Not Bad for Delancey Street

A COSMIC SCALE

Despite his success and determination, Rose still depended upon his wife’s steady and tasteful judgment. Brice was a check against his coarser show business instincts, and the first time the couple were apart that coarseness got the better of his judgment. In June 1932, Brice sailed for Europe with her two children and was away for three months. Her time back home was brief, because in October she left again for two months to perform on the road. While she was out of town, Rose made a producing mistake that cost him forty thousand dollars.1

Ben Hecht and Gene Fowler, both writers and newspapermen, approached Rose with a drama called The Great Magoo, which the authors cynically described as “a love-sick charade, drama full of passion and bird calls, something like Romeo and Juliet.”² The play actually gets down in the gutter with the worst dives in show business, the demimonde, where grubbiness rules, despair hovers, and a producer with the I-dare-you-to-say-it name of Sam Kuntzmiller expects dancers “to sign on the dotted couch.”³ Magoo displays the kind of daring bad taste the National Lampoon ran with in the 1970s, and like it, Magoo was the creation of brilliant pranksters possessed of what Maney called “sheer arrogance.”⁴ “Recognition by these titans touched off gongs in [Rose’s] skull,” Maney said. He was not the only one whose thinking was short-circuited by the pair. “I confess that I was awed by Hecht and Fowler,” said the play’s director, George Abbott.⁵

Hecht, who had already won the first of his two Oscars for his Hollywood writing and screenplays, was a legend by 1924 when, at age thirty, he moved from Chicago to New York and left some in the Second City “calling for the flags to be flown at half mast.” Hecht agreed to live by “conventional morality” but protested, “My manners don’t reach into my mind.”⁶ In New York, he held much in contempt, including himself as a Jew. The literary critic Leslie Fiedler called Hecht’s 1931 novel, A Jew in Love, “a work of inspired self-hatred: a portrait of the Jewish author as his own worst (Jewish) enemy.”7 Hecht reminds his audience that the gross characters in Magoo are also Jews. “I forgot—I ain’t in a synagogue,” says one, as he removes his hat.⁸ It took the Nazis to liberate Hecht from his ambivalence, and in 1943 when he spearheaded the creation of the theatrical pageant We Will Never Die, to demand that the American government save European Jews from annihilation, his staunchest ally was Billy Rose.

“‘The Great Magoo’ is the low-down on low people,” reported Variety after the December 2, 1932, opening. “Not diverting.”⁹ Maney, paid for his put-downs, said, “Knowing less about the drama than he knew about the migrations of the Arctic tern, Rose couldn’t cope with The Great Magoo once it had been bludgeoned.” Before it closed after eleven performances, Maney suggested filling the house by issuing subpoenas.¹⁰ Rose recouped some of his losses by selling the film rights to Paramount, but the disaster’s saving grace was the discovery of more future collaborators.¹¹ The scenic designer Herman Rosse’s work for Magoo was featured in Theatre Arts Monthly.¹² He later designed Rose’s Diamond Horseshoe nightclub. Hecht and Abbott became part of Rose’s Jumbo team. In addition, together with the great lyricist E. Y. “Yip” Harburg, Rose wrote for Magoo “It’s Only a Paper Moon,” one of America’s greatest popular songs. It deftly leavens cynicism with romance, as its worldly but lovelorn narrator admits that the cheap illusions of theater—“Just as phony as it can be”—can yield magic if graced with love. Hecht and Fowler’s published version of Magoo attributes the lyric solely to Rose. That was not the case, but perhaps Harburg’s willingness to credit Rose’s contribution obscures the more sizable role he played. “Well, but I will say one thing about Billy Rose,” Yarburg recalled. “I must give him due credit. He was a great editor. . . . Don’t forget that I was writing poetry and free verse at the time and I had to make that terrible, terrifying transition from light verse to lyricism, to lyric writing, and he really helped me come down from Olympus to Broadway. So his editing did a lot of good for me. I was always grateful for it.”¹³

A GOLD MINE

By the time Magoo folded at the end of 1932, it was clear that Prohibition was on its way out. In the November election, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and his fellow Democrats, nearly all in favor of Prohibition’s repeal, had won the White House and Congress and states began voting to approve the Twenty-First Amendment to the Constitution shortly after Congress passed a resolution to begin the process in February 1933. On December 5 of that year Utah became the thirty-sixth state to ratify the amendment and Prohibition was dead.14 Ten days later on December 15 Rose opened the Casino de Paree, a theater-restaurant concept so new that “no exact name has yet been found” to describe it, reported Gilbert Seldes.¹⁵ Variety agreed that its originality made it “truly the most unusual nite club in the world combining as it does the better features of the American theatre with the Continental supper club.” The industry trade predicted it would be a “gold mine” and a peer of the world’s greatest clubs. It was “a New York landmark comparable to the former Ziegfeld roof; Folies Bergere and Casino de Paris, Les Ambassadeurs or the Mouline [sic] Rouge of Paris; or the Kit-Cat and Cafe de Paris of London; or the Casanova, Haus Vaterland or Kempinski’s of Berlin,” wrote Variety. “For the New York spot is a combination of all.”¹⁶

What Rose did was cobble together existing entertainments into novel juxtapositions and combinations to yield an attraction greater than the sum of its parts. Seldes spotted elements of “night clubs, restaurants, vaudeville shows, with several touches of the circus and the atmosphere of the cabaret and sideshow thrown in.”¹⁷ The physical space also represented a new hybrid. “Rose created the theater-restaurants, which put cabaret revues, entertainment, and dining service into converted theaters,” explains the historian Lewis Erenberg.¹⁸ Many theaters closed during the Depression and Rose invented a new use for them as venues for nightclub festivities on a scale that overwhelmed. His Casino de Paree accommodated well over a thousand customers, with 500 guests upstairs in the former balcony and 650 downstairs. Rose devised a seating innovation to permit such crowds. He tore out the seats in the New Yorker Theatre on West Fifty-Fourth Street near Eighth Avenue and replaced them with tables that dovetailed so that, as Variety marveled, “a party of four if becoming eight can so join the two tables that they mesh and yet have all the patrons” facing the stage.¹⁹ This reconfiguration allowed six customers to fit in the space formerly occupied by just two theater chairs. Two bars served the two levels: the downstairs one, festooned with “caricatures of Broadway, stage, screen, journalistic and other notables,” was “The Nudist,” so called because of the image of a naked woman just six inches tall that waved from a fishbowl, while the upstairs bar was decorated by the whimsical illustrator and noted puppeteer Tony Sarg, who in 1928 had created for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade its signature animal balloons.²⁰

Two orchestras spelled each other on the theater’s stage to provide continuous and loud music. As Rose put it, “We play the ‘St. Louis Blues’ so you can hear it in Weehawken.” The theater stage was a performance space larger than any typical nightclub could offer and was grand enough to also welcome customers who wanted to dance. “Patrons overflowed the stage and performed intricate patterns of the dance, coat tails flying, neckties streaming in the wind,” a reporter observed. To up the sexual tension, Rose drafted chorus girls from the Ziegfeld Follies to open the revue-style show he also offered guests. These the reporter described as “a posse of nymphs attired in diaphanous garments of microscopic proportions.”21 However, Rose would not spring for Ziegfeld’s extravagant costume budget, and some considered the showgirls’ outfits drab. There was an inexpensive solution to that problem. “It was a relief to see the girls without clothes,” wrote Gilbert Seldes, “a spectacle Mr. Rose did not fail to provide.”²²

For Seldes, a Rose fan, the excitement of the approach was how it “broke down all distinction between stage and audience” and allowed for an unparalleled atmosphere of “noise and excitement and well-being. . . . It may not be great theatre, but it is alive.”²³ This vitality had Jewish roots. When the Casino de Paree opened, Theatre Arts Monthly praised New York’s Yiddish theater of twenty years earlier in almost the same language for the same spirit: “The play began in the lobby or perhaps even on the sidewalk before the theatre. The audience was a part of the performance and the whole performance was alive.”²⁴

More than Rose’s familiarity with the Yiddish theater—or the jolly chaos of his sister Miriam’s wedding—determined his course. The model for the combination of entertainment and inexpensive dining for large audiences that Rose housed in a converted theater originated in Times Square in 1929 with the entrepreneur Nils Granlund’s Hollywood Restaurant, and then in 1930 with his Paradise Restaurant.²⁵ But by the time Rose’s Casino opened in late 1933, the dinner and entertainment model had also gone upscale. At clubs set within the Algonquin, Plaza, Waldorf, and St. Regis hotels, as well as at freestanding establishments such as El Morocco, “it used to be enough if they let you in,” Stage remarked, “but now, even with dinner in most of the places . . . there is always something going on.” The legal sale of alcohol revived the high end of the business, but with a new wrinkle: “Along with the emergence of glitter came the notion of entertaining the guests.”²⁶ However, for Rose the trouble with following the lead of New York’s so-called café society was its dependence upon a “socially exclusive appeal (with anti-Semitic overtones).”²⁷ His instincts toward large-scale entertainment, coupled with restrictive social realities, meant he had to stick to his native ground in the more Jewish Broadway district and go after an audience financially and ethnically excluded from the St. Regis with a modestly priced place that was loud and fun and unbuttoned. That suited Rose. “He is given to wildness, extravagance, a cheerful, inoffensive vulgarity, and everything slapdash, noisy, rough, and comic,” Seldes wrote. These attributes delivered the key idea behind his Casino, which was to flip Granlund’s Hollywood Restaurant formula on its head. As Rose explained, “A floor show is an effort to bring a little of the theatre into a restaurant. So when repeal came I said:—‘Why not put a whole restaurant into a theatre?’”28

The result was fantastic. “All the knock-down, drag-out in my nature exudes rapture about the Casino de Paree,” reported the New Yorker’s Lois Long under her pseudonym, Lipstick. “I knew it was the inside of a converted theatre, but I had no idea, really. Tiers and tiers of tables slope toward the huge stage; there is a colored hi-de-ho orchestra on one side, and a white-folks one on the other . . . it is all big and glorious, . . . you’ll have the time of your life.”²⁹ “The entire atmosphere of the place was one of a carnival” as it “combined the more delirious features of the Winter Garden, the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles, a Durbar at Delhi and the café of the Griswold Hotel at New London on boat race night. . . . The place was a sort of honky tonk on a cosmic scale,” wrote the reporter Lucius “Luscious Lucius” Beebe, an outlandish character whose costume of evening cape and top hat was as florid as his prose.³⁰

The Casino attracted the famous as well as the regular Joe. “On a Sunday night you see composers, vocalists, and celebrities marching up to the microphone to do their stuff,” Seldes wrote.³¹ To guarantee patronage by notables Rose hosted charity events that virtually commanded the presence of a Park Avenue set with names such as Countess Mercati and Mrs. William Randolph Hearst. Irving Berlin, George Gershwin, and George M. Cohan attended a benefit there for the Authors League Fund and Hollywood soon decided Rose’s club would make a good setting for a movie.³² Al Jolson starred in a film that during production was titled Casino de Paree, though released in 1935 as Go into Your Dance.³³

The average customer’s tab was just $3.00, but the club’s weekly gross reached $40,000, thanks to up to three shows a night, starting with dinner hour, then eleven o’clock, and a final show at two in the morning if demand called for it. The weekly draw was “probably the all-time record high business which any cabaret-restaurant in New York, Paris, London or anywhere has done,” according to Variety.³⁴

FINE GENTLEMEN

The Casino opportunity presented itself while Rose was minding his business, doing only two things at once. In May 1933 he was preparing Crazy Quilt for a second tour and also thinking up a Ziegfeld Follies act for Brice when Rose’s sometime songwriting partner, Fred Fisher, introduced him to one Yermie Stern, a dress manufacturer with underworld connections.35 Stern “said he and some gentlemen who were interested had rented the [New Yorker] theatre and they wanted to turn it into a cabaret with the name of Casino de Paree,” Rose recalled. They wanted Rose to run it for them. When Rose wondered who the backers were, Stern said, “Oh very fine gentlemen. The owners of King’s [sic] Beer have an interest.”³⁶ The Brooklyn brewery was one of thirteen in New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania owned by a Jewish mob run by Waxey Gordon and Abe Zwillman, along with partners from Italian mobs such as Charles “Lucky” Luciano.³⁷ Others may also have played a role. “Dutch [Schultz] told me he was the boss of Billy’s [Casino],” said Charles Washburn, a Rose publicity man. “Billy owed me an overlooked $600 at the time of opening. Schultz paid me. ‘Want a receipt?’ I asked. ‘I paid you, kid, didn’t I?’ he shrugged. Nobody asked him twice for dough.”³⁸ Other investors were legitimate but ruthless businessmen. Sam “Subway Sam” Rosoff made millions in New York City subway construction and in the 1920s had many dealings with the gangster Arnold Rothstein. In the thirties, Rosoff, “an immigrant of incredible vitality . . . fat, swaggering—a dandy in dress,” jointly owned twenty-six liquor stores with Morris “Little Ziggy” Zeig, a gunman who had graduated into less bloody underworld activities.³⁹ The subway builder was not out of his element in criminal company. In 1938 he was a suspect in the murder of a union organizer.

Rose hated the criminal type, but he knew them well. They had been his peers when he was a kid on the Lower East Side. The ones who bullied and beat him were now running New York nightlife, and Rose’s familiarity and ease with criminals astounded many. “They respected him,” Dave Dreyer said. “Dutch Schultz . . . thought highly of him, came to his office all the time. He talked just like them, too. Couldn’t bulldoze him. He was only this high and he stood up to them toe to toe.”⁴⁰ Maney was not impressed. “When he was running saloons I had an argument with him,” he said. “I had an agreement I would never go into them. Backed by gangsters. Thugs. That was [all right] with him.”⁴¹ Such realism was not unique. Granlund also accepted the inevitability of gangster partners and described them as “‘essentially . . . just a tough breed of businessmen.’”42 Rose’s equivalent toughness made him the target of the joke, “Who has the biggest prick in the world? Fanny Brice.”⁴³ Another crack was that you could kidnap Rose, but who would pay to get him back? “I was known on Broadway as an intensely selfish fellow and a tough trader,” he later admitted. “There was nothing especially endearing about the image I conjured up in those days.”⁴⁴ Under the circumstances, though, his reputation brings to mind the gangster Mickey Cohen’s quip: “I don’t call a man a son of a bitch who’s in a walk of life that calls for him to be a son of a bitch.”⁴⁵

SMALL TIME CAVALCADE

In the spring of 1934, still employed by Stern and the boys, Rose found greater visibility in a new venue. Billy Rose’s Music Hall, Inc., leased the Manhattan Theatre on Broadway near Fifty-Third Street, around the corner from the Casino, and though the company’s president was Stern, Rose got the publicity. The new club was called Billy Rose’s Music Hall. Its name invoked comparison with the monumental Radio City Music Hall that had opened eighteen months before, attracted attention with an electric sign forty feet high, and began Rose’s tradition of affixing his name to all his undertakings.⁴⁶ The space originally housed the Hammerstein Theatre, built in 1927 by Arthur Hammerstein to honor his producer father, Oscar Hammerstein I. Sitting empty in 1934, it offered the scale and grandeur Rose loved. The interior’s domed ceiling and walls covered with mosaics evoked a Gothic cathedral.⁴⁷ A few weeks before the Music Hall opened on June 21, 1934, Rose had for once exhausted his capacity for promotional hype. He stole Beebe’s line and predicted to A. J. Liebling that the club “will be a honky tonk on a cosmic scale. It will be the apotheosis of popular-priced amusement. It will be the nuts.”⁴⁸

And it was.

“There were undoubtedly flag raisings in honor of this and that among the Babylonians which embodied some of its cockeyed features. But as a monument of lunacy the Billy Rose Music Hall is in a class by itself,” Beebe again reported.⁴⁹ Once more there were small dovetailing tables where the theater seating had been, room for one thousand, and “a madhouse of gayety . . . chaotic revelry in a strange combination of Mardi Gras–Beaux Arts Ball–Coney Island atmosphere.”50 All that, however, was to be expected, and Rose was not interested in duplication. Clearly experimenting, taunting the idea of limits, he turned up the volume and assaulted the senses from every imaginable angle. Now there were one hundred singing waiters who were “made up to look like old time tough guys, with red noses and all,” and “gaudy nudes . . . daubed in hey-hey profusion over the red and gold walls” by Clark Robinson, who in 1933 was the art director at Radio City Music Hall.⁵¹ In addition there was jazz music by Benny Goodman and his orchestra and a “multimedia extravaganza” provided by newsreels and a projection of the mob scenes from D .W. Griffith’s The Fall of Babylon.⁵² Open from 11 a.m. to 4 a.m., the Music Hall served lunch for fifty cents. Dinner and a show was priced at $1.00 and late-hour suppers topped out at $1.50, but Rose devised ways to generate additional income from liquor sales and the for-hire services of “100 hostesses for lonesome stags.” This Lonely Hearts Club of young women “wore tight black satin dresses with red hearts over the left tit,” Rose bluntly explained, “and you bought a lonely heart cocktail for $1 and you could dance with any girl.”⁵³ The women approached customers and, according to one reviewer, came as close to illegal solicitation as the law allowed.⁵⁴

But it was Rose’s return to the nostalgia of his 1924 Fatal Wedding production that was the “socko highlight of it all.” The “Small Time Cavalcade” will “become something in show biz history,” wrote Variety. Lifted from Ben Hecht’s unproduced play Hearts and Flowers, “Cavalcade” was the kind of emotionally moving production Brice could hardly believe Rose capable of. At first glance, it seemed a procession of show business grotesques. “It’s truly a cavalcade of the varieties,” Variety reported, “from the corniest of two-man song-and-dance teams, down through a succession of fire-eaters, magicians, musical clowns with bulbous noses and copiously weeping glims; strong women, bellringers, musical bottles and bones manipulators, comedy fiddlers, acrobats, gymnasts, casting acts, minstrel men, straight barytones, Irish tenors, clowns and the entire gamut of the lexicon of ring and rostrum entertainment.” In front of a backdrop “painted like hundreds of faces looking down,” some forty acts performed to “old-time melodies,” until little by little they filled the stage and “a thin Irish tenor” sang Hecht and Rose’s composition “Dreaming of Broadway,” which Rose recited from memory thirty years later.⁵⁵

Allow me friends to introduce

Professor, if you please,

The artists of the vaudeville stage that Broadway never sees

Masters of the laugh and tear

Clowns and jesters gay

Playing the tank towns year on year

And dreaming of Broadway

Give ’em that great big hand of yours

This is their one big shot

May I present the Small Time Cavalcade

The acts that Keith forgot.

Rose continued, “There was all the love and the torture and the tragedy and the hurrah of show business on these faces and they sang, ‘We never made good on Broadway / We’re playing the small-time still / We never made good on Broadway / But with a break, by God, we will.’”56 The number drew three minutes of solid applause. Newspaper reviews called it “one of the most touching recitations we’ve heard in ever so long” and “really effective and not a little moving to those of us who knew vaudeville in the old days.”⁵⁷ “William Morris, Sr. came in and cried like a baby and sent two cases of champagne to the company,” Rose said and Variety reported.⁵⁸ Discussing the number near the end of his life Rose defended the show and its players with more sympathy and insight than his tough image would have predicted. These vaudevillians were not pathetic people, he said: “One of the things that motivates everybody, from Winston Churchill to Mahatma Gandhi, is the esteem, the affection, the admiration, the applause of his fellow man. Most people go through their lives without any applause.”⁵⁹ The so-called small-timers received theirs.

A BEATIFIC GLOW

While all this was going on, Rose also was the creative force behind Brice’s acclaimed 1933–34 Ziegfeld Follies performance as the humbled but still pompous Russian (Jewish) Countess Dubinsky. As Brice’s character explains, before the revolution, “Nicolai and all his princes nibbled nightly on my blintzes.” But gone now are the days of licentious interludes with aristocrats. In New York she is an ordinary stripper. Referring to herself in the third person Brice’s Dubinsky laments, “The Countess Dubinsky, right down to her skinsky, is working for Minsky now.” Stage devoted a two-page spread to Brice’s act and ran seven photographs of the Dubinsky number. “There are other points in the show,” the magazine said of the Follies, “but when we recall Fannie [sic] Brice’s Minsky number, we forget what they are.”60 The New Yorker agreed: “Boy, that Fannie [sic] Brice! She’s marvelous!”⁶¹ Her triumph was in good measure due to Rose. “The songs and sketches he helped create for her . . . ‘fit’ her perfectly and enabled her to impersonate a variety of memorable comic characters,” writes the Brice biographer Barbara Wallace Grossman.⁶² The custom fit was made from Jewish material. “Fanny was a Jewish comedian and the Follies was a very goyish show,” Rose said.⁶³ But in 1933, the Jewish Shuberts licensed the Follies, for Ziegfeld had died in 1932 and his widow, the actress Billie Burke, had debts to pay. As Rose’s Jewish Dubinsky, Brice soared to new heights. “She was better than she had ever been in previous appearances under the Ziegfeld banner,” noted Grossman.⁶⁴

With fascism on the rise in Europe and big government programs the hero at home, Rose’s hardboiled cleverness, manic industriousness, and obvious pleasure in being Billy Rose stood for something. Just before she praised Rose’s Casino, the New Yorker’s Lipstick announced, “America has come through. We sturdy pioneers can take it.” Rose was one of the American individualists who H. L. Mencken in June 1934 recognized were unfashionable and under attack but nevertheless worthy, resilient, and necessary. In “Individualism Cheats the Coroner” Mencken took to task those on the left and right who demanded sacrifices for their favored abstractions, the people and the state. “To this unhappy faction belong all the tin-pot despots who now rage in the world, and the Brain Trusts which fill its air with blah. In Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin the fraternity has grand masters, and everywhere it has chapters.” But such movements were doomed, Mencken wrote. “They all collapse when they are permitted to collide with the eternal nature of man. It is not in that nature for a man with what appears to be a likely idea for lining his pockets to yield up its execution to a gang of petty pedagogues and attorneys. . . . The progress of Homo sapiens in the United States, hereafter as in the past, will be carried on by men who follow their own ideas and serve their own interests.”⁶⁵ That same month a Vanity Fair columnist also seemed to have had Rose in mind when he argued the importance of magnificence for the middle classes: “They crave color, splendor, pomp and ceremony. . . . They simply don’t want these luxuries to be the other fellow’s exclusive privilege.” The columnist acknowledged that President Roosevelt’s New Deal did crucial work in providing people with work and bread, but declared that “the people want a show, as well as a run, for their money.”66

Rose agreed and as usual was thinking of his next and always bigger step. After the Music Hall opened, he applied for a passport, received it on July 27, and the next day settled into a first-class cabin to England aboard the Majestic, the world’s largest ocean liner and the one that during the booming 1920s was considered by the elite as “the only way to cross” the Atlantic.⁶⁷ There was no shortage of reasons for Rose’s journey. First, the Kings beer group was in financial trouble. After he set sail, news broke that Sam Rosoff called in his note of $700,000, and also voted a claim held by one Arthur Diamant worth $460,000 to force a reorganization of the business. Rose became aware of the impending problem no later than July 11, when Rosoff was appointed the brewery’s “temporary trustee.”⁶⁸ What this meant for Kings’ investment in the Casino de Paree and Billy Rose’s Music Hall was unclear, but Rose obviously decided not to wait and find out. Besides, Europe offered a number of enticements. Variety covered the doings there and in March ran a story about Paris’s Bal Tabarin nightclub and its “formula for packing them in nightly.”⁶⁹ Rose visited the Tabarin. Europe also was home to the writer Ferenc Molnar, a Rose favorite. The Jewish-Hungarian novelist and playwright was a Hungarian Ben Hecht, “a sentimentalist who shrewdly masks his sentimentality . . . [with an] extremely dexterous and most persuasive, derisory humor,” wrote the theater critic George Jean Nathan.⁷⁰ In 1931, Rose wanted to produce Molnar’s The Play’s the Thing and news of the writer ran in the Times shortly before Rose’s voyage, because Molnar’s 1907 novel, The Paul Street Boys, had just been turned into the film No Greater Glory.⁷¹ Rose traveled to Budapest and met Molnar.

The voyage also offered Rose the opportunity to reintroduce himself to his boyhood hero, Bernard Baruch. Among the many celebrities who enjoyed Billy Rose’s Music Hall were Irving Berlin, Harpo Marx, Oscar Levant, and, on opening night, Baruch’s friend Herbert Bayard Swope, together with Bernard’s younger brother, Sailing Baruch.⁷² Swope knew Rose from their WIB days, surely introduced him to Sailing, and Swope and Sailing must have secured Baruch’s permission to share with Rose the news that Baruch was going to be in Czechoslovakia with fellow game hunters on the Count Karolyi estate, because that is where Rose visited Baruch in August. “They had breakfast at six A.M. and Baruch and 20 guests went out on horseback,” Rose said. “Each guest had an attendant who carried his gun and loaded it. . . . Dogs and beaters flushed coveys of quail.”73

But what most stoked Rose’s interest was the chance to see Star of the Circus, a Budapest attraction Variety lauded as a “revue-musical-legit-vaude-circus entertainment . . . a real hit and something distinctly new.” It told the story of a love affair between the daughter of a circus manager and an upper-class boy whose disapproving parents only agree to the match after their son “becomes an acrobat for her sake.” What was new was that on this skeleton scaffolding, “scarcely more than an idea . . . brilliant acrobatics and dance productions [were] hung,” love songs were crooned, clowns performed, and “trained bears” entertained.⁷⁴ The idea clearly caught Rose’s imagination. He announced plans for such a circus musical even before he left New York. On July 26 the Times ran a short article with the long headline, “‘Broadway Circus’ Planned for Spring, Billy Rose Would Include 1,800 Dancers and Show Girls in Huge Human Spectacle.” The Associated Press ran its story the day Rose sailed. “The circus has added nothing of consequence to its program since the days of Barnum. It has been static and the box office receipts have endured a steady attack,” Rose said. But he had a remedy. “My experiences in the theater and night club field lead me to believe that mass entertainment, spectacularly presented, has great box office potential.”⁷⁵

In Budapest Rose met with Ladislaus Bus-Fekete, author of Star of the Circus, and reportedly “paid [a] $5,000 advance for [Star of the Circus] rights against a weekly percentage and gets 50% of the world film rights also.”⁷⁶ Major press coverage was immediate. Before he returned to New York, a foreign correspondent for the Times interviewed Rose and reported on the showman’s outrageous boasts, views, visions, pronouncements, and judgments. Rose became “swathed in a beatific and phosphorescent glow” as he imagined his forthcoming Broadway circus. “He tosses his mane wildly,” the reporter observed, “and there is a fey glint in his eyes as he paints the possibilities of the half-million-dollar carnival.” The traditional circus is through, Rose said. “The proprietors offer three rings because they’re in league with the aspirin people. No human being can watch three rings at once.” He argued that adults go to the circus at the demand of their children. “It’s not a grown-up entertainment and, besides, it doesn’t smell good. It’s a badly lighted, constantly repeated bore displayed in a frowsy-looking tent. I want no part of it.”⁷⁷

Then Rose let fly with predictions that he and the Times were happy to treat as a virtuoso display of talk, performance art, a form of entertainment, and one not to be confused with information. “Statistics on Mr. Rose’s circus are wooed from him easily,” said the Times. “He states that he will have a ballet of 200, another 200 dancers schooled in the Tiller tradition, 100 show girls for pictorial purposes, a choral group of 250, still another hundred dancers of the Albertina Rasch kind, a Chautauqua of notables made up of slightly faded picture stars, politicians, authors, radio crooners and athletes, and two orchestras of 100 pieces each. A congress of stooges will be in the melee and a huge demonstration in magic will be a feature.”78 It was a vision apparently inspired by one of the vital tenets of Manhattanism divined by Koolhaas, which was a “hyper-density” of population, a celebration of congestion. It also expressed another of the great city’s purposes that manifested itself in Rose: “to overstimulate the imagination and keep any recognizable earthly realities at a distance.”⁷⁹

NOBODY HOME

Rose’s stand-up routine for the Times did contain one down-to-earth message: he was out of Kings’ enterprises. This departure had nothing to do with poor management decisions made at the Casino and Music Hall clubs during his absence, as Rose later claimed. He and Yermie Stern made the split official a week before Rose returned to New York. It was probably all but over when Rose sailed to Europe accompanied by publicity for his planned circus. But it was not amicable. Rose said he was owed $16,000 in back pay for the weeks he was in Europe, that he “owned the scenery and costumes” at the Casino de Paree, and that Stern could not continue calling Billy Rose’s Music Hall by that name. Stern disagreed on all points, and after Rose returned to New York on September 4, a meeting was arranged at the Casino de Paree. Rose brought along the powerful columnist Walter Winchell as a prominent witness whose presence would make violence impossible. Threats of violence were another story. When Rose insisted his contract supported his case, the gangster Spunky Weiss replied, “Why, Billy, while you was in Europe I took a look at that contract and I shot out all the clauses.”⁸⁰

It’s a great yarn, and it keeps getting better. After the meeting, Winchell told Rose his life was in danger. Rose agreed and at five in the morning telephoned Bernard Baruch, who contacted Attorney General Homer Cummings, who called up J. Edgar Hoover, who dispatched three G-men to contact the criminals with the message that nothing had better happen to Billy Rose.⁸¹ Unfortunately, the story is too good to be true. It is not credible that Rose asked such a favor of Baruch just weeks after reestablishing contact with him for the first time in fifteen years. In fact, nearly two years later Rose was still not certain of his friendship with Baruch and, addressing him in a letter as Mr. Baruch, apologized profusely after Fanny Brice’s stockbroker contacted Baruch for financial advice. “I write this letter so that you will know that none of this was my doing,” he said. “Despite the fact that I have spent hours in your company, I have never presumed on our friendship for guidance in the stock market.”82 In 1934, asking Baruch for protection from gangsters would have been an unimaginable presumption. Besides, Winchell could have helped Rose reach Hoover. Winchell received a personal note from the FBI director in April, and on September 6, at the time Winchell and Rose supposedly met with the gangsters, the columnist talked with Frank Fay, head of the bureau’s New York office, who informed Hoover that Winchell “praised you highly for the attitude which you assume against gangsters and other so-called ‘gorillas.’”⁸³ Finally, as Rosoff’s lawsuit proved, by the mid-1930s even gangsters sought remedies in the courts. Rose filed three lawsuits against his former employers.⁸⁴ He was obviously not afraid for his life.

But he might have feared his life had not yet assumed the gigantic proportions he desired, a problem that could only partly be addressed with actual accomplishments. Invention was also required. Rose turned thirty-five in September 1934, and his résumé was a succession of sometimes very successful but brief engagements. His adventures with the Casino de Paree and the Music Hall lasted just over a year. Rose might also have been disheartened by the disruptions and loneliness of his life with Brice. In the summer of 1933, the Rose-Brice family moved from 1111 Park Avenue to a building at 32 East Sixty-Fourth Street.⁸⁵ When Rose went there after completing his 1934 trip to Europe, Fanny was not home. On the day he arrived, she opened the Follies in Chicago. It was the start of a nearly seven-month road show, and when Rose’s month in Europe is tacked on, the separation of husband and wife lasted almost eight months, except for a week in December during the Christmas holiday, when Rose traveled with Brice’s children to visit their mother in Kansas City. Frances and Bill called their mother’s husband Mr. Rose, but he was warm toward them. “Rose had brought not just the children, but the presents, time, and spirit to make 1934 the greatest Christmas Fran and Bill had ever spent,” writes the Brice biographer Herbert Goldman.⁸⁶

Children brought out Rose’s most charitable sentiments. Perhaps because of his own sufferings in childhood, or perhaps because children were unable to challenge or threaten him amorously or financially, he performed some of his kindest acts on their behalf. His decent behavior toward Brice’s children hints that Rose’s sister Polly may have been on to something when she insisted her brother was a wounded innocent. “He is the soul of kindness and goodness and generosity,” she told a would-be biographer. “Billy is so soft and kind inside. . . . When Billy gets tough, he’s protesting against himself. He’s just trying to control himself, so his emotions won’t run away with him.”87 It was a Jewish type that emerged from America’s scrappy ghetto neighborhoods, and a fictional character appears in Saul Bellow’s Humboldt’s Gift with the affliction Polly attributed to Billy Rose. “He has fine feelings which frustrate him because they fiddle his heart, and he overreacts grossly,” Bellow wrote of his character.⁸⁸ The Americanization of the Jews forced many to become emotional contortionists, twisting awkwardly to disguise traits that could hold them back.