The Busy Heart

Pulitzer Prizewinner Van Wyck Brooks (The Flowering of New England) got a license at 61 to marry Gladys Rice Billings, 60, remote in-law of Massachusetts Senator Leverett. Saltonstall, Songwriter, Milton Drake (Mairzy Doats) was sued for a separation by his lamzy divey, Betty. Dorothy Parker, 53, most-quoted lady with the '30s, was sued for divorce by Fellow Writer Alan Campbell, who complained that they had become strangers. And Mickey Rooney, 24, was sued for separate maintenance by wife Betty Jane (Miss Birmingham 1944), who said she was dissatisfied with her $10,000-a-year settlement after learning that Mickey's salary was $250,000.

The Restless Foot

Umberto II of Italy was the latest jobless monarch to eye the U.S. as a tourist. He had a lot of friends there, said he, and it was just a matter of packing.

Sweden's King Gustaf, 88, home from ten weeks of embroidery (instead of tennis, by doctor's order) on the French Riviera, was looking sharp as a needle.

The Queen Mother Nazli of Egypt, Princess Fathia, and sister Princess Faika, visiting in Manhattan, ventured out to a Broadway show. Fathia lost a breastpin of 36 diamonds and 25 sapphires. Next day she got it back; the usherette who found it got $100.

Rita Hayworth dropped in on the sunny south of France after a little Paris shopping. Ready for any emergency, she had bought, among other items: 17 evening dresses, 20 bottles of perfume, a case of champagne, a monkey, a collected works of Existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre.

What Makes Billy Run?

(See Cover]

Around a corner in The Bronx scuttled a wild-eyed runt. The kid's tiny round head was ducked between high, skinny shoulders, his nose was bleeding, and he sobbed as he ran. After him pounded three bigger boys. One by one they gave up the chase; the runt ran too fast. He ran until he was out of sight. He is running still.

In his 47 years, Billy Rose has sprinted breathlessly (sometimes sidestepping, and down dark alleys) from grinding poverty to easeful wealth, from chalk on the sidewalk to a Rembrandt in his parlor, from a cold-water tenement to elegant $100,000 diggings on Manhattan's Beekman Place.

He ran first from a career as a speed-champion stenographer to a career as one of the most successful songwriters in Tin Pan Alley history. He ran on to fortune and a Broadway winner's fame as a nightclub proprietor and as one of the greatest showmen of his time. As a columnist (at roughly $52,000 a year), he is currently showing impressive stamina and speed in a fiercely competitive branch of journalism. After only nine months of newspaper distribution, Columnist Billy Rose's "Pitching Horseshoes" has landed in some 145 papers with an estimated 18 million (Billy's estimate) total circulation.

The Rose prose, with a base of carnival-barker shrewdness and a pink topping of cotton-candy poetry, has caught the crowd like an inspired midway pitch. Only last week his column caught 17 more papers. By June 10 he expects to close a deal sewing up 3,000 U.S. weekly newspapers. That would put him thousands of readers up on Winchell himself. With no pretense to modesty, Columnist Rose predicts: "I'll be second only to the Bible."

Such britches-busting boasts have helped to make little Billy a big nuisance to a great many people. A Broadway wit once snarled: "Nobody would ever kidnap Billy Rose. Who would pay the ransom?" Billy has been cussed up & down the main stem as a cheapskate, a blowhard and a social climber who "truckles to celebrities and yells at waiters." More recently, he has been denounced by some of his detractors as a phony intellectual.

His few close friends temper this estimate. Bernard Baruch, who has known Billy for 30 years, says solemnly: "This man, small in stature, is big and broad and fine in his viewpoints." Author Ben Hecht admits that "Billy has a genius for not making friends" and is "as wistful as a meat ax"; but he is also "a kind of frustrated poet . . . a kind of slum poet and Jack the Ripper rolled into one."

Buck Hunt. Most of Billy's conscious running has always been in the direction of money. Says he: "I spent the first 40 years of my life in the buck hunt. There was nothing in the world but Billy Rose and he was going to get his. It's a tough street, I told myself, and you'd better learn how to count." With Billy, that has often meant counting other people out.

Fanny Brice, his exwife, has said that "Billy's got a seven-track mind," and a friend calls him "one of the few men I know who has learned anything after 35." Billy's greatest aid in the learning process is a sort of photographic brain capable of almost total recall. Pressagent Dick Maney believes that Billy remembers every good gag he has ever heard: "When I first knew Billy, he had only one figure of speech--everything was like the inside of Earl Carroll's stomach. Then it got so I could tell who he'd been out with the night before by the way he talked."

Sideline Seat. Nowadays, Columnist Rose is waist-deep in the fanciest possible metaphors. At its best, his talk combines the shriller styles of E. E. Cummings, a nightspot headwaiter, P. T. Barnum and a Polo Grounds peanut vendor. But he flavors this potpourri with a cynical wit. "What people don't seem to see," he complains, "is the Billy who sits on the sidelines and laughs at the game."

Billy does ridicule, but only halfheartedly, the life he leads. "My only exercise," he once jeered contentedly, "is a brisk walk to the bathroom." Until recently, he dodged the sun: "I should get wrinkled. What am I, a prune?" Every week he puts away handfuls of costly chocolates, most of which have long since settled in a small bulge in the middle of his 5 ft. 3 in., 140-lb. frame. Billy's skin has a worn, beige look, grading to blue under his quick, cold eyes.

He works at least 14 hours a day. About 10, he gets up, bathes, shaves, douses himself with Bain de Champagne perfume, wraps himself in a six-foot-square Turkish towel and drips across the costly Aubusson tapestry rug on his bedroom floor. He sits down at his three bedroom phones (one gilded). There he starts the day's business. He rarely reaches the office before 2 p.m., frequently drifts home from Toots Shor's or the Stork Club after 3 a.m.

Billy the Kid. That is life in the "upholstered trap" fashioned for himself by William Samuel Rosenberg, born in 1899 on a kitchen table on Manhattan's Lower East Side. His father was a peddler who would rather have been a poet. "When people were doing passementerie," says Billy, "he was in fringe." On the fringe is where the Rosenbergs lived. They never held on to a set of rooms for long; it was cheaper to move (to The Bronx or to Brooklyn) than pay the rent.

That the Rosenbergs had any home at all was a triumph for Billy's mother, Fannie Rosenberg, a woman as firm and substantial as black bread. Fannie did everything big. She yearned for a 30-room house. In later, better days, she frequently brought home 20 pounds of fish for her little family, and baked up vast heaps of pastry that lay around for weeks going stale. In bigness, Fannie found an outlet from an environment that imprisoned her as a radiator imprisons steam. At this steam valve, Billy was nurtured and here he inhaled the megalophilia that has dominated his life.

In slum neighborhoods, the runt gets picked on. "I had to fight to stay alive," Billy recalls, "and I always lost." But he always came back for more. One day he came back with a heavy lock dangling at the end of a strap. He knocked out two of his attackers and the rest beat it. Billy learned the lesson: plainly, all men are not created equal--but there are equalizers.

Razz-Ma-Tazz. The greatest equalizer, Billy soon found, was money. In school he did well enough, but he never showed real brilliance until just before grammar-school graduation. For the occasion, Billy desperately wanted a new suit. Where could he get the $5? While he was wondering, the school offered a $5 prize for the best English composition. Billy won it with a description of the emotions of a boy running. "I realized then," says Billy, "that the only guy this razzmatazz world would pay was a specialist."

A year later young Mr. Rosenberg was a specialist--and making $50 a week after school. By determined practice, he had become a crack stenographer. About the time Billy won the Manhattan school speed championship, John R. Gregg, whose shorthand system Billy used, gave him a job as a demonstrator. Soon Rose could take 280 words a minute, real champ form. When he quit high school in his third year, he was making as much as $200 a week from his shorthand.

Way to the Top. At 17, Billy was out of the slums. When the U.S. went to war, he went to work for Bernard Baruch's War Industries Board at $1,800 a year. After a week on the job, Billy asked for and got the job of organizing the Board's stenographic service. Soon he began spending nights at Baruch's house, taking dictation from the great man himself. The year in Washington was decisive for Billy's career. "I saw big men, the big tories, if you will, but big men, too. They talked tough, but they talked from information. I decided I wanted to be like them."

When the war ended, Billy "went on the bum, mostly because I wanted to find a way to the top." He found that way six months later, back in New York. One night in a Manhattan delicatessen, he met some songwriters. After Baruch, they looked to Billy like "a buncha dumb-heads"--until somebody told him they made 40 and 50 grand a year. "Just like that," says Rose, "I decided that this was the grift for me."

Billy picked up the art of songwriting in his own brash but methodical way. He spent three months, nine hours a day, in the New York Public Library dissecting hit songs of the previous 30 years. All popular songs, he cunningly concluded, fell into well-defined categories: 1) love songs, 2) nonsense songs, 3) jingles, 4) songs built around a silly syllable. Of these syllables, Billy discovered, the double-o sound--"oo"--was the most successful. On this principle, he carefully constructed some sound effects called Barney Google ("with the goo goo googly eyes"). Just as his calculations had indicated, it was a smash hit. Having shortened his name to Rose, Billy lengthened his list of popular song hits and that year made more than $60,000.

In the next eight years, following his formulas, Billy wrote more than 300 songs. Forty were hits. At least a dozen (including Without a Song, It's Only a Paper Moon, It Happened in Monterey) are all-time favorites and have brought Billy an "AA" rating with ASCAP (The American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers)--a distinction he shares with Irving Berlin, Cole Porter, the late George Gershwin and very few others. Billy's songs still bring him about $18,000 a year.

Bingo-Bango-Bungo. With his new riches, Billy began to gild the Rose. He acquired a fancy flat, a new wardrobe, a valet, an ornamental but vicious green macaw. In 1924, he got still another source of income: the Backstage Club, a little "speak" which he established over a garage on Manhattan's West 56th Street. Billy's shows, which were bingo-bango-bungo stuff even in those early days, soon made the club popular with the better type of bootleggers and gangsters of the Prohibition era. Joe Frisco was M.C., and to sing his song. Billy hired a chorus girl with a voice as hot and blue as a gas flame--Helen Morgan.

In 1927, Billy met Fanny Brice and promptly began his courtship by writing her a vaudeville act. Two years later they were married. Fanny had long been Broadway's No. 1 comedienne; to her flock of friends, Billy was just "Mr. Brice," a noisy little guy who carried drinks and got underfoot. Billy began looking around for an equalizer. In 1930, he decided to become a Broadway producer.

"Bantam Barnum." Billy Rose's skyrocket career as a showman began with a miserable fizzle called Corned Beef & Roses. Desperately, he rewrote it, renamed it Sweet & Low. Though it had Fanny Brice in some of the original Baby Snooks routines (which Billy wrote), it thudded again. Billy rewrote the show a second time, renamed it Crazy Quilt, and took it on the road. Billed as "A Saturnalia of Wanton Rhythm Featuring Exotic Divertissements," Crazy Quilt played to packed houses at almost every stop. In nine months, Rose recouped his $75,000 outlay and made $240,000 clear profit.

That winter, the Rose really bloomed. His name became as current in Broadway beaneries as stale bagels. To keep up the chatter, Billy hired Pressagent Maney. In the next seven years, Maney forced the growth of the real Rose with a rich and soggy compost of legends, half-truths and downright fiction. But Maney also spread Billy's fame as a "Bantam Barnum," "Mighty Midget" and "Basement Belasco."

"Paint the Joint Red." Just after Repeal, Billy was hired (at $1,000 a week) by an underworld syndicate, backed by some of the more distinguished members of the Brooklyn Beer Gang, to run a big Broadway nightspot called the Casino de Paree. With the Casino, Billy revolutionized the nightclub business. His plan of action to attract the masses: 1) "Red is the most successful and exciting color, so paint the joint red"; 2) "Crowd them together--they'll communicate the excitement through their elbows"; 3) "Keep the prices reasonable, the liquor good and the food edible"; 4) "Make the acts loud enough to outshout the customers and short enough to give them a chance to drink up."

Billy opened still another entertainment factory, the Billy Rose Music Hall, before he and the Beer Gang "separated" in 1934. In parting, Billy rashly gave a piece of his mind to some of the boys. To keep Billy from (as Billy said) "being built into the East River Drive," Friend Bernard Baruch called in the FBI. Billy named names, and the G-men had a word with all of them. Billy had found another equalizer.

$1,000 a Day. Rose's nightclub success only made his pinwheel imagination whir faster. Why not stage a circus in a Broadway theater? Billy hired Hecht and MacArthur to write the show, Rodgers & Hart to do the songs, Paul Whiteman and his orchestra to play them. Jimmy Durante as the star, and Broadway's biggest showcase, the Hippodrome, to house the spectacle. He called it Jumbo and induced Millionaire John Hay Whitney to back it with a down payment of $200,000. Cracked Rose: "This will either break Jock Whitney or make me."

By the time Jumbo finally opened, after six months of rehearsals, it had cost Whitney a lot more. Though it was a hit, it never paid for itself. But it did put Billy Rose on the map as a showman. It put him, specifically, in Fort Worth, Tex., which hired "Mr. Brice" at $1,000 a day to stage its 1936 Frontier Centennial.

Cleveland then asked him to brighten up the Great Lakes Exposition. For Cleveland, Billy dreamed up a water ballet "with Lake Erie for a stage and Canada for a backdrop." He called it the Aquacade, and in 1939 brought it east to New York's World's Fair.

The Aquacade was the supreme spectacle in Billy's spectacular career. But for a time, production and labor troubles threatened to make it the supreme flop. Said Rose hoarsely: "With such labor pains, it's sure to be a big baby." It was. It was the hit of the Fair (and later of the San Francisco Fair). It was the only major concession at the Fair that made a nickel. In two seasons, it made Billy more than $1,000,000 clear profit. Billy knows the reason: "All God's chillun got 40-c-."

Organized for Luxury. During the Aquacade period, Billy stopped running for the first time and contemplated his million-dollar money belt. He was a famous showman. His nightclub, the Diamond Horseshoe (started in 1938), was grossing $1,250,000 a year, and ranked with Grant's Tomb and the Staten Island ferry as a Manhattan tourist attraction. Billy says of this period: "The race is over, I told myself. Stop running. You've won. Let 'em stick the wreath around your neck and snap the pictures. go on back to the barn and take it easy."

With that, Billy began to "get organized for luxury." He was divorced by Fanny ("Our marriage had been thinning out for several years anyway"), and he married Aquabelle Eleanor Holm. He bought his five-story town house and later picked up two "storybook" estates 40 miles north of Manhattan. (One of them he plans to use as a shelter for displaced European children.)

The town house was redecorated and bedizened with a $2,000,000 (Billy's estimate) collection of paintings, a $50,000 collection of Paul Storr silver, and what Billy calls "all the latest antiques." In this hushed splendor, Billy and Eleanor play house. "Billy has changed," says an admiring friend, "from a Lindy table-hopper to a sumptuous host." The Rose parties are small but as meticulously cast as a Broadway production. "Conversation," says Billy, "is the password." It admits such famed raconteurs as George Kaufman, Ferenc Molnar, Ludwig Bemelmans and Leopold Stokowski.

Eleanor (with the help of four servants) keeps Billy's homes as antiseptically clean as a swimming pool. He calls her "the Sapolio Kid" and "one of the two greatest gals of the century" (the other: Fanny Brice). Eleanor doesn't think much of Billy's paintings, but he takes them as seriously as he has taken all his other equalizers.

Vegetables on His Legs. After two years of coolly inviting his soul, Billy began to yearn again for the heat and excitement of the race. As he puts it: "I had stood still so long, I found vegetables growing up my legs." In 1943 he produced Carmen Jones--Oscar Hammerstein's all Negro version of the Bizet opera. It was a smash hit, and the first of Billy's Broadway theatrical ventures to bring him a profit. Billy then bought up the Ziegfeld Theater, which he owns and operates at a six-figure annual profit.

After a postwar trip to Europe, the Rose felt like "running in a new direction." But he took the first steps quite by accident. He began writing a series of newspaper ads for his Diamond Horseshoe: "Miscellaneous notions on Life, Art, Reforestation, and Sex among the Aborigines." The ads were written with such sprightly zeal that all Broadway was soon babbling about them. The newspaper PM began printing them as a regular column. That was all the encouragement Billy needed. He raced off in all directions asking editors if they wouldn't like to run his column free for the first six months.

Who Writes His Stuff? From the day Billy's column hit print, many a reader has imagined that he smelled something that was not quite the Rose. The blunt, inevitable question has been: Who writes his stuff for him? Billy swears that he does it himself, "and it takes me from four to six hours a day." Actually, there is little room for doubt that Billy writes the prose that bears his byline. The column talks like Billy, it mawks like Billy, it has all of Billy's change-rattling eloquence and off-the-arm skill with a gag. Besides, he is far too shrewd to be caught in a whopping lie.

He does have two young writers helping him, he says, with leg work and research. An advertising man who has studied the subject closely claims that "Billy writes the column all right, but the two helpers do more than leg work. Billy isn't always the most grammatical writer in the world, you know." With or without helpers, Rose is still one of the hardest workers in a lazybones game. Most of the big columnists have one or more "helpers."

Billy's column takes the broad view. One day he may deliver a cheap-seats catcall at international politicos; the next he may tool up an ancient vaudeville wheeze into a brisk short short. A sample of his grandest manner: "Even if we told them how, I don't think the Russians could make the atom bomb. . . . I gather it takes more than a cyclotron, some chemists, and a boy to run out for coffee. I don't think the Soviets have what it takes. . . . How come they haven't been able to turn out a first-rate automobile? There are no top secrets in a Chevvy. . . . I'll tell you why. To make machines work . . . it takes a bunch of kids who worship the pliers and the screwdriver rather than the hammer & sickle. And that's us--not them. . . . Don't go telling me they're going to drop an atom bomb on my home. They'll first have to learn the difference between borscht and lubricating oil."

Will even a successful career on the fringe of journalism induce Billy to stop running? Well--he has "a really hurrah idea" for a radio program. "One of the nation's ten biggest companies," he says, has offered to sponsor it in the fall.

The runt from The Bronx has indeed put on weight--and he intends to keep throwing it around. "I like my politics," says middle-of-Broadway Billy, "and now & then I'm going to make them known in the column. I think I'll be able to have some influence on the 1948 election. Oh, I'm going to be quite a fellow in these next few years." If Billy keeps running, the rest of the population may eventually need an equalizer.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.