Paul Moss is a big, grey-haired Jew whom Mayor LaGuardia picked to be New York's Commissioner of Licenses when he turned Tammany out of City Hall three years ago. Since the power to license is the power to reform, Commissioner Moss, who is as notable for his integrity as for his dapper dress, lost no time suppressing shortweight ice dealers, market racketeers, dirty magazine publishers.
In private life. Commissioner Moss's business was show business. He and his brother, Benjamin S. Moss, were pioneer chain cinemansion operators, he coproduced a hit called Subway Express and for a long time was a prominent Theatre Guildsman. It was only natural that Commissioner Moss should concentrate his reform zeal on Broadway. He requisitioned dress rehearsal seats to all productions so that if a show was dirty it could be cleaned up without the furor of revision after the opening. He made all casting offices take out licenses, rid the city of unscrupulous booking agents. In 1934 he requested that burlesque houses tear out their stage-to-audience runways, gave them six months to restore decency to their performances. The burlesque producers tore out the runways but that was all. Last week, after three patient years, Commissioner Moss made theatrical history when, with one fell swoop, he darkened 14 burlesque houses, threw 2,000 theatrical workers out of work, and at least temporarily ended what is professionally known as "louse opera" in the city where it was born and has flourished rankest.
No burlesque theatre ever pretended to be on the same moral plane as a theological seminary. Columnist Westbrook Pegler recalls a pre-War burlesque house on State Street in Chicago where, after the performance, the comedian auctioned off the girls to members of the audience, "who claimed them then and there and took them, still in costume, to the beer hall in the rear. Possibly they married and settled down in the suburbs to raise large families of respectable Americans, but from the way things seemed to be going about midnight that was impossible." Pre-War burlesque, however, was not in the same class with burlesque since the Depression.