by Fran Leadon
But not even Cohan fully understood Broadway. He kept trying, putting Broadway itself in the starring role of play after play—Forty-five Minutes from Broadway, Broadway Jones, The Man Who Owns Broadway, Hello, Broadway!—while never quite articulating exactly what made Broadway so strange and wonderful. At one point, in Broadway Jones, two of Cohan’s characters, Josie and Jones, try to pin it down.
JOSIE: What is Broadway? . . . a street?
JONES: Sure, it’s the greatest street in the world.
JOSIE: Some people say it’s terrible.
JONES: Philadelphia people.
JOSIE: And some says it’s wonderful.
JONES: That’s just it. It’s terribly wonderful.
JOSIE: I don’t understand.
JONES: Nobody understands Broadway. People hate it and don’t know why. People love it and don’t know why. It’s just because it’s Broadway.
JOSIE: That’s a mystery, isn’t it?
JONES: That’s just what it is, a mystery.
Cohan had spent his entire childhood on the road, never staying in one place for long. As an infant, he had been put down for naps in backstage trunks and boardinghouse bureaus, and no doubt romanticized Broadway because it was the closest he ever came to a real home.
“I guess Broadway, for me, was everything in life I’ve never had,” he once said. “My education, and the friendships, games, adventures, and just plain fun of boyhood and growing up.”
CHAPTER 23
BROADWAY GHOSTS
LITTLE JOHNNY JONES, FEATURING A CAST OF EIGHTY AND enough sets, props, and costumes to fill two baggage cars, traveled to Boston, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Los Angeles, and everywhere in between: Rock Island, Illinois; Clarksburg, West Virginia; Newport News, Virginia; Pensacola, Florida; Grand Forks, North Dakota; and countless other cities and towns, while its songs swept the country in the form of sheet music and the new-fangled phonograph records that were bringing the sounds of Broadway directly into the homes of small-town America.
“Do you like music? If you had one of these Talking Machines do you know what it would mean to you and your family?” read one advertisement in 1906. “Imagine yourself on Broadway; everybody is craning his neck to catch a sign of the procession about to pass. It’s coming—hear that? That’s the incomparable Sousa; see the drum major. Can you hear the trombone solo, and now the full band again?”
Broadway had become New York’s chief cultural export. For many Americans it was less a place than a state of mind, a perpetual dream of success. Those seeking fame and fortune on the Broadway stage came by the thousands to New York, lining up for auditions in Shubert Alley, which ran between the Shubert and Booth theaters and the Hotel Astor, congregating in hallways outside the offices of agents, and pestering producers with pleading letters.
“I am a girl eighteen years old, of fairly good appearance, I should say, with brown eyes and hair,” one letter to David Belasco began:
From the time I was a child I have loved the theatre. Nothing else has ever interested me nearly so much. I think I have some real talent for the stage—that is, my family and all my friends tell me I have. I have acted in several amateur plays in our city and have even had some of the most important parts. I have always received much applause.
After thinking it over carefully I am writing you to ask if you can find a chance for me in any of your companies. I can even come to New York to see you if you think there is any hope. I would prefer to act serious parts because I believe I have emotional ability. I would not expect to do very prominent work during the first year or two, so I would not ask very much pay at the start. Will you please consider my application, for it means so much to me?
Yours very truly,
Agnes Anderson
The percentages weren’t in Agnes’s favor. Belasco never replied to her letter, instead using it as a cautionary tale in his 1919 manifesto The Theatre Through Its Stage Door.
“Success,” Belasco wrote, “or what seems to be success, in amateur theatricals . . . yields the theatre an abundant harvest—those who mistake the kindly applause of their friends as proof that they have the acting gift.”
The Daily Telegram of Clarksburg, West Virginia, called Broadway the “Street of Broken Hearts.”
But they kept coming. Young women who grew up reading Photoplay and Variety and memorizing every detail in the lives of Ethel Barrymore, Blanche Bates, Maude Adams, and Minnie Maddern Fiske came to Broadway determined to follow in the footsteps of those renowned dramatic actresses. Others were lured by tales of the glamorous world of producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., a smooth Lothario with a thin smile, lavender shirts, and pockets filled with diamonds and candy. Ziegfeld had turned Anna Held, Fanny Brice, and Billie Burke into stars, and each fall recruited fresh new faces for his wildly popular, mildly naughty Follies. Belasco, meanwhile, had discovered Mary Pickford. Was it so far-fetched that an unknown gal from Tucson or Tallahassee might make it on Broadway?
But when things didn’t work out, many young women found themselves stranded in New York with few employment alternatives. After Alice Germaine didn’t make it on the stage, she took a room near Times Square and began working as an escort.
“I do not ask whether they are married,” she said of her clients. “It makes no difference to me. I take them to dinner, to a dance or a performance. I have a regular rate—$10 for one man, $15 for two and $20 for three, with dinner and other expenses.”
Grace Le Gendre came to New York from a small New England village, but took to drink and wound up imprisoned in the Tombs, the city jail, for skimming $2,000 from the Hotel Gregorian, where she worked as a cashier.
“The lure of New York beckons a girl to ruin and the lights of the Great White Way only dazzle and blind her,” she told a reporter who interviewed her in her prison cell.
Ida Brown, twenty, left her hometown of Cortland, New York, for Broadway in 1915 and found work as a chorus girl at the Winter Garden Theatre. But only a few days later she took a joyride with a group of pleasure seekers and was killed in a head-on collision on a foggy stretch of Pelham Parkway. A United Press account of her death and funeral drew contrasts between Broadway’s frivolous fantasy world and the appalling reality of Brown’s body coming home in a baggage car. The story ran in newspapers all over the country, with local editors adding their own cautionary headlines: “Broadway’s Old Story Retold in Girl’s Death,” “Story of Ida Brown Typical of Numerous ‘Careers’ on Stage,” “Broadway Lights Are Not for Her,” “Dares City’s Clamor, Goes Home in Coffin.”
Other women simply disappeared. Another wire service story labeled Broadway the “port of missing maidens,” and recounted the sad tales of Ruth Cruger, Dorothy Arnold, Florence Whittier, Helen McCarthy, and Jessie McCann, women who vanished without a trace. Of the estimated 3,500 missing persons reported in New York every year, the story claimed, 800 were never found, and half of those gone “permanently missing” were young women.
“The glamour of the Gay White Way has been dimmed by the general knowledge of its sordid, paltry viciousness,” the Washington Herald proclaimed in 1911. Five years later journalist Ida McGlone Gibson stated that the Broadway of George M. Cohan was no more.
THAT WASN’T TRUE, exactly: Both Broadway and Cohan were still thriving, but by the teens it was clear that the Great White Way was changing. World War I temporarily dimmed Broadway’s bright lights, which were switched off to save electricity. Then a prolonged Actors’ Equity Association strike in 1919 ruined much of the esprit de corps that had existed between theater types. And then Prohibition arrived and turned Broadway on its head.
When the Volstead Act took effect, at midnight on January 17, 1920, waiters circulated among the booths and tables of Broadway’s lobster palaces and glumly informed patrons they could no longer order alcoholic drinks. Beloved institutions soon went by the wayside; even Rector’s couldn’t survive without selling alcohol. Bootleggers became Broadway’s new heroes, and organized crime transformed the
Great White Way into an illicit landscape of speakeasies, cabarets, and nightclubs.
Things got really sordid on Broadway then, the beginning of a long slide into nefariousness that has only been arrested in the last twenty years. But the early years of Prohibition, especially the nine years before the Great Depression, also marked Broadway’s creative peak: In 1927 alone, 264 new shows opened, including the groundbreaking Show Boat at the new Ziegfeld Theatre. Times Square’s new Paramount, RKO Palace, Rivoli, and Loew’s State theaters featured combinations of movies, live music, and vaudeville, while a boom in the construction of traditional playhouses brought the Apollo, the Earl Carroll, the John Golden, and other new theaters to the surrounding blocks.
On any given week, visitors to Broadway could see, live on stage, Ethel Barrymore, Noel Coward, the Great Houdini, the Marx Brothers, Eddie Cantor, George Gershwin, Ivor Novello, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne, Paul Robeson, Mae West, Rudy Vallee, and W. C. Fields. They could go to new plays by O’Neill, Odets, Shaw, Ibsen, and Dreiser, and movies starring Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, Lon Chaney, Harold Lloyd, Norma Shearer, and Rin-Tin-Tin. After the shows, they could descend on Lindy’s, the Beaux-Arts Grill, or the Club Anatole for dinner, then head to Roseland for dancing, and then, too drunk or exhausted or elated to go home, to Texas Guinan’s cabaret for the rest of the night.
MARY LOUISE GUINAN had been one of those unlucky women who came to Broadway with stars in their eyes but never quite made it. She was born and raised in Waco, Texas, and moved to New York in 1906 with dreams of a career on the stage, but found only bit roles in road productions. She had a brief moment of fame playing cowgirls in silent films, hence the nickname “Texas,” but by 1922 was just one of many has-beens floating around Times Square. Prohibition was a godsend for Guinan, the thing that, along with grit and hard work, finally brought her fame and fortune.
She began working in nightclubs as a performing hostess, where she attracted the attention of Larry Fay, a racketeer and owner of a lucrative fleet of taxis. Fay longed to mingle with the city’s social elite, and in 1922 he and Guinan opened the El Fey Club on 44th Street, just east of Broadway. When federal agents padlocked the club in 1925, Guinan momentarily moved her act—and her catchphrase, “Hello, suckers!”—to vaudeville, and then opened a new club with Fay a few blocks from the first one.
By 1927 Guinan, an angular woman with a blond bob and a fondness for garish jewelry and red stockings, had detached herself from Fay (who was later gunned down in another club) and was running the 300 Club on 54th Street. Guinan had become the toast of Broadway’s Prohibition netherworld, her regular patrons an improbable cross-section of the city: Society types from Fifth Avenue, Wall Street bankers, prominent judges, and Mayor Jimmy Walker, along with tourists, writers, baseball players, boxers, and assorted mobsters, leeches, and grifters.
Damon Runyon was often there doing research for the “Broadway stories” he began publishing in Cosmopolitan and Collier’s in 1931. Brimming with allegorical “guys” and “dolls” with names like Regret, Sorrowful, Lola, Silk, and the Brain, all of whom spoke in vivid, present-tense prose peppered with Yiddish-inflected jazz-age slang—“scratch” for money, “chill” for relax, “equalizer” or “Roscoe” for gun—Runyon’s stories were largely based on the 300 Club’s crowd of nighthawks. Guinan herself appeared occasionally as “Miss Missouri Martin.”
The 300 Club was small as cabarets went, with barely room for a kitchen, an orchestra in the corner, twenty to thirty tables, and a small dance floor. Chinese lanterns lent the place a soft, mysterious red glow. Guinan rarely arrived at the club before one in the morning, creating a nightly buzz of anticipation among her guests, who whiled away the hours before her grand entrance by listening to the orchestra, buying cigarettes from the cigarette girl, and eating sandwiches ordered from a battalion of waiters in red uniforms.
Guinan blew into her club, English writer Stephen Graham wrote after a visit in 1927, like an errant firework. Graham watched in fascination as Guinan circulated among the tables, kissing cheeks and caressing outstretched arms and calling everyone “darling,” and then climbed onto a stool in front of the orchestra to preside over a Ziegfeld Follies–like revue that featured choruses of scantily clad women. Waiters hooted and hollered and encouraged the crowd to make as much noise as possible. The evening’s entertainment culminated in an antic snowball fight, using “snowballs” of white felt.
Then came more dancing and drinking and a fistfight or two. Graham described patrons passing out on tables as night gave way to dawn, and three drunken women singing “Bye Bye Blackbird.”
When Graham finally emerged from the club into the street, he was astonished to find the sun fully up and people striding purposefully to work. Guinan, following her morning routine, had a sandwich with her staff and a few friends and finally headed home to a house in Greenwich Village, where she had nailed four blankets over the bedroom window to keep out the sun and lived with a parrot that could only say “telephone” and “go to hell.”
MILE 6
COLUMBUS CIRCLE TO 79TH STREET
CHAPTER 24
THE BOULEVARD
ANYONE STAGGERING UP BROADWAY IN 1927 AFTER A LONG night at the 300 Club would have passed through Automobile Row, a strip of offices and showrooms for General Motors, Ford, Buick, Cadillac, Studebaker, and Packard that had turned Broadway between Times Square and Columbus Circle into a futuristic thoroughfare devoted to the wonders of the internal combustion engine. At Columbus Circle, Broadway grazes the southwest corner of Central Park and enters the expanse of the West Side. And once past 59th Street, even an inebriated daybreak wanderer would have noticed that Broadway had suddenly become an entirely different street.
Broadway above Columbus Circle is wider, grander, and greener than the street below it, and is a remnant of the Boulevard, or the Grand Boulevard, the romantic vision of Andrew Haswell Green, a well-connected mid-nineteenth-century lawyer and comptroller of the powerful Central Park Commission. Green’s Boulevard came about because of an 1865 legislative act granting the Central Park Commission absolute power in planning all of Manhattan above 155th Street, the part of the island left unresolved by the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan. In addition to coming up with a master plan for upper Manhattan, the act also empowered the Central Park Commission to lay out a “road or public drive” running up the West Side from 59th Street, “as far north . . . as the commissioners may determine,” which ended up being all the way up to 168th Street. The act stipulated that the path of the new road should follow the old Bloomingdale Road between 59th and 106th streets; north of that point the commissioners could lay out the new drive wherever they wanted.
The Bloomingdale Road opened in 1703, beginning where the Bowery ended at present-day 23rd Street, and ran like a ribbon up the West Side. The road was about 65 feet wide, although its width was inconsistent and it was full of unexpected jogs and doglegs. It was never paved and throughout its history was often flooded. But the Bloomingdale Road was, by all accounts, a beautiful country thoroughfare lined with trees and fences and dotted on both sides with farms and estates, streams and ponds.
Well into the nineteenth century, Manhattan’s West Side was called Bloomingdale, named by seventeenth-century Dutch settlers in honor of Bloemendaal, a city in northern Holland. Less a cohesive village than a wider district, Bloomingdale was a world apart from the big city to the south, and traveling up and down the Bloomingdale Road offered New Yorkers a chance to breathe fresh air and enjoy a few hours of solitude away from the daily grind of urban life. Horticulturalist Michael Floy Jr., for one, much preferred running errands on the Bloomingdale Road to selling camellias and dahlias from the family nursery on Broadway near 12th Street.
“I found today that ‘labor was rest,’ and coming down the Bloomingdale road I had a very good time,” Floy wrote in his diary in the spring of 1834, adding that on his way back to town he had admired the trees, shrubbery, and “handsome littl
e gardens” along the road and had been delighted by the sound of birds and frogs “tuning their voices.”
Until 1811, when Eighth Avenue opened, the Bloomingdale Road was the only north-south route up the West Side. Eighth Avenue was straight as an arrow, topography be damned, one of twelve avenues laid out in the 1811 Commissioners’ Plan that also called for the Bloomingdale Road’s erasure. But somehow, perhaps through the intercession of the Astor family and other wealthy landowners who owned building lots along its path, the Bloomingdale Road wasn’t closed, even as other highways and lanes superseded by the city grid gradually faded away. Legislative acts in 1838 and 1847 affirmed the Bloomingdale Road’s continuation on city maps, and between 34th and 86th streets it was even widened to a uniform 75 feet. But when Green and the Central Park commissioners began plotting the Boulevard in 1865, the Bloomingdale Road north of 86th Street remained a muddy country lane, its very existence precarious: At any time it could have been closed by order of the city’s Common Council.
The 1811 Commissioners’ Plan was a product of the American Enlightenment, Cartesian in its insistence on straight lines. But by the time Green began considering construction of the Boulevard, Romanticism, with its allowance for ambiguity and approval of emotional responses to nature and art, and the Picturesque aesthetic, with its notion of idealized landscape as artistic composition—“scenery”—had become entrenched in the American consciousness. Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted codified both ideas in Central Park, an 840-acre scenic tableaux built over the barren city-owned Common Lands in the middle of Manhattan.