Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/217



I do not tremble for the old age of Fred Stone, Frank Tinney and Sir Harry Lauder, nor have I ever seen Al Jolson or Ed Wynne dropping five-dollar gold pieces in the nickel slots in the telephone booths and the Subway turnstiles. Yet every one knows, of course, that actors have no business sense and that managers and producers are notoriously shrewd business men.

Oddly, however, these canny producers and managers never have been able to maintain a club of their own in New York, though their heedless charges support four or five flourishing institutions, among them The Lambs, probably the most successful club in the world, and one of the most distinctive. I say most successful, because no other club is used so intensively by its members, is given such a collegiate loyalty, or is so literally the home, hearth and headquarters of its personnel as the six-story building in West Forty-fourth Street just around