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Shinn has designed a rotary engine and an automobile. He won the commission for the enormous murals in Trenton's City Hall by building an eight-foot model of the building, through the windows of which the late John Roebling (wire rope) was delighted to discover a reproduction of his own Factory No. 9. He decorated the interior of the Belasco Theatre in Manhattan, has been art director for three cinema companies. And, best of all, he is the author of one of the most successful burlesques ever written: Hazel Weston, or More Sinned Against Than Usual. This Shinnanigan has been played continuously for 23 years and translated into seven languages. Year ago, along with Myrtle Clayton, or Wronged from the Start, it was bought by Warner Bros. for the cinema.
Newshawks found "Eve" Shinn in the middle of his gallery last week, re-enacting for the benefit of a few oldtimers another of his melodramas, dear to the author but less successful commercially than Hazel Weston. It was entitled Lucy Moore, the Prune Hater's Daughter. Leaping about the room, acting out each part and interpolating editorial comments, Artist Shinn gave his version of the plot. Excerpts:
"You see this fellow he not only hated prunes he wanted to ABOLISH them to crush the very germ out and gee whiz we had a swell machine on the stage with colored lights and the pits came out the end like bullets out of a machine-gun against a copper gong. . . . Bill Glackens* always was the villain, and he comes on with a long mustache covered with furs looking rich as hell. Lucy Moore spurns him 'cause he wants the machine as a prune pitter to make pies but wait a minute you haven't heard anything there's three more acts of it!"
Artist Shinn dines at 5:30 p. m. in order to spend his evenings working on still another drama, a morality play entitled Exterior Street.
*William J. Glackens, another of "The Eight" and long a painful disciple of Renoir, also held a retrospective exhibition in Manhattan last week. Critics were polite, could find little of his work as effective as the street scenes he used to do 35 years ago.