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AND NOW, HOLLYWOOD! 199
vania the incumbent quit his job. Jesse Lasky, whose act did not begin until half-past nine, thereupon “doubled” in the box office. This service brought him the acquaintance of advance agents, local managers, and theatre owners; he became interested in vaudeville as a business. By now he realized that he would never climb Parnassan heights as a cornet player. He saw an opening toward affluence — devising and managing “musical acts.” In an interior New York town he had met B. A. Rolfe, a cornettist with a thrill in every note. Some call him the greatest trumpeter in the world. Lasky sketched out an act for him, and booked it tentatively. An offer of fifty per cent, more than his salary as orchestra leader drew Rolfe to the footlights. Eventually he and Lasky formed a partnership, and sprinkled the Eastern circuits with musical acts. Lasky originated the business and sketched the rough plots for turns comic, turns serious, turns beautiful. He dressed his bijou bands in rich uniforms and labelled them the “Colonial Sextette” or the “Military Octette.” He found ways of torturing music out of stage furniture. He hammered jokes and bits of business, purchased at two dollars apiece from professional “gag men,” into knockout vaudeville acts. The vaudeville mania was rising toward its peak and he prospered astonishingly. Growing ambitious, he started with the Harris firm the “Folies Bergere,” the first cabaret in New York. This opened, in an artificially cooled theatre, during the summer of