By ROGER WATKINS

The last flight of Concorde, from New York to London, triggered a flashback for this writer and maybe one or two other former staffers. It reminded me that that great silver bird was a player in one of Variety’s more bizarre ad-grabbing adventures, the like of which helped sustain the financial environment when hot sales seasons faded into nuclear winter.

This particular ad play, from inception to the point of delivery, was almost surreal and involved not only Concorde but also English nobility, some captains of the entertainment industry and even the proprietor of the New York Times. Perhaps the most extraordinary thing of all was that, in order to work, the whole covert exercise required an international conspiracy of silence.

Intrigued? Let’s start at the beginning . . .

Variety advertising through the year periodically ran up some peaks and then dived into troughs, a tedious phenomenon that made for uneven cash flow – a pain for those trying to keep local bureaux on an even financial keel and, perhaps worse, the seesaw income caused wild variations in commission-based take-home pay.

The ad guys in Europe, each personally in charge of their own sales destiny and responsible for paying bureau bills out of some of the proceeds, knew they could keep the peaks high – at peak times the paper sold itself and needed only a light touch on the gas – but in those plentiful doldrums months it was a case of pressing the pedal hard to the metal and coming up with ideas that could generate a few dollars more.

Christmas had always been a prime doldrums season. Clients were spending their money on parties and corporate gifts but not on advertising. It was just not the right time to get into a serious conversation about the benefits of running a spread at Christmas – particularly when the Anni was due in a couple of weeks and we didn’t want to shift ad dollars away from that.

In London, we groaned when, in 1986, we learned that Variety was due to be published on Wednesday, December 25! Ouch!! The bookies would have given you any odds you liked against anyone wanting to strut their stuff on the very day show business managements were shut along with practically everything else.

I cannot recall exactly what it was that triggered the thought but as London ad rep John Willis and I wracked our brains for a Christmas Day sales angle, we had a Eureka! moment. Lew Grade was born on Christmas Day in 1906 – which meant he would be 80 years old on December 25.

Lew Grade, by now a Knight of the realm for services to the entertainment industry, meaning he was entitled to be addressed as Sir Lew, was the UK’s leading showman, known globally and active in films, television, music and legit theatre. Not just known but much loved on both sides of the Pond and the nearest thing the Brits had to a living legend.

Lew at 80! Still feisty. Still relevant. Still into a whole slew of transatlantic ventures to feed his US distribbery ITC with motion pictures and filmed television series.

It seemed to us in London that winter that from an editorial point of view we could easily justify a birthday special on Lew but given that it was Christmas, and his birthday, the ad guys wanted the special to be special. We wanted it to be a surprise for him.

As everyone knows keeping something secret in show biz is an exercise in over-ambitious folly – and in this case we were approaching dozens of people to take out a congratulatory ad, many of whom were in daily touch with Lew – but in the gung-ho spirit of the times we said what the hell and decided to give it a whirl.

First job was to get some key people on side. I had a confidential (“don’t tell Lew”) pub lunch meeting with Marcia Stanton, Lew’s p.a. of many years’ standing, and laid out the plan.

We had lined up Lew’s great pal Jimmy Green, perhaps the leading journalist ploughing the show biz furrows at the time, to write up Lew’s story. I explained to Marcia that we wanted to write “top secret” letters (that began, I recall, “Sshhhh! Not a word to Lew but . . .”) to the home (not office) addresses of all the key players in Lew’s address book.

Variety’s offer would be a specially designed, uniquely-priced space – a one-sixth of a page, like no other space sold at the time by Variety – which would be presented, six-on-a-page, as birthday “cards,” a concept approved by Syd.

The reason, I explained to Marcia, was that since we were soliciting personal greetings, rather than corporate marketing messages, we wanted to create a level playing field. If everyone had the same-price, same-size space, the message became the focus not the size of the ad spend.

Marcia went for it! She not only supplied all the private addresses but got Lew’s wife, Lady (Kathy) Grade, on side as well – a move that was to prove invaluable later.

Responses to the ad pitch letters were immediate and voluminous. We filled a dozen pages as Lew’s industry pals entered into the spirit of the thing and happily provided personal messages to be typeset by Variety. In the main, those Yuletide ad takers signed their greeting with first names only guaranteeing virtual anonymity among all but a very few Lew Grade insiders.

Among the producers, impresarios, television execs, artists and the like who sportingly provided us with a massive array of warm birthday greetings for show biz’s newest octogenarian was one civilian – Ochs Sulzberger.

We also learned that Sulzberger’s paper, the New York Times, now alerted to the impeding birthday, was going to run a feature article on Sir Lew – who by this time Variety was calling Sir Loot – which would run on Christmas Day. There goes our cover, I thought, the Times was bound to mention the upcoming Variety special.

The Variety production guys in New York did a bang up job making up the ads. Each one was distinctive and unique in appearance. Bernard Delfont, Lew’s showman brother and later Lord Delfont, and Lew’s nephew Michael Grade, himself a powerhouse in British showbiz, broke the rules and took a page ad each but we figured that was okay since they were family. Nobody would get too upset about being upstaged.

Getting in the ads was fine. Keeping the project under wraps was going okay (we hoped). The tricky bit was about to come. How could New York get a copy of the issue to London for delivery to Lew on Christmas Day?

With Syd’s okay, Mort Bryer, Abe Torres and Paul Rosowsky worked a minor miracle. As the press ground out the 72-pager, they rushed an early copy to JFK to see if they could get an obliging traveller to handcarry the paper on the next flight to London, effectively the reverse of the Hank Werba style Europe-to-NY copy run.

Happen the next flight to Blighty was Concorde. Happen also that the pilot of Concorde was fascinated when he heard why Variety was looking to get single copy to the UK in time for Lew’s birthday. He agreed to personally ferry the issue across the Pond and deliver it to the driver the London office had laid on at Heathrow.

The captain said he knew who Lew Grade was – the bantam Brit used Concorde from time to time – and he knew Variety, “the paper with the funny headlines.” He was happy to help and the paper went with him into the cramped cockpit of the supersonic jet.

Our driver at Heathrow held up a big Variety logo pasted onto a board as the Concorde crew cleared Customs and took delivery of Lew’s birthday special. He lit out for Harrods where I had agreed to meet him to grab the paper and deliver it to Lew at around 11 am Christmas morning.

Lew lived in a Knightsbridge penthouse apartment just around the corner from Harrods. It was one of those places where the elevator went up five floors but Sir Lew and Lady Grade lived on the sixth floor. If they wanted to see you, they would call up the elevator to their floor – it couldn’t be accessed from within the elevator – which is why it was crucial that Kathy Grade was in on the mission.

She was expecting my call from the porter’s desk and told me to get into the elevator, which duly zipped to the magnificently appointed penthouse. Kathy was smiling hugely when she said: “He doesn’t know a thing about it.”

Lew was in his bedroom on the phone with BBC, which was interviewing him for a radio programme. When he hung up, his wife said: “Lew, Roger’s here’s with something for you.”

Lew emerged with a quizzical look on his face. “What’s up? What can I do for you? It’s Christmas Day. It’s my birthday. I’ve just been on the radio. What is Variety doing here?”

“Happy birthday, Lew, from Variety,” I said. “We put together a little surprise for you in the paper which is published today, your birthday. Here, take a look.”

He was stunned as he opened the issue and saw page after page, ad after ad full of fond greetings and insider jokes. Tears rolled down his cheek as he read each ad and accurately identified every one of the advertisers in the special section.

Lady Grade hovered with her camera and recorded the occasion for the family album (See pics) as I answered Lew’s questions about how it was done.

“And you never knew?” I queried. “Didn’t the New York Times tip you off when they interviewed you for their piece?”

“Not a word,” laughed Lew. “It just goes to show that I don’t know everything that’s going on around here.”

The following is excerpted from Inside Variety, pages 83-86. For other extracts from Peter Besas unofficial history of paper, click the button Inside Variety on the left of the screen.

by PETER BESAS

Just three years after its founding, on March 1, 1909, Sime Silverman pushed the Variety office seven blocks uptown to Times Square. The paper’s motto had become “All the News All the Time – That Green Paper. Variety, You Know It By The Color.”

Not only were the new facilities more spacious, but, more pointedly, in keeping with Sime’s flair for showmanship, they were marvellously visible to anyone wandering across the Square. From the second floor of 1536 Broadway, on the northeast corner of 45th Street, smack in the center of the “crossroads of the world”, a prominently-displayed Variety logo blazed its green, illuminated message over the Great White Way.

On the street level, the building housed a cluster of shops: Levey’s Cleanser, the Bullock & Spencer Café, a “theatrical” café with the word CIGARS prominently painted on its two showcases, and Rothschild’s clothing store. A draper and a chiropodist shared the second floor with the Variety offices.

Although the new office could not boast of fronting the door of an impresario of the stature of Charles Dillingham, as had been the case in the Knickerbocker Building, it could lay claim to another, perhaps more colorful, distinction: in the upper floors of the building unfolded the dramas and shenanigans of those dwelling in New York’s best-known theatrical boarding house, the Bartholdi Inn.

The Bartholdi catered to a picturesque mélange of show biz types – thespians, hoofers, acrobats, monologists, animal trainers and other assorted specimens of the vaude fauna, who, for a consideration, were provided rooms and a square meal at Mother Theresa Bartholdi’s establishment. The Inn originally started in 1899 with two upper floors at 1536 Broadway. Five years later, Madame Bartholdi took over the corner of 45th Street and two adjoining buildings, and in 1906 two more houses were added on 45th Street, giving the Inn 110 rooms.

“It was half-soled and heeled – and you had to know your way to find your room. Rooms were rented by the week . . . Madame Bartholdi acted as banker and advisor, advanced fares and money to actors, let them run up bills into the thousands, and told me she never lost a penny! . . . The Inn had a real bohemian atmosphere, the tables had lighted candles and beer was served in small glass pitchers,” wrote Joe Laurie, Jr. in his book on vaudeville.

Another writer recalled the Inn in 1912: “The Bartholdi was a rendezvous for actors and chorus girls out of work, and another kind of lady who was never out of work. At the top of a wide staircase leading up from the street sat Mama Bartholdi, slightly mustachioed, squat and overweight, with a heart to match her size . . . Practically no one who came to the Bartholdi Inn ever carried a suitcase.”

Among those who had made the Inn their home were Pearl White, Fanny Brice, John Gilbert, Wallace Beery, William S. Hart, Mack Sennett, Charlie Chaplin, D.W. Griffith and Eva Tanguay. And it was ostensibly at the Bartholdi that the Four Cohans stayed during their sojourns in Gotham, at least before they made the big time. Such, as least, is suggested in the film Yankee Doodle Dandy. When Mother Bartholdi died she left over a million in cash and real estate.

At the Bartholdi in 1907 Vincent Sardi, the famous restaurateur, whose eatery was to become synonymous with elegant after-theatre supping, met his future wife. In his book of reminiscences, Sardi dedicated a whole chapter to the Bartholdi Inn. He recalled that Sime Silverman once urged Mother Bartholdi to take the special steak sandwich that sold for a quarter off the menu. People who aren’t in show business might find out about it, he said.

In summertime, beneath the windows of the Bartholdi Inn, the Variety office tempered the searing rays of the New York sun by pulling out a large striped awning over the window facing Broadway, and a smaller one over the window overlooking 45th Street. But the cooling effect of the awnings was sometimes undermined by idle actors who flicked lit cigarettes and cigars out of the windows overhead which landed on the awnings, sometimes just burning one more hole into them but occasionally setting the awning ablaze.

Hence Sime and Johnny O’Connor always kept a bucket of water handy for such contretemps. The bucket was complemented by another useful prop, a baseball bat. This was kept handy next to Charlie Freeman to enforce respect for Variety’s blunt assessment of vaude talent in the event irate actors, acrobats and hoofers erupted in the office seeking retribution.

As you entered the office, you came to the mail desk and a low gate beyond which ranged desks and filing cabinets for the small staff consisting of three or four reporters, a bookkeeper, and a few advertising solicitors.

Sime even managed to get BRyant 1536 for his phone number, the same number as his street address.

At the Broadway end of the room stood Sime’s rolltop desk with upright phone and typewriter, and an upholstered leather swivel chair from where he could peer through the big three-part window and survey much of the Broadway scene he knew so well.

The view on the west side of the Square included Garrity & Hiff’s popular grogshop at 46th Street, flanked by the new Hotel Astor and the Putnam Building beyond, which had become the vaudeville nerve center of Broadway since Keith’s United Booking Office had moved there. No more than a strong breath further south was Dowling’s bar, at 43rd beside which rose the pile of Hammerstein’s much-lauded vaudeville theatre.

“Inside Variety”, (c) by Peter Besas

by PETER BESAS

The emergence of slanguage was essentially a phenomenon of the 1920s. In the early decades of VARIETY’s existence, Sime Silverman and most of his staff simply wrote as they spoke, using the speech of the street, but without straying too much from proper English.

However, with the upheavals endemic to the 1920s, post World War I society cast off conventions and constraints, including the written word, and plunged recklessly into the Flapper Age. And with it came not only the transformation of the written language, but the acceptance of that patois which heretofore was considered ill-suited for anything other than genre literature.

It was then that VARIETY’s slanguage erupted like a linguistic Vesuvius, pouring its verbal lava into every journalistic interstice of the paper.

Perhaps it was just part of the transformation of America that occurred after the breakdown of traditional structures. But the change in mores spawned word slingers like Damon Runyon, George Ade, Walter Winchell and other practitioners of the vernacular, creating a style that pleased readers already familiar with it in the street.

Slang had always existed, but its popular proliferation and flowering in the 1920s is unparalleled in earlier and later decades. VARIETY’s slanguage in essence was the slang of Broadway enhanced and given one or two further fillips.

In the 1920s some of the paper’s most formative staff was added. And it was largely they – Conway, Pulaski, Greason, Green and Sime – who kneaded the slanguage and made it the trademark of VARIETY.

Before long we start getting heads such as “Variety Goes Chump for Flaps Who Have But One Life to Five M.C.’s”.

By 1929, the slanguage had evolved to such a degree as to be almost cryptic to outsiders. One story read, “Legs Minus That S.A. – N.G. Dancer Stagers; Fiends on Gams. Chorines Sifted by Stems – Class Femme Steps High – Doorknob Knees Mean Floppo.” (S.A. – sex appeal; N.G. – no good; stems and gams for legs, and floppo for failure)

In a 1930 article in the Bookman, the author wonders, “What, for example, can the uninitiated make out of this headline? ‘Pash Slaps M.C. Fan Clubs Rated Worthless to Theatres as B.O. Gag'”. The author renders it into the King’s English as: It has been ascertained that organized theatre parties of young girls who have a sentimental admiration for the actors who function as masters of ceremonies at motion picture theatres are worthless so far as increasing box office receipts goes.”

One of the earliest practitioners of slanguage on the sheet was Jack Conway (Con) who for 15 years before and during the Depression impishly filled VARIETY with an indelible jumble of scintillating metaphors, mother wit, wisecracks and street slang. Conway slung slang more adeptly than a cook in a diner slung hash.

Conway penned a piece for the 21st Anniverary issue, entitled, “Why I Write Slang”. He began by explaining that at an early age he picked up a “three-a-day habit against food.” And then: “Although I have tried all the known cures including a prejudice against work, I’m still an addict. No craving for expression motivated me when I hung up the finger glove and sliding pads in favor of socking a typewriter. A crossed ligament in the right soup bone had more to do with the assault than all the inhibitions outside of the Observation Ward at Bellevue (hospital).

“As one apt critic put it, ‘Without slang he would be dumb’ and he might have added, hungry. Slang, in addition to providing me with seven flops weekly and three scoffs daily, has saved me from night school and made it possible for me to get the pennies without making weight for the erudite word slingers who are big leaguers in the three-syllable racket. I had sense enough to know that with my 50-word vocabulary, I’d be a busher in that company . . .”

Abel Green also was a famous slang slinger, and used to speak the way the paper read. When prestigous man-of-letters Bennett Cerf met Abel the first time, Green’s partiing remark was, “Stay with ’em, boy. I think you’ve got B.O.!” When Green noted the horrified expression on Cerf’s face, who thought VARIETY’s editor was accusing him of having body odor, Abel explained, “Box office, boy, box office!” Besa

Shaw Discombobulated

Copies of VARIETY were likely to turn up in the most unexpected places. Random House editor Bennet Cerf once found one in George Bernard Shaw’s apartment in 1938. Cerf’s mission was to persuade Shaw to let him include Saint Joan in a Theatre Guild Anthology. But Shaw declined. Cerf noticed a copy of VARIETY on his desk and when the editor expressed surprise, Shaw told him he wouldn’t be without it.

“I thought I knew the English language,” he said, “until one day I saw VARIETY in a friend’s home. Upon my soul, I didn’t understand a word of it. I subscribed at once”.

This led to a long discussion of the sheet’s history, and a marked unbending on the part of Shaw. Finally, he gave permission to use the play, upon payment of exactly twice the amount Cerf had paid any other contributor.

/// In 1933, W.J. Funk of the Funk and Wagnalls Company, which published the Standard Dictionary and the Literary Digest, drew up a list of the ten most fecund makers of American slang then current. Sime Silverman was among them.