by Unknown
The thing was almost settled. You know there’s something about a uniform—full or empty—and then those military weddings with crossed swords are always so picturesque. We were just going to announce it, when a cruel summons came for Bob to leave for Mexico with his troop. He left me, tenderly vowing to bring me back Carranza’s head to put upon my mantelpiece—and then, while he was gone, Paul happened.
VII. PAUL, THE VANISHED DREAM
I cannot dwell on Paul, the last one. I have not yet fully recovered from him. He was the Ideal Husband—an English-tailored Greek God, just masterful enough to be entertaining, just wicked enough to be exciting, just clever enough to be a good audience. But, oh, he failed me! In a moment of absent-mindedness, he went and married a blonde and rounded person whose walk in life was the runway at the Winter Garden. I am just beginning to recuperate.
And these are the seven reasons why my mail is still being addressed to “Miss.”
MEN: A HATE SONG
DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD (PARKER)
FROM FEBRUARY 1917
I hate men.
They irritate me.
I
There are the Serious Thinkers,—
There ought to be a law against them.
They see life, as through shell-rimmed glasses, darkly.
They are always drawing their weary hands
Across their wan brows.
They talk about Humanity
As if they had just invented it;
They have to keep helping it along.
They revel in strikes
And they are eternally getting up petitions.
They are doing a wonderful thing for the Great Unwashed,—
They are living right down among them.
They can hardly wait
For “The Masses” to appear on the newsstands,
And they read all those Russian novels,—
The sex best sellers.
II
There are the Cave Men,—
The Specimens of Red-Blooded Manhood.
They eat everything very rare,
They are scarcely ever out of their cold baths,
And they want everybody to feel their muscles.
They talk in loud voices,
Using short Anglo-Saxon words.
They go around raising windows,
And they slap people on the back,
And tell them what they need is exercise.
They are always just on the point of walking to San Francisco,
Or crossing the ocean in a sailboat,
Or going through Russia on a sled—
I wish to God they would!
III
And then there are the Sensitive Souls
Who do interior decorating, for Art’s sake.
They always smell faintly of vanilla
And put drops of sandalwood on their cigarettes.
They are continually getting up costume balls
So that they can go
As something out of the “Arabian Nights.”
They give studio teas
Where people sit around on cushions
And wish they hadn’t come.
They look at a woman languorously, through half-closed eyes,
And tell her, in low, passionate tones,
What she ought to wear.
Color is everything to them,—everything;
The wrong shade of purple
Gives them a nervous breakdown.
IV
Then there are the ones
Who are Simply Steeped in Crime.
They tell you how they haven’t been to bed
For four nights.
They frequent those dramas
Where the only good lines
Are those of the chorus.
They stagger from one cabaret to another,
And they give you the exact figures of their gambling debts.
They hint darkly at the terrible part
That alcohol plays in their lives.
And then they shake their heads
And say Heaven must decide what is going to become of them,—
I wish I were Heaven!
I hate men.
They irritate me.
THE SHIFTING NIGHT LIFE OF NEW YORK
JAMES L. FORD
FROM FEBRUARY 1917
The crest of the so-called night life of New York has now reached as far north as 64th Street. Fifty years ago it had only stretched to 14th Street. Fifty blocks in fifty years! At that rate of progress the night life of New York will center, in another fifty years, around St. John’s Cathedral and the district around Columbia College.
During the flash age that succeeded the Civil War in New York—an age that was the result of the thousands of newly made American fortunes—vulgarity, crime, and loose living overshadowed good taste and good breeding as it has never done before or since in the history of New York. That was a city that New Yorkers of to-day would find it hard to recognize. The profession of architecture was then about on a par with that of brick-laying. The newer parts of the town were composed of rows upon rows of “brown stone fronts,” all precisely alike in appearance and construction, and as shallow and flimsy and perishable as the fortunes that had built them. The Tweed ring was in power and notorious thieves sat, unashamed, in the seats of the mighty. A gaping crowd every day delighted in gazing at Jim Fisk, as his four-in-hand brake, filled with bedizened women, paraded solemnly up and down the streets, usually followed by a well-known quack doctor of the time with no less than five horses hitched to his carriage.
• • •
Bank burglars, murderers, and gamblers fattened on the city. Crooks like Jimmie and Johnny Hope, “Sheeny Mike” Newman, “Reddy the Blacksmith,” “Gentleman George” Howard, “Dutch Heinrichs,” all of them men of the kind that, in better ordered communities, usually shun the light of day and walk only in darkness, daily decked themselves in fine raiment and joined the afternoon strollers on Broadway just below 14th Street.
From this carnival of vulgarity the fashionable society of the time of course held strictly aloof. They took their pleasures decorously, behind their own mahogany doors, at Delmonico’s, at the theatre, or opera, and, once a year, at the Charity Ball, which was then held at the Academy of Music.
Near the Academy was a famous restaurant, known, in those days, as the Maison Dorée. It stood on the south side of Union Square, and opposite it was an Italian restaurant established in the fifties by Signor Moretti, for the purpose of supplying Mario and Grisi with their native food and, incidentally, to introduce chianti, maccaroni, spaghetti and other Italian delicacies to the American palate. Moretti’s name still survives him on a restaurant signboard in West 35th Street.
It was in a theatre just west of 6th Avenue, afterwards rebuilt by Charles Fechter and now known as the Fourteenth Street (a motion picture house) that H. L. Bateman introduced French opéra bouffe to New York, with Tosté as his leading star. She appeared there in “La Grand Duchesse,” “La Belle Hélène,” and in “Orphée aux Enfers.” It was a very fashionable place of amusement then, and its first tier was composed of a circle of boxes for all the world as if Oscar Hammerstein had built it.
• • •
Above Union Square the streets were all dark at night, save in 23rd Street where Booth’s Theatre—at the corner of Sixth Avenue—and the Grand Opera House—at the corner of Eighth Avenue—emitted their welcome beams of light. Further south was the theatrical district, for the Rialto was then stationed at Houston Street. There were also many places of amusement strung along Broadway, from Barnum’s Museum, at Ann Street, to Lester Wallack’s Theatre, at 13th Street. It was at Niblo’s Garden—near Houston Street, on Broadway—that “The Black Crook” was given for the first time. I can still re
member how it shocked the town, with its revelations of undraped women, and how it filled the house with the tired business men of that day, while the dust rose in clouds from the pulpit cushions on Sundays, for the clergy were all loud in their denunciation of the entertainment, and, incidentally, of infinite value in advertising it. Pauline Markham, as Stalacta, and Bonfanti, as the première danseuse—both of them still living in New York—appeared in the original cast of “The Black Crook.” It was in celebration of the first named that Richard Grant White—the father of Stanford White—coined the phrases “Her voice is vocal velvet,” and “She possesses the lost arms of the Venus of Milo.”
• • •
Not far from Niblo’s was the huge Olympic Theatre, where George L. Fox played “Humpty Dumpty” and burlesqued the “Hamlet” that Edwin Booth was giving for a hundred nights at the Winter Garden, which was then opposite Bond Street. The Winter Garden was on the site of what is now the Broadway Central Hotel, where Ed Stokes killed Jim Fisk—and next door to Pfaff’s beer cellar, where Walt Whitman, Fitz James O’Brien, George Arnold, E. C. Stedman and other talented men were trying to create a bohemia such as Henri Murger, in Paris, loved to describe and write about. It was in Pfaff’s that Henry Clapp dictated to Artemus Ward—who was then beginning his career as a lecturer—the famous reply of “Brandy and water,” to the telegram that he had received from a western lecture manager: “What would you take for a hundred nights in California?” This brief answer did more to advertise Ward as a humorist in the then settled parts of the far west, than could have been accomplished by any amount of publicity and press work.
Strange as it may seem to the present generation, the basements of many reputable commercial buildings on Broadway were occupied by concert saloons in which men were served with drinks by short-skirted women, and, not infrequently, drugged and robbed. It was from these basements that the word “dive” was coined. The block between Bleecker and Houston Streets was known as “Murderers’ Row,” because of the frequent killings that took place there, while it was from a silent house, with heavily curtained windows, in East 14th Street, that Washington Nathan brought forth the frail witness who proved his alibi on the night his father was murdered in 23rd Street, just across the way from the Fifth Avenue Hotel.
• • •
The jeunesse dorée of that period did not disdain to seek amusement along the Bowery, which was filled with dives, concert halls, and variety shows, in many of which some of the sinister arts were practiced successfully—and without fear. Owney Geoghegan’s “Old House at Home” was a favorite hang-out of professional beggars and desperadoes. Mr. Geoghegan’s funeral, with two wives racing after the hearse all the way to Calvary, was a noteworthy event in the Bowery’s social annals. There were respectable resorts there, too, including the Stadt, and Bowery Theatres, the Atlantic Garden, the Volks Garten, Tony Pastor’s, and the Tivoli.
Harry Hill’s picturesque dance house, situated at the northeast corner of Crosby and Houston Streets, and frequented by one kind of women and every sort of men, was one of the few resorts on the east side in which both life and pocketbook were rigorously safe-guarded by the proprietor. Harry Hill was a smooth-shaven Englishman of the old-fashioned sporting type, who had once driven a mail-coach in England, and who was brought to this country by Mr. Edward Woolsey of Astoria. Mr. Woolsey wanted him for a coachman, in which capacity he subsequently found employment with the Ironsides family in New London. Harry Hill’s resort attracted men of every sort, including sailors, thieves, pugilists, revellers from distant cities and many gentlemen and aristocrats. Don Carlos, the Spanish Pretender; the Grand Duke Alexis of Russia; the late Duke of Marlborough, and Lord Mandeville, who afterward became the Duke of Manchester, found much entertainment there. Weber and Fields, Pete Dailey, W. J. Scanlan, Maggie Cline and Andrew Mack first appeared on its little stage, and long before they became at all known to metropolitan audiences. It was here that was held the first meeting of the Salvation Army in New York, and it was here also that John L. Sullivan first put up his fists in this city, in a fight with a pugilist named Steve Taylor, who had been offered fifty dollars for standing in front of Sullivan for three rounds—a feat which he failed to perform. Thomas A. Edison found in Harry Hill one of his earliest friends; and it was at Hill’s place that Edison’s first electric light was installed. Hill remained at his old stand until the early eighties when it was closed up by the police because he would not pay them any more blackmail. It was to Harry Hill that the detectives addressed their historic utterance: “This is an iron age, and everybody has got to produce.”
• • •
The flash age of the town ended in a single night, with the panic of 1873, and there followed a period of financial depression and enforced economy that stilled much of the gaiety of the city and finally brought the town down on its knees, in the dust and ashes of repentance—through the great Moody and Sankey revivals.
During this period of depression, the doings of a so-called fast set in New York society attracted a degree of popular attention that seems strange to us now. This set was admirably satirized by Lawrence Olyphant in “The Strange Adventures of Irene McGillicoddy,” a book that seems to us about as exciting as “Our Village,” by Mrs. Gaskell. Having purified itself in its revival exercises, New York soon began to regain its spirits. Money flowed more freely and those forms of vice that are mis-named pleasure entrenched themselves firmly in the region between 25th and 34th Streets—West of Broadway. It was this region that subsequently became known as The Tenderloin.
The Cremorne, the Buckingham, and the Argyle Rooms, all attracted visitors of the same class that had once frequented Harry Hill’s and the other down town, Broadway resorts.
The late seventies found the theatrical Rialto at 14th Street, and it was on the sidewalks of Union Square that most of the theatrical business of the country was transacted. There, actors were engaged; companies booked, and dramatic printing ordered. Contracts were signed in the nearby hotels and saloons, and those who liked to gaze at actors on the stage, had ample opportunities for gratifying their longings. Then, very slowly, the Rialto drifted uptown, pausing at 26th Street, and then, with a brief stop at 35th, rushed on to “The roaring Forties.”
• • •
In 1879, Augustin Daly, who had suffered many reverses in other houses, opened the theatre at 30th Street which still bears his name. He had chosen three young women of talent to arrest the public’s attention. These were Catherine Lewis, Ada Rehan and Helen Blythe, and, curiously enough, it was in the last named star—now totally forgotten—that the manager placed his highest hopes. After many experiments in musical pieces, Mr. Daly devoted himself to German comedy, adapted to American needs, while at the same time Mr. A. M. Palmer presented French dramas at the Union Square and Mr. Lester Wallack gave English plays with a company exclusively British.
So that, until the close of the seventies the American dramatist was a wholly negligible quantity in our stage and it was not until Mr. Palmer presented “The Banker’s Daughter,” a play by Bronson Howard, and “My Partner,” a drama by Bartley Campbell, that everybody began to take hope for the American drama. The first nights at the three theatres above alluded to soon became very fashionable events. At Harrigan and Hart’s Theatre, many unforgettable local farces, at first enjoyed exclusively by the wise theatre-goers of the lower wards, finally attracted the more fashionable theatre-goers from uptown.
Fashion was far more staid, decorous, and conventional then than it is now. Only a few very daring hostesses were willing to “receive” actresses, not even such splendid artists, and women, as Sara Jewett, Adelaide Phillips, Clara Louise Kellogg and Christine Nilsson.
Mrs. [Lillie] Langtry, despite the fact that she brought letters from persons very high in English society, was cold-shouldered by everybody, while her subsequent affair with Frederick Gebhard caused the town to rock with a degree of feverish excitement that was concl
usive proof of its lack of sophistication and its essential naïveté. The old-fashioned footlight illusion which divided the players from the audience, was then rigorously maintained, to the great benefit of the theatrical profession, which, in my opinion, has gained nothing and lost much through its general introduction into our best drawing-rooms.
• • •
The night life of New York now breaks, with a thunderous crash, on a cabaret and theatre district that stretches along Broadway as far as 64th Street, a distance of more than three miles from old Niblo’s, where exactly fifty years ago, gaping crowds used to watch the spectacle of “The Black Crook.”
To those New Yorkers who now spend an occasional evening in Longacre Square, and who can look back a half a century or so, the night life of the city, as it was fifty years ago, must seem in retrospect like the night life of a quiet and secluded little New England village.
ACTRESSES: A HATE SONG
DOROTHY ROTHSCHILD (PARKER)
FROM MAY 1917
I hate Actresses.
They get on my nerves.
There are the Adventuresses,
The Ladies with Lavender Pasts.
They wear gowns that show all their emotions,
And they simply can’t stop undulating.
The only stage properties they require
Are a box of cigarettes and a package of compromising letters.
Their Big Scene invariably takes place in the hero’s apartment.
They are always hanging around behind screens
And overhearing things about the heroine.
They go around clutching their temples
And saying, Would to God they were good—
Would to God they Were!
There are the Wronged Ones;
The Girls Whose Mothers Never Told Them.
In the first act they wear pink gingham sunbonnets
And believe implicitly in the stork.