Word: showmanly
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...Bantam Barnum." Billy Rose's skyrocket career as a showman began with a miserable fizzle called Corned Beef & Roses. Desperately, he rewrote it, renamed it Sweet & Low. Though it had Fanny Brice in some of the original Baby Snooks routines (which Billy wrote), it thudded again. Billy rewrote the show a second time, renamed it Crazy Quilt, and took it on the road. Billed as "A Saturnalia of Wanton Rhythm Featuring Exotic Divertissements," Crazy Quilt played to packed houses at almost every stop. In nine months, Rose recouped his $75,000 outlay and made $240,000 clear profit...
...time Jumbo finally opened, after six months of rehearsals, it had cost Whitney a lot more. Though it was a hit, it never paid for itself. But it did put Billy Rose on the map as a showman. It put him, specifically, in Fort Worth, Tex., which hired "Mr. Brice" at $1,000 a day to stage its 1936 Frontier Centennial...
Organized for Luxury. During the Aquacade period, Billy stopped running for the first time and contemplated his million-dollar money belt. He was a famous showman. His nightclub, the Diamond Horseshoe (started in 1938), was grossing $1,250,000 a year, and ranked with Grant's Tomb and the Staten Island ferry as a Manhattan tourist attraction. Billy says of this period: "The race is over, I told myself. Stop running. You've won. Let 'em stick the wreath around your neck and snap the pictures. go on back to the barn and take it easy...
After ten years of silence, Ruth got the old showman's urge again last winter. She warmed up with three guest appearances on Rudy Vallee's radio show, then put in a three-week nightclub hitch (for $4,000 a week) at Manhattan's big, brassy Copacabana. By that time she was ready for radio again...
...after, he latched on to the biggest stunt of his career: his feud with Jack Benny. One night he assured a guest on his program, a twelve-year-old violinist, that he played the Flight of the Bumble Bee better than Benny played it after 40 years of practicing. Showman Benny knew a cue when he heard one. For ten years radio's biggest running gag has been kept alive without a single backstage strategy conference...