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ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN the corner from Broadway. House rule number one reads,

"The club house shall never be closed", and it never has been.

As its poet laureate sang on the occasion of the club's golden jubilee:

About Christmastime of 1874, George H. McLean, a layman, invited Harry Montague, Harry Beckett, Edward Arnott and Arthur Wallack, all members of the cast of "The Shaughraun", then playing at the old Wallack Theater, to a supper in the Blue Room of Delmonico's Fourteenth Street restaurant after the show.

There were no actors' clubs then, and these five had no thought, at the time, of founding one. Actors, when not acting, were accustomed to loiter on the benches and sidewalks of Union Square, talking shop. If the weather were forbidding it never was more than seventeen steps to a bar,—every man's club.

In February of '75 the original five and two recruits to the circle gave a supper at the Maison