Orpheum's $50,000 liquor bill owed to the firm Meyerfeld, Mitchell and Siebenhauer. Accounts differ on whether Walter lost total control of his organization at this point or was able to continue with Meyerfeld as a principal partner and investor. Meyerfeld did become the head of the Orpheum Circuit the following year when Gustav Walter died in Los Angeles while being prepared for an emergency appendectomy operation. Meyerfeld had the means to purchase the outstanding shares of the Orpheum Circuit from Walter's heirs before launching an aggressive expansion of their operation west of the Mississippi River with the help of Martin Beck, his gifted general manager. By 1911 the Orpheum Circuit had grown to be the largest in the West, owning outright twelve grand theaters with leases on dozens more. Meyerfeld was credited with bringing "modern vaudeville" to the Western United States with quality entertainment performed in palatial theaters. He was, if not the first, one of the first showmen in the region to pay his talent's traveling expenses to lure vaudeville acts west. Meyerfeld was admired by his contemporaries as a good manager who ran a model business organization. According to his New York Times obituary, San Franciscans considered Meyerfeld "the Rockefeller of Vaudeville". In the early 1900s Meyerfeld and Beck formed an alliance with United Booking Offices, an organization that came about following a merger between the B. F. Keith and F.F. Proctor circuits, that gave the Orpheum Circuit, through its booking agency, Central Vaudeville Promotion Co., control over virtual every vaudeville house of that time west of Chicago. This arrangement and other similar trust agreements would later lead to antitrust charges from state and federal agencies along with lawsuits from competitors at home and abroad and from groups representing vaudeville talent who felt these types of agreements between competing vaudeville circuits drove down wages. On December 3, 1919, Meyerfeld in San Francisco and Beck from New York City announced that the Orpheum Circuit had merged with several Midwestern vaudeville circuits, such as Cole and Castle, Cella and Tate, Fehr and Singer, and the Finn-Himan Corporation. The new company was to be called Orpheum Circuit Consolidated (later Orpheum Circuit Inc.) and would operate some fifty venues including every major vaudeville house west of the Mississippi River between Chicago and New Orleans and as far north as Western Canada In 1920 Martin Beck became president of Orpheum Circuit Inc. and