The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (11 page)

Winchell was, as Stanley Walker put it, “an astonishingly alert, electrically nervous little man,” fast-talking, indefatigable, avid. His biographer Neal Gabler writes, “He smoked furiously, gabbed incessantly, scribbled quickly (usually with a stubby pencil on the back of envelopes or on a folded square of newsprint) and drummed the table with his fingers on the rare occasion when he wasn’t talking.” He would hang around the speakeasies, and if he heard a burst of laughter from a table he would race over and cry, “What’s the gag? Is it anything for the column?” Tex was, in the early days, his mother lode. Winchell would often spend the entire night at one of her clubs, playing poker and swapping stories with her and Hellinger after the place closed up, at three or four in the morning. Later on, Winchell would say that it was Tex who gave him the idea to write about society folks, because she would point around the room and say that this one was having an affair with a chorus girl, and that one was about to get married, and the other one had just come back from Reno. And Tex knew the gangsters every bit as well as she knew the party girls.

Winchell’s obsession with ephemera, his breathlessness, his hokey neologisms, made him something of a joke with the soigné crowd who hung around Neysa McMein’s studio; but he would ultimately become a bigger figure than any of them. Winchell’s education ran through sixth grade, and he aspired to nothing greater, or lesser, than to tell the secrets of Broadway, which he described variously as “The Main Stem,” “The Street of Broken Dreams,” “The Clogged Artery.” A nation that was as besotted with Broadway as he was couldn’t get enough of Winchell’s news. By the late 1920s, when he had left
The Graphic
for the far more reputable
Mirror,
Winchell was one of the most famous newspapermen in the great age of newspapermen. And then his stupendously popular radio show, which he began broadcasting in 1930, lifted him to a level of celebrity all his own. Winchell became the Mayor of Broadway, the Bard of Broadway, the Boswell of Broadway. He described a world where everybody had something going on the side—an affair, a racket, a dark secret. And he defined as well the tough-guy ethos of a crowd that lived by its own rules. “At that other table is a horse from a different stable. The woman with him isn’t his wife. . . . His wife is in a 46th Street hideaway right now with The One She Goes For. Got it? . . . Must be terrible to be found out. . . . And a guy is a sap to wise a pal, too, even when he knows he is being crossed. . . . They never appreciate the tip.”

Winchell absorbed the gangster ethos, and the gangster language, of the nightclub world, and replayed it to America in his own peculiar patois—“a guy is a sap to wise a pal.” Winchell knew that whole crowd, and was particularly close to Owney Madden, who gave him a Stutz Bearcat. Madden, who was also a friend of Tex’s, owned one of her clubs along with his confederates Frenchy DeMange and Feets Edson. Winchell often passed along to his readers juicy bits of gossip about hoods that he picked up from Tex. In February 1932, he reported that “five planes brought dozens of machinegats from Chicago Friday” in order to rub out Vince “Mad Dog” Coll, a feared hit man who had been reckless enough to kidnap DeMange and extort a ransom from Madden. When Coll was murdered in a phone booth that very night, Winchell was targeted for revenge—the hoods feared he would be forced to talk to the DA—and it may only have been his relationship with Madden that saved him.

Winchell was at once a creature of Broadway and a student of Broadway. He loved the big names, but he was too much the ex-hoofer to have stars in his eyes. Broadway, he once wrote, “is a hard and destructive community, even for those who ‘click.’” He would later become a baroque figure, a great friend of J. Edgar Hoover and a notorious red-baiter, less a teller of tales than himself the tale; but as a young man, hopping from one speakeasy to the next, he “caught the tempo of New York in the late twenties and early thirties,” as Stanley Walker writes. “The tempo was brittle, cheap, garish, loud, and full of wild dissonances.”

Texas Guinan ultimately became such a byword for Broadway nightlife that she starred in her own movie,
Queen of the Night Clubs,
in 1929, and enjoyed several stints as a celebrity journalist. Her column, “Texas Guinan Says,” appeared daily in
The Graphic.
She put three dots between her items, just like Winchell, producing the same breathless, jazzy sense of experience caught on the fly. She tossed off a rapid-fire sequence of cracks and tough-guy asides: “There are far too many women who act like they were born in revolving doors—they are so dizzy and keep going around in circles.” And she was a name-dropper to put anyone but Winchell in the shade, managing to include, in the space of about 250 words, Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Benito Mussolini, Primo Carnera, David Belasco, Heywood Broun, and Ethel Barrymore— although, to be fair, it’s unlikely that Wilson, who died in 1921, visited any of Tex’s clubs.

Tex comes down to us today chiefly through the works of Damon Runyon, the other and more lasting bard of Broadway in the nightclub era. Runyon’s girlfriend Patrice Gridier was in Tex’s chorus in 1925, though it is safe to say that he would have gravitated to Tex’s clubs in any case. Tex was a natural-born goddess of Runyon’s scruffy Olympus. One of his most famous stories, “Romance in the Roaring Forties,” written in 1929, concerns not only Tex but Winchell, whom Runyon normally treated as somewhat below his level of regard, but who served perfectly as a Broadway type. Runyon barely deigned to disguise his characters: “Romance in the Roaring Forties” opens in the “Sixteen Hundred Club” of “Missouri Martin,” “an old experienced doll” known as “Mizzou” who “tells everything she knows as soon as she knows it, which is very often before it happens.” The story concerns a gossip columnist named Waldo Winchester who falls in love with Billy Perry, the girlfriend of a gangster named “Dave the Dude,” whom Jimmy Breslin, in his luminous but hallucinatory biography of Runyon, identifies with the Mafioso Frank Costello. The story’s narrator treats Waldo as an unaccountable idiot for having placed his life in jeopardy over a girl; and Mizzou tells Billy that she is “a little sap” for falling in love with a starving newspaperman when “everybody knows that Dave the Dude is a very fast man with a dollar.”

“Romance in the Roaring Forties” is, like so many Runyon stories, a kind of extended joke, because the violence for which the reader is being continually prepared not only never occurs but collapses into rank sentimentality. Rather than obeying his initial impulse to murder Waldo, Dave arranges for him to marry Billy because, he tells the narrator, “I love her myself so much that I wish to see her happy at all times, even if she has to marry to be that way.” And then, when it turns out that Waldo is already very much married and was only trifling with Billy, rather than murdering Waldo a second time, Dave turns around and marries Billy himself. Dave has a heart of gold; and he is still, of course, a ruthless killer. The story never loses its hard-boiled edge because we know perfectly well that marriage will not “reform” Dave. And it probably won’t reform Billy, either. But of course only a sap would suggest as much to either.

Runyon’s Broadway, like Winchell’s, was a comic rather than a tragic place, a place full of wild incident, a place where the normal human motives are much easier to read because the citizens prefer to do without the usual layers of hypocrisy. It is a very far cry from the Broadway of Julian Street or Rupert Hughes—not because the place has degenerated, but because it has become impossible to imagine a morally superior alternative. Some combination of Prohibition with the generational contempt for received proprieties has so completely discredited conventional norms of behavior that an honest cynicism, combined with the threadbare sentimentality of a dying hood who falls in love with a lame dog (another Runyon tale), has become the local ideal of nobility. A guy is a sap to wise a pal.

Runyon was, like Tex, a western migrant to the big city. He was born, by an amusing coincidence, in Manhattan, Kansas, and as a small-town newspaperman he had knocked around the western mining camps— usually reeling drunk—that Tex could only boast about. Runyon wasn’t a florid person, like Tex; he was one of those devastatingly funny people who almost never smile, which is to say that he could be a very disconcerting person. His stoicism, his tough-mindedness, his contempt for the straight and narrow, and his storytelling gifts made him an appealing figure among the hoods and horseplayers and reporters with whom he invariably hung out. Runyon only arrived in New York in 1910, when he was twenty-six. In 1914 he landed a job at William Randolph Hearst’s
American,
where he remained as sportswriter, feature writer, and columnist until 1928. When he wasn’t in Florida for spring training, or in Chicago for a fight, he could normally be found within the confines of Times Square.

Though Runyon was at least as much a Broadway character as George S. Kaufman or anyone in his circle, one finds very little reference to him in their writings, or to them in his. They occupied different Times Squares, for by this time Times Square had become such a capacious, such a various, place that it could accommodate several very different cultures and could conjure up to the rest of the world a very mixed set of images and associations. There was a lighthearted, witty, and urbane Times Square, and a roguish, slightly sinister Times Square. And this truth was expressed geographically, for Runyon’s Times Square, both the one he wrote about and the one he lived in, was a micro-neighborhood located well to the north of Kaufman’s theatrical world, which was concentrated in and around 42nd Street.

A new Madison Square Garden had gone up in 1925 on Eighth Avenue between 49th and 50th Streets; and the sports fans and promoters and ticket agents and bookies who went to the Garden for prizefights and college basketball games and bicycle races and wrestling matches hung out at the hotels and bars immediately to the east. The sidewalk on the east side of Broadway between 49th and 50th was known as Jacobs Beach, because the fight promoter Mike Jacobs and his pals were wont to camp out there. Both Winchell and Runyon frequently dropped in on the crowd there for local tidings; both men also lived for a time in the rooms above Billy LaHiff’s Tavern on 48th west of Seventh, as did Jack Dempsey and the columnist Bugs Baer. Runyon later removed to the Forrest Hotel, a block to the north, which also hosted the innumerable assignations of the boxer and heartthrob Primo Carnera. Texas Guinan’s various clubs were never more than a few blocks away, and the other great nightclubs of the time, including the Hollywood and the Silver Slipper, were virtually next door. Here was a vast, teeming world that extended no more than a thousand feet in any direction.

If Walter Winchell was Broadway’s town crier, then Damon Runyon was its griot and its folklorist-in-chief. Runyon gave the world a Broadway that was infinitely dense with incident, and yet scaled down to the size of a village. It was an intricate little place where people walked from here to there, saluting their friends and experiencing chance encounters that not infrequently led to their death. “One night,” Runyon writes in “The Brain Goes Home,” “the Brain is walking me up and down Broadway in front of Mindy’s restaurant, and speaking of this and that, when along comes a red-headed raggedy doll selling apples at five cents per copy. . . .” In other stories, the narrator isn’t even going anywhere; he’s just standing outside Mindy’s front door when the neighborhood characters come waltzing down the street, and soon another adventure has begun.

Runyon’s geography was subtly different from Winchell’s. With the help of guides like Tex, and thanks to his own burning ambition, Winchell had left behind the vaudeville shtetl of 47th Street for the beau monde of the clubs and cabarets. But it was just this side-street world, whose denizens gazed yearningly at the blazing lights of Broadway, that interested Runyon. For all his tough-mindedness, Runyon was a sucker for little people with hopelessly big dreams; he wrote about them with a pathos Winchell never could have mustered. In fact, he christened the block behind the Palace Theatre “Dream Street.” There, he wrote, “you see burlesque dolls, and hoofers, and guys who write songs, and saxophone players, and newsboys, and newspaper scribes, and taxi drivers, and blind guys, and midgets, and blondes with Pomeranians, or maybe French poodles, and guys with whiskers, and nightclub entertainers, and I do not know what else.” And all of them “sit on the stoops or lean against the railings of Dream Street, and the gab you hear sometimes sounds very dreamy indeed. In fact, it sometimes sounds very pipe-dreamy.” It is no coincidence that after this epic evocation, Dream Street Rose, the living soul of the street, tells the narrator a tale about a young woman—herself, in days gone by—in the mining town of Pueblo, Colorado, another burg full of stranded souls dreaming of the big strike that will set them free.

It is a crucial part of Runyon’s mystique that it is almost impossible to say where life ends and literature begins. You cannot read the Broadway stories without imagining Runyon himself as the all-knowing, deadpan narrator—the fellow who modestly says he “gets about.” Runyon, of course, got about. Keeping approximately the same hours as Winchell or Tex, he would emerge from LaHiff’s or the Forrest in the early afternoon, join the crowd at Jacobs Beach, and then wander inside to his table immediately to the right at the front of Lindy’s, the “Mindy’s” of his stories. Lindy’s was to Runyon what Texas Guinan’s clubs were to Winchell: the place where the stories he wanted to hear were told. Runyon would sit there for hours with Nils T. Granlund, or with Carnera or Dempsey, or with various small-time gangsters, or with Arnold Rothstein, the model for the Brain.

Rothstein, who controlled the poker games and the floating craps games along Broadway and elsewhere in the city, was a legendary figure in Times Square, a soft-spoken and mysterious character who seemed accountable to no one. In
The Great Gatsby,
Fitzgerald names him Meyer Wolfsheim and recounts the widely believed tale—since discredited—that he had fixed the 1919 World Series. Fitzgerald’s Rothstein is a silken monster who proudly shows Nick Carraway his cufflinks: “finest specimens of human molars,” he brags. Indeed, the dark revelation at the heart of the novel is that Jay Gatsby works as a bootlegger for Wolfsheim and owes his entire fortune to him. In Rothstein are concentrated all the dark forces that lie below the wild gaiety of Fitzgerald’s novel.