When Hollywood Had a King Page 2

  Because Jules was in a great hurry to escape the confines of South Bend, he enrolled in summer school at Winona Lake Academy to accelerate his high school schedule. It was his first time away from home, and he was so homesick he almost quit; but then he decided to promote Saturday night dances for the students of his school and also the University of Indiana summer school, and he became so engrossed in this activity he forgot his homesickness. He found a dance hall in Warsaw, a few miles away; arranged for a streetcar line to run a special car from Warsaw back to Winona at midnight; printed postcards announcing these dances and sent them to all the students. “This was my first dance promotion,” he recalled in a series of interviews conducted by former New York Times reporter Murray Schumach in the 1970s. Upon graduating from high school at sixteen, Stein commenced what he later referred to as “negotiations” with colleges—proposing that he would play in the school band in exchange for free tuition. The best offer came from the University of West Virginia—not only free tuition and books but a job playing in the local Swisher Theatre two nights a week, for about $5 a night. During the two years he spent there, Stein came up with another business venture; realizing that students had trouble locating one another, he solicited ads from merchants and put out a student guide—in which his name appeared in letters larger than all the rest. (“That was a mistake,” he said later. “I never did anything like that again.” Stein seemed to consider it vulgar. Indeed, cultivating personal anonymity would become one of the hallmarks of his business life.) The following summer, he formed his own band and played in hotels; he also gave dance lessons in the fox-trot, two-step, and waltz. After graduating at eighteen from the University of West Virginia, Stein attended the University of Chicago for a year of postgraduate study; he continued to receive tuition free in exchange for playing in the band, and he found Chicago a far more lucrative market for booking other band dates. Soon, Stein realized he could make more money booking bands than playing in them; and, when he booked them for a summer stint at a resort, he found other opportunities as well. At Charlevoix, Michigan, in the summer of 1919, he not only provided musicians for the season but also paid to lease the hotel beauty parlor and barbershop and haberdashery, which he then ran—an instinct for dominating numerous venues that would become more pronounced over time.

  Thanks to his band booking, Stein was able to put himself through medical school in Chicago (it was said that during his internship at Cook County Hospital he set the record for the greatest number of tonsillectomies performed in one day), and was even able to spend a year in eye research at the University of Vienna. Traveling through Germany during a period of extreme inflation, he kept a detailed diary of his expenditures, which were minimized by the relative strength of the dollar (for example, he spent 65 cents for an overnight train from Leipzig to Berlin). While Stein took great satisfaction in recording his economies, he also developed a lasting fear that inflation might someday wipe out all his savings. By 1924, he had completed his studies, and he was working for well-regarded Chicago ophthalmologist Dr. Harry Gredel. But medicine was not what compelled him; money was. So that year, with $3,000 in capital, Stein started a band-booking agency he called the Music Corporation of America. And if it had a familiar ring—like, say, the Radio Corporation of America—that is just what Stein intended. The Radio Corporation of America was the consortium of five huge corporations—United Fruit, General Electric, Westinghouse, AT&T, and Marconi—that had decided to join together in 1919 in order to divide the nascent radio business among themselves. It was a preposterous analogy—the implicit suggestion that this company, which had opened for business in a tiny, two-room office in Chicago’s old Capitol Building, might become to the band-booking business what these corporate giants were to the radio business—but Stein’s expectations had always been vaulting. When he was still in college, he had vowed that one day he would drive a Rolls-Royce and own a seat on the New York Stock Exchange. Now, the letterhead for this fledgling booking agency featured a sketch of the globe, with a short musical phrase (about three measures of “My Country ’Tis of Thee”) stretching across the equator.

  It did not appear to be a particularly propitious moment to go into the band-booking business. Prohibition had closed many cabarets and beer gardens, putting thousands of musicians out of work, and radio was widely perceived as a medium that would displace musicians even more. America’s first commercial radio station had opened in 1920, and by the start of 1922 more than five hundred of them were broadcasting; the explosion of radio, said Herbert Hoover, then secretary of commerce, was “one of the most astonishing things that have ever come under my observation of American life.” In fact, radio would become a boon to musicians generally, and to the fledgling Music Corporation in particular; but this was not yet apparent. Petrillo was outraged by the fact that musicians were not paid for their performances—something that would be detrimental to Stein as well. In early 1924, the rough-spoken Petrillo released a statement to the press that was plainly ghostwritten: “With the exception of brewers and distillers, no class of men have felt the blow of Prohibition more keenly than the musicians. . . . If no check is made, it is only a matter of time until music as a profession is relegated to history. Parties, banquets, and social functions now use the radio for music. . . . Free advertising of orchestras given by broadcast stations doesn’t feed the large majority of musicians affected.” Following Petrillo’s declaration, a vote of the membership of Local 10 prohibited union musicians from playing on the radio for free in the Chicago jurisdiction. The broadcasters attempted to fight, but not for long. A triumphant Petrillo recalled later: “They told me to see their lawyer. The lawyer was usually an ex-Judge So-and-So. He had a lot of books on the table to prove the Government owned the air. I said, ‘I know the Government owns the air. What I want to find out is who pays the musicians!’ ” Petrillo bargained hard for radio musicians’ pay and union jurisdiction, and eventually radio musicians would be brought to the top scale of the music industry—something that probably stimulated the growth of big bands (and worked to Stein’s advantage).

  In hard times, in any event, the astute discern opportunity; that was a Stein-like maxim, one that he would put into effect again and again in his life, as an entrepreneur and an investor. And the opportunity he spied at this moment was the one-night dance band tour. It was terribly simple. If a band or orchestra were to be booked at a café or hotel for a long engagement, as most were, then they did not necessarily need an agent. But if they were to travel from one-night stand to one-night stand, an agent was a virtual necessity. And if these bands became successful and numerous enough, then the bigger, famous bands would come under the sway of Music Corporation as well. The demand for these traveling bands, moreover, was there, for dancing had become the biggest single factor in the entertainment business; there were hundreds of new halls, pavilions, and ballrooms going up in communities across the country. The potential existed to draw as many as five thousand dancers to a single affair, grossing as much as $10,000 a night. Over the next couple of years, thousands of new orchestras would come into being, and radio would make many of them nationally famous. There had been some one-night tours before Stein started Music Corporation—he had booked a couple himself—but they were poorly organized, haphazard affairs. Stein saw he could make it into a business.

  Here, as in other critical situations over the years, he would need the support of the musicians union—particularly Petrillo, and also the national president of the AFM, Joseph Weber. For the locals had, Stein already knew, a “hatred . . . for the imposition of traveling dance bands.” He needed Petrillo to waive his injunction against traveling bands coming into Chicago, and he needed Weber to persuade locals across the country to relent. Stein felt it was imperative for him to be a delegate to the AFM national convention, and in order to increase his chances of becoming one, he joined five different locals, including Chicago’s Number 10. For ten years, he was a delegate to these conventions, and he introd
uced a number of resolutions favoring or protecting the traveling dance bands. All lost. Some of the other delegates’ proposed resolutions would have put him out of business if they were passed. But Stein cultivated his relationship with Weber, and they became good friends, though they did not enjoy the same bond he had with Petrillo. And, as Stein commented, “Weber was able to convince the delegates of the folly of their thinking.”

  Meanwhile, Stein was building the business from scratch. The earliest clients were, unsurprisingly, the hardest to sign. One night at the Lincoln Tavern, a busy roadhouse on Chicago’s North Side, Stein was captivated by the Coon-Sanders Nighthawks, a band headed by Joe Sanders at the piano and Carleton Coon on the drums. The two were noted for their singing, especially their duets; they had already made some Victor records and had become popular, especially through nightly radio broadcasts from the Muehlebach, a hotel that was the premier dance spot in Kansas City. Stein eagerly fastened on them, but they tried to shake him off. They’d done well enough on their own, and were already signed at the Congress Hotel in Chicago for the next season. Stein, however, told them he had a different idea. Since radio had already built them an audience in the Midwest, he would send them on a one-night tour of small towns, and with clever booking and good advertising, the box office receipts should far exceed what they could make in a fixed locale. Still disinclined, Sanders asked for an advance of $10,000, to be deposited before they left Chicago. To his amazement, Stein agreed. He didn’t have the money, but he decided he would demand a 50 percent advance from each of the promoters. The tour was such a hit that Stein netted about $10,000 after his costs.

  The first associate Stein hired was William Goodheart, a part-time musician whom Stein had first met when he was still in school, and he had booked the band in which Goodheart, a student himself, was the piano player. Goodheart was a humpbacked gnome of a man who devoted himself to his tasks with a kind of infernal energy, and so terrorized his associates that orchestra leaders’ wives were said to hush their youngsters by warning them that not the devil but Goodheart would get them. His mission for Music Corporation was to comb the territory and compile information on every possible locale, no matter how remote, for a traveling dance band; and, at the same time, to try to win bookings in major hotels. One of Goodheart’s stops was the Muehlebach Hotel. As he later described to Karl Kramer, a Music Corporation employee who wrote a memoir about these early days, “I stopped off there intending to sell Ted Weems, which was one of the few top orchestras we handled. I spent three days getting the run-around from the front offices until somebody tipped me off that I was talking to the wrong parties and that all the Muehlebach bands were booked out of the men’s washroom. It sounded like a joke until I sounded out the chief attendant in that august department. It cost me a good part of my meager travel funds to find that the hotel management, before making any decisions on booking or changing bands, always had the washroom boy conduct a sort of Gallup poll among his customers. He queried each visitor about his particular likes and dislikes in dance orchestras, and these plus all the overheard comments and conversations, he passed on upstairs. Such opinions were considered as unbiased and factual and probably were an exact measure of customer opinion. So I spent a lot of time and some money in this department extolling the merits of Ted Weems’s wonderful orchestra, and, at the same time subtly conveyed that the financial welfare of the washroom staff would be assured when linked to the booking of MCA bands in the Muehlebach.” The Weems booking was made, and the Muehlebach became one of MCA’s most important customers for many years.

  Over the next couple of years, Goodheart and a small cadre of additional Music Corporation employees compiled the mailing list of buyers that became the engine of their one-night business. At first, it dealt only with the Midwestern states, but eventually it covered the country. California, for MCA, was especially unknown territory, until one clever young employee, Taft Schreiber, came up with the idea of persuading Western Union executives to sponsor a plan to have each branch manager send a list of all the dance jobs in his town. He argued that it would build wire business for the company, since so much of MCA business was conducted by telephone and telegraph—and what would have taken years to amass by sending MCA salesmen as scouts was done in short order. Each name on this list was stamped on an Addressograph plate, tabbed with individualized notations as to the customer’s idiosyncrasies, and these were kept in locked cabinets. It was a top secret but storied property. (Once, a competitor approached the MCA employee in charge of these plates and offered him $500 for a duplicate roll; it was decided that a new list should be made from the morgue of obsolete and discarded plates in MCA’s back room, and proffered in place of the real thing. The $500 was credited to “miscellaneous one-night bookings.”) With the mailing list in hand, the process became quite methodical. A decision was made about what territory would be best for a given band; then, sample packages of advertising were sent to promoters. Stein and his team prided themselves on their marketing materials, which were, indeed, innovative in this area; each booker was provided flyers, window cards, circulars, news stories, and original posters, done by a team of poster artists employed by MCA.

  The one-night business was lucrative, but it needed to be complemented by bookings at nightclubs and, especially, deluxe hotels—these provided prestige and, also, the radio time that enabled bands to become famous more quickly. And when Stein founded Music Corporation, the biggest booking agency in the Midwest, and the one that booked nearly all Chicago’s hotels and cafés, was the Edgar A. Benson Company. Stein spotted vulnerability in the Benson operation, however. For no matter how well known were the bands Benson was representing, he insisted that each one be billed primarily as a “Benson Orchestra.” Even on some phonograph recordings, that was how they were named. In Stein’s view, it seemed like a foolish egoism; Benson failed to realize that a dance orchestra could attain the same fame as a movie star, and that fame, in turn, would only increase box office earnings. Soon, Stein started winning some Benson clients away, promising them that not Music Corporation but they would be the stars, under his direction. It was a principle he would continue to apply over the years. And there was no obstacle to his winning these clients away because Benson had no contracts with them, only casual mutual agreements. Not so, Stein. The Stein contract was “a thing of beauty,” wrote Karl Kramer. It was not only exclusive but, in most cases, lifelong. For it contained a paragraph that said the contract was in effect until the band leader had grossed $1 million. (“A lot of leaders took this to mean that they were guaranteed a million, which in those days was a lot of money,” Kramer added.) Stein may have had other gambits, too, like the Muehlebach sweetener, for capturing Benson’s clients, for soon most of them had joined the MCA fold; the big jobs, therefore, became MCA’s as well; and within several years, the Benson agency disintegrated. Years later, Benson, sick and destitute, would write Stein a letter, asking for financial help.

  Now that Stein had acquired much of the hotel- and nightclub-booking business, his goal was to obtain “exclusives” from these buyers. If they agreed to buy all their talent from him, he would of course have far more bookings available, and his competition would effectively be shut out. Why these buyers should agree was a harder proposition. He started by promising them a steady flow of performers who were right for them, at the right prices; and he assured them that they would get first call in their area on his top talent. If the logic of this arrangement was not compelling enough, there were other benefits available, as Goodheart had suggested in recounting his dealings at the Muehlebach; there were, for example, Christmas presents for those who hired talent, large sums of cash given with no quid pro quo, in the spirit of the season. The more exclusives Stein was able to obtain, the more important clients flocked to him; the more important clients were his, the more he obtained exclusives. It did not happen overnight, but it was a machine that would keep feeding itself, growing larger and larger, and with it came a great deal of
leverage. This was the dawn of “tie-ins,” a practice that later would become almost synonymous with MCA. Harry Sosnik, who signed with MCA in the late twenties and eventually became a well-known composer-conductor, recalled in an oral history that MCA initiated this system in this early period. It operated on the principle, Sosnik said, that if you wanted Guy Lombardo—which everyone did—you had to take some unknown orchestra for a couple weeks. “The big names were the ones that opened the door for MCA’s lesser-known orchestras, which created a very big MCA.”

  A highly profitable extension of exclusives and tie-ins was called “packaging.” Stein would ask an exclusive buyer for a lump sum for all the season’s entertainment; then Stein would pay the bands himself out of these monies. And if he were able to juggle effectively—mixing expensive bands with less-expensive, and maybe putting a high-cost band in for less money because he couldn’t find them any other bookings (or so he told his musician clients)—then what he pocketed at the end was much more than the usual agent’s commission of 10 percent. It was a natural evolution; first Stein, as a youth, realized he could make more money booking bands than playing in them; and then he realized that, in many instances, he could make more money employing them than booking them.