Artists & Artistes

A trade union, most of whose members enjoy substantial salaries and agreeable working conditions, is as much a professional fraternity as a union. Such a group is the American Guild of Musical Artists, formed last year as a result of a golfing conversation between Baritone Lawrence Tibbett and Baritone Frank Chapman, the personable, amiable husband of Contralto Gladys Swarthout (TIME, June 8, 1936). Tibbett is still president. The Guild, whose aim was frankly to protect the prestige rather than the purses of its members, signed up 400 of the elite of U. S. opera singers and concert artists, everyone from Richard Bonelli (made second vice president) to Paul Whiteman. But the Guild could not obtain a union charter, for it trespassed on the field of the Grand Opera Artists' Association of America, which had been chartered by the A. F. of L. a year before.

No mere fraternity, the G.O.A.A.A. was formed by a German-born contralto named Elizabeth Hoeppel, onetime of the Chicago opera, who among other things wanted the U. S. Government to provide more relief for jobless singers. Contralto Hoeppel's union offered little to the Tibbetts and Swarthouts of the musical world. It appealed to the modestly-paid singers of troupes like the touring San Carlo Opera and Manhattan's Hippodrome company; it signed up 280 of these, got them a closed shop and a $40-a-week minimum wage. In the Metropolitan Opera, whose best singers are also the singers of periodic opera in Chicago, San Francisco, Philadelphia, the G.O.A.A.A. made little headway whereas the Guild, soon after its organization, appeared able to do better. On such grounds the Guild demanded G.O.A.A.A.'s charter. Last week came a show-down before the Associated Actors & Artistes of America, the rejuvenated "one big union" of the U. S. entertainment field (TIME, Aug. 9).

Upon charges by the Guild that the older union had failed to unionize the opera field, the A.A.A.A. announced a hearing in the Manhattan headquarters of Actors Equity Association. Furious, aware that the skids were already greased for their union, the Grand Opera Artists' high command, led by a Hippodrome baritonfe named Giuseppe Interrante, held a mas|; meeting in Steinway Hall. Star speaker was not a worker but an employer--Al-fredo Salmaggi, explosive, long-haired manager of the Hippodrome troupe, who once weathered a G.O.A.A.A. strike--between the acts of A'ida when the company suspected it was not going to be paid promptly--and has since become one of its firmest supporters. Dramatically, he presented the controversy to the meeting as a personal matter, told his listeners that Baritone Bonelli had lately said: "No one who doesn't make $10,000 a year has a right to call himself a grand opera artist." To cries of ''Bravo!'' and "Viva Salmaggi!" the Hippodrome boss cried: "Tibbett can't sing! He's just lucky. And that goes for Bonelli too. Why, neither of them could sing in my theatre for more than $15 a night." Other G.O.A.A.A. speakers charged that the Guild was a "company union" of the Metropolitan Opera, and vowed that Grand Opera Artists would fight for its life through the courts.

But when Manager Salmaggi's Baritone Interrante, as president of G.O.A.A.A., showed up for the hearing last week, he sang a softer tune. Dropping his charges that Associated Actors & Artistes had been '"scheming" with the Guild, Baritone Interrante agreed to a face-saving compromise by which the two unions would be merged under the name of the newer and more successful one. The Guild agreed to lower its dues from $25 a year (for voting members) to a sliding scale of from $12 to $100 a year, depending on income, so that G.O.A.A.A. members could all remain in the union. Having thus accomplished exactly what it had planned to, but with a minimum of friction, it remained for the Guild, as a legally constituted labor union with a new membership of small-fry artists, to divest itself of the appearance of being a club of big names. As if aware of this. Baritone Bonelli at once announced a drive to unionize even the mighty Metropolitan. But he added: "I hope I'll never see the day when Guild members will have to go on strike."

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