(4 of 6)
With a $1,000,000 bond issue sponsored by Fort Worth's businessmen, Rose's dreams took form. First was Casa Mañana, a great theatre-cafe with tables for 3,000 to 4,000 diners arranged on mounting terraces. Below in the midst of an artificial lake will be a 130-ft. revolving stage which will gyrate under "250 Eye-Bedeviling Coryphees." Some say Rose's original idea was to keep the stage stationary, make the theatre revolve.
Another Rose vision is a circular theatre with a circular curtain to show a circular audience the great Rose show, Jumbo, which boomed all last winter in Manhattan's Hippodrome, but is "just a side show" in Fort Worth. Other items: "The Last Frontier," musical super-rodeo à la Rose; "The Pioneer Palace," resurrection of an old Texas barroom and dance hall on a Rose scale; finally "The Sunset Trail," a kind of midway, one of whose attractions is to be "The Nude Ranch" with Sally Rand.
While preparing Fort Worth to startle the country, Billy Rose in person startled Fort Worth. Wearing a 10-gal. hat and chaps as if they were his native costume, the little Broadway Barnum rode around town on a gleaming mustang, sporting a deputy sheriff's gold badge, toting a bejeweled six-gun "as protection against Dallas' angry city fathers." Dallas was indeed enraged when he rented a building opposite the entrance of the Dallas Fair, started to put up a huge electric sign reading: "Forty-five minutes west to whoopee! Dallas for Education, Fort Worth for Entertainment." Dallas promptly declared the building unsafe for so large a sign.
"Billy the Kid" Rose further startled Fort Worth by going around with a two- headed snake, keeping three live wolves in his office, falling in with an oldster who insists he is Jesse James and produces birth certificates to prove it. He lectured in the First Methodist Church, showered the State with folders that made Fort Worth's Centennial look almost a 100% nude show, and attracted attention in Los Angeles and Manhattan by advertising: "WANTED: 100 bona fide noblemen, whose titles stem from either active or extinct monarchies and who, for adventurous or economic reasons, are willing to serve as dancing partners for the Flower of Texas, from July 1 to October 15. In answering submit photographs in uniform, with orders, ribbons and decorations evident, and ancestral outline, that your validity may be established easily. Give physical proportions, age and domestic status. Salary $100 a week. Bogus counts, masqueraders and descendants of the Dauphin will get short shrift. Address Billy Rose, Texas Frontier Centennial."