B 1,141,742 I1u S ~ '' -.., ' /" ' ~,, I.. 0.. _~. -,.. ~, = IEX Ef~~&i~II #l -Art, ^t" I t. ~ ~l.., ~b,.~C A ' ' d~ ' r:z: Q, Y i": ~ ~ -.,ir~ s. r r.. nii Ar:1 N" "Z i$~lie - AO 41 b p irr ~~i! ~ ~8... ~01.f. I~lf"Y~ J F iP2" I'., -w714 - K At 11 K _\4 N _ __ _ _ New York Nights STEPHEN GRAHAM I. I44 I a 00 %. II lb~* ~~br or ICi V. iL' 4 THE GORGE OF GENERAL MOTORS "Going along 59th Street one approaches lofty mountains." New York Ngts ~By. Stephen G raham ewAiuther of "London Nights," "cMidsummer Music,." ",(Under London, I" etc. Illustrations by Kurt Wiese New' York George H. Doran CompanyV COPYRIGHT, 1927, BY GEORGE H. DORAN COMPANY NEW YORK NIGHTS -BPRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA THIS BOOK IS AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED to PATRICIA Certain of these chapters have appeared in Harper's Magazine and in the New-Yorker, to the editors of which acknowledgment is made. S. G. I I Contents k rr If' iI I BROADWAY.... II NIGHT LIFE III EXTERIOR STREET IV MY PARTNERS. V SPEAKEASIES VI AT ROMANY MARIE'S VII AT TEXAS GUINAN'S VIII AT TEXAS GUINAN'S (SUITE) IX NEW YORKERS. X BLOSSOM-LAND XI ZELORA'S BALL XII A ROOMING HOUSE IN SPEAKEASY STREET XIII "BURLESK" XIV LIBUSE, THE CRAZY WAITER XV MOSKOWITZ XVI ROUND ABOUT POLICE HEADQUARTERS XVII CHINESE THEATRE XVIII THE BOWERY XIX FROM THE FLOP HOUSE DOOR XX A SPEAKEASY UNDER THE SKY XXI THEODOR AND THE RITZ-CARLTON ROOF XXII THE BURNING OF THE NETHERLAND TOWER XXIII MOUNTAIN SCENERY XXIV TOUGH AUDIENCES. XXV HARLEM vii PAGl 13 19 36 53 60 79 84 104 I10 122 127 135 138 147 I51 i6o 179 183 200 215 b; 223 232 234 242 CONTENTS PAGE XXVI THE SUGAR CANE. 252 XXVII EXCLUSIVE!.......256 XXVIII SECOND HALF OF THE NIGHT. 268 XXIX A NEW-YORKER FREE-FOR-ALL. 279 XXX BLEECKER........282 XXXI LIGHTED RAFTS..... 284 viii Illustrations THE GORGE OF GENERAL MOTORS FRONTISPIECE "Going along 59th Street one approaches lofty mountains." PAGE PARAMOUNT BUILDING. 5. (Near view.) Like superimposed brick-kilns the Paramount blunders upward to the moon. PAUL WHITEMAN... 21 His baton conducts the lesser lights of Broadway. FROM THE HUDSON AT NIGHT.. 39 Palaces and temples of commerce, prophetic and murmuring by day, awe-striking by night. AT THE SPEAKEASY RESTAURANT.. 6 "What is your name? Was you here before?" TEXAS GUINAN........ 85 This little girl invites you to give her a hand. SUBWAY JAM...... The "Subway Rush" is worse than the Tube in London or the Metro in Paris. ' "BURLESK"...... 139 "Just save a little ray of golden sunshine for a rainie daey! It will come in mighty han'y when the skies are grey." AT MOSKOWITZ'S...... 53 Kosher broiled, kitsi-kitsi-shitsi, and the old man wants to play his dulcimer to the king. MULBERRY BEND........ 65 A stone-throw from Police Headquarters Little Italy decks the night. FLOP HOUSE....201 Creatures that once were men live under the city in the Bowery. BURNING OF THE NETHERLAND TOWER 225 Fifth Avenue one night had a great candle in the sky. THE SUGAR CANE......259 Ethiopia entertains Solomon at 135th Street. I25TH STREET FERRY..... 28 Where the Palisades sends its searchlights to the stars. ix New York Nights '7> 279 A. I 1.) CHAPTER I Broadway 2ROADWAY is the mother of Broadways all l ) over the world, mother of the lights of Piccadilly Circus and of the Place Pigalle and Teatralny Ploshtchad. The Great White Way is the greatest white way. Those who have never seen it may think that its wide street of automobiles and its thronged pavements were white or that its buildings were marble. But the whiteness is not reality, it is transfiguration; it is the suffusion of floods of soft electric light. A little light is arresting, a little more is staring, more still is annoying, but Broadway has left these stages behind. It has more light by night than it has by day. The blind are aware of some extra luminosity when they are taken along it. One could almost surmise that upon occasion on Broadway at night the blind had received their sight. Miracle is usually attended by light, and, per contra, this marvellous light of Broadway might cause miracle. Broadway is a great place of health. It is a free electric-ray treatment. It is a tonic light-bath. Almost every one in the world feels better in health when he leaves the cross-streets and the inferior avenues to bask in the great open space in front of that New York temple, the Times Building. Here voices are clearer, eyes brighter, and the whole body more vivid than anywhere else in New York. Though business is responsible for I3 NEW YORK NIGHTS the gift, business gets washed out of the eyes there in the witching hours& Men may still talk business there after the adding-machine has ceased its clatter, but they talk it in a better way. For light is a strainer to the mind and lets thoughts go through clearer. And the pleasure-snared are spiritualised there, and lovers who commonly seek the dark, enjoy and suffer by the infiltration of light. I sometimes think that the crowds, fused as they are by gaiety, contain numbers of solitary people, friendless and lonely men and women, who have moped all day in wretched gloomy rooms, in homes which are mocked by the happy idea of home. At eleven o'clock at night they bethink them of the radiant shore just so many blocks away, pick themselves out of their loneliness, and make for the light, to lose themselves in the light-intoxicated throngs. Poe's man in the crowd is walking there every night, back and forth, forward and back again, his eyes lit by some dream. The disillusioned are there to recapture their illusions; the childless, how many with children of their own are still childless, there to find their lost children; the orphans to find that humanity is but one family, and that in truth there is no such thing as an orphan in the world. The Paramount Building, like some great cocoanut palm, leans indulgently over the Hotel Astor. The theatres debouch their pirouetting pushing half-dazed men and women. Their conI4 PARAMOUNT BUILDING (Near view.) Like superimposed brick-kilns the Paramount blunders upward to the moon. \N Op ~ BROADWAY centrated footlight stare melts to the grandeur of a vaster better-lit stage. They are adjusting and adjusting the lenses of their eyes while they push their way to the freer spaces. The long trains of raging cabs and cars roar and surge like impeded water-courses, but the laughter and light talking of the crowds dissolve their discords, hoots and impatiences. New York is greater than its chauffeurs as Venice than its gondoliers. No such habitual concourse of multitudes can be seen anywhere else in the world. Londoners do not come together in such numbers except on special occasions such as New Year's Eve at St. Paul's or Armistice Day at the Cenotaph. Parisian boulevards are pale and meagre by comparison. If the lights of Broadway are the great First Cause of the crowds coming into being there is an answering influence from the crowds themselves. The thousands of light-filled eyes repay from their hidden reserves. Humanity is also shedding light, and it wells upward into that other artificial light which is greater than day, a marriage of humanity and life. But it is not real. The philosopher spurns its actuality and turns back in mind to Manhattan Island as it was and to humanity as it is, was, and shall be, without decoration and shams, the mass of melancholy straddling bipeds so ashamed of themselves that they forever resort to disguises. The philosopher is in part right. It is not real. What is it? It is theatrical. The theatres have I7 NEW YORK NIGHTS disgorged their gazers and listeners, and these have crossed the footlights and have all become actors themselves. That is true. All men and women are actors. Some divine their roles better than others, but all love the limelight. They love the artifice of night. It gives greater scope than the naturalness of day. They love to mouth it on the stage and gesticulate as they go along. They are prouder of their make-up than of their faces, of what they seem than what they are. I have only a walking-on part in this great show, and so have time to look about me and criticise. At one thing I especially marvel, that is, at the lighting effects. There is no garishness, no glaring competition of lights. New Yorkers know how to act their parts, but they are greatly helped by the stage and the setting. My commonest reflection as I walk up and down the Great White Way is that somewhere behind the scenes there is a marvellously gifted producer. i8; ~ -- -------- ---- ----- --- ------- CHAPTER ii Night Life T\TEW YORK may not be America but it is 1L' New York. And New York stands outside comparison. It is without doubt one of the most remarkable places existent now, and one of the most remarkable in history. It is a portent of this and the coming time, the towering apex of a growing pyramid of civilisation. At the same time it is not natural. In some respects it is grander than Nature, for there is more to marvel at in a skyscraper than in a mountain, and there is the illusion of more light flashing off its dynamos than from the revolving sun itself. It is amonument of human artifice. Mankind has built on Manhattan Island something which is almost intolerable, something which has been less hostile to the simplicity of the human soul, but which becomes hourly more insupportable. For, the higher the houses the smaller the people; the greater the general noise the less the human voice; the more exultant the mechanism the more depressed the organism. New York spells stress; civilisation spells strain. Nowhere is there greater stress upon millions of people, nor greater strain. Life becomes unlivable, the heart abhors what is called life. It is a city for men, for adolescents only, not for the child in man and woman; a city of prose, of no fairy tales, of ruled lines, of no lore, a city of rigidity, '9 NEW YORK NIGHTS not of wavering and fantastic shapes. New York is a fortress-and how shall the soul escape? I walked the streets of New York a long while before I found poetry. There was majestic and glittering prose, but no glamour, no softness, no tenderness, no emotional relief even in the secret after-midnight hours, sanctified by the sleeping, by the invincible stars and the quietude of the rivers. The memory of the day persisted through the night, like pavement heat which robs cities of the relief of sundown. I could understand the remark so commonly made even by those who like New York, that they would never choose it as a city in which to live-in which to be resident and spend their life. To the visitor it can be stimulating beyond any other city. And to the worker returning after his vacation it is another tonic beyond what he has found on the mountain or the sea. It has the stimulus of the Casino where a man will at first be intoxicated by winning and go on to lose much more than he has won. It liberates energy in a human being, and then takes that energy and much more than it has created. This at least is one true impression of New York, and it caused a writer and observer to think indulgently of the relaxations of the people of the city. Do not attack men's pleasures; attack first the type of work that preceded the pleasure. In our taut modern life we shall not grudge men and women the escapes that they make. A great deal of New York night life is purely escape from New 20 -N I - I eD --- A 1i < 4 PAUL WHITEMAN tIis baton conducts the lesser lights of Broadway. NIGHT LIFE York. The side-walks of New York, about which there is the charming sentimental song, are still the runways of business. You take a step to one side, pass a doorway, and you are in a different world. There is a different runway where dancing girls flutter and beckon and sing to a calling crowd. You look at the sea of men's faces, turned towards pleasure as flower-cups to light, and if you are not merely censorious you realise that their drab daily life makes them need illusion at night. The night club disenchants New York. You pass the portals of a guarded house, leave the throngs in the Avenue, and straightway you are transported to another clime. You are in a village street in Millen, Georgia, with wisps of cotton blowing about. There is dancing in the village square. But it is not Millen of to-day, not of the twentieth century. Old wooden lamp-posts stand round the square, with smoky kerosene lamps in the quaint lanterns above. Lamp-dazzled Emperor moths are on the wing, and float above in the dim light. Men and women sit about at tables, talking or listening or merely existing. It is a Southern night with all the enchantment of indolence, of dusky faces, of soft music, easy laughter and song. There are tall slender lime trees about the village square. The soft black sky above them is sombre pleated cloth. There are owls with silver plumage and blue diamond eyes looking from the walls. It is only light enough for the eyes to see 23 NEW YORK NIGHTS and rest. A group of Negroes are singing a Dixie song, and the Negroes are like slaves and they are like children. They are fondly unified in a sentimental group, and they croon and beguile with notes of long-drawn sweetness and sadness, telling of another country, a mythical Africa or a neverrealised Mother-land, where the corn is so yellow that pure gold is refined, where the birds you cannot hear in Manhattan warble sweetly, where there are flowers so perfect as to produce the melting mood in man, where there is an idleness as of heaven, where our troubles are as nought, where some one, Mother or Mammy, sweetheart or cornfed bride or "baby" is waiting for us, praying for us. Outside the night club roll the surface cars, the automobiles hoot, the shop-signs glare, the overhead trains crash on all night, the second shift of workers in the factories gives way to the third shift, the machinery which drives men murmurs intently, persistently, regularly, like a pulse. But inside all is unreality, sentiment, indulgence and relaxation. New York has been banished. Trapdoors have been opened and the tall buildings have gone down under the rock. The sky-signs have faded out. Even the watchful stars are erased, and soft Dixie stars have taken their place. The Go-get-it spirit has gone, and the Let-it-go spirit has taken its place. Time has ceased to be money. Money has ceased to be the great desirable. News sheets have ceased to brazen forth ill-luck. Time 24 NIGHT LIFE and money and news have slipped away, and their urgencies become forgotten. In their place is dreamland, or Nirvana, or a Mussulman's paradise where houris beguile. Out prance the "Brown Skin Vamps" in a naked children's romp, saffron-coloured silhouettes gliding from lamp-post to lamp-post, posturing, frolicking, showing off. In a primitive community in the Wild West such a show might result in brutal interference on the part of exuberant males. Some "hard guy" would leap the railings. But the slaves of civilisation in New York are not hotblooded. They are at most warm. Many go to be warmed up, being rather cold. They may have unspent balances at the bank but not unspent physical reserves. Sex appeal is akin to "twilight sleep," it brings about merely twilight awakening. It is languorous and sweet and indulgent and inactive. After the Vamps have danced the audience still dances. It waltzes indolently to the strains of Irving Berlin's lachrymose love songThough you left a tear As a souvenir It doesn't matter, dear, Because I love you. The love-mate is not fiercely desired. She has become a "sweetie" or a "baby," some one to fondle and pet. And the terrible male has become merely a beau or also a "baby," or even, horrible 25 NEW YORK NIGHTS expression,-"sugar-daddy." The moon is arranged by Nature for lovers, but this in the Dixie Night Club is a dancing under an artificial moon. Ordinary moonlight is a visionary unreal light, and living in it is living in a reflection. But in the small hours of the night in the dance club it is mock moonlight. A curious contrast Broadway out-blazing the sun, and the night club out-doing the moon with its dim half-light. This is an impression of the Cotton Club. But if you go to a very different type of resort, say Gipsy Lands on a Thursday night, there is a similar illusion. At the time of writing Thursday night is the great night. Gipsy Lands is Hungarian. I think that for all the hyphenated, for all the foreign elements in the great city New York tiredness expresses itself in a special form of ennui, and that that ennui is a sort of homesickness, a yearning for the old home in Europe, a yearning for an idealised old home. No one really wants to go back, all they want is to dream of going back. It is just as sentimental and unreal as the Dixie dream. Gipsy Lands,* high up on Second Avenue, has the aspect of a political club. You seem to be over-seriously scrutinised as you enter the dark doorway. No illuminated sign tells you where it is and bids you enter. I suppose the proprietor does not advertise. He does not want the general * Since writing this Gipsy Lands has been padlocked, gone higher up the Avenue and changed its name. 26 NIGHT LIFE public so much as his own people. The people who enter help to sustain the character of the place for they are mostly Central European. Without them, the big hall is dreary and its painted walls garish and irrelevant. But with them an illusion of being in Transylvania is produced-TransOceania and Transylvania in one. Nearly every one inside the club seems to be talking either Hungarian or German. It is part of the ritual to fling off English and revert to the mother-tongue at night, that mother-tongue with all its tender associations. Modern America is checked in with hat and coat at the door, and a freed human being strolls up the narrow ways between the red and white chequered cloth tabletops. There is considerable hubbub of mixed parley, which even the music does not silence. The fine orchestra is playing Hungarian and German music, and the first violin supreme above his fellows and all listeners harmonises the murmur of conversation, making every Hungarian voice among the guests an instrument under his musical sway and leadership. There are enormous pictures of mountain and gipsy life on all the walls. In fact, the walls are entirely taken up by these brightly coloured landscapes. There is no bit of wall obtruding itself, no vestige of the masonry of the city. The soul finds itself in a new setting. A way of escape has been provided out of the great clamorous bondage of New York into the charm and freedom of a 27 NEW YORK NIGHTS little Hungary-just beyond a black doorway on Second Avenue. And when Gipsy Lands is full of people the illusion is complete. The life-size figures of gipsies on the walls become alive. They also somehow have come in from the Avenue. They are taking part in the gala night. The leading violinist is performing the miracle. He threads with living music the bending, waving, talking, laughing, crowd and joins scores of conversations. He wins song from them at last, and all break into longdrawn sighing, triumphing chorus. The violinist then slips away like a nurse who has sung a baby to sleep, and in his place the player of the great dulcimer becomes dominant. The dulcimers are sounding, the dulcimers are sounding, the people are singing, yes, even the gipsies who have stepped out of the pictures on the walls are singing the choruses outside their tents. It is two in the morning. It is Hungary. Brazen New York has dissolved in a cocktail. The unreal has become the real-the Hungary of the hungry heart, the imaginary, fantastic, ever-beloved fallacious Hungary, has been created, the sentimental other home. The stress of New York has made Hungarian hearts do this. One of the most charming places in which to eat in New York is called Samarkand. It is hung with rose-red Persian silks and strange-looking Oriental lamps are suspended from the roof. It is very small-just a casket-and it is served by 28 NIGHT LIFE very charming Russian ladies, probably emigres of the Russian Revolution. The silk-clad orchestra is perched in a sort of dove-cote above the height of the door. One night I listened to Chaliapin's great song "Haulers on the Volga," sometimes called "The Volga Boat Song," and was much impressed by the sentimental dreamlike rendering of it. It is really a song of labour, of effort. It is folk-music taken from the lips of the strongest men in the world, the bargee peasants who with ropes about their middles tow various heavy crafts along the Volga stream, walking the soft bank in heavy rhythmic laborious steps and singing to unify their efforts and to feel that all are pulling together. But at Samarkand those ai-uchniems were entirely dissociated from work, and sounded like love-calls of birds in Spring. The song was sung by a real Russian of charming voice. It reminded of Russia. It took the thoughts far away from New York, but to an entirely unreal sentimental Russia, where there was no mud and no labour 4 and no poverty and no rags, no social movements, no rebelliousness. But it satisfied. That was what the diners at Samarkand required-something as far from New York as a wonder city of Central Asia, something as far from labour as a love song. The Russians have the most enchanting foreign resorts in New York. I doubt if I had more pleasure anywhere than at the Russky Medvied, which 29 NEW YORK NIGHTS is a sort of outpost of East Side gaiety. Not at the dinner crush. There is a very cheap dinner served, and the cabaret is crowded out with lively people going on afterwards to the Houston Street Burlesque and other shows. They bring New York in with them, and there is too much New York to get dissolved in the cup. But when they have gone the Russky Medvied becomes itself. Occasional people, mostly Russian, sit over their tea and lemon and dream, while a divine orchestra of balalaikas and violins takes them back to Russia, to the forests, the birch-trees, the little churches, the ever-touching Russia of poetry, ballad, churchmusic and folk-tale. Here also the natural walls are painted out, though not so felicitously as in Gipsy Lands. The birch trees so loved of the Russians, the national trees of Russia, are of course depicted with all tenderness. But the rest is an appeal to the merchant. There is a naked but winged chorus girl in the woods. It is a picnic. There is a disarray of dessert and champagne and red muskmelons lying cut open on the grass. The Russian he-bear, the bull-moose of those parts, holds his wine-glass over the cendre hair of his picnic companion, his robust appetite and sensual taste contrasting idly ~with the somewhat cool chaste manners of those who sit at the tables below the pictures, sipping their tea and lemon, balancing their cigarettes and dreaming with the music. Not far away, but on the other side of the 30 NIGHT LIFE rushing coursing Avenue is Little Rumania, made famous in part by the custom and pen of Mr. Konrad Bercovici, but much more by the owner Moskowitz, who is one of the most charming Jews I ever met. The most likely place for a proprietor of a restaurant is near the cash register, but Moskowitz is not there. He is almost always behind his dulcimer which he loves like an only child. Little Rumania is not a night club. Again, it is not quite itself till after the dining crowd has filtered out, leaving the habitues behind. Then it changes into a sort of cabaret, and the playing of Moskowitz and the singing of a Jewish chansonist become the attractive features of the place. It is most alive after the theatre, and becomes thronged with artistic elements of the East Side. It is a marvellous little safety-valve, and its entrance is a trap-door leading away from one of the most commercial regions of the city, for where is there such a massed competition of small shops as on the lower East Side? Moskowitz told me how as a boy he had begun earning money playing a dulcimer on the ferryboat going between Vraila and Galatz on the Danube. His father used to wait at one of the landing places and take most of the money, leaving him a tiny margin, and from that day to this he has been spiritually wedded to a dulcimer. He is a venerable figure on the East Side now, and his dulcimer seems to have grown with him. The instrument in Little Rumania is much too big and 3' I NEW YORK NIGHTS too valuable to be taken by a boy of fourteen to play on a ferry-boat. But his restaurant remains a sort of ferry. His doorway is a landing-stage, and as you step inside you begin to glide insensibly but steadily away from New York. For nothing that the musicians play expresses the soul of the great city. It expresses escape, it expresses illusion, desire, yearning, O that I had the wings of a dove Then would I fly far away and be at rest. And when the soloist sings "Jassa! Jassa!" the fat ladies at the tables slap their bare arms with their palms and sing it in chorus too. Even Jassa is more desirable than Manhattan. At night all the Jews go back, and this time Moskowitz is their Moses. Don Dickerman is another of the pleasure-vendors of New York who has cleverly commercialised the desire for illusion. Every one enjoys the Country Fair, its gaiety, its colour, its fustian and its freaks, its robust if vulgar music. Dickerman told me he once played the part of the "ManMangling Human Gorilla" at Maine County Fair, and it gave him an idea for his resort on East Ninth Street. There the guests all get into quaint booths ticketed "Zisco that Strange Girl," "Maniac Marmaduke and Family," "Kiss Me" and the like, and the place is all alive with hanging 32 NIGHT LIFE bunting, freak-shows, cockshies and so forth, and a good band very rurally clad. Dickerman has also produced the Pirates' Den. He was with William Beebe on one of the Arcturus expeditions and brought back to New York some remarkable marine curiosities. These figure in the Pirates' Den. It is rather a boyish night club. All the waiters are disguised as pirates of the I8th century, and except for their mild eyes and blameless mouths are a fearsome looking crowd. They stage scenes from "Treasure Island," and ship brawls, they fire shots, break into outrageous talk, start old-fashioned disputes and clash cutlasses. The den is dark. It has its wonderful parrot. You drink cider from old mugs and stare at full-bodied sailors in cotton vests and corded breeches and knee boots with hanging leather flaps, at the walls of the smoky cellar hung with maps, toy-ships, fishes' skeletons, whales' vertebrxa, picks from Cocos Island and pirates' signatures cut on rocks. Suddenly there is a squall of thunder and lightning, and the band and its platform raised by pulleys begin to mount to the upper deck. The sound of a ship's bell breaks through the noise of the mock storm. Voices are heard from various parts of the imaginary ship. "All quiet on the main deck, sir!"... "Forward light burning brightl"... "Prisoners safe in the brig!" "Good kid stuff, don't you think?" enquires 33 NEW YORK NIGHTS Dickerman, admiring his own artifice. "All this appeals to the everlasting boy in the grown man. It gets him, he likes to forget business and that he is grown up, and be a boy again." I think of the words of the poet "Come, be a child once more" as invisibly written over the portals of the Pirates' Den. Not that New York people need the invitation. They are very ready to be children again. I was at a dinner of the New York Bar once and listened to eminent judges singing "A long long trail of winding" in chorus. I have even been to a church where they sang "Jingle Bells" instead of a hymn. It is all part of the great escape from the too serious life which the grown-up world has invented. In the New York dawn the cabs are drawn up outside the Night Clubs. Miss Guinan still stands on her chair in her enchanted grotto on 54th Street and indulgently pets the lost children of the city who have come to her. Or Barney Galant drinks his liquorice and water and loquaciously banters the relaxed and sweetened revellers of Greenwich Village. Nigger Heaven, away up in the hundred-and-thirties, begins to dim its stars. The sun heaves upward revengefully crimson and self-conscious, urgently hastening the banishment of Night. The toilers stream along the cross-town streets. The long arms of cranes become visible swinging great stones into position in the new tall buildings. "We are only beginning," say the machines. The New York of to-morrow is imperi34 NIGHT LIFE ously calling. New Yorkers-you shall go higher, you shall go faster. "Yes," says the New Yorker in his heart, "but at nights we shall deny the visions of the day." New York is not America, but it is New York. New York night life is not even New York. It is a hidden chamber in the kingdom of the heart. Draw the blindsl Light the lampsl 35 CHAPTER III Exterior Street STARTED off from South Ferry one night upon a zigzag walk. Sleepless tramps were huddled in the seats in Battery Park; others were lying on the grass, flat and dazed as if they had fallen from balloons. There were hoots and howls from across the river, red lights and green lights, the hum-grum of machinery, and the strange electric-light cascade of moving elevated trains. 'Twas one by the clock. Syria slept. Greece slept. I walked by Front Street to Moore Street, to Water Street, to Broad, to Pearl, to Coenties Slip, to Stone, to Mill Lane, to South William Street, to Broad again, past a blank empty lighted telegraph office, to Exchange Place, to New Street, to Wall Street. Thus I arrived at the financial anvil of the world. But all was still, no hammering, no bellows blowing, no flying sparks. Yellow stars looked down on the deserted Exchange. But I saw what appeared to be some Pagan temple, a stark altar of human sacrifice, and it proved to be a famous Christian Church, none other than Holy Trinity on Broadway, and as I stood by the strange little graveyard the church clock struck half past one. The little white headstones looked like the dead popping up from the tomb. There was heard the resounding hoot of a steamer on the river-yea, the last trump. Fast cars scooted along wet empty Broadway as if flee36 EXTERIOR STREET ing the wrath to come-and all were going up town. Then I went on by Little Thames Street, and felt for a moment as if I were in part of the City of London. It also is deserted in the regions of Capel Court at that hour of the night. There are no night-shifts in stockbroking. You do not see a relief of stenographers being marched up Wall Street by a Managing Clerk; the stenographer's relief is prancing in the White Friars and Tangoland. I was in Cedar Street and Greenwich Street, walking under the "El" like a rat, and came to Liberty Street-O Liberty, most empty was thy street-and to Washington above that sleeping Syria and sleeping Greece, and so, going by Cortland Street, I came to West Street and its great market. It was two o'clock, and New York here was very much alive. There were horse waggons and motor waggons, cases and baskets of vegetables and fruit, and porters innumerable hurrying hither and thither with gleaming white-wood boxes on their shoulders. I emerged from the dead city where never a blade of grass twinkles before square toes and came into a fairyland of cucumbers and corn, cabbages and melons and Malaga grapes. Refreshing fruit odours invaded the nostrils. Heaps of small black grapes looked in the dim light like exaggerated caviare. I kicked a peach as I walked along. What largesse in the night, 37 NEW YORK NIGHTS peaches are like stones in the roadway! They tumbled from wooden troughs and buckets uncovered and overfilled. There were South Mountain oranges and California lemons. There were crates of greens stacked higher than men. There were cabinets of blackberries and raspberries. The nose whispered to the heart "Raspberries, raspberries" as it tasted the air. Coloured porters with perspiring gleaming f aces shouldered boxes of green varnish-surf aced peppers along narrow alley ways between piles of other boxes. Carrots peeped out of their ventilated crates like brown ribbons. Side streets were blocked with potatoes and yams. Activity, activity, activity-and quietude. The workers do not help themselves along with foul expletives and abuse as in London. They seem to be conserving their energy, or imitating the electric lamps which do their job and say nothing about it. But it is a big market, bigger than Covent Garden in London, and I reflected that New Yorkers eat more fruit and vegetables than we do. There is more for them to eat. Their reserves are greater. The quayside beyond the market is long and spacious and empty. The freer air seems to be minus something-is it the mental ozone of New York? West Street is a long backyard. It has no mechanical turnings on the left. If you wish to take a turning on the lef t, the way of the heart, you must take a ship. There are ships in the wharves still as birds dozing head on wing in a covert at 38 FROM THE HUDSON AT NIGHT Palaces and temples of commerce, prophetic and murmuring by day, awe-striking by night. I-,1-1 s t',,-Z. EXTERIOR STREET night. Not a rustle nor a whisper comes from the giant Cunarder. West Street is the landing stage of the Atlantic ferry. You stand on West Street and you think Southampton. You stand in West Street and you think Havana, San Juan, Cristobal, Panama, Valparaiso. You stand on West Street and think Cherbourg, Naples, the Piraus. But now no one is thinking anything. The gangways may be down, but no one is on them. Eastward New York's luminosity lies in layers like masonry of light and darkness built from the rocks to the night-sky. Westward lies the beautiful river flowing away to the calm ocean. And on the wide roadway of the quay laden lorries rush and crash bearing produce to the market or away. I sought a turning on the left and did not find one till Fourteenth Street. It was a lonely walk. A drunken man sitting on a bit of paving addressed me vaguely. He was looking at the heavens with lack-lustre eye. "There's only one star left. How far's that from here?" he queried. I passed an empty "Goulash Kitchen," passed standing freight cars, passed the embarkation for Tampa and Mobile, passed the Boston and Providence pier, passed the R. M. S. P., passed the Hoboken Ferry and entered the Gansevoort market stirring feebly. A black and white cat was squatting in the roadway fastidiously eating melon. My turning to the left proved to be the virtual one of Eleventh Avenue where it starts North near 41 NEW YORK NIGHTS West Fourteenth Street, and there, like a derelict trolley car left stranded on the ooze after the subsidence of a flood, was a windowed shed with the explicit word LUNCH printed on it. This was kept by a lonely Greek. "Where do you come from?" I asked, perched on my revolving stool at the counter and munching pie. "Island," he answered. "What? From Ireland? You don't look it." "No. Island. Crete. Greek, yes." "Fine country." "No. Some nations go up. Some nations go down. The great Alexander thousand year ago take whole world. Then Venetians come. Before Jesus. Romans. Yes, the French. Napoleon. Germans. Now English, I guess." "Not Americans?" "No, English now. But in two hundred year maybe England go down. Other nation rise up." "How d'ye like New York?" "Not like it. Bad place here. Kill you for a dime. Want woman; cost ten dollars. Take her hotel two more. Drinks bad poison. Good drink cost big money. Not like New York." A friend from the island of Rhodes rolled in for his morning coffee on his way to work at the National Biscuit Factory. "Rhodes no good. Italians there. They turn out Greeks. New York fine. Plenty money. Rodos bad." I said Good Morning and Good-bye, and 42 EXTERIQR STREET walked out on to Fourteenth Street, turned into Tenth Avenue and then into West Fifteenth Street where the "fleet" of the Biscuit Company was waiting in the dark like a string of camels before dawn on the outskirts of Baghdad. Biscuits are not made all night. They are evidently partly compounded of daylight. But here was where my friend from Rhodes belonged, or in local parlance here the islander "held down his j ahb." Ninth Avenue was drear. Orion up above the roofs was striding hastily across Sixteenth Street. On Eighth Avenue a big fruiterer's stood wide open, very still and empty. What zest for trade! West Seventeenth Street, Seventh Avenue, West Eighteenth, Sixth Avenue, West Nineteenth, passed as one. I was thinking of London and did not notice them. At Fifth Avenue I paused, for the speedway had had its nightly wash and was all aswill with water like a bath-house floor. I zigzagged across to Lexington and saw an iceman dragging blocks of ice into a large cleanswept and ready but empty cafeteria. On Twentythird Street I stopped at a shop window which was stacked with dollar shirts. A tall notice said "FORCED TO SELL." The shop was closed but it was flooded with electric light. I saw many offices and barber shops where the lights had been left on all night. And on Twenty-ninth Street I paused in front of a locked undertaker's where a white-lined baby's coffin was exposed, charmingly illuminated. 43 NEW YORK NIGHTS On Avenue A, the ashpan of the other avenues, there were notices which struck an Englishman as strange. The words TRANSIENTS met my eye. We advertise "Short Garage" but New Yorkers talk of "Transients." What poetry there is in the word! In some streets all other lighted signs have been put out and the one word remains brilliantly enshrined, now here, now there, "Transients!" "Transients!" After all, every one in the great caravanserai of New York is a transient. Every one in the caravanserai of the world is a transient. The world itself is a transient. Look up among the stars; you will see it as a celestial sky sign. There it is pricked out all over the dark deep of spaceTRANSIENTS. I am a transient in the city of New York at night. I am gyrating across the fitfully sleeping city from the Hudson to the East River. No other great city can be got across so quickly. One could run across it in less than half an hour. I was soon out at the water edge on the other side of the island, listening to the ceaseless Edison works. Oh, what is Edison contriving there, are they engines of death or of life? The wonder name of Edison stirs the imagination as if he were an arch wizard, the Michael Scott of the New World. The river of Time flows by and the great works climb upward on its banks. It is five a.m. Something of the burden of the city has been lifted. The air is light. The heart 44 EXTERIOR STREET seems freed. I feel happy to be walking. I love the space and the quietness. I have got rid of the idea of going to bed, got rid of the routine of daily life. New York and its millions, its wealth, its mysteries, are mine. There is a sense of conquest. The bustle has died down and I am still walking. The majority of people are asleep-but I am not the least sleepy. It seems as if life has just begun. I am dancing on a springed floor. The stones of the side-walks help me to leap along First Avenue, grim, empty, gloomy Avenue One, which has no turning to the right except little bottle-neck lanes which go down to the edge of the water of the East River. I spent many nights in this way wandering about the city and returning at dawn, resuming next 0r night at the point where I had left off the night before. Whoever would know the poetry of New York must walk it in the after-midnight hours, see the red light come out on the Metropolitan tower preliminary to the striking of the hour; one is too pre-occupied and diverted to observe it in the livelier hours; enter the Central station at four a.m. and see it anew, deserted, silent, beautiful as on the morning of Opening Day; see the City Hall at dawn hanging down from on high like the sky's apron. Queensboro Bridge, seen from the foot of East Fifty-third Street late at night, is a marvellous spectacle. There is light in the sky above and 45 NEW YORK NIGHTS wandering light on the river below. There is all the grandeur which circumambient shade can give. "What have I come to?" you ask, astonished after the sordidness of the Avenue, with its many garbage cans. Suddenly you see a mirage. It is called Queensboro Bridge. It takes the mind to the finest parts of the Seine and the Thames. You feel you must be at the centre of a great city, near its Parliament, its palaces, its pontifical grandeurs. But this is Rome without a Pope-a mere bridge, beautiful and awe-inspiring by accident, a convenience whose formal magnificence goes unheeded in the daytime, when business absorbs all the interest and takes the first and only place in men's eyes. Still as I walk on I find the influence of the bridge expressed in men's habitations. As I approach the great viaduct of the bridge the poor district smartens up dramatically. The massive piles of the viaduct and the lofty exaggerated attendant factory chimneys, the vague Colossus of a gas works, all suggest more spacious living, and Sutton Place is the reply. But I descend rapidly a long straight empty street nameless here for evermore, and it becomes Avenue A-the old ashpan once again. People of no social prominence are herded in grim unremarkable blocks. Fire ladders disfigure the houses, or do they merely hide them, like black veils the ravaged faces of elderly ladies. Perhaps the houses look worse than a similar variety in 46 EXTERIOR STREET London. But imagine Bow and Whitechapel all festooned with rusty fire ladders! There is something queer about these ladders. They look like the old black ladders of tramp steamers let down to the wharves. The immigrant never gets away from the debarkation gangway. All New York is a quay. I see all the vessels that have arrived there-then the population swarming on the streets are all people who have come off ships. But it is the most extraordinary shore in the woxld. It is well to have arrived there sometime or other on life's voyage. Solitary walking along the empty streets seems to attune the mind to the city. True thoughts flow like music from the mind. I came to another outside street happily named Exterior Street. It has a Venetian view of river, lights, ferries, and small boats. Away beyond the river the sparse lights of Welfare Island diamond the dark. On the right is the grandeur of the bridge. But Exterior Street is below New York. It is bounded by the great grey cliff of the original Manhattan Island. Somewhere up above there are houses and gardens. Children perhaps come and drop pebbles down into Exterior Street or on to the shaggy tufts of old grass. It is like a bit of mountain road. There are hunks of uncontrolled rock. The shoulder of the world juts out. The silence is only accented by the rustling of the wind. No, there is another sound which is part of the silence, it is the undying whirr of rotary machines. I am walking towards 47 NEW YORK NIGHTS a huge factory and from its little doors strange dwarfs with darkened faces come out, look round, and go in again-the workers, they don't belong. I sit on the grass under the cliff and look over the water. It is Exterior Street: I am outside New York. To understand any experience you must get outside of it. King Canute went to Exterior Street and bade the waves keep away from his toes. The gentry from Park Avenue and Upper Fifth might well make a pilgrimage to Exterior Street at four in the morning and sit there in the grass, outside the scene of their wealth and their power. I left this curious street by smart residential East Seventy-ninth, thence by East End Avenue to East Eightieth. I had been outside; soon I was very much inside. I came to a steaming curtained window, lighted and murmurous. The one word STUBE was explanatory. I went inside and asked for cider. This seemed to amuse the bar-tender who, however, poured out two mugs of it at once and set them before me. There was a big notice on one of the walls, NO GAMBLING, and under it a vociferous throng were throwing scarlet dice. "Splitz!" "Splitz!"-every one at the bar was asking for "Splitz." I was invited to join the "Wilhelm Union." No one spoke a word of English. Mine host kept saying something about zwei kasen Scotch verkauft. I had a glass of whisky with a red-faced and 48 EXTERIOR STREET puffing, very drunken man who showed me an iron cross and very paradoxically wanted to kiss me. I pointed to the only girl in the establish- /,?. ment, sitting sulkily in a corner. He took me over to a poster depicting the American Unknown Soldier which was inscribed-"Work for the Living," and he nodded his head sententiously. A fig for unknown soldiers; all German soldiers were unknown. At least, so I surmised. In this tavern ended another night and when next I resumed I quickly reached luxuriant, spacious, Southern-looking Fifth Avenue, the Avenue, as it is affectionately called. Curious fact about the avenues-the word avenue means approach; in England avenues are usually bordered with trees; in order to make a road into an avenue you plant trees. An avenue's trees are its guard of honour leading to the portals of country house, castle, or palace. But the avenues of New York do not lead anywhere. They are paved rivers which go on and on through various districts to * lose themselves eventually in wildernesses, to be dried up in social deserts. But Fifth Avenue for one hundred and ten streets does preserve its character of grandeur, and it is one of the most exhilarating ways to walk in any city. With Central Park on one side and fine houses on the other, I walked twenty blocks, the Harlem moon standing over the street and raising gleaming reflections all the way. Moonlight also glinted from the highly polished varnish of fast moving 49 NEW YORK NIGHTS automobiles. No one was walking except myself, and many men and women passed in cars and taxis, mostly lovers indulgently petting one another in course of transit from one night-club to another, or from a dance to their homes. I turned with the park railings along Hundredand-Tenth Street and came to the gay base of Lenox Avenue, then went in a circle through the Morningside district back to Fifth Avenue. I came to Harlem all aflare with the lure of pleasure-cabarets, night-clubs, dance-halls, chop-suey restaurants, parlours. At three in the morning I watched a bevy of coloured girls operating a barber shop, cutting the fuzzy hair of Harlem dandies in a brilliantly lighted hairdressing saloon. I strayed into Capitol Club and saw white women dreamily trotting with Negroes in slow jazz, strange women who defy the custom of night to enjoy the sensual thrill of the black man's dance. By the cross-streets I passed through Africa. Street after street was entirely black, housing swarms of families, all black. Banjoes still throbbed in some; the ukuleles gurgled dance music, but most houses were silent. They were sleeping and snoring. They were bathed in the deep physical ardour of Negro sleep-only in doorways here and there petting couples lingered awake, oblivious of the clock. I left Harlem by Edgecombe Avenue and St. Nicholas Avenue, the road dug up and dotted with red lanterns, and came to a substantial quiet 50 , EXTERIOR STREET and English-looking neighbourhood, Hamilton Terrace, I44th Street and Convent Avenue, very respectable. But respectability only held a strip, and having crossed it I was in Amsterdam Avenue. Then I came to Broadway still very much Broadway and, making a sharp descent by I47th Street, came once more to the end of New York-the grandest backway of all-Riverside Drive. The view was very beautiful. I could imagine that the Hudson River was the Danube and that I was in Bratislava again. The esplanade was high, serene, and wind-blown, fresh with raindrops flickering across the eyes. Little boats, like sleeping ducks, lay upon the surface of the water. The automobiles which whirled along the drive seemed unreal; the river is the great reality. It is on view here. It knows it was before all the rest and will survive it, with thousands of years both before and after. A ferry boat crosses the river like a tram on the sea-transients once more, transients. Three shooting stars follow and pass over New Jerseytransients, transients. All is transient. New York is a setting for a drama that is being played, a spectacle which is being rehearsed. At four in the morning I am walking along like the Wandering Jew, but my taste is shared by two lovers in a solemn closed car drawn up overlooking the river. Through the misty glass I see them in one another's arms, in close embrace. Through silver-tinted clouds the moon seems 51 NEW YORK NIGHTS to beat her way, keeping coming out, keeping going in, and as I climb Washington Heights I seem to be making another exit from the city, upward to the stars. All the way from South Ferry to the sky-I have skated the stairways of the city. I have gone from outside to inside, by Exterior Street to the heart. The mystic closes his eyes that he may see better. The curtain which comes down gives leisure to the mind to consider the hidden springs of drama. Night reveals the day. 52 CHAPTER Iv My Partners * A PRETTY partner is the best passport to New York at night. With the right sort of lady on your arm you can obtain admittance into any resort, even the most guarded and exclusive. With her you do not need to "crash," to use an expression commonly heard near night-club doors. It is a sad comment on chivalry, but plain-looking women are looked upon with suspicion. Place r aux dames has given way to Place aux jolies femmes. In America most plain women have the cause of Woman or of public morals at heart. t They are ardent temperance reformers and belong to purity leagues. So door-men have orders to exclude them. I tested this with a severe intellectual friend who used to be the partner of a man on a radical weekly paper and found that doormen were shy of her. At first in New York I went about by myself and that had several advantages. I was able to walk the city up and down. No one wants to walk far in New York; taxis are numerous and cheap. The New Yorker has no feet. But the taxi closes off the view. You feel some bumps and you surmise you are on 8th Avenue, or a blaze of light tells you that you are on Broadway. And as for subways and Elevated trains, they seem to destroy both time and scene. I also found it advantageous to go to certain speakeasies alone. At the cost of one bad drink I saw all there was to be seen, 53 NEW YORK NIGHTS whereas with a companion it might have been necessary to drink several. But New York is not a lonely man's city; it is social or it is nothing. The lively places are the more interesting. For these one must have a suitable partner. You do not have half as much of an adventure by yourself as you do with a friend. There were Patricia and Helen. I owe so much to Pat that I have dedicated this book to her and I owe a great deal to Helen, too. Amusing and striking the difference between being at Texas Guinan's with a partner and being there without one. Without one you are a gigolo. Patricia sold film-rights of novels and helped edit a magazine. Helen was an artist on the "World." One wrote a monthly article of gossip; the other was responsible for a Sunday "strip." Many of our adventures found reflection in the articles and the strip. It is charming to take out girls who are earning their living. Their day experiences enriched night conversations. Had they been ordinary revellers they would never have got up till lunch the next day, but Pat even after all night festivity seemed fresh and fit at her office in the morning. I danced first with Helen at the Villa Venice, one of the more refined of the fashionable resorts in the neighbourhood of the Plaza Hotel. Probably it is not fashionable at all nor Bohemian, but just middle-class. I think so because drink was not much in view. With Pat I danced first at the 54 MY PARTNERS Bamboo Inn, which is an enormous non-descript Harlem cabaret. I was with both Helen and Patricia at the Nest, at Gipsy Lands and at Little Rumania. I danced with Helen at Connie's Inn, at Small's, at Roseland, at the Mirador, at the Pennsylvania Grill and several other places. Helen and I had walking-on parts at "Broadway" on one occasion and sat at a night-club table on the stage and clinked glasses. Another night we went behind the scenes of the "Circus Girls" at the Winter Garden. We talked to the horses, the chorus girls and the clowns. There was a white horse called Thunder who kept turning off 9 electric lights with his nose. A clown would address him in this wise: "Why can't you leave the < light alone? Who do you think you are? You great bum, thinking of nothing but eats. If you; don't behave, you'll be a dead horse. We won't put your rhinestone harness on." And another clown standing by would comment, "Keep away from him. He was a good horse till he met you." The horse turns off another light. "All right. No sugar to-night. The son of a bitch. Shame on you, bad boy, naughty boy. ) Don't do it. Lissen there. Back up." And Thunder would raise his upper lip in a quivering grimace asking for sugar. * It was interesting to watch the disarray of chorus girls and clowns and rapid-moving sceneshifters and white madams strutting about in ballet dancers' frills feeding the horses with sugar or 55 NEW YORK NIGHTS brushing archly against grandiosely dressed Grand Dukes or scarlet-coated masters of the hunt. We sat in Hassell's dressing-room while he posed for a drawing, sitting and holding an eyebrow pencil to the brow of his daughter Virginia. It was Virginia's first appearance in New York and her father said he thought her face was too luridly made-up, "like a butcher's shop." Helen told me that last time she was at the Winter Garden there was an elderly gentleman in a brown derby who sidled up to all the girls in turn, caressing most of them and kissing some. She enquired who he was and was told, "He is the angel of the piece." But this time there was no angel; the Circus Girls were performing without heavenly guidance. With Patricia I visited many speakeasies. Helen helped me a great deal because she is so very observant and filled out my own impressions by telling me things which I should never have seen. Patricia helped me in a different way. She is the soul of gaiety and enters with such verve into the spirit of night-life that I am not surprised that her nick-name for herself is "the darling of the speakeasies." Sparkling, laughing, intoxicating Pat, I shall never forget you as you were on Armistice Night at Texas Guinan's, strutting about with a white bear-skin which you had borrowed from one of those nearly naked girls, who had been marching to every military air the band could think of. They said, "Texas does not know MY PARTNERS her job to let you be part of the company and not one of us." With Patricia I danced at the Lorraine, at Barney's, at Paul Whiteman's and among the palms under the sliding roof of the Club Madrid. We saw the burning of the Netherland Tower together. We went to midnight Mass at the Russian Church on Russian Easter Eve. We had been dining with Robert Milton at his apartment on West 57th Street. He was encouraging us to write a play. Milton, who is a clever producer, is a Russian born near St. Petersburg. I believe he was designed for the priesthood but ran away. He told us amusing stories of his early days when he was on the road with Douglas Fairbanks and others, and they relied on Doug to dazzle farmwives with his stunts, and thus obtain a "handout." He is a whimsical, diverting, ingenious person. We talked and laughed for hours, but it was Russian Easter Eve. So the three of us took a cab and went to Church together. The Russians in New York are split into at least two factions. The Reds hold the cathedral on 95th Street, taking their lead from atheistic Moscow. It is part of the organization paradoxically named the "Living Church." The Whites have rented a church in which to carry on the true traditions of Orthodoxy. It is the Church of St. Salvador at I2ISt and Madison. To St. Salvador we went. At midnight Patricia and I might have been 57 NEW YORK NIGHTS seen standing wedged in a mass of Russians, listening to many cries of Christos Voscrece. We held candles in our hands. I felt very sad. There was little to remind me of Russia. Few people crossed themselves. There were no men in the choir. Women were there uncovered. There were no Easter breakfasts waiting for blessing. My mind went back to Moscow and the night of the eve of my marriage, listening to all the Easter bells, and above all to the booming forth of Ivan Veliky. Mr. Milton's face also was pale and tense as if he were thinking of Russia. Curious to think that we were on the verge of Harlem with all its jazzy activities. In London at the Russian Church on Easter Eve one is entirely in Russia. I suppose the Russian spirit does not thrive in America. About one in the morning we lost Mr. Milton. Yes, just about the time one turns to one's neighbour to give the Easter kiss he was not to be found. Patricia learned the right answer to "Christ is risen..." Yes, He is risen indeed. But instead of giving me the correct salute she looked around for Mr. Milton. With Pat I went to see the "King of Kings," also to "Deep River," and the "Grand Street Follies," and to the Lafayette Theatre to see Negro burlesque, and to that quaint comedy called "White Wings." Pat learned to sing "White wings they will never grow weary," which was the most popular street song in London when I was a small boy and was revived in this piece. 58 MY PARTNERS Many of our nights out were associated with songs. She loved dining at the Russian Bear for the music. We sampled many charming dining places such as Katinka's, the Marine Room, the Hoffbrau House in Hoboken, Manney's Place amid the garbage of Forsythe Street, and Hungaria and Abbazzia in Yorkville. Many resorts were nameless. They were just street-numbers and the best of them was a French restaurant-speakeasy on 5ist Street, run it was said in connection with a French ship, a picture of which hung over the zinc bar. We saw the dawn come up one morning, walking arm in arm on top of a high building, among tiled tepees and strange looking tanks. The roses she had worn all night were still living on a shoulder of her rose-coloured dress, and rosecoloured reflections from the glamorous East softened the staring starch and dead blackness of evening attire seen in the morning. Happiness on many nights lasted over till next day when we might be seen lunching at the Algonquin, and till evening when we would be at Jack's bar, or dining at Hemil's, after that, sitting laughing in a theatre, going from thence to a cabaret, then to another place of dance. I think that in all this we never had a dull moment. Pat was to me the living spark of New York. 59 CHAPTER v Speakeasies T]HE itinerant bootlegger running around in his car delivers gin at the door at the price of two dollars a bottle. I have one in front of me; it is labelled "HIGH & DRY GIN-BOOTH'S, estd. 1740. The Original Dry Gin." It is marked "Imported for Medicinal Purposes only." In England a similar bottle of Booth's Gin would cost twelve shillings. Gin is very easily made and I have no reason to say either through surmise or experiment that the contents of the bottle are impure. When I needed liquor for a party at my apartment I telephoned Helen's bootlegger, Bobby, and I said plainly just what I wanted and he would run up with it in his car, bacardi at three dollars a bottle, apricot brandy at three-fifty the libre. Most liquor sold by a reputable bootlegger is cheaper in New York than in London. Occasionally a fancy price is asked for some special bottle. There are always people who having paid a high price will find that the liquor is superior and for that reason high prices are exacted. But it is safe to say that in general Prohibition has caused a cheapening of drink in the United States. But in some speakeasies prices are much heavier. I suppose one pays to cover the risk in the barkeeper's business. The customer pays his part of the graft. Nevertheless the profits must be high. You can buy from a bootlegger Sauterne at fifty cents the bottle and you can pay for a similar bottle 6o AT THE SPEAKEASY RESTAURANT "What is your name? Was you here before?" Q) I SPEAKEASIES at a restaurant as much as six dollars. I know the wine well enough not to be deceived. I believe real French White wine is very rare in New York; it does not pay to import it. Authentic rum is brought in great quantities from the Indies and that also is very cheap except when bought in a cocktail at a speakeasy. New York swarms with speakeasies. Some of them are curiously charming places and should survive the Volstead Act if that piece of legislation is ever abrogated. There are many Italian ones half of which are known as "Tony's." Let me describe one to which I went to meet Laura, a poet. Spy-holes, moving shutters, padlocks, chains, bars, a password... the Italians understand well the ritual of the secret society, but the AngloSaxon is always rather mirthful over elaborate precaution. One might have thought that Tony belonged to the Black Hand. But inside his establishment there was nothing frightening. His rooms might have been those of a college girl years ago. Rose-coloured walls, a bust of Dante on the mantelpiece, views of Florence and Rome and of the Leaning Tower of Pisa, thin-legged uncomfortable straight-backed chairs and work-tables. And there was Laura, whom I had promised to meet, sitting at one of the little work-tables contemplating a half-filled glass of creme de rose. 63 NEW YORK NIGHTS I said that I would ne'er come back, But here I am, here I am, she crooned. With her was a young novelist of fame. They had been to the theatre together. A scene in a speakeasy and a dialogue of two theatregoers discussing the play would make a piquant epilogue for a Broadway play. The clientele at this bar was mostly of women. Women brought their women friends. Women brought their men friends. Tony accepted men's money but he had I believe a preference for that of the women. It is sometimes an act of gallantry nowadays to take women's money, and in this respect he was gallant. This was a lady's speakeasy. We sat down to a conversation on the theme: Where is modern woman going? I said, back to the harem and the veil. I contended there would come a time when passive man would arouse himself, declaring that women in their freedom had gone too far, and that a war would be waged for the re-enslavement of the sex. But in my argument I was not supported, and in my pre-vision they did not see with me. Somnolent ladies in charming gowns nodded their heads bibulously at neighbouring tables. Fat cherry-cheeked Tony smiled between rings at the bell. At each ring he went momentarily pale so that those who observed him thought of the police. He brought me some Benedictine, and the bottle was right. But the liqueur was curious-trans64 SPEAKEASIES parent at the top of the glass, yellowish in the middle, and brown at the base. It was sweet and strong, and I am sure you could not find its like in France. Oh, what dreams seemed to result from drinking itl Next morning I had no appetite for breakfast. That is the bane of speakeasy life. You ring up your friend next morning to find out whether he is still alive. When you receive good liqueur you can be sure it is imported. But it seems to me now you need to be a European to be able to decide what is good and what is spurious. Americans are falling into horrid doubt.,The best liqueur offered me in New York was in a place off Fifth Avenue kept by three Irish boys. This purported to be I830 Grand Marnier. "Jack" said it had been consigned to him by mistake, a very small bottle and very expensive. But as the rule of his establishment was a dollar a drink, no matter what you had, he would keep to that price. This was certainly good Grand Marnier, and just as certainly it was imported, not made. There was no doubt of that, though I should not care to say I believed it was nearly a hundred years old; it was dark and rich and powerful. It was very enkindling. This speakeasy was an elegant suite of rooms furnished with broad and soft divans, luxurious armchairs and dim shaded lights, for drinking and precious petting. Jack, the eldest of the three Irish proprietors, gave the opinion that the marriage rate 65 4 NEW YORK NIGHTS in New York was improving because petting was becoming so expensive. You could not go to a Child's Restaurant to pet, or to one of those places called "Coffee Pots," or to thunderous Thompsons, where there are only bachelor seats, or to a selfserve cafeteria. Lovers cannot hold one another in Bryant Park where the tramps converse, nor at fashionable hotels glared at by tip-hunting waiters. You must do it in a taxi where the meter counts the kisses in dollars and cents, or resort to a night-club or speakeasy where love is assessed in the price of bootleg liqueur. Jack considered that all to the good. He held that petting caused a procrastination of marriage but hindrance of petting hastened it. Still, there are so many dim rooms in New York, with or without cover-charge but certainly with "petting privileges" that I was inclined to doubt Jack's edict that petting was decreasing, though I had an open mind as regards. the relationship to the marriage question. Nevertheless I suppose those long intimate after-theatre conversations in the dark corners of Jack's bar were more of love than of marriage. But the liquor even here where the commendable Grand Marnier was sold was not dependable. The liqueurs were excellent but danger was hidden in the cocktails. One can never be quite sure what will happen to you after a New York cocktail. One night Pat fell a victim to the ingredients of an "old-fashioned cocktail." We dined at a 66 SPEAKEASIES Rumanian restaurant on the East Side, on "Garnitura" and a bottle of sacramental wine. Then we went to see "Deep River"-the Negro jazz opera, at whose pedantic libretto, a sort of slow-motion Shakespeare, we laughed exceedingly. Thence we went to Jack's who diverted us for hours telling his reminiscences and gossiping about his customers. His chief bootlegger (wholesaler) was a teetotaller who had a discreetly furnished apartment on Park Avenue, with teak cabinets and walls hung with priests' vestments. He was wholly matter-of-fact, conventional, timorous. There was nothing of the sheik or bootleg king. No gunman he! He was not concerned with territorial rights and invisible frontiers like Steve Crandale and Scar Edwards in that gripping melodrama "Broadway." His preoccupation was merely getting the stuff in and getting it distributed, and he was one of the busiest of men-at the telephone. Another friend of Jack's-a customer-was known as Count Romanof. Some one said to him, "Why, your name is the same as the Tsar'sl" He replied, "Oh, yes, my uncle." He was a supposed dealer in Art treasures and he always came with some potential purchaser who stood him the drinks. The likelihoodof his being a Romanof was impaired by the story that he used to be known as Prince Serge Obolenski, the one who. married the rich Miss Astor, until the real Prince Serge confronted him one day in Paris and gave him confounding evidence of a personal alibi. 67 NEW YORK NIGHTS Then Jack imitated the talk of "Billy the Kid" and drew a picture of his wife on an old envelope. Billy the Kid was evidently a night bird and a habitue. There are mannerisms of talking which are especially to be associated with the alcohol habit. The lips are more compressed than those of teetotallers who more or less speak with frank open mouths. But Billy the Kid as imitated by Jack did not seem to open his mouth at all. Jack took personal charge of our drinks. He showed us his bottles assuring us that he was very particular about labels. If he ever received a bottle with a "phoney label" he set it aside and returned it to the wholesaler. But it must be thought that there was some destructive ingredient in his "old-fashioned cocktail" that night unless perchance it was the Rumanian sacramental wine which caused the trouble. The Houston Street vineyards may be suspect. About two-thirty in the morning we took a cab to a Russian cellar. It was supposed to be closed, but upon talking in Russian to one of the out-coming customers we found admittance. Here a Russian was playing a concertina and a man in evening dress was dancing with a highball balanced on his head. His beautifully-gowned partner did not seem to mind the risk she took of being splashed with whisky. If her partner ruined her dress no doubt he would have to buy her three. There were beautiful white swans on the roseate walls. Portly waiters brought forth chicken and rice and skewered bits of mut68 SPEAKEASIES ton smoking hot from the hands of an able Russian chef. Dreamy American couples petted in the corners; garrulous Russians gossiped over drinks, and the young fellow in peasant blouse mixed jazz with folk music as he fingered the concertina. On the shadowy floor the burlesque gentleman hopped to and fro with the glass of whisky on his head. But my companion had not much interest in this matter or in the interesting couples in this roselighted Caucasian den; she was ill. Her face was white; she trembled. We ordered black coffee but it remained untasted. There was nothing for it but to put the sufferer in a taxi and take her to the house of a woman friend who happened to live within a hundred yards of this place. And my little friend remained as if poisoned for the greater part of the day and did not eat breakfast, did not go to her office. It was an example of the risks of speakeasy life-speak easy and die badlyl ~ The speakeasies are a remarkable feature of the new American life. Every time you go for a drink there is adventure. I suppose it adds to one's pleasure to change into a pirate or a dark character entering a smuggler's cave. You go to a locked and chained door. Eyes are considering you through peep-holes in the wooden walls. There is such a to-do about letting you in. Some one for the first time must be sponsor. You sign your name in a book and receive a mysteriouslooking card with only a number on it. The bartender says to you suggestively as you sign your 69 NEW YORK NIGHTS name, "And you will please remember your address." And you are admitted to a back-parlour bar with a long row of stooping and loquacious drinkers. There may be only three bottles in use, the main supply being hidden away in some place less liable to raids. There may be a red signal light which can be operated from the door in case of revenue officer or police demanding entrance, and at the red light signal the contents of the three bottles are incontinently emptied into the street below. At the men's bars there seems to be more nervousness and drama than at the fashionable mixed saloons. At one bar named after a flower which opens its cups at night the whole drinking company were requested to go out at about two one morning just for half an hour because the stairway was infested by suspicious-looking characters who demanded to be let in and would not go away. "I can't take no chances, gentlemen," said the bartender. "I've just got to close up for a while." "Open again at two-thirty maybe." I had some amusing adventures with men who volunteered to take me a round of the bar-rooms. But they were generally cut short by the incapacity of the guides. Synthetic whisky sets a man on and then very quickly sets him off, "it makes him stand to, and not stand to" as the porter says in Macbeth. "Excuse me, I'm so drunk I can't walk across Broadway," said one. "Put me in a cab and let's call it a night." 70 SPEAKEASIES But in New York I did not call anything a night that ended before midnight. I made a jolly round with one of the oldest of New York reporters, a man who had been out every night for the last thirty years, now attached to the Station House of the White Light district. His was decidedly a seasoned head. With every glass of "inspiration" he took two chasers of beer. "Mine's inspiration please," he said each time, that being bar-slang for rye. He lasted till three in the morning. The lights of the Great White Way are like the shop lanterns of hundreds of bars. All around that circle of theatrical glare are the quiet alleyways and entrances of drinking places. The police are not concerned to close them, indeed they will direct you to them. At one of them I met a couple of detectives who were drinking beer and finishing their pencil notes on a burglary they had been investigating. It was only a few doors up from the police station though separated by a Catholic church and a synagogue. Every bar has its peculiarity. This one had interlocking doors. When you entered one door the inner automatically closed. When the bar-tender opened the inner door his action closed the outer door. At another bar which had an illuminated door of frosted glass the signal was to place an extended palm on the door, and when that shadow of a hand was seen from within the bolts were withdrawn. 7I NEW YORK NIGHTS One that we entered was kept by an Irishman. He has always been in the business, and preserved from his old legitimate bar a block of dry Leitrim mud which he had brought with him from Ireland thirty years before. It reposed in honour on the cash register and was tied round with emerald ribbons. The Irish are great people for keeping up the traditions. Several bars had grills and cooked a supper. Others had free sandwich counters where you helped yourself. Others had little restaurant rooms. One, kept by a pyramidal-shaped and jovial Italian had cabinets particuliers where you could take your girl. The cabinets were just shuttered apartments of green painted wood-not very secret; for one saw the women's faces frequently through half-opened doors. "You Irish?" I asked of the man behind the bar. "No, just a plain ordinary Wop," he answered. This was a well-known theatrical speakeasy, frequented by actors, supers, stage-hands, and what not, very democratic. Not far away is a shop which keeps open all night and displays in its windows such unusual wares as eyebrow pencils, nose putty, eye-shadow, and moist rouge. At the bar were one or two characters from the underworld of Broadway theatrical life. One debauchedlooking fellow offered to show me sights that would skin my eyeballs. But my companion dismissed him as a bar-room hanger-on. "He knows nothing but bars. You ought to get a 'Graphic' 72 SPEAKEASIES reporter to take you round if you want initiation." He looked at me quizzically. "No, you don't even need a 'Graphic' reporter I guess. You'll find your way about this old town without much help." The reporter was a little unsteady. "I was well spanked before you came along," he explained. He invited me to come with him to the Station House. There he was well known and was good friends with every one. "Officer, I want you to meet Mr. Graham; he's an ole friend, met on the other side years and years ago. 'S come to give the once over to this lan' of liberty. And when I think the 'World' newspaper raised the money to buy the pedestal to put up that dam' lie in our harbour I say the Press of this country is doing the country no good. No objection to Mr. Graham visiting your cells? Come along." We passed a shelf crowded with liquor bottles, raided some time or other by the police, probably now containing little to drink, and went down to the basement of the building where were a number of cold stone cells with lattice-work iron doors. Here two melancholy drunks were confined. One of them, all in tears, told us how he had come to the station and requested to be locked up so as to give peace to his wife and daughter. "My wife is very ill, but I've been raising hell all night, and I thought the only thing to do was to get locked up and give her a quiet night," said he. We passed him through some cigarettes, and my companion, holding the iron bars and swaying, 73 NEW YORK NIGHTS gave him a lecture on the evils of alcoholism. "You ought to quit drinking, m' boy, before it's too late. It's poison. One day you'll be found dead in the street. Obey the laws of the country, m' boy. They're for your protection. Sure! Uncle Sam doesn't want you to get in this horrible state, a disgrace and a menace to a decent family. See? Am I right? Am I right?" The police laughed very much at this for my companion was himself drunk and was trying to keep his balance as he gave forth this homily. He laughed also and tottered up the stairs into the Station Hall. Then we went to a Beauty Parlour much patronised by chorus girls and dancers from the revues. It's a very successful establishment combining two businesses, for at the back of the parlour there is a little window out of which ever and anon comes a hairy hand dispensing creature comforts to the fair unseen. A nice place! A girl goes for a manicure and gets a nip, goes for a wave and gets a splash. In the old days in New York there were definite hours for drinking. And in London there are certain hours. But many of the bars in New York E keep open all night. The new trade is very irresponsible. One bar-tender was reproaching Scotland with getting rich by poisoning America. I said the whisky he sold never came from Scotland. It must be made locally. He said I was right. 74 SPEAKEASIES "We get it now in the mash," he said. "And it's turned over to the guys on Eighth and Ninth Avenues to be worked up into the real stuff. God knows what they do to it. Our rye is cut many times over. There's no check on the makers. None of them ever gets charged with manslaughter. One of our members was found dead in a hotel last week with our card on him, and the police came to me to identify him. His girl had canned him and he came to us to forget it, drank too much, and died of it. They brought it in 'suicide through strychnine poisoning.' "But we're dropping the card system all around Broadway. You've got to get in on your face. Cards seem to be dangerous. So many get sore at us after cleaning themselves out, and they mail the card to the police with our address. The police notify us of a coming raid. But it costs us heavy. And there's not such a lot of profit in a speakeasy. Not so much as you might think with drinks at fifty cents. If you want to see where money is being made you must go to a fancy joint. It's the hostesses who sell the stuff and boost up the takings." It was three in the morning. Some one looking at my companion winked knowingly, and a jovial Irishman behind the bar began to lie"All out, boys; going to close now. All out, boys." He thought the reporter had reached that stage when it was better to go home. 75 NEW YORK NIGHTS "May the Lord God give rest to all peaceful souls," chanted an Irish bar-tender goodnaturedly. "All out, boys." And a young fellow took my companion by the arm and led him to the door and dexterously ejected him. I followed and took his arm, leading him laboriously to the subway. Wherever I went in New York, be it the journalists' booth at Police Headquarters, or a fashionable tea, or a convivial dinner at a friend's house, or a night club, or a publisher's office, friends and acquaintances, the intimate or the chance met, whispered addresses to me which I scribbled in my note-book, addresses and pass words. There came to be so many that I forgot who gave me each. The clientele of one place I visited grew like a snowball. I was taken by a New York editor, and he inscribed my name in the proprietor's book. Next day I took a friend and inscribed his name. But you could not get in till your name had been written down. One night I chose a place at random from my notebook list. It was on West Forty-sixth Street. I had to give the name of S. K. I took a friend. The taxi put us down opposite a very dark and gloomy-looking house. The basement had an iron gateway like the entrance to a prison. "This place has been raided and closed," I said to my companion, and felt disappointed, but upon ringing the bell a man with a head shaped like an egg 76 SPEAKEASIES came from an interior door and parleyed through the gate. "Who are you?" "I am S. K." "Are you sure?" "Yes, that is the name." "I don't recognize you." He went and brought the boss. "You S. K.?" he queried. "That's right." The boss, a florid Italian, hesitated dramatically, and then took a chance and bade us be admitted. We had dinner and were very adequately served, though plied with expensive drinks. But there was an interruption. The man with head like an egg returned and queried: "Are you sure you are S. K.?" "That was the name given me." "But you are not S. K. himself?" "No." "Because S. K. is in the kitchen. Perhaps he is a friend of yours." "I will go see him. He is probably a literary man." But the real S. K. was a stockbroker and he glared at me. I explained very sweetly that I was a literary man exploring New York at night, and he was mollified by that. When I came to pay my bill the boss poured forth a douceur for my companion and myself — 77 NEW YORK NIGHTS two glasses of real apricot brandy. "I'd take it as a favour," he said, "if you are writing about New York, not to mention my place." "Certainly," I promised. "I name no place and compromise none. Good night." At another resort of this kind my bill was discharged by the boss-on condition that I did not mention his establishment. Amusing this, in New York, where normally there is such a craving for publicity. I was told that I was leading a life of danger, going the rounds of the speakeasies. I ought to take out a heavy life-insurance. I have no doubt it was so, especially as I am an abstemious person and have no particular pleasure in drinking spirits. But I survived in good health. Perhaps that was due to the walks I had between three in the morning and dawn. It is exhilarating to walk the empty streets of the great city and for me, despite my amused interest in the ways of speakeasies, I was happier outside than inside. 78 CHAPTER vi At Romany Marie's P a narrow stairway and past a stout coloured cook filling a little kitchen, past a long line of free hat pegs hung with coats of visitors, are two rooms, shadowy, ornate, reposeful, and at some tables people are playing chess, at others people are talking in low voices, at others people are watching a Japanese sketching with tiny brush and Indian ink. Suddenly the cafe is mildly aroused, for one of the groups has become strangely vocal. A plaintive and shrill voice is singing an Asiatic song which is out of keeping with the spirit of New York. A new instrument has introduced a new motif and one divines that the orchestra turns to a new theme. A short thickset man comes out of the shadow toward me, a drab figure with red face and small light blue eyes. It is Steffanson the explorer whom I have not seen in an age. He comes tip-toeing toward me, as he were on the tight rope of a Northern meridian, with Eskimo music behind him and the shadow flicker and red glimmer of the aurora showing his face. The singer is Therese du Gautier, who has been in Northern Canada collecting Eskimo music. With her is the French musician Edgar Varese. Her chant is an Eskimo lullaby sung before New York was, and no doubt to be sung after it has gone. The scene is Romany Marie's garret in Washington Square. An unearthly keening, snowhuts, little people fur-wrapped, reindeer, darkness 79 NEW YORK NIGHTS dimly lighted by snow, explorers, an explorer's mind- A spell has been wrought. But what does it mean? Where am I? Whose goloshes have I put on by mistake? The green 'buses roll down Fifth Avenue into the Square, like the weights of wall-clocks, selfwinding, keeping the whole city ticking. Washington Square is the kitchen floor of New York in which a tall grandfather's clock is ticking, steadily ticking-"Forever Never: Never Forever. As 'Twas so 'Twill be. As 'Twill be so 'Twas." It registers, registers-what does it register? Time, heart beats, civilisation, history? The wail of the Eskimo music seems to remind us that it is not civilisation. It says so much that is paradoxical, says that the West is East, that the New World is the Old World. Asia seems to expand in the night, Europe is an extension of Asia, America an extension of Europe. In an occult sense Asia is the subconsciousness of every one, Asia is the world. The singer becomes silent. There is quietude in the low-roofed night club. Some one pokes the embers of the log fire and miniature meteors fly up the vent, sparks and smoke with a subsidence of grey ash. People are whispering-the Japanese, unperturbed, goes on sketching, the chess players stare at their locked wooden battles. Romany Marie floats up to Therese du Gautier with coffee and congratulations. Congratulations always seem irrelevant after a 8o AT ROMANY MARIE'S miracle. Romany Marie, stout, swarthy, empearled, with crimson ribbon in her black hair and peasant art evident in her embroidered dress, is a Jewess bearing the protective colouring of a Rumanian. To take part in the disenchantment of New York one ought not to be a Hebrew. Israel and business are too much identified. Be a Rumanianl Be a Gipsy! "I was born in an inn on the fringe of a great forest in Moldavia," says Marie. "My mother kept the inn. She met my father first in the depths of the forest. He had a red kerchief about his neck; he was wild-eyed; he was full of song." Once, far, far away from here between Rumania and Bessarabia there was a wayside inn on the edge of a dark forest. That forest stretched away v to the Dneister and the Ukraine, without a break. In it there wandered many gipsy bands. It was quite like the beginning of a fairy tale. "I am one of a wandering tribe loving freedom and song; that is why I am so glad when travellers come to the garret, yourself, Steffanson, George Brown the Scotch gipsy. When I was on Christopher Street all the Bohemians came to me. They talk about me in Paris, in Budapest, in Vienna. They all know Romany Marie's. Picasseau has painted here. O'Neill wrote some of his plays sitting before my fire." Like a living visitor's book Romany Marie recalled the visit of the Prince of Wales. Every American loves the Prince of Wales' feathers. 81 -' — ------ NEW YORK NIGHTS Faces, faces, faces, and among them that of the debonair, cosmopolitan, amusing Prince, with its mechanical smile. Yes, he is a traveller, a sort of royal gipsy, a child stolen by the gipsies to be returned later on to a throne. "Guido Bruno used to live here once and he edited his weekly from this studio," Romany Marie continued, striving unnecessarily to make her garret memorable to me. At Steffanson's suggestion Mlle. du Gautier had begun to sing another Eskimo song, one specially dear to him. He had heard her sing it several times. So had Edgar Varese. But they wished it repeated. There were elusive unheard-of quarter tones in it. It was music that had no reference to music. We were stilled and listened. Marie went away silently to the kitchen. The Japanese with studious interested eyebrows went on sketching, his face softened with musical reserves and unspoken thoughts. The Oriental has a commoner habit of communing with his soul than we have. We marvel outwardly; the Easterns marvel inwardly. So the spell was re-imposed. Washington Square faded out. The foundations of Fifth Avenue rocked. Where millions were cooped together there was just one voice quavering and shrilling out of the primeval wilderness of man's heart. The rugged Norwegian Steffanson is a rock-like person, unemotional, hard, like most Norwegians. He seemed to grow harder, more compact, as he listened, as if a rock could edify. Varese was dif82 I -- - AT ROMANY MARIE'S ferent. He is a modern French musician of the type of Stravinsky, not eschewing the cacophonies, the discordant and elusive; not traditional, extratraditional. One felt his active attention, not merely receptive but creative. The rest of us were merely muted and rendered inoperative by the musical negatives coming upon our ears. It was different when the Frenchwoman turned to Canadian-French folk-music. We were rendered more comfortable, were nearer together, more domestic. The centuries telescoped and gentle Europe consoled the spirit with its communicable hopes and loves. The old pots on the shelves, the country plates on the walls, were pleased. We had been taken in out of the wilderness to a peasant's cottage. Somewhere there was a pot-au-feu. It was not even a wayside inn in Moldavia. It was old France, pre-revolution, France under a Louis, obscure and simple. The Aurora Borealis flashed no more, the hungry stars dimmed out, to a roof of smoke and thatch. The soul had changed rooms in the universe which is outside New York -below, behind it, and around it. 83 CHAPTER vII At Texas Guinan's O NE thing that has charmed me in America is the spirit of co-operation. You have only to announce your intention of studying some aspect of the national life, and America comes forth to help you. It is like the fairy-tale when the boy setting forth on his quest of treasure is met at each corner of the road by some mysterious helper. When arriving in New York I knew nothing of the night life I was going to study and therefore was as unlikely as any hero of a fairy-tale. On the boat I was actually told that there was no night life: Prohibition had killed it. I thought then that it would be interesting describing New York asleep at ten-thirty. I would write a short study entitled "Curfew in New York." London thinks of New York as very lively, but it knows nothing of Texas Guinan's, or Barney Galant's or the Paradise Club. Florence Mills in her show of "Blackbirds" has a scene presenting "The Nest," but who has heard of that charming night club outside of New York? Van Vechten's "Nigger Heaven" awakened a mild curiosity regarding Harlem but not one in ten thousand Englishmen knows whether Harlem is a district, or a city, or a cabaret. And the average Englishman arriving in New York depends on his hosts rather than on himself for his entertainment. How differently the same man would arrive in Paris, intent on a gay time and knowing quite explicitly 84 I. i i TEXAS GUINAN This little girl invites you to give her a hand. I "i 0 AT TEXAS GUINAN'S what he intended to do and where he intended to go! I had not heard of Texas Guinan's in London except as a name associated with records of the music of her orchestra. And when I heard an American say, "Because you call Texas Guinan by her first name, don't think you won the war,?' I did not understand the reference. Then in the first days in New York a lounger in a theatrical speakeasy said, "You're studying night life. Give me two hundred bucks and I'll take you to Texas Guinan's. It all starts there." I did not part with the two hundred bucks but I was interested in the striking name. I met William Beebe, the hero of the Arcturus, one who not only knows life downunder in the ocean but down-under in the ocean of New York. He is a brilliant star-like person who looks at you, as it were from an eye in the centre of his fine brow. He also impressed on me the advantage of seeing Texas soon, and he called her the most wonderful mixer of the Bohemian elements of New York Society to-day. The general impression I obtained was that a ticket for the Three Hundred Club,* as Texas Guinan's was then politely called, being a club for the original four hundred less the hundred undesirables, was equivalent to the "freedom of the city by night." "Jimmy Walker rules New York by day; Texas Guinan by night." It was not all that perhaps, but it was an important door. My first night at the Three Hundred Club re*Subsequently padlocked and reopened as the 48th Street Club. 87 NEW YORK NIGHTS mains memorable. I came at midnight, and at seven in the morning I was still there sitting at a table with Texas, Harry Thaw, a bedizened Frenchwoman called Fifi, handsome Bill B- a screen star, and a young angel-millionaire who at that hour in the proceedings seemed pathetically in love with old man Guinan's daughter and forgetful of all else in the world. There were others, yes, but it was the end of the festivity. Most of the guests had gone home and Texas herself was eating cantaloupe and chicken sandwiches surrounded by her retainers, and discoursing in her large voice of the triumphs of the night and of triumphs to be. The room is long, but not too long to be homely. No one can be lost in it. The walls are covered with pleated cloth and the roof tented with the same cloth softly toned in old rose, green, and sere yellow. There are hanging Chinese lanterns, and on the walls illuminated designs of parrots. There are twenty or thirty tables and a small space in the middle of them for intimate dancing. The lighting is wonderful. There is nothing to try the eyes or irritate one. It is radiantly lighted and yet it is not the light associated with noisy excitement and jazz. You have come there not for a giddy hour but for hours and hours. That is why the illumination is so carefully toned. You part with your hat and coat; you are conducted to a table and you realise the pleasure of an intimate companion with whom you can talk of the things 88 AT TEXAS GUINAN'S of the heart for three or four hours, punctuating your conversation with dancing. A charming girl in blue satin trousers and wearing a crimson sash comes offering cigarettes, arriving at each table like a blown wisp of silk or a moth to a flower. This is Ethel, equally elegant and fresh at each hour of the night. Alternating with her is a smart girl in black with silver flowers on her hips, carrying large ornate dolls which indulgent New Yorker male likes to buy for his lady friend. He gives his "baby" a baby, his "cutie" a cutie, his "baby-doll" a baby-doll. It is a sort of playful identification. Or it is a symbol of the primitive interest of a man and a woman bathed in the love atmosphere. The silver-spangled nymph is a young goddess with babes for sale. There is a low buzz of conversation. Waiters in red-faced uniforms flutter to and fro with silvertopped bottles and elaborately prepared sandwiches. Four guitarists, the "Castillians," go from table to table and play to the various parties in turn, as it were playing them in and welcoming them. They play, and then they break into rich subdued vocal harmony. They are dark men of differing heights and proportions, South Americans, romantic of feature. Each looks like a lover -a serenader under his mistress's window. They -play deliberately, quietly, with subdued passion. It is a murmuring of the strings. Their steps also, as they move from one table to the next, are 89 NEW YORK NIGHTS measured, deliberate, gracious. They remind me of the preliminaries at an Orthodox Mass, when incense in a processional way is carried to each of many altars. They sing gipsy songs, Spanish serenades, American ballads. They sing by request what they are asked. Their musical attentions are indulgent, the Club's personal compliment to each party of guests. But Texas Guinan is not here. I surmise that she is still sleeping off the effects of the night before. Rumour has it she generally gets up to dinner. But one waiter says that she has looked in at her brother-in-law's night club-Tommy Guinan's. Another avers she has been to a theatre and went on to "Sherry's." The guests are expectant of her appearance and keep looking to the door. But Texas seldom arrives before one in the morning. To pass the time the band slips indolently into jazz, and the partnered crowd toes the parquet between the tables. Some guests are leaving but new ones are arriving. The club has been open since ten-thirty. There are still some free tables. But by one o'clock there is not a free place. The room is full. Lady Diana has arrived accompanied by a Judge's son. Two famous baseball players arrive. Here comes a rich Park Avenue hostess. Here comes the wife of one of the richest bankers in America. Here comes a well-known editor whose wife thinks he is pounding out editorials on world affairs, and instead he has a fascinating blonde on his arm. 9o AT TEXAS GUINAN'S Here comes Don Rafael, a wealthy Spaniard who has the torso of a bull-fighter and the assurance of one of the three musketeers. I see the Mayor flitting in elegantly to touch the hands of several of a large party and yield his charming smile to the i ladies. As I look at the square bottles on the tables my mind goes back to a verse on the London Underground trains:"From Underground to everywhere Matured by age and bottled square." and I wonder if Mayor Walker of New York has any connection with famous Johnny Walker. Many guests seem to bring bottles with them, and I am afraid these took away from sartorial grace. Even the smallest flask rather disfigures a Tuxedo. It seems appalling for rich and elegant males to dance with bottles in their pockets. Ladies of course have to risk leaving their bottles on the tables, but it was sad to see one of the most beautiful women exquisitely dressed yet pressing a big bottle of whisky to her bosom under her shawl of Persian silk. In the midst of all this was one octogenarian lady with white hair and one child of thirteen who danced with her tall father. "Look, the dancing grandmother has come," said my neighbour, pointing to the old lady. "You should see her dance. She's full of passion." I did not know Texas by sight. But at half past 9I NEW YORK NIGHTS one she arrived and was unmistakable. No stranger needed to ask who was Texas Guinan. There she was like a queen, like the sun, like a big firework, like a gorgeous tamer who has just let herself into a large cage of pet tigers. The name was whispered from table to table, Texas, Texas. She is a big woman, buxom to say the least. Of any age, with the grace of twenty-five. Her father is seventy. But you do not think of her age. She has a sort of immortal look. She was clad in a rose-coloured dress with cream lace gorget and the same lace low down her back. There was an enormous rose on her right shoulder lying on a large leaf. Her thick blond hair was rigidly waved. She wore a triple necklet of large pearls, and two ropes of pearls from her shoulders to her waist, and she had rose-coloured slippers with sparkling rhinestone heels. There was a large pearl in a ring on one of her fingers. A woman of considerable physical strength and good carriage. She.'' w1alked well and with assurance. A kiss here, a stroke of the hand there, an uttered "darling" there, she went from table to table clasping the company into a unity about her personality. Her smile seemed to be very prepossessing, a very magnetic winning smile. When I went up to her to introduce myself I am sure she had not the remotest idea who I was or why I had come, but she smiled in a royal way which Queen Victoria could not have bettered, promising to 92 AT TEXAS GUINAN'S come to my table presently; "I want to have a talk with you," she said. More kisses, young men came up to her and demanded personal caresses. "Hello, Corrie; hello, Harry, Jimmy, Charlie. Hello, Charlie, I see your old flame is on the other side of the room. Well, Diana! Isn't this Rafael my beau? Say, Harry, where's your wife-do you still love her? I'm so glad." She spoke in a deep voice, not with her lips but with her whole body. There was no mistaking her voice. It rose over the other sounds in the room. However, she was later than usual in arriving and wanted to get the show started. One of her handsome cavaliers helped her and she E climbed on to a chair. She stroked his head in thanks, and then, erect and magnificent, began to boss the company, the band, the waiters, and the dancers. Click-clacks of painted wood were on most of the tables, but Texas had a heap of them handed up to her and she served catches to men and women all over the room. Sure as she caught your eye she hurled you a clapping machine. Her roseate form erect there in the midst of the company kept the whole interest in herself, and by throwing the clappers she kept the gaze of all and sundry jumping to her. The near-naked girls came out and sang a song about cherries. One carried a basket of fruit. She 93 NEW YORK NIGHTS. sang very attractively, and at the chorus, "Cherries! Cherries!" all the waiters shouted "Cherriesl" All the guests shouted "Cherries!" The whole room resounded with hoarse cries as if it had become a fruit market, "Cherries!" "Cherries!" Texas encouraged the whole staff to be noisy, her idea now being to get every one excited. The girl with the basket made the tour of the tables and put a cherry into each man's mouth. One took the cherry and kissed the girl's fingertips. A girl following ruffled up men's hair as she passed. Great fun having your hair ruffled by a kid! It made the young men feel like fathers. A new profession for girls-hair-rufflersl Texas all the while kept throwing clappers and making loud remarks to new friends as more and more visitors crowded in. A troupe of girl sprites from the back got hold of one young fellow, pulled him to bits, lugging off his coat, unbuttoning his vest, handing up to Texas his watch, his pocketbook, and the rest of the contents of his pockets. He seemed to enjoy it immensely, and while he dressed again the girl sprites in a ring danced round him. Then he encircled the waists of one or two of them and smacked them and got away. There was a succession of young dancers, white girls whose glimmering bodies so near and intimate produced not merely an odeur des femmes. Adam ceased to be interested by the garden and was only interested in his rib. It was merely the show-off of pretty girls, "fair and pleasant for delights." 94 AT TEXAS GUINAN'S Russian ballet would have been out of place, too intellectual and aesthetic. For the ballet, like all true dancing, is art. But this was indulgence, a picnic without a wood, in an artificial summer. But it was light-hearted and gay, not like the atmosphere of burlesque, or of the Folies Bergeres or Moulin Rouge. Texas Guinan has the art to make her party young-gay, light-hearted, irresponsible. As in a burlesque of Vachel Lindsay's recitations, the audience was continually called upon to shout some line in the midst of the songs. A girl knowingly points to her two eyes and two breasts and sings "She has this and she has that." And the crowd, or in any case the waiters, interrupt in chorus with the line "And she knows her onions." Texas, with an air of kindness, kept calling on the audience to applaud new singers and dancers. "Oh, encourage that girl. Give that little girl a hand!" she would implore, suiting the action to the word by shaking her click-clack noisily, and thus she would obtain a chorus of applause. During the songs the waiters amused themselves by shouting, "Louder, louder!" "Louder and funnier!" "Sonya, Sonya!" (This to a Russian dancer.) "Gigolo, Gigolo!" "O. K. O. K." "All right, Texas! All right, Texas!" They seemed to me rather out of hand. But the hostess herself encouraged this and I suppose knew 95 — NEW YORK NIGHTS what she was about. The clamour helped to unify the crowd of guests. The revue culminated in a snow-ball fight. Scores of felt snow-balls were brought in baskets and distributed among the guests. Every one began to throw balls at the man and woman of his particular fancy. White balls flew in all directions in the rosy light of the Chinese lanterns, responsive laughter bubbling up from all quarters. Lady Diana put her pretty head in an inverted basket to save it from being pelted. After this sham battle the jazz band resumed its musical invitation, and there was general dancing. Even Texas, somewhat unwillingly, was captured by a gallant partner and led round. I had an interesting talk with her father-"Old Man Guinan," as the staff familiarly call him. He was originally British, belonging to a Dublin Irish family which settled in Canada. His daughter's real name is Marie Louise, named after the Princess. But the father made home and fortune in Texas. The daughter who before she was an impresario was a cinema star and before that a Texan cow-girl, did well to be known as Texas, "fair as a star when only one is shining in the sky." She can rope steers as ably as she can rope dancers, and at times her club has something of the rodeo in the air. "My daughter is a born mixer, and she's full of pep and good-humour and everything else," said he. "Wherever she goes she makes friends. Presi96 - ----— ~ ~ --- —-------— ~-~ -------------.-I-.. I-_.._I_._....__.__._.. AT TEXAS GUINAN'S dent Harding adored her. Mrs. Harding not less. She and the Prince of Wales were the best of friends." The old man is a character derived you might say direct from Thackeray, and I can imagine how that master hand would have dealt with him and his daughter in a novel. He's a delightful old fellow who doesn't care a rap for the conventions. After an adventurous life in business speculation and finance he is now his daughter's manager and runs the commercial side. Not that Texas herself is not shrewd enough to do that better than he can at his age but, being out all the night she must be free of the day. Mr. Guinan told me of the millions he had won r and of the millions he had lost, the corner he had made in seed potatoes, the hold he had had on vast numbers of priority railroad shares, the fights he had had with railroad kings, and of the wonderful deal he nearly concluded with the Harding administration, and if half of it was not exaggerated ~ some one ought to be at pains to write his biography. Texas gave Harding so great pleasure and he so admired her that he sent for the old man and desired to know in what way he might advance him in honour and estate, to show his gratitude. "Tell me what I can do for you, socially, commercially, financially." The old man said he would like to help his country by cutting the prices on certain Government contracts by twenty-five per cent. 97 NEW YORK NIGHTS "No," said the President, "you should have control of these contracts, and if there is a margin of twenty-five per cent, why, I think it only fair that you should benefit." "I placed an order that night for nine billion envelopes," said Mr. Guinan. "All was drawn up and was waiting to be signed. Mr. Harding took the document away with him. But a great personal and national misfortune intervened. The President never came back." "When did you become an American citizen?" I asked him. "In 1878 when I came to Texas. Exactly two hours and fifteen minutes after I arrived I forsook Queen Victoria and recorded my vote for the Democratic ticket. But I have always retained the greatest respect for the British Empire, its laws and its administration, and would rather be governed under British law than under United States." But this remark was partly compliment to me and partly irritation at the liquor laws. Great Britain is frightfully popular at bars and in night clubs in New York. Between the hours of three and five in the morning almost half the company at the club paid their bills and left. But other visitors flocked in to take their places. The ordinary clubs of the White Light district close between three and four, and numbers of their guests came along to look up Texas. They were mostly lit up with pleasure be98 AT TEXAS GUINAN'S fore they arrived. Some revue girls with partners came in. A popular actor hailed as Eddie appeared. Harry Thaw, who had perhaps been there all night, emerged into view and I was able to consider his very extraordinary face. Don Rafael became very prominent. Handsome and adored Charlie, Charlie what, I don't know, began to receive many attentions from Texas and from the other ladies. There was to be a second revue at five o'clock, and Texas was busily engaged restraining those who thought of home and bed and in welcoming newcomers. She held several departing guests by sheer force of will. She appeared to be in excellent spirits, and hit men over the head with her clapper as she passed them. A lately-married couple fresh from their honeymoon appeared. "Oh-ho, the newlywedsl" she cried, and sent a waiter for a bag of rice. Every now and then she caught my eye and fixed me. "Don't go!" I had told her I might describe the night in a book, and she appeared very eager that I should have a full impression. "Don't go, Diana, don't go," she cried, seeing that lady show signs of making a move. "The second show is beginning." Texas used all sorts of devices to delay the going of those who had risen, and she was often successful. She had great power of will, and I marvelled at her energy, and vitality. The five o'clock revue was pleasant. There were not quite so many people. Texas, after a 99 NEW YORK NIGHTS bout of pelting the newlyweds with rice, settled down at a long table to enjoy the show herself, her admirers clustered about her. Her table would have made an excellent movie picture, for there was a great deal of facial expression and the group was unified by the dominant personality of Texas herself. When she wanted the lights low she called "Cohen!" and all the waiters shouted "Cohen!" The lights were low during most of the second revue. I noticed that some of the guests were asleep in their seats. One of the waiters borrowed a horn from the jazz band and blew dreadful reveilles into the ears of the sleepers. But they did not awake. Bootleg sleep is most profound. Some one whispered to me that there was a special tariff for those who could not be awakened by a trumpet. Some guests looked as if Gabriel himself could not have disturbed them. I had grown accustomed to being out all night, but I began to feel tired. There were a number of tired and faded but hypnotised people there. Some were irritable, and I foresaw the chance of some one starting a fight in the club. But a charming girl in a cerise coat and ninon knickers crooned "Baby face! Baby face!" And a score sang it with her. And a trio of young girls in Oxford trousers sat in chairs in the rosy twilight and sang "Blackbird" sweetly, indulgently, patheticallyMake my bed and light the light, I'll be home late to-night. I00 AT TEXAS GUINAN'S As it neared six o'clock in the morning these words began to seem without meaning. But I gathered that many of those present were at Texas Guinan's night after night, all night. The ordinary sweetness of darkness and night meant nothing to them; they defied it, denied it. If they slept with their wives they slept by day. Still, all were affected with "Bye-bye, blackbird" sentimentality. Even Texas with her tireless bursting energy seemed stilled. The waiters standing about in the dim light looked like wax-works. The company drooped like flowers at sunset. There seemed after all to be some sadness, perhaps some tragedy hidden in the lives of these fearfully gay people. Then the lights went up and playful nymphs emerged. Don Rafael made himself a nuisance by encircling their waists with his arm and leading them about to introduce them personally to those they already knew. He had been attempting this all night to shouts- of "Sit down! Sit down 1 He was making himself unpopular. Suddenly some one picked a quarrel with him and there was a scuffle in which one of the ropes of Texas' pearls got broken. Waiters intervened to part the fighters, and there was a good deal of confusion. Harry Thaw, gabbling and laughing beside Texas, seemed monstrously amused, but she was angry and began to use threats and persuasions, commands and coaxings, to stop the feud. A real fight was narrowly averted. The Spaniard retreated in chagrin. He was in the wrong, but Jo' NEW YORK NIGHTS Texas was fond of him and called him a "Swell feller." But the American who was accompanied by a beautiful and distinguished-looking lady she seemed also unwilling to offend. Half a dozen men on the floor were seeking her lost pearls, to which however Texas seemed indifferent. Nowadays no one gets excited over lost pearls. But I thought the tireless good mixer might for a moment lose her self-control. She said to me, "I'm so-" She was going to say "tired," but she would not admit it. Don Rafael, having swallowed his insult, came to say "Good-bye. Texas looked at him appealingly. "You're still my beau, always my beau." And he gravely accepted her assurance and caress. Texas had her breakfast brought in. "Well, Harry," she said, "are you going to give me a copy of that book of yours?" Thaw seemed flattered, but there were two expressions on his strange face. His eyes and brow seemed in conflict with his mouth and chin. He spoke like a turkey gobbling. "You'll buy a copy and then I'll autograph it for you... I'm a mean fellow, I am." "Bill, you look like Jack O'Brien of Philadelphia. Quit staring at him." The gentleman addressed was leaning forward and staring with a fixed expressionless stare. An actor brought in Fifi. I was next to Texas on one side, on the other was a young fellow who kept telling her in a tear102 AT TEXAS GUINAN'S stricken voice how he loved her and asking her not to make fun of him. She said she would never make fun of him. "Let me take you home in my car. I promise you I won't hurt you," said he. As if any one could harm Texas Guinan! At that moment Harry Thaw stood up and appeared to be about to fight the newly-come actor. "If Harry is going to fight I'll not be a witness," cried Texas, stood up, and with Fifi suddenly made her escape and went home. Then we all went home. It was strange to walk out into the broad daylight from that radiant room of everlasting midnight and find it was pouting with rain and that the morning toilers were hurrying through it to their daily work. 103 CHAPTER viii At Texas Guinan's (Suite) YjY last dance in the Fall was at Texas Guinan's. Patricia and I spent the night out and were there till six-thirty in the morning of the day I sailed for England. We promised that on my first night back in America we would celebrate by going to Texas again. But much intervened during the winter. Texas Guinan's had been padlocked when I returned. I had read something of her adventures. First, Aimee MacPherson had been to the club with another revivalist and had had a "swell time," whatever that means. I imagine it would be an act of great courage to attempt to save souls in a night club. Real apostolic fervour would be required for that, which is something rarely possessed by the revivalists. They looked in and saw that the night club was innocent and Texas was very sweet to them and that was all. They sing a witty song about it now at the new club. And Texas when a little later she was arrested by federal officers who raided the club, exclaimed as she got down from the chair where she had been standing, "I don't care, only let me have some devotional books along." An onslaught was made on the night clubs during the winter. Many were closed and I saw the yellow padlocks on the doors of several places I used to visit. Clubs had changed their names. Jack had removed his speakeasy from 54th Street 104 AT TEXAS GUINAN'S (SUITE) to 48th. Jack's brother had decided to extend business and was opening a new drinking establishment on top of a skyscraper. A curfew law had been promulgated by the Commissioner of Police requiring all places of amusement to close at or before three in the morning. Not that any old man goes round the streets of New York at three in the morning ringing a bell. But the police are given the opportunity to call. Texas was not arrested by the New York police, who have always been friendly to her, but by federal agents. The Three Hundred Club was shut up. But the proceedings against the lady proved farcical. She stood up and amused the court and the judge with her witty repartees and it was decided that whatever went on in the club she was not responsible. She was nominally not the proprietor of the club but an employe. There was therefore no case against her. Also during the winter rumour had it that Texas had been rejuvenated. As a witty journalist put it "Map of Texas Lifted." A woman I met shortly after my return, Mrs. Arbuckle, also at leading hostess of night clubs, said, "Texas is the queen of night clubs, she can never be suppressed." I felt there was something immortal about her. So one night I espied an electric sign on 48th Street. It said "Texas Guinan and her Mob Open April 6th." Patricia and I therefore decided to keep our tryst. I had been up to Columbia to fulfil an engage105 NEW YORK NIGHTS ment to speak with Milt Gross on the twin topics of Humour and Being Serious before the Writers Club. It was a curious contrast coming from the quiet ladies of the faculty to the joy-cave of Texas. We arrived about midnight when there were not many people. There were more waiters than guests. Texas had not yet come. We got a good table and surveyed the new scene. The room was smaller than that of the Three Hundred Club, but it was brighter, more playful. It had sham windows framed with illuminated coloured caricatures of New York celebrities such as Texas herself and Paul Whiteman. On strings across and across hung numerous red, yellow and blue balloons. There was a good square of dancing floor, and tables three sides of it. The same set of waiters were there, Ethel, the cigarette girl, loped indolently along. The girl who used to sell flowers was now selling magnolias. All the guests began to wear their white blossoms. She told us that Sonya the Russian girl was performing at the Loew State Theatre, "going over great." Patricia and I danced till Texas came in. It was a very hot night but an artificial breeze such as one might feel on a boat at sea tossed the pretty coloured balloons about and wafted our faces while we moved to the music. It was as if the band was producing a gale. Many new guests came in and presently a roar of clapping heralded Texas herself-"Texas, Texas I" I was so surprised. In came a charming young person dressed in a slight Dubarry gown, a Io6 AT TEXAS GUINAN'S (SUITE) lissom figure in spun gold. She wore the same Texas pearls and cleverly combed auburn hair. She was radiant with smiles, she carried a police whistle in one hand and blew it vociferously every two or three seconds. She moved about with an equestrian grace and the cow-girl in her was very apparent. All the waiters rattling their clappers, the band in musical uproar, balloons popping and the whistle blowing-men in all parts standing up, shouting and waving to Texas Guinan, imparted a delirious excitement to the night club, and this excitement once begun did not die down for hours. What a vitality and animal magnetism the woman possesses! Texas went from table to table greeting her friends, breaking from each in turn by shouting some witticism. Any mark of attention was an honour. No one wanted to be overlooked by her. I felt a glow of pleasure as if I had been moved up nearer the throne when she slapped me playfully on the cheek. Texas on her chair ruling the giddy throng, throwing clappers, streamers, snowballs, blowing her whistle, summoning her henchmen, silencing the guests for a moment, propounding a riddle: "Who is the greatest flapper on the American stage?" "Fanny Ward, this one, that one..." "No, the greatest flapper on the American stage, I'll tell you. It's the American flag." Texas calling out the girls for her revue and asking the guests to rattle their clappers, make a big 107 NEW YORK NIGHTS noise for each little dancer.... ". Come on, give this girl a hand," Texas demurely listening to a man singing a ballad about her, accompanied by four guitarists, about her conversion by Miss MacPherson, her arrest, her friendship with the Mayor, the lights all suddenly switched out, and the band firing at the balloons with toy pistols causing resounding pops, cries of "Chicago, Chicago!" one tiny light appearing making dimly lucent the hanging balloons, the night club shrouded in soft darkness while a beautifully dressed girl does an Oriental dance waving rich luminous silk about her, the lights up again, Texas blowing her whistle insistently, in the reduced noise she addresses a lively guest whom she calls California: "I want you to say after me the words What am I doing?, putting the accent first on the what, then on the am, then on I, and last of all on the word doing. You will see it alters the sense." "The answer is either a horse or a flower," replies California, who is waggishly mellow and obstinately refuses to obey Texas. Texas whistles, whistles, whistles, insists, and California drunkenly and self-consciously repeats the words-"What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing? What am I doing?" "You're making a dam' fool of yourself. Don't you see?" rejoins Texas with great mirth. Once more much whistling. Texas calls on the waiters to eject a college-boy who won't sit down i08 AT TEXAS GUINAN'S (SUITE) when told to by her. "Give him his check. Come on, you rascals. Show you can do something besides lift watches and diamonds from the tables. Throw him out." But every one is throwing snowballs and streamers and in the hubbub the incident is passed over. Texas dances with each of her beaus in turn. We all dance. We are pelted with snowballs while we dance. Our feet are ankledeep in coloured paper. About our necks and our heads and our hair trails coloured paper. The wind blows the balloons about and men and women pinch them as they pass and burst them. The exuberant band plays the Kinkajou. A vast gentleman who looks like Sam Hill tries to dance that with his sweetie. Late-comers arrive dancing as they come. One of the Fairbanks twins arrives with her newly gotten husband. Texas gives a signal and the orchestra leaves off playing jazz and breaks into the wedding-march. A hornblower goes ahead of the happy pair brazening forth joy. Musicians and guests join in a Bacchanalian procession round the room. Then once more the dancing-square is filled and we whirl to the strains of "Do, do, do what you've done, done, done, before, baby!" Curfew passes; four o'clock passes; the dawn light is coming up in the sky outside but the star of Texas does not pale. Gaiety goes on. Patricia and I said adieu to the Queen. "Goodbye, darling! Don't be so long before you come again 1" 109 CHAPTER ix New Yorkers SHAW in Pygmalion identified the suburban habitats of people in a crowd by the characteristic differences in their cockney accent. In New York a clever reader of faces might be able to tell at a glance on what floor a man lived. People are beginning to get a Isth floor look. Faces of mountaineers are beginning to appear in the streets of New York, uplifted, bardic. There is a great deal of difference between the depressed expressions of those who dwell on ground-floors and those who inhabit the peaks. It is a terrible burden to carry the sense of there being twenty storeys above one. The pioneers of Manhattan are up in the cerulean; these are the people with the views and the air; the people who have got out of the shadow. They go to the window and say, "Just look out at this marvellous wonderful city." Those living down below are denied these views and get a cellar expression on their faces. "If you're passing just drop up," says a friend to me. In what other city in the world could one hear such an expression? This is a city of glorious movement, yes, but I do not like the symptoms of paralysis that have set in with the signalling system of pinioning the traffic. It looks as if the whole of New York were smitten with rheumatoid arthritis. These bus and taxi jerks will be reflected in the soul by and by and I expect to see some very jerky babies around. 110 SUBWAY JAM The "Subway Rush" is worse than the Tube in London or the Metro in Paris. U-I, 0b~. NEW YORKERS And lovers will love in that distressing way... rush and halt, rush and halt. By the way, in the imbroglio of New York traffic what is the true function of the cross-town tram? I always give one a chance, if it passes me I catch it at the next halt. Generally I overtake two or three when I cross the town. They get passengers because they obstruct pedestrians and also I suppose because the new race of New Yorkers has no feet. There seem to be scarcely any street-criers in New York. I have heard one man cry, "I cash old clothes," but that is all. I suppose the general noise has killed the voice of the hawker. And, alas, none is selling flowers in the street. There is such noise on Sixth and Third Avenues that my soft English is always misheard on those streets. I am silenced as I walk with my friend. But there is an avenue tribe which is at home in this din. The children of Third and Sixth Avenues talk two octaves higher than those of Fourth and Madison. The means of locomotion seem too to be producing a caste system of manners. There is the subway push, the taxi flutter, the elevated airiness, the automobile poise. The subway pushers however do seem to set the pace. It is a terrible city for pushing. On the other hand, people carry themselves well. That is because they have to raise their eyes constantly to high points in the air. The skyscrapers are straightening the spines of each I13 NEW YORK NIGHTS and all. You do not have to say to the growing boy, "Look up, boy, look up!" The crowd has light steps. Only the police are heavily shod. So many people dance at night that the rubber-heel industry must be suffering. New York men look less elegant than they did before Prohibition. They seem more bulky about the hips. Flasks and the black bottom are making them hip-conscious. Women dance together at the dining-dancings on Broadway but at the more fashionable resorts twi-feminine partnership is not tolerated. In the Village they dance together unashamed to a murmurous chorus of "fairies, fairies," and the Greenwich Village poet 'plains"Fairyland's not far from Washington Square." This is something not imitated in London, where it may still be a charming compliment to call a girl a fairy. At a fashionable the-dansant, in fact, at the Lorraine, I was interested to see men check in their waist-coats with hat and overcoat. At the Pavilion Royal an enthusiastic dancer asked a waiter for a a fresh collar. At Arcadia I saw a man with large perspiration marks on his coat. At the Pennsylvania Grill one night I saw a fat elderly inebriated couple after jostling several people fall over one another in the middle of the floor. They picked one another up ruefully, kissed and continued to try to dance. I 14 NEW YORKERS Checking in the waist-coat seems not unreasonable at certain seasons. I have been at Paul Whiteman's on a Saturday night when the heat was on and the whole company was moist before it began to dance. In the hot weather in many places the men take off their coats as well. They wear belts but not braces, so it may be said that like Russians they dance in their blouses-a shirt by any other name! Hot weather breaks down many conventions of dress. In London even in summer one wears a cloak over evening-dress, but on Broadway on summer nights you see many men in dinner-jackets and light hats but without cloak. America however is not only more untraditional than England but also more individualistic in fashion and manners. It is only on such occasions as the Straw Hat festa in the fall that a certain amount of mob discipline is applied to fashion. I watched the dancing at the Pennsylvania one night and listened to Roger Wolfe Kahn's most admirable orchestra. I suppose most of the guests have their hotel bed-rooms at the back of their consciousness; but some have checked in their bags at the station and are dancing till within a few minutes of train. They are drummers from Oshkosh dancing with their New York flirts. But what bad dancing! What floor manners! It is curious that people so good in the organisation of business, who combine so well in trade should be so individualistic on side-walks and dance-floors. But this criticism does not apply to Southerners I15 NEW YORK NIGHTS who are in New York. They are an unheeded pattern to the rest. The foreign elements in New York make it rough. The Italian element is especially very burly. They take more liberties with conventions than any one. You may upon occasion see an Italian serving a soda-bar on Mulberry Bend in his B. V. D.'s. The Italians rush the traffic signals more than the other races. And they are becoming more wealthy and more prominent. "The English, the Irish, the Scotch and the Goimans is all right," says the woman who cleans my apartment, "but the Italians is gone way up since Prohibition. Won't speak to you no more; has their cars and all that. It doesn't seem fair." The successful Italian bootleggers are too showy to please their neighbours, but I believe they have very little social ambition. The Jews are very different. They want to climb. For instance, Moskowitz told me he thought of going to England in the hope that he would be invited to play his dulcimer to the King. In all seriousness. He would be even a greater light on the East Side than he is if he could say he had played to the King of England. New Yorkers type their love letters. I met Browne of "This Believing World," and Raphaelson of "The Jazz Singer," at Moskowitz's one night, I remember we had a lively talk about love, religion and night-life. Apropos of typing love letters, Raphaelson remarked, "They dictate them; II6 NEW YORKERS they keep carbon copies and they sign themDictated but not read." Patricia said to me one night that America had become to such an extent germ-proof and sterilised that naive love was now almost unknown. Sophisticated is one of the commonest words of everyday speech. I heard a girl say, "I am very sophisticated intellectually. He only threw me over when he found I was not sophisticated physically." A noun has been invented. They talk of "sophisticates." The American colleges are turning out swarms of sophisticates. Those who pet in night clubs are not experiencing love's young dream; they are sophisticates. Another word competes with sophisticated; it is synthetic. Synthetic runs sophisticated very close. It is a Prohibition word and no doubt owes its origin to "synthetic gin." Elmer Gantry is synthetic; New York is synthetic; milk is synthetic; emotions are synthetic; articles must be synthetic. A man talks to me of a new night club which will be synthetic village. In England "mixing them".s cricket slang and refers to the varying of pace in the balls of an over; but in America it means drinks. The cocktail is a figure of life. New Yorkers wilfully mix their emotions in order to get a greater "kick" out of them. Broadway dramas are put up from known ingredients, more or less skilfully mixed, mystery, terror, humour, sex, sentiment. A good story is one in which these are well mixed. The experienced person holds up 117 NEW YORK NIGHTS his glass to the light and after sipping its contents tells you what he thinks there is in it. Nothing comes straight from God; everything comes out of coloured bottles. I met a writer of popular science one day. He is a man who believes all things and yet is a pessimist. As a writer he is extremely successful. His mind is founded on a belief in science popularly understood. But he seems to be disillusioned about life. You cannot mix him anything for which he will not give you the formula. "What next in writing?" was a question which he propounded to me. I said, "Why not compile a book of unanswerable questions as a set-off to the present 'ask me another' craze? Americans are getting the dangerous idea that all questions can be answered." But the scientist remarked, "Yes, we are beginning to know a little more about everything." Travel, gaiety, new experience seemed to have little lure left for him. The night-life which I described to him he dismissed as "carnal." I said, "What you need to do is sell all that you have and give it to the poor. Clothe yourself in rags and set off for some place like Mecca." "Oh, I've tried it. I've tried it," said he. But he had a charming room at the Algonquin. I imagine that if the Gospel were rewritten for Americans with synthetic souls a story of that kind would be told. The answer to the young man. "One thing thou needest. Sell what thou hast, Ii8 NEW YORKERS give it to the poor, take up thy Cross and follow me." And the answer-"I've tried it, I've tried it." I sat next to Mrs. Tom Lamont at a dinner given in honour of Masefield at the Brevoort one night. "What do you do at night clubs at five in the morning?" she asked me. "You put your arm round your companion and at least imagine you are in love," I replied. "I think there is only one person in the world I could sit up all night with," said the banker's wife. "Your husband?" "I was thinking of God. Do you think I could find God in a night club?" "I think you find Him in unexpected places. You often fail to find Him in churches and religious books." "Yes? And how about the devil?" "I think you find God and the devil very close to one another. You stand a very fair chance of having a religious experience in a night club if your soul is due to have one." That conversation took place before Aimee MacPherson visited Texas Guinan's. I was invited to tea one evening by Clement Wood and Gloria Goddard, poetic tea in the "Village" which implies cocktails and shaded lights. A feature of this kind of tea is that no tea is provided. Clement Wood with wonderful voice sang Negro spirituals; Gloria said a poem of hers 19 6 NEW YORK NIGHTS about the "uxorious sycamore," clever phrase suggesting to the talkers of harems of birchesbachelor pines, shimmying aspens and other amusing combinations. One of the guests was Laura, who read a ballad which was so frightful that no one would express an opinion till I had said what I thought. I decided to risk her enmity. "My dear, it's terrible," said I. Laura was not abashed. That was her own private thought. She came over and sat by me. "And how do you find New York?" asked Laura. I said it would be very pleasant if the liquor were not so bad. "What!" she exclaimed in dismay, "you do not like our liquor? Why, it's much better in New York than anywhere else in the world." "Your patriotism is going too far," said I. "Lately I had some Benedictine from a bottle with 'Benedictine' on its seal, and labelled D. O. M., but having a sort of poison within. It was nearer blasphemy than boot-legging." "But, Mr. Graham, you can get wonderful Benedictine in New York, just wonderful." "Now that's strange," said I. "You accept my criticism of your poem but you uphold your country's bad liquor." "Let me take you to a place where I can give you better Benedictine than you will find in France. Are you free to-night about I I:30? Very well. That's fine. Come to Tony's and you shall 120 NEW YORKERS judge for yourself. You will? Well, be punctual. Last time I promised to meet a man there at eleventhirty and he did not come till after midnight and I did not want to drink any more. But I saw on the list of drinks that Tony was serving absinthe frappe that night. It gave me a thrill. You cannot get absinthe even in France but we with Prohibition had it. I felt unreasonably proud of Uncle Sam. So I had an absinthe frappe and then I had another. Still my friend did not come; so I went on drinking. At last, looking to the doorway I saw him enter. I had had five absinthe frappes I "I felt strange and uplifted. Mr. Graham, I felt like the Mother of God, I felt more cosmic than I have ever felt before." Prohibition, it will be observed, has the power of heightening the effects of language even in a writer of bad ballads. The lady paused to give better emphasis to her striking phrase. I accepted her invitation and received some very indifferent Benedictine. I suggested that the name on the label be altered to "Bootleg Blessing" or "D. 0. M.-With the blessing of The Monks of Eighth Avenue." 121 CHAPTER x Blossom-Land "[ DO not ask what the girls do during the day, L as long as they arrive here each night fresh and fit. The manager of -- land loves each of his hostesses in turn, but I can't do that. It does not make for discipline. I want to keep this place under control and build it up. The girls are carefully chosen and they are an asset of the dancehall. They bring custom. Men come here night after night to dance with the same girl. The hoofers also are useful to business. A man will come in with his wife; he does not want to dance with her nor she with him. He takes a hostess, she takes a hoofer. They have a happy evening; they don't get annoyed with one another. Or a plain elderly lady comes in without a partner; it is little pleasure to dance with her, she chooses a hoofer. It is not exactly jam for him, but he may get a big tip. Sometimes he makes a useful friend. A rich woman dancing-mad, unable to find a partner in her own set will find one here and adopt him, take him to her home, perhaps even take him round Europe with her. There are several known cases." The Manager of Blossom Land mentioned the names of two well-known society ladies who had thus found male help. "The girls also make useful connections. A Wall Street man used to come here regularly three or four nights a week and ask for Marguerite. He 122 BLOSSOM-LAND did not dance. He would sit with Marguerite in an arm-chair in a quiet corner upstairs and pretend that she was his pet daughter from ten till one. He simply wanted something to take his mind off stocks and bonds after the day's work. He paid for the full number of dances and from that the girl took 25% commission. And not infrequently she would find under her stocking a twenty-dollar bill. He petted her a little, but it was all very innocent. They talked of life. I don't think he ever made a date with her outside Blossom Land. If you look at the girls you will see they are superior. They all have self-respect. I could not vouch for their morals, but they still think a lot of themselves." It was a magnificent dance-hall, with two platforms for bands and a cinema screen in between. It cost a dollar to enter. There was a cosy clubroom where men could go and smoke if disappointed in love. There was a luxurious mezzanine floor where you could take your partner for intimate conversation. But it was not allowed to bring in liquor. The professional dancers were elegantly dressed-Lopez the Spanish girl with green robe and black kerchief about her head was an example in herself. But the dancers were chiefly of the clerk and shop-girl type. The men wore shabby ready-made clothes; the girls were showy. There were some very good-looking ladies and some wild ones. All the races in Europe seemed to be represented. It was a sort of League 123 /' NEW YORK NIGHTS of Nations dance. There were few with whom one would have cared for conversation. Yet what education would have done for most of them! I suppose it is generally overlooked that in our life of to-day, there are so many de-educative activities that the ordinary education received at home and at school is more or less destroyed during adolescence; it is not sufficient bulwark against degrading influences. We used to think that education was wasted on girls. But it is clearly necessary now if only as a prophylactic. Civilisation eats away the dignity of womanhood; business deadens its intuitions. Blossom Land dancing was a remarkable sight. They do not dance there as they do at night clubs or at fashionable hotels. It is more free, fanciful, picturesque. There is much more space and the dancers take advantage of it. The dancing is very ambitious. The ballet and the musical-comedy stage have infected the steps of the children of the dance-halls. In England popular dancing is much more disciplined and monotonous than in America. No Charlestoning or Blackbottoming is allowed at Blossom Land but there are some things done which would cause reproof in a London dance-hall. The women are more unrestrained. They give their partners more joy. They lope along with long outstretched guiding arms and insurgent thighs; they do close-up minuet curtseys where the girl drips over the man's knee. They run and 124 BLOSSOM-LAND chew as they run, keeping tongue rhythm. Every now and then they kick up one leg behind as in a cinema kiss. One young fellow dances the whole time with his knee between the thighs of his beautiful partner. She is in a light frock of crimson silk under which is a short white petticoat, and then rather neat black bloomers. She straddles his leg sometimes in such a way that she seems to be riding a wooden horse; he holds her waist with an open hand; she languishes backwards and her loose hair trails toward the ground. She seems to be doing a tableau of woman's surrender. A more pretty type is the imitation Pavlova continually doing the dying swan, retiring one leg behind and scraping an arc on the ball-room floor in mock death. A similar feat is that of hanging right down on men's lowered arms and pointing a toe straight to the roof. This seems to occur mainly in the Tango which is danced at Blossom Land with great variety. It is curious to see a boy pick up a girl with his two hands to her sides, her legs wavering artistically in mid-air. You do not need to be a spy to discover that all the girls wear bloomers. To my eyes as I sat at the side sipping my ginger-ale the festive coloured scene was an eerie piece of make-believe. It was difficult to see these gay partners as they were in their offices and shops by day, or in their homes. Two psycho-analytical views suggest themselves; one that their dancing was the language of suppression, the other that it 125 NEW YORK NIGHTS was the expression of a neurosis caused by frustration in life in modern New York. But it is possible to give too much theoretic explanation to a simple phenomenon. Boys and girls are out for diversion. Restraint is off. They like dancing. Sex helps. 126 CHAPTER xi Zelora's Ball BOUGHT Zelora for thirty-five cents but she cost me five dollars before the evening was through. "Which of you ladies would like to dance with me?"... Zelora was the first to smile, so I took her. She was tall and broad and deep and comely; she was sheathed perfectly in green silk; her pencilled eyebrows made black 4 half-circles over her large baby eyes. Everything I did was cute. Between dances she took me by the hand and led me across the ball-room floor to the table where I sat. She was cute too. Everything was cute. "Where do you come from? What part of the United States?" "I come from way back." "Not from New York?" "Oh, I live on West End Avenue, but I was raised on a farm way back in Idaho. My father is a farmer." "I guess you're a Mormon." "Yes, I'm a Mormon." "Right first time. You're the first Mormon I have danced with." "Don't pull my dress up, honey. That's better." "So.you're a Mormon. Have you been sealed yet?" "No, I haven't been sealed except at birth. I was never inside of a temple." 127 NEW YORK NIGHTS "Are you all alone in New York?" "I live with my sister Zoar. She dances at Arcadia." "She is a hostess there?" "Yes, she's terribly good-looking, too." "Idaho seems a very small state to me; looks as if one could jump across it." "Guess it's a small state but the mountains are big." "Did you ever do any farm work?" With disgust... "No." "But how did you get to be so tall and well developed?" "Horseback-riding, climbing trees, climbing mountains, running." "You look very well." "Gee, I should say. I'm the smartest girl on this floor." "Did you dance out there in Idaho?" "Yes, most everybody dances there. There's nothing else to do. Gee, you should see the farm where I was raised. It's way down between two mountains. On one side you see Look-out Mountain. There's a beautiful waterfall comes down just by the gate." In an interval of the dancing a girl came out and sang a popular song about the joy of getting a boy. I sat with Zelora at a table eating ice-cream., Those dancers who had not got tables sat on the floor of the dance-hall, and we watched a small 128 ZELORA'S BALL revue. We heard a song about the Mississippi Delta:Muddy water in the street, Muddy water on my feet, But I love the Delta; It's God's own shelter. It was the time of the great spring flood of the Mississippi and seemed to be wrongly worded. But the song was a curious commentary on the theory that New York is not America. There I was at Roseland, the most popular dance-hall on Broadway. My chance partner was from Idaho and we were listening to a song about the Delta. New York after all does draw most of its colour and sentiment from the rest of America. Zelora wanted to know where I lived and what I was doing and would I not take a ticket for a ball. This beguiled me to come again and spend a very gay and colourful night at this lively resort of the masses. I brought Helen and four or five others to the Arabian Night's Ball. At eleven-thirty the following Tuesday night we passed through the din of the Turkish band at the door and were admitted into the midst of two thousand revellers. Mr. Burgess, the manager, who was extremely kind and hospitable, found a table for us and made me one of the judges of the costumes. Paul Whiteman was to come from his cabaret for a few minutes and give away the prizes. 129 NEW YORK NIGHTS There were sixty-five professional masqueraders taking part besides the hostesses and the hoofers and the general public. There were sultans and jinns and caliphs and sorcerers and Aladdins and wicked uncles and Ali Babas, dreadful masks, alluring nakedness and somehow or other everything that was not Arabia as well-unless New York and the world itself is just an Arabian Night. And Zelora was my Scheherazade. Noise, odour of naked bodies and crush. The police may insist on the discreet attire of the houris of the stage but they do not interfere with the revellers of Roseland. There were many young men made-up as girls exposing a large part of their bodies as if in defiance of the supposed fairer sex. What was chiefly against them was that they were mostly too tall. One of the most effective of them was introduced to me as Texas Guinan. She had Texas's blond wig and a mass of pearls and she imitated the tremendous voice of Texas. "May I leave this horror at your table for a little?" said Mr. Burgess. This false Texas was nothing loath to partake of some gin-we had some with us and mixed it with ginger ale. She was a lively character and attracted a number of other dancers about us. Another male impersonator of woman came and showed us his step-ins which he alleged he had made himself; they were of pink diaphanous crepe de chine and fastened with a tape. Over this 130 ZELORA'S BALL fragile garment he had only a burnous but there was something incredibly ludicrous and bizarre in a man of six feet standing exposed for a moment in girl's underwear. He began to carry on a mock flirtation with Texas, encouraged by shouts of mirth from the others. "Come together, girls," said the appalling blonde. "Let me tell you a story. Those who don't think they ought to listen, go away." She turned to Claire, an artist of twenty-five or so, who looked very quiet and pure-"You, my dear, don't listen to this." Claire looked annoyed. "Well, there was once a widow who had lived too long in a state of moral restraint, and suffering from her ill-health she went to a doctor for advice. He said to Madam, 'There is nothing I can do for you. You had better marry again.' " 'What sort of man do you advise, doctor?' asked the widow. "'Any young man with big boots,' said the doctor, "but stand back, you bourgeois, you won't get the point of this story." The false Texas reeled off a series of stories which were more indelicate than amusing. I took Claire out to dance and left him. We agreed that there are limits to what one will listen to from a man dressed up as a woman. The dancing under the baton of Fletcher Henderson's orchestra was a riot. We were mixed up with moving tableaus. Intermingled with the normal masqueraders were 131 NEW YORK NIGHTS groups who were also allowed to compete for the prizes. A man beating his wife accompanied by an imploring child were parading the ball-room. They were intended to represent the CURSE of PROHIBITION. In England they might well have been taken to be a living picture of the popular song"Sell no more booze to my father." It's the cry of his heart-broken child. Another trio was a statuary group of the Village Blacksmith and his sons. They were frosted all over and looked as if they had fallen off a Christmas tree. A third group, evidently Russians, were labelled LOST IN THE STORM, a man, a woman, a little girl in torn clothes, their feet done up in sacking tied round with string. They trailed a baby sewn up in a quilt lying in a birch-bark sled. Their faces were pale and haggard and the realism of their make-up was so effective that Clare and I wanted to go to them and offer them money. They won the second prize for originality. That is a terrible category to be in, the second for originality, but there was a group which put all the others into the shade. It was called SHANGHAI SOLDIER and had the merit of being both topical and striking. A crouching soldier in soiled khaki was bearing on his back a raped and murdered girl. She hung there like a sack of flour. The soldier held a rifle with bayonet fixed covering a skulking Chinaman who was chained to his free hand. This apparition from China stalked the gay ball-room for half an hour 132 ZELORA'S BALL and the soldier must almost have died from exhaustion. Mr. Burgess asked me to be one of the judges and I gave my vote unhesitatingly for the soldier. I came to play quite a part in the ball. I 'sat in the middle of the floor and there were twenty-five parades of dancers past me. We had to choose for originality, charm and wit and there were first, second and third prizes in each category. Daddy Browning balancing a see-saw of peaches and sugar and leading on a string an unwilling goose easily won the first prize as funny man; the second was won by one of the men dressed as women. He called himself Black Bottom, was dressed entirely in black and owed his success to the serpentining of his body and his hips. A very funny Charlie Chaplin followed him. Then we judges could not agree about a third prize for originality. I was in favour of a crippled " newsboy, but there was clamorous demand for a one-legged soldier. I thought this soldier had really two legs but had hidden one of them in a remarkably clever way but I discovered that he was a war-victim and that the desire to give him a prize was purely sentimental. He and the crippled newsboy mounted the rostrum together and a vote was taken by acclamation. The soldier won. A princess, a genie and a rose won the three prizes for charm. They also were judged by popI33 NEW YORK NIGHTS ular vote as there were so many beautifully dressed girls. I went about taking pretty girls by the hand and leading them to front so that they could be properly viewed. The Roseland hostesses were entered in a separate competition and a very chic bell-boy in trouserettes of light blue satin with little cap to match won the prize. I was sorry it could not go to my partner Zelora but Idaho did not know how to improve on her natural good looks and she was outmatched. We were hours judging. It was three o'clock when Mr. Burgess waved to the band and said, "Come, let's dance again." Then the Shanghai soldier and Daddy Browning and the Orphans of the Storm and the wicked Sultan waving his scimitar and Scheherazade and the false Texas and the crippled newsboy and the forty thieves and the Honolulu girl and the beach-comber and the women in rompers and the geishas and the blind cobbler and the wonderful tailor and the statuary group and the Curse of Prohibition and the Civil War veteran still bearing the tattered flag of his regiment and the Egyptian figures wearing huge yellow and scarlet masks and the artists' models and the funny policeman and Helen and myself all danced. Broadway outside rolled on the same as ever. What remained of our party went across the road to Roth's for roast beef sandwiches and coffee. While we sat there gaily discussing the ball the first workers of the morning began to come in for their breakfast coffee, their eggs and their wheat. I34 CHAPTER xii A Rooming House in Speakeasy Street F I have not arrived at Easy Street at least I am on Speakeasy Street; I have a lodgment in the Roaring Forties. I live on the fourth floor, rear of a little old house which looks like a red flowerpot in a yard beside the lofty white business palaces which surround it. On the roof of a similar house which faces my window there are wind toys which revolve gaily, a juggler who throws mirrors, a gobbling duck, a black sheep who waggles his head, a windmill. The Street-door of the house is never closed; the tenants go in and out at all times of the night. They are actors, musicians, hoofers, bootleggers. Giant jars of alcohol, too big to steal, are delivered on the second floor-"'Is there a speakeasy in this house?"-"I know damn well there is," says the always angry Mrs. Sullivan, who not only does the rooms in this house but in two others in the same street. There is no elevator, the balustrade of the steep crazy stairs is broken as if some time or other drunken men had fallen through. The air is infallibly Irish but the place is hung with huge dusty German prints. No one knows exactly who is living in the house. There is one telephone; it is on the second floor and it rings all day. In the mornings no one answers it; all the inhabitants are asleep. Angry foreign voices try to tell us the names of the people they want to speak to. A notice in pencil says, "Will those who are not polite I35 _i~L*~C1II~ -~ ----. -C -— i — LF —l — -~.-^I NEW YORK NIGHTS enough to take a message leave the telephone alone." Doors on various floors stand half-open all the evening and most of the night. You hear a medley of guitar-playing, songs, bla-bla of announcers on loud speakers, noisy discussions over cards. My nearest neighbour wears crimson and red pyjamas over his trousers and is forever on the stairs in this attire. The second-floor front is a large room where companions from Babel gather about a billiard table every evening. Second rear seems to deal in liquor. In the third-floor front two men in their B. V. D.'s dance to a gramophone. And ever and anon the telephone rings insistently, till some one is moved to lift the receiver and yell a name up and down the stairs. My bootlegger, a young fellow with a Y. M. C. A. expression, comes upstairs laden with the stuff and calling my name. He sits on my bed and discourses on the merits of his rye which he sells only to be "cut." He brings me an unsolicited bottle of apricot brandy. "I can recommend it highly," says he. "It costs you only three-fifty the bottle." "Why, yes," I reply, "it would cost five dollars in London." "And if you have any ladies visiting you," says he knowingly, "mix a little gin and apricot brandy; it has a good effect." His car was waiting outside. He promises to come regularly. When I took my room I was told, "This is a house where nobody interferes with anybody else's 136 --- -- - - - -. ~ A ROOMING HOUSE IN SPEAKEASY STREET business." That has proved to be true. It is freer than a hotel. No one is looking for tips; there is no door-keeper. No one raises her eyes if you bring your dancing-partner from the night club to give her a drink at three in the morning. One special sign of freedom is that no man ever smiles at you or gives you greeting. The women about the place may smile; the men never. The men have decided that they will remain strangers. That makes the place much freer. In the rooming-house on Speakeasy Street they do not speak. 137. CHAPTER xIIi "Burlesk" PERSON who makes disgusting noises in order to provoke mirth is a buffoon, so also is a fat man who deliberately amuses by his fatness. There is much buffoonery on the comic stage. It is a low popular taste. Burlesque stands theoretically higher. It is mockery through exaggeration. It is caricature dramatised. It is more witty and less extravagant than Extravaganza. But it may also be more brutal. Sheridan's play The Critic is a burlesque. The Taming of the Shrew is a burlesque. Somerset Maugham's Our Betters is a burlesque. But the word is seldom applied to true drama of that kind. The comprehensive word comedy has to suffice. The word burlesque seems to have been appropriated by a different type of entertainment. At least, in America. In Great Britain there are no burlesque shows. The expression would not be understood in London. In America "burlesque" is a revue where vulgar talk is mixed with naked girls. Its background is one of comic tramps, Jewish buffoons, and jocular policemen. Its object in entertainment is to provoke ribald laughter and cause physical excitement of a limited kind. Probably it sprang into existence in the mining camp or as part of country fairs. There are many burlesque elements in the shows of a fair. Then it met the taste of the immigrant masses. It was first of all a men's show, and only later became one 138 "BURLESK" "Just save a little ray of golden sunshine for a rainie daey! It will come in mighty han'y when the skies are grey."