by Nik Cohn
That was just the beginning. The maidens married millionaires, and so did their replacements. Some of the millionaires wore titles, others Wall Street ermine. Stanford White attended forty performances running. Diamond Jim Brady had a minor stroke. So Broadway’s Golden Era was launched.
The dogs had long since barked, the caravan moved on. Long before the Great War, the theater district had relocated uptown, and its old neighborhood became the Garment Center.
By the 1940s, only the Met remained. After dark, when the garment factories had shut down, it offered a lone splash of light in the wilderness. Stage props lined the outer walls, there being no space to store them within, and arriving operagoers would find themselves plunged directly from their taxis into a Spanish bullring, Prince Igor’s court, a garret in old Montmartre.
Now the yellow-brick brewery was long gone as well and, with it, the last vestige of romance. By day the side streets teemed, not with Egyptian eunuchs and Spanish zingari, but with sweated pushboys hauling handtrucks full of frocks and frillies. And even these were being driven westwards, defeated by rocketing Broadway rents.
The Bridal Building, stuffed with an estimated hundred thousand wedding gowns, was an heroic exception. Increasingly, its splendors were being despoiled by dross and gimcrackery. Still, the building remained Lush Life’s especial favorite: ‘Paradise at cost.’
Marriage was much on her mind these days. Tommy Blalock had not popped the question yet, not in so many words. But he spent much time in reminiscence, mooning over his mother and sisters and all his old friends, who were married now, who had family and home: ‘I can read the signs. The handwriting on the wall,’ said Lush Life.
‘And what does it say?’
‘Hot diggity dog,’ she said.
At her behest, I’d sought out a man named Fred Silver, who ran JoElle Bridals and was revered inside the industry as one of the last classicists. His gowns, floor-length with ten-foot trains, had been superb. When he fluttered them and spread them wide, they soared and spun like great white birds, tumbled against the light. But he was not happy. True beauty came expensive, and these days people would not pay. They preferred cheap gewgaws, Hispanic razzle-dazzle, all sequins and plunging necklines. That way, if they got stood up at the altar, they could go directly to the disco without having to go home and change.
Even white was on the outs. In this age of trash, a wedding day was no longer sacrosanct. More than likely, after all, it was merely the first of several. So why not save time and trouble, buy something in pink or baby blue, more amenable to reruns?
‘A marriage mart, that’s all we have today,’ Fred Silver said. He was a lovely man, as courteous and melancholic as the sacristan of a desecrated shrine. But he was glad that he was not young, just starting out. ‘Who wants to be a used-bride salesman?’ he asked.
In this bone orchard, Bert’s laughter rose up fanfaring, a trumpet involuntary. ‘It’s better to be a good liver than have one,’ he said. ‘All horseplayers die broke. Don’t look back, something might be gaining. Barely a man is now alive who paid the mortgage at three to five. It’s not over till the fat lady sings.’
Where the Met had stood, there was a bust of Golda Meir and some blow-ups of French-cut bikinis. Reeling out of the shadows, a drunk flew in our faces. He was singing Send in the Clowns: ‘Which reminds me,’ said Bert.
The saloon he chose was a McAnn’s, deep, dark, and anonymous, with a steam-table reek of corned beef and cabbage so rank that our mouths clogged with grease by osmosis. The Irish bartender’s face was full of nose or, more properly, of bandages, tape, and safety pins where a nose should have been. ‘I got bit by an owl,’ he said.
We did not ask.
Down along the bar was a grinning, hard-muscled man bursting out of a Black Sabbath T-shirt. ‘The Hat!’ he cried. ‘It’s Charlie. Charlie DeVoe.’
Of an instant, Bert was transmogrified. His face went slack and passive, his mouth sagged half-open, his shoulders hunched in remembered defeat, and he was Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront. ‘Charlie,’ he mumbled. ‘It wasn’t him, Charlie. It was you. Remember that night in the Garden? You came down to my dressing room and said, “Kid, this ain’t your night. We’re goin’ for the price on Wilson?” You remember that? “This ain’t your night.” My night – I coulda taken Wilson apart. So what happens? He gets the title shot outdoors in the ballpark, and what do I get? A one-way ticket to Palookaville.’
At the first words, Charlie DeVoe took on the hurt, avid look of a golden retriever that senses it’s being teased but can’t think how or why. His grin wilted, froze; he started to back off. But Bert pursued him, his flat whine more deadly than any shouted abuse. ‘You was my brother, Charlie,’ he said. ‘You shoulda looked out for me a little bit. You shoulda taken care of me just a little bit, so I wouldn’t have to take them dives for the short-end money.’
‘I had some bets down on you,’ the bartender provided, not looking up from his pouring. ‘You saw some money.’
‘You don’t understand. I coulda had class. I coulda been a contender,’ Bert ran on, relentless. ‘Instead of being a bum, which is what I am, let’s face it.’
He drained his Cutty Sark. Spent, he stared down his own reflection in the backbar mirror: ‘It was you, Charlie,’ he said.
Back on the street, we turned our faces uptown, plunged on into the weather. ‘Who’s Charlie DeVoe?’ I inquired.
‘Never saw him before in my life,’ said Bert.
So we came to the Deuce.
Since I’d moved into the Hotel Moose, this had become my corner store. Daily use had begun to blur it, dull its edge. But now I stood on Amen Corner, outside the La Primadora Quality smokeshop, and saw it all again for the first time: the hookers in hot pants and lacquered wigs; the bodybuilders and midnight cowboys; the tattooed sailors in leathers; the evangelists with their bullhorns and sandwich boards; the butches, the bitches, the faggots, the femmes; the teenage runaways, and the children standing, staring; the movie marquees pimping Brain Damage and Genital Hospital, Slave Girls from Beyond Infinity and Creepozoids and Blood Sucking Freaks; and the men in plastic raincoats, and the men with brown paper bags; the hooded tracksuits, the combat boots and fatigues; the Polaroid photographers, two shots a buck; the three-card monte hustlers; the Mantan All-Americans, the Vampirellas, the Sons of Satan; and Bert.
Close behind my left ear, he quoted Washington Irving, recalling this same vista: ‘A sweet rural valley, beautiful with many bright flowers, refreshed by many a pure streamlet, and enlivened here and there by a delectable Dutch cottage, sheltered under some sloping hill and almost buried in embowering trees.’
A fat lady sang hallelujah. She wore white and she must have weighed three hundred pounds, the rich brown meat jumping on her bare arms, the sweat jumping hot off her forehead at each stomping of her big left foot, each shake of her tambourine. ‘Jesus loves you,’ she roared. ‘Why don’t you love Him?’
Her name was Sister Pearl; she had worked this corner for years. The first time I’d seen her, ten years before, she had waxed so ecstatic that she choked on her tongue and all her words got garbled, lost. But lack of coherence had not fazed her. ‘What’s the use in making sense?’ she’d told me afterwards. ‘Far better just to burn. Fan the flame or the fire will die. Then the Lord spews you forth from His mouth.’
These were words that had bitten deep. When her preachment was done and she took a break, leaning up against the subway rail, I asked her if she still lived by them. ‘Middling,’ said Sister Pearl, and she gave a quick birdlike nod, oddly finicky in one so monumental. ‘Sometime the flame burn up more fiercer than ever. Only sometime it don’t.’ But that did not break her faith. ‘I do not weep and moan,’ she said. ‘I study God’s Grace and contemplate the soaps.’
Across the street, Bert was visiting with Lenny Schneider, the Fighting Newsboy. Lenny had been a journeyman welterweight in the forties, and when he retired, he’d taken over this newsstand, Manhattan’s
most esoteric. It not only stocked the out-of-town papers but Novoye Russkoye Slovo and El Diario La Prensa and Il Corriere Della Sera, the Haiti Observateur and the Gaelic American, Riskarbitrage Monitor and Conscience Weekly, as well as Flash Gordon’s boxing newsletter, racing tips, dream books: ‘You want what to read, we got it,’ said Lenny. ‘Or else it’s coming, it’s coming.’
A sturdy soul with no neck or nonsense, he was the last link with an older Forty-second Street: ‘When the people here was still human beings. Most of them, anyway.’
Bizarrely, this block had once bespoken tone, civic pride. When the original Times Tower went up in 1904, the Times’s editor, Charles Miller, had made a dedication speech that I’d long treasured: ‘The shadow of these walls, with the coming and departing suns, shall fall upon uncounted myriads of men, whose tread shall echo round them, whose eyes shall become wonted to their harmonious proportions, and whose voices shall swell the note and hum of the busy city through generation after generation until where we now stand a gray and time-stained pile shall stir the passerby to reverie by its venerable and historic interest.’
That was the stuff. Inside ten years, however, the Times had moved out and sex moved in. Flo Ziegfeld brought his Follies to the New Amsterdam, and soon the whole block was filled with pleasure palaces – George M. Cohan’s Candler, the Eltinge, the Liberty and the Lyric, the Victory and the Apollo. Some featured vaudeville, others musical comedy. But showgirls were the staple, and the Deuce had been peddling flesh ever since.
The New Amsterdam still stood, long since converted into a movie palace, a few yards from Lenny’s newsstand. At the same time that I’d first met Sister Pearl, I had spent a night there. The experience had not been forgotten.
The movie had been Looking for Mr Goodbar. It was a slow night; I was idle. So I paid my money and entered, and I found myself plunged into an epic madness.
The New Amsterdam had fallen on scuffling times by then; the decor was much scarred, and so was the clientele. But the magnificence was indestructible. There were massive carved-bronze elevators; sculpted stone frescoes of scenes from Shakespeare and Wagner; green marble stairways, soaring to the empyrean; floors of patterned marble; nymphs, satyrs, wizards, elves; walls gilded or bronzed; a granite fireplace the size of a small house. Every inch of available space, it seemed, had been embellished, in some way transmuted. Door handles turned into centaurs, and light holders became Egyptian goddesses. Junkies slumped on baronial thrones.
I went upstairs and sat in the balcony. Discarded hot dogs, cigarettes, and sodas formed a swamp underfoot. Somewhere far above me, I could just discern a vast vaulted ceiling. But the aisles were rank and claustrophobic, and I sat down right at the back, where I could feel solid wall against my back.
Mr Goodbar was almost over. For reasons which escaped me, everyone on the screen kept screeching and yelling. I took refuge in the bathroom.
When I returned, my seat had been usurped. In the darkness, it was impossible to make out the intruder in any detail, but I sensed something female, white. Too spineless to argue, I took the seat adjacent and dragged my attention back to the screen. A hand touched my knee, paused for a moment, then started to climb my thigh, very soft. It disturbed my concentration, so I moved away. Shortly afterward, the film ran out.
The lights went up; I looked along the row. Sure enough, my neighbor had been female, white. From this distance, she looked about forty, small and well dressed, essentially demure. She wore white gloves, and she looked straight ahead, as if I no longer existed. She seemed to be waiting.
All around her were men at jive. But she did not move, and she did not seem to notice. After a few moments, a large white person appeared at her side. He was tall and muscular, and he wore a dark uniform, complete with peaked cap, like a chauffeur. Reaching out his right arm, he placed it behind the woman’s back. Then, without the smallest sign of effort, he lifted her up, cradled in the crook of his elbow. Her head lay against his shoulder, and he carried her away.
She had no legs.
In the years intervening, the place had fallen yet further. It had been a porno and kung-fu house; had even been reduced to snuff films, live footage of live deaths. Currently it stood empty: ‘Excepting the ghosts,’ Lenny said.
He meant this literally. According to derelicts who’d slept there, the shade of one of Ziegfeld’s showgirls, identified as Olive Thomas, was in the habit of floating down from the vaulted ceiling onto the deserted stage, where she stood silently watchful, as if waiting for the evening’s curtain to rise.
None of this was the Hat’s speed. He was not easy unless laughing, safely walled behind his one-liners. Under fire from legless ladies and long-dead ingenues, he spat out the dead stub of his Black Watch, sought refuge in Lenny’s stock. ‘It’s déjà vu all over again,’ he said, neck-deep in Jugs. ‘He can run but he can’t hide. Kill the body and the head will die. All life is six to five against. Never play cards with a man called Doc.’
After Olive Thomas and her Follies had come burlesque.
By the thirties, all the showgirls had turned to strippers, ecdysiasts, and Forty-second Street was a midway, another Coney Island. Apart from the skin palaces, there were shooting galleries, penny arcades, freak shows. They reached their apotheosis in Hubert’s Museum and Flea Circus.
It opened in 1920, west of the New Amsterdam, and for the next five decades, it defined the whole territory. At street level, it was merely a glorified romper room, packed with pinball machines and Wild West gunslinger games, Jap-zapper torpedoes, and Hidden Secrets of Sex displays, shipped direct from the Academy of Medicine, Paris, France. But the real wonders lived in the basement. There you could witness Sealo, the boy amphibian; and Estelline, the three-hundred-pound sword swallower; and Congo, the jungle witch doctor. There Grover Cleveland Alexander, the great baseball pitcher, gave lectures on his career. So did Jack Johnson, Li’l Arthur, the first black heavyweight champ. Tiny Tim appeared as the Human Canary; Princess Wago and her Pet Pythons competed with Madame Catalina of the Sixteen Serpents. But the greatest show of all, which ran for thirty years, was Professor Roy Heckler and his educated fleas: the Sensational Siphonapterae.
The Hat remembered it well. The Deuce of his first explorations had been a world of bearded ladies and belly dancers, midget wrestlers, two-headed calves and mule-headed boys, mermaids, gorilla girls, a thousand tassel-twirlers. It was a labyrinth, a sexual Arabian Nights. ‘You didn’t walk it, you got lost in it,’ Bert said. ‘If you got lucky, you were not found again.’
But now the word was hard core, and no secrets were left unexposed, no mysteries whatever. Inside the Sex Shoppe, next door to Love Slaves Tortured to Blood Dripping Death, there was a multicolor portrait, many times lifesize, of Superslit, the World’s Smartest Pussy. Hand-tinted, it looked as gaudy as sunset in the Painted Desert, as bottomless as the Grand Canyon. According to the Lebanese in charge, it had also been trained to perform party tricks: ‘See for yourselfs, gentlemens. With your own eyes and ears behold.’ By his father’s beard, it could smoke cigarettes, swallow golf balls and putt them out, even suck in banknotes and make the correct change. ‘But will it fetch your slippers?’ Bert asked.
‘How much you wanna pay?’
We stumbled back onto Broadway. The theater crowds were converging, and the sidewalks were jammed solid. Pinned against the entrance to the Geraldo Rivera show, we looked up at the neon, Coca-Cola and Casio and Citizen Quartz, Toshiba and Minolta, Movieland, the Mardi Gras; and the giant billboards, Mamma Leone’s and Solid Gold, A Chorus Line, Cats, and the monstrous hand dipping into the jar above Nathan’s; and the news squibs flashing, the arcades, the movie signs, the liquor ads, the whole of Times Square ablaze, and all of it had changed, changed utterly, and nothing had changed, never would.
Dazzled, we floated with the tide, let ourselves be punted uptown. ‘The social ramble ain’t restful,’ said Bert. ‘In the big inning, God created heaven and earth. He had larceny in his heart but
his feet were honest. He might step on your shoes but he don’t mess up your shine. Cadillacs are down at the end of the bat. The graveyards are full of irreplaceable people. Even Napoleon met his Watergate.’
Between Forty-third and Forty-fourth, the Paramount Building still flaunted its fourteen setbacks and glass globe on top. But its great theater, where the young Sinatra had sung and the bobby-soxers swooned, was destroyed. It was either here or someplace else, said Bert, that Snow White had premiered. To publicize the opening, seven dwarfs were flown in from Hollywood and installed, fully costumed, above the neon. They had a long afternoon to pass there, and nothing to do but play cards, so they smuggled up a few fifths of rye concealed in their padded stomachs. The rye proved good, the afternoon humid, the costumes stiflingly hot. When the world’s press and the TV crews arrived, they found the dwarfs mother-naked and incontinent, showering the crowds with abuse, empty bottles, and much, much more: ‘Which reminds me,’ said the Hat.
On the lip of Seventh Avenue, we ducked into the Metropole. It used to be a shrine to jazz; now it had gone topless. Inside a deserted ballroom, there was a bar as long as a bowling lane, and a strawberry blonde danced on its top in a G-string and glitterdust scarlet pumps, snapping gum, her green eyes fixed on infinity.
‘Long, lissome, luciferous,’ Bert murmured. It was a phrase from Colonel Stingo, beloved of A. J. Liebling. Six feet two, the girl must have been, all legs and no breasts, and she was flexible as raw rubber. When her stint was done and she came down among us, she said that she was from Texas. Her name was Katy Freeway.
The Hat and I had comprised her entire audience. With a small frown, she copped a stool between us and called for water, Jack Daniel’s back. ‘You guys writers?’ she asked. ‘Or is it something I ate?’
She was in supreme condition, a racehorse on the muscle. Across her bone-white stomach ran a scar like a pink slash-mark, and it flexed and flurried with every sleekit motion. A tangerine wrap was slung loosely across her shoulders. Through one of its cigarette burns, her left nipple flirted with the tip of Bert’s cigar. ‘Jack Dempsey, I loved that man,’ he said. ‘He used to sit out in the window of his restaurant, right there on Times Square, with the George M. Cohan statue in front of him and the great James Montgomery Flagg oil painting of him getting knocked clean out of the ring by Luis Firpo behind, 1923, the wildest heavyweight brawl in history, and he must have signed a million autographs and posed for a million pictures – he was on display his entire life, every minute, but never once did I see him lose his poise, his presence, not once. Oh, he was just marvellous.’ Bert rescued his cigar, contemplated its pulped and sopping remains with a dreamy, if raddled, eye, and he raised his glass. ‘The Champeen,’ he said.