  NEW YORK: Books by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer CHICAGO: CONFIDENTIAL! By Jack Lait HELP WANTED By Lee Mortimer NEW YORK BEHIND THE SCENES NEW YORK: by JACK LAIT and LEE MORTIMER New Revised Edition CROWN PUBLISHERS, Inc. · NEW YORK COPYRIGHT, 1948, 1951, BY CROWN PUBLISHERS INC. All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or a newspaper. Sixth Printing, February, 1951 Revised Edition, September, 1951 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AMERICAN BOOK-KNICKERBOCKER PRESS, INC., NEW YORK CONTENTS pic P-s-s-t— Lait and Mortimer want a word with you—confidential: The authors had a lot of fun writing these pages. And infinitely more getting what they put into them. They both turned prematurely gray becoming Broadway-wise. What you will read here they observed, absorbed, inhaled and swallowed through the years. They lived it. This tome has no message. It may be helpful, it may be useful, but never purposeful, though it attempts to offer much sound advice. But who ever followed sound advice? If folks did, there would be no more marriages, divorces, gambling, guzzling, dancing, romancing, chasing, cheating, slickers, suckers, hussies, hangmen or hangovers—heaven forbid! The "Confidential" in the title means Lait and Mortimer, who have never been in Grant's Tomb, have been in a lot of other places not so roomy, gloomy or wide open. It means they got their stuff off the record and on the up-and-up. Therefore, this is not for Aunt Katie from Keokuk, but Uncle Dave the Deacon might find it of value next time he attends a convention in New York. If you are seeking an orthodox guide or travel book about Gotham, lay this down. You will find little about the Empire State Building, Brooklyn Bridge or the $2.50 cruise around Manhattan. The shelves of stores and libraries already groan under the burden of books on those subjects. No. This is a commentary on and compendium of the Big Burg from the inside out, with some facts and observations that could amaze, amuse and steer not only strangers, but most of those supposedly nonexistent Americans, native New Yorkers. The gaucherie of many locals as well as all yokels defies the emery-wheel polish of the world's most exciting, most thrilling and most misunderstood metropolis. The cognoscenti—you can count them on the keys of the piano that Polly Adler stored when, after 40 years of lucrative operation of the oldest profession, she quit and went to Hollywood—know a few things, but their experiences have been circumscribed. Knowing New York is a full-time career. To those who still get dizzy looking up at the tall buildings, who think a headwaiter smiles at them because he likes them, who send notes back to the stage-door tender and who think this is just Milwaukee multiplied, we cheerfully dedicate the memory of our mornings after and aspirins thereafter. We will them the thousands of waking hours when we should have been asleep, as lagniappe. But we believe that if our readers study this work assiduously and note its findings and one-way arrows, they may avoid some booby-traps. We believe so, though we don't expect so. If this volume has any aim, it has four. It is designed to tip off the frequent visitor, who "knows" his New York; to derube the first-timer or the once-in-a-whiler; to polish up the permanent resident, who is sure he knows "our town"; and to give the largest classification, the vicarious traveler who does his New York sightseeing at home, in his easy chair, a series of close-ups that he never ogled off a screen or Sunday supplement. We shoot at all ages, sexes and checkbooks. To them we present an island, hard, hostile, palms up and thumbs down—but hot. Its creed is cash. Don't try to crash it otherwise. You can't buy everything—only almost everything. And it's worth all it costs you if you buy the right merchandise in the right spot at the right time. That's why we were born, to tell you about it—confidential. PART ONE 1. MY LITTLE GAY HOME IN THE EAST This little island called Manhattan is the summer resort supreme. Never a mosquito, rarely a fly is seen. Millions live high, where it's cool and rather quiet, except for the soothing and varied whistles of the boats and an occasional fire or police siren. You don't have to be sociable with heterogeneous strangers or even your party-wall neighbors, whom you seldom know on sight. If you want to sail, there are two magnificent rivers, the broad and sporting Sound and the most breath-stopping harbor on earth. If you want mountains, you go by magic elevators to the observatories in the Chrysler Building, Radio City or the Empire State, where you get a magnificent view as soon as the suicides clear the railings. There are, even in mid-July, two score legitimate theatres offering the great hits, for shows that survive into this period are all lusty and hardy. Within easy drives are locality playhouses with several other sturdy attractions, and "straw hat" try-out and revival productions. You have a wide choice of concerts, indoor and outdoor opera, a dozen swanky or swift cabarets and a hundred minor ones. There are three big-league baseball teams within a $1.50 taxi hop from Times Square, always one and often two at home, all exciting, usually at least one out in front. There are a half-dozen boxing shows each week, al-fresco or, like most of the burg, air-conditioned. If you would attend churches, we have some of the finest and most famous cathedrals of all faiths and creeds. Half the saloons are equipped with television, and for the price of a beer you can see and hear leading sports and other biff-bang affairs as they are proceeding. There are eating places from sub-sub basements to the 85th floor, and from automats where you slip in a coin and get back a hot hamburger to the Stork and El Morocco, where you won't be allowed in, which is just as well for your bank roll. There are sidewalk cafÉs, acres of penthouse-terrace restaurants, menus and service and customs of all nations, including the Scandinavian and not excluding the Moravian. And, summer or any season, you have a feeling that the world is spinning about you—and whole little worlds, not geared just for tourists—concentrations of all nations and segments of them—even a White Russian colony. Taxis galore drop the flag at 20 cents. The average haul is a half-buck. Everything is big time. There's an air and a snap and a tang to Manhattan that is generated by championship rather than by huge mobilizations of people and of money. Brooklyn is far more populous; Chicago has more than twice the population. But there is a zip and a zing here, a supercivilized, metropolitan method of behavior, unique and indescribable. Manhattan has a nonchalance about the world and itself known nowhere else. The newspapers do not bother to publish the borough's own vital statistics. One can be born, married, have children, die and be buried, entirely unnoticed. At the other extreme, nobody is important. Celebrities get a passing glance, maybe, and not always that. Bank statements list billions in deposits and almost no one reads them. Ships from every port come and go and get a line for the record, in a few gazettes. Yet there is civic pride, there are organized boosters; Rotarians and Kiwanians and Lions meet and slap backs and call one another Pete and Baldy. No visitor can catch "the Voice of the City." O. Henry, who called it that, didn't. Nor can readers of the beloved tales of Damon Runyon. Damon was our friend and we admired him profoundly, because he could write fascinatingly, almost entirely from imagination, not from photographic impression. Characters like those he concocted never lived, around "Mindy's" or anywhere else. He laughingly said so, himself. New Yorkers compose plays about New York and any resemblance to the living or dead is carelessness. In truth, Manhattan—which for most fact or fiction material is New York—cannot be transcribed or translated. It isn't even itself! There are so many foreign and unrelated elements undergoing a steady, invisible process of blending; the picture changes slowly, yet ceaselessly; and no human camera is fast enough to catch it in the static focus of repose. No one has portrayed New York as Dickens did London or Sue did Paris. Those who tried have had to sectionalize it; none could wrap it all up into a comprehensive entity. If they grasped the financial or theatrical or criminal or social or artistic or political aspect of the city's life, they could not extend the panorama into the human, the domestic, the personal phases. If they looked on high they were so spellbound they could not turn to grope into the subterranean. Those who realized the astounding things and people could not vitalize the humble, the ordinary, the devout and industrious bread-and-butter brothers and sisters. Manhattan doesn't materialize to even those who spend their lives in it. A thrilling, throbbing mystery! Damon Runyon immortalized 47th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, as "Dream Street." Jack Lait dramatized it as "The Canyon." It is a shabby, dismal block. Its 200 yards are lined almost unbrokenly by cheap hotels and rooming houses sheltering all manner of strange characters: retired vaudevillians, down-and-out horse-players, dope fiends, grifters and grafters, pickpockets, derelicts (male and female), drunks, stage widows, miserly recluses, tars and their tarts, crap-game steerers and bottom-dealers. On fine days you see them on the sidewalks. Old women with grotesque young get-ups and peroxided hair, parading their pooches; bewhiskered, unkempt men on the church steps, passionately studying racing scratch sheets; apoplectic dipsomaniacs airing out cheap jags; actors whose world has gone by, talking of starring roles of the past—and next season. Here is the stage door of the once fabulous Palace, mecca for all vaudevillians. The theatre, pride of its builder, Martin Beck, was the hub of the old Keith-Orpheum Circuit, and on its stage appeared, for a quarter of a century, the top names of show business. Around the corner is Broadway and the Great White Way. A block to the east is prosperous Fifth Avenue, glistening in mink and pearls. But life on Dream Street goes on, oblivious of these other worlds. You may walk it at any hour. No one will molest you. Maybe a panhandler will try to mooch a quarter; maybe a flea-bitten, superannuated sister in sin will make a half-hearted signal to you that she can be had. But you won't be in danger. What goes on upstairs, in those small, old rooms, is something else. There crime and vice and con games and watering whiskey and hypoing horses are hatched. There adultery is accepted as a fact of life. There people who work are regarded as outlandish and queer. But there you find no sluggers, stickups or bullies. These are kindly folk. Violence is not in their bag of tricks. This is, rather, a community. The members recognize the right to steal, to cheat, to beg, to scheme, to mate, and to woo weird fancies with hooch and hop. But, no disorder, please—this is The Canyon! Yet in the midst of this murk and muck, grew a flower. Not a peony, not even a rose; a violet, gentle and shrinking and modest, admired and worshiped, but doomed to be crushed by the heavy hobnailed boots of the ruthless underworld and the equally pitiless protagonists of respectability. In the middle of that bleak block, in a second-story apartment, lived big, hearty Martha Geiss. She was a one-bottle and one-case bootleggers' stock exchange. She didn't handle the stuff herself, but she had worked up a trade in hotels and offices, so small buyers 'phoned her when they wanted something sent up quickly, day or night, and she in turn relayed the orders to the various petty peddlers of gin and what was supposed to be whiskey. Her commissions were never large and her work was wearisome and confining. But she always laughed and always had enough to help others and to act as a sort of mother to all the neighbors. And she was a mother—the mother of Frances, the only thing clean and virtuous and young and lovely on Dream Street. When 200-pound Martha parted with her husband and cast her lot with the lawbreakers she brought with her the child, who went to a school in the slums west of Broadway. Everybody knew her and everybody protected her. Youngsters were a great novelty in those parts and Frances was an unusually winsome and friendly one. No one around there would harm her or let anyone else even say a questionable word that she might hear. She was physically precocious and at 14 was a ripe, full-blown beauty, shy, courteous, simply but tastily dressed. Martha's heart was set on having Frances become a schoolteacher. Of course, the child had eyes and ears—very pretty ones. She knew that this was no kindergarten in which she lived. She saw the liquor and dope-pushers, the demi-mondes and the semi-men. She smiled at them all and they smiled back, but as close as they were to her they were far away. In the summer vacation, when Frances was 16, going to high school, Martha's business was rather low. It always fell off in summer, when many of the customers were in the country. Frances was eager to do her share, but Martha hated to send her into the world, where, strangely, she would not get the sheltering care and affection which had always been hers on dirty, degraded Dream Street. Across the way from Martha's window, where she could look into it on summer nights, was an Italian restaurant. Caruso, the owner, was her friend and at times her customer. She suggested that he hire Frances during the vacation as a checkroom and cigarette girl. The patronage was not of the richest, but she did fairly well, what with her beauty and affability. Then, one night, she was called to a private dining room upstairs, where some men were secluded in what seemed to be a heavy conference. At the head of the table sat a stocky, blond, not bad-looking fellow in his thirties, who bought a fistful of cigars and reached for a $10 bill. As he looked up he saw the girl—then he reached for a $20 bill. Later he came down and went on the make. She turned away and told him she never went out with men. He laughed and asked her: "Do you know who I am?" She shook her light brown curls from side to side. He put his face very close to her ear and said huskily: "I am Dutch Schultz!" In every walk of human life there is an upper class. Among the lifers in Alcatraz, who never again will freely see the light of God's sun or draw a free breath, there are classes. A man who has killed three cops looks down upon a piker who only kidnapped a child or robbed a post office. The name he whispered had an electric effect. Among the prohibition aristocracy none stood as high as Arthur Flegenheimer, a tough boy from Yonkers, who not only controlled a large section of the beer business of New York but was the king of the policy racket—the numbers—in Harlem, with political connections that went right through to the White House. Through his pudgy, uncalloused, overmanicured fingers passed $100,000,000 a year. Frances ran across the street, breathless, to Martha, and told her the news, in the same emotional exultation that would have possessed a debutante with a sudden invitation from the Prince of Wales. Martha certainly was not putting her daughter on the market for anybody, but she, too, was swept away with the mighty magnificence of the name. She advised Frances to go for a drive with him in the big, slinky, steel-jacketed and bullet-proof car that she could see from her window. Frances, hatless and flushed, ran back and got an hour off. When Dutch Schultz asked, few people questioned. As she came out, two men slipped from the front seat, and as one opened the door the other, with his hand inside his coat at his armpit where he carried his gat, looked up and down the block. Schultz and Frances got in and the door closed with that authority which only a high-priced limousine can express with a bang and a click. Within a month, Frances was Mrs. Arthur Flegenheimer. It was infatuation on the whisper of a name, but it had grown into a tremendous and all-conquering love. Few romances with figures that defy the law were ever more mutually fervent and sincere. Schultz was always in trouble. Despite the enormous sums he took in, he had to pay out, at times, more. He cheated on his Federal and State income taxes, kept enormous staffs of bodyguards and fixers and collectors, and when he wasn't hunted by the Internal Revenue men he was tracked by gunmen of rivals who wanted to take over. He was frequently arrested and numerous times shot at, and his only chance for a few hours or days of happiness with his bride was to drive to remote villages in New England or 100 miles out on Long Island, where, under an assumed name, he might hole in for a day or two before someone recognized him. Thus they lived for four years, in which time two children were born, first a girl and then a boy. She proudly named their son Arthur Flegenheimer, Jr. He bathed Frances in furs which she didn't want to wear, and weighed her down with jewels which she rarely wore; and he got her up in the middle of nights and took her to strange places, whence they frequently had to escape on a moment's notice, more than once to the music of whining bullets. On October 9, 1935, they were under cover in a hotel in Newark, N.J. They dined in their rooms and then he told her he had to meet some of his henchmen in a little restaurant. She went to a movie. Schultz walked into a little cafÉ and joined two other men on a bench in a booth. The two favorite methods of murder among the outlaws were "put him on the spot" and "take him for a ride." The first was designed to plant a victim, drawn by treachery, to be slaughtered by executioners who would know just where and when, and thus elude the uncertainties of pursuit or having to do a job in a public street. The theory of "taking for a ride" also was usually carried out through misplaced faith, though sometimes at the point of a gun, and its strategy lay in taking the body-to-be out to a quiet, lonely spot where there would probably be no police or witnesses. Dutch Schultz was put on the spot. No sooner had he sat down than the two men who had lured him there dived to the floor, as a man in a green hat stepped out from behind a pillar and gave Schultz all his six bullets in the belly, the gangster's favorite target. To make certainty doubly sure, he was shot with slugs dipped in garlic, a deadly poison to the mucous membranes of the bowels. They took him in an ambulance to a hospital, where he died raving, with Frances' name on his lips. The first she knew she was a widow was when two detectives closed in on her as she returned to her hotel. Of course, she had a faint idea of who had done it or who had ordered it done. But she hadn't been Dutch Schultz' wife for four years not to know the penalty for blowing the whistle on the Mafia which had ordered the execution. From that moment on, she was hounded and hunted by prosecutors who wanted to know who had killed Dutch Schultz; by tax collectors who wanted to know where his money was—those millions he was supposed to have cached; by his former associates, who thought they were entitled to some of the money—and where was it? She lived as a fugitive for years. She had no money. She knew of no money. She knew that he owned a brewery in Yonkers worth more than a million dollars, but he had never dared put it in his own name and those who now controlled it shrugged their shoulders and said they knew nothing of any interest he had. She went to "Dixie" Davis, his lawyer, whom Schultz had made rich, but he had nothing and knew nothing. She sold her furs and jewels, which supported her and the children for a couple of years. Then she was flat broke. She worked as a saleswoman in Bloomingdale's, as a waitress, and almost went blind inspecting minute precision parts in Sperry's. Martha had died in an automobile accident and she was alone with her babies. Not only were the essentials of living a problem, but being allowed to live was even more perplexing. For a while she refused to haul down her flag. She was Mrs. Arthur Flegenheimer and her son was Arthur Flegenheimer, Jr. But when boardinghouse keepers learned who Arthur Flegenheimer had been, and cruel little boys learned who Arthur Flegenheimer, Jr., was, Frances had to pack the little she had and move. From rooming house to cheap hotel to boardinghouse in New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island villages and the fastnesses of Manhattan tenements, where few give a damn about who lives next door, she fled and fled again as the ghost of Dutch Schultz caught up with her. Exhausted, penniless, she went back to her church, the church she had left when she married out of her faith. The priests were kind and understanding. They took the children to a place in the Rocky Mountains and, with the mother's consent, gave them a new last name. No one out there knew Dutch Schultz; few of the rugged folks had ever heard of him. Frances followed. She, too, took the name the children had assumed. We must not divulge it. She turned her back on the city which had given her birth, the city which had given her romance and the city which had booted her around and sneered and pointed in derision to her and her children, the widow and the babies of Dutch Schultz. She is a nurse in a Catholic hospital, still in her early thirties, still soft and attractive. She loves her new purpose and her new surroundings and the peace and usefulness of her life. Your authors know just where she is and who she is, but they will keep it confidential—even from her old friends on Dream Street—The Canyon! If Broadway is a "state of mind," as some phrase inventor put it, a clinical psychiatrist should diagnose it. He might isolate the precise form of dementia which drives this wacky world of fancy, flesh, piracy, pruriency and pure poesy to its multiform objectives. Nowhere else do the Lord and the Devil work so nearly side by side. Here romance, misery, murder, adultery, mother-love and human frailty are commodities; carnal appeal and ridicule and horror are inventoried and price-tagged; the money-changers throng the steps of the temples of art with none to castigate them. Slashing through the very center of traffic in solid substances, this highway of economic parasitism dominates the scene. New York is a great seaport—so are Baltimore and Boston; New York is a great factory town—so are Cleveland and Detroit; New York is a great railroad terminal—Chicago is greater; New York is a great seat of learning—so is Los Angeles. The difference is still Broadway. There is only one! In its days of richest glory, Broadway's crown jewels were its masters of stage production; their thrones were its theatres where their works reigned. Of all these, not even excepting the brothers Frohman, the most lustrous was David Belasco. He covered a wider range of time as well as of topic. He was the archdirector, a playwright of cunning talent, a manager and star maker. He was a more intensely exciting character than any he ever dreamed up. He built the Belasco Theatre, which was his show-case, his workshop, his royal castle, his private museum, and his play pen. Past 76, he was vigorous, virile, and planning for the future. Mr. B. (even his mistresses called him that) told one of your authors, who was his intimate friend despite a wide disparity in ages, that he couldn't truly interest himself in a play unless he had a sweetheart in the cast. Handsome, distinguished, with hypnotic and penetrating eyes under black lashes in contrast with snow-white hair, wearing always a priestlike costume which he had designed and would never explain, his years did not dim the electric effect he exercised on beautiful women. Six floors above street level, over the stage flies of the Belasco, he had fitted up a private gallery housing the spoils of the ages—tapestries, paintings, rare furniture, Venetian glass, armor, snuffboxes, statues, miscellany. Beside it was a complete living suite, practical but furnished with antique plunder. There he often lived while in the pangs and ecstasies of conception, preparation, and consummation of his plays. Few ever penetrated that sanctum. He had another private retreat on the balcony level, walled in off the nave. There he received esoterically but with broad hospitality, with a steward to serve drinks and tidbits. In that room, one night, while a hit play was in action below, he got word from his stage manager that a feminine principal had fluffed some lines. He sent for her after the act. In the presence of one of your authors, he berated her as a gold-bricker and an ingrate. "I gave you everything you ever had," he shrilled. "And the first thing I ever gave you was a bath!" She bitched up no lines in the next act. The next season another beauty gave him the romantic interest he required for a later success. At the height of its run, he was stricken with pneumonia. His amazing constitution and will licked it, though he had passed his 76th birthday. Weakened as the great Belasco was, the soul of the great lover still burned within him. He had been in retirement for weeks. The girl, a blonde this time, was young, and, he feared, fickle. As long as he was on his feet, none of his mistresses dared stray around. But he had been laid up for weeks. The inamorata of the moment was ensconced in a private three-story residence not far from the Gladstone Hotel where he lived. Because of his family she could not come to see him during his illness. He did not tell her when he would be allowed out again. And, the first night he could ambulate, he decided to spy on her. He set up his post across the street, where, from behind a light-pole, he could look up and over. A sudden rainstorm poured out of the sky, and with it a cold wind. But he had seen a shadow—of a man and woman, it seemed to him. And with the consuming zeal and drive with which he did everything, he remained there, drenched and shivering, ignoring everything but those windows. He found out nothing. But the exposure resulted in a second attack of pneumonia. That tawdry anticlimax ended the life of the genius at whose feet Broadway had bowed—a martyr to suicidal jealousy at his advanced age—jealousy over a run-of-the-mill gal whose name no one would remember on the street that will never forget him. a.—Give My Regards to Broadway When Georgie Cohan penned his crude classic, New York's Main Drag ran from Herald Square at 34th Street, on Broadway, to Times Square at 43rd Street, with tentacles precariously reaching northward a few blocks and a few outposts of the Tenderloin's last frontiers stretching southward. Broadway's uptown growth had been progressive from historic days when the theatre and hotel zones were around City Hall Park, not far from the Battery. During the years, successively, Diamond Ditch moved up, centering at 14th Street, then again at 23rd Street, coming to anchor at Herald Square before its final migration to Times Square. Within memory of men who for old time's sake are still called "middle-aged," the crest of the White Way was in the 30's. Here such noted playhouses as the Herald Square, Garrick, Empire and Casino had clustered about them the town's half-a-hundred legit theatres. The still standing and thriving Metropolitan Opera House was then the Mecca of Pittsburgh millionaires. On Broadway, in the district and its side streets, were famous cabarets and night clubs, places like the Normandie, the Pre-Cat, CafÉ l'Opera and others. The tide imperceptibly but inevitably flowed northward. Even while Herald Square was in its ascendancy, Times Square bloomed and blossomed, with 42nd Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, flashing more legitimate theatres than any other block in the world. By the end of World War I, Gay Gulch had crossed the great divide, was almost entirely north of 42nd Street, though many theatres and a few night clubs continued to stay below 42nd Street as late as the early 20's. The coming of Prohibition found most of Gotham's glamor studding what we still call the White Way. The Paramount Theatre now occupies the site of Shanley's famed cafÉ. The Claridge, popular-priced tourist hangout, was originally Rector's and later, as the Claridge, top spot for stage and movie names. The Knickerbocker Hotel, with its memorable bar and the Parrish painting of King Cole, was at 42nd and Broadway. Today it is the Newsweek Building. The King Cole painting now hangs in the aristocratic bar of the St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue. The Palais Royale operated in the present location of the Latin Quarter, at 48th; the New York Roof was atop a structure on the site now occupied by the new Criterion Theatre; the Bartholdi Inn, celebrated theatrical boardinghouse, was at 46th and Broadway, where Loew's State now stands. The coming of Prohibition dispersed the pickle factories. The big places with grand old names couldn't stand up without liquor revenue. The wining and dining industry was taken over by a new breed and operated in side street cellars and stables and old residences. At the same time, a number of new night clubs, mostly intimate affairs, were opened on Broadway. These were not supposed to be speaks. You brought your own makin's and they supplied the set-ups. If you forgot your flask and they knew you, they'd get you all you could carry. The most celebrated speakeasies were clustered in every side street of the 40's and 50's on both sides of Broadway, and down to the East River. Some of the most famous night clubs of the present period such as the Stork Club and Leon & Eddie's began as humble blind tigers. More about them in later chapters. Among the rooms best remembered from the torrid 20's are the El Fey, Tex Guinan's, the Madrid, the Hotsy Totsy, the Abbey, the Silver Slipper, the Plantation, the Argonaut, the Frivolities, La Sportiva, Cap Williams', the 50-50 Club, and Sid Solomon's Central Park Casino, which was Jimmy Walker's night "City Hall." Some had lurid histories, with gangland killings and knifings an almost everyday commonplace. But many of today's Hollywood and Broadway greats came out of this hurly-burly. Harry Richman and Morton Downey both played pianos in speaks. Georgie Raft hoofed at Roseland dance hall, later for Tex Guinan, at $50 a week. Joan Crawford, then Lucille Le Seur, worked as a show gal at the Frivolities, where a fabulous story of Cinderella on the Main Stem happened. It was the custom on Sunday nights to hold chorus girl "opportunity contests," at which outstanding youngsters appeared and sang or danced. The winner was awarded a $50 bill. These contests were conducted by Nils T. Granlund, a character truly as fantastic as the lies told about him, who had been Marcus Loew's personal press agent and the first radio star in the country, working under the pseudonymic initials, N.T.G. He became the leading cafÉ man of his age. N.T.G., known as "Granny" to thousands in show business, was then directing the entertainment policy of the Frivolities, as well as ten other midtown clubs, and the "opportunity contests" were rotated from club to club, week after week. Tests of this sort, run on the level, can become tremendously dreary affairs. So Granny picked out three sparklers from as many shows and arranged for them to enter all the contests. One of his trio always won. One of these pert pigeons was a show gal named Ruby Stevens. Today, in Hollywood, she's known as Barbara Stanwyck. Another was Clare Luce—the actress, not the playwright-politician. The third was Lucilla Mendez, who became an exotic star. One Sunday night, back in the 20's, the contest was at the Frivolities. At the appointed time, each of the three took the floor and did her little song or dance. They were so good, having it down pat by now, that they expected no competition from uninitiated outsiders. But one dared it, an unknown child who looked about 13. Compared to the three sleek and sexy sirens who had preceded her, she was bedraggled. Her heels were worn down, her stockings in runs and her face shiny. The audience tittered. But she stole their hearts with a brand of dancing never before seen on jaded Gaiety Gulch. The customers cheered. They shouted. They screamed. So, though the three hot-house lovelies sneered and pouted, Granny handed the youngster the prize. And he told her he was going to put her to work at the Strand Roof, at $50 a week. The girl almost fainted. As an afterthought, N.T.G. asked her name. She replied: "Ruby Keeler." She became that almost mythical creation, "The Toast of Broadway." She was taken under the "wing" of Johnny Irish, a long since forgotten gangster, whose hoodlums saw to it no others romanced her. But Al Jolson, then the king of show business, fell—and hard. Irish, who loved her with a love that passeth understanding, called the singer to his hotel room. Al, fearing he was about to be taken for a ride, was agreeably surprised when the mobster asked what "his intentions are." In relief, Al blurted out that he wanted to marry the dancer. Big-hearted Irish adopted a noble pose, gave the girl up. "I'll take my boys to Atlantic City," he said, "and you hop an ocean liner with Ruby. Otherwise maybe some of them will get an idea you're taking her away from me and maybe they won't like it. And heaven help you if you don't marry her." She married Al Jolson at 17. She hit film stardom. Then she chucked it, still in her twenties, to marry a poor boy, rusticate in Pasadena and have four children. By 1928, it seemed Prohibition was here to stay. The easy money boys, grown fat and rich with two-by-four hideaway speaks, began to think about expanding. But when a law-evading night club got too big, too noisy, too public, even the usually complaisant cops had to smack it down. And if they didn't, a rival mob did. The hotel grills and roofs, forced to go straight to protect huge investments, long were dead ducks by now and so were the hotels. There just was no big place where a man and girl could go and have some dancing and fun, unless he was known to the gorilla at the door and could afford citrate of magnesia labeled Mumm's at $35 a throw. That year, Granlund had a vision. He conceived the idea of building a huge cabaret room large enough to pay off on quantity business alone, instead of bootlegging. As a further inducement to lure the wary man of moderate means, ducking high prices, fancy foreign headwaiters and tremendous tariffs, he invented the minimum charge, to supplant the imported and resented couvert. A syndicate built such a cabaret on Broadway, between 48th and 49th Streets, in a room once occupied by Rector's of hallowed memory, and after that having housed a chop suey palace. The new place was named the Hollywood Restaurant. It got off to an immediate success with big bands, famous acts, and the most beautiful girls this side of heaven. The great Ziegfeld, as a smart business, tied up with N.T.G. on an exchange policy, which called for a selected few of the Hollywood girls to double into the "Follies," an equal number of the glorified doubling into the Hollywood. No liquor was sneaked at the club, but if you brought your own you were sold a set-up (costing two cents) for a buck. The Hollywood's success was immediate, and before the club expired more than a decade later, it had lived to see the cover charge die. Club after club in New York, Chicago, Hollywood, Europe, Asia, South America, followed the policy of elaborate shows and minimum charge. The Hollywood was the daddy of practically every cabaret in business today. This revolution, plus the hard times following 1929, again changed the face of Rue de Revelry and environs. Even before Repeal, many clubs of the Guinan era and stamp folded, including Guinan's. On one side, they were hammered by the depression; on the other they were against the competition offered by the Hollywood and its imitators. A new crop of lovelies had come up, were displayed and went on to Hollywood. To mention one, Alice Faye—a Hollywood Restaurant pony. Rudy Vallee, leading the band there, adopted her as a protÉgÉe. He later took her with him into George White's Scandals, in which he starred. Alice, who had dark brown hair in those pre-blonde days, did one bit number. It was enough, with Rudy's backing, to show trained talent scouts. Soon came the equally large and elaborate Paradise Restaurant, across Broadway from the Hollywood, to compete. The syndicate which built it lured N.T.G. away from the Hollywood, some said at the point of a gun. There were times during those shimmering nights when show girls, those with followings, were paid as much as $250 a week simply to undulate across the floor. Many were driven to work in Rolls-Royces. Minks—even sables—were a dime a dozen. Naked was the doll whose arms weren't covered with diamond bracelets. Fifteen years ago, the hegira to the East Side had not gotten under way. Playboys, head salesmen, mobsters, visiting firemen—all fast with a buck—nightly made happy the hearts of headwaiters. c.—From the Circle to the Square Though what the world calls "Broadway" is not a street, but a condition, the purpose of these few pages is to tell you about the thoroughfare named Broadway, and more specifically, that part of it now the Rialto of the western world. This meandering bit of avenue, following the tortuous curve of an ancient cow path, is delimited south of 42nd Street by the flourishing wholesale garment industry; and, north of Columbus Circle, by Central Park and automobile row, some of which extends south of the Circle, encroaching into the White Way as far as 54th Street. So, all the Glittering Gash can honestly claim for its own is 12 short blocks, measuring exactly three-fifths of a mile. This is the street of a million lights, of a broken heart for every bulb, and more bulbs every night. This is Gotham's Main Drag; strangely, save for the milling crowds and the blinding Mazdas, it has not now and has not had for the past decade those features which are universally supposed by all the people "in the know" all over the world, except in New York, to be on Broadway. At this writing, on the whole "street," there are but two theatres permanently devoted to the legitimate stage. But there are more than 30 legitimate theatres in New York. All, except the aforementioned and a handful on parallel avenues, are located east and west of Broadway, in narrow side streets in the 40's and 50's. Of about 1,500 licensed cabarets in New York, there are at this writing but four with entrances on the Stem. If, from seeing the film of that name, you thought 42nd Street—where it crosses Broadway—is the center of Manhattan's mad gaiety, you have much to learn. That thoroughfare, once the home of a dozen proud theatres including the New Amsterdam of red plush and wonderful memories, is now devoted exclusively to "grind" movie houses, penny arcades, flea circuses, army and navy goods stores, orange juice stands and frowzy but friendly dames. Broadway teems with dime dance halls, open air hot dog counters, photo and shooting galleries, souvenir and novelty holes-in-the-wall. It is the honky-tonk that was Coney Island, the crossroads carnival. But, strangely enough, in the daytime, when the bright lights that draw the rubes are off and Broadway's sidewalks are comparatively free, it reverts to its old estate as the home and capital of the entertainment world. For here, and nearby, are the offices of the theatrical producers, the agents who sell the acts, the dance studios where embryo chorus fillies learn to hoof; the costumers and the hooters, the scenic artists and designers—and Tin Pan Alley. When Mike Jacobs moved his handmade teeth and his principality of pugs a few feet west to Madison Square Garden, he broke up a mongrel marriage of sock and song, which had long been the Brill Building. An old-fashioned, ten-story structure, smoke-grimed, with creaking and groaning elevators, it had become the stronghold and nerve center of two giant industries. Prize-fighters, the tycoons and tramps who manage them, rubbers, sponge-carriers, trainers and the motley mob which gathers around the boxing racket rubbed against music publishers, composers, lyric writers, piano players, arrangers and the others of the equally heterogeneous individuals engaged in creating and selling the songs of the world. On the main floor, facing Broadway, are two cafÉs—the Turf, hangout for musicians, and Dempsey's, rendezvous of pugs. Across the street, on the 49th Street side, is the Forrest Hotel, long the secondary concentration headquarters for the boys of Jacobs' Beach. Up the street and across Eighth Avenue is the Garden, the Taj Mahal of the biff business. In the dingy Brill Building, day and night, swarm the unsung individuals of the singing empire, in every respect unique and little known outside its own realm. There are 320 firms in New York City that publish music. Of these a dozen are highly successful, another half dozen do well and the rest are mostly shoestring affairs, picking up the ragged edges and discards of the leaders. The sine qua non of a music publisher is his demonstrating rooms. These are usually tiny cubicles scarcely larger than the battered upright pianos they contain, each manned by a key-thumper who can transpose, ad lib and torture a melody into any tempo for any purpose from a soft-shoe dance accompaniment to a cry for help that would break your heart. Getting these songs before the public, or as the trade terms it, the "plug," is perhaps the soul of the industry. There are scores of men and women infesting every radio station and theatre where "flesh" performances still remain. Their business is to get their songs sung or played or whistled or even ground out on a hand organ. The big stars are hard to approach and the business, which is organized, has long ago put a foot down on what was formerly an elaborate system of bribery, so that personality, pleading, pull, as often as actual merit and fitness, go to place songs with leading orchestras and ace headliners. But a late development in the business, one which suspiciously smacks of a restraint of trade violation, is the practice of some publishers of giving a stock interest in their firms to noted crooners, band leaders and disk jockeys, who in return "plug" the latest publications of the companies in which they are interested. An offshoot of this kind of tie-up, which has the further effect of keeping the compositions of the unknown or the unelect from the market, is off-the-record agreements between the principal publishing houses tied up with singers and band leaders to play only the product of the companies in the charmed circle. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours. The demonstrating offices are besieged by ambitious youngsters, failures and never-could-be's who think that they can find a "Yes, We Have No Bananas" or "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" to draw them to the top overnight. These are inconsequential persons and they are insulted and refused, but they break through here and there. For a bad singer, all songs are bad. Yet it is in the nature of the stage-struck never to admit that they have failed, but to carry the deathless conviction that it is the "material." They haunt the music publishers, fighting for a chance at the latest, always with high expectations that this time this will be it. So the Brill Building, overrun as it was for years with every element of the prize ring and the sheet music world and its vocalists and hoofers and bandsmen, naturally became a beehive for minor agents, who pick up shabby fees from unimportant performers. Some of these have offices in telephone booths and some of them only in their hats. For a commission they will try to sell anything to anybody. They watch the cheap saloons for a "disappointment"—which means that an act has fallen out temporarily or permanently because of delirium tremens, dismissal or death; they try to induce other saloons, without entertainers, to try some—find small, off-key dens and seek to sell them a singer or a sister act. The amount of aggressiveness and persistence they put into their misspent endeavors would probably get them a good income anywhere else—but they would be out of "show business," and they never will be. |
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