Gilbert W. Gabriel, an early New Yorker writer. “It begins with a couple of bad steers and heavy stumbles—or, so it did last night—and then manages a safe walk, a comfortable jog-trot . . . until, all of a sudden, it is galloping in wild, giddy ways and taking all the hurdles like a champion winner.”⁷⁰

Rose’s venture soon chalked up a fourth iteration when in September Crazy Quilt left Broadway for a tour of the provinces. “The road, you have heard, was dead,” Seldes wrote. “Billy Rose didn’t even know it was sick.”⁷¹ It was a great part of Rose’s terrific confidence to challenge accepted wisdom, ignore experts, and trust his taste and what he saw with his own eyes. “Rose had had enough of the wise boys,” Hellinger wrote.⁷² They were the ones who told him to quit after the failure of Corned Beef and Roses, and the same thinking applied now. “Following a moderately successful New York engagement, Crazy Quilt should normally have sought refuge in a warehouse,” wrote Stage magazine.⁷³ Instead, Rose hired the publicity agents Richard Maney and Ned Alvord, the former an expert with newspapermen and the latter an advertising rogue who considered purple prose too self-effacing. Alvord promoted Crazy Quilt as “Three Shows in One,” “Theatrical Colossus,” a chorus of “Notable Nymphs,” “Statuesque Odalisques,” “Dashing Demoiselles,” and the following mouthful: “A saturnalia of wanton rhythm, fastest of all dancing shows, a maelstrom of lithesome sprites in divertissements of exotic and daring conception, culminating in the terpsichorean piece de resistance, El Bolero.”⁷⁴

Rose and Alvord “told the customers it was the hottest show they had ever seen; they came and found one of the funniest,” Seldes said. Jessel left to do other work, but Brice stayed and toured Chattanooga, Sioux Falls, Omaha, Oil City, Tulsa, Cleveland’s Hippodrome, Buffalo, and other “cities where nothing but movies” had appeared in years, and where the locals were “hungry for first-hand sight and sound.”75 On the road, Brice continued to tutor Rose. “I taught Billy how to talk to the performers,” she said. “He would jump on them and I explained to him, ‘Even if they give a bad performance, you don’t tell them—they know, and they don’t need to hear it from you. They don’t go out there to give a bad performance.’ He didn’t know people were that way. He wasn’t sensitive to anybody.”⁷⁶

Others submitted contrary testimony. “I was his friend—and my honest belief [is] he was mine—until the day he died,” Alvord said. “I couldn’t have run my end with less supervision from the throne had I been 100% proprietor instead of hired hand. With most of his enterprises I had a cut of the profits which in most cases [was] substantial.”⁷⁷ John Murray Anderson staged the Crazy Quilt road show and brought back stories of generosity. “Billy told me that he hadn’t realized how much work the show would involve, that he was more than pleased with the result, and asked me to disregard the contract we made, because he wanted to double the amount of the weekly royalty . . . and each week thereafter Billy paid me exactly twice as much as my contract called for.”⁷⁸ Maney “had great fun with him. He didn’t care what I said about him.” That made Rose a perfect client, because Maney’s approach to publicity was to insult his show business clients through deployment of a “system of invective that sounded like swearing but was in fact as innocent as Mother Goose,” a strategy that yielded up what the New Yorker’s Wolcott Gibbs, a Maney admirer, termed the “disinfected epithet.” Maney explained, “It’s much easier to write sardonically. I gloried in [Rose’s] ignorance but he didn’t care. I invented all these ideals for him . . . Basement Belasco . . . Penthouse Cagliostro. . . . He reveled in them.”⁷⁹ All these Rose portraits—brutish, open-handed, considerate, comically broad-minded—are accurate, said Vicki Walton, daughter of Rose’s third wife. “He was nice, he was loving, he was gentle, he was a cocksucker,” she said. “He was all of that. He could be a son of a bitch if you were in business with him and you tried to cross him. . . . But by the same token he was loving and adorable and funny.”⁸⁰

Crazy Quilt toured for forty weeks, until June 1932, and along the way it tallied receipts that made “most Broadway grosses look paltry.” Stage recognized Rose’s importance as an innovator: “The most extraordinary barnstorming of the season has been the nationwide tour of Billy Rose’s musical show Crazy Quilt. . . . The junket is significant not only because of its success but as an augury of what other theatrical attractions can accomplish by considering the country at large and not merely Broadway.”81 Weekly box office amounts regularly topped $40,000. Wrote Gilbert Seldes, “As Variety reported the gross receipts . . . in towns which Broadway had never heard of, local producers compared their own sheets and whistled soft goddams.”⁸²

THE SUGAR CRUSHER

Upon returning to New York in the summer of 1932 Rose immediately moved the offices of William Rose, Inc., where he was president and Brice vice president, from a fourth-floor office at Forty-Second and Seventh Avenue to the fifteenth-floor penthouse of the Wurlitzer Building. Located a little further east at Forty-Second and Sixth Avenue, the lavish ten-thousand-square-foot space was recently home to the Brunswick Radio Corporation, a division of Warner Bros. Pictures.⁸³ Rose could now afford to be on a par with big players. Crazy Quilt made him a bundle, and Brice was very pleased. “We went out on tour and just cleaned up,” she said.⁸⁴ The profit was about $200,000 and the new penthouse office trumpeted his success.⁸⁵ “Centered under a forty-foot ceiling, Rose’s desk was as big as a billiard table,” wrote Maney. “An enormous black block in the Delft-blue carpet bore his initials.”⁸⁶ According to a reporter, “Great walls were tapestried with a revue-producer’s notion of something pretty ‘fly’ in the way of what the well-dressed wall will wear,” and an adjacent terrace was “tiled with the glossy splendor of a Sultan’s courtyard and pleasant fountains tinkled archly.” The surroundings inspired Maney to greet Rose with a mocking, “A golden good morning to thee, Effendi.”⁸⁷ To make sure their heads fit under the forty-foot ceiling, Rose and Brice commissioned comic portraits of themselves. There was “a replica of the Mona Lisa, with Fanny Brice’s rolling eye and wicked leer taking the place of the famous head,” Gilbert Seldes reported, and “an oil of Mr. Rose called The Sugar Crusher. It immortalizes the fury which comes over Rose at the laggard melting of sugar in these days of hard compressed tablets. Rose pounds the sugar in the cup with a spoon and chose to be painted in action.”⁸⁸

If these measures failed, Rose could always put the top down and fit into his 1932 Duesenberg Model J LeBaron Dual Cowl Phaeton J182. The convertible was chauffeur-driven because Rose almost never drove, and perhaps because New York mayor Jimmy Walker—forced to resign in 1932 but still beloved—also had a chauffeur-driven Duesy. Duesenberg’s advertising campaign identified the vehicle’s ideal owner as “a gentleman sportsman” at ease on his yacht. In reality, the luxury car was the choice, too, of the New York gangster Owney “the Killer” Madden, as well as those closer to the advertisement’s target market, such as Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, the DuPonts, and the Vanderbilts. Rose’s “Model J was the very embodiment of wealth, power, and success.” Customers spent more than twenty times what they would for an ordinary car: Model J prices started at $13,500 and could reach $20,000 at a time when a Ford went for less than $600. Rose’s purchase was especially noteworthy, because in 1932 the maker of America’s most expensive car sold only ten vehicles.89

All the while Rose kept up his family obligations, and his sisters’ career choices reveal that he exerted great influence and acted as substitute father. After his sister Miriam divorced her imported bridegroom and got married for the second time on April 21, 1931, to an optometrist named Frederick Stern, Rose was an official witness to the Jewish ceremony. Miriam was three days shy of thirty but listed her age as twenty-five. She also claimed the wedding was her first.⁹⁰ Her casual relationship with the truth and her occupation as a stenographer suggest an attempt to copy brother Billy’s style and success, an achievement she could not fathom. Billy “was really smart and circumspect and shrewd. He really knew how to function,” said Stephen Gottlieb, a stepson to Rose’s sister Polly. For Miriam, however, Rose’s success was just a matter of wishing it. “Miriam had once told my father that if she’d wanted to she could have been as successful as Billy,” Gottlieb said. “That’s what in all seriousness she said.”⁹¹ Miriam was like her father, said Helen Schrank. She inherited David Rosenberg’s shallow character, unimaginative intelligence, and bitterness toward a world he did not have the gifts to exploit or even enjoy. Rose’s enmity toward his father extended to Miriam. He never helped her financially.⁹²

His sister Polly also did not possess Billy’s business talents, but she exhibited their mother’s energy. Polly was a “feminine version” of Billy, said a childhood friend. “She was quite a gal. Polly had spark and vitality. . . . She was very attractive.”⁹³ Billy paid the tuition when Polly attended New York University in the mid-1920s, and in 1933 he probably helped her land a job dancing at a nightclub under the name Polly Porter. And when in her desire to become an actress she got her nose fixed, Rose paid the bill.⁹⁴ But for Rose, there was nobody like Fannie Rosenberg. “The mother, he adored her,” said Schrank.⁹⁵

A few months after Miriam’s wedding, Rose reminded his business associates to watch their step. First he sued Joseph Schenk for reneging on his promise to produce two Fanny Brice movies, not just Be Yourself. The suit went on for nearly a year until March 18, 1932, when it was “discontinued without costs to either party.”96 Still, Rose had made his point. He was prepared to fight, despite the bother and expense of going to court. He also came to the aid of his fellow songwriters in their fight against music publishers. Since 1914, ASCAP had policed the public performance of songs, to demand payment on behalf of its publisher and songwriter members, but the advent of the talking movie business offered publishers a new way to shortchange writers. Film studios paid ASCAP a small public performance fee, while publishers got “large sums . . . for the right of synchronization, the right to use the music in pictures.”⁹⁷ In addition, through the power of the Music Publishers’ Protective Association, ASCAP reduced payments to songwriters from two-thirds of monies collected to half. During the Depression, publishers regularly paid next to nothing to buy a song outright, free of the need to pay the writer royalties. Songs were sometimes even sold for rent money or a meal.⁹⁸

Rose’s feisty response to the Music Publishers’ Protective Association was the Songwriters’ Protective Association (SPA), which he thought up in early September 1931, just before Crazy Quilt hit the road. To turn it into reality he descended upon Arthur Garfield Hays. “Now, when Billy Rose gets an idea, the fur begins to fly, for with him an idea means action, quick action, and plenty of it,” said the prominent attorney. “He wants things done and he gets them done.” Rose demanded that Hays draw up the incorporation papers for a Friday meeting of the SPA. “This is only Wednesday, so we have plenty of time,” Rose assured him. This condition Hays could handle. A bigger problem was that songwriters “were accustomed to sleeping in the daytime, while we lawyers had formed the habit of sleeping at night.” Meetings were held at “Dinty Moore’s, Lindy’s, and Sardi’s,” and a meeting “with two song writers would develop into a congregational discussion with twenty or thirty.”⁹⁹

Rose became the first president of the SPA (today’s Songwriters Guild of America), senior officers included Ira Gershwin and Irving Berlin, and the songwriters secured their rights. When Rose died, the association—then called the American Guild of Authors and Composers—ran a front-page notice in its newsletter: “Thousands of songwriters and their families lead a better life today because of the efforts of Billy Rose.”¹⁰⁰

Such actions never dented Rose’s reputation for toughness. There were good reasons. “Billy has a genius for not making friends,” said Ben Hecht, who called him “as wistful as a meat ax” and “a kind of frustrated poet . . . a kind of slum poet and Jack the Ripper rolled into one.”101 And Rose was not satisfied with the biblical formula for justice, said Chester Conn. “It was two eyes for a tooth. If he could get the better of you.” There was also the fact that “the characteristic of Billy’s benevolence was he did it as a matter of course. He didn’t go telling about it. He didn’t sneak it under the table, either. He did it like a businessman,” said the daughter of Rose’s friend, the composer Deems Taylor.¹⁰² Most of all, as his success with the many iterations of Crazy Quilt proved, his prime driver was to be, like his mother, an unstoppable, unappeasable force. As he told Mercedes McCambridge, “When you find yourself in a tunnel . . . don’t turn back. Keep going until you see a steady gleam of light at the other end, and go for it with all your might, knocking down everything that stands in your way.”¹⁰³