Life and travel on the cars have for many years preoccupied the imagination of this department, both as a way of going and as editorial copy, and it takes but the least provocation to set us off on trains and railroads, the people who ride and maintain them, and the individual character which each of the several hundred railroads of the land comes to assume in the minds of thoughtful as well as imaginative persons.
The occasion offered itself the other day for us to embark on a trip on the venerable Baltimore and Ohio, an urbane and mannered railroad which, over the decades, has contrived to attract to itself a considerable body of sentiment and personal good will. Indeed, should the B & O ever find itself in need of a catch phrase or slogan for advertising purposes, it could do worse than to refer to itself as “The Gentleman's Railroad.” Travel on its various trains has about it a good deal of the quality of a well-upholstered but by no means gaudily maintained gentleman's club; and good manners and hospitality, often mentioned and infrequently practiced or encountered on its closest rival road, are practically universal on the B & O. This department knows a fairly numerous company of travelers who go to some inconvenience to ride the B & O out of New York as a gesture at once positive and negative. They like the B & O and they heartily dislike the entire character of its closest competitor on the runs to Washington, Cincinnati, Saint Louis, and Chicago.
For one thing, the diners on the B & O are so superior to those of any other railroad in the East as to warrant no comparison. The menus are long and various and notably lacking in the types of entrees with which other stewards' departments like to affront the taste of travelers. There are always plenty of steaks and chops and good cuts of beef on a B & O diner with wonderful hot breads and rich desserts to match. Lunch or dinner there, while rolling through the mellow countryside of Maryland or Pennsylvania, is an event, not an expedient.
Then, too, experienced voyagers know that it is usually easier to get aboard a B & O train. The quality of urgency and hustle is lacking from its schedules, and the brash and hurried commercial trade goes elsewhere, leaving the B & O's facilities to the knowing and perceptive travelers, who are also, happily, less numerous. When they want to ride the cars in comfort, voyagers within its territory take the B & O as a matter of course. After all, what other railroad in the fifth decade of the preposterous twentieth century maintains rocking chairs in its depots?
There is talk now and then, and all of it frightening, of decentralizing the motion picture industry and transplanting it either partially or in its entirety to the east coast of the United States, presumably somewhere near New York. However admirable the notion may be so far as Hollywood is concerned, the idea is a nightmare to New Yorkers, and Manhattan authorities had better take urgent steps in the matter unless they are reconciled to seeing life on a constant and everyday basis conducted as it even now is revised several times a year when film prestige needs the benefit of civilization and when what is known as a “premeer” subjects Gotham to the mannerless capers and absurd posturings of film folk and their rented admirers.
In a community whose foundations rest on nutbergers, drive-in cat's-meat shops, women in trousers, men without neckties, and crowds of foetid urchins caterwauling and swooning in the streets, and paid instead of publicly flogged for doing it, the simian manners of film stars aren't so noticeable. Public tumults engendered by the bodyguards of psychopathic night-club singers and the ad-mixture of slugging, bleating, and hysterics that pass for social intercourse are regarded as good promotion and stylish publicity, but New York hasn't yet become entirely reconciled to this sort of caper. The crowds attracted by the first nights of legitimate theaters are already quite offensive enough without having film press agents cruising the reformatories and urging delinquent and idiot juveniles to run amuck in the streets to honor their employers when they venture east to see themselves drooling, mugging, and clowning on the screen in first nights of films that were better never fabricated or uttered.
The comedy and nuisance of what pass for movie celebrities away from their native zoo have assumed such proportions that the Waldorf, whenever one of these pests puts up there, has to recruit a special regiment of house police simply to cope with the creeps and cretins whom press agents hire to follow their principals and make street scenes. Sherman Billingsley and other night-club proprietors, at their wit's end to protect their regular and more mannered customers from the pushing and pretentious entrances of boors from Bel Air, have to reorganize the entire conduct of their premises and make arrangements tactfully to segregate the actors from the legitimate patrons. Anything that can be done to enforce an immigration quota on film personalities seeking admission to Manhattan on a group basis is no more than is demanded by the communal peace.
For all that Manhattan may be guilty of a thousand and one evidences of ava-rice and chiseling, greed, graft, gyp, rookery, and blackjacking, travel in the nation convinces the voyager in suburban parts that there is one form of small-time cheating which isn't practiced so much in New York as it is west of the Hudson where it is universal, and that is in the field of bar drinks. The greatest licking the American sucker public is taking today isn't in the field of side money for rents or under-the-counter prices for cars or any of the other swindles to which, being a member of the most gullible citizenry of all time, he submits with no visible sign of outrage. It is in the payment of fantastic prices for drinks in the provinces which no New York barkeeper in a responsible resort would dare set before a customer.
Cocktails, for example, in honest New York bars frequented by people of reasonable discrimination—the Plaza, the St. Regis, Bleeck's, Whyte's, and a number of others—are served in three- or three-and-a-half-ounce glasses, and are filled with two and a half ounces of liquor, often enough three. In tearooms and standup bars alike in Chicago, Los Angeles, even, may heaven forgive its mention, in San Francisco, saloon proprietors barefacedly serve their so-called cocktails in ounce-and-a-half glasses in which there is often less than an ounce of watered liquor. This, mark you, is in large cities accustomed to the uses of urbanity. In small towns and country resorts this department has seen Martinis served over a large olive in a liqueur glass, so that there was by no conceivable possibility more than a tablespoon of diluted liquor in the glass, and the suckers pay sixty and seventy-five cents for this portion of nothing. The humorous aspect of this deal, in which the bar profit may conceivably run as high as 1,000 per cent on a two-dollar bottle of gin, is that the belles poires who put up with such nonsense are the very people who, in the hospitality of their own homes, excuse themselves if they pour less than six ounces of bourbon in a highball, and strain to make a fifth of gin provide a round of Martinis for four people!
The absolute legal minimum of liquor available in a cocktail anywhere should be three ounces, which, at current prices, would reduce the bar profit to a mere 400 or 500 per cent on every drink, and the hotel which can advertise that it hasn't a one-ounce jigger on the premises should get a civic award. There is no transaction in the world where the buyer should so much beware as when buying a drink over a bar, but the great American public, a sucker to its last dime and terrified to protest even when its pockets are being picked by unmasked criminals, puts up with the service of cocktails at six bits apiece, 50 per cent of which are as stimulating as so much tap water. There may be a good deal to be said, when all the returns are in, for the Texas or bottle-state civilization where the fool is protected from the ounce-and-a-half cocktail glass the way he is from morphine or blasting gelatin, by law, and where the least drink one can purchase is the reasonable or economy-size sixteen-ounce container.
Whatever other generalities may be derived from the evidence available at this writing as to the nature and quality of the current Broadway theater season, one circumstance permits of no debate at all. It is that the American legitimate stage is entirely and unequivocally in the hands of the English. Last year the two triumphant productions of the season were English plays acted by predominantly English casts, The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Windermere's Fan. This year, so far at least, the single really triumphant offering has been English, played by an English cast: Maurice Evans' enchanting revival of Man and Superman at the Alvin. Its runner-up, The Heiress, which is an adaptation of Henry James's Washington Square, has for its principal performer an Englishman in the person of Basil Rathbone and for its author an expatriate American Anglophile who was more British in manner, person, and thinking than any beefeater you could imagine on duty at the Tower of London.
Whatever cumulative disasters may be encircling the British Commonwealth, deliberately pillaged and bankrupted by its “common man” government, the English theater still dominates the American stage and contrives this dominance with a charm, assurance, and grand manner that are irresistible.
According to the archivists, this is the first production of Man and Superman to have been staged on Broadway since 1912, and in reviving the manners, costumes, and other properties of that age, Mr. Evans very astutely played upon the sentiment of wistful nostalgia which is almost universal today and which is sure-fire theater, as can be attested by a long variety of successes ranging from I Remember Mama to High Button Shoes. It is entirely probable that the last years of English tranquility, which flowered so luxuriously and gracefully for a decade previous to the fateful date of 1914, may eventually find themselves one of the superlatively romantic and glamorous periods of the modern legend, with their American counterpart in San Francisco just before the fire of 1906 or Leadville and Denver in Haw Tabor times. They offer the same background of opulent period design, of individual characteristics, and brave gestures with doom, of a sort, in the now-known offing.
Mr. Evans has missed no single trick in recreating the London society of 1912 while cleaving to the strictest of Shavian intentions, and if some of the colloquies about money, Americans, and standards of sexual morality are so dated as to be practically sentimental souvenirs, there is nothing in the theater today which so fetches the cash customers as a Prince Albert coat or early Daimler motorcar with its occupants armed cap-a-pie against the elements in goggles, veils, and gauntlet gloves.
In much the same direction of effort, though, of course, in a widely separated field of endeavor, is the abovementioned High Button Shoes, a musical comedy with a book by the magnificent Stephen Longstreet, a notable in the list of GOURMET contributors, which is paying off at the Century Theater to audiences no less enthusiastic, in their fashion, that those of Man and Superman. High Button Shoes is strictly a period-design musical which relies for its bounce and uproar on such fairly assured devices as a Mack Sennett ballet and a Rutgers-Princeton football game in the era of Gloria Swanson and the original raccoon overcoat with the fur outside. GOURMET readers, familiar with Mr. Longstreet's wonderful whimsies and grand manner of yesterday, will recognize a wealth of his devices and allusions and, if they are in what even passes for their right minds, be enchanted with them.
The morning after the opening of High Button Shoes, this department encountered, handily encamped in the men's bar of the Plaza, which is something less than a seltzer squirt from the Century, a brace of important Wells Fargo Bank executives on safari from San Francisco. They had managed to extend their hotel accommodations, canceled their train space to Washington that afternoon, and indefinitely postponed all thought of returning to the valiant precincts of Market Street. For why? They were going that afternoon to the matinee of High Button Shoes, and to the evening performance and to the evening show the evening after that. They had seen it opening night and were not prepared to leave Manhattan until High Button Shoes went on the road, when they purposed to go with it. It seems, at the writing, as though this might be a long, but far from lonely, vigil.
The disappointment of the season, to date, has been a widely heralded and critically touted dreariness produced by the Guild under the title Allegro. So determined had been the Guild's advance promotion by word of mouth and other devices that a deplorable number of Manhattan's first-string reviewers were persuaded to lend their applause to a Rodgers-Hammerstein bore so far removed from, say, Oklahoma! as not to be recognizable as the product of the same team. The tiresome thing concerns itself with the biography of a smalltown doctor's son executed in Greek choral stances and stylized progressions with the usual ballet by Miss de Mille, a thing in itself excellent, but a manifestation which is coming to be standardized and on tap everywhere. As for the story of Allegro, who now cares?