“Dangerous,” he repeated, as a grin, appreciative but tender, lighted
up his rugged features. Then, with conviction, “_I’ll_ say it is!”
_McClure’s Magazine_
YOU’VE GOT TO BE SELFISH
BY
EDNA FERBER
YOU’VE GOT TO BE SELFISH[7]
By EDNA FERBER
When you try to do a story about three people like Sid Hahn and Mizzi
Markis and Wallie Ascher you find yourself pawing around among the
personalities, helplessly. For the three of them are what is known in
newspaper parlance as national figures. One n. f. is enough for any
short story. Three would swamp a book. It’s like one of those plays
advertised as having an allstar cast. By the time each luminary has
come on, and been greeted, and done his twinkling, the play has faded
into the background. You can’t see the heavens for the stars.
Surely Sid Hahn, like the guest of honor at a dinner, needs no
introduction. And just as surely will he be introduced. He has been
described elsewhere and often; perhaps nowhere more concisely than on
page 16, paragraph two, of a volume that shall be nameless, though
quoted, thus:
“Sid Hahn, erstwhile usher, call-boy, press agent, advance man, had
a genius for things theatrical. It was inborn. Dramatic, sensitive,
artistic, intuitive, he was often rendered inarticulate by the very
force and variety of his feelings. A little, rotund, ugly man, with the
eyes of a dreamer, the wide, mobile mouth of a humorist, the ears of a
comic ol’ clo’es man. His generosity was proverbial, and it amounted to
a vice.”
Not that that covers him. No one paragraph could. You turn a fine
diamond this way and that, and as its facets catch the light you say,
“It’s scarlet! No--it’s blue! No--rose!--orange!--lilac!--no--”
That was Sid Hahn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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