The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square

by James Traub

  In many ways, the most thrilling environments on Broadway in the early years of the century—the most theatrical ones—were not theaters, but restaurants. These were the “lobster palaces” of Times Square: Rector’s, Reisenweber’s, Bustanoby’s, Murray’s Roman Gardens. The lobster palaces were temples to the god of conspicuous consumption, where the freshly minted millionaires of the age went to flaunt their wealth by eating staggering meals and leave staggering tips; a headwaiter might clear upwards of $15,000 during the holidays. The settings were strictly Gilded Lily. The downstairs dining room at Rector’s, which accommodated one hundred tables, featured floor-to-ceiling mirrors and Louis XIV furnishings; both the table linen and the cutlery bore the “Rector griffin.” The Café Maxim, at 38th and Broadway, clad its waiters in its own version of Louis XIV: ruffled shirts, black satin knee breeches, silk stockings, pumps with silver buckles. Most of the dining rooms were below ground level, so that the patron reached his table via a grand stairway. The producer and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld had popularized the triumphal entry, with huzzahs and bravos and trumpet flourishes and bowing and scraping. Here the man about town with the actress of the day on his arm, or the budding plutocrat and his wife, could make just such an entrance, usually accompanied by the house orchestra. Here every man could be the star of his own drama.

  This was an era of epic eating, when the plutocrat, like the Hawaiian prince, demonstrated his wealth by the dimensions of his belly. Diamond Jim Brady became one of the great celebrities of the age simply by out-eating everyone around him. Brady once explained his philosophy of dining by saying that he started each meal with his stomach four inches from the table and ate until the two made contact. When Diamond Jim returned from Paris with a mania for filet de sole Marguery, George Rector’s father sent him off to France to learn how to prepare the dish. When Rector returned two years later, a virtuoso of sole, he was met at New York harbor by Diamond Jim and Rector’s Russian orchestra. Whisked directly to the kitchen, he prepared perhaps the single most famous meal of an age famous for its meals. Diamond Jim was joined by Sam Shubert, the theatrical impresario; Marshall Field, the department store magnate; Adolphus Busch, the brewer; and the composers Victor Herbert and John Philip Sousa. Diamond Jim pronounced himself ecstatic.

  The Rectors had made a fortune running the only restaurant permitted at the Chicago Exposition of 1893; the family was already well established by the time it opened its ornate palace, in September 1899, on the east side of Broadway between 43rd and 44th, immediately south of Hammerstein’s Olympia. Rector’s was the first, and the greatest, of the lobster palaces. (Rector claimed to have been the first to actually serve lobster, their signature dish.) Despite the magnificent setting, Rector’s offered a vastly headier social milieu than the stodgy world of Delmonico’s. Everyone who mattered dined at Rector’s—the Floradora Girls and their cattle-baron escorts, O. Henry and Stephen Crane, Oscar Hammerstein and the Whitneys, Diamond Jim and Lillian Russell. There was gambling in the private dining rooms in the rear, and manic stock speculating—it appears to have amounted almost to the same activity—at the tables upstairs and down. Whatever news there was on Broadway could always be gleaned among the tables at Rector’s. In his memoirs—for restaurateurs then were at least as celebrated as ours are today—George Rector says, “It was the cathedral of froth, where New York chased the rainbow, and the butterfly netted the entomologist. It was the national museum of habits, the bourse of gossip, and the clearing house of rumors.”

  At a time when the theater itself was almost absurdly stylized, dining was a kind of free-form drawing-room comedy; and as the hour drew later, the drama became more intimate and more risqué. The light posttheater supper came to symbolize the sophistication, and the nocturnal habits, of the Broadway crowd. The stage door Johnny, the young swain or incorrigible roué besotted with an actress or chorus girl, was expected to preen with his catch in the racy setting of the Broadway restaurant. This late meal was widely known as the Bird and a Bottle, the “bird” standing both for the meal and the young lady. Chorus girl was, in fact, the principal dish served at the lobster palaces, at least late at night. Many of the restaurants kept rooms upstairs so that the gentleman need not suffer the inconvenience of a hotel. Murray’s Roman Gardens, a palatial setting that would have made Nero blush, offered “24 luxuriously furnished and richly appointed bachelor apartments.”

  This entire world of gargantuan meals, corpulent men, and stolen kisses would come to seem thoroughly archaic to the next generation, who scarcely felt the leaden hand of the Victorian past. And yet the very publicness of these pleasures, the variety of the crowd, was something quite new. Back in the Gay Nineties, Stanford White had held private orgies in the damask-draped splendor of his private aerie in the tower of Madison Square Garden. Now the man of means could satisfy his appetites in full view of the world (if not of his wife). A new, unashamed morality was brewing in the democratic and ungoverned climate of Times Square.

  3.

  NOTHING BUT GIRLS

  TIMES SQUARE WAS ALREADY the sex capital of New York by the early years of the twentieth century. The brothels of the Tenderloin had moved north along with the restaurants and theaters: in 1901, vice investigators identified 132 sites where prostitutes plied their trade in the area bounded by Sixth and Eighth Avenues and 37th and 47th Streets. In many of the hotels around 42nd and Broadway, including the celebrated Metropole, where the old gunslinger and newspaperman Bat Masterson held forth at the bar, prostitutes and their pimps controlled dozens of rooms. Forty-third Street between Broadway and Eighth, where The New York Times was to move its office, was known as Soubrette Row, for most of the brownstones on the block functioned as brothels. A man could scarcely walk a few blocks in the area at night without being propositioned. As a form of commerce, sex could scarcely have been more open and unabashed, despite constant attempts at suppression.

  As a form of culture or entertainment, on the other hand, sex, or rather sexuality, remained largely taboo. The more degraded forms of popular culture, like the concert saloon, were essentially prostitution in the form of entertainment. The high culture of theater, on the other hand, remained largely starchy and histrionic. Between these poles lay the frolicsome light operas in which Dreiser’s Carrie made her living and the more risqué burlesque-type shows, like the venerable Black Crook, where voluptuous women danced the cancan and trafficked in heavy-handed double entendre. What Broadway lacked, at the turn of the century, was a figure who could fuse the naughty sexuality of the streets and the saloons and the burlesque show with the savoir-faire of lobster palace society—someone who could make sex delightful and amusing. What it lacked was Florenz Ziegfeld.

  Ziegfeld was an upper-middle-class figure with refined tastes and low-brow instincts—a much improved version of Willie Hammerstein. Ziegfeld’s father, a German (but not Jewish) immigrant, was a classical musician who ran a music school in Chicago. Ziegfeld absorbed his father’s standards, and his dignified bearing, but from an early age demonstrated a Barnum-like aptitude for promotion and flimflam. While still a teenager in the 1880s, he bought a huge bowl, filled it with water, and charged admission to an exhibit of “Invisible Brazilian Fish.” The fish flopped, but Ziegfeld then toured with the Great Sandow, a celebrated strongman. Ziegfeld understood that Sandow was not just a power lifter but a sex symbol: he substituted a pair of skimpy shorts for his star’s circus-era leopard-skin cloak, and then persuaded several society ladies to feel the biceps of this near naked Apollo—thus causing, as he had intended, a tabloid sensation.

  But Sandow was only a way station. Ziegfeld began dabbling in theater, and in 1896 he sailed to London in search of affordable talent. There he became utterly smitten—professionally and personally—with Anna Held, an adorable, toy-sized creature who had no great gifts as a singer or dancer, but whose tiny waist (eighteen inches), insinuating manner, impressive embonpoint, and dark, flashing eyes had made her the darling of the stage in both London and
Paris. Wresting Anna away from Europe, and from her managers, with a combination of fabulous gifts and equally fabulous promises, Ziegfeld arranged a triumphant arrival in New York. Anna’s ship was met by Diamond Jim Brady, Lillian Russell, a thirty-piece band, and a large contingent from the press. (Much the same welcoming committee was to reassemble several years later for the arrival of George Rector, Jr., and the recipe for filet de sole Marguery.) Once he had established Anna in a magnificent suite at the Savoy Hotel, Ziegfeld concocted a preposterous tale about the restorative milk baths she allegedly took that somehow held the newspapers of the day transfixed. Anna became the most celebrated beauty of the age—a new, hummingbird type as against the beloved but lumbering Valkyrie Lillian.

  Ziegfeld created a series of flimsy vehicles designed to exploit Anna’s famous charms, including Mam’selle Napoleon, in 1903, and the more daring Parisian Model of 1906. These were negligible works of theater. One New York reviewer wrote of The Parisian Model: “Real merit the concoction has none, the music being reminiscent, the humor bewhiskered and hoary, and the plot imperceptible.” The same critic described one of Held’s dances as “quite the most disgusting exhibition seen on Broadway this season.” But that was more or less the point. In that number, called “A Gown for Each Hour of the Day,” Anna ducked behind a screen composed of taller chorus girls for each of the many costume changes. Those girls themselves disrobed behind painter’s easels in a number called, with typical Ziegfeldian lubriciousness, “I’d Like to See More of You.” And yet Ziegfeld had a finely calibrated instinct for opening the floodgates of appetite so far, and no further; he was always saved by his sense of taste. In the words of one of his biographers, Marjorie Farnsworth, “Ziegfeld knew the subtle line between desire and lust, between good taste and vulgarity, and never crossed it. He came close a few times, but he never quite crossed it.”

  Ziegfeld was not a director, and certainly not a writer. His proper title was “producer,” but this barely does justice to the influence he exercised. Ziegfeld’s own life was a very conscious work of theater, intended to be consumed by the public through the medium of the newspapers, and to keep a gorgeous sense of luxury, romance, and inspired recklessness washing back and forth between the life and the stage. Ziegfeld was a handsome, dark-eyed man who dressed impeccably; and he understood how to stage-manage his serial romances in a way that Donald Trump could only envy. He fell in love with Anna, and then with an endless succession of beauties; these liaisons ensured that both he and they remained in the spotlight. Ziegfeld plied his beloved, whoever she was, with an endless stream of sable coats and diamond pins and hotel suites and private railroad cars; everything in their lives was the best, the biggest, the shiniest. The love was real, but the display was calculated. Ziegfeld was such a shameless promoter that when Anna’s $250,000 jewelry collection was stolen, she suspected he had done it to create a sensation; and when the same thing happened to the actress Billie Burke a decade or so later, she lodged the same accusation.

  Ziegfeld was said to be coldhearted and selfish—his principal biographer seems to have loathed him—but he was also a magnificent character. His plays made him fantastically rich, but his recklessness kept him perpetually teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. His insouciance was legendary. P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, who wrote the book for several of Ziegfeld’s plays, describe him at a casino in Palm Beach: “Ziegfeld was standing by a table with a handful of the costly green chips, dropping them carelessly on the numbers and turning to talk to the woman next to him without watching the wheel. He won, but went on talking, leaving the chips where they lay. . . . Only when his companion squealed excitedly and pointed to the piled-up counters did he motion languidly to the croupier to push them towards him.” An awestruck Bolton says, “You feel that hundred-dollar bills mean no more to him than paper matches to a cigar store”; to which Wodehouse responds, “And half the time he hasn’t enough to buy a waistcoat for a smallish gnat.” This was Ziegfeld’s life; but it was also a myth—or what we would now call a lifestyle—every bit as potent as the dreams of giddy passion Ziegfeld retailed in his plays.

  Ziegfeld’s own art was the presentation of female beauty. He sought, he said, “the embodiment of every man’s dream of the ideal woman.” And this was no vaporous ideal. He once explained that “in a really beautiful face, the height of the forehead should equal the length of the nose, the length of the nose equal the distance between the septum of the nose and the chin, the distance between the eyes equal the length of one of them.” He considered the “Titian beauty” the rarest of all; preferred the temperaments, if not the legs, of short girls; abhorred the knocked knee; and insisted that “thighs to be beautiful should exactly touch each other.” It is somewhat shocking to read that Ziegfeld’s ideal choral novice should be no more than sixteen, though of course at the time not many girls remained in school beyond that age. Ziegfeld taught these teenagers how to walk—breasts out, shoulders back, chin up—how to dress, how to talk, how to behave in public. Once he had turned them into Ziegfeld beauties, he added costumes, lighting, makeup, music: the magic of the stage.

  Ziegfeld really hit his stride with the Follies of 1907. The Follies was hardly an innovative production: it was a remake of the popular Parisian “revue,” a series of skits and songs poking fun at the leading figures of the day, the shows, the crazes, the stars. And yet the show exuded a sense of cosmopolitan refinement, of dash and wit, that made it a tremendous success. It was also short—forty minutes—and moved at a head-spinning velocity that only added to the sense of excitement. The Follies were widely imitated but never eclipsed. Ziegfeld rechristened the show Ziegfeld’s Follies, turning it into a kind of branded product. He used the show to introduce his new beauties, as well as rising stars like the singer Fanny Brice. Every year the girls’ dresses grew more revealing and their headgear more fantastically involved; and every year the show became faster, more elaborate, and more polished. In 1909, Ziegfeld featured Lillian Lorraine, whom he had proclaimed “the most beautiful woman in the world,” and with whom he was then conducting a clandestine affair. Lillian appeared as a replica of Maxfield Parrish’s famous cover girl from Life magazine and sang “Nothing but a Bubble” from what appeared to be the inside of a soap bubble; later she appeared at the controls of a prop airplane hanging from the rafters as she sang, “Up, Up, Up in My Aeroplane.” The first act closed with “The Greatest Navy in the World,” in which the girls pressed lights attached to their costumes, went behind a screen, and produced the effect of forty-eight illuminated battleships riding on the waves of New York harbor.

  The Follies was not wholly a matter of delivering up chorus girls under conditions of high velocity and precision engineering, for Ziegfeld employed the leading choreographers, lyricists, writers, and performers of his day. He provided a home for many of the great vaudevillians of his time, including brassily Jewish singers like Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker. And Ziegfeld brought the Follies to a much higher level of sophistication after the show moved in 1913 from the Jardin de Paris, the roof garden of the New York Theatre, to the main stage of the New Amsterdam—a major step up in prestige. Indeed, it took Ziegfeld to bring to the New Amsterdam a sense of glamour in keeping with the theater itself. The great impresario often presented stars like Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, and Eddie Cantor in a single show. And as designer—one might almost say “cinematographer”—Ziegfeld hired Joseph Urban, a Viennese émigré who was the leading set designer of his day and an artist of very great talent. Urban turned the giddy Follies into a unified work of art. For the 1917 Follies, according to Ziegfeld’s biographer Charles Higham, “Urban created a Chinese lacquer setting, which dissolved in showers of colored water, followed by three sets of crossed red and gold ladders. Sixty girls in Chinese costumes climbed up and down in unison while the ladder rungs glowed in the dark. . . . An opalescent backdrop was laced with what seemed to be thousands of pearls.”

  All the great cultural critics of the day felt
called upon to anatomize the Ziegfeld revue; it was, like the Berlin ragtime song, a central piece of cultural property. Edmund Wilson found its air of mechanical perfection frigid. On the other hand, it was just this air of polish that delighted the essayist Gilbert Seldes, who took the position that mechanical perfection was our destiny whether we liked it or not. The revue, Seldes wrote in The Seven Lively Arts, was the foremost expression of the “great American dislike of bungling, the real pleasure in a thing perfectly done.” And Ziegfeld was its foremost exponent. “He makes everything appear perfect by a consummate smoothness of expression,” Seldes wrote. “It is not the smoothness of a connecting rod running in oil, but of a batter where all the ingredients are so promptly introduced and so thoroughly integrated that in the end a man may stand up and say, This is a Show.” Ziegfeld didn’t aim at greatness; he aimed at delight. He was, in this and so many other respects, the very incarnation of Broadway.

  THE LIGHTNESS, THE SPEED, the wit that Ziegfeld infused into his shows, and that his rivals supplied to their own revues and that sparkled in the roof gardens along Broadway, began to alter the climate of Times Square. The lobster palace came to seem increasingly formalistic, even dull. Julius Keller, the owner of Café Maxim, wrote in his memoirs that he realized some time around 1909 that customers would no longer be satisfied with lobster thermidor served on gilded platters. They needed action. Keller recalled the waiters who used to bawl out tunes at the German dive in the West Twenties where he had worked as a young man. And so, he says, one evening he planted two male and two female performers, dressed in evening clothes, like the rest of the clientele, at a table near the Hungarian orchestra. “At a prearranged signal,” Keller writes, “they broke into song.” Keller knew that he was onto something when his customers burst into applause. From that moment, he says, “Maxim’s never suffered from ennui”—the one fatal ailment of all Broadway establishments. When the customers tired of popular tunes, Keller hired “dark-eyed señoritas with their castanets and Spanish dances,” Russians with “their quaint native costumes,” Hawaiians with ukuleles, and “beautiful girls who wove their way among the tables and with adoring eyes poured forth their ballads of love.”