Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair

by Unknown

  • • •

  At the age of thirty, Anatole returned to Paris to be his father’s Valet. The carpenter who made the guillotines (the Deiblers have sold three to China at seven thousand francs apiece, and one is still operating today in the central prison at Peiping) refused to let his daughter marry the young executioner. In the meanwhile, he had taken up fast bicycle-riding and had joined the Société Vélocepédique d’Auteuil (his name appears on the Société’s early programs as a sprint hope). In the tandem events he met his final partner, a petty government employee, Mademoiselle Rosine Rogis. They were married in 1898, the year before Anatole was appointed Monsieur de Paris. One little son was born to the Anatole Deiblers. He lived for only a month, dying, ironically, from the poisonous prescription of a careless chemist. Deibler refused to bring suit. Then a daughter was born, Marcelle, still the apple of her father’s eye. When Obrecht, Anatole’s second Valet, asked for Marcelle’s hand, Madame de Paris said she would rather see her daughter dead than married to an executioner. So Obrecht married a schoolteacher; and today, Marcelle, in her spinster thirties, drives her father around in the family Citroën. She and her mother do the housework. Deiblers can’t keep servants.

  But despite his ambition to be looked upon as an ordinary French citizen Anatole Deibler is a mystery man to most of France. Few but his neighbors and the criminals he executes know him by sight. Because people are either horrified or fascinated by him, the Deiblers have no friends. They have nothing but business associates. On Sunday nights, second Valet Obrecht drops in to drink a weekly Pernod. On Sunday noons, the Deiblers lunch with the Desfourneaux, who are first, third and fourth Valets. The Desfourneaux are connected by marriage with Madame Deibler’s family and are themselves from an older clan of executioners than the Deiblers, but one not so renowned. Léopold Desfourneaux, an uncle, who was also a Deibler Valet, couldn’t kill a Sunday chicken for stew and was afraid of spiders.

  The Valets can afford to behead only as a side-line, as the job is so ill-paid. Deibler’s four Valets receive, respectively, twelve thousand, ten thousand eight hundred, seven thousand two hundred, and six thousand francs, annually. Deibler himself is paid only eighteen thousand francs a year, besides the ten thousand francs for upkeep of The Widow, who needs nothing but cheap vaseline and a little paint.

  When Deibler is executing in provincial prisons, the smaller guillotine and guignol ride free on a flat car on the same train with him. On one occasion, he lost them for three days, and the two condemned criminals, whom he had travelled a long distance to execute, were pardoned, because the legal hour for their deaths had passed by.

  Deibler and his Valets all travel together in a second class compartment, reserved by the Authorities of Justice; the blinds are pulled down, and no one is allowed to disturb the occupants. At the local hotel Deibler registers as F. Boyer, Travelling Man from Arras. One necessary item in his travelling equipment is an alarm clock, since an Albi hotel-keeper once forgot to arouse him in time to perform an execution. He also takes a revolver along with him, as headsmen have been repeatedly shot at when executing anarchists.

  After thirty-six years as the only national headsman working in Western Europe, Deibler is tired and cardiac. He tried to resign a few years ago, before the execution of Gourgulov, assassin of President Doumer; his resignation was accepted, on the condition that he pass up the full-pay pension which French executioners have always drawn. He is still working. Executioners, since they have little else that is pleasantly worldly in their lives, like money. Deibler permitted Obrecht, his second Valet, to turn the déclic for Gourgulov’s head, as a sign of his own retreat and as a mark of his dynastic selection, since he has no son. The oldest Desfourneaux, Anatole’s first Valet, is entitled to inherit the job, but he is middle-aged, easy-going, and hates responsibility. Obrecht will probably be appointed the future Monsieur de Paris. . . .

  Anatole Deibler’s stoical, courageous attitude toward his job has done much to satisfy the French people in regard to their method of capital punishment. It appears to be a sensible, economical, and probably painless guarantee of protection for modern society. Deibler does not think of himself as a divine instrument, but as a lonely cog in a large legal machine. He says that he is set in motion by the jury that votes, by the judge that condemns, and by the President of the Republic who fails to grant a pardon. Like them, he is guiltless of blood. But his neighbors will dine with the jurymen, the judge, and especially with the President. They will not dine with Anatole Deibler.

  THE BUMS AT SUNSET

  THOMAS WOLFE

  FROM OCTOBER 1935

  Slowly, singly, with the ambling gait of men who have just fed, and who are faced with no pressure of time and business, the hoboes came from the jungle, descended the few feet of clay embankment that sloped to the road bed, and in an unhurried manner walked down the tracks toward the water tower. The time was the exact moment of sunset, the sun indeed had disappeared from sight, but its last shafts fell remotely, without violence or heat, upon the treetops of the already darkening woods and on the top of the water tower. That light lay there briefly with a strange unearthly detachment, like a delicate and ancient bronze, it was no part of that cool, that delicious darkening of the earth which was already steeping the woods—it was like sorrow and like ecstasy and it faded briefly like a ghost.

  Of the five men who had emerged from the “jungle” above the tracks and were now advancing, in a straggling procession, towards the water tower, the oldest was perhaps fifty, but such a ruin of a man, such a shapeless agglomerate of sodden rags, matted hair, and human tissues, that his age was indeterminate. He was like something that has been melted and beaten into the earth by a heavy rain. The youngest was a fresh-skinned country lad with bright wondering eyes: he was perhaps not more than sixteen years old. Of the remaining three, one was a young man not over thirty with a ferret face and very few upper teeth. He walked along gingerly on tender feet that were obviously unaccustomed to the work he was now putting them to: he was a triumph of dirty elegance—he wore a pin striped suit heavily spattered with grease stains and very shiny on the seat: he kept his coat collar turned up and his hands thrust deeply into his trousers pocket—he walked thus with his bony shoulders thrust forward as if, in spite of the day’s heat, he was cold. He had a limp cigarette thrust out of the corner of his mouth, and he talked with a bare movement of his lips, and a curious and ugly convulsion of his mouth to the side: everything about him suggested unclean secrecy.

  Of the five men, only the remaining two carried on them the authority of genuine vagabondage. One was a small man with a hard seamed face, his eyes were hard and cold as agate, and his thin mouth was twisted slantwise in his face, and was like a scar.

  The other man, who might have been in his mid-fifties, had the powerful shambling figure, the seamed brutal face of the professional vagabond. It was a face and figure that had a curious brutal nobility; the battered and pitted face was hewn like a block of granite and on the man was legible the tremendous story of his wanderings—a legend of pounding wheel and thrumming rod, of bloody brawl and brutal shambles, of immense and lonely skies, the savage wildness, the wild, cruel and lonely distance of America.

  This man, somehow obviously the leader of the group, walked silently, indifferently, at a powerful shambling step, not looking at the others. Once he paused, thrust a powerful hand into the baggy pocket of his coat, and drew out a cigarette, which he lit with a single motion of his hard cupped hand. Then his face luxuriously contorted as he drew upon the cigarette, he inhaled deeply, letting the smoke trickle slowly out through his nostrils after he had drawn it into the depths of his mighty lungs. It was a powerful and brutal gesture of sensual pleasure that suddenly gave to the act of smoking and to the quality of tobacco all of their primitive and fragrant relish. And it was evident that the man could impart this rare quality to the simplest physical acts of life—to everything he touched—because he ha
d in him somehow the rare qualities of exultancy and joy.

  All the time, the boy had been keeping step behind the man, his eyes fixed steadily upon the broad back of the vagabond. Now, as the man stopped, the boy came abreast of him, and also stopped, and for a moment continued to look at the man, a little uncertainly, but with the same expression of steadfast confidence.

  The bum, letting the smoke coil slowly from luxurious nostrils, resumed his powerful swinging stride, and for a moment said nothing to the boy. Presently, however, he spoke, roughly, casually, but with a kind of brutal friendliness:

  “Where yuh goin’ kid?” he said. “To the big town?”

  The boy nodded dumbly, seemed about to speak, but said nothing.

  “Been there before?” the man asked.

  “No,” said the boy.

  “First time yuh ever rode the rods, huh?”

  “Yes,” said the boy.

  “What’s the matter?” the bum said, grinning. “Too many cows to milk down on the farm, huh? Is that it?”

  The boy grinned uncertainly for a moment, and then said, “Yes.”

  “I t’ought so,” the bum said, chuckling coarsely, “Jesus! I can tell one of youse fresh country kids a mile off by the way yuh walk . . . Well,” he said with a rough blunt friendliness, in a moment, “stick wit me if you’re goin’ to the Big Town. I’m goin’ that way, too.”

  “Yeah,” the little man with the mouth like a scar now broke in, in a rasping voice, and with an ugly jeering laugh:

  “Yeah. You stick to Bull, kid. He’ll see yuh t’roo. He’ll show yuh de—woild. I ain’t kiddin’ yuh! He’ll take yuh up to Lemonade Lake an’ all t’roo Breadloaf Valley—won’t yuh, Bull? He’ll show yuh where de ham trees are and where de toikeys grow on bushes—won’t yuh, Bull?” he said with ugly yet fawning insinuation. “You stick to Bull, kid, an’ you’ll be wearin’ poils . . . A-a-a-ah! yuh punk kid!” he now said, with a sudden turn to snarling viciousness.

  “Wat t’hell use do yuh t’ink we got for a punk kid like you?—Dat’s duh trouble wit dis racket now! . . . We was all right until all dese kids began to come along! . . . Wy t’hell should we be boddered wit him!” he snarled viciously. “Wat t’hell am I supposed to be—a noice maid or sump’n? . . . G’wan, yuh little punk,” he snarled viciously, and lifted his fist in a sudden backhand movement, as if to strike the boy. “Scram! We got no use fer yuh! . . G’wan, now. . Get t’hell away from here before I smash yuh one.”

  The man named Bull turned for a moment and looked silently at the smaller bum.

  “Listen, Mug!” he said quietly in a moment. “You leave the kid alone. The kid stays, see?”

  “A-a-a-ah!” the other man snarled sullenly. “What is dis anyway?—A—noic’ry, or sump’n?”

  “Listen,” the other man said, “yuh hoid me, didn’t yuh?”

  “A-a-ah t’hell wit it!” the little man muttered. “I’m not goin’ t’ rock duh cradle f’r no punk kid.”

  “Yuh hoid what I said, didn’t yuh?” the man named Bull said in a heavy menacing tone.

  “I hoid yuh. Yeah!” the other muttered.

  “Well, I don’t want to hear no more outa your trap. I said the kid stays—and he stays.”

  The little man muttered sullenly under his breath, but said no more. Bull continued to scowl heavily at him a moment longer, then turned away and went over and sat down on a handcar which had been pushed up against a tool house on the siding.

  “Come over here, kid,” he said roughly, as he fumbled in his pocket for another cigarette. The boy walked over to the handcar.

  “Got any smokes?” the man said, still fumbling in his pocket. They boy produced a package of cigarettes and offered them to the man. Bull took a cigarette from the package, lighted it with a single movement, between his tough seamed face and his cupped hand, and then dropped the package of cigarettes in his pocket, with the same spacious and powerful gesture.

  “T’anks,” he said as the acrid smoke began to coil luxuriously from his nostrils. “Sit down, kid.”

  The boy sat down on the handcar beside the man. For a moment, as Bull smoked, two of the bums looked quietly at each other with sly smiles, and then the young one in the soiled pin-stripe suit shook his head rapidly to himself, and, grinning toothlessly with his thin sunken mouth, mumbled derisively:

  “Cheezus!”

  Bull said nothing, but sat there smoking, bent forward a little on his knees, as solid as a rock.

  It was almost dark; there was still a faint evening light, but already great stars were beginning to flash and blaze in cloudless skies. Somewhere in the wood there was a sound of water. Far off, half-heard and half-suspected, there was a faint dynamic throbbing on the rails. The boy sat there quietly, listening, and said nothing.

  GOLDEN SWANK

  ALLENE TALMEY

  FROM FEBRUARY 1936

  Nightclubs these days are rancorously shooting off in so many directions that the wisest gangsters refuse to invest in so shaky a business. No fat-faced Dutch Schultz backs the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center. No Owney Madden, small and boney, cuts himself unasked into the profits of the Persian Room at the Plaza. No Larry Fay, with horse-teeth, a big black hat, and a record of forty-six arrests, runs the Weylin Caprice Room. No Johnny Irish complains to his headwaiter that in this damp weather all his bullet holes hurt. Those strings of Prohibition nightclubs, owned by the Fays and the Maddens, are gone. Only occasionally do their lieutenants pop up in hidden financial records.

  When they do, they claim that they are present just to protect an old investment. Those gangsters who went into it in the old days took it on as a profitable side racket to their large scale bootlegging, their rum running, their hi-jacking. They never rose out of the business by the stern route of busboy, waiter, captain, owner. It is no racket for a gangster. The policy boys from Harlem, who came to Broadway for a bit, are gone. Big Bill Dwyer, a Madden lad, flopped as a partner of Zelli, and only John Bagiano, who once had a hand in Greenwich Village beer deliveries, is happy with his interest in the Versailles. Most of them are willing to back out gracefully, leaving the field to the hotels, to the Rockefellers, and to two gentlemen, suave relicts of Prohibition. They are John Perona and Sherman Billingsley. Their business talents, devoted for years to a sly mockery of snobbery, now flourish with the Social Register. None of the dozens of little speakeasy fellows, who rose to be broken on the rack of grafting agents, had the flair of those two for the right set.

  Now in their forties, they are columns of respectability. What diffidence they have can be discerned only in their eyes, the soft blue of Billingsley in the pink cushion of his face, the brown pebbles of Perona in his lean hardness. They walk with matronly dignity, secure in their elegance. Sherman Billingsley’s scrubbed Middle Western brightness keeps his Stork Club seething. Over in the dumps by the Third Avenue Elevated, John Perona runs El Morocco, the smartest nightclub of them all.

  Society is their game these days. The men with the social sense are the winners. Slowly they have built up an aristocracy of the supper clubs with photographs of their hand-made royalty in the social columns. Perona, of course, is the master. Even Billingsley admitted that, when Perona snagged for El Morocco the courtship of Barbara Hutton by Prince Alexis Mdivani.

  His El Morocco at two o’clock on a winter’s morning is a dream of a nightclub, smoky, stifling, with an electricity of gayety, starting from no known socket. Tables completely cover the dance floor, artfully arranged by Perona into a lovely cross-section of night club aristocracy. In clumps the débutantes sit, calling out from table to table, laughing their high whinny. In further clumps the kept women flash with diamonds almost as big as those of the society girls. There are always actresses, movie stars, models. Somewhere in the center wanders Perona with his sixth Scotch and Perrier, flashing his white smile, talking in his charming accent, which is neither
[Italian] nor the English of Eton-bred Roman Princes. Obviously the jolly play-boy, laughing, gay, he talks in fashionable clichés.

  There is little evidence then of the Giovanni Perona, born to a small café-keeper in Turino, Italy, who once batted back and forth on the London-Buenos Aires boats as busboy, steward, deck hand, until he met a big fat-handed fighter, named [Luis Angel] Firpo. When Firpo came to New York for the Sailor Maxted fight, Perona came too. He stayed. By the time Firpo returned for the Dempsey fight, the boy had his own speakeasy on West Forty-Sixth Street, filled with the sporting crowd. Deep in the smoke and the betting, Perona played practical jokes with an eye on the cash box.

  A few years later he moved to East Fifty-Third Street, setting up, with the exception of Jack and Charlie’s, the most exclusive speakeasy of them all. He called it the Bath Club. With a suddenly developed social sense, he sliced off the top layer of the sporting crowd to take with him. The rest he left behind in the débris of Forty-Sixth. To the Bath Club came a newer, smarter crowd, more débutantes, more writers, more swank actresses. When he moved further East three years ago, he sliced again.

  It was not until he had El Morocco about a year that Perona achieved the social rise for which he had been struggling. He staked his all on the blank little boys who were working hard on their reputations as men about town. At eighteen he let them run bills until they would come into their inheritances. Like an Oxford tailor he never duns. For that restraint they let him into their secrets, their loves, and their plans. He is confessor, advisor, and doctor to them. Like an analyst, he allows them to confide endlessly, charging only, however, for food and drink.

  Some of them this year organized the Round Table. Every night, about fifteen of them eat at a big table with their President, Bill Plankinton, at the head, Perona by his side. These professional Peronites include Erskine Gwynne, Bobby La Branch, James and Woolworth Donahue, Dan and Bob Topping. So far the boys have thought of only three rules: two bottles of vin ordinaire on the table, no girls for dinner, no one in Plankinton’s seat. The Round Table even has its own private telephone.