Monday, Dec. 11, 1933
"Names make news." Last week these names made this news:
Looking up from the paper he was reading in the executives' washroom of his McGraw-Hill building in Manhattan, bald, white-bearded James Herbert McGraw, 72, head of McGraw-Hill Publishing Co., saw two bandits, faces masked by towels, levelling pistols at his head & heart. "Hello," said he calmly. Abruptly he snatched the towel from the face of one of the bandits, barking, "Who are you? What are you doing in this building?" When the other pulled out a rope to bind him, Publisher McGraw lunged forward, grappled with both, unmasked the second bandit. His companion dropped his revolver, pulled out a hammer swaddled in a towel. Publisher McGraw dodged, then prudently subsided. They bound & gagged him, took $90 from his coat pocket, escaped. Released by a porter. Publisher McGraw gruffly told newshawks: "I wanted it kept mum, because I'm not much of a hero. I'm a very modest young fellow."
On to a platform before the Philadelphia Lecture Assembly strode slender, freckle-faced Eva Le Gallienne of Manhattan's Civic Repertory Theatre and strapping, hollow-eyed Ethel Barrymore. Invited to address the Assembly earlier in the week, Miss Le Gallienne failed to appear, was now making amends by speaking gratis. Several hundred Philadelphia socialite women, including Mrs. Upton Favorite, Mrs. Trenchard Emlen Newbold and Mrs. Arthur B. Waters, the Assembly's director, who had scolded her roundly and threatened to sue, appeared to hear her apologize. But Miss Le Gallienne had no apology to make. She rapped out: "I'm disappointed in all of you. You don't know how hard we work. Ill or well, if our mothers are dying or our dearest friends ill, we must be there at the theatre. Does such training make us break appointments? In 20 years I have never missed a professional engagement."
At the end of her speech about a National Repertory Theatre she smilingly told her audience: "I have a great treat for you ladies this morning. I have brought along Ethel Barrymore." Hearty applause died abruptly as Actress Barrymore strode imperiously to the platform's edge. Her voice quivered with rage. "Miss Le Gallienne does you great honor to be here," she began. "I do you honor to be here. I don't see why we bother to speak to you at all. You have no appreciation. You don't know anything. You never have known anything. You never will know anything. I don't see why we speak to you, especially to a moronic audience such as we have in Philadelphia. We've worked. We've sacrificed. We've tried to please you. Pfht! What difference does it make? I found this child. She has done more for the American stage than anyone else in the world. And yet you dare criticize her, a woman of her intelligence, because she doesn't appear at some meeting or other that she doesn't know anything about. My grandmother had a theatre here in Philadelphia, when people still had manners. . . . You should be happy to come here two or three times to hear Miss Le Gallienne once."
The Philadelphia ladies were speech less until their guests had left. Then broke out an indignant babble: "Mortifying! . . . Impudent! . . . Worst insult!" Said Mrs. George Horace Lorimer: "Miss Barrymore's last two plays have been unfortunately chosen and Philadelphians do not like them. Hence Miss Barrymore is resentful. . . ."
Asked at a Washington party. "Why haven't we heard more from you?'', President Roosevelt's Republican fifth cousin Alice Roosevelt Longworth replied. "I am trying terribly hard to be impartial and malevolent at the same time."
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