Hogging the Act?

In 1900, Sam, Lee and Jake Shubert descended on Manhattan to lease the Herald Square Theater. They had come down from Syracuse to fight the Klaw & Erlanger syndicate's dominance of the U.S. stage. Broadway, chafing at the syndicate's ironfisted control of 1,250 theaters, whooped the young rebels on. But when, after some 20 years of skirmishes and pitched battle, Jake & Lee* won their war, many producers began to wonder if they had not swapped one tyranny for another. "Instead of Klaw & Erlanger," gagged one, "we've now got tooth & claw."

As the legitimate theater business dwindled before the movies' onslaughts, the Messrs. Shubert tightened their hold on what remained. About 14 months ago, the U.S. Department of Justice's antitrust division set FBI agents poking through the Shuberts' files, buttonholing show people in the rabbit warrens of Broadway casting offices. Last week Attorney General J. Howard McGrath rang up the curtain on a little drama of his own. In Manhattan's federal district court he slapped on a civil suit charging the Messrs. Shubert with monopolizing the U.S. theater in violation of the antitrust law. For good measure, he also sued Marcus Heiman, joint owner with the Shuberts of the United Booking Office, the only agency in the U.S. through which producers can arrange nationwide tours for their shows.

Squeeze Play. In a 23-page complaint, McGrath ticked off the defendants' alleged sins against free trade. They control 15 of the 32 theaters in New York, seven out of nine in Chicago, two out of three in Detroit, and all the houses in Boston, Baltimore, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. With almost all the tryout towns under their thumb, said the complaint, the Shuberts have forced producers to rent Shubert-controlled theaters in New York by threatening to bar them from out-of-town houses. And when producers take successful shows on the road, it was charged, they have to arrange their tours through the United Booking Office or run the risk that the Shuberts may refuse to give them a tryout theater for their next show. The Government's demand: let the Shuberts divorce themselves either from the booking or the renting business.

Although the Government made no criticism of the Shuberts' taste, generations of theatergoers had winced at their shopworn revivals and musicals.

Life With Father. One Broadway showman who had given the FBI a tearful earful was Producer Oscar Serlin. He has been feuding with Jake & Lee ever since he offended them in 1939 by opening his smash hit Life With Father in the non-Shubert Empire Theater. When he took Life With

Father on tour, he told reporters last week, the Shuberts banned him, from their theaters. Serlin had to rent assembly halls, burlesque houses, even a vacant department store, to get space for his show. As fast as he left a town, Serlin said, Shubert emissaries ("They've got a lot of three-headed nephews who front for them") moved in behind him, buying up the make-do theatrical property to forestall his return and prevent any other maverick producer from moving in after him. But the Shuberts also had defenders along Broadway. Said pint-sized Showman Billy Rose: "In the 25 years I've been in this business I've never had any trouble with them. They trade hard . . . but they always live up to a contract. If it weren't for their booking office, the average producer wouldn't have either the facilities or the knowledge to book shows across the country."

The Shuberts, long experienced in warding off brickbats, reacted with stoic calm. Said 74-year-old Lee Shubert, sunning himself on the sands of Florida: "We shall . . . prove that we have operated with an efficiency that deserves the encouragement, rather than the criticism of [the] Government."

*Sam was killed in 1905 in a train wreck.

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