The second city

ASHTON STEVENS

Chicago's metropolitan spirit in its artistic manifestations as compared with that of New York

Always examine the credentials of the man who writes about Chicago: he may be prejudiced.

I recall Edward Dean Sullivan, who subsequently became the author of Rattling the Cup on Chicago Crime, alighting from a New York train and with wondering eyes inquiring of one of his hostesses, "Where am I?" She informed him with not immodest pride that he was in the Second City of the United States.

Mr. Sullivan took another look at it and sighed, "But how second!"

Then there was Stephen Reardon who late in life permitted a thousand miles to get between Broadway and himself. When Percy Hammond (this, of course, was before Mr. Hammond became one of Manhattan's most distinguished Chicago and Shakespeare haters) asked him, "What do you think of Chicago?" Mr. Reardon immediately and enthusiastically answered, "It's a double Newark!"

Perhaps it would be a slight exaggeration to say, once a New Yorker, always a Chicagophobe. Be that as it must, out of their own wisecracking mouths New Yorkers intimate not only the indubitable secondness but the almost firstness of the freshwater metropolis.

But who am I (you may well ask) to give this city its place? What are my credentials?

They are, briefly, these: I am a San Franciscan by birth, a New Yorker by adoption, and a Chicagoan by improvement. The reader can trust me to be as detached as a celluloid cuff.

Well, Chicago is not as gaudy as she has been painted—painted, I mean, not by her rivals but by Chicagoans themselves; by, for instance, the Chicago-bred authors of The Front Page, The Racket, Chicago, and of those uncountable books about gunmen. These authors were all Chicago reporters. Journalism being perhaps the last lawful adventure left to youth, many brilliant and otherwise regenerate young Chicagoans went in for it after the war. These romantic cynics, wistful for a Jesse James, composed for their journals symphonies on "the petulant pop of the pistol" and wrote of beer barons with pens that might have been dipped in champagne. A1 Capone's debt to the Chicago reporter is incalculable.

He is not, really, half as interesting as he appears through the amber of his embalmers' wit—albeit I have felt the whirling globe stand still when Mr. Capone has risen from his seat at a firstnight and gone out to a retiring room followed by more dinnerjacketed body-guards than that chamber could accommodate comfortably.

But this always happened on a Sunday night, which is quite a different opening night at the Chicago theaters from Monday or any other night in the week. It is this Sunday night opening, I think, that sometimes makes a Chicago failure of a New York success, or vice versa.

The Sunday-nighters are inclined to be hoarse and hairy as compared with the purling and depilated week-day play-goers. They laugh from the abdomen or not at all, and they have been known to make birdlike sounds at an English revue and to toss pennies to the actors of a leisurely comedy of manners.

Indeed, I recall with blushes the derisive laughter that on a holiday evening greeted the first Chicago performance of Noel Coward in The Vortex, a play that had been as successful in Manhattan as The Makropoulis Secret (subsequently a Chicago success) hadn't been. I also recall Mr. Coward bitterly saying (a friend tried to persuade him that the unseemly mirth had been only the laughter of excitement), "No, let's face it: Chicago has taught me that The Vortex is the Metropolis' secret."

But take the drama in Chicago on any night but Sunday and its audience is very much like New York's. To be sure, there will be fewer white ties, as there will be fewer unemployed players and authors and managers, but (I should say after much firstnighting in both capitals) the feeling for a good play, or against a bad one, will be about the same. Which has strengthened this impartial witness' conviction that, say what New Yorkers will about New York being a nation, she is just a very large American city after all.

I suppose nothing better attests the metropolitan spirit of the city by the lake than the equanimity with which it receives plays and novels that obscure its virtues and spotlight its vices. Once London was the villain in the play; then New York; now Chicago: westward the course of evil takes its way. Anyway, it is a certitude that the capital of the "ham what am" and J. Ham Lewis has grown since those gaslighted nights when its public had to be assured that the awkward Cherry Sisters were kidding nobody and doing the very best they knew.

Of course, comparatively few original plays and fewer books are actually produced in this city, where some eight hundred periodicals are printed, where the Goodman Theater under the wing of the Art Institute sustains its repertory company somewhat after the manner of the Moscow Art Theater, and where the Civic Theater, little sister to the rich Civic Opera House, enjoys (if that is the word) an extensive season of Shakespeare under the direction and with the acting of Fritz Leiber, who may be not too roughly described as the Walter Hampden of the Midwest. This condition has not only encouraged writers to move eastward in the general direction of publishment until many of Chicago's Hechts and MacArthurs have become Chicagoans in name only, but it has fostered among playgoers an informal but numerous organization that for purposes of identification may be called the I Saw This Show in New York With a Better Cast Club.

But there are times when most of the members of this slightly snooty organization are not in a position to snoot, granted there is such a verb. That would be when the Chicago Dramatic League—a subscribing body of drama lovers brought together by the Messrs. Shubert and perhaps other Manhattan managers in emulation of, and competition with, the New York Theater Guild —are witnessing the American premiere of a Second Mrs. Fraser, an Infinite Shoeblack, or of any other of the English novelties that have justly caused this annual engagement at the Princess Theater to be called the most interesting London season this side of the Thames.

Chicago may not be a "producing center" in the Broadway significance of that term, but, thanks to the League and London and the steadily upclimbing Goodman, Chicago passes first judgment on some of the most important plays that are staged in this country. And I fancy the records will show that Chicago anticipates the theatrical taste of New York almost as accurately as New York, in a wider way, anticipates the theatrical taste of Chicago.

In the realm of opera there is no direct competition, and comparison must take a sleeper jump; for it would seem that Mr. Insull and Mr. Kahn have a gentleman's agreement by the terms of which the Chicago Civic and the New York Metropolitan Opera Companies no longer invade each other's home towns. Thus the two cities at the extremes of the Twentieth Century and Broadway Limiteds are each permitted to believe that its own opera is the better. But if I were arguing for the supremacy of Chicago in the arts of the ear and throat I should he inclined to concur with neighbours as naive as myself who believe that Chicago's Mary Carden is herself a Metropolis, just as Prof. Michelson is Science and Dr. Stock, Music.

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A comparison of opera houses is, of course, out of the question until the Metropolitan shall have acquired a new home. The new Civic Opera House possesses what Max Reinhardt and Eddie Cantor are agreed in terming the finest stage in the world. The house itself, however, would seem to he debatable; families—good old Chicago families, as time flies on the shores of Lake Michigan—have been disunited by arguments over the opera house that Samuel Insull built. A son will call its architecture Balaban, a daughter Katz, a father (and in this case I vote with father) Second National Bank.

But Mr. Insull is too thoroughbred a sport to care what the public calls it so long as they subscribe liberally for its operatic shows, which they do.

The Civic Theater, in the Civic Opera House building, shelters not only Shakespeare but a short season of comic opera; which I should fancy is a slight one up on New York. But incontestably unique, incomparable, is Ravinia, where, within a mosquito's flight of the Loop, Mr. Eckstein presents in the open air the song birds of the Metropolitan Opera against a counterpoint trilled by native feathered warblers.

In this delectable North Shore suburb a man may enjoy simultaneously a good opera and a good cigar, and feel much as King Ludwig of Bavaria must have felt on his best nights. I, at least, can imagine nothing grander—unless, for the World's Fair in 1933, Mr. Insull can be persuaded to move his Civic singers into Soldier Field Stadium, seating 145,000.

Size is really no object in Chicago. Although the city bulges with "biggests," the days of dimensional bragging would seem to have gone forever. It is the out-of-town, rather than the local papers that hymn glees for Chicago's recent "biggest wholesale building in the world," a comely barn where the Palace of the Louvre could be hidden in the basement. A nice little place like the Art Institute is not "loved and avoided" as New York's Metropolitan Museum is sometimes said to he by the New Yorker. It is part of the everyday life of the people. Here some of the modern masterpieces were given shelter before the world was ready to proclaim them masterpieces; here incredible thousands of students make ready to starve in a garret as portrait painters or own their own yachts as commercial artists.

In fact, there is less culture talk than culture in what was once known as the porkopolis. The New York Theater Guild had no trouble at all in acquiring half as many subscribers as at home for its half as long season here; somebody must die before you are eligible for an afternoon seat at the Stock Symphony; and the Gordon String Quartet has just unostentatiously passed from a local into a national institution.

There is also a temptation to gloat a bit over the sculptured architecture which has recently found expression in hundreds of gleaming towers that are presently doomed to Londonlike agedness in a drab dress of soft coal.

Your citizen of the Second City is likely to be a shy fellow, a bit deliberate and a lot literal. For is it not truthfully related that when Mr. Benjamin Marshall, architect of many a historied Chicago hostel, entertained the Prince of Wales at his suburban home in Wilmette (thereby earning his description as a hail fellow Wilmette) and asked one of his guests if he had met the Prince, that diffident bachelor reflected gravely and answered, "No, 1 don't believe I have?"