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

by James Traub

  Kaufman’s wit, indeed his whole temperament, was shaped around an intense aversion to uninflected emotion. Moss Hart, who as an untried novice collaborated with the already titanic Kaufman, describes addressing a heartfelt speech of thanks to the bundle of limbs that was the playwright slumped, apparently inert, in an armchair. “To my horror,” Hart writes, “the legs unwound themselves with an acrobatic rapidity I would not have believed possible, and the figure in the chair leaped up and out of it in one astonishing movement like a large bird frightened out of its solitude in the marshes.” Kaufman literally could not write love scenes; the love interest in The Butter and Egg Man, the only play he wrote by himself, is so perfunctory that the two young people seem almost to have been ordered to bond. Wisecracking protected Kaufman from having to peer too deeply into the human swamp, as O’Neill did. Plainly, he was not nearly so great a figure as O’Neill. But it was his very emotional astringency, his horror of the false—even of the heartfelt—that made him so representative a figure of this age of urbanity; for much of the drama, and much of the sensibility, of the twenties was based on a repudiation, whether comic or tragic, of the easy sentimentality of an earlier age. And this, in turn, explains why both Kaufman and O’Neill strike us today as “modern,” though almost none of their predecessors do.

  Kaufman was absolutely and utterly a creature of Broadway. He rarely strayed beyond walking distance from Times Square; almost all of his friends were show folk. He kept his job at the Times years after he no longer needed the measly salary, though it’s hard to say whether this was owing to his love of the milieu or his ever-present fear of failure. And Kaufman wrote about what he knew; Broadway gave him his setting, his characters, and his language. The characters in The Butter and Egg Man, for example, speak an almost impenetrable vaudeville slang—“I done six clubs for the wow at the finish, and done it for years!” “Butter and egg man” was the Broadway pejorative for one of the freshly minted midwestern plutocrats who could be counted on to back stage productions; the play’s main character is a starstruck rube from Chillicothe, Ohio, whom a scheming producer separates from his inheritance. (The play-within-the-play features a trial scene, a brothel scene, and a dialogue in Heaven between a rabbi and a priest who “talk about how everybody’s the same underneath, and it don’t matter none what religion they got.”) Kaufman’s Beggar on Horseback concerns a gifted young composer who agrees to marry a bubble-headed heiress in order to avoid having to write commercial dreck for the theater. June Moon takes up the same theme in reverse: the main character, Fred Stevens, is a sentimental dolt who makes a smash debut as a Broadway songwriter.

  The surfaces of Kaufman’s plays are so glittery, and the characters so busy amusing themselves and one another, that it’s easy to miss the underlying ferocious disgust with the business ethic and middlebrow taste; in fact, Kaufman’s contempt for the world of success is scarcely less bitter than that of his more notoriously sardonic contemporary, H. L. Mencken. Many of Kaufman’s plays have a character like Fred Stevens, or like Leach, the movie scenarist from Dulcy, who has achieved commercial success through sheer force of mediocrity. Most of Beggar on Horseback, which Kaufman wrote with Marc Connelly, consists of a surreal dream sequence in which the bohemian hero, Neil McRea, is trapped in the bourgeois world of his in-laws as inescapably as O’Neill’s Rob is on the farm. Neil’s new father-in-law, dressed in golf knits, barks into the phone, “Buy 18 holes and sell all the water hazards!” while six corporate automata march about mindlessly repeating “Overhead,” “turnover,” “annual report.” Neil is gradually driven insane by the cacophony of banalities; he murders the entire family, only to be subjected to a trial that turns into an antic musical comedy, in which he is pronounced guilty of writing unpopular music. Kaufman somehow managed to churn out one popular and meticulously crafted play after another without ever compromising his view that the marketplace demands craven pandering.

  FOR ALL HIS MOODY silences and his tics, George Kaufman was a gregarious man who loved company and who seems to have hated to work alone. In an era when everyone worked with everyone, Kaufman was the arch-collaborator. He worked with fellow playwrights like Marc Connelly, novelists like Edna Ferber, even greenhorns like Moss Hart. And he was a charter member of the great floating cocktail party–poker game–mutual admiration and ridicule society of the day. Hart, still a wide-eyed observer of the Broadway scene in the late 1920s, records the guest list for a typical “tea party” (a comic euphemism for a drinkathon) at the Kaufmans’: Ethel Barrymore, Harpo Marx, Heywood Broun, Edna Ferber, Helen Hayes, George Gershwin, Alfred Lunt, Alexander Woollcott, Leslie Howard, Dorothy Parker, Robert Benchley, Robert Sherwood, Herbert Bayard Swope. More or less the same group might have assembled another day at Woollcott’s country place in Vermont, or the uptown studio of the artist Neysa McMein, or even at a rented place in the south of France. Theater is, of course, an inherently collaborative medium, but what is still remarkable about the circle of the 1920s is the extent to which they were a circle—a group of people who lived an almost collective life, and whose work was in many ways the record of that charmed, overheated, fiercely competitive society. It was the special privilege and delight of the audience, both in the theaters and in living rooms across the country, to eavesdrop on this wicked and inspired conversation.

  The wits of Broadway wrote with each other, for each other, and about each other. Dorothy Parker, the most mordant and perhaps the most heartbreaking of the whole circle, began her career as a theater critic at Vogue in 1916 and moved on to Vanity Fair, where she was edited by the playwright Robert Sherwood and his fellow Robert, Benchley, later a comic stage performer and then a mainstay at The New Yorker; she was ultimately fired after trashing Ziegfeld’s wife, Billie Burke, in the Follies. Woollcott, in many ways the central figure of the group, as well as the presiding genius of the Algonquin Round Table, the famous lunchtime gathering of wits at a hotel just off Times Square, virtually made a career out of writing about his friends. Besides reviewing their plays, and often composing charmingly facetious prefaces for the plays’ published editions, Woollcott wrote two magazine profiles of Kaufman as well as both a profile and a full-length biography of his friend Irving Berlin. In 1929 he began simultaneously writing a weekly column for The New Yorker and, more important, broadcasting a weekly radio show that told the world of Broadway doings and often featured Broadway stars. Woollcott played a Woollcott-like figure—a fat, indolent, waspish kibbitzer—in S. N. Behrman’s Brief Moment. Much later, in 1939, Kaufman and Hart wrote a play about Woollcott, The Man Who Came to Dinner.

  The effect of all this nonstop collaborating, chronicling, criticizing, lunching, and drinking was to push the art of the period in the direction dictated by the circle’s collective sensibility: wit, speed, sparkle, savoir-faire. Irving Berlin, the peerless manufacturer of hummable, lovable tunes, was certainly the most mainstream, the most conventionally successful, of the figures who joined, or at least regularly visited, the Algonquin Round Table. But intimacy with Woollcott, Dorothy Parker, and the rest turned him in a different direction. Berlin’s biographer describes him writing “What’ll I Do?,” a song that sounds as much like Cole Porter as it does like Berlin, in a setting that is sheer Cole Porter: arriving with a bottle of champagne at a party given by Parker and Neysa McMein, Berlin sat down at the piano and began composing. When Berlin first met the beautiful young socialite Ellin Mackay, who was to become his wife, she told him how much she admired “What’ll I Do?”

  The limitation of the Round Table was that it tended to inspire gag writing and brilliant buffoonery; but over time, Kaufman and his collaborators evolved a form of satiric drama that was rooted, more or less, in character. In 1929, Kaufman and Ring Lardner, the great and mordant sportswriter and essayist, wrote June Moon. In the play’s prologue, two strangers on a train try so hard to make contact with each other that neither listens to the other, and each natters on about people whom the other couldn’t possibly know.
The situation is painfully human, though at the same time ridiculous; and indeed, Fred, the songwriting-star-to-be, is consigned to that special circle of hell Kaufman reserves for pandering success. “He’s not a fellow that can think for himself,” one hardened ex–chorus girl chirps. “They left that out.” George Jean Nathan wrote in The American Mercury that June Moon “should assist greatly in putting the quietus on the mere phrase-makers, the wise-crackers, the apostles of the New Wit. Every word belongs to the situation, the milieu, the character who speaks it.”

  One of the running jokes of June Moon is the musical hack who predicts, “Gershwin will be a nobody in ten years,” and then, when Gershwin actually shows up, complains, “He stole my rhapsody.” Kaufman had in fact begun collaborating with Gershwin on the musical Strike Up the Band, which first appeared in 1927. The Broadway musical as it has since come down to us essentially dates from this year. As if by harmonic convergence, George and Ira Gershwin’s Funny Face, starring Fred and Adele Astaire, also appeared that year, as did Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s A Connecticut Yankee, adapted from Mark Twain, and Show Boat, the epic musical of black life on a Mississippi riverboat written by Edna Ferber, with songs by Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II, son of Willie and grandson of the original Oscar. What distinguished all these works from their predecessors was the sheer sophistication of the music and songs; they also began to move in the direction of integrating music, song, and narrative, rather than stitching together a patchwork of gags and skits and showstoppers, as Berlin, Kern, and others had largely done before.

  Strike Up the Band is such a ferocious piece of work that it had to be withdrawn from the stage; it succeeded only after Kaufman and Gershwin had toned down its sarcasm. The main character, Horace K. Fletcher, is a butter-and-egg man on a monstrous scale, a cheese manufacturer who inveigles the dim-witted President Coolidge into declaring war against Switzerland in order to block imported Swiss cheese. The premise is vintage Kaufman, since its very ludicrousness has the effect of liberating the author’s satirical imagination. Horace offers to pay for the entire war, and return a 25 percent profit, so long as the war is named after him. “It’s a go!” cries the president’s chief adviser. “Strike Up the Band,” a typically ingenious Gershwin pastiche of patriotic tunes, is the musical device Horace uses to whip up war fever and thus further his shameless profiteering. Horace soon has the young men of America marching off to bloody the Swiss, who have the good sense to hide in the mountains, and ultimately to surrender. The Gershwins’ score includes “The Man I Love” and “I’ve Got a Crush on You,” as well as a Gilbert and Sullivan sound-alike in rhyming couplets and a ragtime tune celebrating the triumph of jazz. For all the virtuoso eclecticism, Strike Up the Band is generally considered the first musical in which the songs emerge directly from the narrative, just as June Moon was one of the first Broadway plays in which the humor is rooted in character.

  Nineteen twenty-seven was an astonishing year. Broadway theaters staged an average of 225 shows a year during the decade; in 1927 the figure reached 264, a figure never equaled before or since. It was not only one of the greatest seasons in the history of Broadway, but the year of Babe Ruth’s sixty home runs and Charles Lindbergh’s successful transatlantic flight, a year of heroes and parades and headlines. The stock market was making everybody rich, elevator boys as well as bankers. “The uncertainties of 1920 were drowned out in a steady golden roar,” Fitzgerald later wrote. “The parties were bigger . . . the shows were broader, the buildings were higher, the morals were looser and the liquor was cheaper.” It was a moment of frenzy that was bound to spend itself, though you would think, from Fitzgerald’s apocalyptic disgust, that the catastrophe of the Depression arrived as a biblical punishment for wantonness. Indeed, he writes, “The city was bloated, glutted, stupid with cake and circuses.” Yet Broadway would never again be so entrancing as it had been in those dazzling and giddy years of Woollcott and Kaufman and FPA and chorus girls lolling naked in fruit baskets. And no one knew it better than Fitzgerald himself. “For the moment,” he writes at the very end of “My Lost City,” “I can only cry out that I have lost my splendid mirage. Come back, come back, O glittering and white!”

  6.

  THE PADLOCK REVUE

  FROM ITS EARLIEST DAYS, Times Square floated on a mighty ocean of alcohol—nickel beer, gin, whiskey, wine, and the fine champagne downed by the quart at Rector’s and Shanley’s. The artistic souls who passed their days and nights along Broadway—the actors and the hoofers and the chorus girls and the composers and writers and stage managers and agents and producers and ticket scalpers—soothed their frayed nerves and bucked up their faltering egos with nightly drafts from the local dives and taverns, the lobster palaces and the hotels. In Mirrors of New York, a thoroughly soused memoir dating from 1925, the essayist Benjamin de Casseres describes Times Square as the central depot of a “Grand Trunk Line of Booze” stretching down Broadway, and the bar at the Knickerbocker Hotel, on the southeast corner of 42nd and Broadway, as “the headquarters of the 42nd Street Country Club.” “At the corner outside one heard for years only one phrase,” De Casseres plangently recalls: “ ‘Let’s have another.’” Nineteen twenty-five was, of course, the heart of Prohibition; and Mirrors of New York is a melancholy recollection of a vanished golden age. “The rapid fall of the booze forts around these corners and the rise of the chocolate and soda centers on their ruins is a matter of near history,” De Casseres writes, in what is possibly the earliest account on record of Times Square ruined by the forces of modernization and propriety.

  The Eighteenth Amendment took effect July 1, 1919, but the Volstead Act, which made Prohibition national law, only went into force on January 16 of the following year. It was a bitterly cold night; the temperature dropped to six degrees. The drinking crowd jammed into the old booze forts like condemned prisoners partaking of a final meal. Reisenweber’s held a funeral ball; the waiters at Maxim’s were dressed as pallbearers. For all the chin-up insouciance, the metaphor was no joke for the establishments themselves. Without alcohol, the great lobster palaces felt like overupholstered mess halls. Who would linger until the late hours over a carafe of ginger ale? Within three years, every single one of the great old Broadway restaurants had disappeared. And in their place came the hot dog stands and soda fountains and “coffee pots” that disgusted the likes of Benjamin de Casseres. Prohibition annihilated the splendid eating and drinking culture of Times Square.

  What it could not annihilate, of course, was drinking itself; that was much too deeply ingrained in the life of the place. And so drinking changed, almost overnight, from a beloved pastime, like dancing or playgoing, to a clandestine and fugitive act. Within a few years there were hundreds, if not thousands, of speakeasies in the area around Times Square. Most of them were located not in the grand open spaces formed by the convergence of the avenues, as the lobster palaces had been, but in brownstones, and above restaurants, and behind shops, on the cross streets of the Forties. Many of them were just underground versions of the cheap bars that had flourished in the area for years; the patron would show a familiar face or mention a familiar name, or even mumble a password through a sliding window or a barred opening in the door. Others were private homes, where drinkers would be escorted into what had once been the living room of an apartment. Some of these establishments—the kind you might read about enviously in The New Yorker— offered copies of the latest magazines, and soft armchairs, and legitimate Scotch highballs. Others—a great many more—reeked of yesterday’s Welsh rarebit and watered their gin and padded their bills, and occasionally robbed a customer too drunk to notice. A. J. Liebling once wrote a story in The New Yorker about sign painters who had made a fine living during Prohibition instantly repainting nightclubs and shifting around the furniture, so that when outraged patrons returned the next day with the police the place was unrecognizable, and they doubted their own fuddled memories.

  A speakeasy was a criminal establishment, li
ke an opium den. The cop on the beat could usually be paid off to look the other way, but the more intrepid and relentless federal agents were raiding bars and nightclubs, smashing the bottles, padlocking the establishment, and carting off the owners and the staff to jail. Most patrons, and most owners, considered the raids a nuisance and an occupational hazard; Prohibition made absolutely no moral headway among the sophisticates and devout drinkers of Broadway. If anything, Prohibition had the effect of discrediting sobriety itself; the mild risk associated with drinking only made the act more chic. And the almost complete separation of eating and drinking probably also had the effect of promoting drunkenness.

  But speakeasies rested on another and more serious species of illegality, for the trade in bootleg liquor was almost entirely controlled by organized crime. Rum-running essentially created organized crime in New York and Chicago, just as the rise of the drug trade in the 1960s and after fostered the rise of new criminal cartels. The great underworld figures of the day—Dutch Schultz, Owney Madden, Lucky Luciano—were first and foremost bootleggers. And they plowed their wealth back into Times Square in the form of nightclubs, which were speakeasies with entertainment. Virtually all the famous nightclubs of the day—the El Fey, the Silver Slipper, the Hotsy Totsy, the Parody—were partly or wholly owned by gangsters. “It was a setup made to order for mobsters,” as Nils T. Granlund, the foremost producer of nightclub acts, writes in his memoir, Blondes, Brunettes and Bullets. The mobsters were already supplying the alcohol, they had access to enormous supplies of cash, and many of them loved nothing more than hanging out at the clubs.