Top Slander

Los Angeles' Burbank Theater was known to the trade as a "hoodoo house" when a lean, sandy-haired, 23-year-old manager named Oliver Mitchell took it over in 1899. Weaned in the theater as a "top stander" in a family acrobatic act called The Three Moroscos, Oliver assumed the name Morosco. He struck out for himself at the age of twelve, became assistant manager of a theater at 16. At 35, in the Burbank, he produced a musical hit, The Bird of Paradise.

From then on Oliver Morosco was one of the nation's most spectacular showmen. From a succession of Broadway hits including The Bat and Peg o' My Heart (with a glamorous new star, Laurette Tay lor) he made more than $5,000,000. But an 18-year-long plagiarism suit over The Bird of Paradise dogged most of his career, and in 1923 he was neck deep (though later cleared) in a $2 1/2 million stock swindle involving his vast theater holdings. About that time, his shrewd judgment of box-office began to fail him. After passing up an option on Abie's Irish Rose, he went bankrupt in 1926. Assets: $200. Liabilities: $1,033,404.

Like those of many great theatrical contemporaries, Oliver Morosco's name still blazes from the marquee of a Broadway theater. As playgoers queued up there last week for tickets to The Voice of the Turtle, the man whose name was on every ticket lay in a Los Angeles morgue. Morosco had died at 69 under the wheels of a streetcar in the city where he first made good. He was dressed in a threadbare suit. In his pocket was eight cents.

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