March 2013 | Theatre
History March 1, 2013
When Actors’ Equity Staged Its First Strike
(American Theater magazine)
In 1919, actors shut down Broadway, won an eight-show week
and scored a major victory for American labor.
By Robert Simonson
On Monday, Aug. 18, 1919, the best stage show
in New York wasn’t on Broadway. It was raining in the city, and there was a
subway strike. Yet 500 standees had crowded into the auditorium at the
Lexington Avenue Opera House, at the corner of 51st Street.
The curtain rose on a cast of 150. All were members of the
upstart Actors’ Equity Association, but none were being paid. The
show was the first of a week of benefit performances put together by the union,
which had stunned the theatrical world 11 days prior by going out on strike.
Marie Dressler taught hoofers a dance routine in about a
quarter of an hour. W. C. Fields acted as master of ceremonies. Lionel and
Ethel Barrymore performed the second act of The Lady of the Camellias.
Eddie Cantor took the stage and joked that for once he was making as much as
Ethel Barrymore. Eddie Foy and his various children performed. Silent film star
Pearl White expressed delight at getting the opportunity to talk.
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| Lionel and Ethel, The Lady of the Camellias, 1919 benefit |
Sometime into the entertainment, a spotlight hit Ed Wynn,
the phenomenally popular Ziegfeld Follies comedian, at his seat in the third
row. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he said with grandiose formality, “Justice Lydon
has forbidden me to appear on the stage tonight. I am very sorry this has
occurred, but of course the orders of the court must be obeyed.”
Indeed, the Shuberts and their fellow producers had brought
a host of lawsuits down upon the actors participating in the strike. Earlier
that day, Judge Lydon had issued an injunction against Wynn appearing on the
Lexington stage, asserting that he was under exclusive service to the Shuberts.
Choosing to obey the letter of the law if not its spirit, the comedian
continued, “If I had been able to appear tonight, I had in mind telling you a
story…” and proceeded to perform his whole act from Row 3.
Throughout the jam-packed evening, there were pleas for
money. Ethel Barrymore pledged $1,000; brother Lionel did the same. Caught up
in the moment, a teenage unknown named Tallulah Bankhead pledged $100 she did
not have. (Her granddaddy down South wired the money soon after.) “The
enthusiasm of the players for the cause went right across the audience and we
got immediate return from them,” remembered Ethel Barrymore, “just like a ball
being tossed back and forth; you threw it out to them and they threw it back to
you; regular team play.”
By the end of the run, the show had raised a profit of
$31,000. The young union’s war chest had grown from $13,000 before the strike
to $100,000. Because it was rumored that the theatre producers might apply for a
writ to impound the show’s bank receipts, the manager of the Lexington Opera
House opened an account at the Harriman National Bank under the name of Isaiah
59:14, based on the biblical passage that reads, “And judgment is turned away
backward, and justice standeth afar off: for truth is fallen in the street, and
equity cannot enter.”
War had broken out between the nation’s producers and
actors, and the first and most important battle was for the affection of a
public that had been battered by labor conflicts for the past few decades.
Average Americans had grown suspicious of the tactics of management and
sympathetic to the plight of workers. Fellow workers showed their support of
the striking actors in practical terms. Taxicab drivers pasted “Equity for Actors”
on their windshields. One kicked a couple of actors out of his cab when he
found out they were scabs hired by a producer to replace Equity performers.
Local merchants, knowing actors to be among their clientele, pledged 10 percent
of their receipts to the strike fund. Sam Gerson’s cigar store hung out a sign
saying, “Striking actors: get your cigarettes here, and pay when you win.”
The producers were stunned as much as furious. This wasn’t
the first they’d heard of Actors’ Equity Association—the union had been formed
in 1913—but it was the first time they’d had trouble with it. The moneymen of
the American theatre had seen actors’ guilds come and go over the years.
“The producers looked upon actors as silly children,”
recalled Tallulah Bankhead, “vain, illogical, capricious, even slightly
demented. How could artists hope to function in something so plebeian as a
union?”
In fact, some actors did feel that a union was too plebeian
for them. “Recognition of the Actors’ Equity under the peculiar existing circumstances
would be a calamity,” wrote Minnie Maddern Fiske in a letter published in the Washington
Post during the thick of the strike. Fiske, who had been a leading actress
at the turn of the century, went by the regally proper stage name of “Mrs.
Fiske” after she married a prominent theatre critic. “Acting is not manual
labor, and the pay of actors cannot be scaled as the pay of manual labor is
scaled. Actors, it should be needless to point out, are paid according to
individual abilities…. The whole idea of linking a profession that, wholly
apart from its economic conditions is, after all, an interpretative art, is
intolerable.”
The prideful Fiske was one of many actors who, as the New
Republic put it, lived the values of the 19th century—a dangerous position
in the cutthroat, industrial 20th. That attitude was the Achilles’ heel of the
acting profession, and managers exploited it shamelessly. Fiske, a star, could
afford to adopt a position of disdain for unions. It was the rank-and-file
actor who suffered the petty indignities, abandonments and piddling wages.
A History of Disrespect
In
the years leading up to the strike, performers had become the indentured
servants of the stage, obliged to take part in weeks of rehearsal free of
salary (up to 10 weeks for a play, 18 weeks for a musical). During certain
weeks of the year, including the Christmas and New Year’s holidays, Holy Week,
and Election Week, actors perversely received half salary. Nearly all actors
had to purchase their own costumes, and in the days when costume dramas were
king, that could be a crippling expense. Hotel bills were also borne by the
touring performer.
An actor’s stark terms of employment could be found in the
black-and-white of his or her contract. One agreement from 1903 read, “The
contract may be canceled by said employer immediately or otherwise in case of
bad business, or any other cause, necessitating in the judgment of said
employer the abandonment of the play or tour, or the disbanding of the
company.”
Another notorious contract offered a dense, clause-heavy
page with a line at the bottom for the actor’s signature. Unless signers
turned the page over, they wouldn’t notice the 25 additional provisos listed
there as “included in the contract.” Among these were $5 fines for such things
as bad behavior, loud talking, lateness to rehearsal, liquor—or even
laughter—in the dressing room, disrespect of the stage manager, and “hanging
about” in the lobby; the forfeiture of a week’s pay for being seen drunk in a
bar or missing a performance; a $2 fine for talking in the wings; and a $1 fine
for the use of profanity. The vague charge of “conduct unbecoming ladies and
gentlemen” could result in forfeiture of the fee for the entire engagement.
The managers were not puritanical authoritarians looking to
enforce a strict code of conduct; their motives were entirely monetary. After
all, by 1913, the theatre was the fourth-biggest industry in the country.
Actors were the only “on trust” item on a producer’s balance sheet, and
unscrupulous producers took full advantage of their vulnerability. Plays were
paid for in advance, as was the scenery and its transport. Even the house
manager got an advance—but performers routinely got suckered.
It wasn’t always that way. Until the late 1800s, the theatre
was dominated by actor/managers, performers who assembled companies around
their own talents and toured the nation. The managers’ fortunes rose and fell
with those of their fellow thespians. But in the years following the Civil War,
show business grew into its name. Routes and circuits were formalized. Booking
offices were founded. From this fertile era of change emerged a cutthroat
organization called the Theatrical Syndicate, comprised of six booker/owners
who, by 1896, group-owned 37 first-class theatres, and soon nearly all of the
top houses in America. The alliance constituted a powerful monopoly, with six
men deciding which plays would run where and what percentage of the box office
was theirs; they even dictated changes in scripts.
It took a trio of brothers from Syracuse named Shubert to
step on the syndicate’s neck. Beginning in 1900, the upstart competitors began
to take over some theatres and build a chain of theatres nationwide. For
actors, the Shuberts may have been even worse than their predecessors, as they
did nothing to reform labor conditions, sometimes stretching unpaid rehearsal
periods to as much as 12 weeks.
Pointing to the office of Lee Shubert, high atop the Shubert
Theatre, producer Morris Gest once quipped, “Every union in the theatre was
started because of that man.”
Actors’ Equity Is Born
On
Jan. 13, 1913, a few actors decided to give organization a chance, gathering
for the purpose of “correcting or mitigating the abuses that have crept on the
profession” and to decide “upon a uniform form of contract that would be alike
acceptable to the fair-minded manager and the fair-minded actor.” William
Courtleigh, a Canadian-born actor who played no other significant role in the
creation of the union, deserves a place in its history for suggesting “Equity”
as a name. The motion was unanimously carried. On June 19, Equity met with the
Twelfth Night Club to invite women to join. Mrs. Thomas Whiffen, 68, was
elected the first female member.
The union was formally founded on May 26 by 112 actors
gathered in the Pabst Grand Circle Hotel on Columbus Circle, and actor Francis
Wilson was chosen its first president. He was a bold choice, perhaps the last
man on earth the Shuberts and the syndicate would wish to see elected the
megaphone of American actors, as he’d tussled with producers before and won a
settlement of $50,000.
At first, producers didn’t pay more than polite attention to
Equity. They didn’t have to. Though Equity was nearly a thousand members
strong, it was still a middling outfit with little muscle behind it—not the
kind of muscle that the mammoth American Federation of Labor had, with its 4
million members led by Samuel Gompers, the most powerful American labor leader
of his time.
There was an obstacle to Equity joining the federation, however.
The AFL gave out only one charter to each profession, and the White Rats
Actors’ Union had the one for performers. The AFL was sympathetic to Equity and
attempted to clear the way for the alliance, but the vaudevillian Rats wouldn’t
budge.
News of Equity’s overtures to the AFL alarmed the United
Managers’ Protective Association (UMPA), a then prominent loose organization of
theatre owners, managers and bookers. So did Equity’s growing numbers—2,500 and
rising. In 1917, UMPA was ready to talk again. Suddenly, things were moving
fast. A contract was approved by the producers on Aug. 10, and two months
later, it was adopted.
For the first time in history, the American actor had a
standard working contract. Its benefits were handsome. After four weeks’ rehearsal
in a play or six in a musical, a union actor was guaranteed two weeks’ work.
Managers would pay for costumes of actresses earning less than $150 a week and
for transportation. An eight-show workweek was established in most cases. Most
important of all, UMPA promised to settle disputes through arbitration.
But something was amiss. Before Christmas had passed, Equity
noticed that the Shuberts and their fellows were not using the contract they
had accepted weeks before. So Equity turned to its members, asking them to sign
a pledge stating that they would refuse to work under anything but the UMPA-AEA
contract; offenders would risk expulsion.
Brinksmanship and Grudge Matches
By
March 1919, Equity members comprised nearly 50 percent of legit theatre actors,
including nearly all of the best and best-known ones, and there was talk of
creating a closed shop—a union that bars employers from hiring any non-members.
Predictably alarmed, the producers called a meeting with
Equity leaders at the Hotel Claridge on May 2. It did not conclude well. When
producer Winthrop Ames rose to suggest revisions to the contract, Equity’s
Wilson stood and offered a rebuke: “Five years ago we came before you with our
hats in our hands. Well, it’s different now!”
From across the dining room came the sound of shattering
crystal. David Belasco had brought his fist down on a wine glass. His hand
bled. Trembling with anger, he swore he’d retire for good before he would
accept the union.
Many producers disliked the recalcitrant, obstinate Wilson,
remembering past troubles the comic actor had caused them, but Belasco hated
him. “When [Belasco] spoke Wilson’s name,” said a fellow producer, “it came out
as two long hisses, ‘Fransssesss Wilsssson.’”
That hiss now floated across the dining hall.
“What [Belasco] said after that no one knows,” wrote Hopkins. “Pandemonium
broke out…Two angry old gentlemen, nursing an antique grudge, had ruined our
plans.” On May 23, the Producing Managers’ Association met and decided to sever
relations with Equity and hire a lawyer.
Toe to Toe
After
some jockeying, the White Rats finally relented, and the AFL issued a new
international charter to cover the entire amusement field, encompassing a
number of unions of equal standing, Equity included. On July 18, the Four
A’s—the Associated Actors’ and Artistes of America—was formed. Equity now had
muscle.
It was late July, the time when the new theatre season
traditionally comes together—actors are hired, contracts signed. Backed by
millions in the bank, the producers could bide their time. Actors, always hard
up, could not. They had to stay on the offensive. It was time for a show of
power.
Frank Gillmore, an even-tempered Shakespearean and leading
man from London, was tapped as Equity’s commander in chief for the coming
skirmish. The strike resolution was passed at the Hotel Astor ballroom on
August 7 without a single dissenting vote. It read, “Until a satisfactory
arrangement is made with it governing the working conditions of the actor, we
will not perform any service for any manager who is a member of the Producing
Managers’ Association, or who refused to recognize our Association, or to issue
its contracts.” It passed on the first vote, and by 7 p.m., the strike was in
effect.
Frank Bacon, an actor/playwright in a show called Lightnin’,
was the first to join up: He ordered his company out and hung a sign over the
marquee: “Lightnin’ Struck.” Things happened quickly after that, as a dozen
other shows followed Lightnin’ into darkness. Long lines of people
seeking refunds formed at box offices that were caught short of cash. Nearby
movie houses did well that night.
The producers, it seemed, were caught off guard. “I didn’t
think the boys would go so far,” sniffed producer Sam Harris. “Starve the
actors out,” blustered Belasco. In the papers the next day, the managers
accused Equity of “alignments with notorious destroyers of good will and peace;
public vilification of managers; pernicious and untrue propaganda—a complete
demoralization of all that it had taken years to build up.” The strike had sent
the theatre “into the valley of venom, and we are called upon to hate those we
have grown up with.” One producer would later describe the month-long strike as
a “reign of terror.”
Despite personal visits by producers—a number of them former
journalists—New York’s newspapers sided with the actors. News of show closings
decorated the front page of the New York Times for several days running.
Heywood Broun, powerful columnist and drama critic of the New York Tribune,
wrote, “The actor is in a disadvantageous business position as long as he must
bargain individually. This is so generally recognized that the right of
collective bargaining has been won in almost every other industry in the United
States.”
The Stars Align
The strike presented a dilemma for the bona fide stars. Headliners already
had what Equity’s everyday players were fighting for—they could go either way,
depending on their conscience and sense of justice. Most actors who doubled as
managers left the union, and others—like Alfred Lunt, just then on the brink of
stardom—wavered but ultimately stayed with the union.
The support of the Barrymores, America’s most famous
theatrical family, was critical to both sides. Ethel was off to visit her
cousin Georgie Drew Mendum on 44th Street when the car was stopped by a mass of
people. She had to get out and walk but had no clue what the uproar was about.
“It’s the strike,” said Georgie. Ethel hadn’t read the papers. “Strike?” she
asked. “What for?” Georgie laid out the facts of the situation. Barrymore had
no gripe against her producers, Frohman and Hayman. The syndicate men who had
caused so much misery for so many had made her queen of the Empire Theatre.
Still, she was an actress. “I ought to belong to Equity,” concluded Ethel,
forgetting she was already a lifetime member.
Georgie urged her cousin to go to Equity headquarters
immediately, knowing the effect such a visit would have. A cry went up from the
crowd when Barrymore was spotted outside the union’s brownstone at 160 West
45th Street. She was carried up the stairs and hoisted onto a table. Choristers
kissed her hands and the hem of her dress. Barrymore later wrote that the scene
reminded her of the French Revolution. “I’m with you, whatever it is,” said the
bewildered actress.
Producer Alf Hayman (Al’s brother) was furious with Ethel.
He warned her that he was cabling Mrs. Patrick Campbell to come over from
London to play Lady Helen Haddon in the upcoming production of Déclassée,
a part slated for Barrymore. “I’m sure she will be very good,” replied Ethel.
Ethel’s brothers, Lionel and John, followed her lead and
offered their solidarity. So did their debonair, magnificently mustachioed
uncle, John Drew. James O’Neill wired his support to Francis Wilson.
One actor stood solidly in opposition to Equity: George M.
Cohan. Few men had a name as big. He was a true phenomenon—star, writer,
director and producer of most of his shows. His “Over There” had become the
anthem of World War I. He was a giant. Yet the strike had shuttered his hit, The
Royal Vagabond. His refusal to join in the struggle became instantly infamous:
“Before I will ever do business with the Actors’ Equity Association, I will
lose every dollar I have, even if I have to run an elevator to make a living.”
Soon after, a sign appeared in Times Square: “Elevator
Operator Wanted: George M. Cohan need not apply.”
Some shows managed to limp on. Cohan himself stepped into The
Royal Vagabond, and, by promoting seven chorus members to lead roles, he
managed to put on a makeshift show. At the 44th Street Theatre, the Shuberts
hastily assembled a vaudeville bill that didn’t in the least resemble The
Gaieties of 1919, which had been playing there. They did the same with Monte
Cristo, Jr. at the Winter Garden.
Equity members picketed and paraded, often savvily. Fifteen
cars filled with the prettiest actresses the union could find sailed down to
Wall Street, source of the financing for many shows. “We are not after more
pay, but fair play,” read their banners. Prior to the first benefit show at the
Lexington Opera House, a parade proceeded down Broadway. In an effort to
counter its effect and curry favor with the press, managers handed out cigars
to newspapermen along the parade route.
Meanwhile, the producers, enjoying little public support and
having no shapely picketers to send out, turned to the law. The Shuberts filed
suit against not only Equity and its officers, but also 184 of its prominent
members (including a few who were dead). They sought half a million dollars in
damages and held the union and its individual members responsible. Process
servers swarmed about the city, serving papers on picketers at theatres and
strike headquarters. Equity quickly sent Francis Wilson and other officers out
of town, lest they be served. Elevator operators and janitors started tipping
off Equity bigwigs when they saw a server coming.
In their defense, the Shuberts cited the Danbury Hatters’
Case as their legal precedent. They couldn’t have angered labor more had they
poked Samuel Gompers with a sharp stick. The case was a particularly sore spot
in labor circles. In the 1914 landmark ruling, the owners of D.E. Loewe Hatters
in Danbury, Conn., had sued boycotting union members as individuals, holding
them responsible for losses. The courts agreed, and as a result, many union
members lost their homes and life savings.
Management had stepped in a hornets’
nest—relying on that case surely set the AFL permanently against their cause.
But the managers loved the tactic. The Shuberts printed the names of the Winter
Garden cast in papers in New York, Boston, Brooklyn, Philadelphia and Chicago.
The producer Morris Gest used it to attempt collection of $250,000 from the
striking cast of The Five Million. Actors who had wavered in their
support of Equity now had no choice but to climb aboard—it was the union or
personal destitution.
In Praise of Federations
By
Aug. 16, 18 shows were dark. Another five scheduled productions were abandoned
before they went up. Soon after that, the unions walked out of the Winter
Garden. The stage, the New York World declared, was now “completely
disorganized. [The strike had] brought to a standstill the entire machinery of
the American dramatic stage in the most prosperous year in the native theatre’s
history.”
On Aug. 26, Equity met at the Lexington Opera House, where
the union entertainments continued to be sellouts. A rumor flitted about the
room that AFL chieftain Samuel Gompers had just disembarked the U.S.S.
George Washington. During the strike, Gompers had been in Europe attending
the Peace Conference at Versailles. The managers went to the ship to meet him,
hoping to co-opt the labor leader, while Wilson and Gillmore tried to stretch
out their meeting in hopes that he would appear. Wilson was about to adjourn
when a “short, square, stocky figure” entered the auditorium. Gompers took the
stage to an ovation three minutes in duration.
“Whatever influence or power there may be in the great
American Federation of Labor to help you, rest assured that power and influence
is behind you until the end,” Gompers said. He then warned, “The future depends
not upon the managers but upon you. Many a good cause has gone a-glimmering
because of the failure of the men and women to maintain the spirit of the
cause…You have aroused the managers to an understanding of your power. They are
alert. But they have not only their own brains, but can buy brains by the
pound. As sure as life and death, if you weaken, the treatment you received in
the past will be as nothing compared to that which you will receive in the
future.”
Gompers’s involvement—which, from most points of view, seemed
inevitable—spelled doom for the producers. The AFL’s power was soon evident, as
well. Gompers took a train to Washington, D.C., to meet with the AFL’s
executive counsel. Soon after, a call came from Washington, ordering the 412
stagehands employed at the Hippodrome out. The cast followed. Six thousand
theatregoers expecting to see Happy Days were turned away.
It was a thunderbolt. The shutdown took everyone by
surprise. The Hippodrome had been left alone by Equity because it was a
vaudeville house, owned by the United States Realty Company.
Theatres were closing in D.C., Boston, Chicago,
Philadelphia, Providence and St. Louis. Suits filed by the Shuberts and others
had come up empty. By Sept. 3, the peace-making contract was in order. Equity
would be recognized, all suits against the union would be dropped, there would
be an eight-performance week, arbitration would be accepted, and striking
actors would not be discriminated against. Strangely, there was nothing in the
wording about money, aside from a provision assuring actors extra pay for added
performances. At that point, the actors were more interested in rights than
remuneration. (A minimum wage wouldn’t go into effect until 1933.)
The news made headlines across the country. In inch-high
letters, the front page of New York’s Evening Mail trumpeted, “Strike
Off. Theatres Reopen.”
The strike had lasted an entire month, and by the end,
Equity had grown from a couple of thousand members to 14,000, and its treasury
had swelled from $13,500 to $120,000. Losses to the theatre industry were
estimated at $2 million.
“The maddest joy was evidenced around the Equity
headquarters in 45th Street,” noted the World.
