Page:Levenson - Butterfly Man.djvu/120



HENRY COLMAN was a theatrical producer of the old school. His theatre was his church and his club. He was devoted to it passionately. If he had been a sentimentalist, he would have loved every inch of it—but Henry was too dull for sentiment. At sixty he was, as always, a realist to the core.

Henry had been a poor boy. The man who now dressed so impeccably once had sold candy in the aisles of the old Union Square Theatre and tickets in the box office of Daly's. He had admired and willingly slaved for his own lordly producer bosses of that day, including the noted international operatic impresario, Fritz Ungeld.

Henry's pride, his Commodore Theatre, now worth three quarters of a million dollars, had been erected on the spot where, for sixty years, four brownstone houses stood. It had cost thirty thousand in cash. Henry had come into possession of his pot of gold in a curious way. Ike Forman, who had operated Mendelssohn Hall back in the nineties, had died, leaving a most unbeautiful widow. Mrs. Forman had inherited her defunct husband's moderately large fortune. Henry Colman wooed and won her and thus was able to erect a new temple to Thespis on a side street off Broadway.

A gem of a theatre, the Commodore, a hat box, a unique playhouse, an intimate showplace. In the beginning it was a financial failure. Henry could savor a woodcock or tripe