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Though the 376 towns of Manager Judson's chain usually take Community's cabbage along with its caviar, they actually get a larger quantity of big-time music than would otherwise come their way. The kicks against Columbia's system have come not from its customers but from its commodity: the artists themselves. Biggest bugaboo Columbia has today is Lawrence Tibbett's dress-collar union, American Guild of Musical Artists. A. G. M. A. has never liked Columbia's practices of giving its artists oral contracts, exploiting a few big names, never letting its artists know what prices they are fetching. Manager Judson keeps his own books, and keeps them to himself.
Employe Judson. To the few independent managers who can subsist on the crumbs that Columbia and NBC let fall, the wholesale chains are objects of mingled horror and envy. Columbia's president draws his share of that feeling. But Judson loses no sleep over what his less successful rivals think of him. Looking like a Daily Worker caricature of a capitalist, he sits behind an enormous French walnut desk in Manhattan's Steinway Building, continuously smoking big Havana cigars. Says he: "Managers are employes of artists. An artist is perfectly free to hire any manager he wants." But when A. G. M. A. representatives last month wanted to look at Employe Judson's books (on the theory that the employer has a right to know how the business is going), Employe Judson refused pointblank.
Employe Judson regards Lawrence Tibbett's A. G. M. A. as just so many howling Reds. "The American people won't stand for being told that a great artist cannot appear before them because he hasn't a union card." Asked whether a young, unknown artist with an independent manager has any chance against the competition of the big chains, Manager Judson replies: "If he's a good artist and has a good manager, God himself couldn't stop him."
* A member of an old-fashioned German street-band.
* The cost of getting Community Concerts into operation was $140,000. Judson regards this sum as a loan to Community's artist-clients, which they are gradually "repaying." Their "debt" still amounts to $94,000.