Front matter

Books by Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer

CHICAGO: CONFIDENTIAL! WASHINGTON: CONFIDENTIAL!

By Jack Lait

HELP WANTED THE BIG HOUSE BROADWAY MELODY BEAST OF THE CITY PUT ON THE SPOT GANGSTER GIRL BEEF, IRON AND WINE (short stories) GUS THE BUS OUR WILL ROGERS WILL ROGERS' WIT AND WISDOM A PRACTICAL GUIDE TO SUCCESSFUL WRITING

By Lee Mortimer

NEW YORK BEHIND THE SCENES

NEW YORK: Confidential!

by

JACK LAIT

and

LEE MORTIMER

New Revised Edition

CROWN PUBLISHERS, Inc. · NEW YORK

COPYRIGHT, 1948, 1951, BY CROWN PUBLISHERS INC.

All Rights Reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review to be printed in a magazine or a newspaper.

Sixth Printing, February, 1951

Revised Edition, September, 1951

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

AMERICAN BOOK-KNICKERBOCKER PRESS, INC., NEW YORK

CONTENTS

Introduction vii

Part One—THE PLACES (Confidential)

1. My Little Gay Home in the East 3

2. The Canyon 7

3. The Main Drag 16

a. Give My Regards to Broadway 19

b. No Cover Charge 24

c. From the Circle to the Square 27

4. The Theatah 38

5. Swing Lane 43

6. East Side, Best Side 49

7. We Never Go There Any More 67

8. Where Men Wear Lace Lingerie 72

9. It's Not True 78

a. Chinatown 78

b. Little Tokyo 86

c. Koreans 89

d. Corregidor 89

10. Around the World in New York 91

a. Beer and Pretzels 91

b. Borscht and Blintzes 93

c. The Not-So-Blue Danube 100

d. Little Italy 100

e. Stromberry Poy 102

f. Modern Babel 102

11. Black Ghetto 104

12. And Ye Took Me In! 126

13. Up in Central Park 134

14. New York's Dormitories 138

Part Two—THE PEOPLE (Confidential) 143

15. The Minx in Minks 144

16. Guys and Pearls151

17. Glamor Pusses 156

18. Models 161

19. Second from the End 169

20. Party Girls 179

21. It Could Only Happen on Broadway 182

a. The Carrot Top and the Opal 182

b. Edith Finds Love 185

c. Unto the Second Generation 187

d. The Good Deed 192

e. Gun Moll 194

22. White Way Wolves 200

23. The Noted and the Notorious 206

24. There is No Society 209

25. Hoodlums' Hierarchy 220

26. Hello Sucker! 231

27. No Pain, No Fun 236

Part Three—THE LOWDOWN (Confidential) 241

28. But You've Got to Get Here First 242

29. Room with Adjoining Blonde 250

30. Tips on the Town 259

31. Inside Stuff 270

32. Midnight Manners 277

33. Confidential Guide to New York 284

Part Four—THE APPENDIX (Confidential) 297

A. Backstage Phone Numbers 298

B. Ticket Stubs 299

C. Headwaiters' Names 301

D. Movie Company Talent Scouts 301

E. Glossary of Harlemisms 302

F. Gustatory Guide 305

INTRODUCTION

P-s-s-t—

Lait and Mortimer want a word with you—confidential:

The authors had a lot of fun writing these pages. And infinitely more getting what they put into them. They both turned prematurely gray becoming Broadway-wise.

What you will read here they observed, absorbed, inhaled and swallowed through the years. They lived it.

This tome has no message. It may be helpful, it may be useful, but never purposeful, though it attempts to offer much sound advice. But who ever followed sound advice? If folks did, there would be no more marriages, divorces, gambling, guzzling, dancing, romancing, chasing, cheating, slickers, suckers, hussies, hangmen or hangovers—heaven forbid!

The "Confidential" in the title means Lait and Mortimer, who have never been in Grant's Tomb, have been in a lot of other places not so roomy, gloomy or wide open. It means they got their stuff off the record and on the up-and-up.

Therefore, this is not for Aunt Katie from Keokuk, but Uncle Dave the Deacon might find it of value next time he attends a convention in New York.

If you are seeking an orthodox guide or travel book about Gotham, lay this down. You will find little about the Empire State Building, Brooklyn Bridge or the $2.50 cruise around Manhattan. The shelves of stores and libraries already groan under the burden of books on those subjects.

No. This is a commentary on and compendium of the Big Burg from the inside out, with some facts and observations that could amaze, amuse and steer not only strangers, but most of those supposedly nonexistent Americans, native New Yorkers.

The gaucherie of many locals as well as all yokels defies the emery-wheel polish of the world's most exciting, most thrilling and most misunderstood metropolis.

The cognoscenti—you can count them on the keys of the piano that Polly Adler stored when, after 40 years of lucrative operation of the oldest profession, she quit and went to Hollywood—know a few things, but their experiences have been circumscribed. Knowing New York is a full-time career.

To those who still get dizzy looking up at the tall buildings, who think a headwaiter smiles at them because he likes them, who send notes back to the stage-door tender and who think this is just Milwaukee multiplied, we cheerfully dedicate the memory of our mornings after and aspirins thereafter. We will them the thousands of waking hours when we should have been asleep, as lagniappe.

But we believe that if our readers study this work assiduously and note its findings and one-way arrows, they may avoid some booby-traps. We believe so, though we don't expect so.

If this volume has any aim, it has four. It is designed to tip off the frequent visitor, who "knows" his New York; to derube the first-timer or the once-in-a-whiler; to polish up the permanent resident, who is sure he knows "our town"; and to give the largest classification, the vicarious traveler who does his New York sightseeing at home, in his easy chair, a series of close-ups that he never ogled off a screen or Sunday supplement.

We shoot at all ages, sexes and checkbooks. To them we present an island, hard, hostile, palms up and thumbs down—but hot.

Its creed is cash. Don't try to crash it otherwise.

You can't buy everything—only almost everything.

And it's worth all it costs you if you buy the right merchandise in the right spot at the right time.

That's why we were born, to tell you about it—confidential.

PART ONE THE PLACES (Confidential!)

1. MY LITTLE GAY HOME IN THE EAST

This little island called Manhattan is the summer resort supreme.

Never a mosquito, rarely a fly is seen.

Millions live high, where it's cool and rather quiet, except for the soothing and varied whistles of the boats and an occasional fire or police siren.

You don't have to be sociable with heterogeneous strangers or even your party-wall neighbors, whom you seldom know on sight.

If you want to sail, there are two magnificent rivers, the broad and sporting Sound and the most breath-stopping harbor on earth.

If you want mountains, you go by magic elevators to the observatories in the Chrysler Building, Radio City or the Empire State, where you get a magnificent view as soon as the suicides clear the railings.

There are, even in mid-July, two score legitimate theatres offering the great hits, for shows that survive into this period are all lusty and hardy. Within easy drives are locality playhouses with several other sturdy attractions, and "straw hat" try-out and revival productions. You have a wide choice of concerts, indoor and outdoor opera, a dozen swanky or swift cabarets and a hundred minor ones.

There are three big-league baseball teams within a $1.50 taxi hop from Times Square, always one and often two at home, all exciting, usually at least one out in front.

There are a half-dozen boxing shows each week, al-fresco or, like most of the burg, air-conditioned.

If you would attend churches, we have some of the finest and most famous cathedrals of all faiths and creeds.

Half the saloons are equipped with television, and for the price of a beer you can see and hear leading sports and other biff-bang affairs as they are proceeding.

There are eating places from sub-sub basements to the 85th floor, and from automats where you slip in a coin and get back a hot hamburger to the Stork and El Morocco, where you won't be allowed in, which is just as well for your bank roll.

There are sidewalk cafés, acres of penthouse-terrace restaurants, menus and service and customs of all nations, including the Scandinavian and not excluding the Moravian.

And, summer or any season, you have a feeling that the world is spinning about you—and whole little worlds, not geared just for tourists—concentrations of all nations and segments of them—even a White Russian colony.

Taxis galore drop the flag at 20 cents. The average haul is a half-buck.

Everything is big time. There's an air and a snap and a tang to Manhattan that is generated by championship rather than by huge mobilizations of people and of money. Brooklyn is far more populous; Chicago has more than twice the population. But there is a zip and a zing here, a supercivilized, metropolitan method of behavior, unique and indescribable.

Manhattan has a nonchalance about the world and itself known nowhere else. The newspapers do not bother to publish the borough's own vital statistics. One can be born, married, have children, die and be buried, entirely unnoticed. At the other extreme, nobody is important. Celebrities get a passing glance, maybe, and not always that.

Bank statements list billions in deposits and almost no one reads them. Ships from every port come and go and get a line for the record, in a few gazettes.

Yet there is civic pride, there are organized boosters; Rotarians and Kiwanians and Lions meet and slap backs and call one another Pete and Baldy.

No visitor can catch "the Voice of the City." O. Henry, who called it that, didn't. Nor can readers of the beloved tales of Damon Runyon. Damon was our friend and we admired him profoundly, because he could write fascinatingly, almost entirely from imagination, not from photographic impression. Characters like those he concocted never lived, around "Mindy's" or anywhere else. He laughingly said so, himself.

New Yorkers compose plays about New York and any resemblance to the living or dead is carelessness.

In truth, Manhattan—which for most fact or fiction material is New York—cannot be transcribed or translated.

It isn't even itself!

There are so many foreign and unrelated elements undergoing a steady, invisible process of blending; the picture changes slowly, yet ceaselessly; and no human camera is fast enough to catch it in the static focus of repose.

No one has portrayed New York as Dickens did London or Sue did Paris.

Those who tried have had to sectionalize it; none could wrap it all up into a comprehensive entity.

If they grasped the financial or theatrical or criminal or social or artistic or political aspect of the city's life, they could not extend the panorama into the human, the domestic, the personal phases.

If they looked on high they were so spellbound they could not turn to grope into the subterranean.

Those who realized the astounding things and people could not vitalize the humble, the ordinary, the devout and industrious bread-and-butter brothers and sisters.

Manhattan doesn't materialize to even those who spend their lives in it.

A thrilling, throbbing mystery!

2. THE CANYON

Damon Runyon immortalized 47th Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, as "Dream Street." Jack Lait dramatized it as "The Canyon."

It is a shabby, dismal block. Its 200 yards are lined almost unbrokenly by cheap hotels and rooming houses sheltering all manner of strange characters: retired vaudevillians, down-and-out horse-players, dope fiends, grifters and grafters, pickpockets, derelicts (male and female), drunks, stage widows, miserly recluses, tars and their tarts, crap-game steerers and bottom-dealers.

On fine days you see them on the sidewalks. Old women with grotesque young get-ups and peroxided hair, parading their pooches; bewhiskered, unkempt men on the church steps, passionately studying racing scratch sheets; apoplectic dipsomaniacs airing out cheap jags; actors whose world has gone by, talking of starring roles of the past—and next season.

Here is the stage door of the once fabulous Palace, mecca for all vaudevillians. The theatre, pride of its builder, Martin Beck, was the hub of the old Keith-Orpheum Circuit, and on its stage appeared, for a quarter of a century, the top names of show business.

Around the corner is Broadway and the Great White Way.

A block to the east is prosperous Fifth Avenue, glistening in mink and pearls.

But life on Dream Street goes on, oblivious of these other worlds.

You may walk it at any hour. No one will molest you.

Maybe a panhandler will try to mooch a quarter; maybe a flea-bitten, superannuated sister in sin will make a half-hearted signal to you that she can be had. But you won't be in danger.

What goes on upstairs, in those small, old rooms, is something else. There crime and vice and con games and watering whiskey and hypoing horses are hatched.

There adultery is accepted as a fact of life.

There people who work are regarded as outlandish and queer.

But there you find no sluggers, stickups or bullies.

These are kindly folk. Violence is not in their bag of tricks.

This is, rather, a community. The members recognize the right to steal, to cheat, to beg, to scheme, to mate, and to woo weird fancies with hooch and hop.

But, no disorder, please—this is The Canyon!

Yet in the midst of this murk and muck, grew a flower.

Not a peony, not even a rose; a violet, gentle and shrinking and modest, admired and worshiped, but doomed to be crushed by the heavy hobnailed boots of the ruthless underworld and the equally pitiless protagonists of respectability.

In the middle of that bleak block, in a second-story apartment, lived big, hearty Martha Geiss. She was a one-bottle and one-case bootleggers' stock exchange. She didn't handle the stuff herself, but she had worked up a trade in hotels and offices, so small buyers 'phoned her when they wanted something sent up quickly, day or night, and she in turn relayed the orders to the various petty peddlers of gin and what was supposed to be whiskey.

Her commissions were never large and her work was wearisome and confining. But she always laughed and always had enough to help others and to act as a sort of mother to all the neighbors. And she was a mother—the mother of Frances, the only thing clean and virtuous and young and lovely on Dream Street.

When 200-pound Martha parted with her husband and cast her lot with the lawbreakers she brought with her the child, who went to a school in the slums west of Broadway.

Everybody knew her and everybody protected her. Youngsters were a great novelty in those parts and Frances was an unusually winsome and friendly one.

No one around there would harm her or let anyone else even say a questionable word that she might hear.

She was physically precocious and at 14 was a ripe, full-blown beauty, shy, courteous, simply but tastily dressed. Martha's heart was set on having Frances become a schoolteacher.

Of course, the child had eyes and ears—very pretty ones. She knew that this was no kindergarten in which she lived. She saw the liquor and dope-pushers, the demi-mondes and the semi-men. She smiled at them all and they smiled back, but as close as they were to her they were far away.

In the summer vacation, when Frances was 16, going to high school, Martha's business was rather low. It always fell off in summer, when many of the customers were in the country. Frances was eager to do her share, but Martha hated to send her into the world, where, strangely, she would not get the sheltering care and affection which had always been hers on dirty, degraded Dream Street. Across the way from Martha's window, where she could look into it on summer nights, was an Italian restaurant. Caruso, the owner, was her friend and at times her customer. She suggested that he hire Frances during the vacation as a checkroom and cigarette girl.

The patronage was not of the richest, but she did fairly well, what with her beauty and affability. Then, one night, she was called to a private dining room upstairs, where some men were secluded in what seemed to be a heavy conference. At the head of the table sat a stocky, blond, not bad-looking fellow in his thirties, who bought a fistful of cigars and reached for a $10 bill. As he looked up he saw the girl—then he reached for a $20 bill.

Later he came down and went on the make. She turned away and told him she never went out with men. He laughed and asked her:

"Do you know who I am?"

She shook her light brown curls from side to side.

He put his face very close to her ear and said huskily:

"I am Dutch Schultz!"

In every walk of human life there is an upper class. Among the lifers in Alcatraz, who never again will freely see the light of God's sun or draw a free breath, there are classes. A man who has killed three cops looks down upon a piker who only kidnapped a child or robbed a post office.

The name he whispered had an electric effect. Among the prohibition aristocracy none stood as high as Arthur Flegenheimer, a tough boy from Yonkers, who not only controlled a large section of the beer business of New York but was the king of the policy racket—the numbers—in Harlem, with political connections that went right through to the White House. Through his pudgy, uncalloused, overmanicured fingers passed $100,000,000 a year.

Frances ran across the street, breathless, to Martha, and told her the news, in the same emotional exultation that would have possessed a debutante with a sudden invitation from the Prince of Wales.

Martha certainly was not putting her daughter on the market for anybody, but she, too, was swept away with the mighty magnificence of the name. She advised Frances to go for a drive with him in the big, slinky, steel-jacketed and bullet-proof car that she could see from her window. Frances, hatless and flushed, ran back and got an hour off. When Dutch Schultz asked, few people questioned.

As she came out, two men slipped from the front seat, and as one opened the door the other, with his hand inside his coat at his armpit where he carried his gat, looked up and down the block. Schultz and Frances got in and the door closed with that authority which only a high-priced limousine can express with a bang and a click.

Within a month, Frances was Mrs. Arthur Flegenheimer. It was infatuation on the whisper of a name, but it had grown into a tremendous and all-conquering love. Few romances with figures that defy the law were ever more mutually fervent and sincere.

Schultz was always in trouble. Despite the enormous sums he took in, he had to pay out, at times, more. He cheated on his Federal and State income taxes, kept enormous staffs of bodyguards and fixers and collectors, and when he wasn't hunted by the Internal Revenue men he was tracked by gunmen of rivals who wanted to take over. He was frequently arrested and numerous times shot at, and his only chance for a few hours or days of happiness with his bride was to drive to remote villages in New England or 100 miles out on Long Island, where, under an assumed name, he might hole in for a day or two before someone recognized him.

Thus they lived for four years, in which time two children were born, first a girl and then a boy. She proudly named their son Arthur Flegenheimer, Jr.

He bathed Frances in furs which she didn't want to wear, and weighed her down with jewels which she rarely wore; and he got her up in the middle of nights and took her to strange places, whence they frequently had to escape on a moment's notice, more than once to the music of whining bullets.

On October 9, 1935, they were under cover in a hotel in Newark, N.J. They dined in their rooms and then he told her he had to meet some of his henchmen in a little restaurant. She went to a movie. Schultz walked into a little café and joined two other men on a bench in a booth.

The two favorite methods of murder among the outlaws were "put him on the spot" and "take him for a ride." The first was designed to plant a victim, drawn by treachery, to be slaughtered by executioners who would know just where and when, and thus elude the uncertainties of pursuit or having to do a job in a public street. The theory of "taking for a ride" also was usually carried out through misplaced faith, though sometimes at the point of a gun, and its strategy lay in taking the body-to-be out to a quiet, lonely spot where there would probably be no police or witnesses.

Dutch Schultz was put on the spot.

No sooner had he sat down than the two men who had lured him there dived to the floor, as a man in a green hat stepped out from behind a pillar and gave Schultz all his six bullets in the belly, the gangster's favorite target. To make certainty doubly sure, he was shot with slugs dipped in garlic, a deadly poison to the mucous membranes of the bowels. They took him in an ambulance to a hospital, where he died raving, with Frances' name on his lips. The first she knew she was a widow was when two detectives closed in on her as she returned to her hotel.

Of course, she had a faint idea of who had done it or who had ordered it done. But she hadn't been Dutch Schultz' wife for four years not to know the penalty for blowing the whistle on the Mafia which had ordered the execution.

From that moment on, she was hounded and hunted by prosecutors who wanted to know who had killed Dutch Schultz; by tax collectors who wanted to know where his money was—those millions he was supposed to have cached; by his former associates, who thought they were entitled to some of the money—and where was it?

She lived as a fugitive for years. She had no money. She knew of no money. She knew that he owned a brewery in Yonkers worth more than a million dollars, but he had never dared put it in his own name and those who now controlled it shrugged their shoulders and said they knew nothing of any interest he had. She went to "Dixie" Davis, his lawyer, whom Schultz had made rich, but he had nothing and knew nothing. She sold her furs and jewels, which supported her and the children for a couple of years.

Then she was flat broke.

She worked as a saleswoman in Bloomingdale's, as a waitress, and almost went blind inspecting minute precision parts in Sperry's. Martha had died in an automobile accident and she was alone with her babies.

Not only were the essentials of living a problem, but being allowed to live was even more perplexing. For a while she refused to haul down her flag. She was Mrs. Arthur Flegenheimer and her son was Arthur Flegenheimer, Jr. But when boardinghouse keepers learned who Arthur Flegenheimer had been, and cruel little boys learned who Arthur Flegenheimer, Jr., was, Frances had to pack the little she had and move.

From rooming house to cheap hotel to boardinghouse in New Jersey, Westchester, Long Island villages and the fastnesses of Manhattan tenements, where few give a damn about who lives next door, she fled and fled again as the ghost of Dutch Schultz caught up with her.

Exhausted, penniless, she went back to her church, the church she had left when she married out of her faith.

The priests were kind and understanding. They took the children to a place in the Rocky Mountains and, with the mother's consent, gave them a new last name.

No one out there knew Dutch Schultz; few of the rugged folks had ever heard of him.

Frances followed. She, too, took the name the children had assumed. We must not divulge it.

She turned her back on the city which had given her birth, the city which had given her romance and the city which had booted her around and sneered and pointed in derision to her and her children, the widow and the babies of Dutch Schultz.

She is a nurse in a Catholic hospital, still in her early thirties, still soft and attractive. She loves her new purpose and her new surroundings and the peace and usefulness of her life. Your authors know just where she is and who she is, but they will keep it confidential—even from her old friends on Dream Street—The Canyon!

3. THE MAIN DRAG

If Broadway is a "state of mind," as some phrase inventor put it, a clinical psychiatrist should diagnose it. He might isolate the precise form of dementia which drives this wacky world of fancy, flesh, piracy, pruriency and pure poesy to its multiform objectives.

Nowhere else do the Lord and the Devil work so nearly side by side.

Here romance, misery, murder, adultery, mother-love and human frailty are commodities; carnal appeal and ridicule and horror are inventoried and price-tagged; the money-changers throng the steps of the temples of art with none to castigate them.

Slashing through the very center of traffic in solid substances, this highway of economic parasitism dominates the scene.

New York is a great seaport—so are Baltimore and Boston; New York is a great factory town—so are Cleveland and Detroit; New York is a great railroad terminal—Chicago is greater; New York is a great seat of learning—so is Los Angeles.

The difference is still Broadway. There is only one!

In its days of richest glory, Broadway's crown jewels were its masters of stage production; their thrones were its theatres where their works reigned.

Of all these, not even excepting the brothers Frohman, the most lustrous was David Belasco. He covered a wider range of time as well as of topic. He was the archdirector, a playwright of cunning talent, a manager and star maker. He was a more intensely exciting character than any he ever dreamed up.

He built the Belasco Theatre, which was his show-case, his workshop, his royal castle, his private museum, and his play pen.

Past 76, he was vigorous, virile, and planning for the future.

Mr. B. (even his mistresses called him that) told one of your authors, who was his intimate friend despite a wide disparity in ages, that he couldn't truly interest himself in a play unless he had a sweetheart in the cast.

Handsome, distinguished, with hypnotic and penetrating eyes under black lashes in contrast with snow-white hair, wearing always a priestlike costume which he had designed and would never explain, his years did not dim the electric effect he exercised on beautiful women.

Six floors above street level, over the stage flies of the Belasco, he had fitted up a private gallery housing the spoils of the ages—tapestries, paintings, rare furniture, Venetian glass, armor, snuffboxes, statues, miscellany.

Beside it was a complete living suite, practical but furnished with antique plunder. There he often lived while in the pangs and ecstasies of conception, preparation, and consummation of his plays. Few ever penetrated that sanctum.

He had another private retreat on the balcony level, walled in off the nave. There he received esoterically but with broad hospitality, with a steward to serve drinks and tidbits.

In that room, one night, while a hit play was in action below, he got word from his stage manager that a feminine principal had fluffed some lines. He sent for her after the act. In the presence of one of your authors, he berated her as a gold-bricker and an ingrate.

"I gave you everything you ever had," he shrilled. "And the first thing I ever gave you was a bath!"

She bitched up no lines in the next act.

The next season another beauty gave him the romantic interest he required for a later success.

At the height of its run, he was stricken with pneumonia. His amazing constitution and will licked it, though he had passed his 76th birthday.

Weakened as the great Belasco was, the soul of the great lover still burned within him. He had been in retirement for weeks. The girl, a blonde this time, was young, and, he feared, fickle. As long as he was on his feet, none of his mistresses dared stray around. But he had been laid up for weeks.

The inamorata of the moment was ensconced in a private three-story residence not far from the Gladstone Hotel where he lived. Because of his family she could not come to see him during his illness. He did not tell her when he would be allowed out again. And, the first night he could ambulate, he decided to spy on her.

He set up his post across the street, where, from behind a light-pole, he could look up and over.

A sudden rainstorm poured out of the sky, and with it a cold wind. But he had seen a shadow—of a man and woman, it seemed to him. And with the consuming zeal and drive with which he did everything, he remained there, drenched and shivering, ignoring everything but those windows.

He found out nothing.

But the exposure resulted in a second attack of pneumonia.

That tawdry anticlimax ended the life of the genius at whose feet Broadway had bowed—a martyr to suicidal jealousy at his advanced age—jealousy over a run-of-the-mill gal whose name no one would remember on the street that will never forget him.

a.—Give My Regards to Broadway

When Georgie Cohan penned his crude classic, New York's Main Drag ran from Herald Square at 34th Street, on Broadway, to Times Square at 43rd Street, with tentacles precariously reaching northward a few blocks and a few outposts of the Tenderloin's last frontiers stretching southward.

Broadway's uptown growth had been progressive from historic days when the theatre and hotel zones were around City Hall Park, not far from the Battery.

During the years, successively, Diamond Ditch moved up, centering at 14th Street, then again at 23rd Street, coming to anchor at Herald Square before its final migration to Times Square.

Within memory of men who for old time's sake are still called "middle-aged," the crest of the White Way was in the 30's. Here such noted playhouses as the Herald Square, Garrick, Empire and Casino had clustered about them the town's half-a-hundred legit theatres. The still standing and thriving Metropolitan Opera House was then the Mecca of Pittsburgh millionaires.

On Broadway, in the district and its side streets, were famous cabarets and night clubs, places like the Normandie, the Pre-Cat, Café l'Opera and others.

The tide imperceptibly but inevitably flowed northward. Even while Herald Square was in its ascendancy, Times Square bloomed and blossomed, with 42nd Street, between Broadway and Eighth Avenue, flashing more legitimate theatres than any other block in the world.

By the end of World War I, Gay Gulch had crossed the great divide, was almost entirely north of 42nd Street, though many theatres and a few night clubs continued to stay below 42nd Street as late as the early 20's.

The coming of Prohibition found most of Gotham's glamor studding what we still call the White Way.

The Paramount Theatre now occupies the site of Shanley's famed café. The Claridge, popular-priced tourist hangout, was originally Rector's and later, as the Claridge, top spot for stage and movie names.

The Knickerbocker Hotel, with its memorable bar and the Parrish painting of King Cole, was at 42nd and Broadway. Today it is the Newsweek Building. The King Cole painting now hangs in the aristocratic bar of the St. Regis Hotel on Fifth Avenue.

The Palais Royale operated in the present location of the Latin Quarter, at 48th; the New York Roof was atop a structure on the site now occupied by the new Criterion Theatre; the Bartholdi Inn, celebrated theatrical boardinghouse, was at 46th and Broadway, where Loew's State now stands.

The coming of Prohibition dispersed the pickle factories. The big places with grand old names couldn't stand up without liquor revenue. The wining and dining industry was taken over by a new breed and operated in side street cellars and stables and old residences.

At the same time, a number of new night clubs, mostly intimate affairs, were opened on Broadway. These were not supposed to be speaks. You brought your own makin's and they supplied the set-ups. If you forgot your flask and they knew you, they'd get you all you could carry.

The most celebrated speakeasies were clustered in every side street of the 40's and 50's on both sides of Broadway, and down to the East River.

Some of the most famous night clubs of the present period such as the Stork Club and Leon & Eddie's began as humble blind tigers. More about them in later chapters.

Among the rooms best remembered from the torrid 20's are the El Fey, Tex Guinan's, the Madrid, the Hotsy Totsy, the Abbey, the Silver Slipper, the Plantation, the Argonaut, the Frivolities, La Sportiva, Cap Williams', the 50-50 Club, and Sid Solomon's Central Park Casino, which was Jimmy Walker's night "City Hall."

Some had lurid histories, with gangland killings and knifings an almost everyday commonplace. But many of today's Hollywood and Broadway greats came out of this hurly-burly.

Harry Richman and Morton Downey both played pianos in speaks.

Georgie Raft hoofed at Roseland dance hall, later for Tex Guinan, at $50 a week.

Joan Crawford, then Lucille Le Seur, worked as a show gal at the Frivolities, where a fabulous story of Cinderella on the Main Stem happened.

It was the custom on Sunday nights to hold chorus girl "opportunity contests," at which outstanding youngsters appeared and sang or danced.

The winner was awarded a $50 bill.

These contests were conducted by Nils T. Granlund, a character truly as fantastic as the lies told about him, who had been Marcus Loew's personal press agent and the first radio star in the country, working under the pseudonymic initials, N.T.G. He became the leading café man of his age.

N.T.G., known as "Granny" to thousands in show business, was then directing the entertainment policy of the Frivolities, as well as ten other midtown clubs, and the "opportunity contests" were rotated from club to club, week after week.

Tests of this sort, run on the level, can become tremendously dreary affairs. So Granny picked out three sparklers from as many shows and arranged for them to enter all the contests.

One of his trio always won.

One of these pert pigeons was a show gal named Ruby Stevens. Today, in Hollywood, she's known as Barbara Stanwyck.

Another was Clare Luce—the actress, not the playwright-politician.

The third was Lucilla Mendez, who became an exotic star.

One Sunday night, back in the 20's, the contest was at the Frivolities.

At the appointed time, each of the three took the floor and did her little song or dance. They were so good, having it down pat by now, that they expected no competition from uninitiated outsiders.

But one dared it, an unknown child who looked about 13. Compared to the three sleek and sexy sirens who had preceded her, she was bedraggled. Her heels were worn down, her stockings in runs and her face shiny.

The audience tittered. But she stole their hearts with a brand of dancing never before seen on jaded Gaiety Gulch.

The customers cheered. They shouted. They screamed.

So, though the three hot-house lovelies sneered and pouted, Granny handed the youngster the prize. And he told her he was going to put her to work at the Strand Roof, at $50 a week. The girl almost fainted.

As an afterthought, N.T.G. asked her name.

She replied: "Ruby Keeler."

She became that almost mythical creation, "The Toast of Broadway."

She was taken under the "wing" of Johnny Irish, a long since forgotten gangster, whose hoodlums saw to it no others romanced her. But Al Jolson, then the king of show business, fell—and hard. Irish, who loved her with a love that passeth understanding, called the singer to his hotel room. Al, fearing he was about to be taken for a ride, was agreeably surprised when the mobster asked what "his intentions are."

In relief, Al blurted out that he wanted to marry the dancer. Big-hearted Irish adopted a noble pose, gave the girl up.

"I'll take my boys to Atlantic City," he said, "and you hop an ocean liner with Ruby. Otherwise maybe some of them will get an idea you're taking her away from me and maybe they won't like it. And heaven help you if you don't marry her."

She married Al Jolson at 17. She hit film stardom. Then she chucked it, still in her twenties, to marry a poor boy, rusticate in Pasadena and have four children.

b.—No Cover Charge

By 1928, it seemed Prohibition was here to stay. The easy money boys, grown fat and rich with two-by-four hideaway speaks, began to think about expanding.

But when a law-evading night club got too big, too noisy, too public, even the usually complaisant cops had to smack it down. And if they didn't, a rival mob did.

The hotel grills and roofs, forced to go straight to protect huge investments, long were dead ducks by now and so were the hotels. There just was no big place where a man and girl could go and have some dancing and fun, unless he was known to the gorilla at the door and could afford citrate of magnesia labeled Mumm's at $35 a throw.

That year, Granlund had a vision.

He conceived the idea of building a huge cabaret room large enough to pay off on quantity business alone, instead of bootlegging.

As a further inducement to lure the wary man of moderate means, ducking high prices, fancy foreign headwaiters and tremendous tariffs, he invented the minimum charge, to supplant the imported and resented couvert.

A syndicate built such a cabaret on Broadway, between 48th and 49th Streets, in a room once occupied by Rector's of hallowed memory, and after that having housed a chop suey palace.

The new place was named the Hollywood Restaurant. It got off to an immediate success with big bands, famous acts, and the most beautiful girls this side of heaven.

The great Ziegfeld, as a smart business, tied up with N.T.G. on an exchange policy, which called for a selected few of the Hollywood girls to double into the "Follies," an equal number of the glorified doubling into the Hollywood.

No liquor was sneaked at the club, but if you brought your own you were sold a set-up (costing two cents) for a buck.

The Hollywood's success was immediate, and before the club expired more than a decade later, it had lived to see the cover charge die.

Club after club in New York, Chicago, Hollywood, Europe, Asia, South America, followed the policy of elaborate shows and minimum charge. The Hollywood was the daddy of practically every cabaret in business today.

This revolution, plus the hard times following 1929, again changed the face of Rue de Revelry and environs. Even before Repeal, many clubs of the Guinan era and stamp folded, including Guinan's. On one side, they were hammered by the depression; on the other they were against the competition offered by the Hollywood and its imitators.

A new crop of lovelies had come up, were displayed and went on to Hollywood. To mention one, Alice Faye—a Hollywood Restaurant pony.

Rudy Vallee, leading the band there, adopted her as a protégée. He later took her with him into George White's Scandals, in which he starred.

Alice, who had dark brown hair in those pre-blonde days, did one bit number. It was enough, with Rudy's backing, to show trained talent scouts.

Soon came the equally large and elaborate Paradise Restaurant, across Broadway from the Hollywood, to compete. The syndicate which built it lured N.T.G. away from the Hollywood, some said at the point of a gun. There were times during those shimmering nights when show girls, those with followings, were paid as much as $250 a week simply to undulate across the floor. Many were driven to work in Rolls-Royces.

Minks—even sables—were a dime a dozen. Naked was the doll whose arms weren't covered with diamond bracelets.

Fifteen years ago, the hegira to the East Side had not gotten under way. Playboys, head salesmen, mobsters, visiting firemen—all fast with a buck—nightly made happy the hearts of headwaiters.

c.—From the Circle to the Square

Though what the world calls "Broadway" is not a street, but a condition, the purpose of these few pages is to tell you about the thoroughfare named Broadway, and more specifically, that part of it now the Rialto of the western world.

This meandering bit of avenue, following the tortuous curve of an ancient cow path, is delimited south of 42nd Street by the flourishing wholesale garment industry; and, north of Columbus Circle, by Central Park and automobile row, some of which extends south of the Circle, encroaching into the White Way as far as 54th Street. So, all the Glittering Gash can honestly claim for its own is 12 short blocks, measuring exactly three-fifths of a mile.

This is the street of a million lights, of a broken heart for every bulb, and more bulbs every night.

This is Gotham's Main Drag; strangely, save for the milling crowds and the blinding Mazdas, it has not now and has not had for the past decade those features which are universally supposed by all the people "in the know" all over the world, except in New York, to be on Broadway.

At this writing, on the whole "street," there are but two theatres permanently devoted to the legitimate stage.

But there are more than 30 legitimate theatres in New York. All, except the aforementioned and a handful on parallel avenues, are located east and west of Broadway, in narrow side streets in the 40's and 50's.

Of about 1,500 licensed cabarets in New York, there are at this writing but four with entrances on the Stem.

If, from seeing the film of that name, you thought 42nd Street—where it crosses Broadway—is the center of Manhattan's mad gaiety, you have much to learn.

That thoroughfare, once the home of a dozen proud theatres including the New Amsterdam of red plush and wonderful memories, is now devoted exclusively to "grind" movie houses, penny arcades, flea circuses, army and navy goods stores, orange juice stands and frowzy but friendly dames.

Broadway teems with dime dance halls, open air hot dog counters, photo and shooting galleries, souvenir and novelty holes-in-the-wall. It is the honky-tonk that was Coney Island, the crossroads carnival.

But, strangely enough, in the daytime, when the bright lights that draw the rubes are off and Broadway's sidewalks are comparatively free, it reverts to its old estate as the home and capital of the entertainment world.

For here, and nearby, are the offices of the theatrical producers, the agents who sell the acts, the dance studios where embryo chorus fillies learn to hoof; the costumers and the hooters, the scenic artists and designers—and Tin Pan Alley.

When Mike Jacobs moved his handmade teeth and his principality of pugs a few feet west to Madison Square Garden, he broke up a mongrel marriage of sock and song, which had long been the Brill Building.

An old-fashioned, ten-story structure, smoke-grimed, with creaking and groaning elevators, it had become the stronghold and nerve center of two giant industries.

Prize-fighters, the tycoons and tramps who manage them, rubbers, sponge-carriers, trainers and the motley mob which gathers around the boxing racket rubbed against music publishers, composers, lyric writers, piano players, arrangers and the others of the equally heterogeneous individuals engaged in creating and selling the songs of the world.

On the main floor, facing Broadway, are two cafés—the Turf, hangout for musicians, and Dempsey's, rendezvous of pugs.

Across the street, on the 49th Street side, is the Forrest Hotel, long the secondary concentration headquarters for the boys of Jacobs' Beach. Up the street and across Eighth Avenue is the Garden, the Taj Mahal of the biff business.

In the dingy Brill Building, day and night, swarm the unsung individuals of the singing empire, in every respect unique and little known outside its own realm.

There are 320 firms in New York City that publish music. Of these a dozen are highly successful, another half dozen do well and the rest are mostly shoestring affairs, picking up the ragged edges and discards of the leaders.

The sine qua non of a music publisher is his demonstrating rooms. These are usually tiny cubicles scarcely larger than the battered upright pianos they contain, each manned by a key-thumper who can transpose, ad lib and torture a melody into any tempo for any purpose from a soft-shoe dance accompaniment to a cry for help that would break your heart.

Getting these songs before the public, or as the trade terms it, the "plug," is perhaps the soul of the industry. There are scores of men and women infesting every radio station and theatre where "flesh" performances still remain. Their business is to get their songs sung or played or whistled or even ground out on a hand organ. The big stars are hard to approach and the business, which is organized, has long ago put a foot down on what was formerly an elaborate system of bribery, so that personality, pleading, pull, as often as actual merit and fitness, go to place songs with leading orchestras and ace headliners.

But a late development in the business, one which suspiciously smacks of a restraint of trade violation, is the practice of some publishers of giving a stock interest in their firms to noted crooners, band leaders and disk jockeys, who in return "plug" the latest publications of the companies in which they are interested.

An offshoot of this kind of tie-up, which has the further effect of keeping the compositions of the unknown or the unelect from the market, is off-the-record agreements between the principal publishing houses tied up with singers and band leaders to play only the product of the companies in the charmed circle. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

The demonstrating offices are besieged by ambitious youngsters, failures and never-could-be's who think that they can find a "Yes, We Have No Bananas" or "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" to draw them to the top overnight. These are inconsequential persons and they are insulted and refused, but they break through here and there.

For a bad singer, all songs are bad. Yet it is in the nature of the stage-struck never to admit that they have failed, but to carry the deathless conviction that it is the "material." They haunt the music publishers, fighting for a chance at the latest, always with high expectations that this time this will be it.

So the Brill Building, overrun as it was for years with every element of the prize ring and the sheet music world and its vocalists and hoofers and bandsmen, naturally became a beehive for minor agents, who pick up shabby fees from unimportant performers.

Some of these have offices in telephone booths and some of them only in their hats. For a commission they will try to sell anything to anybody. They watch the cheap saloons for a "disappointment"—which means that an act has fallen out temporarily or permanently because of delirium tremens, dismissal or death; they try to induce other saloons, without entertainers, to try some—find small, off-key dens and seek to sell them a singer or a sister act. The amount of aggressiveness and persistence they put into their misspent endeavors would probably get them a good income anywhere else—but they would be out of "show business," and they never will be.

Tin Pan Alley has its own glossary. All songs are "numbers." Love songs, mother songs, anything romantic, are "ballads"—a remote adaptation of the original word. All songs of regret and revenge and love's bitter grief are "torches." All crazy songs, which make no sense, are "freaks." All crazy songs which make some sense are "novelties." War songs are "flag wavers." All songs about the south are "Dixies."

The overnight possibilities of radio and millions of juke-box and parlor records have revolutionized the arts and wiles and guiles of "plugging," which is too bad in some ways, though the members of the craft were generally about as venal vultures as the morasses of Manhattan have disgorged.

Their vocation gave them license to knock on dressing-room doors, and many pressed their advantage beyond the call of duty.

They had expense accounts, some professional standing and a fund of that gutter shrewdness and knowledge which are perilous possessions of the unprincipled, yet licensed, scavengers who infest the outer rims of a world which holds forth a few miraculous rewards and an untold number of sordid soul-searings to young, impressionable, overoptimistic girls who reach so desperately for that one chance in a million.

Such girls are exposed to contacts in getting costumes, make-up, dancing shoes, printed "notices," their very jobs. They are hectic, striving, not subject to the reactions and restraints of sheltered, normal living.

And it is no attack on the geniuses and executives of the music business to state that the riffraff of its ragtag has a sustained record of abusing the hospitality of a harum-scarum world where shadow and substance have undefined borders.

Nearby, too, are the home offices of all the giant Hollywood studios. The pavements, which at night echo and re-echo to the tread of millions of heels, are pre-empted all day by cigar-smoking, side-of-mouth-talking, sure-thing artists and wise boys; bookies, promoters, pluggers, gamblers, hangers-on and layers-off.

The southeast corner of 50th Street and Seventh Avenue epitomizes the decline of the Stem. Gone is the glamorous Earl Carroll Theatre that once graced the spot.

Today, where the most beautiful girls in the world passed through the magic portals, there is a two-story taxpayer with a five-and-dime, a chain pharmacy and a chop suey emporium.

The career of Earl Carroll was as fantastic as any in show business. A Pittsburgh theatre usher turned flyer in the embryo air force of World War I, Earl first made his mark as a song writer, when Enrico Caruso bought special lyrics from him.

Even before he built the first of his two theatres, he was pressing Ziegfeld in the girl-show industry.

Yet the trade knows that none of Earl's proud productions ever showed a profit on the books, save White Cargo, which wasn't a musical, and the rights to which were taken from him. Carroll, however, lived like a king, on salaries and royalties, though his backers committed suicide, went bankrupt, or both.

On Broadway they still talk of Joyce Hawley's champagne bath. Carroll threw a private party on his stage for friends and backers. Miss Hawley, teen-age chorine, was ordered to bathe in a tub of champagne. Some said she was nude.

Carroll was indicted—not because Joyce wore nothing, but because he denied he bought the wine. Earl was true to his bootlegger, claimed it was only ginger ale. So he did a bit in Atlanta for perjury, rather than blow the whistle.

Carroll's second theatre opened in 1931, with the eleventh edition of the "Vanities." It was the most magnificent legit house ever built, with luxuriously decorated rest rooms for the chorines and a backstage that could play a circus. Before the year was out, they took the house away from him. The $5,000,000 structure limped along as a cinema revival house and cabaret, only to be razed for a Woolworth.

Washed up with New York, Earl produced a supper-club floor show at Palm Island Casino, Miami, in 1935, and again in 1936, when the intrenched mobsters kicked him out. Carroll moved on to Hollywood.

Half the movie colony came in as stockholders on his first night club, the idea being that they would own special private boxes. But the financing came to a halt when the framework was up. The stockholders bowed out and Earl got control. His success in Hollywood became legendary; he lived like an Eastern potentate in a mansion that made a movie set look like a Quonset shanty.

Plenty happened on and off Broadway—to the Earl of Carroll!

The complexion changes at dinnertime, when the excursionists and suburbanites, disgorged by the train-loads from subway kiosks, take over.

The rush reaches its peak between 8 and 8:30, when the steady but slow-moving stream of stragglers, strollers and starers meets the head-on rush of theatre-bound hordes.

Again at 11, when the curtains fall in three dozen houses, there is a mad scramble of hemmed-in humanity.

Soon after midnight, though the lights still blink bravely, the crowd thins out and drops off. Broadway, having lost most of the places that attract revelers, is no longer a late street.

Its larger night clubs, patronized more by tourists and middle-class burghers, have little play after 2 A.M. Only a few even bother to present late shows, though in other sections of the city floor entertainment runs until 4 o'clock.

When the gawkers get off the Stem—but long before the break of day—it is taken over by its third set of citizens.

Dope-peddlers work the west side of the street, between 45th and 47th Streets, and on Seventh Avenue, between 48th and 50th Streets, on the east side of the street.

You can buy reefers in a dozen cheap bars on 48th between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, and at 51st and Seventh, in front of the cafeteria. In fact, when Federal agents haven't their full quota of pinches in at the end of the month, they tap people at random here—and almost every one has the "makings."

Blowzy hookers congregate at 47th.

Runners for clip joints work outside the bigger bars and clubs. Policy pay-off men visit the saloons and cigar stands.

About this time, too, chorines and musicians are getting off. They swarm into the sandwich bars, delicatessens, lunch counters and all-night drugstore fountains.

The first faint streaks of dawn, breaking through the long, narrow lanes to light now almost deserted Broadway, point the way home to offside hotels and bed for make-up-streaked cuties who may dream of Hollywood, fame and fortune.

And this year, and next year, and every year, maybe five will find it.

The pages immediately preceding and following this chapter are devoted to those portions of the New York scene which, not physically on the street known as Broadway, are so intimately connected with it that in the idiom of the city they are referred to as "Broadway."

For instance, "Dream Street," the theatre section, and 52nd Street's Swing Lane are parts of the Broadway scene, though the latter is a good 300 yards removed from the Stem.

At this writing, the late Mayor LaGuardia's verboten on the old institution of burlesque still stands, but the average peasant will not be looking for it here, because his own home town probably tolerates at least one burly-Q house.

The nearest theatres dispensing that form of entertainment are in Union City, N.J., reached by Lincoln Tunnel, or 42nd Street ferry (10 minutes) and in Newark, reached by Hudson Tube (30 minutes) or Pennsylvania Railroad (15 minutes).

Though the so-called "Poor Man's Musical Comedy" is outlawed here, many of our $5 and $6 musicals and stage plays contain material that would make the most frenzied front-row burlesque patron blush. But there are still no "strippers."

One gal of our acquaintance who had made a respectable and comfortable living on the road (even in Boston) peeling in night clubs and theatres, was booked into one of our larger cafés last year.

Aware of the police ban on that form of art, she revised her act to a comedy strip-tease, which left her clothed almost as completely as an Eskimo maiden, at the crucial end of the bit.

But, next day, the management got one word from the cops—"Nix!" The monitors of modesty admitted the girl was completely clad. "But," said they, "it is a sub for a strip-tease."

There is nothing approaching the nudity permitted in other cities in our midtown clubs.

Navels must be covered.

As for higher up—

If you have tears, prepare to shed them now. That's about all you can still shed on Broadway.

4. THE THEATAH!

Though films, radio, video and even night clubs far surpass the legit in numbers of those employed and in earnings of most stars, New York is the last citadel on this continent of that phantasmagoria of the ages, the theatre.

Shubert Alley, a narrow private street running from 44th to 45th, behind the Astor Hotel, is its ventricle. Within a 300-foot radius are some of the most important playhouses, the thrones of most of the theatrical impresarios and mighty agents, and the dining places and haunts of the distinctive, generic folk who compose this gregarious galaxy. Old-timers, and some stars, still foregather in the Astor Hunting Room. The mart and meeting place for lunch, dinner and after openings is Sardi's.

The youngsters eat at Walgreen's drugstore, 44th Street and Broadway, and the drugstore in the Astor; instead of cocktails they sip cokes and smoke reefers.

Here they swap dreams, inveigh against the "favoritism" that holds them back and tell what they'd do if they had the part instead of Helen Hayes.

Unfortunately, too many of the adolescents have been tinged with political radicalism and tainted with homosexuality.

Yet, the New York theatre is still the most vital and vibrant facet of show business, and from it comes almost everything good in its bastard offspring, radio, its newer brother, television, and the movies.

Despite the thousands of accounts that have been written about the drama, the comedy and the cruelty that go into an offering in a first-class playhouse, no one has yet conveyed realistically the hopes, the fears, the prayers, of the actors, the authors, the directors, producers and attachés as they approach and experience the momentous opening night.

It is a gigantic gamble, forever in untried walks; for the over-all combination is never the same.

One chuckle in the right spot can make a career and a million dollars; a dimple in a knee, an ad lib side remark which is left in because it was spontaneous, an expression on one face at a critical moment, have been known to do it. Yet, no one has ever lived who could say, before an audience has put thumbs up or down, "This is a hit."

There has been much controversy over the power of the critics. In New York, these dozen professional reviewers are a jury, voting the fate of many men and women, who are on the defensive. But there is no presumption of innocence, and there are no attorneys to plead for the accused.

There is the right of appeal, to the public; and, once in a miracle moon, the people override the reviewers.

Saddle-sore, jaded, blasé playgoers they are; honest, usually. Broadway-wise, they can recognize a success. Because they are regulars and show-weary, they are quickest to rise to anything above mediocrity.

Having been critics, we know the way the fellows react and feel. They are not vicious deliberately, as many have charged; nor are they soft and sympathetic, as many would have them. They have a job to do and their obligation is to the reader, not to the subjects of their criticism.

The first-nighter, whose mass response in a measure prompts and primes the critics, is likewise a recidivist, an addict, and therefore a tough customer. He and she make all the openings—to see, usually to sneer, sometimes to cheer, often to be sadistically delighted at the spectacle of a misspent endeavor.

They do not go, like others, because they are especially drawn by a star or a playwright or the glamor of a title, or—which is most important—because they have heard or read that this is worth seeing. Those who do so are in the mood to be pleased. Those who go to show off sables and necklaces, to see how others dress, to brush against the wise crowd and gossip in the intermissions, are, at the very best, neutral.

And they grow impatient and belligerent because too many around them are synthetically enthusiastic.

Those would be the husbands, wives, sweeties, neighbors, creditors and kin of everyone affected by the life-and-death trial. They laugh on hair-triggers, applaud bit-players' entrances, loudly approve.

They are no corporal's guard. In a city like this, there are a half-million people directly concerned in the destinies of the theatre.

The average company includes 20 performers, 13 stagehands, a unit manager, a press agent, from one to three authors, a director and assistant director, often an orchestra, as often a chorus of 12 to 40, not to mention the house employees. Hundreds have worked on costumes, painting and constructing scenery, the properties (movable tangibles), advertising, wigmaking, lighting, photographing and the many other processes that go into something that someone "presents."

None of these persons must miss a première. Seldom is a single ticket bought, so multiply automatically by two. Then add collateral and congenital kin and romantic close ones.

These favorably prejudiced rooters, plus the asbestos-lined, never-miss first-nighters, plus the critics, the hawk-eyed scalpers, the hard-boiled New York scouts for Hollywood, the agents of the players or acquisitive agents looking for clients, nervous stockholders in the theatre and show and their staffs, comprise the hundreds "out front" on the monumental night when everything is riding on an uncharted path toward a gold mine or a morass.

It is not a "representative" audience. But it represents New York and all the 48 States. For this is the night of decision!

There has been much talk and squawk for "constructive criticism." It would mean about nothing. By the time it appears, it would have to be reconstructive. And it's then too late.

A handful of plays have upset the original opinion, notably Abie's Irish Rose, Tobacco Road and Hellzapoppin'. In all those instances, and the few others where a production caught its second wind, the backers were game and optimistic, plowed through losses with a confidence rare in such enterprises.

As a rule, what the first-nighters say as they come out is final, be it an Ibsen revival or a Theatre Guild musical or a bawdy revue.

Word spreads amazingly fast and far. Fifteen minutes after a smash has rung down, the cigar-store crowds in the Bronx and the burghers on Staten Island and the stoop-sitters in far Flatbush are chewing about it. For a big hit is big business in the Big Burg.

No recurrent event, including contest sports, sells papers like an important opening. Thousands know that what the critics say means a flop or a run. Not only are many directly interested, but millions follow such news, as Los Angeles reads Hollywood trade matter, Chicago goes for stockyards' statistics, Detroit watches auto output, Washington eats up politics and Memphis seeks the latest on "the state of the River."

For the stage is a colossal industry in Greater New York.

Its "legitimate" houses turn over more than $1,000,000 a week in good months.

Its unions are rich and powerful, its personnel exceeds in volume the population of some metropolitan cities.

Yet its fortunes hang on invisible, intangible hairs!

5. SWING LANE

In defiance of police regulations, two lines of sleek and fancy limousines are parked nightly outside Jack and Charlie's famed 21 Club in 52nd Street.

One reason why the cops close their eyes while pounding that beat is that the cars, with liveried chauffeurs, are owned by the rich and prominent townsfolk. Another is that many of the machines carry burnished seals, signifying they belong to, or at least are assigned to, high city, state and national officials.

West of Fifth Avenue, 52nd Street was long a street of wealth. Today, the 21 Club is wealth's last outpost.

This was a baronial thoroughfare, lined on both sides by fancy brownstone and brick residences of solid and superior citizens.

But the northward encroachment of business, culminating in the late 20's and early 30's with the construction of Rockefeller Center only a block south, drove the householders elsewhere.

Many of the luxurious brownstones were converted into rooming houses and made over into one- and two-room apartments; but the chief industry in the block was speakeasies. The street was a natural—it ran in the right direction, i.e., its one-way traffic was routed from west to east, which in midtown New York is important, because the bulk and the best of aftertheatre traffic goes that way.

Repeal brought new problems. Drinkers wanted more room and more air. A dozen years of small, smoky dives caused claustrophobia.

In 1933, they welcomed the big, roomy, hotel grills and Broadway cafés.

Of the 50-odd blind pigs in 52nd Street, between Fifth and Sixth, only two remained. But those two have become national institutions.

By far the most famous cabaret night club in the country is Leon & Eddie's, at 33 West 52nd Street. It started in 1929 as a narrow, dingy speak, directly across the street from its present premises, at No. 18, now part of Rockefeller Center.

The 21 Club, next door to Leon & Eddie's, technically is a restaurant, not a night club, inasmuch as only food and liquor are served; no show or music.

A history of the 21 parallels the decline of society, about which more in a succeeding chapter.

Its proprietors, former speakeasy operators, came to be considered arbiters of high fashion. It was supposed to be a great honor to be permitted to enter their saloon. And if one of the bosses deigned to talk to you, it was regarded by many as equal to being a box-holder at the Metropolitan Opera.

When one of them (Jack Kriendler) got scorched in the papers, however, it was over a mess with a middle-aged Long Island matron, and the whole town howled with the anticlimax of it all. Kriendler died at the early age of 48. His funeral, attended by top names, was the social event of the season.

Though most of 52nd Street's gin joints folded and died in 1933, the thoroughfare did not lose its essential character as an entertainment avenue.

People were used to it, the traffic advantages remained, and it was near to the Music Hall, Broadway and the East Side.

Many of the undercover locations blossomed out under new management, and with new decorations, as intimate night clubs.

Leon & Eddie's already had moved across the street and already was famous.

But in a little room, over near Sixth Avenue, called the Onyx, something happened that set the street for all time to come.

The Onyx was a musicians' hangout. It seated about 50, specialized in hot licks played by a small pick-up band, headed by two nimble lads named Farley and Riley.

They had written a gag song called "The Music Goes Round and Round." It was unpublished, but by request they played it eight or ten times a night at the Onyx, and many of the musicians who came in to relax joined in the jam sessions and played it with them.

The song was finally published and became one of the top freaks of all times. Its chief result, however, was to firmly establish 52nd Street as Swing Lane.

Through the years since then, dozens of clubs have come and gone on the street, with Leon & Eddie's and 21 the only prominent ones to remain through it all. Yet it's still known as Swing Lane.

During the past few years its complexion has been changing, as more and more smaller swing spots have begun to specialize in Negro entertainers and bands.

Many of these small clubs have become, for all practical purposes, "black and tan" spots where whites and Negroes (of opposite sexes) mix, not furtively.

Two other developments in the street—said to be natural consequences of its jazz madness—are the presence of reefer (marijuana) addicts and homosexuals, of all races.

Mind you, these people do not go to Leon & Eddie's or many other places in the block.

But the owners of the clubs they infest—mostly small places near Sixth Avenue—have been helpless before the horde and many of them welcomed this new business.

It is the observation of these writers that mad modern music, sex perversions and narcotic addiction run arm in arm. They surely do in night clubs.

Police and Federals have frequently raided these dumps and arrested dope-peddlers, including musicians, hat-check gals and waiters.

A few of the clubs had their licenses lifted for short periods, but in every instance, when the proprietor proved he didn't know about the lawbreakers, they were restored.

One corner of 52nd and Sixth Avenue is particularly obnoxious, a hangout for prostitutes and homos, dark and light.

But don't let this scare you from a trip to 52nd Street. It is part of the spice, and you are completely safe, especially at Leon & Eddie's.

Since V-J Day, many night clubs on the south side of 52nd Street have been torn down to make way for the Standard Oil Building extension of Rockefeller Center.

Many established cabarets were forced to shutter or move when the work first got under way, and present indications are that, before long, the seamier sides of Swing Lane will have disappeared, leaving only a handful of top respectable spots.

Meanwhile, a peculiar situation developed as a result of this infringement by big business. At the eastern end of this one block are stone skyscrapers and exclusive shops showing luxurious wares.

One square to the south is Radio City, and a block north is dignified, restricted 53d Street.

Those who own the real estate at the west end of Swing Lane have a feeling they are directly in the path of Manifest Destiny. Their property has possibilities of incalculable wealth. The golden lightning is scheduled to strike so soon, the freeholders do nothing toward improving the brownstones which still remain, but rent them out at high rates to night clubs on the ground floor while the upper stories cater to transient roomers or have been reconverted into small kitchenette apartments.

In this little valley less than a hundred yards long is a unique concentration of vice and hokum. Here are deadfalls designed especially to attract the tourists with promises of naughty displays of undraped female cuticle; yet, by the time the customer has paid his tab, he's seen nothing more revealing than a fat female supposed to be "nude," whose generously proportioned panties and bra (which always remain on) are constructed of material as thick as carpeting, and as opaque.

Yet other places, next door, cater to dope addicts, perverts and streetwalkers, while many of the furnished rooms over some of the most respectable places are frequently employed as assignation houses, or provide drop-ins for youths and young girls seeking places in which to engage in mad marijuana revels.

Fifty-Second Street, between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, has long been the poor sister of Swing Lane, for most of its length a dreary, dingy path of parking lots, garages, closed stables, and a few saloons, though right near Seventh Avenue there are a few first-class restaurants.

Another 52nd Street phenomenon is an influx of Chinese restaurants in the past few years. There are five in a half block off Broadway, and more than a dozen others within a block radius. But more about the uptown Orient in a later chapter.

6. EAST SIDE, BEST SIDE

The lines of the Kipling poem have been rewritten. Here we say—"Take me somewhere east of Fifth, where a man can rinse a thirst."

The past decade has seen most of midtown New York's night life—the publicized part, anyway—transferred there.

Here are the places where Gotham's cabaret-wise go; the big glitter and glamor joints on the West Side are for visitors only.

However, when the oaf searches for the so-called entertainment district on the East Side, he will not find it. All the patronage is taxi trade—or drop-ins—from the huge neighboring hotels and apartment buildings. There is no East Side Bright Belt.

The East Side is where you find such snooty places as the Stork Club, El Morocco and the Colony; such gay spots as the Copacabana and the Versailles.

Many of the world's finest and most celebrated dining spots snuggle in the section; there are so many, it would be impossible to give even a sketchy list here. One—Chambord—surrounded by tenements and low groggeries, where pheasant breast sells for $16, is regarded the costliest on earth.

Once the term "East Side" connoted poverty. It signified endless miles of filthy streets, lined with rickety tenements in which millions of Europe's dispossessed struggled for a foothold in the land of promise.

Of that East Side—the lower East Side—much remains.

Our present excursus deals only with a wonderland of wealth, a unique Mecca of marble and steel with all the world's riches, that lies above 42nd Street, a creation of recent times—a development in the wake of the electrification of the New York Central tracks, and the opening up of miles of priceless and convenient midtown property to exploitation for residences and office buildings.

This East Side cannot be described in one sentence, nor in one book. It is a Manhattan mélange of money and beauty, prodigality and banality, with haunts and hangouts of every description, from pizzerias for truck-drivers to regal retreats.

There is the world-famed Stork, owned by the sui generis Sherman Billingsley, a smooth ex-speak proprietor and former partner of Owney "The Killer" Madden, prohibition vice king, which caters to internationally distinguished literary people, personages high in government, newspapermen, industrialists, stars, financiers, Fair Dealers, labor overlords and millionaire left-wing movie stars, writers, crooners and do-gooders.

There is also the far-famed El Morocco, owned by John Perona, another fabulous ex-speak proprietor, which serves much of the Hollywood and international society glamor set. Rules for admission into its zebra-striped confines are tougher than those for the Union League Club. No man wearing a sport jacket, or sport shirt, or sans tie, has ever been permitted to patronize El Morocco, regardless of his worldly rank or the size of gratuity pressed on Carino, the dour visaged maître d'. This Cerberus of the door is unimpressed by royalty, nobility, blue blood or Hollywood fame. He bars mobsters and those who look like them; tough guys and babes; noisy ones and pugnacious ones; those overdressed or overplastered. There are no exceptions. When Humphrey Bogart punched a dame who tried to walk off with his toy panda, in El Morocco, he was put on its louse list forever.

But there are clubs in the East Side that get most of their trade from perverts. Models, out-of-work chorines and loafers of both sexes play near by. A few still cater to what is left of the "mob," notably the Copacabana, where Frank Costello throws his lavish parties.

Park Avenue—beautiful, stately and broad boulevard built over the New York Central tracks—has taken up where Riverside Drive left off, as the place to hole up your "keptie."

Oh, yes, there are respectable people on Park—many of them. The per capita wealth of its residents is probably the highest in the world.

If you are an out-of-towner, and you have been slipped a phone number to call by a friend, for a charming companion to keep you company during your stay—at $20, $50 or $100 a night—you will note that the phone exchange is ELdorado, volunteer or REgent, all East Side numbers.

When your guide points out a building as the scene of a particularly gory sex crime, you will invariably find it is on the East Side, probably near the East River.

For Gotham's Tenderloin has moved and changed.

No longer are the rich, lush pickings and pick-ups around noisy, flamboyant Broadway clubs.

New York has grown up, it seeks its pet pastimes amid surroundings of class, taste and luxury, of which these is plenty in the East Side.

Its shops contain priceless furs and gems, the screwiest and most expensive clothes and hats, the rarest and most unobtainable antiques, furnishings and rugs.

Its well-groomed and deftly made-up and turned-out ladies of leisure come high.

There is more wealth, more splendor, more finery gathered here than in any place on the world in any period of history.

The Sybarites were wrong-side-of-the-trackers by comparison.

A curious phenomenon of the recent war resulted in the greatest collection of treasure in the history of the world being stored in squalid Second and Third Avenue tenement houses, in the upper 40's and 50's, on the East Side.

Soon after Hitler took over, displaced merchants began pouring into America with rare gems, antiques and works of art as their only medium of exchange.

The beginning of war brought a tidal wave of similar fine works to these shores, as British and Continental art dealers moved their stocks here, out of reach of bombers.

New York, already an overcrowded commercial city, had absolutely no room to accommodate the hundreds of merchants who sprang up to sell these priceless goods. In desperation, they were forced into ground-floor stores of creaky and ratty old buildings in the slum stretches of Second and Third.

But, because this is a strange city, with contrasts in each block, and few well-defined upper class and lower class residential sections, it so happened that right around the corner from these tenements, quite often in the same block, were the apartment homes of the wealthiest folk in the nation—those most interested in buying such wares.

At the time the fabulous goods poured into the country, American millionaires began collecting jewels, art and expensive furniture as a hedge against inflation, on the theory that they always have value and are easily portable.

If you are coming to New York to make a splurge, or learn what life is like, or impress someone on a business deal, you must headquarter on the East Side.

Most any of its hundred standard hotels will do. If you are staying a while, you may want an apartment.

Humorist Harry Hershfield used to explain to his friends that he was "on Broadway, but not of it."

Those were the days when it was considered a rap to say of one "he has gone Broadway."

When one went Broadway (or Hollywood) it wasn't nice at all. He developed a severe case of big-shotitis, spoke of money in tablecloth figures and referred to Lee Shubert as "Lee" and Louis B. Mayer as "Louis" (when they weren't around).

But now, with most of the things that were then so characteristic of Broadway as de trop as a pug dog, the people who used to go Broadway go Park Avenue.

It is the same sort of disease, but more aggravated, and when it hits the average guy it raises a higher fever.

You can spot a man who went Park Avenue by the fact that he refers to Alfred G. Vanderbilt as "Alf" and Barbara Hutton as "Babs." He mutters gibberish of "dilatory domiciles" and "married maidens," and has a Social Register.

It has destroyed the usefulness of many otherwise useful people, as will be attested by several East Side night club proprietors.

But one of the queer results of the evolution in fashion is that a lot of society girls from Park Avenue have reverted—and "gone Broadway," becoming models, torch singers and even chorus girls.

The Park Avenue bug usually bites hoi polloi in one of the four or five East Side bistros that cater to the high-tipper set—Stork Club, Colony, Armando's, or El Morocco.

An attaché—say a press agent, headwaiter or even the boss—is swept off his feet by patronage of aristocracy; when the debutantes call him by his first name, the ex-barkeep begins to think of marrying one.

Unless a name is in the Register, he gives it a table in left field. He becomes the complete snob, an insufferable boor, and ends up being a chump to the congenital bluebloods and those who knew him when.

Now, some East Side night spot impresarios are hot to hire D.A.R. names, for tone, réclame and "contacts."

Sherman Billingsley of the Stork once thought it good business to engage a group of society girls to publicize his place.

"Maybe the debs can't do the job as well as the regulars, but they don't go ga-ga when they see a DePuyster," he said. "Besides, even if they don't get printed publicity, their friends come to visit them, which brings in business, which is what I'm in business for."

Not all who "go Park Avenue" are fakes or phonies. For the wealth, the fame and the acclaim that go as rewards for talent, endeavor or outstanding beauty also are on the East Side.

Those who achieve—via business, the arts, or charm—soon find the orbit of life has swung away from Grand Street or 42nd Street, as it had from Sioux City, and now extends from El Morocco to the Stork.

Take the tale of Florence Pritchett, outstanding beauty of two coasts, once reported engaged to young Alfred G. Vanderbilt, before his surprise marriage. Then she went with movie star Bob Walker.

Florence is the product of a small Jersey farm. Back home, like most daughters of plowboys, she dreamed of Broadway, read movie and theatrical magazines, studied the fashions in the slick paper issues.

But she didn't know how to dress or make up.

She came to New York, like many others, in search of big things. But Chance quite often puts gals like her behind a five-and-dime store counter instead of inside a natural mink.

Chance, in the person of John Robert Powers, the models' agent, discovered her. He whipped her into one of the most fashionable young women in town. She quickly became his top number.

She married young Dick Canning, who before the war was associated with an advertising agency which handled the account of the New York Fashion Industry. Dick cleverly arranged a tie-up whereby his lovely wife was provided with the most expensive in the smartest of frocks, coats and hats, which she wore nightly to all the swank clubs. Every day she had a complete, different outfit. Imagine that, girls!—wearing $300 dresses, a new one every day, new $30 shoes, new ermines, new silver foxes, priceless hats.

Florence became the talk of the town. She was welcomed in the most exalted circles. Powers put her in charge of his school, teaching other young girls from farms how to become models. Then Dick Canning went away to war. Florence still had to go out dancing, at the Stork and other gay spots.

After her divorce from Canning, the wealthiest and most eligible young men in New York's swank set began to kneel at Florence's feet.

Florence capitalized on her glamor first as a contact woman for Sam Goldwyn, sent ahead of his super productions to woo publicity, then as a fashion editor, and later as a highly paid radio commentator.

She lost Alf Vanderbilt, but married another Vanderbilt heir, the very rich, very social Earl E.T. Smith.

Though clothes made the gal in Florence's case, Café Society doesn't go in for overdressing. The siren with the extreme hat or costume shrieks like one.

You will find that most best-dressed wrens, aristocrats or successful upstarts, seldom wear hats. While it's socially proper to dress formally, the percentage of those in evening wear in the best spots is definitely below the "fast sets" in rich inland towns.

But what East Siders lack in flash is offset in taste, quality and richness.

A mink coat is the irreducible minimum for a squab who wants to travel in our so-called best circles.

In some spots, ordinary minks have grown so common, it's said the women give them to their maids and take on gray and blue minks. In one club, the gag is that you aren't allowed past the plush rope unless you're wearing a stone marten or platina. Other animals are sent around to the back door.

The East Side's most overdressed crowd was seen at the fabulously successful Monte Carlo, a large portion of whose well-heeled customers were nouveaux riches from New York's golden needle trades market.

This club was born as the House of Morgan, built for the late Helen Morgan by a wealthy admirer. Torchy La Morgan was by then on the way down. The place soon folded and went into bankruptcy. Its premises remained empty until Felix "Fefe" Ferry, Romanian-born producer and promoter, an émigré from Monte Carlo, London and Paris, raised a bank roll to open what was to be the town's most exclusive cabaret.

The new company was underwritten by a score of New York's richest men, on the theory that, as part owners, they would become regular patrons.

A requirement for admission to the bistro was evening clothes.

Now, it is a fact that those who like to dress will not do so under compulsion. Even the stockholders stayed away.

When it went broke, Ferry raised new capital and operated under a less rigorous policy. But the seed had been sown and had taken root.

The real estate firm operating the property decided to take a flyer in the saloon business itself, putting Sam Salvin, son of a successful night club operator of a generation ago, and Dick Flanagan, a happy character with a load of friends, in charge.

The policy was quickly changed. Instead of pitching for the trade of debutantes and scions, notoriously poor spenders, Monte Carlo publicized its herring and wooed the rich dress manufacturers and their ladies. When this fizzled out, another switch was tried—quiet refinement.

Once one of the five top money-making cabarets of the world, it is now shuttered. Its patrons now visit Monte Proser's La Vie En Rose.

William Zeckendorf, president of the firm which owned the defunct Monte Carlo, swung the deal to bring the United Nations to New York over cocktails at one of its corner tables.

Another East Side restaurant patronized by those who know is El Boraccho (The Drunkard), strictly a dining and wining place, fronted and partly owned by Nicky Quattrociocchi, one of New York's odd characters. The money to open the place was put up by Gracie Fields, the English screen star, and Monte Banks, her husband.

Nicky, a handsome immigrant who barged in 25 years ago from Italy, is a living example of how you can get by in Gotham on wits, nerve and connections.

After a short and desultory career in Hollywood as Theda Bara's leading man in silents, Nicky gravitated to New York, where he was classified a playboy.

He was always neatly dressed, traveled in the correct circles and knew the right people. Yet things were such that once he gave a "Bundles for Nicky" party, to which guests were invited on stationery headed by a list of 1,000 honorary chairmen, and asked to contribute items to help furnish Nicky's 12-room apartment.

Among the suggestions of what Nicky needed were an electric razor, baby grand piano, love seat and cuspidor. The party was a huge success and the apartment couldn't hold all the gifts. One reason was that Nicky's 12 rooms turned out to be a one-room unfurnished flat.

Nicky achieved another kind of renown—more gruesome. He was completely innocent, but a macabre coincidence attended another of his pranks.

Lovely, exotic Helen Kim Mont committed suicide in her Park Avenue apartment. Mrs. Mont had been on the stage under her maiden name, Helen Kim. She was of Korean descent.

As the poisonous fumes were snuffing out the life of this Broadway orchid—bride of 29 days—the lobby of her apartment building was filling up with several hundred gay society folk who had received Nicky's invitations:

"You are most cordially invited to attend a mystery cocktail party which will be given in honor of someone you know, by someone you know. Such a party, with your kind cooperation, should be the most unusual and amusing in New York."

Nicky had sent out the letters, inviting notables to the nonexistent cocktail party, scheduled to start at the hour the beautiful girl chose to end her life in another part of the building.

Stunned by the tragedy, which gave his jest a Grand Guignol denouement, Nicky said:

"I thought it would be a lot of fun to invite them to cool their heels for a while, and then show up. I had no way, of course, of knowing what would happen."

The deadly fumes had just killed Helen when the ermine-wrapped women and their top-hatted escorts began to flock into the building—and the gas emergency crew raced through the lobby.

Nicky started his East Side Restaurant on an investment of less than $5,000. Friends helped him construct the bar. Decorations consisted of labels from whiskey bottles, losing $100 horse race tickets and the lip imprints of women patrons.

The friends he made during his playboy days flocked to the new café, making it an overnight wow. And it never slowed up.

Despite New York's fame for entertainment, but a handful of cabarets catering to New Yorkers present shows, which are considered attractive to only the prairie flowers.

The average East Side café-goer usually doesn't even want to dance, and when he does he dances only sambas and rumbas, all other steps being passé.

The purpose of dance music in fine clubs is to provide overtones for conversation. For that reason, the bands play pianissimo and all melodies are in one tempo, so you aren't conscious of the breaks.

That's because New Yorkers don't go to clubs for laughs, legs or lilts—they stroll in to dine, drink and talk, to tell their patriots how pretty they are, or even sell a bill to a customer.

When New Yorkers want shows, they go to theatres.

Though we haven't the exact figures at hand, it's a pretty good bet that, per capita, there are more places to purchase liquor around newspaper offices than are to be found in the neighborhood of any other kind of business building.

During the late great drought, the side streets in the East 40's, near Second and Third Avenues, in the vicinity of New York's two largest journals, News and Mirror, blossomed with speakeasies, so many in fact that one three-story building contained four.

After repeal, a good many of these resorts continued in business as legal saloons, catering mostly to printers, proofreaders and reporters, selling food and drink at moderate prices. Who ever heard of a newspaperman with a spare buck?

Came the war's beef and butter shortage. Ex-speak proprietors with bootleg blood in their veins again heard the stirring call to battle.

Word soon got around that you could always get steaks in these places. Furthermore, there was something bohemian in going to them, because you could rub shoulders with newspapermen and maybe once in awhile see a famed columnist or cartoonist.

Then there were the caricatures on the walls, often drawn by needy members of the craft in payment of booze, and the sawdust on the floor.

New York is a town that follows the leader. Locals began taking their out-of-town friends. Pretty soon you needed reservations and still stood in line, and dingy old saloons boasted doormen, while the journalists who had made the places couldn't wedge in.

The places caught on, and even after the shortages eased the once lowly gin mills continued to draw the carriage trade, considered by everyone in "the know" as the last word in "steakeasies."

Among them are the Palm, Second Avenue and 45th Street, known to initiates as Ganzi's; the Montreal, 45th and Second, known as Colombo's; Pietro's, at 45th and Third, once called The Key Club, because during Prohibition you used your own private key instead of a card; the Pen and Pencil and the Scribes in 45th between Second and Third; and Danny's, the Press Box, and Chris Cella's, between Third and Lexington.

A recent development on the East Side is the looming prominence of Lexington Avenue as a "Main Street." Lexington's rise can be traced in an inverse ratio to Broadway's decline, as the better class of visitor began to select East Side hotels and do his dining and dancing nearby.

Before the war—say a dozen years ago—Broadway drew a different type of tourist. Then he was a buyer, with fire in his eyes, desire in his blood, and all tabs paid for by the manufacturers and salesmen who were out to give him a better time than did their competitors.

Other visitors were well-heeled Rotarians from the interior and their ladies, here to see the sights and shows and do some shopping.

These people of ample means were Broadway's leaven, keeping it gay and prosperous.

Both large groups dried up during the war. Their places were taken by millions of gaping and gawking servicemen from everywhere, here on leave or passing through, and other millions of defense-plant workers from nearby Jersey, Pennsylvania and Connecticut communities, their pockets bulging with unaccustomed wealth, for the spending of which they had no talent.

It takes many years of practice and some taste and intelligence to make a buck do the things New York can make it do.

These barbarians inundated Broadway. They drove the last remaining residents off the White Way, and with them went much of the flavor of the Stem.

To cater to this horde, which preferred to ankle aimlessly up and down Broadway, eat at hot dog stands and see a movie as the high point of the evening, came shooting galleries, flea circuses, "playlands," photo galleries, souvenir stores with pennants and fancy pillows embroidered with mushy sentiments, grind movies, "sex" bookstores, ham-and-eggeries, portrait artists who paint your picture while you wait, and stands that sell "cocoanut champagne" at a dime the drink.

When the war ended, the "cheap-John" gravy train was over, too. But the better class of visitors never returned to Broadway, which is now forced to get along on a mere dribble of pikers.

The desirables, who began to come back to New York in great numbers, made their headquarters east of Fifth. Lexington Avenue, though one of the narrowest, soon became the East Side's main drag, for many reasons. First, it has more hotels than any other, many of them new, modern and varied in prices. The subway runs under it. Furthermore, both Madison and Park are restricted as to types of window displays and advertising, and electric signs are, as on Fifth Avenue, prohibited.

Third Avenue is still encumbered by the elevated railroad, the only one not torn down to make way for progress, and Second and First Avenues are not only too far east, but are dingy and slummy.

So Lexington is beginning to take on the attributes of a Main Street. It has all-night restaurants and lunch stands, all-night drugstores, and most of the better night clubs are no more than two blocks away, east or west.