Max by Howard Fast

Author:Howard Fast
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media

[ S E V E N ]

Max had asked Clifford Abel, the architect, to join him and Sam Snyder and Fred Feldman for lunch at the Café Coronet on Second Avenue. Clifford Abel, only thirty-seven years old, had already earned a national reputation as an innovator alongside such men as Stanford White and Frank Lloyd Wright, except that he eschewed somberness or granite dignity. As it was said, he built palaces, which was precisely the reason Max had come to him; yet while Abel’s experience was widespread, this was his first meal in a Jewish dairy restaurant.

‘So we’ll find no meat on the menu,’ Max explained. ‘You’ll try the fish, it’s excellent. And why no meat? It ain’t like Mr Upton Sinclair wants we should all be vegetarians. It’s a question of the Jewish dietary laws. Myself, I don’t pay attention to them, but Jewish restaurants don’t want to turn away the Orthodox Jews, who won’t eat anything where meat and milk products are mixed. So to sell meat and milk dishes, a restaurant would have to have two kitchens, two cooks, two sets of dishes, and also pots and silver. Much easier to be one or the other. In this case, the Café Coronet is a dairy restaurant.’

Abel was not sure that he had followed Max’s train of thought, but he nodded agreeably and wondered about fish.

‘Not included,’ Max said.

‘You order for me,’ Abel said. ‘My tastes are catholic.’

‘I’m afraid it’s only Jewish food,’ Max said. ‘I didn’t know you were Catholic.’

‘Only in taste.’ To Feldman’s relief, Abel turned the conversation to the matter at hand, confessing that he had never built a theatre. ‘It’s a very special art, you know. They say acoustics are a science, but I question that. I should think you would have engaged Bill Tuthill. His Carnegie Hall is a miracle of acoustics.’

‘Because I don’t want no Carnegie Hall, and I don’t want no Metropolitan Opera House, and I don’t want no theatre like fifty theatres we already got. Right now, Mr Abel, the Britsky chain consists of eighteen theatres here in New York City, eleven in Philadelphia, two in Albany, two in Pittsburgh, six in Boston, two in Atlanta, and seven in Chicago. Makes almost fifty. Most of them were legitimate houses, a few were concert auditoriums, a number of music halls, and a few we built ourselves. But as far as Tuthill is concerned, I don’t think he’d know what I’m talking about. It’s a question of the movies. Sure, acoustics are important, but that’s not my first concern. In fact, I have just about decided that the stage show, the vaudeville act, is a weak sister. It’s the old music hall trying to keep pace with progress. Until now, nobody had the guts to do away with vaudeville. Yeah, I know, in the nickelodeons there was no vaudeville, but the day of the nickelodeons is over and now every exhibitor feels that if he don’t have five vaudeville acts he can’t claim to run a first-class theatre.

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