Page:Once a Clown, Always a Clown.djvu/275

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WOLFIE LOVES THE LAMBS

no longer could afford to pay the rental. The Actors Order of Friendship then leased out the entire property and rented rooms in the Columbia Theater building, where it meets periodically. Equity has so usurped the original purpose of the order that it now functions only as a fraternal insurance body, and it will die, presumably, with its present membership.

The Green Room Club moved to Number 19 West Forty-eighth Street, where it has remained since. It has absorbed a club organized by managers and producers eighteen years ago and which they failed to maintain, and now includes such figures as Mr. Belasco and Mr. Frohman among its members.

Before disaster overtook the White Rats, the vaudevillians had built a large and handsome club in Forty-sixth Street west of Broadway. Debt and the failure of the strike closed the club. E. F. Albee, overlord of vaudeville, saw his opportunity, bought the property and installed his National Vaudeville Association in it. The N. V. A. is a sort of "company union." It offers illness and death benefits, maintains a hospital in Chicago as well as a club in New York, and membership is enforced at ten dollars a year upon all of the eight thousand

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