The House That Shadows Built (1928)

ZUKOR BECOMES A SHOWMAN 83 terials as needed. So Adolph Zukor moved to New York, and put their establishment in Twelfth Street near Broadway on a factory basis. Morris Kohn remained behind to close up the Chicago business, and then followed. Zukor had by now two children : Eugene and Mildred. They found a comfortable flat at the corner of One Hundred and Eleventh Street and Seventh Avenue, a district which was then a German and Jewish quarter. Marcus Loew lived on the opposite corner. To Zukor, he was then merely a passing business acquaintance; Morris Kohn knew him better. Loew, who began life as a newsboy on the East Side, had drifted like Zukor into the fur trade; had branched out as a salesman. Finally he set up for himself as a broker in raw furs. His sales route took him West, where he came into competition with Morris Kohn. These lively and able rivals first met in a St. Paul hotel. ‘‘I was registering at seven o’clock in the morning,” says Kohn, “when the clerk told me that another fur salesman, named Loew, had a room. I went up at once, for I wanted a look at him. He was packing to catch a train and — at that hour in the morning — he was wearing a top hat and a fur-lined coat. He must have noticed me staring at the hat, for he winked and said, ‘ I wear ’em to impress ’em.’” Twice, on a bad turn of the fashion, Loew had gone down to the edge of bankruptcy. Now he was climbing