Drugstore Paper

Hangout for Broadway's anonymous, footsore young actors is the vast, bare-tabled, coffee-smelling basement of Walgreen's drugstore in Times Square. Into this "poor man's Sardi's," every noon, swarm the occupants of a thousand hall bedrooms, to eat and table-hop, jam the phone booths, swap hard-luck stories, pick up casting tips. Lately they have also been coming to buy a nickel's worth of reading matter.

Last fall a 30-year-old ex-newspaperman who also hung out in Walgreen's decided that these kids needed a "press" behind them. On a bank roll of $8, Leo Shull created it. In a rickety-rackety "office" where day beds jostled typewriters he started a daily mimeographed newssheet called Actors Cues. First issues rounded up every available scrap of casting news. Soon Editor Shull added a personals column, reprinted the critics' reviews, insulted the critics, lambasted snotty producers, tossed in editorials, wisecracks, rumors.

The kids in Walgreen's ate it up. They became not only Actors Cues readers but legmen as well. By last week Actors Cues claimed, a little wildly, that it had got actors 500 jobs. Shull had become a one-man clearinghouse, with scouts hunting him up and producers giving him their casting lists. In addition, Editor Shull had organized playwrighting and acting classes for his flock, wangled hundreds of free theater tickets for them, laid plans to get them an eating-and meeting-place of their own and, above all, an experimental theater. (A benefit dance last week netted $1,000 to start the ball rolling.) Circulation of Actors Cues was "nearing" 1,000, with people like Katharine Hepburn, Guthrie McClintic, Joseph Schildkraut on the mailing list.

Brash, flip, pugnacious, the paper is almost as alive as it is illiterate. Items:

>"The Fox studios is looking for a lovely Spanish type who can speak Spanish fluidly."

>"The stage mgr of 'Johnny 2 x 4' is getting very uppity-puppity with the actors."

> "If you are a grief-stricken wife who has just killed her husband and are weeping buckets, hold that pose & hurry over to the Hillman Publications who will pay you $5. . . ."

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