A Rose Is a Columnist

Once he was a shorthand champion who used to take dictation from Bernard Baruch. Now he takes it from nobody. Billy Rose, who is about the size of a Broadway boutonniere, is a self-made showman, songwriter (Million Dollar Baby) and saloonkeeper. He is also a zealous art collector. Last week the bantam Barnum, jack of many a theatrical trade, was mastering a new one. As an offbeat Broadway columnist who pays to be published, he had received offers from two newspaper syndicates who wanted to pay him instead.

Billy Rose spends $1,500 a week for space to get his stuff printed--and rakes in a fivefold return from it at his Diamond Horseshoe nightclub. Most of his copy, which appears in one-column ads every day in the tabloid News and less frequently in other Manhattan papers, shrewdly ignores his place of business, which has a low-budget show, no stars and little to advertise but Billy Rose. His field: "miscellaneous notions on Life, Art, Reforestation and Sex among the Aborigines."

Rose, who likes to pose as a lovable little gaffer, runs plugs for some of his rival saloonkeepers' shows, admires other space-grabbers ("One of the great showmen of all time is a kindly, pickle-faced fight promoter named Mike Jacobs . . . rates with Barnum, Ziegfeld and Roxy") or endorses the free entertainment of watching Manhattan's public markets and Broadway's fancydancing billboards. He advises customers not to tip his waiters too much, warns "If you are looking for naked tootsies, the Horseshoe is not your cup of tea" (but slyly suggests that the girls are more tempting the way they're dressed). He recommends the Italian war movie Open City and ponders the perfume business ("We're both selling froufrou and sex but their advertising makes mine look like Sunday School stuff").

In one nostalgic paragraph, he lamented that "to this generation, Ziegfeld is William Powell with talcum at the temples." In a thumbnail review of Around the World, he asked Orson Welles "Isn't it about time you made up your mind whether you're Senator Pepper, D. W. Griffith, or Kupperman the Quiz Kid? . . . You've been away too long, Doubledome." In another piece he gave the back of his hand to an old pal: ". . . Gary Grant has been putting the blast on the kids who pester him for his autograph. I don't get it. When I first met him he was a Coney Island stilt-walker and his square monicker was Archie Leach. . . . When he pushes past those spangle-starved kids and boots them around in print, he's putting a match to his own meal ticket."

Last week Columnist Rose, who uses a young advertising man named Lee Rogow as a legman--but needs no ghostwriter--wondered if he was getting read. To wangle fan mail, he offered a free champagne supper for the ten best lists of the top ten "glamor-pusses of 1946." (In his own, he tucked in Wife Eleanor Holm, onetime swimming champion.) His take in four days: 7,400 letters.

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