When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi
Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the
personalities helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in
newspaper parlance as national figures. One n.f. is enough for any short
story. Three would swamp a book. It's like one of those plays advertised
as having an all-star cast. By the time each luminary has come on, and
been greeted, and done his twinkling the play has faded into the
background. You can't see the heavens for the stars.
Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honour at a dinner, needs no
introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been
described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on
Page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though
quoted, thus:
"Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had a
genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive,
artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very
force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the
eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humourist, the ears of a
comic ol' clo'es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to
a vice."
Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine
diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say,
"It's scarlet! No--it's blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--"
That was Sid Hahn.
I suppose he never really sat for a photograph and yet you saw his
likeness in all the magazines. He was snapped on the street, and in the
theatre, and even up in his famous library-study-office on the sixth and
top floor of the Thalia Theatre Building. Usually with a fat black
cigar--unlighted--in one corner of his commodious mouth. Everyone
interested in things theatrical (and whom does that not include!) knew
all about Sid Hahn--and nothing. He had come, a boy, from one of those
middle-western towns with a high-falutin Greek name. Parthenon, Ohio, or
something incredible like that. No one knows how he first approached the
profession which he was to dominate in America. There's no record of his
having asked for a job in a theatre, and received it. He oozed into it,
indefinably, and moved with it, and became a part of it and finally
controlled it. Satellites, fur-collared and pseudo-successful, trailing
in his wake, used to talk loudly of I-knew-him-when. They all lied. It
had been Augustin Daly, dead these many years, who had first recognized
in this boy the genius for discovering and directing genius. Daly was,
at that time, at the zenith of his career--managing, writing, directing,
producing. He fired the imagination of this stocky, gargoyle-faced boy
with the luminous eyes and the humorous mouth. I don't know that Sid
Hahn, hanging about the theatre in every kind of menial capacity, ever
said to himself in so many words:
"I'm going to be what he is. I'm going to concentrate on it. I won't let
anything or anybody interfere with it. Nobody knows what I'm going to
be. But I know.... And you've got to be selfish. You've got to be
selfish."
Of course no one ever really made a speech like that to himself, even in
the Horatio Alger books. But if the great ambition and determination
running through the whole fibre of his being could have been
crystallized into spoken words they would have sounded like that.
By the time he was forty-five he had discovered more stars than
Copernicus. They were not all first-magnitude twinklers. Some of them
even glowed so feebly that you could see their light only when he stood
behind them, the steady radiance of his genius shining through. But
taken as a whole they made a brilliant constellation, furnishing much of
the illumination for the brightest thoroughfare in the world.
He had never married. There are those who say that he had had an early
love affair, but that he had sworn not to marry until he had achieved
what he called success. And by that time it had been too late. It was as
though the hot flame of ambition had burned out all his other passions.
Later they say he was responsible for more happy marriages contracted by
people who did not know that he was responsible for them than a popular
east-side shadchen. He grew a little tired, perhaps, of playing with
make-believe stage characters, and directing them, so he began to play
with real ones, like God. But always kind.
No woman can resist making love to a man as indifferent as Sid Hahn
appeared to be. They all tried their wiles on him: the red-haired
ingénues, the blonde soubrettes, the stately leading ladies, the war
horses, the old-timers, the ponies, the prima donnas. He used to sit
there in his great, luxurious, book-lined inner office, smiling and
inscrutable as a plump joss-house idol while the fair ones burnt incense
and made offering of shew-bread. Figuratively, he kicked over the basket
of shew-bread, and of the incense said, "Take away that stuff! It
smells!"
Not that he hated women. He was afraid of them, at first. Then, from
years of experience with the femininity of the theatre, not nearly
afraid enough. So, early, he had locked that corner of his mind, and had
thrown away the key. When, years after, he broke in the door, lo! (as
they say when an elaborate figure of speech is being used) lo! the
treasures therein had turned to dust and ashes.
It was he who had brought over from Paris to the American stage the
famous Renée Paterne of the incorrigible eyes. She made a fortune and
swept the country with her song about those delinquent orbs. But when
she turned them on Hahn, in their first interview in his office, he
regarded her with what is known as a long, level look. She knew at that
time not a word of English. Sid Hahn was ignorant of French. He said,
very low, and with terrible calm to Wallie Ascher who was then acting as
a sort of secretary, "Wallie, can't you do something to make her stop
rolling her eyes around at me like that? It's awful! She makes me think
of those heads you shy balls at, out at Coney. Take away my ink-well."
Renée had turned swiftly to Wallie and had said something to him in
French. Sid Hahn cocked a quick ear. "What's that she said?"
"She says," translated the obliging and gifted Wallie, "that monsieur is
a woman-hater."
"My God! I thought she didn't understand English!"
"She doesn't. But she's a woman. Not only that, she's a French woman.
They don't need to know a language to understand it."
"Where did you get that, h'm? That wasn't included in your Berlitz
course, was it?"
Wallie Ascher had grinned--that winning flash lighting up his dark, keen
face. "No. I learned that in another school."
Wallie Ascher's early career in the theatre, if repeated here, might
almost be a tiresome repetition of Hahn's beginning. And what Augustin
Daly had been to Sid Hahn's imagination and ambition, Sid Hahn was to
Wallie's. Wallie, though, had been born to the theatre--if having a
tumbler for a father and a prestidigitator's foil for a mother can be
said to be a legitimate entrance into the world of the theatre.
He had been employed about the old Thalia for years before Hahn noticed
him. In the beginning he was a spindle-legged office boy in the upstairs
suite of the firm of Hahn & Lohman, theatrical producers; the kind of
office-boy who is addicted to shrill, clear whistling unless very
firmly dealt with. No one in the outer office realized how faultless,
how rhythmic were the arpeggios and cadences that issued from those
expertly puckered lips. There was about his performance an unerring
precision. As you listened you felt that his ascent to the inevitable
high note was a thing impossible of achievement. Up--up--up he would go,
while you held your breath in suspense. And then he took the high
note--took it easily, insouciantly--held it, trilled it, tossed it.
"Now, look here," Miss Feldman would snap--Miss Feldman of the outer
office typewriter--"look here, you kid. Any more of that bird warbling
and you go back to the woods where you belong. This ain't a--a--"
"Aviary," suggested Wallie, almost shyly.