Jitterbughouse

Last week the world's biggest dance hall opened in Manhattan and thousands of the jitterbug youth of the Melting Pot jounced, flung and stomped themselves into possession of it. The hall was Manhattan's famous Madison Square Garden, turned into a summer Dance Carnival at a cost of $100,000 by Showman Monte Proser.

For 100 nights, under mammoth silver palm trees rising toward a starry blue-silk sky, a changing trio of bands will blare out over a vast dance floor holding 5,000, spectators' stands seating 4,000, cafe sections seating 1,500. Admission is 66-c- on weekdays, 88-c- on weekends and holidays, with the partners of Service men admitted free.

At last week's opening, while Benny Goodman's brasses blasted One O'Clock Jump at a jumping, sweating tumult, it seemed that Proser's enormous joint had a chance to make the 30,000 weekly admissions and $18,000 weekly gross estimated as necessary to break even.

Small, swarthy, horn-rimmed Monte Proser has the somewhat weary, harassed countenance of many men who have endured and survived Broadway and Hollywood show business. Born in London, he came to the U.S. at 14, was Food Administrator Herbert Hoover's office boy during World War I. He has also been a stable boy, peanut salesman, barker and roustabout for Snapp Brothers' Circus, paid promoter of theatricals on Long Island and in Yellowstone Park. As a Hollywood press agent he plugged Mary Pickford, Harold Lloyd, George Arliss, Lupe Velez, Hedy Lamarr. During the past decade he press-agented more than 50 night clubs, in 1936 opened his own La Conga in Hollywood, followed it with several Beachcombers (in Manhattan, Providence, Boston, Miami Beach) and Manhattan's Copacabana. In these resorts he has featured tropic atmosphere and a tall, affirmative rum drink called the Zombie, shrewdly advertised: "Only Two Zombies to a Customer." Imperturbable showman Proser himself doesn't like rum, sticks to Scotch-&-water, once told a New Yorker reporter: "I got a lot of saloons. So what?"

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