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High-paid stenography satisfied Rose until he met a songwriter who bragged of making $50,000 a year. By patiently reading most of the songs published in the U. S. in the 20th Century, and discovering the frequency in hits of certain phonetic combinations (notably the double-o he used in Barney Google), Rose drilled himself into a top-flight songwriter, in his best year made $60,000. But by that time he had met and married Comedienne Fanny Brice, whose six-figure income made him feel inadequate again. Just as Depression was about to strike, Rose launched himself as a producer.
Although Crazy Quilt made Rose some money on a cut-rate road tour in 1931, Broadway paid him little heed until he cashed in after Repeal on the Casino de Paree, first of a succession of inexpensive night-club-vaudeville houses which caught on with moderate spenders. (His latest project of this kind, the Diamond Horseshoe, netted Rose $76,000 in its first ten weeks this spring.) In 1935 Rose tried the theatre again with Jumbo, a vast indoor circus which, Rose said, "will either make me or break Jock Whitney" (who helped back it). It did neither, but it got Rose an invitation the next year to help Fort Worth spite Dallas in their rival celebrations of the centenary of Texan independence. That in turn got him his chance at Cleveland.
Fort Worth and Cleveland gave Rose a reputation as an exposition mortgage-lifter, but to many of the civic patriots who conceived New York's Fair, a Rose girl show had no place in their vision of the World of Tomorrow. How Rose thawed their attitude so thoroughly that he eventually got the Fair's choicest ready-built concession for a figure 10% under that of the highest bidder, is a Broadway legend. The favorite version is that it happened when Grover Whalen went one night to Rose's Casa Mariana, saw himself roundly saluted in a World-of-Tomorrow skit.
Billy Rose still dresses badly and lives in a fast-talking, frenzied ferment from the time his day begins in his $350-a-month apartment in Tudor City. One of the shrewdest economists in the entertainment world, he hires a C. P. A. who relentlessly watches Rose and every one of his lieutenants.
At the moment, Billy Rose thinks he would like to keep up his progress toward bigger and better things by doing an Aircade, with airplanes in the sky instead of swimmers in the water. But Pressagent Maney says, reflectively blinking his eyes: "The boss and I figure that maybe we can go on a national tour, with a small Balkan War."