Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  The Shuberts uncharacteristically spoofed the Wales Padlock Law by producing a revue called Padlocks of 1927. It starred Texas Guinan, the symbol of nightclub revelry, who always greeted her patrons with the trademark phrase “Hello, suckers!” Miss Guinan made her entrance on a white horse, sang some songs, and browbeat the audience with insulting remarks. A line of comely chorines backed up her star turn. The more Texas upbraided the customers, the more they loved her.

  The thrice-married Miss Guinan, whose real name was Mary Louise Cecilia, was born in Waco, Texas, but much preferred Manhattan and the riches she accumulated as a nightclub hostess. Manhattan returned the compliment by patronizing her West Side speakeasies. Whenever the Feds padlocked one, she opened another, and another. There Jimmy rubbed elbows with athletes, socialites, Wall Street brokers, politicians, and mobsters who had grown semirespectable by “importing” Canadian whisky and even backing Broadway shows.

  Collier’s magazine reported that “three-quarters of the 2,500 dry agents in New York are wardheelers and sycophants named by politicians.” Entering a speakeasy wasn’t difficult for the better class of drinkers. The speakeasies, or simply “speaks,” gained their name because the fancier establishments required a few whispered words of recognition at the entranceway’s peephole to make sure the caller wasn’t a Treasury agent.

  Not surprisingly, the speakeasy world was closely tied to bootleggers, organized crime, and some Tammany politicians. Miss Guinan’s partner, a Hell’s Kitchen hood named Larry Fay, was linked to Owney Madden, the town’s biggest bootlegger. Madden, who had friends in the Tammany clubs on the West Side, was not a man to be crossed. He usually found it sufficient to exercise only silent muscle against rival gangsters. It was rumored that he considered Legs Diamond—the Hotsy Totsy Club owner and Arnold Rothstein’s former bodyguard—anathema because the flamboyant Legs called too much attention to his colleagues in the underworld. Whether Madden had anything to do with Legs’s death will never be known.

  “I would rather have a square inch of New York than all the rest of the world,” said Miss Guinan, who lived hard and passed on at the age of forty-nine. The New York Herald Tribune offered this generous tribute: “She was a master showman and accomplished psychologist. She had ability, too, and would have been successful in any one of a dozen more conventional fields. To New York and the rest of the country, Texas was a flaming leader of a period which was a lot of fun while it lasted.”

  New Yorkers seeking racier entertainment than the hundreds of Broadway shows and thousands of speakeasies could always pull down their fedoras, pull up the collars of their raincoats, and duck into the Gaiety on Forty-sixth Street or one of the other five-shows-a-day “burleycue” houses. If they bought a watered lemonade drink, patrons could sit through two shows while eating a thick fifteen-cent hot pastrami club sandwich, with mustard and coleslaw, from the crowded Gaiety delicatessen next door.

  The “burleycues” featured aspiring or retired Catskill Mountain comedians. Their standard jokes invariably included a fire hose spritzing a stream of water as the phallic punchline. The strippers shed their garments, piece by flimsy piece, to the beat of a five-piece pit band while an over-the-hill tenor in white tie and tails sang, “A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody.” One star performer on the burlesque circuit was known for her remarkable ability to jiggle the tassels on the nipples of her ample breasts in opposite directions at the same time.

  But it wasn’t all fun and games in the field of entertainment. New York was also the center of book and magazine publishing; bookstores, newsstands, and neighborhood public libraries offered a variety of works for new learners and serious readers—though there is no evidence that Mayor Walker was among them.

  The 1920s saw the internationalization of American literature, partly the result of widening horizons after World War I. It was a decade that produced lasting literature. For his remarkable group of novels depicting the smugness and hypocrisy of American small-town life—Main Street, Babbitt, Arrowsmith (Pulitzer Prize, 1926, declined), Elmer Gantry, and Dodsworth—Sinclair Lewis received the 1930 Nobel Prize for Literature, the first American to be so honored (he accepted). Lewis said he refused the Pulitzer because the prize was awarded not for literary merit but for the best presentation of “the wholesome atmosphere of American life.” By his standards, “wholesome” was a dirty word.

  In the same decade, Pulitzer-winning novelists included Edith Wharton, for The Age of Innocence; Booth Tarkington, for Alice Adams; Willa Cather, for One of Ours; Edna Ferber, for So Big; and Thornton Wilder, for the Bridge of San Luis Rey. Novelists who were passed over for Pulitzers at the time included John Dos Passos, for Manhattan Transfer; William Faulkner, who published Sartoris and The Sound and the Fury; Ernest Hemingway, for The Sun Also Rises and A Farewell to Arms; and E Scott Fitzgerald, for The Great Gatsby.

  Black writers came to the fore during the 1920s in the literary and artistic movement that became known as the Harlem Renaissance. The nucleus of the movement included Jean Toomer, Wallace Thurman, Arna Bontemps, Countee Cullen, and Zora Neale Hurston. Among the notable authors (and books) were Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues); James Weldon Johnson (God’s Trombones), and Claude McKay (Home to Harlem). They offered a realistic portrayal of black life.

  “The 1920s were the years of Manhattan’s Black Renaissance,” said Langston Hughes, linking music and literature. “It began with ‘Shuffle Along,’ ‘Running Wild’ and the ‘Charleston.’ It was the musical revue that gave a scintillating sendoff to that Negro vogue in Manhattan, which reached its peak just before the Crash of 1929, the Crash that sent Negroes, white folks, and all rolling down the hill toward [President Roosevelt’s] Works Progress Administration. White people began to come to Harlem in droves. For several years they packed the expensive Cotton Club on Lenox Avenue. But I was never there, because the Cotton Club was a Jim Crow club for gangsters and monied whites. They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity.”

  Almost as soon as Walker entered City Hall, he found it necessary to preserve his health by leaving Manhattan as often as possible, winter and summer. After the strenuous campaign, he went to Palm Springs to rest up. Shortly after taking office, he attended the Kentucky Derby. The papers reported his wardrobe as well as the race results. Field glasses were formally draped over his double-breasted suit. His wide-brimmed light fedora was rakishly tilted to one side, Walker style. At the estates of his wealthy friends, he took vacations in Malibu and Palm Beach, wearing his special sports outfits.

  Instead of reprimanding the mayor for his long absences in the better watering holes of Florida and California, the tabloids found him wonderful copy. He represented the people, living out their dreams. Irving Berlin found time to capture the mood of the public in another musical tribute to his dear friend that did not, however, endure in his catalogue of hit tunes:

  Who told Broadway not to be gay?

  Who gets his picture taken three times a day?

  Jimmy!

  We’re glad to show,

  That we all know,

  That Jimmy’s doing fine.

  Can’t you hear those old New Yorkers hollering:

  Gimmie—gimmie—gimmie Jimmy for mine!

  In his first year in office, the Honorable James J. Walker put on his top hat and tails and became a self-appointed ambassador to Europe, spending more time with the royalty than the peasantry. His entourage set sail on the Berengaria, a German ship that had become a Cunard liner after the Great War as part of reparations. The Walkers occupied the luxury liner’s Imperial Suite, the cost to them unknown.

  At a reception given the night before by the Grand Street Boys at their Fifty-fifth Street clubhouse, the mayor had been presented with a golden scroll of the Ten Commandments, written in Hebrew. Among those cheering him were Governor Alfred E. Smith, Patrick Cardinal Hayes, U.S. Senators Robert F. Wagner and Royal S. Copeland, a dozen state Supreme Court justices, Al Jolson and other theatrical personalities,
and such “philanthropists” as Paul Block (who would later be heard of as one of the mayor’s illicit financial sources).

  In a sentimental speech, Walker said, “I love my city more than anything else in the world, unless it be my country and my God. I must, on my travels, earn the respect to which my city is entitled, and I promise you boys tonight, that I will think, look and act in terms of a public servant.”

  Hundreds of well-wishers came to the Hudson River pier to bid him bon voyage, the fire department band played and the police department glee club serenaded him with Irving Berlin tunes. Walker turned to his shipboard pals and said, “I never would have believed there were so many people glad to see me leave town. I hope they’ll be just as glad to see me get back!”

  The mayor’s principal spear carrier, Hector Fuller, an advertising and publicity man who accompanied Jimmy, Allie, and their friends, put out the word that the mayor was taking a “hard-working vacation” in the “charming cities” of London, Dublin, Berlin, Munich, Baden-Baden, Venice and the Lido, Rome, Paris and Castlecomer, his father’s hometown in County Kilkenny.

  No newspaper dispatches exist about Allie Walker’s clothes for the trip, but Jimmy’s wardrobe included forty-eight suits, twelve sports jackets and matching striped pants, twenty white piqué vests, a dozen topcoats, morning coats, and top hats, and one hundred ties, and that was only the outerwear. The foreign press reported Jimmy’s outfits more closely than his speeches.

  The high point of the grand tour was his visit to Ireland. In the village of Castlecomer, Walker spoke emotionally:

  “When a man comes from a far country back to the land of his fathers, back from Castle Garden where his sire entered to become an American citizen, to arrive at Castlecomer whence in the years gone by his father came, who shall find words adequately to express his emotions? Mine own people! How truly now can I use that phrase about Americans on one side of the Atlantic and the Irish on this. To have looked into the eyes of villagers who knew my dear father and have shaken his hand; to stand in their hearts as a symbol of the great opportunity that America offers! This has been a privilege of which a much humbler man than I might well be proud.”

  In Rome, Mayor Walker proved a dangerous amateur as an envoy for the United States. His blarney did not do him—or his country—proud when he met Benito Mussolini, the Fascist dictator. After a private talk with II Duce (Hector Fuller boasted that it was the longest interview Mussolini had given since coming to power), Walker gave a press conference at the Excelsior Hotel before forty newspapermen.

  Confidently but witlessly, Walker said:

  “I told Mussolini that it has been one of the greatest honors of my European tour to meet him. I told him that I really believed he was the greatest figure in modern times and that I have long admired him. I can understand, without difficulty, after talking with Mussolini for forty-six minutes, why he has been the wonderfully successful man that the world recognizes. I found him a man of great personal attraction. Like all great men, a man of great mental strength and at the same time a man of deep sympathy. His one outstanding success lies in the fact that he is a genuine humanitarian.”

  Il Duce issued this statement to the world press:

  “Mayor Walker is young, not only in appearance but also in spirit. He is a man of great talent, an idealist, and a practical man at the same time. Therefore, he is highly fit to govern the great metropolis where millions of Italians live and whom the New York Mayor has praised, saying they were upright, hardworking and obedient to American laws. Mayor Walker has left me with a feeling of greatest sympathy.”

  It was an exchange that Walker’s sympathetic biographers have chosen to forget.

  After six weeks, the mayor’s entourage returned to New York on the Ile de France. In honor of its distinguished passenger, boasted Hector Fuller, the flag of the City of New York flew from the liner’s foremast for the first time in its history. When the ship docked, the police department band vied with the Boys’ Band from the Greenwich Village Post of the American Legion in playing such popular tunes as “Maggie Murphy’s Home” and “Sidewalks of New York.”

  As cameras clicked and flashbulbs went off, Walker made a brief speech to the welcoming newspaper reporters on the pier: “Boys, primarily I’m glad to get back in New York for a vacation. I went abroad for a rest, but the constant round of hospitality and courtesy shown me had us on the go constantly. To detail everything would take hours and days. But I come back joyful to know the great esteem in which Europe holds New York. Wherever I went I heard nothing but admiration for our city and it made me proud to be a New Yorker.”

  Most of the newspapers bought the line that the junket was a success, comparing Jimmy Walker to the Prince of Wales, England’s own dandy. An editorial writer in the New York Evening World, reaching for elegant words to match the mayor’s dashing wardrobe, wrote:

  “Whether he receives a French committee in his pajamas, or strolls into the smart Mayfair Hotel in London, dapper and smartly garbed in a double-breasted suit, panama hat, soft-collared grey shirt and blue scarf, he exudes geniality and goodwill and sells America. Verily, the Prince of Wales may be a good salesman for the British Empire, but he will find the going hard after Jimmy Walker has smiled upon his customers, sung them a song, and sold little old New York.”

  A new round of official receptions, led by the businessmen of the Advertising Club, greeted Jimmy as a conquering hero. At a luncheon in the Grand Ballroom of the Hotel Astor in the heart of Broadway, three thousand people were somehow accommodated. Walker was presented with a portfolio, bound in morocco, that included photographs of every city and resort he had visited.

  Responding to the welcome-home speeches by his friends and benefactors in the business community, the Night Mayor said, “You can find some comfort from the fact that in my every waking hour I love New York. There is not anything in the world I would not do for this great city, nor anything that I would not give for it.”

  Referring to his visit to Mussolini’s Rome, he added, “Your Mayor, if you please, took off his hat to the statue of Christopher Columbus who made it possible for you and me to live in a place where we could be on the level with ourselves and all the world.”

  Rising to their feet, the businessmen, churchmen, and public officials applauded every one of Jimmy Walker’s sincere platitudes.

  It was now the autumn of 1927. Walker was at the height of his popularity. His life and the city’s life were filled with sunshine and prosperity. The darkening clouds were barely visible.

  SIX

  Hares and Hounds

  Arnold Rothstein’s murder was still “unsolved,” and reformers knew that New York’s police and courts (not to mention prosecutors) were on the take or simply looking the other way. But where to begin an investigation? The Appellate Division of the New York State Supreme Court finally started the ball rolling after an incident involving Magistrate Albert H. Vitale, a Tammany hack, who was used to line up votes for Jimmy Walker in the Bronx. Magistrate Vitale had been a friend of Arnie Rothstein. Some time before the gangster was gunned down, Vitale had borrowed nearly $20,000 from him.

  A seriocomic incident took place that proved Magistrate Vitale’s underworld connections to be of the finest. It happened at a testimonial dinner and fund-raiser held by the Tepecano Democratic Club at the Roman Gardens in the Bronx. (Italian members of the club altered the club’s name; it derived from the nickname—“Old Tippecanoe”—of General William H. Harrison, hero of the battle of Tippecanoe, who was the ninth American president.) Most of the members were lawyers and bail bondsmen doing business in Vitale’s courtroom. The guest of honor was none other than the Honorable Albert H. Vitale himself.

  With a wave and a hearty salute, he stood up to acknowledge the plaudits of his fellow Democrats and financial contributors. They included various gentlemen with police records, including Ciro Terranova, the “Artichoke King.” Terranova, who monopolized the sale of vegetables in the city’s Italian ne
ighborhoods, arrived at the affair in his armored limousine, which had bulletproof windows.

  Suddenly, six masked men, pistols drawn, entered the private dining room and lined up the guests against the wall. A city detective handed his revolver to the robbers without attempting to use it. Magistrate Vitale slipped off his diamond ring and hid it in his pants; a former magistrate, Michael Dilagi, stuffed his diamond ring in his shoe. The six masked robbers took thousands of dollars from the guests, quickly dashed outside, and disappeared into waiting getaway cars driven by experienced wheelmen.

  Naturally, this unscheduled entertainment embarrassed Vitale, the honorary president for life of the Tepecano Democrats. He left the Roman Gardens at two o’clock in the morning and immediately drove to his own Democratic clubhouse. With a few well-placed telephone calls in the next two hours, he rounded up all the cash, gold cuff links, and star sapphire pinky rings that had been stolen at his party, restored the loot to the surprised guests, and saw that the police detective’s stolen gun was returned.

  On August 27, 1930, Edward R. Finch, the acting presiding justice of the Appellate Division’s First Department, which covered Manhattan and the Bronx, ordered an investigation of the Magistrates’ Courts.

  At the same time, with the national Democratic convention two years away, some of Governor Roosevelt’s political intimates were already working for his presidential nomination. They did not want to arouse anti–New York sentiment that might damage F.D.R’s chances around the country. The full depth of corruption in the city could not be anticipated by Roosevelt or his advisers. Tammany Hall was still in a position of influence in city, state, and national elections. Its leaders had contributed to F.D.R’s gubernatorial victory. It was not yet time for Roosevelt to put on his armor and challenge the Hall and its designated officials.