is nothing in Gest’s career to indicate that he would ever contribute anything to the theater’s best interest. He is the son-in-law of David Belasco.
Then there is Sam Harris, long the junior partner of the firm of Cohan & Harris, who began his career in the arts by managing Dixon, the colored champion featherweight pugilist, and the redoubtable Terry McGovern, champion lightweight prize fighter. With tastes formed at the ringside, he launched into theatrical ventures, allying himself with Al Woods. He catered to the lower classes and made a fortune by producing atrocious melodramas in second and third class houses.
And yet this is the Sam Harris who commands the patronage of hundreds of thousands, yes, millions of theatergoers, some of whom go on innocently believing that when they invade the theater they also enter, by some mystical process, “the realms of art.”
Al H. Woods has but one good eye. It is not this personal loss that matters, but the history of the misfortune which goes back to the time when Al was a member of an East side gang. The common report was that he used to play the piano in a downtown place, east of Fifth Avenue. Mr. Woods is also a distinguished patron of dramatic art—he presented “The Girl from Rector’s” and “The Girl in the Taxi,” two of the most immoral and pointless shows of recent years. Several times he has secured the rights to certain Viennese operas, which were bad enough in themselves from a moral point of view, but which were at least constructed with true artistry; but even these he marred by an inept infusion of vulgarity and blague.
The public, of course, does not see and does not know these gods before whom they pour their millions yearly, nor does the public know from what source theatric vileness comes. It is amusing to listen to the fledgling philosophers discuss the “tendencies of the stage,” or expatiate learnedly on the “divine right of Art” to be as flippant and as filthy as it pleases, when all the time the “tendency” is started and the “art” is determined by men whose antecedents would make Art scream!
The American Theater is a small group of Jewish promoters and a large group of Gentile gullibles, and
