The Heart of the World

by Nik Cohn

  In Izzy’s remembrance it was even colder: ‘Twenty below easy, thirty maybe. Your breath turned to icicles any time you breathed out.’ So he breathed in and drifted with the crowds. Outside the Café de Paris, formerly Rector’s, there was a figure on stilts, done up like Rollin Kirby’s newspaper cartoon of Prohibition – Abraham Lincoln turned mortician’s mate, with a high stovepipe hat and red boozer’s nose, a bottle peeking from his hip pocket. He started to swing up Broadway. And Izzy Grove traveled with him.

  They journeyed out of Times Square past Automobile Row – its showrooms aglint with De Sotos, Pierce-Arrows, La Salles – and the American Horse Exchange till they came to Evelyn Nesbit.

  She was not in a good mood. Divorced from Harry Thaw, she now ran a small tearoom in the West Fifties. She had spent years in vaudeville, demonstrating novelty jazz dances like the Castle Walk and the Grizzly Bear. That was finished, and she was resting – a weary, overstrung woman, described as a whipped race-mare, with a budding morphine habit.

  On Prohibition Eve, slouching outside her tearoom, she drank gin from a stone hot-water bottle. The street was full of horses, not a car in sight. That’s what stuck in Izzy’s mind, the dry-ice steam rising off the horses’ rumps, the warm reek of their turds. And Evelyn Nesbit was drunk; she kept shouting out It’s over. Everything is finished. And the Prohibition man on stilts started mocking her, bouncing back the phrases like an echo. It’s finished. Over and done. Then the crowd took it up. Everything is finished. Tutta e finito. They crushed in around Evelyn Nesbit, jeering in her face, and she was still a lovely woman, big eyes like beacons in the fog and chestnut hair running wild, just scared, a little strange. Like she couldn’t grasp what was happening. ‘Outta touch with reality, you could call it,’ Izzy said. So she was shouting and cursing, the gin slopping down the front of her dress and the ice-steam billowing, the streetlights haloed with mist, the smell of fresh horseshit: ‘Like a stage set or some movie. And this lost woman, but beautiful, crying Over, it’s all over. And me, I’m just a kid, I bust out crying, too.’

  Enter Bat Masterson.

  The old Dodge City gunslinger now served as a boxing writer for the Morning Telegraph. Ancient but still straight-backed, he was a familiar Broadway figure. ‘Long tailcoats, high-heel boots, a ten-gallon hat,’ Izzy said. ‘Looked like he was wearing fancy dress. But he was good to kids, whatchacallem street urchins, always tossed us loose change. He wrote me up one time; I was still in the amateurs. The paper never printed it.’ And now he hove up through the icy mists, the Bat. To find a lady in distress.

  He did not hesitate. Swiping freely with his cane, he parted the drunken mob, pushed through to Evelyn Nesbit’s side. The man on stilts, Prohibition, blocked his path. Twelve feet high, and his swaying shadow, a monster’s shape, playing over the tenement walls. But the Bat flicked his cane, and the figure came tumbling down. ‘Just a halfpint runt he was, at that. Laying out in the gutter, squealing he was killed.’ Right on cue, a hansom cab appeared. Evelyn Nesbit wrapped the hot-water bottle inside her shawl; Bat Masterson handed her up. ‘You are kind, sir,’ she said.

  ‘Ma’am, you honor me,’ the Bat replied. He raised his hat, she lowered her veil, they went their separate ways. Through the biting cold, Izzy Grove felt a sudden warmth against his thigh: ‘Goddamn horse was pissing down my leg.’

  It was a tale often told; the details varied each time. Only the central image was fixed – the gunslinger and the scarlet woman, both down on their luck, still flawless in gallantry, grace: ‘You are kind, sir. Ma’am, you honor me,’ Izzy said. ‘Two years of Prohibition, and all you heard was Oh, you kid!’

  In those years, the center had moved east. Most of the fashionable speaks were clustered round Madison and Fifth, and Broadway was left with the honky-tonks. Instead of lobster palaces, there were night clubs and bottleshops, blind pigs, discreetly tucked off the square; instead of Diamond Jim Brady and Lillian Russell, there was Owney Madden.

  Soon Jimmy Walker was mayor, and boodle was in bloom. Following Madden and Larry Fay, whole tribes of mobsters came pouring out of Hell’s Kitchen, which festered two blocks to the west. Graduates of street gangs, the Gophers and the Hudson Dusters, they carried .32s and names like Shuffles Goldberg, Skush Thomas, Big Frenchy DeMange. By Chicago standards, they were pinochle players, but they played rough enough for Broadway. Suddenly, there were clubs called the Silver Slipper and the Cave of the Fallen Angels. Two dead bodies headlined at Legs Diamond’s Hotsy Totsy Club. At Porky Murray’s, there were two more.

  Survivors of the Golden Era glanced once at the new Broadway, then fled. ‘The slaughterhouse of Moronia,’ Stanley Walker called it. ‘There are chow-meineries, peep shows for men only, flea circuses, lectures on what killed Rudolph Valentino. An old army sergeant, aided by fast-spieling salesmen, lectures on health soap, psyllium seeds and reducing belts, with dire threats of the toxic poisoning habit. Another lecturer, armed with vials filled with chemicals of many colors, pleads for the buying of real estate near the Muscle Shoals development, Alabama. Haberdasheries are closing out at reduced prices; a fire sale is going full blast; an auction sale of fantastic gewgaws draws enough people to block the sidewalk; a pushcart pedlar exhibits 100% pure whiskey candies – three for five cents.’

  The depression only quickened the fall. Movie houses had already driven the theaters into side streets. Now the last plush restaurants failed. Faced by the burlesque houses and the dime dance halls, even the Palace could no longer compete. Self-styled the World’s Capital of Vaudeville, it folded its two-a-days in 1932: ‘Went skin,’ said Izzy Grove. Of all the square’s Edwardian pomps, only the Astor Hotel clung on.

  Even La Guardia kicking out the mobsters did not raise the tone. They had been happy as clams, content with their slot machines and penny arcades, the fights, prostitution, and dope. But when the Little Flower declared war, they opted to dim their lights. So they backed off Broadway, regrouped in Brooklyn and New Jersey: ‘And that’s where the crime came in,’ Izzy said. ‘When the Mob had control, there might be coupla shootings, unnerstand, between friends. But street crime, you never heard a such a thing. Purse snatching, mugging and such, it just wasn’t done. A guy could walk on Broadway at midnight, a thousand bucks sticking outta his back pocket, and nobody would touch it. In case the guy is Dutch Schultz’s cousin.’

  With the mobsters gone, Lindy’s reverted to a school for newspapermen, press agents, comics; and in that peaceful strain it remained, till Leo Lindemann sold out in 1969. ‘A good Broadway man. He knew to make a dollar,’ Izzy said. But today his memory was desecrated, years after his death, by a chain of tourist-trap slopshops in his name, peddling eye of newt and tongue of toad at $9.95, plus tax.

  Izzy Grove, too, had fallen on evil times. By the late seventies, when I met him first, he was no longer active as a booking agent. For the past thirty years, in fact, he hadn’t been active as much of anything. His last steady employ had been at the Garden, sticking up fight posters. Through the fifties and sixties, his shopping cart and bucket of glue were Eighth Avenue landmarks. Then the Garden changed management, and his phone had stopped ringing.

  Even so, he maintained an office on West Forty-sixth. It was a broom closet in a showbiz building, right up the block from the Edison Hotel. At sixty dollars a month, he’d been there since the Eisenhower years, and there he planned to remain, holed up against change, till the fat lady sings, he said.

  He was a blocky figure with bottle-bottom glasses and busted hands, his ruined face framed by twin cauliflower ears; and he did not stop talking, not ever. ‘I got a talking mouth. Born that way,’ Izzy said. ‘I see people, I start to gab, it’s automatic. Then I don’t know to stop. I got so much inside me, unnerstand, it’s gotta go get some air.’

  At seventy, he’d been on Broadway for fifty-eight years. Twice daily, he did his ceremonial laps, a tummler’s progress, Fifty-first to Forty-second and back, on the stump from deli to newsstand, luncheon counter to cigar store,
shaking hands and waving at every step, blowing kisses, slapping backs, monologuing nonstop. It was as if he was campaigning: ‘Running for office,’ he said. ‘But the office always runs faster.’

  He kissed his hand to himself. ‘Everybody knows Izzy Grove, and I know some of them,’ he said. It was his street, his property. He had been written up by Runyon, by Dan Parker of the Mirror. ‘The day there is no Izzy Grove, there’s no more Broadway.’ He tapped himself on the nose. ‘They say they’re gonna pull my lease, kick my tuchis in the street.’ He punched himself in the guts. ‘It’ll never happen,’ he said. And it happened.

  The day he got his eviction notice, he came into the Gaiety Deli; it was a Tuesday lunchtime. There was an old lady used to eat there every day – her name was Sarah; she used to be a conjurer’s assistant. Every day she’d come in at the same time, order up the exact same lunch, egg salad on wheat toast, a celery soda. And she had this dog, some kind of pug, that was even older than her. She called it Bernhardt. Sarah and Bernhardt, that was her little joke. A disgusting yellow-fang mutt, all slobber and snuffle and stink. But anyhow, Izzy Grove, he’d come in the Gaiety for coffee or a knish, and every day without fail, the old dog would get under his feet somehow, and Izzy would rear back, aim a kick at its fat butt. This was his sense of fun. Only this day, this Tuesday, when Izzy Grove came in, he didn’t lift a flat foot. He didn’t even see the dog waiting there to get its kick. He just ordered a white coffee, walked away. ‘Whatsa matter?’ Sarah asked him. ‘You get too big a man to kick a dog these days. It’s too much trouble, maybe.’ She was hurt, anyone could see that. She took it personally. ‘Or maybe,’ Sarah said, ‘maybe you find another dog. Not so old, not so fat. Maybe you’re finding some fine young bitch.’ But Izzy didn’t rise to her. He looked at Sarah, then he looked at Bernhardt. It was like he’d never seen them before. ‘I tell you what,’ Izzy said, ‘go kick your own dog.’

  It was a terrible thing. People were getting evicted all over Broadway. From the Deuce to Columbus Circle, seventeen blocks, it seemed no building was safe. The Japanese had taken over; the mammoth realty conglomerates; and worse than either, the AGONYS – Americans Gloating on New York Slime. Between them, they had determined that Times Square was a hellpit – ‘the national cesspool,’ said William Whyte, urban strategist; ‘a stink in the nostrils of propriety,’ said a federal aide – and must be exorcized. All its crazed and shambolic, insanitary, and wondrous labyrinths must go, to be replaced by antiseptic tanks and traffic-free walkways, ‘a Bloomingdale’s atmosphere.’

  The first step in achieving this shopping-mall utopia was to rid the area of human rodents. ‘Scattering them is the first shot,’ said William J. Stern, the chairman of the Urban Development Corporation. ‘We fire the first cannonball which scatters them and then we hunt them out.’

  Officially, the prime targets were pornographers. But the smut-peddlers proved too shifty. Flush them out of one foxhole, they merely nipped around the corner and started over. Izzy Groves, however, were so many fish in a barrel. They had no friends in the right places, no wads to grease the right palms. So out they went, haunch, paunch, and jowl. ‘They cut my phone; they knock down my door,’ Izzy told Josh Alan Friedman, a writer for Oui magazine. ‘I live right; I behave myself. My wife, Alice, she rest in peace, always told me that instead of being a tough guy, a shylock, a racket guy, a numbers runner, or a bookmaker, to go into legitimate business.’ So now he was defenseless. ‘No leverage, no dice,’ he said.

  When the first freeze of shock wore off, he started to seep, like melting wax. ‘I don’t want to cry. It’s just my face is wet,’ he said. He was the Ghetto Avenger, survivor of a hundred wars, but not fool enough to believe that he would survive this. Take him out of Broadway, and he was done for. ‘Any other place, I can’t breathe,’ he said. ‘You can’t breathe, you die.’

  He ran the street in panic frenzy, howling out loud. Prayer meetings were held at the Actors’ Temple, and Izzy granted interviews. ‘It’s one of these odd quirks of happenstance that befall mankind,’ he was quoted in Oui. ‘I got relatives. Where are they? I was in the papers. Where are they? Where? When I made money, unnerstand, hey, yeah, free tickets, the fights, afterwards somethin’ to eat. But I want to pinpoint one thought. Quote me. Yesterday’s cheers have a very short echo –’

  Now, less than ten years on, the razing of Izzy Grove’s street was almost complete. Block after block had been cleared of detritus – booking agents and song pluggers, dance studios, music publishers. In their place, gleaming new, stood a Novotel and a Holiday Inn, assorted office blocks and construction sites. Ten years more, and the whole strip would be indistinguishable from any other American downtown: ‘Like Duluth,’ Bert Sugar said, ‘only not so much distinction.’

  The last time I saw Izzy Grove, he’d taken refuge at the Chin-Ya, a Japanese bar in back of a Fifty-fifth Street halfway house. He was not a drinking man, barely touched the stuff. But this day his hands were shaking; he couldn’t stop leaking. ‘It’s all over,’ he said. ‘History.’

  He did not mean just himself. Not any more. For most of his life, it was true, he had been blinkered, half-blind: ‘All I seen is before my nose. Me, me, and me,’ he said. ‘But since this, I gotta new angle. I come to unnerstand how I’m connected. A constituent member, you heard that phrase? My wife, she rest in peace, that was her favorite saying.’ He was drinking kosher wine. Stray droplets clung to his chin. ‘What it means is, a piece of the pie,’ Izzy said. ‘Just one small slice, a sliver, out of the total totality.’

  In his new vision, Broadway was no longer his street, his property. It did not belong to him, but he to it. So his own ruin was just part of a larger crime, a systematic crushing of all proper things. ‘They’re tearing down the world,’ he said.

  ‘Good for business,’ said the Japanese barman brightly.

  ‘Not for mine.’

  These were the last days, he believed. ‘Lemme tell you about Broadway. The truth,’ he said. ‘People think it’s about bright lights, this star and that star, unnerstand, the theaters and babes, limousines, the big wheels and cheeses, all that order of affairs.’ His face was all knots and gnarls, liver spots; it looked like riven oak. ‘It’s not about that,’ he said.

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Quirks,’ said Izzy Grove.

  He pushed away his empty glass, a gesture of abdication. ‘City pols and landlords call them crazies, freaks, call them bums. But quirks is all they are,’ he said. ‘Just people a little different, they got some kind of bug in their heads, some kinda notion, unnerstand. It could be singing, dancing, could be fighting, could be selling the best sturgeon, schtupping the most broads, anything. Wearing a pink tie with lobsters on it. Dancing the Big Apple in their underwear. Could be nothing wears a name.’ His eyes behind the thick glasses would not stop leaking. ‘Just some tweak like an itch, won’t let them be. So they don’t fit in, they got no place, see what I mean. No place except for Broadway, and now they don’t got that.’ He dabbed at his wet face with a handkerchief the color of dried putty. ‘Where’m I gonna go?’ he cried. ‘How’m I gonna live?’

  On the street, the wind blew harder.

  In Roseland, the lights went blue, green, purple, pink, and the couples danced cheek to cheek. At night there were rock groups or salsa bands, but on matinee afternoons the great arena reverted to a ballroom. Again the floor filled with people touching, holding on. Most of them were past sixty, and many were much older. Some had been coming here since 1932, the year that Roseland began. Still they waltzed and fox-trotted, they quickstepped, and they tangoed. The changing lights played over them, clothing them in soft washes. ‘Make believe,’ the emcee purred. ‘Close your eyes, drift away. Make believe.’

  Up some steps was a long horseshoe bar. On faster numbers, the mambos and pasodobles, it filled with old ladies resting. They kicked off their pumps, sat kneading their swollen feet. Spotting me sitting alone, a single man with a tall drink and a notebook, one fig
ure detached itself from the ranks, plumped down on the stool at my side.

  ‘Let me entertain you,’ it said.

  The voice was girlish, slightly nasal, but musical withal. Cigarette-husky, it came from a slim-bottled blonde in a green sheath dress cut tight above the knee and slit up the left thigh. The dress set off showgirl legs in sheer silk stockings and high-heeled silver slingbacks. ‘My name is Roz, I’m sixty-nine,’ the blonde said. ‘My speciality is bringing joy.’

  Hopping down off the stool, she backed a few steps across the bar alcove, launched herself into a recitation. ‘Hello, I’m Rosalind Kantor from Roslyn,’ she began. ‘Actually I live in Mineóla but Roslyn is close enough, so you can call me Roz from Roslyn, not so young in years but younger than springtime at heart.’

  At the end of each phrase she paused, frozen in mid-gesture, her smile congealed, until my scribbling caught her up. Her diction was crystalline, her delivery button-bright. Where required, she even threw in stage directions. ‘Roz from Roslyn,’ she said. ‘Not so young in years but younger than springtime at heart, and this is my life’s story, actually it’s just a sketch, but I hope it keeps you amused anyway.’ She curtsied and set up a time-step, three steps to the left, then back, three steps to the right, then back. ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘You are a lovely audience.’

  She raised her right hand to her throat, her ringed fingers curled loosely about an unseen microphone. ‘It’s been a long, long journey my little life has made, and I hardly know where to start. So I’ll start right here, at Roseland, that’s where it all began. I was just fifteen and all the boys said I looked very cute, actually I drove them crazy, but I don’t like to seem I’m tooting my own horn, even though I am. (Laugh.) Well, in those days they had talent contests here, every Tuesday afternoon I think, and one time my friends ganged up on me and would not stop kvetching until I gave it a shot. So I did. I did a little song and dance, a couple of gags, and my impression of Jimmy Durante. Inka Dinka Doo, you remember that one? Well, that certainly dates you. (Drumroll. Rimshot.) Anyway, I entered, and they booed me off. No, really, it was just horrible. I cried and cried for days. But the showbiz bug had bit me, and actually it never stopped. And the rest is history. (Laugh. Sing eight bars of Inka Dinka Doo.)