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

by Unknown

  The boys are only part of the hundred and fifty regulars, the nightclub-going essence of the Social Register, who stop in every night, sometimes only for a single night cap before going home. On dull nights some four or five hundred come, on good nights eight hundred. After closing time, about five or six in the morning, Perona goes over the checks, seeing who the spenders are. Dinner for four, with cocktails, wine at dinner, and champagne later frequently runs up to sixty or one hundred dollars. Parties of eight often spend three hundred. The wily, who know the place, order his special Armagnac at $2.25 a pony.

  Mugs never find out about the Armagnac. When they slip in by mistake, the headwaiter shuffles them hastily to tables by the kitchen’s swinging doors. Waiters bump them, bring one drink at a time, get afflicted by waiters’ blind eye. Although Perona has no cover charge, any order less than fifteen dollars for two may have a two dollar cover charge slapped on. If the management just doesn’t like the faces, the cover charge may balloon to ten dollars a head. Perona is always too busy to hear complaints from the stuck. Their bleat annoys him.

  • • •

  While John Perona stays carefully in the light, his name popping up in the social chatter columns of the tabloids, his picture frequently in the Evening Journal, his brother, Joseph, remains in the background, running the kitchens and the kitchen staffs. A puffy gourmand, with a mouth for wine, Joe Perona knows no celebrities, casts no beamish eyes on the pretty girls. He watches the meat. While John flashes handsomely on a mounting wave of social advancement, Joe remains a highly irascible quartermaster, known lovingly as “Mother Superior.”

  Oddly enough, most of the money Perona makes in the winter, he squanders in the summer on his Westchester Bath Club in Mamaroneck. From an excess of energy, he constantly adds equipment, a badminton court, a pool, boats, an outdoor dancing floor. In faded blue shorts, and a maroon shirt, he lies every day by the pool, playing interminable games of backgammon, a long lime drink by his side. Surrounding him are the professional Peronites with, in addition, the clown or two he always has around. The butts of his gags, the clowns live on the place with no check ever presented. Of all, Peppino, a jolly tub of a man, is his pet. Unhappily, last year Peppino had a breakdown from the strain of exuberant crowds tossing him into the pool.

  Of all the gags Perona ever worked, his most superb was the creation of Frank Busby. So constantly and so casually did Perona mention Frank that all El Morocco soon knew these salient details. Frank Busby had been born in South America. He was kidnapped by gypsies, and then adopted by an Indian Maharajah. Reluctantly Perona admitted that his friend was the richest and handsomest man in the world. “He is coming here,” Perona casually said one night, “to buy up General Motors and distribute it to the poor.”

  On Mondays Perona usually relaxes from his week-end strain by racing down to his two-hundred-and-sixty-acre farm in New Jersey with its rambling Colonial house. There he cooks for himself, rows around on his enormous artificial lake. He keeps three boats there; three more on the Sound. When he drives himself, incidentally, he chooses out of his stable of eight, the Austin; likes to have his chauffeur, Confucius, drive him in the Cadillac. Every other year he goes to Europe, mainly to buy his clothes from Caraceni, the best tailor in Rome. Behind him, he leaves his wife and children to live quietly in a mild Jersey suburb, far from the farm and El Morocco.

  • • •

  Far different is Sherman Billingsley’s place. He loves the mugs,—the right mugs, mugs who write, fight, and are in the papers. They are the backbone of his business. They come in delighted squads to the Stork Club, just off Fifth Avenue. Behind its fresh white limestone façade, the Stork Club makes no blunt pretenses. Guests run right into the enormous square bar, where three ripe lushes, like a set piece on a Victorian mantel, drink all night. What no one sees is the watchful man in the balcony, checking on the bartenders through a slit to see that no liquor is snitched.

  What everyone, however, does see is Billingsley, and his mild periwinkle eyes, a deep blue flower in his buttonhole, stopping by the tables. He whispers in his soft voice, rasping like a well-oiled saw. With everyone he has a secret joke, a flicker of his eye-lid letting them in on a private lark. Too late, they find, as he moves on, he never told the secret joke. Billingsley relishes the dash of excitement here, the heat of people getting happily and gently drunk. When the pace dies off, he orders a brandy on the house for everyone. Sometimes it takes five or six free brandies a night to keep up. That dash of excitement, of course, brings celebrities. There are always a couple of fight managers, a bruiser or two, actresses, men from the track, movie producers, aviators, newspaper men, and enough society names for a bit of elegance in the society columns.

  They are all there to be warmed by the ingenuous jollity of Sherman Billingsley, of Anadarko, Oklahoma, where there were only Indians and Billingsleys. By 1920 he had drug stores in the Bronx and four Bronx blocks of monotony known as Billingsley Terrace. Later he turned real estate broker, with his first negotiation a lease for a brownstone house on West Fifty-Eighth Street. His principals insisted that he come in with them. They were going to open a speakeasy, call it the Stork Club.

  That private house became the first of the three Stork Clubs. It zoomed quickly into success. As soon as Billingsley found himself really running the place, he startled the trade by not charging extra for enormous blue bowls of celery, radishes and olives. He banked the bar with exposed bottles in an era when bar tenders just poured out a smoky liquid for any order of Scotch, from bottles under the bar. In Billingsley’s place the customers named their brands and saw the liquor poured. He put down the first carpet in a speakeasy, advertised his illegality with a bright red canopy.

  At that time Billingsley did not care for swells. He wanted the sports and the newspapermen. It all paid him well. After the Federal men, who smashed up most of his places, smashed up the first Stork Club, he put his profits into other peoples’ clubs. He went halves with Tex Guinan, owned the Royal Box with Zelli, had an interest in the Park Avenue, the Zone Club, the Kit Kat Club, and the Club Napoleon.

  • • •

  Billingsley loves to run his places from the front. He arrives about five in the afternoon and stays until closing, doing everything for himself except the buying. That is Mrs. Billingsley’s job. When Sally was the hit of the year, Mrs. Billingsley danced in its chorus. Now, still pretty, and exceedingly efficient, she buys for kitchen and bar. By now Billingsley has worked out a pretty system of running the place. He keeps a smiling blue eye on the waiters. If he notices one of them pushing, or arguing with the customers, he never reprimands. He sends the man a telegram, aimed to arrive at six in the morning. The telegram advises: “Be Nice to Customers.” Waiters rush up constantly with notes. The Billingsley autograph stretches around the world. The only details he does not bother with are those of the checkroom, the outside doormen, the cigarette girls, and the ladies’ and men’s room attendants. From the concessionaires, to whom he leases those privileges, he receives some twelve thousand dollars a year. His rent, however, is only eight thousand.

  Last winter he started out to catch the social crowd, but it was not until Marian Cooley opened her Thursday Nights that he really achieved a touch of elegance. Since then the bloods swarm the place. Just to prove, however, that he was not foolish, he took on Jockey Earl Sande, who, through with riding winners, sang moaning ballads through his nose. That publicity brought in mugs even from Hawaii, who took home with them the memory of Billingsley’s chunky charm.

  But mugs to Billingsley and Perona are merely the spine of their business, the fat and the fun lie in mass arrangements of Whitneys, Astors and Vanderbilts. Theirs is an almost mystic flair for the nuances, the chiaroscuro, of the Social Register.

  Acknowledgments

  EDITOR

  GRAYDON CARTER

  V.F. BOOKS EDITOR

 
DAVID FRIEND

  MANAGING EDITOR

  CHRIS GARRETT

  ASSOCIATE EDITOR

  JACK DELIGTER

  Editorial assistance and guidance was provided by:

  John Banta, Elien Blue Becque, Marley Brown, Cat Buckley, Lauren Christensen, Lenora Jane Estes, Mary Alice Miller, Tathiana Monacella, Cullen Murphy, Walter Owen, Sarah Schmidt, and Lucie Shelly.

  We gratefully acknowledge our partners at Penguin Random House, including Ann Godoff, Scott Moyers, Ginny Smith Younce, Sofia Groopman, Tory Klose, Darren Haggar, Kathryn Court, and Patrick Nolan.

  For archival and business expertise, we appreciate the guidance of Alexandra Bernet, Brian Cross, Christopher P. Donnellan, Julie LaPointe, Amanda Meigher, and Shawn Waldron.

  We sincerely thank our colleagues at Sabin, Bermant & Gould; the Wylie Agency; and the Rights and Permissions Department of Condé Nast Publications.

  And we are forever indebted to Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair from 1914 to 1936, who commissioned most of the pieces included herein.

  Contributors

  SYYED SHAYKH ACHMED ABDULLAH (1881–1945) was the pseudonym of the Russian-born writer Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff. Under his pen name, Romanoff wrote a series of pulp novels, most notably The Thief of Bagdad, which was adapted into a popular Douglas Fairbanks feature in 1924.

  SHERWOOD ANDERSON (1876–1941) was an American novelist, short story writer, and frequent Vanity Fair contributor who influenced writers such as Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, and Wolfe. V.F. editor Frank Crowninshield once observed: “[Anderson has] shown us that there are no limits to what one may see through the little window of the short story.”

  DJUNA BARNES (1892–1982) was an American author who ran in modernist circles in Paris and New York. Impressed by Barnes’s roman à clef novel Nightwood, the eroticist Anaïs Nin once told her, “A woman rarely writes as a woman, as she feels, but you have.”

  ALFRED H. BARR JR. (1902–1981) was an American art historian and the first director of New York City’s Museum of Modern Art. Barr helped introduce the American public to experimental art of many genres, led the critical charge to underscore the importance of Picasso’s body of work, and set out to establish what would become one of the world’s most significant art collections.

  ROBERT C. BENCHLEY (1889–1945) was a regular contributor to Vanity Fair before becoming the magazine’s managing editor in 1919. A celebrated humorist, Benchley—an Algonquin Round Table regular—was the driving force behind the satirical film How to Sleep, which won the 1935 Academy Award for Best Short Subject.

  GEORG BRANDES (1842–1927) was a noted Danish critic and scholar who championed the modernist movement in Europe in the late ninteenth and early twentieth centuries. His early support of Friedrich Nietzsche helped solidify the philosopher’s reputation.

  HEYWOOD BROUN (1888–1939), a member of the Algonquin Round Table, was a journalist and editor who founded the American Newspaper Guild. Writing for the New York World, Broun published the first syndicated column to be read by one million people.

  THOMAS BURKE (1886–1945) was a British author best known for his story collection Limehouse Nights, a series that focused on the realities of life in a London slum. The director D. W. Griffith used some of Burke’s tales as the basis for his films Broken Blossoms and Dream Street.

  WALTER CAMP (1859–1925), a sportswriter and coach, helped popularize the new sport of football during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As a member of the Rules Committee, Camp forever changed the game by instituting a line of scrimmage and a proscribed set of downs, thus earning him the sobriquet “The Father of American Football.”

  JOHN JAY CHAPMAN (1862–1933) was an American critic and essayist whose work appeared frequently in Vanity Fair from 1918 to 1925. Following Chapman’s death, the critic Edmund Wilson characterized him as “the best letter-writer that we have ever had in this country.”

  SAMUEL CHOTZINOFF (1889–1964) was a pianist in his youth before turning to music criticism in the 1920s. His essays on jazz and popular song appeared in Vanity Fair until he became the music editor for the New York World in 1925. He would go on to serve as the music director of NBC radio and television.

  JEAN COCTEAU (1889–1963) was an innovative French poet, novelist, dramatist, and filmmaker who occasionally wrote about the arts for Vanity Fair. A confidant of some of the most creative men and women of his generation (Proust and Picasso, among them), Cocteau died of a heart attack after being informed of the death of his friend Edith Piaf.

  COLETTE (1873–1954) was a French novelist and performer (full name: Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette) as well as a regular contributor to Vanity Fair in the 1920s. Best known for her novel Gigi (later adapted into successful Broadway and Hollywood productions), Colette published more than thirty books in her lifetime and, upon her death, became the first woman to be afforded a state funeral in France.

  RICHARD CONNELL (1893–1949) was an American fiction writer. Best remembered for his short story “The Most Dangerous Game,” Connell also received an Academy Award nomination for Frank Capra’s Meet John Doe, a film based on Connell’s short story “The Reputation.”

  DAVID CORT (1904–1983) was an American author and columnist who wrote for Vanity Fair throughout the Jazz Age. In 1936, Cort joined the newly launched Life, where he would help oversee coverage of World War II.

  NOËL COWARD (1899–1973) was a playwright (Private Lives, Design for Living, Present Laughter, Blithe Spirit), composer, director, actor, and singer. He received his first U.S. paycheck at age twenty-one—from Vanity Fair—for a satire on royal love affairs, published here.

  E. E. CUMMINGS (1894–1962) was an American modernist poet, essayist, and a frequent Vanity Fair contributor until a 1927 falling-out with editor Frank Crowninshield, which ended cummings’s relationship with the magazine. In the mid-twentieth century he emerged as one of the country’s most popular poets.

  CLARENCE DARROW (1857–1938) was an American lawyer and a civil liberties stalwart who gained fame for representing high-profile defendants such as the union leader Eugene Debs; the murderers Leopold and Loeb; and John Scopes, the science teacher charged with violating Tennessee law by introducing students to the concept of evolution.

  RANDOLPH DINWIDDIE was an occasional Vanity Fair contributor in the 1920s.

  THEODORE DREISER (1871–1945) was an American novelist and social activist whose books such as Sister Carrie and An American Tragedy addressed the brutal realities of urban poverty.

  T. S. ELIOT (1888–1965), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, wrote some of the most highly regarded poems of the twentieth century, notably, The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock, The Waste Land, The Hollow Men, and Four Quartets.

  DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS (1883–1939) was a titan of the silent-film era, starring in hundreds of motion pictures and earning the nickname “The First King of Hollywood.” In 1919, he formed the independent movie studio United Artists with his future wife, actress Mary Pickford, actor and filmmaker Charlie Chaplin, and director D. W. Griffith.

  DOUGLAS FAIRBANKS JR. (1909–2000) was an American actor and World War II hero. The only son of screen legend (and fellow Vanity Fair contributor) Douglas Fairbanks, he managed to make a name for himself by appearing in classics such as The Dawn Patrol, Gunga Din, and the original version of The Prisoner of Zenda.

  F. SCOTT FITZGERALD (1896–1940) was an American writer whose four completed novels are considered by many to be the archetypal literary works of the Jazz Age. Upon publication of The Great Gatsby in 1925, the poet T. S. Eliot declared it to be “the first step American fiction has taken since Henry James.”

  JANET FLANNER (1892–1978) was an American journalist and novelist best known for the “Letter from Paris” column she wrote for the New Yorke
r under the pen name Genêt. Flanner was the third guest on the 1971 Dick Cavett Show episode that featured Norman Mailer’s notorious on-air confrontation with Gore Vidal.

  FORD MADOX FORD (1873–1939) was an English novelist (The Good Soldier), critic, and editor of the literary journals the English Review and the Transatlantic Review, through whose pages he helped champion the work of Jean Rhys, Wyndham Lewis, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, and many others.

  JAMES L. FORD (1855–1928) was a correspondent for the Railway Gazette and a critic for the New York Herald. His memoir Forty-Odd Years in the Literary Shop chronicled the adventures of a rambunctious journalist in turn-of-the-twentieth-century New York City.

  JAY FRANKLIN (1897–1967), real name John Franklin Carter, was an American columnist and speechwriter who was a regular Vanity Fair contributor throughout the 1930s. Franklin was a speechwriter for Harry Truman during his successful 1948 campaign for president; the following year, he went to work for Truman’s opponent, Governor Thomas Dewey.

  PAUL GALLICO (1897–1976) was an American novelist, short story writer, and sportswriter whose prose appeared regularly in Vanity Fair during the Depression. Gallico became famous for his firsthand accounts of playing sports with professional athletes (boxing with Jack Dempsey, golfing with Bobby Jones). He was also a founder of New York City’s Golden Gloves, the amateur boxing competition.

  FREDERICK JAMES GREGG (d. 1928) was a frequent Vanity Fair contributor as well as an art critic for the New York Sun. In his role as publicity chairman for the momentous 1913 Armory Show, Gregg helped introduce mainstream America to Europe’s modern-art masters, from Picasso to Matisse to Duchamp.