“Roy Howard, poh!” scoffed Mr. McCrory, holding an index finger on a knot in the string, “and Bill Leeds, poh, poh! And also an additional poh for Bill Corum! These masterpieces of the needleworker's art are not for such mousy-modest, retiring, timid, and inhibited Brooks Brothers patrons as they. These are for a man who knows a fine shirt when he sees one, a true connoisseur, a man who likes to play games on the pattern of a single cuff: Mr. Winston Churchill!”
And indeed they were, too. For Winston Churchill is as strong-minded about his attire as he is about his cigars and brandy and soda, and through the dark days of the war Mad McCrory contrived to keep his courage up with regular consignments, shipped to England through very official channels indeed, of shirtings which showed, quite literally, that the star of empire still blazed, and blindingly, over the destinies of England. Neither Prince Christopher of Greece nor John Drew Devereaux, who are among McCrory's less inhibited shirt customers, is possessed of such a taste in fine raiment as the former British Prime Minister, and no London gentleman's furnisher was ever able to satisfy his hanker for tumultuous cowboy patterns. In fact, the best shirtmaker in Burlington Arcade is reported to have refused flatly to cut the materials Mr. Churchill selected, on the grounds that the Commonwealth was already none too secure and it would be better for everybody if the Prime Minister stuck to plain white starched shirts. Mr. McCrory doesn't think of himself as a man of destiny, but he isn't above remarking that England pulled through with his shirts at No. 10 Downing Street, and that there's no telling what would have happened had Mr. Churchill been a more timid fellow.
A youth of this department's acquaintance, recently out of the Navy under what that august organization would like to consider something of a cloud, approached a prospective employer and laid before him unimpeachable qualifications for a tolerably well-compensated job. As a last afterthought of inquiry, his by then near-boss asked about his discharge from the armed forces: honorable, of course? The youth blushed and admitted that quite the reverse was the case, that his discharge was strictly dishonorable. In a moment of complete frustration and revolt he had thrown a Royal typewriter in the face of his immediate superior, a commander, ruining both classifications of government property: writing machine and officer.
The prospective employer required documentary evidence to this effect and upon its being produced, hired the young man instanter. “My office manager is a former commander,” he muttered in a bemused manner, and then added a last qualification: “I suppose you can work just as well with an Underwood?”
The annual and inevitable uproar in the theater, which usually takes the form of screams of outrage and protest on the part of play authors and/or play producers against the rascally critics of the daily press, this season proved as abundantly entertaining as ever, perhaps a little more so because the screeches of pain and indignation were emitted in particularly piercing tones by the producers of a play by Maxwell Anderson, a dramatic architect of considerable standing and with a vast capacity for violent and noisy protest about things. Almost everyone concerned with these regular outbursts of temper in which the critics are, somewhat repetitively, denounced as tools of the reactionary press, is aware of the preposterous aspects of a situation in which the competitor in a game will abide by the rules only if the judge's every decision is in his favor. Mr. Anderson and his backers would have been entirely content to accept the opinion of the Messrs. Barnes, Nichols, and Chapman, the town's ranking drama reporters, had their opinion been that Mr. Anderson was the greatest living playwright and that his nonesuch, called in this case, Truckline Café, was the hottest stuff since Sophocles tossed Antigone to the Athenian first-nighters.
When, by the unanimous consensus of all the town's reviewers, a manifestation in itself as rare as, say, modesty in an actor, Truckline Café was reported to be a little stinker of museum-piece proportions, the Playwrights Company, which had produced the wretched thing, pouted and dug its toe into the gravel and said everyone was a hateful old meanie and didn't play fair. Had the reviews hailed the play as even passably plausible, its producers would have taken the same newspaper space to quote the highlights from the notices, as in fact it did to whimper that nobody understood the drama.
For the rest of the dramatic record of the current installment, the most agreeable entertainment in recent weeks, even though it is by no means uniform in its humors, is Nancy Hamilton's revue, Three to Make Ready, which has come to the Adelphi Theater as the inevitable successor, over the years, of One For the Money and Two For the Show. Under the supervision of John Murray Anderson, a technician who has never yet mounted a mediocre show, Three to Make Ready is handsome and gay if something less than urbane. It may be age or it may be merely the long and distressing familiarity of the theme, but there is something about comedy scenes dealing with plumbing fixtures which begins to leave the New York theatergoer cold. There simply is nothing either sophisticated or charming about the conveniences of modern sanitation and there hasn't been since Frank Morgan tried to make them fascinating in The Band Wagon. Why do otherwise adult persons still insist on monkeying around with the flush toilet as the supposed source of inextinguishable laughter?
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