Eleanor's Show

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Arithmetic is as much a concern to the 60 professional showmen who have cast their pitch in the New York World's Fair amusement area as it is to the amateur showmen who are struggling with the Big Show itself. At the last audit, fortnight ago, the amusement section had divided a take from Fair visitors of a shade over $3,000,000, and it was not enough.

If Fair attendance picks up, a few of the showmen may yet make out, but already two major enterprises have folded, the $300,000 Cuban Village and the Savoy blackface show. Broadway's shop talk, an amalgam of arithmetic and intuition, last week held: 1) that unless Fair attendance looks up, the amusement area as a whole may lose $5,000,000 before closing; 2) that any profits worth talking about so far had been rung up by three concessionaires: Frank Buck's monkey mountain, Jungleland; Life Saver's Parachute Jump; Billy Rose's Aquacade. Housed in the Marine Amphitheatre in the New York State Building, at the gateway to the amusement section and smack across the Fair from the Trylon & Perisphere Theme Centre, the Aquacade and its huge electric sign last week flashed out one of the most amazing success stories in the anthology of show business.

One fact puts the Aquacade in a class by itself among the concessions: Mr. Rose's show had welcomed 2,500,000 customers by last week. At this rate (one out of every six paid admissions to the Fair), it can expect at least 4,000,000 customers by October 30. At Aquacade rates (40-c- to 99-c-; average about 50-c-) that meant a gross to date of something over $1,500,000 (plus an additional $15,000 a week for plugging some 14 products, from Pepsi-Cola to opera glasses). Billy Rose has an equally remarkable way with costs --about $30,000 a week at the Aquacade--and Billy says he is clearing from the Aquacade after expenses as much as $80,000 a week. Although the Fair takes a cut ranging from 8% to 25% of gross receipts from amusement concessions, under Rose's contract his payments did not begin until he had recouped $160,000 he spent to roof the Marine Amphitheatre and build a swimming pool (his total Aquacade investment: $375,000).

Billy Rose likes to call the spectacle that is making him another million "Eleanor's show." It is an ambitious amphibian affair that has plenty of the three things Showman Rose says he most admires: Sex, Sentiment, and Curiosity. An enlargement of the Aquacade Rose put on at Cleveland's Great Lakes Exposition in 1937 (he said then "I'll use Lake Erie for a stage and Canada for a backdrop"), it is not an old-fashioned water show but a slick, streamlined revue put on with professional pace. Before a huge outdoor auditorium that resembles a big-league baseball grandstand, stretches a swimming pool 300 feet long, with a stage behind. In the water Johnny Weissmuller and many of a cast of 350 (500 for advertising purposes) swim and perform water ballets that are poetry and water slapstick that is poetry too. On the stage perform Frances Williams and Morton Downey, endless choruses of girls and boys and four superbly shiftless Aquabuilders, who at each show construct a privy. Olympic champions dive; a fat man falls off a diving board; Channel Swimmer Gertrude Ederle, dumpy and deaf, still raises a nostalgic cheer from the crowd. The Aquacade has also Eleanor Holm.

Water Girl. Billy Rose appeared before the Aquacade audience only once (on the chilly opening night in a topcoat to calm a restless audience), but he and Backstroker Eleanor Holm (nominally only one of the Aquacade's four headline attractions) are the show's real stars. They are its personalities and give it most of its marquee strength. The fact that Billy Rose is going to marry Eleanor Holm as soon as his divorce decree from Actress Fanny Brice becomes final in October does not do their publicity any harm.

Eleanor Holm, born in Brooklyn on Dec. 6, 1913, the daughter of a captain in the New York Fire Department, had luck early in life. Because Olympia Pool, summer meeting place of the Women's Swimming Association of New York, happened to be near her parents' summer cottage, she had expert swimming instruction as soon as she had made her start on water wings. Her unequalled backstroke was developed by a coach who found her backstroke the weakest in her free-style repertory and set her to practicing it exclusively. It was her best stroke when she won her first important championship--national 300-yard medley --in 1927.

By the time Eleanor Holm had won her first Olympic championship, in 1932 (she placed fifth in 1928), she was beginning to attract attention on land. That year Warner Bros, put her under contract at $500 a week, although she declined to surrender her amateur status by swimming before the camera. She spent her year surveying Hollywood's high life, met Husband Jarrett, and was groomed for a movie career. Her coach was Josephine Dillon, Clark Gable's first wife. Whenever Eleanor tired of grimacing into a mirror or exercising her voice, she could always end the lesson by asking Mrs. Dillon about Mr. Gable. When her option came up at the end of a year, Warner's somewhat surprisingly renewed it for $750 a week. But by that time Eleanor knew she had more chance of fame as swimmer than actress. When the studio came to the same conclusion and tried to make her swim, she got them to buy up her contract and let her go.

When the 1936 Olympics came round, Swimmer Holm was doing pretty well as a night-club singer, with her husband's and other bands. She started her celebrated trip on the S. S. Manhattan on the wrong foot with the U. S. Olympic Committee by trying, unsuccessfully, to pay her own way first class. She spent her time in first class anyway, with newspapermen, taking literally the Committee's instructions to keep the kind of training to which she was accustomed. So the Committee's sober Chairman Avery Brundage threatened to kick her off the team. Her newspaper friends, who had been finding the voyage dull, set the radio crackling. By the time the Manhattan docked and Mr. Brundage had made good his threat, factions in the athletic world were divided in partisan schisms. Eleanor was thoroughly sore and dejected. In her suitcase she had a $1,000-a-week theatre contract contingent on her winning another championship. Then she got off the boat to find herself besieged with theatre offers, among them one from Loew's State promising $3,500 a week.

After this unexpected turning point in her life, Swimmer Holm turned professional, did a Tarzan movie with Olympic Decathlon Champion Glenn Morris (which proved that she might have listened more attentively to Mrs. Dillon), made more money than she had ever seen before. She met Billy Rose at the 1937 Cleveland Aquacade, where her curvesome capers pleased him as well as the customers.

Pretty, convivial and companionable, Eleanor Holm always has a very good time. Between shows at the Aquacade, she plays bridge with other members of the cast for stakes that do not jeopardize her pay check (reputedly $2,000 a week), has knitted eleven sweaters for her friends since the show opened. She thinks that after her marriage she will retire. She thinks that Billy Rose is "the most fascinating man I ever met." He probably is.

Mighty Midget. Billy Rose Exposition Spectacles, Inc., which leases the Marine Amphitheatre from New York State and the Fair Corp., has no one on its payroll quite so spectacular as Billy Rose. His pressagent, Dick Maney, has dubbed him The Mighty Midget, The Mad Mahout, etc! A competitor once remarked that Rose's definition of a "myriad" was 18 girls, but that is only one of his accomplishments since he was born Rosenberg in Manhattan, 40 years ago.

As a student at The Bronx Public School 44, he made the track team by learning to jump the gun without detection. After he won a shorthand championship with a broken finger by ingeniously sticking his pen through a potato, he became a demonstrator for the Gregg shorthand system. His specialty was taking notes with both hands from a phonograph chattering 350 words a minute. This inhuman proficiency took him to Washington, aged 18, as organizer of the stenographic force for Bernard Baruch's War Industries Board, where he had occasion to record the thoughts of such dignitaries as J. P. Morgan and the late Judge Elbert H. Gary.

High-paid stenography satisfied Rose until he met a songwriter who bragged of making $50,000 a year. By patiently reading most of the songs published in the U. S. in the 20th Century, and discovering the frequency in hits of certain phonetic combinations (notably the double-o he used in Barney Google), Rose drilled himself into a top-flight songwriter, in his best year made $60,000. But by that time he had met and married Comedienne Fanny Brice, whose six-figure income made him feel inadequate again. Just as Depression was about to strike, Rose launched himself as a producer.

Although Crazy Quilt made Rose some money on a cut-rate road tour in 1931, Broadway paid him little heed until he cashed in after Repeal on the Casino de Paree, first of a succession of inexpensive night-club-vaudeville houses which caught on with moderate spenders. (His latest project of this kind, the Diamond Horseshoe, netted Rose $76,000 in its first ten weeks this spring.) In 1935 Rose tried the theatre again with Jumbo, a vast indoor circus which, Rose said, "will either make me or break Jock Whitney" (who helped back it). It did neither, but it got Rose an invitation the next year to help Fort Worth spite Dallas in their rival celebrations of the centenary of Texan independence. That in turn got him his chance at Cleveland.

Fort Worth and Cleveland gave Rose a reputation as an exposition mortgage-lifter, but to many of the civic patriots who conceived New York's Fair, a Rose girl show had no place in their vision of the World of Tomorrow. How Rose thawed their attitude so thoroughly that he eventually got the Fair's choicest ready-built concession for a figure 10% under that of the highest bidder, is a Broadway legend. The favorite version is that it happened when Grover Whalen went one night to Rose's Casa Mariana, saw himself roundly saluted in a World-of-Tomorrow skit.

Billy Rose still dresses badly and lives in a fast-talking, frenzied ferment from the time his day begins in his $350-a-month apartment in Tudor City. One of the shrewdest economists in the entertainment world, he hires a C. P. A. who relentlessly watches Rose and every one of his lieutenants.

At the moment, Billy Rose thinks he would like to keep up his progress toward bigger and better things by doing an Aircade, with airplanes in the sky instead of swimmers in the water. But Pressagent Maney says, reflectively blinking his eyes: "The boss and I figure that maybe we can go on a national tour, with a small Balkan War."

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