Roxy of Radio City
Samuel ?Roxy? Rothafel Image by Courtesy Columbia University Press
By Benjamin Ivry October 21, 2012
Cole Porter’s 1930s song hit “You’re the Top” declares: “You’re romance, / You’re the steppes of Russia, / You’re the pants on a Roxy usher.” The aforementioned pants owed their existence to Samuel Lionel Rothafel (1882-1936), known as “Roxy,” an entrepreneur, theatre builder and radio personality, honored by “American Showman: Samuel ‘Roxy’ Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry”, a biography published by Columbia University Press.
Written by Ross Melnick, “American Showman” details how Roxy constructed many palaces for movies and related entertainment, of which only Radio City Music Hall survives today. Manhattan’s long-gone, once-majestic Roxy Theatre on Seventh Ave and 50th Street was known as the “cathedral of motion pictures.” Indeed, “Moving Picture World” joked in the 1920s: “Now that New York has three cathedrals, St. Patrick’s, St. John’s, and Roxy’s, we can look for the canonization of the latter almost any day now.” Born in Bromberg, Germany (today’s Bydgoszcz, Poland) Roxy moved with his parents to Stillwater, Minnesota in 1886. He remained ever-conscious of appealing to Jewish audiences, as when he opened a West Harlem theatre, the Regent Roxy, in 1913. A journalist noted in 1923 that at the latter palace, Roxy offered a glimpse of luxury through refined music, soft lights, and quality movies: “This [Roxy] attempted where he knew he would appeal to Jewish audiences, for he knew that the Jews were a music-loving race.” Hiring resident orchestras and choirs one hundred strong in some theatres, Roxy boosted musicians’ careers, as when the Hungarian Jewish violinist Jenő Blau landed a job playing and occasionally conducting in one of Roxy’s theatres, and later became known as the famous maestro Eugene Ormandy.
By pampering audiences in exquisite surroundings, Roxy fascinated some observers such as the pioneering German-American Jewish psychologist Hugo Münsterberg, who termed Roxy the “world’s most natural psychologist” for intuitively grasping the innate link between music and then-silent film. Roxy also attracted the scorn of anti-Semites such as American novelist Theodore Dreiser, whose diary records a 1916 visit with Roxy, a “clever Jew who has become managing director of three great movie houses in New York… That apartment! And his wife! Former kikes all, raised to ridiculous heights by wealth.”
Others lauded Roxy’s talent for presenting films of quality, such as Ernst Lubitsch’s “Passion,” Robert Flaherty’s “Nanook of the North,” Robert Wiene’s “Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” and F. W. Murnau’s “Sunrise,”. Roxy was the top, and not just for his ushers’ pants.
Listen to an orchestra conducted by Ernö Rapée, longtime Roxy theatre music director, in a 1930 recording, here.
And find a 1932 recording here.
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
