Al Jolson

ONCE DOOMED TO DIE FOR WANT OF TEN CENTS— HE LIVED TO TEAR UP $ 1,000,000.
 
So far as I know, there is only one actor in America who ever tore up a contract worth a million dollars.
 
You have seen him in pictures, you have sung his songs, you have laughed at his jokes. He made the first full-length talking picture. And he also made the greatest box-office attraction that was ever created in Hollywood — a picture that earned twelve million dollars, an all-time record that has never been approached by any other film.

That picture was "The Singing Fool," and the man who starred in it was Asa Yoelson — Al Jolson to you.
 
Jolson once drew a salary of $31,250. a week and he drew it for more than six months without doing a day’s work. That means he was paid almost a million dollars for doing absolutely nothing. To be sure, he was ready to perform; but his employers, United Artists, had no script ready to shoot just then; so he played golf and collected a salary that made the income of the President of the United States look like a stenographer’s stipend.
 
Then he did one of the most unexpected and generous acts that has ever brightened the cynical darkness of Hollywood. The depression had just struck. Joseph Schenck, a life-long friend of Jolson’s, had lost heavily. There was still more than a million dollars due Al Jolson on his contract; but he tore the contract up and handed it back to Joseph Schenck, head of United Artists, saying: ‘'Forget it! I’m not doing anything for you and you don’t need to pay me any more money.”
 
Charles Schwab once created a sensation in Wall Street by tearing up a salary contract that guaranteed him a million dollars a year; but this once-poor actor tore up a contract that was paying him almost two million dollars a year. Nobody asked him to do it; nobody expected him to do it.
 
Al Jolson had tuberculosis when he was a boy. When he went to a free clinic at Bellevue Hospital for treatment, the doctors told him that if he didn’t get away to the country at once, he would be dead in six months. The prescription they gave him was free, so was the medicine; but when he went to get it, he discovered that he had to pay ten cents for a bottle. He didn’t have a dime — so to this day, he has never got the medicine.
 
He recovered without it, anyhow — and without the doctors. But he has never forgotten how it felt to be doomed to die because he didn’t have ten cents. That is why he now spends twenty thousand dollars a year supporting free beds for poor people in a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Adirondacks at Saranac Lake. He has been doing this for eleven years; and he has never seen half of the people whose lives he has saved.
 
I’m often curious about people’s birthdays; but when I asked Al Jolson when he was born, he said he didn’t know. He thinks he is about forty-five or fifty; but he isn’t positive. He was born of poor parents in Russia, born in a little hut with a straw roof and a stone floor. One year was about like another, and his parents didn’t bother to keep track of a little thing like the birth of a child. So he hasn’t the remotest idea whether he was born in 1885 or 1886 or 1888. But after he became famous, his friends wanted to give him birthday presents, so he had to pick out a birthday. He knew it would be bad business to be born in the autumn, for actors are always broke at the beginning of a season. But they are usually feeling pretty flush in the spring, and since May is a nice, warm month, he decided to be born in May — May 26, 1888. He admits that date is not accurate, but it is near enough. Anyhow, it can t be more than four or five years out of the way.
 
Jolson got his first job on the stage when he was a child — a small part in a play called "Children of the Ghetto." He had just one line — he had to rush on to the stage and shout: "Kill the Jews!”
 
His father had a job just then slaughtering cattle in a kosher butcher shop during the week and singing in the synagogue on the Sabbath. So when he heard that his son was shouting in the theatre, "Kill the Jews!” young Jolson’s career almost came to an abrupt end.
 
When Jolson first came to New York, he was penniless, and had to steal a ride from Washington. He was so unsophisticated that when he got to Newark, New Jersey, he thought he was in New York City; so he got off the train and had to sleep that night in a thicket of grass in the Jersey Meadows. When he awoke, his legs and hands were a mass of mosquito bites — raw, swollen, and bleeding.
 
When he finally got to New York, he slept on park benches and on trucks down by the water front. For days he went hungry. The best he could hope for then was a chance to "jump for nickels” in some Bowery saloon.
 
Lee Schubert once remarked that there were only two legitimate actors in America who could go into any big town and fill a theatre on the strength of their names alone. One was Fred Stone, and the other was Al Jolson.
 
Yet Al Jolson told me that the first time he ever appeared at the Winter Garden, he was heartbroken. It was a long show, and he didn’t go on until after midnight. He got no applause. Nothing. Not a ripple. That night, after the curtain was rung down, he stumbled up Broadway, sick with discouragement. He lived on Fifty-fourth Street, but he was so dazed that he walked all the way to Ninetieth Street — forty-six blocks out of his way — before he realized where he was!
 
And the furthest thing from his thoughts at that moment — from even his most delirious dreams — was that some day his name would flash like an aurora over Broadway, and that managers would leap at the chance of paying him ten dollars a minute!