Showman (1937)

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SHOWMAN this inexplicable hysteria, they began to catch on and joined with the waiting mob to mill round and look and listen. I thought I'd go mad myself before it was over. And, bad as that was, it was nothing to the ordeal of the twenty-five or thirty men and women who never did find their people in our audience. They waited until everybody else had left— asked again and again if we were sure everybody was out of the theater— and then turned whiter still and went out into the cold and down the street to the Iroquois. If I'd got caught in the theater, I'd have been all right. Anybody experienced in show business would have dived back-stage and down a side-aisle and gone out the stage-door at his leisure— as all the principals of "Bluebeard, Jr.," did. The members of the chorus were in a tighter box. Their dressing-rooms were under the sidewalk and they had to get out through the coal-holes in front of the theater— very curious it looked too, seeing these half-dressed chorus-girls being pulled out of the bowels of the earth. But the paying customers had rushed the same doors they came in by and crushed themselves to death in screaming panic. New Year's Eve in Chicago, just the day after, was the saddest holiday I ever spent. I went to the Hotel Wellington where there was a big celebration scheduled, with the sixteen English chorus-girls who had been featured in "Bluebeard, Jr.," booked to appear. The girls were there but nobody else was. There was no effort to put on a show or work up any gaiety. The 258