by Damon Runyon
By 1913, vaudeville houses had opened. Legitimate theater and movie theaters and nightclubs concentrated in the Times Square area; by the late 1930s nightlife spread northward from Times Square to Fifty-second Street. The peak theatrical season was 1927–28 when 264 shows opened in the district.1 And the theatrical stars had an influence on public behavior. In his columns Damon Runyon would exploit the public fascination with celebrity lives, including stars of New York theater. Songs like James W. Blake and Charles E. Lawlor’s “The Sidewalks of New York” (1894) and Charles B. Ward and John E. Palmer’s “The Band Played On” (1895) kept New York life in America’s aural consciousness. People living outside New York City wanted to learn more about the exotic megalopolis, and in particular about its amusements and entertainments; they eagerly devoured the daily columns of Runyon, Walter Winchell, and their compatriots.
With its underground transportation nexus, its grid of streets, and Frederick Law Olmsted’s ingeniously planned Central Park, New York had a seeming underpinning of order. Runyon’s idiosyncratic yet highly structured plots are a kind of metaphor for New York’s orderly grid of streets, but like that apparent order, they hide—as he shows—a subversive demimonde where economic relationships are oftentimes illegal or morally suspect.
With few public buildings and its elaborate billboard displays, Times Square became the heart of the “informational” city. The Times Square area was named after the New York Times’s new office building in that area. Advertising and entertainment joined to create a center of consumer culture. As Eric Lampard writes, “[A] symbiosis of commercial advertising and commercial entertainment prophetically juxtaposed . . . the glittering theater marquees and extravagant electrical billboards of Times Square.”2
Broadway became the brightest star in New York’s firmament. Runyon defined “Broadway” as extending from Fifty-second Street on the West Side to Times Square as its center at Broadway and Forty-second Street. In addition to the newspaper, theater, and music business, Broadway also included the new version of Madison Square Garden—completed in 1925—between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth Streets on Eighth Avenue. Madison Square Garden was central to the boxing industry, one of Runyon’s interests, as well as to a diversity of other popular entertainments from circuses to horse shows.
The sidewalk in front of Madison Square Garden was called Jacobs Beach after the fight impresario Mike Jacobs, and it extended to the front of Lindy’s. Runyon’s fictional restaurant Mindy’s is based on Lindy’s—an eatery and center of nocturnal life named for its owner-manager, Leo Lindemann—that was located between Forty-ninth and Fiftieth on Broadway. Jack Dempsey, the former heavyweight champ and a Runyon friend, owned two restaurants in the area where sports figures and sportswriters hung out. Until Prohibition ended, the lower Fifties were heavily populated by speakeasies. This is where Runyon locates Missouri Martin’s establishment, based on the one Texas Guinan ran at 151 West 54th Street, and the establishment of Good Time Charley Bernstein, based on Charlie Desserich’s Pioneer Club.
Broadway was the quintessence of the melting pot, and Runyon reveled in its variety. Broadway welcomed ethnic diversity more than other sections of the city, and the road to prosperity for Lower East Side Jews and others often went through Times Square.
The onset of the Depression; the increasing costs of live theater; and the coming of popular, accessible, and inexpensive cinema affected the legitimate theater. (Runyon loved films and went to about ten a week.) Many of the legitimate theaters became motion picture houses and theaters for radio shows. Vaudeville departed by the late 1930s. Burlesque theaters flourished in the mid-1930s until the license commissioner of New York, Paul Moss, closed them in May 1937. Despite occasional reprieves via court victories, the heyday of burlesque theater was over. Even the Fifty-second Street strip clubs finally were closed. The theater district narrowed to West Forty-fourth and Forty-fifth between Times Square and Eighth Avenue. By the 1940s, the Times Square area had become raffish and something of a cross between a carnival and an amusement park.
Runyon published his first four Broadway stories in 1929. As the prosperity of the 1920s gave way to the Depression, Runyon created a world that is far different from the fantasy world of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers films, where the right girl and guy get paired up and which the Depression seems not to have touched. In the Astaire-Rogers world everyone wears elegant clothes and lives in expensive hotel rooms, and characters open their mouths and sing Irving Berlin and George and Ira Gershwin tunes. Berlin, in particular, as Stephen Holden insists, “could touch on a common chord of feeling . . . Often wistful but never bitter, his lyrics embodied a bedrock faith in hearth, home, and country that transcended sentimentality.”3
By striking contrast, in Runyon’s world, selfishness often prevails, no matter the consequences, even if those consequences cause physical harm to others. Here grinding poverty and economic humiliation are prevailing facts of everyday life. The rich are treated radically differently from the poor. Within the horse-racing world, the difference between a tout and a handicapper is whether or not one is broke; if he is not broke, then the tout becomes a handicapper. Runyon’s denizens expectantly await the smile of lady luck, but luck rarely smiles. What gets respect is the perception that a person has some money; even the doormen at nightclubs give “a very large hello” to those who have money and “a very small hello” to those who don’t (“The Big Umbrella”).*
For women, life is often hardscrabble. A woman awaits a man who will take her away from the humiliation of the chorus line to “a little white house with green shutters and vines all around and about” (“Pick the Winner”). While marriage is the one bridge from poverty to economic comfort, more often than not interminable engagements end finally in disappointment. Runyon’s stories include quite a few destitute teenagers who become chorus girls and are promised marriage by unscrupulous characters who may even beat them. Yet some of his fictional women take advantage of and even betray gullible men. In “That Ever-Loving Wife of Hymie’s”), even though Hymie gives his wife every nickel he has to support her in style, she cheats on him.
Let us take a further look at Runyon’s New York during the Depression. Runyon’s imagined world wears the scars of a broken economic system. Jobless men haunt the streets at four in the morning in the hopes of borrowing a few dollars for rent at shabby hotels—or, more often, for gambling—and often awaken in the afternoon. While the musical comedy Guys and Dolls generally makes his Broadway citizens lovable characters, some of Runyon’s ruthless and desperate characters are murderers and use their revolvers and machine guns without compunction. In Runyon’s macho world violence is never far from the surface, and people are not infrequently shot.
The criminal justice system is often helpless in the face of gamblers, whiskey runners during Prohibition, and ruthless gangsters. Bank failures hurt little people. In “Broadway Financier,” Silk is a tiny seventeen-year-old orphan who has to work as a showgirl; her mother died heartbroken after losing her life’s savings earned from scrubbing floors. People don’t bathe every day or use deodorants and often have smells carried over from what they eat or do. Thus in “It Comes Up Mud,” the Runyon narrator says of Little Alfie, “what with hanging out with his horses most of the time, he never smells like any rose geranium.” A schizophrenic such as Cecil Earl “is subject to spells of being somebody else besides Cecil Earl,” while psychopaths roam the streets (“Broadway Complex”).
Runyon writes in the present tense as if to capture the immediacy of every conversation and the life of every story. He has a wonderful capacity for rendering the sounds, smells, and tastes of New York. His eye is the eye of a camera—the camera of tabloid newspapers for which he wrote—and his imagination is a visual one. No wonder that twenty of his stories became motion pictures and two, Little Miss Marker and Lady for a Day (based on “Madame La Gimp”) were major successes. His ear hears and renders gossip, street lingo, and the cacophony of city sounds. Perhaps Run
yon’s most fantastic fiction is that his retrospective narrator seems to have the capacity to accurately remember every word he hears.
In Runyon’s world corruption is rife. The police and even the racing authorities are far more concerned with protecting the wealthy than the class of citizens who are just trying to get by. The police are alternately unwilling or unable to intervene to prevent public or private mayhem. The police are often complicit with the gangsters. Not infrequently, mobsters seem to make the rules rather than the police. Thus if someone complains about how a mobster puts his enemies in sacks in such a way that the victim strangles himself when he awakes, the mobster will report the complainant to police headquarters (“Sense of Humor”).
Runyon sympathized with the dispossessed, yet admired those who excelled even if it was in gambling, manipulating the outcome of sports events, and crime. Thus he held in high regard Arnold Rothstein and Al Capone. The Broadway stories depict gangsters as merely another part of a complex socioeconomic system. They provide for those seeking liquor, speakeasies, gambling opportunities, showgirls, and sought-after sports tickets.
Runyon defined the image we hold of New York as the commercial and entertainment capital of American culture. Yet he portrayed its success as inextricably related to its aggressive, materialistic, and clandestine darker side. He not only helped invent the double image of New York as a romantic, exciting, glamorous city that was at the same time an unwholesome, edgy, dangerous place, but he also strongly suggested that this weird duality existed nowhere else.
He also understood the appeal of gangster chic. Do we not see the interest in the ruthless behavior and cynical speech of gangsters continuing in the popularity of Mario Puzo’s novels (the source of Francis Ford Coppola’s flamboyant Godfather films) and Martin Scorsese’s nihilistic portrayal of secondary mob figures in Good-fellas? One could also cite the blood-soaked Gangs of New York, Barry Levinson’s rough Bugsy, the chic toughness of the HBO series The Sopranos, and the hard-edged John Kander and Fred Ebb Jazz Age musical Chicago. Indebted to Runyon’s depiction of speakeasy culture during Prohibition, Chicago takes a similarly cynical and bemused attitude to the underworld and its complicit relation to the respectable world, even while stressing how the media create reality as a kind of theater for a voyeuristic audience.
RUNYON’S STYLE
Runyon invented a special language to render the variety, commotion, and speed of the modern city. Like Piet Mondrian’s painting Broadway Boogie Woogie (1942–43), Runyon’s style is dynamic, colorful, and exuberant. For his locutions, he borrowed and combined terms from vaudeville, jazz, newspaper headlines, gangster argot, sports, and diverse ethnic discourses, especially Yiddish and Italian. His sentences teem with life, move in several directions at once, and overflow with intensity. Without sacrificing the manic comic energy that he borrowed from vaudeville, he wrote with the loquacity of the New York culture that loved talk for its own sake. Like jazz musicians, his narrators relentlessly play on a central theme, but take off on solo flights or riffs that are oblique variations of that theme. Runyon does not often refer to jazz, but his expressive style, his verbal riffs, and his improvisation certainly owe something to it.
As a journalist, Runyon was taught to put the essential information in the first paragraph, and his fictional beginnings reflect that training by presenting the essential facts. The stories depend on a crisp slang that quickly reveals crucial information. He eschews glittery phrases.
His use of vernacular, slangy, often boozily accented Broadway speech inverted the expectations of high art and expressed his underlying skepticism about wealth, social position, and respectability in a world where money and power prevailed. If a passage is read aloud, it is evident how the sound of his language—tumultuous, cacophonous, brassy, and shrill—represents the world of Broadway. Sentences seem to wander away, as if they’ve had a drink or two at four in the morning, but eventually recover their bearings.
Runyon not only listened with his magnificent ear to the grammatically lax conversational speech that was characteristic of working-class New York, but also embroidered and transformed it into his own inimitable voice. He heard New York City talking—its sounds, its conflicts, its history, and its culture—and offered the rest of the English-speaking world his complex take on it.
The hardboiled, heavily stressed, consonant-loaded style of Runyon owed as much to the sounds of American entertainment as it did to gangster argot and popular journalism. In the New York accent of Runyon’s characters, the consonants are always articulated and the final ones are enunciated fully; the speech slows down as the sentence ends and the final consonant is orated as if a long closing note.
New York culture emphasizes talk as performance and is often accompanied by head and hand gestures almost as a jazz pianist plays with flourishes of his hands, head, and feet. New York conversation is often restless, with the participants intermittently looking around, glancing at their watches, making eye contact and looking away, moving away from the person to whom they are talking as they think of their next destination—or their next conversational opportunity within a room or at a dining table—as their fellow conversationalist finishes. To some outsiders this is rude, but this is the essence of the style in Runyon’s stories.
Just as the stories often end with surprises and reversals, so do the sentences. Indeed Runyon often inverts grammatical expectations, or uses a sequence of clauses to gradually undermine the original premise of a sentence’s first independent clause. The last sentences of a story are memorable for their twists and turns, their wheedling and seduction of the reader into accepting as logical what is in fact outrageous. Take the last sentence of “Situation Wanted”: “Well, afterward I hear that the first lot Asleep sells is to the family of the late Benny Barker, the bookie, who passes away during the race meeting in Miami, Florida, of pneumonia, superinduced by lying out all night in a ditch of water near the home of Miss Anna Lark, although I understand that the fact that Benny is tied up in a sack in the ditch is considered a slight contributing cause of his last illness.” All the apparent circumlocutions at the outset are, upon a second reading, informative and without fluff. Perhaps Asleep found Benny Barker with his fiancée. Indeed, are not many sentences like dances in burlesque and even vaudeville with their playful teasing, arousing of expectations, and surprise reversals? And entire stories bear some relation to the stories of comic burlesque entertainers, stories that depend on punch lines. The rhythms of delivery owe something to stage comedians, often Jewish, whose stories are almost always narrated in the present tense.
The unity of Runyon’s stories as a collective corpus derives in part from the consistency of the Broadway narrator’s hardbitten ironic style and in part from recurring characters like Ambrose Hammer, the drama critic, who is an amateur detective (and may owe something to Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett) and is always falling in love; Waldo Winchester, another scribe, whose name suggests Walter Winchell; Dave the Dude; the Brooklyn hoodlum Harry the Horse and his friends Spanish John and Little Isadore; Sam the Gonoph, the ticket broker; Hot Horse Herbie; John Brannigan, the cop who comes from the same neighborhood as Big Jule and who has his own code in enforcing the law; and Spider McCoy, the fight manager who is always searching for the next heavyweight champion of the world.
ANNOTATIONS FOR RUNYON’S BROADWAY STORIES
“Romance in the Roaring Forties” (July 1929, Cosmopolitan) refers to the West Forties in Manhattan, not to the 1940s. Waldo Winchester is a comic version of Runyon’s tabloid rival Walter Winchell before they became close friends in Runyon’s final years. The two were the most important tabloid voices in America between the 1920s and Runyon’s death in 1946.
Dave the Dude may be based, as Pete Hamill suggests, on Frank Costello, whom Runyon knew quite well and who used brains more than brawn, but I think he is more likely an amalgam of colorful bookmakers and bootleggers with whom Runyon was familiar.
Billy Perry works as a tap dan
cer for Missouri Martin at the Sixteen Hundred Club; Martin is based on a ribald New York speakeasy manager who called herself Texas Guinan and ran the Three Hundred Club with sexy hostesses; her real name was Mary Louise Cecilia.
“A Very Honorable Guy” (August 1929, Cosmopolitan), Runyon’s second story, introduces Armand Rosenthal, known as The Brain. He is based on the gambler and loan shark Arnold Rothstein, who fixed the 1919 World Series and with whom Runyon consorted at Lindy’s and whom Runyon considered a friend. (Runyon may also have had in mind Herman Rosenthal, a gambler who was murdered by corrupt police in 1912.) In “Baseball Hattie,” Runyon uses the name Arnold Fibleman for a character who tries to fix a baseball game.
“Madame La Gimp” (October 1929, Cosmopolitan) is the source of Frank Capra’s 1933 film Lady for a Day and his upbeat remake in 1961, A Pocketful of Miracles. The latter film fuses the nameless apple lady who takes care of The Brain in “The Brain Goes Home” (see below) with Madame La Gimp, an alcoholic street person who sells old newspapers and faded flowers.
“Dark Dolores” (November 1929, Cosmopolitan) is the first of Runyon’s noir stories and the last and darkest of the first four stories that appeared in 1929. Dave the Dude plays an important role, as he does in three of the first four stories. He presides over a major gangster gathering in Atlantic City. When Waldo Winchester complains there are no longer dolls around killing guys, he is referring to the Edward Hall-Eleanor Mills and the Ruth Snyder–Judd Gray murder cases, which Runyon covered in all their lurid details in 1926 and 1927 and which are anthologized in Runyon’s Trials and Other Tribulations (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1947).
“Lillian” (February 1, 1930, Collier’s) is one of a group of early stories (others include “A Very Honorable Guy,” “Madame La Gimp,” and “Social Error”) where Runyon uses fairy-tale endings to transform lonely, isolated, alienated, rejected, and powerless figures into people living comfortable domestic lives. Illegal drinking during Prohibition, which lasted from 1920 to 1933, played a large role in Runyon’s early stories.