Then there is Sam Harris, long the junior partner of the firm of Cohan & Harris, who began his career in the arts by managing Dixon, the colored champion featherweight pugilist, and the redoubtable Terry McGovern, champion lightweight prize fighter. With tastes formed at the ringside, he launched into theat¬ rical ventures, allying himself with A1 Woods. He catered to the lower classes and made a fortune by producing atrocious melodramas in second and third class houses.
And yet this is the Sam Harris who commands the patronage of hundreds of thousands, yes, millions of theatergoers, some of whom go on innocently believing that when they invade the theater they also enter, by some mystical process, “the realms of art.”
A1 H. Woods has but one good eye. It is not this personal loss that matters, but the history of the mis¬ fortune which goes back to the time when A1 was a member of an East Side gang. The common report was that he used to play the piano in a downtown place, east of Fifth Avenue. Mr. Woods is also a dis¬ tinguished patron of dramatic art—he presented “The Girl from Rector’s” and “The Girl in the Taxi,” two of the most immoral and pointless shows of recent years. Several times he has secured the rights to certain Viennese operas, which were bad enough in themselves from a moral point of view, but which were at least constructed with true artistry; but even these he marred by an inept infusion of vulgarity and blague.