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SHOWMAN
lars clear profit every week, rain or shine. Big money in the nineties and nothing to sneeze at in the nineteen thirties. And the best thing I could think of to do with all this money was use it to renew my frantic efforts to become a top-notch theatrical producer. However snooty the theatrical world might feel about seeing a fight manager elbowing his way into their midst, I figured I would eventually get somewhere if I could just keep on sluicing money over Broadway. When I wasn't buying up failing productions just because they inhabited Broadway theaters, I was investing in new scripts and producing them myself. In other words, I was behaving like a theatrical version of Coal Oil Johnny, making myself a financial godsend to managers with dubious productions on their hands and playing an important role in keeping the national currency circulating.
Stage-struck is probably the word, but not exactly the classic variety of the disease. After all, the theater was an old story to me. A veteran of west coast barnstorming and an eminent producer of Bowery melodramas was hardly the conventional type of amateur angel. It was kudos I wanted for my money— uptown Broadway kudos. Nobody under fifty can hope to comprehend what that meant, how the new play was literally the talk of the town in those days and the mainstay of the papers the morning after, how the actors and actresses were lionized socially. Why, Grover Cleveland's most intimate friends, coming and going
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