Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/189

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CAME DAWN AT HOLLYWOOD

at Gloversville, New York, and denouncing the Democrats and the Insurgents who had just taken the tariff off the imported product. In New York one day in 1912 or 1913 on business, the disgruntled Goldfish encountered his brother-in-law, Jesse Lasky, Cecil De Mille and Arthur Friend at lunch in Rector's. Lasky was the son of a Jewish merchant of San José, California. In the time of Queen Lil, he played cornet in the Royal Hawaiian band, the only non-native in the band. He turned up in Nome during the gold rush, tried his hand at newspaper reporting in San Francisco, drifted into vaudeville as manager of Hermann, the magician, became a vaudeville producer and made much money, most of which he lost in introducing the cabaret into America. Incredible as it seems, the cabaret is only sixteen years old on these shores. The first was the Folies Bergères, as faithful a copy of the Parisian institution as the time and locale permitted, which Lasky opened in Longacre Square in the spring of 1911. There was a $2.50 admission fee. That was more than most Broadway theaters were charging in that day, and New York could not see it.

Cecil De Mille's only claim to notice lay in the fact that he was the younger brother of

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