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.