Box Office Boffo

Variety, the legendary show business trade paper, brought out the ardor in her employees. For those who worked there, it was never merely a job; it was a mission to which they devoted their lives. There was no need for time clocks or time sheets at the Variety office. Reporters were happily on call 24 hours a day, skulking about the nightspots and entertainment palaces of Broadway, trolling for news. Employees talked about little else than their paper. In later years, when it was being buffeted by financial pressures, they would ask one another tremulously, “Is there life after Variety?”

As a 30-year Variety veteran who ran the paper’s Madrid office before being unceremoniously dumped by new bloodless corporate ownership, Peter Besas remains so ardent that he has written an exhaustive, frequently fascinating and unflaggingly loving history of the paper and its plethora of colorful denizens. By his own admission, Besas is no cultural historian. For him, Variety is a living, breathing organism rather than a metaphor. He says at the outset that he prefers anecdote to amplitude, description to diagnosis, and as “Inside Variety” “cruises through the near-century of the paper’s existence,” that is pretty much what you get . . . until the homey little paper gets trampled under the jackboots of modern business and Besas begins to wax nostalgic for simpler, better times.

In this he is a true son of Variety, which kept its eye fixed on the week’s box office receipts or the latest show business news. Yet for all its professions of unpretentiousness, Variety was not only a perfect chronicler of the ascendant entertainment culture but one of the enduring symbols of that culture, and the paper’s shifting ethos wound up uncannily reflecting the changing role of entertainment in 20th century America.

From the first, its founder and for 28 years its guiding spirit, Simon “Sime” Silverman, seemed to understand that show business was the reprobate stepchild of American culture--a status on which it prided itself every bit as much as Silverman prided himself on his incorrigibility.

By the turn of the last century, show business was deliberately challenging elite culture, taunting it, and in so doing empowering millions of Americans by giving them a demotic culture of their own that was the antithesis of high culture. In reporting on entertainment, Variety exulted in a similar insouciance. If there was anything it avoided, it was the slightest hint of gentility.

Perhaps Silverman appreciated the relationship of show business to high culture because in some ways it replicated his own relationship to his father. Born in Cortland, N.Y., in 1873 to a prosperous money broker, Silverman seemed to chafe at his father’s respectability, preferring the demimonde of show business to the staid Manhattan financial world Silverman pere inhabited. While working for his father during the day, he reviewed vaudeville shows at night for a short-lived paper called Daily America and then for the Telegraph. When he was fired--allegedly because he panned an act that subsequently canceled an ad in the paper--he decided that he would either become a partner in his father’s firm or start a weekly vaudeville paper. Denied the partnership, he decided the die was cast. With a $2,500 promissory note from his father-in-law, Silverman launched Variety on Dec. 16, 1905.

Silverman was a man of no great intelligence (he called himself an “illiterate”) or ambition, but he did have a rather peculiar passion for amusement. He loved entertainment and spent his evenings at vaudeville and theater. Perhaps even more he loved the culture of entertainment, particularly as it mushroomed around Broadway in the second and third decades of the 20th century. This was the Broadway of Damon Runyon, Walter Winchell, Florenz Ziegfeld, Earl Carroll and Texas Guinan, the Broadway of gangsters and gamblers, of beautiful chorines and molls, of lights and action and excitement. It was an imaginative city, no less than Hollywood, and for a brief time it captivated the entire nation with its showy display of modern clothes, modern talk, modern sex and modern values.

Variety not only covered this Broadway; under Silverman it was an integral part of it, which was a source of its popularity and its charm. It prided itself on a certain lowlife Broadway sensibility. Its offices on 46th Street and 7th Avenue were appropriately dishabille. The dingy ceiling was painted green matching the paper’s cover; the desks were cluttered; the floor space was undefined. Not even Silverman occupied a cubicle; he sat on a dais at the end of a long room on the second floor that one entered through a set of swinging doors.

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The employees fit the setting. They were a disreputable group of former vaudevillians, promoted office boys and yellow journalists, many with slicked hair and broken noses or a general unkemptness like Silverman himself who always had an unruly lock of hair on his forehead. They called themselves “muggs” and identified themselves in their articles by italicized nicknames that seem to have been ripped from Runyon: “Sime” for Silverman; “Ibee” for theatrical reporter Jack Pulaski; “Swing” for reporter Jo Swerling; “Jolo” for reviewer Joshua Lowe; “Skigie” for Silverman’s son, Sid. The final Runyon-esque touch was the introduction in the 1920s of what Variety itself called “slanguage”--the unusual patois in its pages. In Variety, one didn’t leave a job, he “ankled” it; one didn’t sign a contract, he “inked” it; one didn’t shoot a film, he “lensed” it; one didn’t attend a drive-in, he attended an “ozoner”; one didn’t watch a television network, he watched a “web”; films didn’t do well, they did “boffo” or “socko,” or they “flopped.” “I know you’ve been getting a hodful about just what the talking pictures are doing to the racket and that you’re waiting for the three-star special from me, so lend me your cauliflowers,” wrote Jack Conway, Variety’s main slanguage slinger, in a 1929 letter from California on the effect of sound on the movies. “It’s a pip that the articulate films will knock this joint agog not to mention agaga.” Then there were the famous headlines: WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG for the stock market crash in 1929; PITT CAUGHT WITH PLANTS DOWN for a heat wave in Pittsburgh when the air conditioners weren’t operating; BLITZ BOFFS BUFF for a snowstorm that destroyed box office in Buffalo; and STICKS NIX HICK PIX for the Farm Belt’s distaste for westerns and rural-themed films.

There was obviously a good deal of self-consciousness to this smart attitude, and it became so embedded in the muggs that it survived even after the Broadway culture that spawned it had faded. Already by the early 1930s, Variety as an institution if not a newspaper was an anachronism. The movies had taken the wind out of Broadway’s sails, and Silverman reluctantly acknowledged the new medium, first with reviews and then, in 1933, with the addition of a daily edition printed in Los Angeles to compete with The Hollywood Reporter, a new trade paper dedicated to movies. What the movies started, the Depression finished. Even Silverman seemed to recognize that the Broadway he knew and loved was gone. Suffering from tuberculosis and his reveling curtailed, he lamented, “If you can’t go around with the mob, there’s nothing to it.” He died of a lung hemorrhage in his room at Los Angeles’ Ambassador Hotel on Sept. 22, 1933--”away from the street that was the epitome of what Sime personifies,” as Variety eulogized.

Though he was only 60, Silverman may have died not a moment too soon. Hollywood was different from Broadway, the movies different from vaudeville and stage. Broadway valued knowingness--being the guy or doll who knew what’s what. That was Silverman’s stock in trade. Hollywood, on the other hand, valued money and status--being the guy who had the power. Increasingly, as its coverage turned from Broadway to Hollywood, Variety absorbed those values, even as it stuck to its outdated slanguage and wise guy disposition. It was more about box office and promotions, less about the old show business culture.

Though he operated from the weekly Variety offices in New York, the most avid exponent of the new values was Silverman’s hand-picked successor, Abel Green. A longtime Variety reporter, Green looked the part of a mugg. He was short with a receding hairline, oversized glasses and a pug’s face. But in the editor’s chair, he didn’t act like a mugg. He arrogated the paper’s power to himself as Silverman never did, demanding tribute from studios and networks, and he was a first-class star-f--ker. On trips he would provide his staff with itineraries containing instructions on where to send gifts. The hotels, meals, transportation were all “on the cuff,” in Variety parlance, meaning free. Unable to finagle his way into the new media of popular music and television, he effectively lost them to other trade publications--a display of hubris that would cost the paper.

Ostensibly, Green’s supplicants were bowing to the paper’s influence, but beyond its symbolic importance, it is hard to determine exactly what constituted that influence. Besas makes repeated claims for Variety’s editorial independence and integrity; its reviewers could not be bought, he says, implying clout. But those reviews were far less influential than reviews in the general press, and, in any case, he adduces far more examples of a lack of integrity, particularly where Green is concerned, than of righteousness. It wasn’t only the gifts Green received that might make one question the paper’s chumminess with the industry it covered; it was the paper’s television editor’s having a weekly lunch with CBS president Frank Stanton or the fact that reviewers overseas also sold ads to the very companies whose films they were reviewing, making them so-called hybrids. Nor did Variety use its influence to launch editorial crusades to appeal to the industry’s better instincts. At best it can be credited with having opposed Willie Bioff and George Browne, two labor racketeers who extorted money from Hollywood, but the paper was largely silent during the blacklist, to name only one of many campaigns it might have spearheaded had it shown more conscience and conscientiousness.

The substantive importance of Variety, then, is largely self-importance, as even Besas inadvertently suggests. Variety didn’t make money until 1930 and its employees weren’t especially well-compensated, but what they lacked in money they more than made up for in self-aggrandizement, because people in the industry needed them to get into the paper for publicity. To a field reporter puffing up local exhibitors this could be intoxicating. Besas can’t avert it either. He is so convinced of the importance of Variety that his book occasionally degenerates into a series of thumbnail sketches of individuals whose only significance is that they worked for Variety and who could be of interest only to someone as obsessed with the paper as Besas is. For the rest of us, it is like flipping through a stranger’s family album.

This self-importance, however, was largely derived from Hollywood’s own self-absorption. Of course, Variety keeps industry mavens abreast of what is happening, and that is still one of its major functions. But that hardly explains why a studio executive would care if his promotion was listed in the paper or why industry notables feel obligated to buy full-page advertisements in the special issues that were once the paper’s only real profit centers. The answer may be that in an industry obsessed with status, Variety was and still is a means of broadcasting one’s position to one’s fellow status-seekers. To be written about in Variety, to be seen in its pages, is a form of vaunting. In effect, from a snappy Broadway sheet, Variety became Hollywood’s own vanity society column. Or, put another way, it is Spago in print.

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The fact that after passing through three generations of Silvermans--Sime, his son Sid, and Sid’s son Syd--the paper was finally sold in 1987 to the Cahners publishing conglomerate only completes the transformation from old Broadway to modern Hollywood. Like the new Hollywood bean counters, Cahners tossed tradition to the wind. Though Syd Silverman remained the titular head, the new owners first brought in the editor of a restaurant newsletter to run the paper and then the editor of a furniture industry newsletter before finally recruiting the estimable Peter Bart, a former journalist and studio executive. Under Bart, who eventually consolidated weekly Variety with the daily one in Los Angeles in another move with symbolic implications, the paper became more professional and analytical, better crafted and better written, altogether a superior paper. But, like Hollywood itself, it is also less idiosyncratic than it used to be, with less panache and personality.

That is Besas’ plaint. He longs for Sime Silverman and the good old days when show business was a form of outlawry and its acolytes were muggs. He longs in vain. As Variety’s own transformation vividly demonstrates, those days are long gone, never, never to return.