SAUL CHAPLIN is generally considered to be one of the most adept men around. He’s a real “pro,” and that is a word not lightly bestowed by his peer group. He was and still is a successful songwriter, but, unlike his ex-partner Sammy Cahn, who continues to ply his crafts strictly as lyricist, Chaplin early on became a skillful music arranger, a musical director, a composer of film scores, and then an associate producer of many film musicals.
“When Sammy and I got to Hollywood,” he muses, “it was 1939, and the absolute wrongest time to go out there, because they weren’t making musicals. Did he also tell you that they wouldn’t even let us on the Warner lot, where we were supposed to be under contract?”
In the ensuing three decades Chaplin’s career has traveled a considerable distance upward. His varied talents have been put to use on such memorable musical films as Cover Girl, The Jolson Story, On the Town, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, and High Society. For his musical direction of An American in Paris he received an Oscar in 1951, another in 1954 for Seven Brides, a third in 1961 for West Side Story. And add to the list his awards for his work on The Sound of Music.
We are in Chaplin’s Belgravia hotel room; the desk is covered with work schedules and masses of paper that are architectural notes for his current production. Making a large-budget film such as La Mancha is an intensely complicated venture; Chaplin is responsible for all of the intricacies.
Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin
It’s no accident that he’s worked with the best—Jerome Kern, Ira Gershwin, Mercer, Cole Porter (he’s done four Porter film musicals, more than any other music man); and with the superstars—Garland, Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Gene Kelly, Julie Andrews. “For heaven’s sake, don’t leave out Ann Miller!” chortles Chaplin. “That’s my real distinction! I have done more films with Ann Miller than anyone alive! The entire time I worked at Columbia, from 1940 to 1949, it was always Ann Miller. My life from 1940 to 1959 was Ann Miller, because when she moved to Metro, I did too! There I was working with her on Kiss Me, Kate and On the Town and all those big-budget Metro musicals. Believe me, I am the world’s foremost authority on Ann Miller!”
Where was the first Hollywood break?
“Sammy and I got to do a picture at Republic, a thing called Rookies on Parade. The producer didn’t want songwriters, he wanted a story. Our agent told him, ‘Don’t worry—these two guys write anything!’ We’d never written anything in our lives like that, but we were authorities on vaudeville acts because of our Brooklyn Vitagraph days, so we sat down and rewrote half a dozen routines that we remembered, put them together with the cockamamie story about a songwriter—who can even remember what it was? If you look at the credits of Rookies on Parade today—although I cannot imagine why you ever would—you will see, ‘Original story and songs by Sammy Cahn and Saul Chaplin.’
“Then we got to meet Harry Cohn, who ran Columbia. Oh, I know the book’s been written about Cohn, but think about his early background. He’d been a frustrated songwriter, then a song-plugger. And we came in with a lot of hits behind us. Sammy is a very brash guy now, but in those days he was even brasher. He was Harry Cohn’s kind of guy. We were invited to play at a party, and Harry was singing along with the songs that I knew he knew, old songs, and he told Morris Stoloff, who was the head of his music department, who also loved us, to hire us. Cohn was starting to make all those cheap musicals—mostly with Ann Miller!” he adds.
And Cohn, with his shrewd nose for a bargain, no doubt got Cahn and Chaplin at a very low price?
“That,” says Chaplin succinctly, “goes with the territory. Eventually Sammy decided to write with Jule Styne—I suppose Jule has filled you in on that next period—but I stayed on. I had a wife and a baby and I needed a steady job. Eight or nine years I was there, running all over the Columbia lot. The music department had four or five people on staff—we did everything. One week it would be a couple of songs for a quickie musical, the next week it would be arrangements and choral work on one of Cohn’s big musicals, like The Jolson Story or Cover Girl. That is where I really learned the movie business. Later on, when I got to Metro, I couldn’t believe that I was only working on one project, sometimes for months at a time. One picture—such luxury!”
One of those frantic Columbia sessions produced an inadvertent smash-hit song for Chaplin, an all-time “standard”—“The Anniversary Song,” which Al Jolson (or, rather, Jolson’s voice, since it was Larry Parks who played the title role) introduced in The Jolson Story.
“The idea came from Sidney Buchman, the producer. He felt Parks, as Jolie, needed something at the scene where his parents had come from the East for their anniversary party. A little throwaway thing, just for the background to the dialogue. We were at lunch, and Jolie said he knew a tune that would fit—an old semi-classical Russian waltz written by a man named Ivanovici. He hummed it, and it sounded great. So they said, ‘What about lyrics?’ and I said—remember, I did everything over there—‘I’ll knock out a lyric so we can use it.’ I went back to my office, and I swear it can’t be more than forty-five minutes later I called Buchman and told him I had a lyric. Jolson recorded it and it came out beautifully. So they decided to make more out of it, to show Parks actually singing it at the party. I said, ‘If that’s the case, let me rewrite the lyric. This isn’t the best I can do, it’s almost off the top of my head.’ I must tell you,” says Chaplin with candor, “there are still parts of that lyric that embarrass me. Things like, ‘we vowed our true love, the word wasn’t said.’ Nobody says ‘true love.’ It’s terrible. But Buchman refused. He said, ‘You’re going to rewrite it into a failure; it sounds fine now.’
“Jolson had had the idea for the first line of the song, so, as he had music. Which was all right by me, because, as it turned out, he got us a marvelous royalty deal from the publishers. I thought he was crazy at the time—there hadn’t been a waltz hit for maybe twenty years! But Jolie made it into a hit. 1947 … it’s been a hit for twenty-five years, can you believe it?” Chaplin shakes his head in honest perplexity. “Something exists even in that sloppy lyric. It’s another ‘Happy Birthday.’ You cannot go to a wedding or to a ballroom or a club where somebody’s going to have an anniversary party without the orchestra going into that song.”
The meeting of a good song with a great performer made the electrical connection, the right chemical formula for a hit. Other songwriters have remarked that the greatest song in the world sung by the wrong person won’t “work”—that is, move into the Top Ten.
“And vice versa,” agrees Chaplin. “The wrong song done by the best person won’t ‘work’ either. It has to be a meeting of both.”
If “Anniversary Song” is unique, then so is the entire Jolson Story saga. Once one of show business’ biggest stars, Jolson had come upon a dismal stretch after World War II. Well-to-do financially, Al was out of work. Afternoons at the race track did nothing to assuage his battered ego; after years of stardom, he was a has-been. Sidney Skolsky, the columnist, decided that Jolson’s life story would make a marvelous film. But practically all of the major studios—including Warner Brothers, where, ironically, Jolson had starred in The Jazz Singer—turned Skolsky down flat. Jolson was too old. Who had any use for a faded singer? It was Sidney Buchman who became interested in the possibilities and brought the idea to Harry Cohn, who eventually agreed to make the film at Columbia. The Jolson Story was an immense financial success; the irony deepens when it is recalled that Jolson’s voice, circa 1947, when he was recording the music tracks for Larry Parks to perform to, is now considered by critics to have been at its period of absolute perfection.
“Cohn went for the Jolson project again because he was an old song-plugger,” explains Chaplin. “When Cohn was peddling songs in his early days, Jolson was the guy you got the top plug from. If he sang your song, it was bound to make a noise with the public. And here was Cohn, in the ’40s, hiring the guy he’d once been struggling to see. It must have been a big kick for him.
“I was assigned to that picture months before they started,” he recalls. “I worked very hard on it. Knocked my brains out. They had dug up a lady in Pasadena who was a Jolson record collector. I sat in an office, and part of every day I used to listen to her old Jolson records, to get familiar with them. The day of the first recording session, Jolie did ‘April Showers’ first, and, strangely enough, he had forgotten how he used to do it! But when you first heard Jolson, you were never aware of things like that because he was such a thrilling performer that you were … in awe. So he finished the recording, and everybody cheered and yelled, ‘Great, Al!’ I knew he had left out the talking part, the recitative in the second chorus. He said, ‘What about you? Don’t you like it?’ I said, ‘It’s good, but it’s not like the record I remember.’ He said, ‘Well, you know, it’s not easy to do this sort of thing.’ I said, ‘Al, I’m not saying it’s easy, but it isn’t what I think it should be.’ This got us into a whole big argument. And he pulled this famous Jolson thing on me. He took out the big roll of bills that he carried. He said, ‘I made this in show business; show me yours!’ So I said something that you can’t quote, and I walked out. Went home. I was angry too!”
Chaplin smiles. “Al was famous for that sort of arrogance. Eventually I came back, and he’d done it wrong again! But I persisted, and finally we got Al to do it right, and I must say it was better. After that, I was teaching him how he used to do his own songs! I have a record of Jolson doing ‘Who Paid the Rent for Mrs. Rip Van Winkle (While Rip Van Winkle Was Away)?’ in his old-time Low Dutch accent from forty years before. Never used in the picture, sadly.”
“Oh, Al was an incredible performer. It was a privilege to get to work with him. I’ve been so fortunate in that respect—Jolson, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra. And the songwriters! Take the great Jerome Kern—before the Jolson picture I’d worked on Cover Girl, which he wrote with Ira Gershwin, for Rita Hayworth and Gene Kelly, in 1940.
“Kern was a very strict man about changes, you know. Don’t let anybody tell you the Hollywood people pushed him around. He was not to be used up, or kicked around, or moved, or budged, or in any way maneuvered by anybody. He had a very strong personality, and everyone conformed to what Kern wanted. Ask Ira Gershwin what it was like to get Kern to change one note in a song to fit an extra word in the lyric that Ira had written.
“There was one sequence in Cover Girl—a comedy bit for Gene Kelly and Phil Silvers, something on the back of a truck when they’re entertaining the soldiers. They couldn’t think who should write it. I’d known Phil for years, so I said I’d take a crack at it. I took a song of Kern’s that was to be in the picture called Put Me to the Test. Ira Gershwin had written a patter chorus, and I extended it and added some quote comedy unquote material. It was funny in those days … I guess. Right for Phil and Gene. I needed a couple of extra lines for it, and now I must tell you a marvelous scene. I’d explained to Ira I needed a couple of lines, and he told me to come over to his house. I went there, and sitting around were E. Y. Harburg, Marc Connelly, Leo Robin, Arthur Schwartz, and the late Oscar Levant. I spoke to Ira, and Ira said to the group, ‘Listen, don’t leave—we need two lines for this thing.’ So I played it. Well, the joke lines started coming from all these talented guys so fast you could not believe it! Harburg had literally dozens of them! There were so many coming from them all, it became a contest of their own prowess instead of what I needed!”
Who ended up supplying the two needed joke lines?
“Ira, of course.” Chaplin grins. “A marvelous man.
“Anyway, I finished the thing, Phil and Gene recorded it, and suddenly Morris Stoloff said, ‘Listen, you have to let Kern hear it. He doesn’t know anything about this.’ You can imagine with what trepidation I faced that hurdle. We got Kern to come to the studio, and we put on the sound track we’d recorded. He listed to the comedy material and he didn’t crack a smile, and I thought, ‘Well, that’s the end of that, and it hasn’t even been shot yet.’ When it was over, he said, ‘Well, if it works, keep it in. If not, throw it out.’ And he left. It worked, thankfully. Oh yes, it worked quite well.
“Later, I did a picture with Ira at Metro called Give a Girl a Break,” says Chaplin, “and I must tell you what I’ve been doing lately with him. I’ve been going through all his brother George’s unpublished manuscripts, books, notebooks, and out of them, as a result, there’s a piece coming out called ‘Two Waltzes in C,’ which Ira edited and I arranged for the piano. Both were written in 1931 for Pardon My English and were cut out. Lovely waltzes for that period. Oh, this has been an incredible experience!” He beams with undisguised joy. “I’ve found the beginnings of Rhapsody in Blue, the changes in Concerto in F! And besides, there’s a kind of a blues piece that George wrote in 1916, in two keys, where the right hand’s in one key and the left hand’s in the other. It’s just marvelous!” He shakes his head with wonder. “He was seventeen, eighteen years old! Incredible! Now it’s just a matter of Ira releasing it.”
Now to the post-Columbia period. What about the four Cole Porter films which Chaplin worked on—High Society, Les Girls, Kiss Me, Kate, and Can-Can?
“Well,” says Chaplin, softly, “this is something I really cherish. The fact that I had a little something to do with shaping Cole’s scores of High Society and Les Girls. We had a marvelous time on High Society. I was by that time working as associate producer to Sol Siegel. Porter was supposed to write the songs, and they sent me to New York to see him. I was in such awe of him, because all my life, although I’ve written music, I’ve also written lyrics, as you know. And Porter did both—to a fare-thee-well!
“First we had an evening meeting. He said, ‘I want to play you a song.’ He played a song for me which was a nice song but wasn’t right for that particular spot in the picture. But I can’t tell that to Cole Porter, can I? I mean—how am I going to tell him he’s done anything wrong? So I said, ‘A nice song. I like it. Good.’ He played it again. I said, ‘It’s nice. Yes, it’s fine.’ Cole said, ‘Come here.’ And he was limping very badly then, you know, and used canes. He took me over to the sofa, and he said, ‘Look. We are going to work together. Now, I can tell you didn’t like that song, for whatever reason I don’t know yet. You have to tell me what the reason is, because if I agree that your reason is right, I’ll rewrite the song. If I don’t, we’ll use the song. But let’s start out honestly from the beginning.’
“Do you know something?” Chaplin says fervently. “I never got that from anybody before or since! And from then on we had the most marvelous time. He was sick; he wasn’t playing very well. He’s written part of a song called ‘I Love You, Samantha,’ which is one of my favorite songs. And he couldn’t really play it. I got exasperated and I said, ‘Cole, for God’s sake, do you have it written down someplace? I can’t tell what you’re doing!’ He only had eight bars. I played the eight bars. I said, ‘Finish it, my God—it’s marvelous!’ That was the kind of relationship we developed. I remember later I unearthed that song ‘Well, Did You Evah!’ from one of his old shows, DuBarry Was a Lady, and Cole wrote a new set of lyrics, although I’m proud to say I had a word or two in there, with his approval, of course.
“You remember that number ‘Now You Has Jazz’? Such a completely untypical Porter number. It was sung by Bing Crosby and Louis Armstrong at what was meant to be the Newport Jazz Festival. Well, Cole, in his typical thorough way, got Fred Astaire to take him to a few jazz places. Except, you don’t get to learn jazz that way.” Chaplin smiles. “But he tried; he wrote a first chorus of the song. If you listen to it, it’s really a very straight verse and chorus. I wrote part of the rest of it, and then I got Bing and Louis down onto the sound stage and we batted it out in about four days—just playing around with it, so to speak, and then I’d go home at night and organize it, and write whatever needed to be written. That’s how it eventually emerged on the screen.”
Wouldn’t that be considered by anyone else as a collaborative effort?
“No, not at all,” says Chaplin. “I was only doing a job. The song was all Cole’s—just embellished. High Society had a lovely score—‘You’re Sensational,’ ‘True Love’—lovely. There were other good Porter songs, a pretty one called ‘Ça, C’est l’Amour,’ which was in Les Girls … very nice. Got lost. The crazy thing is, I have songs of Cole’s that they didn’t even know existed after he died. You see, our relationship evolved into this; he’d write songs for a picture and I’d say, ‘Cole, let me make a copy of it and think about it.’ He would play it, and I’d take it down, and I would have the only copy. We’d later discuss whether it worked or not—and then I’d give it back to him and he’d either rewrite it or not. As a result, I ended up with four or five songs of his that nobody knew about.
“Four times at bat with Cole Porter,” Chaplin muses, staring through the hotel-room window at the wet London streets below. “Who could ask for a better experience?”
Should we return to the performers?
After Jolson, the one who springs first to mind has to be Judy Garland.
“To start with, I’ve got to tell you that Judy Garland and Julie Andrews have one thing in common which is unique. They learn music like a vacuum cleaner. The minute you played it for them, it came right back again. When it first happens, you’re left with your mouth open because you can’t believe it. Which may not sound like much, but the most tedious part of producing musicals is teaching people new music. You want to get them started so you can have more time for polishing and for acquiring style. Now, with Judy—I wrote an arrangement of Harold Arlen and Ted Koehler’s ‘Get Happy’ for her in Summer Stock. Her record of it was a big smash hit. It’s a very complicated arrangement. Judy heard it three times, but never sang it. Then she got sick. Two weeks later she came in, rehearsed it once, and recorded it in about four ‘takes.’
“Great humor. Bright, and fun to be with—when she was there. Judy may have been the most fun to work with of anybody—no, I suddenly think of Gene Kelly and Phil Silvers, they were lots of fun, too. But Judy was funny, she was cooperative. She was late for every single appointment. I mean, so late that sometimes it became annoying. Until she got there— and then, after she’d arrived, you forgot the whole thing. I remember doing a picture with her here in England, in 1963. We had an appointment to rehearse at eleven in the morning. She came in at seven fifteen that night … and didn’t think anything was wrong with that, you know!” He thinks back for a long silent moment. “Judy had lots of suggestions, and if you didn’t take them, fine,” he says. “If you did, great. Absolutely no temperament about things like that. When it came to recordings, it was the same kind of thing. She was a very good critic of herself. Toward the end,”—he shakes his head slightly—“she got…. Well, even then it would be hard to say she was less critical. She wasn’t singing so well, and I have a feeling she knew it. But I also have a feeling she knew she couldn’t do anything about it.
“But that aptitude of hers for learning was remarkable. It was the same with dancing. Judy would learn routines immediately. That is the kind of talent that girl had.
“The crazy thing is, to have worked with her and then Julie Andrews, who is like that, too. In a way, Julie is….” He hesitates. “I was going to say Julie is a better musician, but I’m not sure that’s true. Both of them have the same past, you know. Not exactly, but similar. Vaudeville parents, broken homes. Not that it means anything, but I suppose it adds to the personality. In both Sound of Music and Star Julie learned the music very quickly, she had valid suggestions, and, more than just that, she had a viewpoint on a song, the same as Judy. You don’t just sing a song, you know. In most cases, songs in a film are scenes.
“You’ve been mentioning a lot of my credits. I’m proud of them, of course,” admits Chaplin, “but what I’m really prouder of is that starting way back with, I guess, High Society, the people in my films were never just singing. They’re always part of a scene. I don’t care about great vocal power; I care that they have the right dramatic feel for the character—more important. The days when songs were only songs left us with Nelson Eddy and Jeanette MacDonald. At that time the important thing was to rear back and sing; they used to scream in each other’s faces. Not now. Not for me, anyhow. Every time I’ve done a musical, I have long discussions with the director as to the intent of the song. What are we trying to prove? And if we start at this point, where should we be at the end of the song—where have we progressed? If we haven’t progressed, the song doesn’t belong in the picture. Because, unless it’s something special, such an unintegrated song will fall out, be cut, when we find out the picture’s too long. That’s generally what happens.
“The best example of songs progressing a picture is in a film I worked on that absolutely would not work without its songs: Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.1 Very quickly—the seven brothers are very despondent; they haven’t got girls. Howard Keel walks in and says, ‘You’re so depressed, why don’t we go out and get the girls?’ He sings a song called ‘Sobbin’ Women.’ By the end of the thing he’s got them so roused up that they all ride off and kidnap the women! Now, if you remove that song, the scene won’t make any sense. The song did it, made the transition for us. That, to me, is the perfect example of the integration of a song in a film.”
Jule Styne has remarked that the three authentic geniuses he’s been privileged to work with were Streisand (“Her I’ve never worked with,” says Chaplin), Frank Sinatra, and Jerome Robbins.
“Well, Frank I first met way back in the days when he was singing with Tommy Dorsey’s band. Cahn-and-Chaplin days. The interesting thing about Sinatra is that the world-famous Sinatra, personality-wise, is no different from the one we knew back in ’37, ’38. A marvelous musician, knows exactly what he wants. Also knows exactly what he wants to hear. Rehearses as little as possible. Frank’s big expression is ‘I don’t want to over-rehearse.’ But he’s always been that way. Great ear—learns music very quickly. He’ll also take suggestions—depending, certainly, on who is giving them. I’ve never had any kind of trouble with Frank. But what Frank will also do is to make up endings. He’ll say, ‘How about doing this?’ and try something on you. Very easy to work with—if you can get him to rehearse. The problem,” Chaplin sums up, “is to get him there in the first place.
“As for Jerry Robbins, I worked with him on West Side Story and I’ve always said, all my life since I’ve known him—and I go back to those days when he was doing On the Town with Betty Comden and Adolph Green; I worked on the film version—that the only person I’ve ever met that I’m positive is a genius is Jerome Robbins. If you know him, you cannot come to any other conclusion. I know Lenny Bernstein very well, I know a lot of others. They’re enormously talented, true, but Robbins is a genius. That’s it. As a genius, it makes him very difficult to work with, and if you’re willing to put with that that, fine.”
Does it then follow that the results justify the difficulties?
“The results are incredible,” Chaplin says without hesitation. “I’ve worked with Jack Cole, with Michael Kidd—marvelous choreographers. But even they admit Robbins is something else. He is something apart.”
The film version of West Side Story was a huge success, both financially and artistically, a landmark musical film. And yet it was far from an easy film to make; throughout its production a steady stream of stories concerning frictions and arguments emanated from behind the sound-stage doors.
“So many things went wrong with that picture while we were doing it, I cannot begin to tell you,” admits Chaplin now. “It was the hardest picture to make, ever. You read my list of credits. The difficulties on all of them put together wouldn’t compare with the problems we had on West Side Story. Toward the end, you know, there was only Bob Wise [the producer-director] and myself left. We had an expression, ‘We’re chipping away at it.’ We figured there was some sort of a jinx hanging over us. Rita Moreno was talking to me one day on the set, and she said, ‘I have to do the next scene out of breath; I better run around the set.’ She runs around the set, sprains her ankle, and is out for a month! Another time, we’re about to start a big dance sequence—our lead dancer comes down with mononucleosis! We’re dubbing2 the picture, we finally get a perfect take … and find that some idiot in the booth has accidentally rubbed out the entire tape! You cannot begin to believe the things we went through!”
Was there any sense, on the part of the creative people involved, that a filmic masterpiece was being fashioned?
He shakes his head and sighs, with remembered angst. “All we cared about was getting it finished. We had absolutely no idea that it was as great a picture as it was. And I must also tell you,” he adds, “that I saw it several years ago, for the first time since I’d done it originally, and I think it’s good. But there are things that I would still change! Things that we didn’t get to do right.”
There followed the mammoth success of The Sound of Music, which Robert Wise also produced and directed, again in close collaboration with Chaplin.
“Never that difficult,” says Chaplin. “It was fun to do, because Julie is fun. We took that to the same theatre in Minneapolis where we’d previewed West Side Story. When the pinion cards came in, they were insane—such ecstatic cards! So we knew we had a hit, and we were delighted. But we had no idea that it was going to become what it has become.”
The “what” Chaplin refers to is a box-office gross for The Sound of Music which has been toted up past $120,000,000 so far. “The next release date is 1974,” he says with a certain amount of awe, “when it goes back into the theatres … for more profit.”
Not bad for a musical which, from its original opening on Broadway until now, has never received what could be called “hit” notices.
After The Sound of Music, Wise and Chaplin did the film biography of the late Gertrude Lawrence, again starring Julie Andrews. Star was a box-office failure. Is there a post-mortem?
“My personal feeling is that it came out at a time when suddenly the generation gap opened up and the movie audiences no longer wanted to see this kind of musical. They wanted Easy Rider. Remember, after Sound of Music, all the musical films bombed, including the big ones—Paint Your Wagon, Hello, Dolly!, Goodbye, Mr. Chips. By the way, Star didn’t lose anywhere near the money that those others lost. As far as I’m concerned, if we gave Fox one picture that’s made as much for them as Sound of Music did and they lose maybe $12,000,000 on another, they shouldn’t really complain, should they?
“Another thing, I think,” he muses, “is that audiences did not want to see Julie in this sort of role. They simply did not want her playing a real person.”
In other words, the public prefers the lady as their private image of Mary Poppins?
“And as Maria, the ex-nun. Not as Gertude Lawrence—and they told us so in no uncertain terms, when they stayed away from Star.”
So where does the film musical go from this point? Does Chaplin consider that the musical era has faded out?
“Not by a long shot,” he says. “But nobody ever again in our lifetime is going to spend $20,000,000 to do a musical. There’s no necessity for it, anyway; for proof of that look at Fiddler on the Roof and Cabaret.
“Hey, listen!” he says, “have I said anything that makes sense?”
If there is an award for understatement, Saul Chaplin has just collected it, along with all the other kudos he’s received, since his arrival in Hollywood in the days when the only way he and Sammy Cahn could get onto the Warner lot was to sneak on with their old pal Jimmy Lunceford.
In those long-gone days the film business was full of people who made musicals. In 1972 Saul Chaplin seems to be one of the last survivors. Is he practicing a dying art?
“Oh, no!” he promises. “The audiences are there.”