Muggs' Birthday

In its rickety, five-story house on Manhattan's West 46th Street, well within earshot of Broadway's clatter and chatter, Variety last week passed its 40th birthday. To celebrate it, pink-cheeked, bow-tied Editor Abel Green, 44, and his staff went to press with a bulging, green-covered, 324-page anniversary number that was five-sixths advertising.

The day it came out, Editor Green herded his staffers (Variety calls them "muggs") upstairs into a dusty, top-floor parlor. He was going away for 'a couple of months, he said, and short, swart, 210-pound Nat Kahn, eight years a mugg, would be boss. Out in Hollywood, Green will help Warner Bros, erect it's long-planned monument to the man who made slangy Variety the "showbiz" oracle it is: Founder Sime ("Mr. Broadway") Silverman.

Acid Upstart. Sime Silverman was fired from the old New York Morning Telegraph for panning a theatrical act that had bought an ad. He borrowed $1,500 from his father-in-law to push into the clamorous crowd of stage-door journalism. His maiden editorial in 1905 carried an acid promise: to print the news "without regard to whose name is mentioned, or the advertising columns."

In the first starveling years, while Silverman feuded with the powerful theatrical houses of Shubert and Albee, actors shied away from his columns (if they bought space, they might get fired). But in dingy dressing rooms and rocking tourist sleepers, Variety became the hometown paper of every vaudevillager whose slanguage it spoke. Sime Silverman kept it a jump ahead of the sheriff and ahead of the times, managed to shift its accent to the movies long before vaudeville died.

He and his muggs, legmen and copy-deskers alike, soon made Variety the richest word-coining mint of the century, to the bafflement of laymen and the delight of language fans like H. L. Mencken and G. B. Shaw. Some of its headlines (such as its 1929 crash flash, WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG, and its STIX Nix Hix Fix, when bucolic cinemas' flopped in the hinterland) have attained a kind of backstage immortality. So have flopperoo, push over, palooka, scram, to click; and such trade phrases as "boff" (a variation of sock or punch) for smash hit, "preem," as a verb meaning to stage a premiere.

Mugg-Maker. From his desk overlooking the street, on a dais where a coutouriere's models once paraded. Silverman fed items to fledgling Gossip Walter Winchell, made knowing muggs out of Jack Lait (now editor of Hearst's New York Mirror) and Columnist Louis Sobol, bought pieces from Quentin Reynolds, Funnymen Fred Allen, Joe Laurie Jr., Milton Berle. As show business became big business and Variety grew, he covered radio and the "niteries," added a Hollywood daily edition and bureaus in London and Paris, picked up scores of stringers in the U.S. and abroad.

In the parlor upstairs, Sime's thirsty intimates could get a drink or close a big deal in Volstead days. Today, beside its faded sofa, ancient radio with morning-glory horn, and murals of Charlestoning showgirls, stands a television set. Over the entrance is a neon sign (reading Chateau de L'ayem), a gift to Sime from Protege Jimmy Durante.

Goofy? Hep. One day in 1933 Silverman called Abel Green up to the dais, told him: "Abel, you sit here." That made Green editor. Silverman died that year, left the business to son Sid, now an ailing absentee.

Editor Green broke in on Variety as an 18-year-old collegian. Today, like all the muggs, he lives partly in a nostalgic past, haunted by Silverman's wise-guy gentleness, his scoops, his Hispano-Suizas. Variety labors to be in the know about the future of television and 16-mm.-film theaters, so that if radio or the movies go the way of vaudeville, it will still be the journalistic handmaiden of entertainment.

Like most experts, Variety's muggs find it difficult to explain themselves. (A mugg, reviewing a picture, must report whether 1) it will sell; 2) it is worth seeing--with the accent on the former.) Sime tried to define the requirements 15 years ago: "To be a mugg you've got to fit. ... A mugg can be practical and idealistic at the same time. Maybe you got to be a little bit goofy to be that way. . . ."

Abel Green puts it more curtly, and with a considerable amount of accuracy: "Our muggs are hep."

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