The House That Shadows Built (1928)

no THE HOUSE THAT SHADOWS BUILT seem, there rewoke in him a quality which he had shown in his youth, but which seems to have lain dormant during his early struggles with business — his faculty for thinking ahead. To that turn of mind — ^which became in later years a habit — many of his old associates attribute his later phenomenal success. The rest envisaged only to-morrow; Zukor’s imagination was constantly analyzing and synthesizing a situation two or three years in the future. He had named that little revamped store at 46 Union Square, South, the Comedy Theatre. There he settled himself in a cubby-hole over the auditorium and swung into another spasm of hard, concentrated work. Now that Zukor had buckled down, Brady paid little attention to this trifling side enterprise. Not once a month did he think to inquire how or what it was doing. Zukor, however, had all his eggs in the one basket. He was trying to squeeze every nickel he could out of the Comedy, whose tinny piano clanged day and night below him, and out of three smaller and more perplexing houses in Newark, Boston, and Pittsburgh. The Comedy, what with permanent seats and a passable stage, gave a reasonably good imitation of a regular theatre. The others still looked what they were — vacant stores in which the revampers had thrown up stages that seemed made of cardboard. The audiences sat on kitchen chairs, on benches, on the second-hand leavings of undertakers’ parlours.