Actor, producer, director. Topics include: family background; childhood and education, Rhode Island; early vaudeville career; 1919-20 Follies; Actors' strike, 1919; early plays: Sally, Irene, and Mary; Honeymoon Lane; Sidewalks of New York; Chrysler-Ziegfeld Radio Follies; New York City Democratic politics: William F. Kenny's Tiger Room; national and state campaigns, 1926-40, organization and finances; banking crisis; 1932 Federal Theater Project; organizer and first president, United Service Organizations Camp Shows, World War II; Tennessee Williams, The glass menagerie; Eugene O'Neill, The iceman cometh; comments on many people in the theater, Hollywood, business, finance, and politics, including L.B. Mayer, Marcus Loew, Sarah Bernhardt, Boris Said, George Jean Nathan, Alfred E. Smith, J.J. Raskob, Tim Mara, Henry Morgenthau, Frank Hague, Joseph P. Kennedy, Michael Curley.