Broadway Connection
Though a prolific writer Hastings never learned to touch-type. This led to a never-ending search for typing help. That was how he came to be friends with Billy Rose. Billy Rose is remembered mainly as a Broadway impresario, writer and producer of many shows. He was born William Samuel Rosenberg in 1899. His first claim to fame was as a stenographer. He was trained in Gregg Shorthand by John Robert Gregg himself and at age 16 won a high-speed dictation contest. During World War I he was the chief stenographer for financier Bernard Baruch, head of the War Industries Board. Somewhere Billy Rose and Milo Hastings met and hit it off. On the train between New York and Washington Milo would dictate and Billy would record. In the 1920s Billy began to write songs. Milo thought the songs were good but he needed a stage name and suggested “Billy Rose”. Billy would bring his girlfriends over to Milo’s apartment in New York and ask Milo what he thought. When Billy married Fanny Brice in 1929 Milo and his wife Sybil were wedding guests.
In the early 1920s Hastings penned The Who-Ams, a comedy-drama, with Leslie Burton Blades. Evidently the play was never produced. A copy exists in the archives of the New York Public Library Performing Arts Theatre.
Hastings was also acquainted with Ned Wayburn the head of the Ned Wayburn Studios of Stage Dancing. Family lore holds that much of Wayburn’s 1925 book The Art of Stage Dancing was actually written by Hastings.
In 1936 during the Great Depression Hastings and Orrie Lashin (secretary to Walter Lippmann) wrote the play Class of ’29 under the auspices of the WPA Federal Theatre Project. The play is about some college graduates unable to find work during the depression and their spiritual unrest. Heywood Broun devoted one of his It Seems to Me Columns in a March 1936 to accusations that the play was socialist propaganda. The play enjoyed a brief run in New York in the Spring of 1936 and was also produced a few other places around the country.
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Famous quotes containing the words broadway and/or connection:
“We all know that the theater and every play that comes to Broadway have within themselves, like the human being, the seed of self-destruction and the certainty of death. The thing is to see how long the theater, the play, and the human being can last in spite of themselves.”
—James Thurber (1894–1961)
“We live in a world of things, and our only connection with them is that we know how to manipulate or to consume them.”
—Erich Fromm (1900–1980)