Not all these mix hashish with their politics. But sex is considered a mandatory gesture of complete conversion.
Ironically enough, while all this over-emphasis on tolerance, equality and the brotherhood of man has taken on the magnitude of big business, the Negroes are decidedly anti-Semitic, and Jew-baiting is a constant maneuver in organized and disorganized form. Certain Negro gangs, mostly composed of zoot-suited teen-agers, make a regular practice of it and call it "Jew-hunting." They find fertile ground for it in the nearby Bronx and set off on expeditions to beat up Jewish children going to and from school.
To understand the Negro as a gangster one must look with accusing eyes at the white toughs who so long terrorized the Negroes.
Wherever the blacks poured across a street to take up new habitations that would accommodate the constant influx from the South and widening opportunities for those already in the North, seeking to escape from their hideous encirclement under unspeakable conditions, they were fought and often killed by hooligans from such old mobs as the Hancocks, the Irish Dukes, the Rainbows and the Goat Hill Hoodlums, who originated in the days of Irish squatter possession of Lexington Avenue and west, north of 96th Street.
The Negroes defended themselves the best they could, and under the guidance of grownup "captains and war counsellors," as they are still known, they organized what now constitutes about 75 gangs in upper Manhattan. They run from 25 to 40 and some to 200.
Among the principal Negro gangs are the Sabres, the Socialists, the Chancellors, the Buccaneers, the Copians, the Barons and the Slicksters.
Their activities now range from fighting each other for the pure love of bloodshed (called "rumbles") to highway robbery. Often fights are faked so that in the confusion and the crowd a quick job of larceny is inconspicuous.
The Chancellors, a strict organization with rank and titles, according to age, strength, bravado and accomplishments, is typical. The groups run progressively up from Tiny Tims to Midgets to Juniors to Seniors. Each class takes orders from the one above and all are as strictly ruled and disciplined as were the Czar's Cossacks, by their war counsellors, known as "bigs."
Not the least of their power is in their auxiliaries, girls ranging from 12 years up, who start as Sub-debs and graduate to become Debs. They are usually the mistresses of the Seniors. Their roles are important before, during and after acts of violence.
By police regulations, only females may search females. The Debs and Sub-debs are usually from 50 to 500 feet behind the warriors. They carry the weapons. Should there be a sudden police charge, the girls evaporate in all directions and the men are found unarmed. But the moment the first fist flies, they rush in and slip the took to the Chancellors. Very often they join in the fight with them and punch, bite and stab, and are quite as vicious as the males.
The weapons, featuring the switch-blade spring knife which is the Harlem standby, also run to first-rate shooting arms and homemade guns which are converted from lengths of tubing. Billies, sword-canes and ice-picks are standard equipment. The harmless-looking souvenir toy bats sold at the ball parks, which can crack a skull at a single swipe, are regularly employed.
Developed from self-defense against the whites, the lust for battle and pillage has become a menace to the respectable Negroes. No colored gangster will stoop to work. Once he belongs, he must make his living with his fists and weapons or he must have a woman support him. Harlem is probably the only community on earth where the women earn more money than do the men. Thousands of them are employed as servants and others do well plying less savory trades. It is regarded as manly and superior for a man to be kept, and to prove his masculinity he is expected occasionally to beat his woman to show her who is master.
The younger thugs, who have not reached that lofty estate, but who must not attempt to be Alger boys, bluntly live by robbery. In some sections a Negro boy or girl not belonging to a powerful gang scarcely dares leave home with a nickel. In addition to being despoiled, they are frequently manhandled.
As a result, many Negro families have sent their children to New Jersey and Long Island and even back south of the Mason and Dixon Line because of the intolerable abuses from their own race.
In fact, Congressman Powell, whose district comprises Harlem, and his actress wife spend most of their time on Long Island. Powell, a light-skinned, but professional Negro and bleeding heart, and Mrs. Powell—Hazel Scott—ride in a chauffeur-driven Cadillac limousine. Miss Scott was cited as a left-winger by the Un-American Activities committee.
On his own statement, a 13-year-old Negro boy, who held up a white schoolteacher at gun point and was caught while fleeing, a clasp knife in his hand and his .32-calibre revolver in his belt, was a member of the Purple Cross gang, with a hangout at 114th Street and St. Nicholas Avenue.
He was ambitious to join the Turks, a gang of older boys. He was told he would have to prove he was tough enough. The Turk leaders gave him the gun and told him to pull a stick-up—"then come back and we'll see about taking you in."
One juvenile Harlem gang has another test—before a tyro can be accepted as a full member, he must commit a rape!
The Negroes took merciless punishment in the big depression. And the recovery was slow for them. By 1940 they were angry and sullen. Then hell broke loose, fomented by meddlesome agitators of both races. A bloody and paralyzing race riot exploded.
The police, suddenly allowed to wade in with night-sticks, finished it quickly. But the causes could not be clubbed down. The resentment and bitterness went underground, to emerge through influences described above, but with few flare-ups because the whites virtually quit going to Harlem.
For months, no taxi driver would take whites to Harlem destinations, and some even refused to drive through the district. Even today few white hackmenwill take you to a Harlem number or answer a hail in that region.
The muggings and the stick-ups soon began to slop far over the borders and today the extent of Negro crime in all the boroughs scandalizes the decent elements of the race. White men have the money. And since they no longer come up to be taken, the goons spread to greener fields.
Lait and Mortimer have set up above only a camera-eye fragment of their long experience and what they learned first-hand in courts, police stations, and day and night contacts with every class and phase of New York's metropolitan manifestations.
They have eaten in Harlem hideaways and imbibed at Harlem's beehive bars. They have had the confidence of Negro detectives, who are too ashamed of the behavior of some of their people to gloss it over.
This chapter will reform nothing. It was written with no such intent. Its sole function is to inform, and the information should serve as a warning.
Harlem is no place for joy hoppers or joy poppers. Outside of the few white people who have business there and who are familiarly recognized, the sight of a white person in the black precincts brings one of several instant reactions:
If it's a white man "on the make," the Negroes are infuriated, though the dregs of their own women are there to solicit him; if a white woman is seen, she is either a tramp or a nut with a yen for colored men, and though plenty of colored men are willing, Harlem looks on her as a pariah and an intruder; if a whiteman and wife walk the avenues, looking curiously here and there, they are peepers who regard the Negroes as the zoo visitors do the exhibits in their cages; if white men go to the worst parts of Harlem to get drunk—God help them.
The old days are over. Gawkers and the idly curious who don't know their Harlem may gamble their very lives. Therefore, the gospel of this chapter is: If you haven't legitimate business there—
Stay Away From Harlem!
12. AND YE TOOK ME IN!
Duringthe last 12 years and growing every year, there has descended on Manhattan Island like a locust plague an influx of Puerto Ricans.
They arrive now frequently at the rate of 2,000 a month and there are today more than 600,000 natives of the island (one authority calculates 710,000) cramped, some 30 in one cold-water flat, mostly in one section of this great island, the whole of which is much smaller than theirs in area.
One of every four persons born in this generation in Puerto Rico is in New York; one of every 13 New Yorkers is a Puerto Rican.
Referring to these Caribbean wards of the nation as a plague is not prompted by prejudice, anger or careless use of phraseology.
Puerto Ricans were not born to be New Yorkers. They are mostly crude farmers, subject to congenital tropical diseases, physically unfitted for the northern climate, unskilled, uneducated, non-English-speaking and almost impossible to assimilate and condition for healthful and useful existence in an active city of stone and steel.
It would be tragic enough if the sorry results were the consequences only of desperate displaced persons fleeing to a haven of hope from the circumscribed possibilities of their birthplace.
But the story is far more sordid. A majority of thesepeople were lured here deliberately, because, as American citizens, they can vote. They are a power behind ex-Congressman Vito Marcantonio, until recently the only American Labor Party member of the House, who rules the wretched section into which a majority of the 600,000 have poured from leaky ships and from miserable chartered planes which are almost beyond description.
The Puerto Ricans at this moment are costing New York City $12,000,000 a year in relief. There is no residence-period requirement, that having been knocked out during the LaGuardia administration, when Marcantonio's word could wipe out law.
Not only are many of these Puerto Ricans on relief within an hour after their feet land on a dock or a secondary airport, but some are already booked on the dole in advance, while they are in the air or on the water.
Until recently Marcantonio maintained a full-time representative in the office of the Welfare Department, whose business it was to get his constituents not only registered on the rolls but also provided with fat and flowing allowances, using broadly every channel created for emergency cases. Now it is done surreptitiously, but still done.
For voting, the law requires one year in the state, four months in the county, one month in the district. But it is impossible to check, even if the holdover handout officials would want to. The Puerto Ricans all look alike, their names all sound alike and if an inspector calls in one of the swarming flats in the teeming tenements, nobody speaks English.
Travel agencies whip up the movement through agents in Puerto Rico. The newspapers and the bill-boards and even signs stuck beside the dirt roads of the remote regions shout with bargain rates as low as $20 for a flight to New York; ship transportation is sometimes even cheaper than that.
Very few Puerto Ricans at home have or ever have had $20. But the money seems to come from somewhere.
Privately, these poverty-numbed, naïve natives are sold a bill of the tremendous possibilities in the great New York which they have seen in the movies and in the patent insides of their local sheets. They are told that here fortunes await many and the rest can quickly go on relief for sums undreamt-of by them or their fathers' fathers.
The result is a sullen, disappointed, disillusioned mass of people, alien to everything that spells New York. The children quickly learn to resent the fact that, though they are Americans, they are foreigners who cannot speak the language and are thus teased and humiliated in schools and on the streets.
Because they are dark of complexion, they are commonly classified as Negroes and share a large portion of the unfortunate prejudice which still bedevils non-Caucasians, even in a community as broad-minded as New York.
Few can obtain employment, though Marcantonio and a few other politicians place them, to a conspicuous disproportion, in minor public jobs, in hospitals, prisons, public works and other institutions where no skills and no English are required.
The youths of both sections run wild. They take on the vilest habits of their surroundings, and the description elsewhere in this book of conditions in Harlem apply very generally to the sections where the Puerto Ricans have swarmed.
As in the case of Harlem, the Puerto Ricans are concentrated in a small area but do not entirely make that their pleasure ground.
During the last two years there has been a steady flow toward Broadway, until the corners in the lower 50's are crowded day and night with zoot-suited men who hang around the riffraff of the amusement centers and so behave that it has long been necessary to post extra police south of Columbus Circle, around the clock.
They soon become marijuana addicts, throng into cheap and crowded dives which cater to their trade, and many become violent criminals with gun and knife. Many of them are dope-peddlers while on relief.
In their own district the children are natural cop-haters, throw stones at prowl cars and drop bricks from the roofs on uniformed policemen.
There are no tougher saloons in Marseilles, Shanghai, Port Said or Panama City than those which seethe with these island immigrants. 108th Street and Second Avenue is the headquarters of the international dope racket.
The crime rate is stupendous and it is increasing and spreading.
One General Sessions judge who had just finished a six-week trial calendar of criminal cases covering the entire borough of Manhattan reported to one of your authors that more than 40 per cent of convictions during that term had been of Puerto Ricans, of whom 2 per cent were born on the United States mainland.
The disease statistics are even more shocking.
Not a few of the natives are cursed with tuberculosis and syphilis before they arrive; a Puerto Rican leper was discovered not long ago. But once they are here, the venereal incidence is marked with a rapid rise, due to association with low prostitutes, with the result that a random health inspection of 1,000 Puerto Rican males between the ages of 15 and 40 revealed 80 per cent infected.
The conditions which cause these frightful statistics are largely parallel to those which afflict the Negroes, but the Puerto Ricans are harmed even more by these conditions because they are strangers, because they have not come of their own free will, like adventurers of courage and enterprise from other lands, who brave regions beyond their horizon to fight for their opportunities.
Most of these are not only outmatched in every battle of life in the fastest and biggest city in the world, but they were far behind in their own unhappy land before they left, and that was why they left.
The callous exploitation of these weaklings is one of the dirtiest crimes in the long and shameful recordof practical American politics. None knows better than those who have primed and prompted and financed the exodus, what they are doing to these victims and what they are doing to the city where they bring them in gutted one-motor planes, sitting on bucket seats, sometimes so crowded that many stand all the way, air-sick and already homesick.
The sight of one of these outmoded flying cattle boats, long since discarded by the government services and regular transport lines, is horrifying and nauseating.
The pilgrims are dropped off at Newark or small private landing places, carrying bundles and babies and the weight of fear and sorrow, through which the gleam of new hope cannot penetrate.
They are marched in and carried in dilapidated buses directly to the filthy, shrieking, miserable rookeries where housing has long been exhausted. This means that each new arrival will be shoe-horned into already jammed, unsanitary, indecent lodgings, to sleep on the floor or even in a hallway.
The relief figures look good and they should, because they are designedly excessive. But prices are high and before these strangers arrive the sharks are waiting and smacking their lips.
And so they constitute not only a horde unfitted for the new habitat, but they quickly become resentful under the hostile conditions, so different from the utopia which smooth-tongued agents painted to people who had never been off the island on which they were born.
Not only that frame of mind, but public support, with a tremendous factor of idleness, proximity to the regions of lowest vice and highest crime, easy opportunity to mingle in the swirl of the unwashed underworld, rapidly perverts them.
They pick up the bad habits of those with whom they are forced to associate, and these they amplify with the enthusiasm of untutored islanders for illegitimate revelry and dissipation.
Merchants of every form of dope, vice and alcohol await them eagerly with merchandise within their means.
Finding themselves unable physically, mentally or financially to compete, they turn to guile and wile and the steel blade, the traditional weapon of the sugar-cane cutter, mark of their blood and heritage.
New York, of course, is not easily pushed around and turns on them, which makes them more bitter and more belligerent, which brings upon them heavier punishment, which makes them uglier, and thus a constant and increasing spiral of hatred spins around these hundreds of thousands.
Some manage to straggle back. But it is an established fact that the city holds and fascinates and imprisons those who have once felt the magic of its embrace.
Columbia University made a survey of the situation. The governor of Puerto Rico put through an appropriation for the island legislature to run down the facts. The Welfare Department of the city and state have thrown up their hands in helpless surrender to thismodern scandal, entirely unforeseen only a few years ago, though Puerto Ricans have had free access without passport to the United States since 1898.
The City Welfare Council, in a sympathetic report glossing over much of the situation, nevertheless described"back yards piled high with garbage," also one block so infested with drunks, marijuana smokers, brawlers, holdup men and insulters of women that decent citizens and even the police deliberately avoid it.
So, this chapter is not merely an observation about a portion of Manhattan Island. It is an exposition of a situation which will echo in the halls of Congress and will write its own pages in the history of the nation, because, as has been pointed out, it is far from static; in every phase it is growing and the sorry end is nowhere in sight.
13. UP IN CENTRAL PARK
Michael Todd, a theatrical producer who hails from Chicago, made a valuable contribution to the unorthodox history of Manhattan with the long-run hit musical play,Up in Central Park, later made into a movie.
Those fortunate enough to have seen this gay operetta may remember references to a crooked land-grab in connection with the building of the park, which packed the coffers of many Tammanyites of the day.
We have thousands of acres of parks in New York; a world-famed zoo and botanical gardens in the Bronx. None, however, can compare with Central Park, a jewel of emerald green in a rectangular setting of mansions and museums and skyscrapers.
But Central Park is not the chaste oasis its verdure and placid lakes might imply.
The prime spot for a pick-up (if you're not hoity-toity) is the Central Park Mall, during the summer, though Riverside Drive runs a close second—if you're a sailor.
Some years ago, the beneficent city fathers inaugurated a program of free dances in Central Park. They were primarily designed for young men and women of the poorer districts.
They also drew degenerates, rapists and wolves.
It's standard practice there to ask any gal to danceand it doesn't seem to matter what color you are or she is.
Many fallen sisters—and very reasonably—take advantage of this frolic on the green to ply their avocation under police protection.
But the amateurs—especially the bobby sox juvenile delinquents—give them unethical competition.
Friendly bushes, in the darkness, provide privacy (of a sort) for a necking party. But those who stray too far from the well-lighted Mall invite serious danger.
Lurking in the park are all manner of anti-social characters, from footpads to vicious sex-maniacs. Blood-curdling crimes are common.
The police cannot patrol every foot of the big expanse of the park, though at times they have had remarkable success in keeping crime at a minimum by dressing a couple of boyish detectives in women's clothes and turning them loose on the scum.
The place is, of course, a happy hunting ground for psychopathic and physical irregulars, who find it an excellent layout to strike up acquaintances with others of their kind.
The southwest corner of the park, at Columbus Circle, has been pre-empted by Negro homos. The north border, Cathedral Parkway (110th) is alive with wicked wenches.
And yet, graceful old Central Park is one of the most beautiful places remaining in this modernist crazy world.
Its lights, architecture and landscaping retain the pre-rococo charm of the last century.
But the old Central Park Casino is gone, a victim of the leveling-down process of the dictatorship of the rabble.
Here, in a charming building surrounded by trees and the greensward, was one of New York's showspots of the hectic 20's where society and café society dined, danced and broke the dry law.
As Jimmy Walker's night city hall (he rarely arose in time to visit the official one), the casino attracted the cream—and the sour milk—of New York officialdom and gangdom. Its prices were outrageous, but its food divine, its liquor bona fide and its dance music memorable.
LaGuardia, darling of the déclassé, elected in 1933 on a platform of revenge and revulsion against civilized living, made the destruction of the Central Park Casino the first major issue in his campaign of social nihilism. He said the land was needed for a play-ground.
No sooner was the casino leveled than he found an excuse to open another dining and dance pavilion in the park, for concessionaires more friendly to his regime.
To do this he destroyed the historic old sheepfold, where generations of city kids learned about nature watching the grazing lambs, and turned the building into a cabaret called "The Tavern on the Green."
Though its prices are not as astronomical as those imposed by the mourned casino, they are still too high for New York's millions of low-income citizens—the voters LaGuardia said the park was for.
Tucked away on a crosswalk in the 60's is a crazy little carousel, circa last century. Here the kids ride the merry-go-round to a tinkly, wheezy calliope playing the same tunes heard there by Teddy Roosevelt. Here is one of New York's most delightful nooks for romance.
You still find the hackies at 59th Street and Fifth Avenue, the last of their kind in the country. Best time to ride is after 4A.M., when the motor traffic in the park has come to a standstill and you have the place all to yourself in a barouche or hansom.
If your doll still holds out, after winding slowly through leaf-covered roads, to the tune of the horse's cloppety-clop, wake up the driver and order him right to the morgue. She's dead.
14. NEW YORK'S DORMITORIES
We aregoing to go statistical on you for a few paragraphs and tell you something about the size of greater New York and the parts of it which you'll probably never get to see—and you don't know how lucky you are, at that.
The population of the incorporated city of New York is approximately 8,000,000, one out of every 17 in the land. One of every 10 Americans lives in New York's metropolitan district, which includes the overlapping areas of Westchester and Nassau counties, New Jersey and Connecticut, within 45-minutes commuting distance from Times Square.
Perhaps one of every 100 persons on earth—20,000,000—live within 100 miles of New York, are employed here, or are frequent visitors for business or pleasure.
Manhattan Island, which is the county of New York, is the core of all this, but actually it is only second in population of the city's boroughs, having about 2,000,000 permanent residents. The balance of the metropolis' huge population sleeps elsewhere.
Brooklyn, approaching 3,000,000, ranks by itself the second largest city in the nation; in area it sprawls all over the map, a maddening maze of crazy streets apparently without beginning or end.
The unwary visitor to Brooklyn who asks a policeman how to get somewhere usually is directed to return to Manhattan and start all over again. The nativesdon't know their way about in this gigantic and illogical patchwork.
The incorporated city of Greater New York, which was born in 1898, when the independent municipality of Brooklyn merged with Manhattan, consists of five boroughs, each coextensive with a county.
They are:
Brooklyn and Queens each occupy the westernmost end of Long Island. Manhattan is located on its island. Richmond occupies all Staten Island. The much-maligned Bronx is the sole borough on the mainland of the United States.
Richmond, historically and geographically a part of New Jersey, from which it is separated by only a narrow kill spanned by a bridge, is five miles from Manhattan, half an hour by ferry. The other boroughs are all connected with each other by land borders, bridges or tunnels.
Considerable confusion exists concerning New York's borough system, because it is the only city in the world including more than one county in its corporate limits.
The counties are not called boroughs. They merely happen to have the same geographic boundaries as theboroughs. The five counties in New York City are, like all other counties in the state, political subdivisions of the State of New York. The boroughs, on the other hand, are political subdivisions of the City of New York.
Each of New York's five counties has its own District (State's) Attorney and courts.
The borough governments, presided over by presidents who are their bailiwicks' representatives in the upper chamber of the municipal legislative body, exist merely for the purpose of superintending local improvements such as street repairs, etc.
Several tomes could be and have been written about Brooklyn, a place which, for some reason, always elicits guffaws when mentioned.
Brooklyn, with its Dodgers, is the most hysterical baseball community in the nation. It also embraces Flatbush, the Gowanus Canal, the fabled tree, a very old and snooty social set, in addition to the worst murderers of the English language north of the Mason and Dixon line.
Though most of Brooklyn's millions work and play in Manhattan, the borough is exceedingly provincial. It has many shopping districts, with fine stores, several popular-priced night clubs and a number of large theatres. Once a try-out spot for legit shows, which were also road showed in Brooklyn after their Broadway runs, Brooklyn, like many other large communities, has become fleshless. In olden days the Metropolitan Opera company appeared there—at the Brooklyn Academy of Music—every Tuesday during the season.
Both authors of this book are New York newspapermen. Yet neither has been in Brooklyn six times in 20 years, except to go to Coney Island, and that is a place one seldom visits any more.
The Coney Island you can see isn't what it was, and we wouldn't advise a trip there unless you are an antiquarian searching for rare remnants of a kaleidoscopic used-to-be. Broads who stroll the boardwalk, while often easy, usually have housemaid's knee.
The air, despite the good zestful salt sea breeze, reeks with the acrid smoke of potato knishes, garlic and frying frankfurters.
Time was when Coney's transgressions were crimson and its sinners wore silks and sables.
On the beach front, and at the adjoining Manhattan and Sheepshead beaches, were fine hotels, race tracks and fabled clubs and residences.
Mustached sports and their high-rolling ladies drank and diced, waded and swam and disappeared in pairs.
Those great levelers, the subway and the auto, which brought Coney within a dime of any part of New York, soon leveled Coney. The dime became its symbol. Luna Park is gone, destroyed by fire and never rebuilt.
Steeplechase, owned by the Tilyous, related by marriage to Brooklyn's once ruling family, the McCooeys, has the roller coaster and nut house field practically to itself, though independent operators on Surf Avenue and the Midway, who pay no park rental fee, offer some competition.
Incidentally, the first roller coaster in the world is still in operation at Coney.
The zenith of the Coney season is the annual Mardi Gras, shortly after Labor Day, modeled after New Orleans' gala event, with local variations and no improvements.
The residents of the other boroughs, like the inhabitants of Brooklyn, are chiefly concerned with sleeping and breeding. If you find these a contradiction in terms, you don't know what they can do in the Bronx and Queens.
PART TWOTHE PEOPLE(Confidential!)
15. THE MINX IN MINKS
(For Gals Only)
This isthe Enchanted City where fables and sables come true and dreams have substance, sometimes. This is the magic spot where gentlemen pay the rent for terraced apartments hanging high over the river and jalopies turn into Rolls-Royces.
Every year they come here: the little gals from farms and villages, inland whistle-stops and, now again, foreign lands. They come here, breathlessly and hopefully, in search of fame and fortune.
The men they left behind were grease-station monkeys, cow manicurists, soda jerks and coal miners. Here they seek men whose pants match their coats, who stand when a lady comes to the table, who know the difference between a filet mignon and filet de sole, and can even pronounce same.
But they don't always find them.
You, reading this, may be one of the dolls bound for New York to take it over. Or you may be a perfectly prissy schoolteacher on a two-week vacation, but with a secret and ineffable hankering to know more about the things the movies mustn't show. Or maybe you are a lady buyer, coming to the fall showings; or a wife, who, left alone by her husband, doesn't want to be by others.
The same tips go for all:
Do not come to Gotham unless you have round-trip fare. If you intend to seek coin or a career here (or just a job) do not come at all unless you have enough to keep you for four months and are insulated against a city that can say no in any language.
Do not come to New York in answer to a solicitation, personal or by mail, for a job. If anyone comes to your home town with offers of good positions in Manhattan, turn him over to the police. Odds are he's an advance man for a call house.
Do not come unless you have friends here already, for it can be a mighty lonesome place. If you are an easy mixer and don't care, you can eliminate the requirement for friends.
Do not come to New York for a visitALONE. There is practically nothing a girl can do here without an escort, or at least without the company of another girl, except ride the dirty subways and stare at the obelisk.
If you can't dragoon a man of your own you are just out of luck. Even the escort services have been banned by law.
But remember, New Yorkers seldom try for pick-ups on the streets, in buses or lobbies. Any girl who responds to a raw come-on may be smiling back at a handsome dick on the vice squad.
However, it is considered o.k. (at your own risk, of course, not ours) to respond to "It's a nice evening, isn't it?" at dance halls, at free dances, bathing beaches, swimming pools, cocktail bars, church and YMCA socials.
Also, on the street (but only if you or he may be walking a dog and one or the other stops to admire it).
Most night clubs and cocktail bars do not admit or permit unescorted women after 10P.M.
(At this writing the City Council and State Legislature are considering bills to ban unescorted women at bars at any time.)
Never talk to strangers in theatres, on subways or in other public places.
You may nod to him in a hotel if you both live there and have seen each other before.
DO NOT walk in Central Park, or other parks AFTER DARK, even if escorted.
CONFESSIONS OF A CAUTIOUS CUTIE:
Smart Gotham gals don't keep diaries. If what goes into 'em is unimportant, why bother? If it's secret stuff, never put it in writing.
Gals who pass out after five (or 55) drinks should wear identification bracelets with name and address—especially when on a first date with a gent who may not know where to deliver the body. In no event should dolls who can't handle their liquor step out with men who can't carry theirs. Who takes whom home?
When entering a night club, a smart gal doesn't stop at the bar to greet every drunk, just to show her escort she's a doll-about-town.
Do not use cheap perfume when night clubbing (or at any time).
Don't invite gents who call for you into your apartment. Have them meet you below. If they once get in, they may decide they'll stay a while, smoke your cigarettes, drink all your liquor, raid your ice box, and then if you won't give in, they won't buy you dinner.
Few Gotham glamor gals are home-grown. Our gals don't go in much for show business and modeling. Those professionals you see on the street and in the night clubs almost all come from out of town.
The deep South—Texas, Oklahoma, Georgia and Florida—towns like Scranton, Pa., and West Coast points, contribute most of our flashy frails.
For a long time, during the war, our source of supply was cut off, when the gals made more money at home in defense work or as waitresses than they could expect to begin with in the expensive-to-live-in metropolis.
But in days before that, there was no horizon at home for a good-looker with ambitions.
They hitchhiked, rumbled in by bus, train and plane. The more fortunate became models or show girls. One of a thousand went on to fame and fortune in Hollywood or acquired a millionaire, in or out of wedlock.
But the reward for the lucky ones is so great that for every failure a dozen new, young, starry-eyed twists come to town.
The case of Mary Stuart, of Tulsa, Okla., is typical.
It is one of the stories that could only happen on Broadway.
The chief characters:
Joe Pasternak, famed movie producer and discoverer of Deanna Durbin; his wife, the former Dorothy Darrell, who was a chorus girl Cinderella, and Mary Stuart, the 19-year-old beaut from out West.
But let us start from the beginning. Destiny stopped in Tulsa and pointed his long, bony finger straight at New York. Mary took the hint.
That day she shoved off. Lacking the fare, she thumbed her way. She had no difficulty flagging rides. For Mary, as we've told you, is a beaut. She has soft brown hair and a figure curved in the right places to accentuate all her loveliness—all 118 pounds and five-feet-five of it.
So she had no difficulty finding work here, as a model by day and as a photo girl in the Grill Room of the Hotel Roosevelt at night.
Into the Grill one night came Pasternak and his own lovely wife, accepting an invitation extended by Guy Lombardo, maestro at the spot.
Miss Stuart, hotly hoping she'd be seen by a Hollywood mogul, had been fired from the photo concession the day before.
But Destiny hadn't been; it was still working.
Through the voice of one of the musicians in Lombardo's band, whom she knew well, Destiny whispered to her that Pasternak had a reservation for that evening.
For a few bucks, Mary fixed it up with another photo girl and paraded past the Pasternaks with the camera.
Mrs. Pasternak saw Mary first, remarked about her beauty to Joe.
Mary, near their table, began to hum in tune to the music.
Pasternak addressed her. "Do you sing?" he asked.
Mary modestly admitted she did—a little.
Pasternak asked to hear her. Mary was unprepared. He said he might leave town next day. So he asked Lombardo to let her try a number with the orchestra.
When Mary got there, she didn't even bother to talk the song over with the piano player. Confidentially, she had rehearsed it with him earlier in the day, framing up the whole thing for Pasternak's visit.
She sang two songs.
Pasternak later admitted she was no world-beater as a thrush. And he had caught on to the game.
"I decided that any girl with that much gall had a hell of a chance in pictures," he told Lombardo.
So he signed her to a contract—that night—without a screen test.
Pasternak, who also discovered the charming and talented Kathryn Grayson, has flirted successfully with Fate more than once. His own stunning wife was, before meeting him, a chorus girl who, in her teens, had been around Broadway so long she was considered "an old face" and practically washed up.
So she joined a touring line of rumba dancers. Far from New York, Pasternak saw her in a night club,asked to meet her, whipped out his fountain pen and a contract and shipped her to Universal, at which studio he then labored.
Dorothy appeared in minor roles in several pictures.
Then she interrupted her promising career to marry her discoverer—a dear friend of her ex-sweetie, Harry Richman, whom she had once followed to London only to be deported by the British authorities because she had neither passport nor money.
But, if any guy says to you, "Honey, you oughtta be in pichures. Let's go up to my room and talk it over,"DON'T. That isnotthe way to get in pictures. That's the way to get in trouble!
16. GUYS AND PEARLS(For Men Only)
Don't bea cluck!
Sure, New York is the home of Tiffany and Cartier, Bonwit and Saks, Milgrim and Bergdorf-Goodman.
But Gotham gals don't flop for saps, simps or retail buyers.
They'll take everything you've got to give 'em—and take you for what you haven't got.
But the more you shower on them, the more they'll laugh at you—while cheating with another.
Of course, if you're only in town for a few days or a few weeks, and you have a penchant for orchidaceous glamor dolls, you've got to kick in and hand out—handsomely.
But don't overdo it. Be careful how you do it.
None but hustlers are for sale. So, whatever you give, make it look like a gift of appreciation for the pleasure, instead of a bribe or fee.
O.K. You are a lonesome gent in New York, looking for company, and where are you going to findher? Of course, we don't know what your taste is—whether you like them little or tall, blonde or brunette, breezily hep or delightfully dumb.
But, let us warn you, Manhattan is mined for a lonely guy.
Best policed city in the world, despite an occasional scandal, there's little opportunity for street pick-ups here, and the quality of what you could pick up is so inferior, you'd be cheated.
New York's cafés and clubs are forbidden by law to employ hostesses or "B" girls, and a police regulation bans mixing between female entertainers and guests.
This rule is so strictly enforced in the big, first-class night clubs, that the members of the casts are required to enter and leave the premises by the stage door.
A friend of ours, a newspaperman, was married to a redheaded hoofer in a Broadway night club. Because of the variance in their hours, the only opportunity they had to visit socially with one another was between shows at her club.
One night, while she was sitting with her husband, the cops raided the place and took up its license. The offense: A female entertainer "mixing" with a guest.
When it was explained to the police that the couple—if not respectable—were at least respectably married, the flat-feet scratched their heads. After prolonged and profound thought, they refused to drop the charges.
"The law says no gals can sit with guys," they stated. "It don't say nothing here about no husbands."
The club was suspended for 10 days.
Some of the taxi dance halls on Broadway employ broads who will dance with you for a dime a dance (and up) plus tip. They are not supposed to makedates with you, and you won't want to anyway, unless you are desperate or dizzy.
If they do date you, you've got to wait until the place closes, at one, or later, then meet them elsewhere than at the dance hall.
(But where are you going with them, during the hotel shortage?)
Turn to Chapter 33 for how to meet friends.
INSIDE STUFF: Many smaller night clubs, especially those on side streets and in Greenwich Village, cheat. Some headwaiters have been known to introduce strangers for a stiff tip. But if you sit out with the tramps in these places, count your drinks, watch your check—and better check your watch.
BEWARE of steerers. If a stranger in the street or hotel lobby or a cab driver asks you if you want to meet a gal, shake your head hard. Odds are he is a runner for a clip joint.
WISDOM OF A WHITE WAY WOLF:
Don't date a late-dater unless you are her late date. (Late-dater: a doll who ducks out on her dinner date at midnight to meet another guy—usually a musician.)
Three funny gags that make 'em laugh are worth more than three hours of romantic salesmanship.
Get yourself a big, fierce-looking hound and walk him around the block. Not only is there a free-masonrybetween all pooch-lovers, male and female ... but plenty of soft little cuties will stop to admire the brute. Then....
Most girls are now too smart for the "ya oughta be in pichures" hokum, but no doll can stand off a guy who "breaks her down." Insults far oftener than flattery bust barriers on Broadway.
Never trust a gal any farther than you can throw a trap-drummer.
Common courtesy demands that if your doll airs you, she rates one day to return. (Unless you have to catch a train home that day—then give her two hours.) If she doesn't show up, find a stand-in. Census bureau says there will be 750,000 more does than stags in this postwar world.
When you take a likely candidate to the Stork or El Morocco, don't try to impress her with your friendship with big shots by introducing her to a movie star or millionaire playboy. She'll probably end up with him—instead of you.
But if she rhapsodizes about a good-looking guy or celeb at another table, go and bring him over and tell him in front of her that your little friend goes for him. She'll be terribly embarrassed.
(Confessions of a Cautious Cutie: Yes, but she'll slip him her phone number, too.)
If you get your dates mixed up and end up with two Little Red Riding Hoods on the same party, don't explain. Smile in a superior way and let the pigeons fight over you—not you over them.
Never enthuse to a fellow wolf about your latest conquest—unless you're trying to lose her.
If you are with a new pretty, tip the headwaiter NOT to give you a ringside table in full view of the other wolves.
Do not let her dance with your pals. Let them dig their own. Be a good fellow, but not that good.
Don't introduce her at all if you can get out of it.
Never pan your pal to your doll and surely don't tell her he's a bad egg with women or a quick-change lover. If you do, you'll find your femme so interested, she'll turn flipflops for him.
When a date stands you up, never give her another tumble, though her alibi about rushing her sick mamma to the hospital or getting an emergency call from the casting office sounded bullet-proof. What undoubtedly happened was that her secret heart throb got back in town unexpectedly.
When you book a babe, have her meet you wherever you'll be. Only chumps wait for dames at stage doors or pick them up at their hotels. Don't be one.
WARNING:
Do not start fights in night clubs. If you think you have a legitimate beef, take your complaint to the manager. If he won't listen to you, the cops or your lawyer will. But don't start swinging. You can't win even if you are a football player, a pug, or pack a rod. You can't whip a bartender who swings a bung-starter. If you can, there's a heavy-handed bouncer, a couple of captains and a wedge of waiters waiting to show you who's boss. If they keep hands off, they'll slip you a mickey finn—and you'll wish you had never been born.
17. GLAMOR PUSSES
New Yorkhas the most beautiful bimbos on earth, and it will amuse you to learn few of them come from New York.
The authors know the buying power of their territory, and one of their ways of paying their rent is selling books.
Yet, slaves to the verities, they must say—sadly, it is true—that if you want a rollicking time with a tootsie, avoid the Bronx and Brooklyn entries.
That is, of course, a generalization. ThereMAYbe some pretty home-grown ones. But we can't find any. Don't say we haven't tried. In the interests of science, natch, we have pursued research. But when we find one worth intensive study, we find she's from Texas, Florida, Oklahoma, Georgia, California or Quebec. Canadian chicks can be fun. But the gals who do best, and by "best" we mean what gals do best, usually come from below the Mason and Dixon line.
The proportion of pretty out-of-towners is higher than the home-bred, because New York gets the pick of the crop from everywhere else.
The homely ones stay home, marry the neighbor's son and raise pigs, chickens and brats.
The pretty pigeons get fed up on louts in lumber-jackets and hit out for Life.
So the imports are pretty, whereas the home output is pretty merely in the normal proportion, which is low.
It is worth noting that, once a doll gets the title of Glamor Puss, it adheres to her for life, a-la a British order of knighthood. Some of our more famous GPs are long past the age of consent, yet they continue to make front pages, collect husbands or boy friends and costly gifts.
An example is Peggy Hopkins Joyce, born Margaret Upton, daughter of a Virginia barber, who recently acquired a seventh spouse and who is working on her eighth. She long carried on a highly publicized feud with Mabel Boll, so-called "Queen of Diamonds," daughter of a Rochester pub-keeper, on the dimensions of their gem collections.
The feud between Peggy and Mabel dated back to when they were both in the sizzling set that made headquarters at old Bustanoby's. Others in that crowd included Lillian Loraine and the Dolly Sisters.
Peggy's sweetheart then gave her a diamond ring. It was a shabby little stone, scarcely over a carat, but it was Peggy's first diamond and it gave her far more of a thrill than many of the brooches and bracelets she was to amass later. Its effect on her friend Mabel was remarkable.
Scientists will tell you that the passion for possessing precious stones is as old as recorded history. It is like a potent drug that fires the blood and flames a desire that knows no rest. So it was with Mabel. Years later she said:
"I thought it was the most beautiful stone in the world. I used to admire it by the hour and beg Peggy to let me wear it sometimes. I never hoped to own anything so grand."
But if Mabel had no diamonds, she had beauty—and beauty is a magnet that has a way of attracting the heart's desire. Mabel craved diamonds. And so, what do you think?
The careers of Peggy and Mabel ran parallel along the road to wealth, fashion, luxury and husbands. If Peggy had the slight edge on Mabel in the number of marriages, Mabel was one up on Peggy in the diamond department.
Included in her collection was supposed to be a big hunk of the Romanoff crown jewels, reputedly given her by Señor Emil Pardo, ridiculously rich Brazilian coffee planter.
Those jewels, sold by the Soviet, had been contrabanded into the United States by an individual said in hush-hush circles to have been a prince. The royal baubles had a more fantastic and fabulous background than the famous late Mrs. Evelyn Walsh McLean's Hope hoodoo rock.
In 1922, the then Prince of Wales, now Duke of Windsor, visited Canada. Patriotic Canadians thought it would be jolly if he were to take a Canadian girl as a bride. They tapped Lady May Cambridge for the honor. The rumor grew so positive, the match was reported a certainty. A smart Canadian promoter got an inspiration to raise a half-million dollars by publicsubscription, buy the Romanoff jewels and have them studded into a necklace as a wedding gift for the Queen-to-be.
It all came to naught when the Prince announced he was not engaged to Lady May, had no intention of marrying. But the necklace had been made. It was a miracle of craftsmanship, consisting of 17 beautiful marquise diamonds and one huge egg-shaped clear blue-white diamond pendant that must have weighed 100 carats.
The promoter went broke, couldn't pay off the New York jeweler who executed the piece. The Maiden Lane merchant's bank took the necklace. Then came the depression.
Even banks needed money, so this one turned the gems over to a free-lance broker, who took them to Paris and showed them to La Boll, then the Queen of the Boulevards.
It was love at first blink. And when Pardo asked her what she wanted for Christmas, she already had the answer.
They were a swell investment for her, too. A few years later, when she no longer knew the rich Brazilian and was a little short, she sold the necklace to Harry Winston, the New York jeweler, who recently bought the Jonkers diamond. Winston paid her about $350,000, cash.
The guy who knows about such things said her collection was worth $3,000,000. Peggy's is valued at only $2,500,000. Poor kid!
Today's GPs don't do nearly so well. Taxes being as they are, they can't expect to.
Back on the migration of sweet pastry to Manhattan, consider another idiosyncrasy of New York night life.
In other towns—even the largest—the young boys own flivvers or borrow the family car and there are places in the country to drive to. And you can neck on the front porch or in the back yard, or at the barn dance or on a slab in the cemetery.
There's none of those in New York.
Most people live in cramped flats, where even the living room often is used as sleeping quarters.
The young femme can't entertain the young male at home; he usually hasn't a car, and if he had, there's nowhere much to drive to.
Most New York kids court in dark movies, kiss in hallways and doorways, and it's difficult to learn the fine points of love—or even of smooching—in such an environment.
So, in the wisest burg of all, the newcomer is wiser than the native.
18. MODELS
The highlypaid babes who pose for the photographers are prettier but dumber than their sisters who hoof in the choruses.
Also, they're not as lively.
They may be more photogenic, yet usually they exude about the same amount of personality as those other models—the wax ones in Macy's window.
But they aren't as witless as they act. The average 18-year-old who poses for a living knocks down $100 a week; a good cover (on a mag) type makes as much as $250, and a $500 week is not unknown to the cream of the calling.
Hold your hosses, kids. Don't rush into town. It's just about as difficult to get pacted by one of the three leading agents, John Robert Powers, Harry Conover or Walter Thornton, as it is to wangle a movie contract.
Usually, a model earns more than a so-called contract girl in films, who often signs at $75 a week.
Many models have gone into films as stars. Others have made favorable marriages. (Definition: FAVORABLE—Moolah.)
Some of the town's top party-girls are models. You see them in all the best places, like Morocco and the Stork, with wine-buyers and wolves.
But most models are quiet, unobtrusive kids, who come to New York breathless and bug-eyed.
There are hundreds of them. All day you see themall over the East Side, scurrying from one advertising agency to another and from one photographer to another.
You usually can spot them, because they invariably carry their make-up and accessories in a Cavanagh, Knox or Dobbs' cardboard hat-box instead of a bag. Those are the insignia of their profession.
They live at the Barbizon for Women, the Shelton, the Beaux Arts, Tudor City and other similar East Side hotels, and they lunch along the counter at 247 Park Avenue and 420 Lexington Avenue, buildings in which models' agents, advertisers and photographers have headquarters.
At cocktail time, you usually find those with dates at Armando's or the Little Club.
Few models flash expensive furs or clothes, yet they are natty and neat, clean-cut, with small features, streamlined, slender and sober.
But these luminous lollipops are responsible for a pernicious influence in dress. Even the most girlish wear girdles, in a mistaken notion it makes their gowns look more slinky.
How really silly! There is nothing cuter than an undulating form swaying to a rumba band. And it's unfair to an escort to clasp a handful of rubber and steel when dancing—instead of something warm and human.
It's really simple, the way the New York girl-grabbers snag the new models.
There's a clique composed of guys who throw cocktail parties, and they manage to keep on excellentterms with the leading models' agents, photographers and publicity boys.
When they hear about a new subject in town, they throw a party in her honor and invite all the others in the gang.
Some are wealthy. But others make a very good living at the thing.
One gimmick is to tax all the male guests a "pro rata" share for the cost of the party, with it generally understood that the host is a major expense.
More indirectly, these connivers, known in other walks by an ugly four-letter word, get by through carrying files of desirable phone numbers.
Some of these characters have "pocket" businesses, such as the sale of diamonds or furs, and every time they complete an introduction to a money-man, the patron is expected to buy a hunk of jewelry or a neck-piece from the go-between, as a gift to the gal.
No classification or occupation is faked as much as that of model.
Many have filed their names with one of the big agents, maybe even done a couple of jobs. But they soon find other means to make money, less arduous than standing on their feet eight hours a day under hot Kleig lights, more steady than awaiting calls for their type.
The term "model" is loosely kicked around in New York and it covers a multitude of skins.
It's difficult for a stranger to meet a real one—that is, unless he has friends in one of the allied businesses, such as advertising, publicity or art.
We are, of course, referring to photographers' models.
There are classifications—much larger—of the ones who model fashions. They should be called mannequins, but that seems a word used only in Paris.
Every wholesale house in the huge cloak and suit industry employs at least one model and all the swank retail stores have whole staffs.
The girls who do this kind of work usually aren't as pretty as the babes who pose for cameras. Facial beauty is not a requisite, although a figure is supposed to be perfect in proportions, to fit commercial dimensions.
Many who work in the wholesale market are friendly and it is considered a regular part of their paid work to "entertain" the big buyer from Burlington.
Many models—photographers' models, that is—go into show business as chorus girls and, conversely, many chorines double as models.
Many of these have the most amazing experiences, and whenever tales like the one about redheaded Joanne Marshall are told, another thousand half-baked pigeons run away from their homes and hotfoot it to New York:
Joanne Marshall, whose real name was Joan Lacock, was born in Wheeling, W. Va., in the summer of 1922.
Her father ran a drugstore. She grew up, the average small-town girl, but shapely, lovely and with the most luminous eyes.
After her father's death, which left the family—her mother and her young brother—about destitute, she and Mrs. Lacock came to New York. Joanne was so entrancingly beautiful, she had little trouble catching on as a model, and quickly earned $75 to $100 a week. She was then about 18.
Some of the other Powers exhibits told her about the offer they had to become show girls in the new revue being prepared to star Al Jolson.
It would be loads of fun. Joanne joined the show, too.
It opened in Chicago in the summer of 1940, then made its Gotham debut that fall. Joanne was crazy about it.
Until then, she knew no serious romances.
Her male companions were young men without serious intentions; youths like Gar Wood, Jr., and George Church, a young dancer in the show, and George Miller, an equally young chorus boy.
One day the great man who starred in the show, the fabulous Jolson, tiffed with Jinx Falkenberg, then a featured show gal in the production, since then a film starlet and "breakfast broadcaster."
Jinx had often gone out with Al after his break-up with Ruby Keeler.
Jolson turned away, suddenly noticed the 18-year-old child who had been dancing, unseen by him, in his own chorus.
He took the gal to dinner, flattered her beyond anything she had heard in West Virginia or from youthful New Yorkers.
He swept her practically off her feet.
We say "practically," advisedly.
For, though she gave the air to all the boys, much totheir anguish and unflattering cracks about the age of her new friend, she resisted Jolson's importuning to marry her.
Yet she was seen with him nightly, shared his favorite corner table at the Stork Club after every show, took him home to meet her family, did not deny published reports that this was the real thing.
The wise Willies said, "See what happens when an old guy with fame and dough comes along? He gets the rail post." So they thought.
They didn't even know about a good-looking young fellow who sang with a band.
Joanne met him in a night club, dated him one night when Jolson was busy elsewhere. He began to take up more and more of her time. Then she married him. It was at about the time he began to click on the radio. He did okay. He is now a top Hollywood star. His name is Dick Haymes. And Joanne is now Joan Dru, married to her second husband, actor John Ireland.