Todd Almighty
The Nine Lives of Mike Todd. 13) Art Cohn. (Hutchinson, 2 1 s.)
'Ttni sun was sinking behind the bagnios of Hen- nepin Avenue.' Mr. Cohn begins arrestingly. Eight-year-old Avrom Goldbogcn is blacking the shoes of a likely prospect. 'Lookin' for a little fun?' he asks, fishing out a card for Sally's. The boy grew up quickly through a dozen jobs, often on the fringes of crime. Bricklayers could earn good money : he established the College of Brick- laying of America with a thousand borrowed bricks and a faculty of one, an Assyrian. At eighteen he was running a construction company in Chicago, at nineteen he was broke. More jobs: another fortune made and lost, with the depres- sion, in • on, n Los Angeles;.a lottery; an attempt at mice- 'racing; gag-writing; then his first break into show business. 'Sell the sizzle, not the steak.' an old pitchman told him. He trained a moth-girl to scamper round a giant candle : at the crucial moment, her draperies caught fire. 'The most moral dance I have ever seen,' cried a clergyman and Mike Todd, as he had now become, was on his way. Master of the gimmick, he starred a penguin in a girlie-show, did The Hot Mikado with a Negro cast, and achieved the longest- running Hamlet in Broadway, historyb!, printing rave •nOtices, froM sports columnists. Mr. Cohn. who died with-Todd in the plane crash last year. obviously tried, against the run of his atlection, to get the warts into his portrait: but the man remains shadowy, a succession of coups and anecdotes. 'How. odd of God to choose Mike Todd.' someone said after a Broadway flop. And yet it was not so odd, really. His biggest gimmick was bigness.. His mammoth parties, his compulsive extravagances aroused delight in people thirsty for circuses, anger in those hungry for bread. He stirred things up. What the moral is .1 have no idea.
301IN COLT MAN
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