The Telephone Booth Indian (21 page)

n the day that
Hellz a Poppin
, the refined revue which began its run at the Fortysixth Street Theatre, was scheduled to move to the larger Winter Garden, Ole Olsen and his partner, Chic Johnson, loitered sadly in front of the Fulton Theatre. The Fulton is also on Fortysixth Street, and
Oscar Wilde
was playing there that season. “It will be a terrible thing for that show when we move,” Olsen said with a wave of his hand. “They been living on our overflow.” Johnson nodded in agreement. Both men were quite serious. This overweening modesty has carried Ole and Chic through twentyfour seasons of show business—as entertainers in a Chicago rathskeller, as a twoact on the Pantages and Orpheum time in vaudeville, and latterly as the proprietors of a “unit show” which has toured the country every year as regularly as
Uncle Tom's Cabin
used to in the eighteeneighties. Vaudeville has been dead for a decade, but Olsen, the thin partner, and Johnson, the fat one, have never known enough to lie down.

An Olsen and Johnson unit show used to carry about forty people, including musicians and a line of twelve girls. There was always a quartet, members of which doubled in bits of slapstick; there were always a couple of specialty acts, and there were always Olsen and Johnson themselves, working like mad through the duration of the piece, just as they do now in
Hellz a
Poppin.
A unit ran seventy minutes, approximately half the length of a musical comedy, and there was no intermission. Olsen and Johnson and their assistants in the unit would play four or five shows a day, depending on business in the movie palaces where they were booked. When business was good, the house manager would ask the partners to speed up their show so that he could get more customers in and out of the seats. Olsen and Johnson would then rush the performance through in sixty minutes. When the unit was teamed with an unusually short feature picture, the partners would sometimes be asked to extend their running time to eighty minutes. Those actors in the present Winter Garden show who have worked with Olsen and Johnson on the road have found it difficult to overcome the habit of asking, “Long or short version tonight?” when they hear the opening chords of the overture. They are just beginning to realize that they are now working on a fairly static schedule. The first half of
Hellz a Poppin
is, with a few emendations, the unit show which Olsen and Johnson opened in Fort Wayne, Indiana, in July 1938. The second half is made up of material from the unit show with which they opened in Denver several years ago. Lee Shubert, their financial backer, saw the first half of
Hellz a Poppin
at a movingpicture theater in Philadelphia, but the partners had a hard time explaining the second half to him because they had no script. Olsen and Johnson carry on by ear, and it seems unnecessary to dwell upon their obvious relation to the
commedia dell'arte.
In order to copyright their present show after it became a hit, they had to have a stenographer sit in the wings and take down the dialogue in shorthand.

From the beginning of their career, Olsen and Johnson have been surefire between Cleveland and California. Intimate acquaintance with their art, which New York has tardily recognized, induces a patronizing bonhomie among the Western
visitors who swarm backstage at every performance of
Hellz a Poppin.
These outoftowners, frequently accompanied by their wives or nieces, casually invade the partners' dressing rooms in such numbers that the hospitable comics, crowded out by their visitors, have to change their trousers on stair landings. Olsen's room usually fills first because he has long been the front man and speechmaker for the team. His room presents the greatest cross section of inland America to be found anywhere on Manhattan outside the lobby of the Hotel Taft. “The boys have been big stars for the last twenty years out where I come from,” said Stephen F. Chadwick, a National Commander of the American Legion, during one of his frequent visits to New York. The commander lives in Seattle. Olsen is constantly inviting callers from Spokane to shake hands with callers from Green Bay, Wisconsin, and prominent executives from Akron to shake hands with prominent executives from Columbia, Missouri. Most of his visitors, in fact, belong to that nebulous but exalted class, the American executive. Olsen and Johnson themselves are honorary members of the Executives' Club of Portland, Oregon, and Olsen is fond of executive turns of phrase. “My thought on this matter is …” he says frequently before advising Johnson to hit a stuffed skunk with a hammer instead of his hat or to use a dressed turkey instead of a dressed chicken for a hunting bit.

The partners are honorary members of the Gyro Club of St. Paul and Minneapolis, the Gray Gander Club of Seattle, the International Association of Police Chiefs, and the Chicago Police Lieutenants' Association. They belong to the Yellow Dogs Club and Ace of Clubs of Columbus, Ohio, organizations of downtown quarterbacks who live for the Ohio State football team. They also hold membership in the Couvert Club of Cincinnati, the Arnama (Army, Navy, and Marine) Club of Los Angeles, the Atey (80) Club of San Francisco, the Round Table of Spokane,
and the Breakfast Clubs of Seattle, Portland, Los Angeles, and Denver. All of these are endemic variants of Rotary, Kiwanis, and the Lions. Olsen and Johnson are honorary Rotarians, Kiwanians, and Lions, too, and are aspirants to the Dutch Treat Club of New York City. They are Elks, and each has been made a Kentucky colonel twice, the second time by a governor who did not know that a predecessor had already commissioned them.

Through their perfect adaptation to the Midwestern terrain where they were born, Olsen and Johnson managed to survive and prosper there for years, preserving the art of hokum for its present brilliant revival. They prefer the word “gonk” to “hokum.” “Gonk is hokum with raisins in it,” they say. “Gonk is what we do.” For a long while survival wasn't easy; Olsen and Johnson once rose at seven in the morning to ride sacred white Arabian stallions in a cattle roundup conducted by the Shriners of Sioux City, Iowa. They never missed an opportunity to play an Elks' smoker, even after having given their regular five shows that day. A glass eater who was with their act in 1929 complained that the benefit shows were ruining his digestion. Johnson convinced him that some chile con carne which he was in the habit of eating late at night was responsible. During one tour, Olsen sold 114 supercharged Auburn sport models for dealers along the route. Auburn salesmen in each town promised prospects a final demonstration by Ole Olsen, the matinee idol of the Northwest. In gratitude for Olsen's services, the Auburn dealers organized yearround OlsenandJohnson clubs. “It rendered the territory OlsenandJohnsonconscious,” Olsen says.

Neither Ole nor Chic has the intrinsic comic quality of a Harpo Marx or a Frank Tinney. They were never as funny, individually, as Clark and McCullough, Duffy and Sweeney, or the members of half a dozen other gifted combinations, and Olsen and Johnson readily admit it. But they have worked for laughs
with a grimmer determination than any of the others, and there is something in the forthright earnestness of their attack which is in itself pleasing. The chief comic asset of the team, considered merely as a team, is Johnson's face. It is a wide, lardy, fatman's face with bulging eyes that resemble poached eggs with pale blue yolks. These curious, anxious eyes belie the jaunty tilt of the derby he wears onstage; they are the eyes of a restaurateur watching a customer eat a bad egg. When the egg goes down without complaint from the customer, the face registers a vast and ingenuous relief. Johnson's expression oscillates between terror and insecure joy. It is impossible not to think about eggs when you think about him—he has a HumptyDumptyish personality Olsen holds himself stiffly and is rather thin; only the wide, mobile mouth marks him as a comic. He is the straight man—glib, arrogant in a loutish way, but intermittently softening his arrogance with an earjoining grin, like a circus clown. Olsen prepares the way for the laughs his stooges get—he is as much a ringmaster as a principal comedian.

One advantage the team possesses over contemporary combinations is its timing. Comedians who work in the films or before the microphone lose the sense of tempo which makes a vaudeville act click on the stage. Since Olsen and Johnson now are almost the only vaudeville team that has been working right along
as
a vaudeville team, they are among the few to retain this knack. An even more important asset when they are central figures in a show is their flair for contriving bits of comic business in which they utilize props and other actors. An exemplary Olsen and Johnson bit is the man who tries vainly to free himself from a strait jacket for practically the whole of
Hellz a Poppin
and winds up in the outer lobby when the customers are leaving after the show. Olsen and Johnson began using that bit in 1926. The timing of the escapist's repeated appearances makes each
seem more comical. “The gag builds,” Johnson says. “You have to know how to humor a gag like that.” When the partners have an audience in their grip, they can make it laugh even at this sort of dialogue:

Q—What part of Ireland do you come from?

A—Staten Ireland.

Q—How old are you?

A—Sixteen.

Q—What do you want to be?

A—Seventeen.

Q—How much would you charge to haunt a house?

A—How many rooms?

“After a few more years,” Johnson says of the final sally, “I think we will change that gag. I will ask, 'How much would you charge to sour some milk?' and the stooge will say, 'How many quarts?' “

“We don't go for suave inflections,” says Olsen, the intellectual of the team. “We go for the ocular stuff. Suave inflections are poison in Youngstown, Ohio.” It is his theory that if you once get a man laughing hard, you can keep him laughing all evening by talking fast. Babe Ruth never had to bunt. “To hell with chuckles,” Johnson says. “Only belly laughs count.”

Until
Hellz a Poppin
became a hit, producers and managers had considered this type of comedy too corny for presentday New York. “Corny” is a cultural term meaning crude, obvious, and the antithesis of what Noel Coward would do in a given situation. The corn taboo had been so fixed in Broadway minds by a succession of smart musicals, all the way from
The Band Wagon
through
I Married an Angel
, that the man who books acts for Loew's State Theatre, where there is a seventyfivecent top,
scorned the Olsen and Johnson unit. The partners were playing four shows a day in Philadelphia when the Loew's booker turned thumbs down on them. They were paying all the salaries and other expenses of their unit and would have been willing to bring it into New York for a price of five thousand dollars a week, out of which they would have taken a profit of around twentyfive hundred dollars. During the Philadelphia run, Olsen went to a night club for a steak sandwich and encountered Nils T. Granlund, a New York nightclub operator who is a tenant of the Shuberts. Granlund thought the unit might have possibilities as a longer revue. He got Lee Shubert to come down from New York and look at the strange provincial charivari, and Shubert, who had several empty theaters in New York, rather dubiously agreed to back Olsen and Johnson in a fulllength piece. “If I hadn't gone out for a steak sandwich and run into Granlund, we wouldn't be in New York today,” Olsen says. “Big things always happen to us like that. We are creatures of destiny.” The Shuberts did not invest much money in the show—probably something like fifteen thousand dollars. They provided it with a collection of sets from defunct Shubert musicals such as
The Show Is On
and
Hooray for What
, a smattering of secondhand costumes from their warehouse, and exactly three new sets of dresses for the chorus girls. Olsen and Johnson could have easily financed the production themselves, but they have always been frugal. “If we had had to buy everything new, it might have cost us twentyfive thousand dollars,” Olsen says, “and that's not hay. The way it was, we figured that if the show folded in New York, we could open the unit in Baltimore the next week anyway, without having lost anything except our time.”

The curious trade prejudice against a hearty laugh almost spoiled the opening at the Fortysixth Street Theatre. The partners took especial pains to insure the success of their Broadway
debut as authoractors. They had even provided a string trio to play in the men's lounge. On the old Orpheum circuit Chic Sale had been their only rival for popularity, and, like him, Olsen and Johnson have always specialized in smokingroom humor. They installed an intricate system of rubber tubing whereby stagehands could blow air under the skirts of the women customers seated in the orchestra. No detail had been overlooked, and the audience laughed incessantly for three hours. This reassured Olsen and Johnson. As they waited up to read the record of their triumph in the morning papers, they kept telling each other that New York was just a department of the sticks. After all, they reasoned, Richard Watts, Jr., of the
Herald Tribune
, was a native of Parkersburg, West Virginia; John Mason Brown, of the
Post
, hailed from OlsenandJohnsonconscious Louisville; Brooks Atkinson, of the
Times
, from a small place in New England; Richard Lockridge, of the
Sun
, from Kansas City (a great OlsenandJohnson town), and John Anderson, of the
Journal & American
, from some place in Florida. The critics should have felt at home at
Hellz a Poppin.
It turned out that no one is so bashful in the presence of the corny as a fugitive from a cornfield.