by Paul French
The Farren’s Follies tour starts in the outports—Tientsin, Weihaiwei—then goes on to Manila, Yokohama, Tokyo, and Kobe, down to British Hong Kong, Dutch Batavia, French Saigon and Hanoi, and even across as far as Bombay to entertain the Raj. It’s an incestuous, claustrophobic world: the girls four to a room, the boys sharing as best they can manage. They bunk up on train couchettes, cram into steamer cabins, their rooms lined with strung-up laundry. The girls smoke incessantly, steal each other’s lipsticks, flirt with the bachelor griffins in Tientsin and Hong Kong and the bored planters in Kuala Lumpur and Batavia; a few disappear, lured away on the promise of a better life. The Malay States rubber planters see an end to their lonely nights; they give ship stewards and hotel porters something to dream of. The Follies annoy the staid old wives of the port towns they visit; the missionaries try to get them banned for indecency. The boys stay out late with older women, making money on the side.
Nellie is charged with keeping the girls in line. They need doctors; they need shoulders to cry on. They’re a type—mostly Russian émigrés prone to extremes of temper; Nellie clones, chosen by Joe personally, with large, dark eyes. They mascara their eyelashes heavily, rouge their cheeks to accentuate their good bone structure, stay out of the sun to keep their skin marble-white, eat intermittently to keep their figures. Hair is cut short, styled close to their heads, with a satin sheen; they use salt and baking soda to whiten their nicotine-stained teeth.
The girls are often trouble. They can come on like good Russian Orthodox girls, but many whore for easy money in Singapore. Doc Borovika, who hangs out with the ham and eggs gang up at the Venus, is the man girls went to when they get back to town. In Shanghai the doc is essential, always on Joe’s payroll and those of several dozen bordellos and cabarets. The doc claims to be a former Austrian Great War flying ace forced to decamp east amid the breakup of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire. Maybe he had been some kind of Red Baron; maybe he hadn’t. But he’s a legit doc, and his services are specialised. The girls have track marks from the doc’s shots of arsenic compound to counteract the syphilis, and more track marks for the shots of bismuth to counteract the toxic reaction to the arsenic shots. Miss a few shots and you relapse fast. The doc looks after the scrapes the girls get when they get unlucky, the pox treatments, and those little pharmacy powders that keep the girls that use straight. He keeps Jack in supplies of Benzedrine for the long nights and sorts Babe for heroin pills, what the Shanghai dealers call Cadillacs, when she comes up short to pay for the good stuff.
Onboard ship and between rehearsals everyone is relaxed. They gather on the ship’s deck for group photographs—fifteen, sixteen girls in canvas shorts and linen shirts knotted to reveal their flat stomachs; a half dozen boys with suntans and tight black swimming trunks; Joe, still good-looking but his hair receding fast, in white flannel trousers, a white shirt and always a tie, whatever the humidity; Nellie in a linen suit and floppy hat to keep the sun off her face. Joe has his arm round Nellie’s waist. He holds her close and means it. The world is his oyster; the Follies are a hit in the treaty ports, the remoter outports wherever foreigners trade, and colonial towns. Where’s the harm in doing a favour for a mensch like Jack back in Shanghai? Little does Joe realise that in taking on that side business and sorting those slots for Jack, he has changed the course of their futures forever and set them on a path of doomed codependency.
5
Jack Riley’s got a shipment coming. The bill of lading says rattan furniture, or maybe ebony picture frames, or the workings for clocks … Inside it’s slots machinery, one-armed bandits, ready to be assembled. Jack’s old Manila contacts had come through, shipping direct courtesy of U.S. Navy transports in exchange for cash wired via Joe, and with the supply sergeants bought off at both ends.
Jack and Mickey park up on East Broadway by the gates of the Shanghai–Hongkew Wharf in a borrowed flatbed truck. It’s early October 1933, and already there’s a chill in the air. They sign the paperwork, slipping the customs squares a few bills. Mickey has rousted some ex-marines who never made it home and opted to keep on enjoying the Shanghai good life to act as trusted stevedores for a few bucks apiece. They load the crates onto the flatbed.
Shanghai is getting slotified, courtesy of Jack T. Riley—every Settlement bar, Frenchtown boîte, and Hongkew honky-tonk joint wants one. Fifteen Chinese bucks for the rental per week and the lion’s share of the take for Jack, with enough kicked back to the venue to make it a worthwhile investment. The Chinese love the new ‘dime-eating tigers’ too, and every Chinese palais de danse wants them.
Back at the Manhattan, the men crowbar open the crates, and Jack puts all that Navy mechanical training to work assembling the things. Riley is the self-declared exclusive supplier of slot machines in Shanghai—from the Northern External Roads up by the Settlement’s border with Chinese Paoshan across to the Western Roads and out to semi-rural Hungjao; Yangtszepoo (‘Y’Poo’ to cops and Shanghailanders) to the far east of the Settlement’s borders down to Frenchtown; from the back-alley juke joints to the uptown parlours and gentlemen’s clubs. If anyone thinks they’re going to take a slot from some other arriviste get-rich-quick driftwood bum who thinks it might be a good idea to start importing, there’ll be trouble. Jack owns and controls every slot machine in a city famously hooked on gambling.
The Navy transports keep on coming, and by Christmas 1933 the Settlement is swimming in slot machines. The SMP didn’t even notice them coming in—they’d never seen them in Shanghai before, didn’t know what they were. Slots are the new big thing and, though the missionaries and the Shanghai Women’s Purity League don’t like them, Shanghai’s got no laws against them. Jack’s got a new nickname courtesy of the North-China Daily News: the ‘Slots King of Shanghai’. Jesus, he even puts his name on the tokens! Immortalised in brass, stamped ‘ETR’, which every leatherneck, squaddie, driftwood, and civilian knows stands for Edward Thomas ‘Jack’ Riley—five cents, ten cents, twenty cents, a dollar ‘good-fors’ redeemable all over town. Jack has effectively created a new alterative currency in Shanghai.
Business is good, and soon Jack needs more muscle than just Mickey to collect the coin. Those same ex-marines gone AWOL come in handy. They’re big lugs who don’t think too much and have a lot to lose—in other words, folks who can’t call the cops. Most have past careers as standover men, robbing small-time Chinese and Russian drug dealers and boosting illegal back-alley casinos. Jack figures they’re just the sort who’d rob him, so he puts them on the payroll instead and charms them with his old Yang Pat patter and Tulsa vowels. What they lack in polish they make up for in intimidation, warning off anyone thinking of grabbing Jack Riley’s take for themselves. Jack pays them, liquors them up at the Bamboo Hut, lets them take their pick of the Manhattan’s girls, and makes sure they get suited, booted, and shaved, even forms them up on weekends as a baseball team. Jack’s Town Team of ex-marines and nightlife types wins the city league and also funds an orphanage for abandoned baby girls out in Hungjao on slots money. The men are all loyal to Jack. Soon they’re known all over town as the ‘Friends of Riley’; think twice before you cross them, start brawling in one of Jack’s joints, or question the honesty of his slot machines too loudly, or the Friends may acquaint your head with the filthy flagstones of Blood Alley.
6
The Follies return home to Shanghai in the steamy summer of 1934, to a new revue at the Paramount, a humungous new ballroom up on Yu Yuen Road by the old Bubbling Well Cemetery where the Settlement meets the Western External Roads. It has a neon tower that proclaims the Paramount a dreamworld, with Tokyo café décor, art deco lamps, and a mixed Chinese–Shanghailander crowd. It’s the latest thing—the Chinese call it Bailuomen, the gate to a hundred pleasures. The moneyed Shanghainese love the place; the Shanghailander 400 enjoy the sprung dance floor. It’s the new place to be seen. The Paramount’s status is sealed when Shanghai’s richest bullion dealer, Simmons, hires out the entire place for his daughter Alice�
��s twenty-first birthday party, and the social pages of the China Coast newspapers can talk of nothing, and nowhere, else. Immediately afterwards, the junction of Yu Yuen and the Bubbling Well Roads is a seething mass of chauffeured limousines jostling to pull up curbside and disgorge the young, rich, and beautiful of the metropolis into the stunning foyer of the Paramount.
Joe lines up the house chorus girls and calls them his Peaches—the Paramount Peaches, no less—and sets up Shanghai’s longest tap line with Nellie front and centre. The theatre is gorgeous, but the dressing room is distinctly less so, with low ceilings and one tiny window-cum–air vent that lets in little more than the screech of the municipal trams and nonstop car horns. A couple of low-watt bulbs provide barely enough light. Chinese dressers cluster by the door, and an old Russian seamstress sits in the corner.
But this is the life—out of the dim dressing room and towards the brightly lit stage comes the chorus. Joe is at the top of the stairs, checking the line for dirty fingernails, too much greasepaint, visible track marks. Then later he’s at the stage door, crowded with fans and young griffins eager to escort the showgirls to one of the Yu Yuen Road cabaret bars round the corner. It’s hopeless; the girls have better places to go, older, better-heeled patrons to spend time with. The swells offer dinner at Ciro’s with white-uniformed waiters and young boys serving tea, or late-night cocktails at Victor Sassoon’s brand-spanking-new Tower Club at the top of the Cathay Hotel. For the Peaches, the trick is to get dinner, go dancing, snag a little treat or two they can pawn later or some cash, all without giving it up. Late-night motorcar rides round the circular Rubicon Road, a shady back table at the Black Cat cabaret in Frenchtown, tableside at the private roulette wheels illicitly spinning in the suites of the Burlington Hotel courtesy of old-time Brit gangster Bill Hawkins, Sasha Vertinsky’s late-night Russian cabaret with the bad boys at the Gardenia on Great Western Road, champagne and Viennese torch songs courtesy of Lily Flohr at the Elite Bar on Medhurst Road—then always the fumble, the grope, the wandering hands.
Nellie herself is still the main object of everyone’s desire; Joe’s got the spot man keeping a light on her, and her alone, all the time. Every head turns when she enters the Paramount—red crêpe de chine dress, long black fur with the collar up, a black cloche hat, dark eyes, red cheeks, ruby-red lipstick, and a waft of Mitsouko. If every man who claimed to have bedded Nellie really had, she’d have been the busiest woman in the Settlement. But Nellie is above and beyond the reach of them all.
After the early show at the Paramount, Jack and Babe roll up in Jack’s new sportscar to take in the city’s largest ballroom for themselves. Nellie makes sure the coffee is strong for Jack and there’s some dope for Babe. Once Babe has kvetched with Nellie some and Jack has chewed the fat with Joe, the Slots King’s got business to attend to.
* * *
Jack Riley’s Friday night bag run starts before the mass of punters rolls into the Manhattan looking to get drunk and laid, while the bored Natashas are still passing the time dancing with each other to the gramophone. It’s out into a sweltering, humid Blood Alley, soon to be a roiling, roistering strip of sweat-stained uniforms, cajoling working girls, and curious slummers. A Chinese driver is at the wheel of the Packard with Mickey O’Brien riding shotgun, a new Friend called Schmidt with a Mauser under his armpit in back along with Riley, and a large padlocked trunk for the coin haul.
Business first: the boys head to the Bamboo Hut to check the shroff office and see that the ledger keepers are minding the chits and there are no seriously bad debts mounting up. Shanghai’s chit system means the officer types and the swells can just sign for their booze and scoff and settle up later with the shroffs, but there are always a few who think they can run up a tab and then skip town without settling. Then Jack is off to the 37427 Club to see the Portuguese about shipping arrangements for more slots. Demand is high, and Manila can’t spare any more, so Joe is tapping Macao for more machines, and Macao is Portuguese territory. Then the nightly slots run: three circuits of machines across the city, each visited once every three days, except for the Fourth Marines Club on the Bubbling Well Road, which is emptied nightly, sometimes twice.
Jack and Mickey head into the joints, collect the coin, sort the machines with tokens, rejig the mechanisms to pay less or more, depending on the take, and schmooze the barkeeps. They sling the canvas coin bags into the back of the Packard where the German Schmidt, with a crooked nose that has to have been broken at least twice, sits with his burly arm round the trunk and his Mauser in full view.
Tonight’s run? The Settlement, starting with Van’s Dutch Village Inn, Love Lane, back of the Bubbling Well Road. A Dutchman named Van, unsurprisingly, and his Japanese wife run the place. It’s small and intimate; Van and his kimonoed voor vrouw boss lady keep watch from a small square enclosure in the middle of the joint. A three-piece orchestra and plenty of sing-alongs entertain the regular crowd, which invariably includes a bunch of off-duty SMP, while the house special—Schiedam moutwijn, malt wine—lays out more than one customer before the end of the night. Up Love Lane to the St. Anna Ballroom, aka Santa Anna’s—a big dance floor with a full band, Earl Whaley and his Red Hot Syncopaters delivering big-band music and broadcasting live over the radio from their studio upstairs. Santa Anna’s is Marine-heavy, a longtime fave of the Fourth Marine Corps given its close proximity to Maggie Kennedy’s long-standing bordello. Next up is the Handy Randy bar and then the Jinx on Bubbling Well Road: German, beefsteaks and beers, small dance floor with Russian and Jewish hostesses, favoured by the Royal Navy’s Jack Tars. Parsimonious and poorly paid Jack Tars never pump as much coin into the one-armed bandit as the always-lucky leathernecks. Finally, the Marines Club for the big haul. The slots are emptied, the owners squared on their cut. The next night it’s Frenchtown, then Hongkew to complete the circuit before repeating it all over again, bringing in bigger and bigger hauls of coin.
By three-thirty a.m., they’re in the Manhattan’s back room again, with only solid regulars out front boozing, Friends armed on the doors front and back. It’s time for the night’s hard count; all that small change needs to make some serious dollars. Jack is on one of his regular caffeine binges, crumbling in bennies to stave off exhaustion. Mickey makes up a big pot of coffee the consistency of Pootung marsh mud for the boss on the percolator hot plate, strong and mean just as he likes it. Riley drinks gallons of the stuff daily, wired to the gills, yet makes Mickey smoke his cigarette outside. The windows and doors are shut tight despite the stifling August night.
Count, count, count. Coin piles across the table, with one pile equalling one dollar—bagged and ready to be banked. Jack, Mickey, and Schmidt are counting fast, marking off ten-dollar amounts on slips of paper for a final total. Pile after pile after pile—dollar after dollar after dollar. Jack is the living embodiment of the ethos ‘watch the pennies and the pounds take care of themselves’.
All done, all tallied, all sorted and squared away. Cash is stashed out in the back room of the Manhattan in Riley’s gigantic American-made and specially imported safe, ready for banking with some discreet Ningpoese moneymen next morning. The men from Ningpo who’d moved to Shanghai and created banking empires are just the type of bankers Jack likes: tight-lipped. Dawn up, first daylight, birdsong over the big-band swing from the jukebox—Paul Whiteman’s ‘Smoke Gets in Your Eyes’, the Settlement’s big hit that year. It really does—out front in the bar the ashtrays are piled high, the whisky bottles with dregs left for the boys. Jack’s blinking fast and sketchy, but the job is done, and he’s a richer man courtesy of the slots addicts of Shanghai. Schmidt and a couple of other Friends are left to guard the safe till the bank opens. It’s time for another pot of coffee, maybe some ham and eggs at the Venus with Sam, Joe, Nellie, and Babe. If there was a better business than this, Jack Riley believed it to be the best-kept secret in all of God’s great kingdom.
7
In September, Jackpot Jack decides to expand and go legi
t. He takes eighty per cent of what goes in the slots, and his stash has grown exponentially. He’s filled several safes in the Manhattan and his pad, not to mention what’s with the Ningpoese moneymen. He’s bought Shanghai Power Company shares, Shanghai Telephone Company Shares, gas company shares, shares in the tram companies in both the Settlement and Frenchtown. But still it keeps on coming in and needs investing.
Don’t be thinking Jackpot Jack has no ambition. He’s looking to move up and move on from the drunks of Blood Alley. Even old Sam Levy at the Venus Café is going upmarket with his Manila Rhythm Boys and a troupe of thick-legged, high-kicking Korean dancers Joe has taught to cancan, while Al Israel’s Del Monte swings till three or four in the morning with another Joe Farren–choreographed floor show, and Demon on the door keeping the drunks and the squaddies out. Jack has taken in the shows at the Moon Palace up on the Szechuen Road. He’s seen the Peaches at the Paramount, and he’s cogniscent of what ‘Ziegfeld’ Joe Farren does. Joe’s got a three-score hoofer chorus line and a hundred dance hostesses over there. Jack wants some of that, some of the crowd that orders champagne and knows the real stuff from the apple cider fizz. Joe might be a yid from some shithole in Europe but he’s treated like a king: the swells love him and his dame. Jack plans to buy himself some of that class. It’s all about the big Shanghai money, the taipan money. Those gents spend large and long, all night, and don’t start swinging fists when they’re tanked.
How to make the leap? Joe tells Jack about a chain of joints up for sale that are just the thing. So Jack buys into DD’s, a trio of swell clubs a brisk walk from Blood Alley, but a million miles in clientele, with a flagship on the Avenue Joffre, Frenchtown’s major boulevard. ‘DD’s: the place to go for swank and swing.’ It’s dinner and dance with some good entertainment after Joe hooks Jack up with suave Romanian crooner Tino and his orchestra, who also needed a move up from the Red Rose. Now Jack is in competition with the Paramount and the swankier joints of the Settlement and Frenchtown. It’s all done, except for one thing: if Jack is going uptown, putting on a tux, chitty-chatting with the 400, he can’t do it with a bleary-eyed hophead in tow.