The Voice Of The Turkey

Broadway's Success Worshipers are among the major social hazards of our time. They all have total recall, unlimited wind and are not above grabbing you by the lapels to cut off your circulation and your escape. I've been backed against innumerable grand pianos at uncountable parties and told in great detail about the opening nights of South Pacific, Ghosts, Show Boat, and a succession of Hamlets. I know the precise second Ethel Merman belted out I've Got Rhythm for the first time, how many people yelled bravo when Walter Huston, wearing a peg leg as Peter Stuyvesant, talked his way through September Song and how many members of Actors' Equity Jose Ferrer killed with his sword in Cyrano. I've been Sothern-and-Marlowed, Barrymored, Lillian Russelled and Gertrude Lawrenced to death.

In self-defense, I've become a Turkey Worshiper. Instead of getting a glaze over my eyes when the bore bears down on me at a party, I counterattack.

"Did you happen to be in New Haven for the tryout of The Light in 1919?" I ask. "How much did they pay you to see The Ladder?" "Do you happen to know offhand the all-time record for the shortest run on Broadway?"

What started as a defense became a religion. Once you hear the siren call of the voice of the turkey, you can't be bothered with such pallid theatrical fare as the smash hit. Now if you'll just make yourself comfortable against that piano and lean your lapels forward a bit, I'll show you what I mean.

The late Oscar Hammerstein II may have become wealthy and famous for such shows as South Pacific, Oklahoma! and The King and I, but I'm sure nothing that happened to him in his career can stack up against a night in Connecticut in 1919 when his first play, The Light, opened its tryout tour. The play never got any further than that tryout date at the Shubert in New Haven. The local critic summed it up with these words, "Its christening robes may well suffice as a shroud for a deadly dull play." Taking the hint, the producer, Arthur Hammerstein (Oscar II's uncle) closed it a couple of nights later, but not before it qualified for The Turkey Hall of Fame. On opening night, midway in the second act, The Light got its first and only laugh. The heroine, played by Vivienne Osborne, faced stage front and said, "Everything seems to be falling down around me." As she delivered the line, her panties slipped and fell to the stage. Mr. Hammerstein never got a bigger laugh in his life nor had any angrier leading lady.

The King of The Flops, the longest turkey run in the history of the theatre, was a drama by J. Frank Davis called The Ladder. It opened at the Mansfield in 1926. It lost $750,000 and ran for a year and a half on Broadway, rolling up an astounding total of 789 performances. The Ladder dealt with reincarnation and its lone backer was Texas oil tycoon Edgar B. Davis (no relation to the play-wright). Mr. Davis, who was reputed to have made ten thousand dollars a day – every day – from his oil wells, was a big reincarnation buff and felt the message of the play was something every American should be exposed to, even if it took his last drop of oil. The Ladder opened to a completely unanimous set of critical pans, but, despite them, Mr.Davis kept it running throughout the 1926 season. At the end of the year the play was $200,000 in the red. On Christmas Day, the oil tycoon-producer called a press conference. His news gladdened the hearts of his cast (at least). He announced that in addition to a collection of staggering Christmas presents, he was giving them a ten-week guarantee of employment. His Christmas present to the theatre-going public was even more unusual. He announced that starting with that evening's performance no admission charge would be made for The Ladder. The theatre-going public didn't respond to Mr. Davis' generosity. There were nights when the cast outnumbered the audience, but the ten-week guarantees were renewed again and again and The Ladder ran another full year, without a penny coming into the box office, losing its producer another $500,000. The show finally closed on Broadway at the end of the 1927 season. Mr. Davis went back to Texas and his oil wells. But life, even at ten thousand dollars a day, got dull, and he headed back East in 1928 and reopened the show in Boston. The reviews were just as bad but the price was just as right. Bostonians stayed away with even more determination than the New York audiences, and in desperation (Mr. Davis felt it was only a question of time before The Ladder caught on) Davis sent agents into Scollay Square to round up and recruit playgoers. Bums were paid up to (continued on page 64)Voice of The Turkey(continued from page 61) seventy-five cents a head to come in out of the cold Boston winter and warm themselves while being exposed to the playwright's cheering message about reincarnation.

The runner-up for the honor of having the smallest box-office take of all time was a play called The Field of Ermine, which graced the Broadway season of 1934. The purists among the Turkey Worshipers contend that it deserves the championship, since The Ladder really wasn't trying. One matinee during the painfully brief run of The Field of Ermine, the box-office treasurer discovered that he had sold exactly one seat for the performance, a balcony seat at a dollar and a half. Free tickets were hastily spread around bus terminals, hotel lobbies and given away at local newsstands as a bonus to every purchaser of an evening newspaper. By curtain time that afternoon, there were exactly forty-one customers in the house, forty on the cuff and the one lone paying customer, a lady, sitting in her seat in the balcony. Before the curtain rose, the stage manager made a speech, inviting all the members of the audience to move down into the first two rows so that the actors wouldn't feel lone-some. All the freeloaders obliged. The lady with the paid-for ticket refused to move. She said she'd only paid for a balcony seat and she didn't feel it was honest for her to move downstairs into the orchestra.

The sweetest-smelling flop in history was a drama that opened at the Cort Theatre on December 8, 1945. It was called The French Touch, was directed by French cinema great Rene Clair, written by Joseph Field and Edward Chodorov and included in its cast such stalwarts as Brian Aherne, Arlene Francis and Jerome Thor. Despite this array of talent, The French Touch might have gone down in theatrical history as just another casualty and hardly worth the attention of a True Turkey Worshiper. There was, however, one added factor that lifted the play out of the run-of-the-mill failure class. It was angeled by a perfume manufacturer. He (or his press agent – or both) decided a Broadway opening night was a perfect opportunity to hustle his product as well as the drama. Gallons of his perfume were trucked in from the factory. "This will be a monumental evening in the theatre," he is said to have remarked (to his press agent or both). "Tonight a play will assault all the senses... including the sense of smell."

The playbills were perfumed and carried down the aisle by usherettes who had been given a generous supply of the stuff and told where to put it. Fifteen minutes before the first-nighters were admitted to the theatre, buckets of perfume were poured into the theatre's ventilating system. The first arrivals found the perfume-scented air a welcome change from the usual theatre smell, a compound of the deodorant in the rest rooms and the carbon monoxide of passing automobiles. It added a festive, expensive note to the occasion. At first. Until curtain time, the Smell-O-Vision-type stunt was an unqualified success. First-nighters searched through their programs for the name for the smell that they were being assaulted with.

Then the curtain rose on the first scene of the play. The perfume, trapped by the curtain in the auditorium, came billowing across the footlights in waves and hit the unsuspecting actors in the face. "We dropped like flies," one of the members of the cast told me. "By the middle of the second act, three members of the cast had vomited, all the dressing-room windows were wide open and still that perfume came rolling across the footlights at us like fog."

By the beginning of the third act, the perfume began to affect the audience. The heavy air made them drowsy and one by one the actors noticed heads nodding and falling forward. According to one self-appointed authority, by the final curtain a good third of the members of the audience were sound asleep. A last-minute attempt to save the situation by turning off the heating unit was only moderately successful. By that time the Cort Theatre had become saturated with the scent and all it really accomplished was to add the threat of pneumonia to the threat of suffocation.

The French Touch lasted a total of thirty-three sweet-smelling performances, and the last vestige of the opening-night perfume was still billowing across the footlights on closing night. Male members of the cast stopped going into the rougher bars until they again smelled like themselves. Actresses in The French Touch, even today, develop an immediate headache when they arrive at a party and discover that one of the other guests is wearing that perfume.

The unluckiest flop of them all was a play called Ragged Army which was scheduled to open on February 26, 1934, at the Selwyn Theatre. Snow began falling on the morning of the twenty-sixth and continued through the day and into the night. It developed into one of the worst blizzards in New York's history. At curtain time on that opening night, four customers (all related to members of the company) turned up wearing hip boots. Since these four had already seen the show at a dress rehearsal and not a single critic braved the weather, the opening was postponed a week. By the time the second opening night rolled around, the snow had cleared off the streets, the weather bureau forecast clear skies and the producers began to congratulate themselves on the fortunate circumstances that had given them an extra week of rehearsal to sharpen up their cast. That morning, the snow began falling. It snowed on into the afternoon and by nightfall the town was snowbound again. At curtain time, three of the four people who had braved the elements the first time showed up. The fourth had been sent to the hospital with a case of pneumonia he'd picked up going to the first opening. The theatre staff, armed with free tickets, went out into the street to recruit first-nighters. They managed to round up a gang of Sanitation Department men armed with shovels, who were on their way home after a stint of snow removal. They checked their shovels with the hat-check girl and settled themselves down in the first row.

Ragged Army opened. It was its first and only performance. It closed the next day, a flop that had been seen only by three hardy friends of the cast and a snow-removal gang, and had never been reviewed by a critic.

It must be admitted that the Thirties were fertile ground for students of flops. The failure of a play was not, then, the monumental disaster it is today, where theatrical productions have budgets ($50,000 to $75,000 for straight plays, as much as $400,000 for a musical) that in the past might have financed the army and navy of a medium-sized Balkan monarchy. The Thirties in America were the last stand of the shoestring producers, and the all-time champ in the field of putting on a play for the least amount of money must be a man named Theron Bamberger. In April of 1933 he opened a play called Man Bites Dog on the smallest shoestring in theatrical history. The entire cost of the production was $2400. His cast received what was then the Equity minimum of $25 a week. There was no rehearsal pay in 1933, so his actors didn't really cost him a dime until opening night. Bamberger found a hungry stage designer who worked for $100. He then found an old set that resembled the one his designer had in mind, and on his drawing board rebuilt it and painted it for a total outlay of $400. Two costumes were rented. As producer, he had a rent-free office at the theatre. He is reported to have used it as a hotel room. The show had no accountant and no lawyer. The play ran for seven performances and lost its entire investment. In a poll of critics at the end of the 1933 season, Man Bites Dog was consistent right to the very end. The critics rated the plays of the year (concluded on page 122) Voice Of The Turkey (continued on page 64) in order of worth. Man Bites Dog wound up in 150th place. There were 150 plays produced on Broadway that season.

Probably the only show in Broadway history that never had a closing night was a loud, raucous would-be successor to the hit Sailor Beware, which opened at the Lyceum Theatre on January 18, 1933. It was called Battleship Gertie and starred Burgess Meredith. The critics liked it and the cast settled in for a long run. After the first matinee (the day after it opened), the Sheriff arrived with a bell of particulars that charged it with being, among other things, obscene and inflammatory. He ordered the show closed and close it did: at its second performance without the usual formality of notice, bad reviews or a closing night.

To a real flop buff, the night of nights was December 25, 1933, when a play titled No Mother to Guide Her opened at a theatre on West 48th Street for the shortest run in Broadway history. In terms of caste among the Turkey Worshipers, being one of the handful of people in the audience that night was a little like being a sport fan who saw Babe Ruth hit that sixtieth home run in 1927 or helped Jack Dempsey back into the ring when Luis Firpo knocked him into the laps of the ringsiders.

No Mother to Guide Her was billed as "an old-fashioned melodrama – hiss the villain, beer and pretzels and false mustaches distributed to the audience." It had one rather important distinction that no other beer-and-sawdust drayma, before or since, could claim. It was acted by a cast of midgets. The producer, Lester Al Smith, carried the wall-to-wall midget motif out throughout the theatre. The usherettes were midgets. A tiny bar in the basement of the theatre was presided over by a thirty-four-inch bartender who dispensed tiny hot dogs and small bottles of beer. The management of the President Theatre (now part of Leone's restaurant) turned a deaf ear to the producer's plea to change the name of his playhouse to The Midget Theatre. He agreed, after a lengthy argument, to make the change on the night the play celebrated its hundredth performance. Having seen a dress rehearsal, he wasn't worried about putting up a new marquee. One of the backers (he had a ten-percent interest in the play, the touring company rights and the movie rights, for a three-hundred-dollar investment) was Harry Golden, at the time the desk clerk in the Forest Hotel across the street from the theatre. Golden gave free opening-night tickets to hotel residents who paid their bill on time, and when he complained to the producer that of the seventy-six first-nighters, more than forty of them were in on passes he'd issued, he was told that word of mouth and rave reviews would fill the house to capacity for subsequent performances.

The thirty-six paying customers got more than their money's worth. In addition to the drama, they were treated, between acts, to feats of daring by wire-walkers (midgets), and sang songs projected on lantern slides led by a midget torch singer. A small orchestra in the pit (midgets) alternated Hearts and Flowers and Humoresque throughout the melodrama.

During the course of the third act, one of the male members of the cast objected to being upstaged by the tiny leading lady. He hauled off and kicked her in the ankle. This led to a general riot among the pint-sized actors that ended with all of them leaving the stage, putting on their hats and coats and walking out of the theatre. No Mother to Guide Her at that moment won an enduring place for itself in the record books: Broadway's shortest run, three fourths of a performance.