Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/256

ONCE A CLOWN, ALWAYS A CLOWN in Hollywood and finds our democracy refreshing is Thomas Meighan. He is the present Shepherd.

As it should be in any club worthy of the name, conversation is the place's principal attraction; gossip, news of the trade and communion of like interests. When that palls, there are billiard tables, there is the ghost of a once-famous bar, and there are card tables. The last usually are busy, but not with the game that suggests itself whenever five or more American males are gathered together. Poker has been forbidden strictly for years, since it all but destroyed one theatrical club in New York. Bridge and auction pinochle take its place, and mah jongg still flourishes there, if nowhere else. The card tables occupy most of the space once given to the dining room. In the wartime crusade to save food and man power the upstairs dining room was abandoned and never restored. The less formal rathskellerlike grill in the basement was discovered to answer all needs.

And there is the library! The old one about the clubman who dropped dead in the club library and whose body was not stumbled upon until three weeks later was told originally, I suspect, of The Lambs.