The Competitor

He was a David among Goliaths-yet he could be the most philistine of men. He called himself "a grain of sand in the public's eye," and he could be just as irritating. His friend Ben Hecht called him "a kind of slum poet and Jack the Ripper rolled into one." To Showman Billy Rose, compliments and catcalls were one and the same. Every knock was a boost, every insult a reminder that at least people were talking about him-as they had from the time he was a boy on Manhattan's Lower East Side until his death last week at 66.*

William Samuel Rosenberg began to attract attention as an undersized schoolboy. He became a winning sprinter "by jumping the gun without detection." Soon afterward he stopped growing. But he kept on running, and he never stopped jumping the competition. He was too tiny--5 ft. 3 in.--to compete physically, so he decided to lead with his right: he became a stenographer. The day before he was to compete in a worldwide shorthand contest, he broke an index finger. He worked his way around the injury by jamming his pen through a potato, then took dictation while holding the potato. At the age of 18, he was pronounced, potato and all, the best stenographer alive. Bernard Baruch took him on as a personal secretary, and William Rosenberg was on his way.

Corned Beef & Roses. All through World War 1 he stayed close to Baruch and learned a thing or two about finances and investing. But in 1918, he quit his job to go "on the bum, mostly because I wanted to find a way to the top." He found it six months later when he met some songwriters in a New York delicatessen. After the patrician manners of Baruch, the tunesmiths looked to him "like a bunch of dumbheads"--until he learned that some of the heads were creating $50,000 worth of songs a year. Again Billy got the jump on the competition, analyzed every novelty song of the day. All of them, he decided, had a silly syllable, and of all the syllables, the sound of oo was the silliest. Rose went to work and produced Barney Google, "with the goo-goo-googly eyes." The song was a hit, whereupon Billy shortened his name to Rose and lengthened his list of melodies: Without a Song, More Than You Know, That Old Gang of Mine, It's Only a Paper Moon.

In 1927 he outsmarted Fanny Brice's long list of courtiers by offering her something no millionaire could produce: a vaudeville act. She liked the material, and she liked Billy enough to marry him two years later; she called him a "Jewish Noel Coward." Suddenly Rose found himself at the starting line again. To Fanny's friends, she was America's top comedienne, but Billy was just Mr. Brice. Again Rose jumped, this time toward Broadway. In 1930 he produced Corned Beef and Roses. It was a loser from overture to finale. He rewrote it, renamed it Sweet and Low. Again it bombed. Again he rewrote it, renamed it Crazy Quilt, and took it on the road for a nine-month run. Rose recouped the $75,000 it cost him to mount it and made $240,000 profit besides.

Bronzes & Bullets. Now that he had sold himself, he hired a pressagent to ballyhoo him as a "Bantam Barnum," a "Mighty Midget" and the "Basement Belasco." He went on to produce eleven Broadway shows (including Jumbo, Carmen Jones'). He opened a restaurant and a nightclub (Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe). He ran the Aquacade at the 1939-40 World's Fair. He became a syndicated columnist, peddling a unique amalgam of show-biz snappy sayings and schmalz. He collected art the way other people collect neckties-he once tried to buy the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Rodin collection-and he gorged on the stock market as if it were so much bagels and lox.

Even his marriages and divorces were spectacular productions. His break with Brice made international headlines; his divorce from his second wife, Eleanor Holm, cost him over a quarter of a million dollars. His marriage to Doris Vidor lasted six months; his third and fourth wives were the same woman-Joyce Matthews. In recent years, the grain of sand decided to leave the public eye, but there was no getting out, or no need to, for that matter. Rose had traded his Broadway sports jacket for a Wall Street vest. He owned 160,000 shares of AT&T which made him the company's biggest single stockholder. In a rising market, his paper profits on AT&T and other holdings felt more like velvet; Rose calculated that between October 1963 and February 1964 they came to $8,733 for every hour the New York Stock Exchange was open.

Eleven months before his death, he gave his 105-piece collection of modern sculpture to the state of Israel. "In this clip-clap, ragtag life," he proclaimed, "this is the most heartwarming thing I have ever done." But the loneliness of the short-distance runner still stayed with him, and to the end he never stopped competing.

"If we are ever attacked," Ben-Gurion once asked him, admiring the sculpture, "where do you want us to hide your bronzes?" Rose didn't hesitate a minute. "Don't hide them," he said. "Melt them down into bullets."

* His health had been declining in recent years, and just before Christmas he went to Houston's Methodist Hospital, where Dr. Michael DeBakey performed extensive cardiovascular surgery. While he was convalescing at his home in Montego Bay, Jamaica, Rose caught a cold, which rapidly developed into fatal lobar pneumonia.

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