Theater: Moss v. Lice

Paul Moss is a big, grey-haired Jew whom Mayor LaGuardia picked to be New York’s Commissioner of Licenses when he turned Tammany out of City Hall three years ago. Since the power to license is the power to reform, Commissioner Moss, who is as notable for his integrity as for his dapper dress, lost no time suppressing shortweight ice dealers, market racketeers, dirty magazine publishers.

In private life. Commissioner Moss’s business was show business. He and his brother, Benjamin S. Moss, were pioneer chain cinemansion operators, he coproduced a hit called Subway Express and for a long time was a prominent Theatre Guildsman. It was only natural that Commissioner Moss should concentrate his reform zeal on Broadway. He requisitioned dress rehearsal seats to all productions so that if a show was dirty it could be cleaned up without the furor of revision after the opening. He made all casting offices take out licenses, rid the city of unscrupulous booking agents. In 1934 he requested that burlesque houses tear out their stage-to-audience runways, gave them six months to restore decency to their performances. The burlesque producers tore out the runways but that was all. Last week, after three patient years, Commissioner Moss made theatrical history when, with one fell swoop, he darkened 14 burlesque houses, threw 2,000 theatrical workers out of work, and at least temporarily ended what is professionally known as “louse opera” in the city where it was born and has flourished rankest.

No burlesque theatre ever pretended to be on the same moral plane as a theological seminary. Columnist Westbrook Pegler recalls a pre-War burlesque house on State Street in Chicago where, after the performance, the comedian auctioned off the girls to members of the audience, “who claimed them then and there and took them, still in costume, to the beer hall in the rear. Possibly they married and settled down in the suburbs to raise large families of respectable Americans, but from the way things seemed to be going about midnight that was impossible.” Pre-War burlesque, however, was not in the same class with burlesque since the Depression.

Because in the depth of the hard times people had other things to worry about and were not likely to take any action that might jeopardize anyone’s business or job, during the early 1930’s the U. S. entertainment business entered upon a period of license equaled only in Europe. The films got broad and bare. Fan dancers, “nudist colonists” and other female exhibitionists were responsible for the gay success of world’s fairs at Chicago, San Diego and Dallas. The fair girls vanished with the autumn and the Legion of Decency rectified the films. But burlesque in New York City suffered no brake except Commissioner Moss’s warning and an occasional police raid when a show got too hot for even the precinct police captain to tolerate. The old scatological burlesque jokes bandied by the tramp, the Irishman and the Jew remained about the same. But as additional burlesque houses opened all over town, desperate competition was expressed in the increasing nudity of the dancers, chorus girls and strip-teasers. Last month the New Gotham Theatre in Harlem reached the inevitable when four of its strippers were said to have revealed themselves for an electric moment with nothing on at all. The more acute among the 50,000 fans who weekly drift from one New York burlesque house to another felt that official wrath could not be far away.

Biding his time until within a few days of May 1, when all burlesque theatre licenses came up for renewal, Commissioner Moss suddenly summoned producers and entertainers from the city’s 14 burlesque houses to his office, asked them to show cause why they should be permitted to continue making a living out of naked women and dirty jokes. Press and pulpit rallied to his support. His Eminence Patrick Cardinal Hayes inveighed against “these disgraceful and pernicious performances,” and the Jews and Protestants agreed. President Thomas J. Phillips of the Burlesque Artists Association of the U. S. lost no time in sounding off in defense of the industry. “The first girl I ever spoke to in a theatre was a burlesque chorus girl,” declared he, “and I married her and I’m still married to her. I resent the inferences that have been cast upon the people of burlesque. . . . Just remember, Dillinger was shot coming out of a moving picture theatre—not a burlesque house.”

Nevertheless at noon on May 1, Commissioner Moss dillingered New York burlesque by announcing he was renewing the licenses of none of New York’s 14 burlesque houses because “the type of performance, the language used, the display of nudity are coarse, vulgar and lewd and endanger public morality . . . and are a disgrace to the people of the City of New York.”

“May God bless our Commissioner of Licenses!” intoned Cardinal Hayes.

“The beginning of the end of incorporated filth,” snapped Mayor LaGuardia.

Broadwayites regarded as a sure sign of returning prosperity the return of public interest in stage morality, guessed that burlesque was dead—for a while.