Read Ebook: New York: Confidential! by Lait Jack Mortimer Lee

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Ebook has 1789 lines and 69631 words, and 36 pages

In relief, Al blurted out that he wanted to marry the dancer. Big-hearted Irish adopted a noble pose, gave the girl up.

"I'll take my boys to Atlantic City," he said, "and you hop an ocean liner with Ruby. Otherwise maybe some of them will get an idea you're taking her away from me and maybe they won't like it. And heaven help you if you don't marry her."

She married Al Jolson at 17. She hit film stardom. Then she chucked it, still in her twenties, to marry a poor boy, rusticate in Pasadena and have four children.

But when a law-evading night club got too big, too noisy, too public, even the usually complaisant cops had to smack it down. And if they didn't, a rival mob did.

The hotel grills and roofs, forced to go straight to protect huge investments, long were dead ducks by now and so were the hotels. There just was no big place where a man and girl could go and have some dancing and fun, unless he was known to the gorilla at the door and could afford citrate of magnesia labeled Mumm's at a throw.

That year, Granlund had a vision.

He conceived the idea of building a huge cabaret room large enough to pay off on quantity business alone, instead of bootlegging.

As a further inducement to lure the wary man of moderate means, ducking high prices, fancy foreign headwaiters and tremendous tariffs, he invented the minimum charge, to supplant the imported and resented couvert.

A syndicate built such a cabaret on Broadway, between 48th and 49th Streets, in a room once occupied by Rector's of hallowed memory, and after that having housed a chop suey palace.

The new place was named the Hollywood Restaurant. It got off to an immediate success with big bands, famous acts, and the most beautiful girls this side of heaven.

The great Ziegfeld, as a smart business, tied up with N.T.G. on an exchange policy, which called for a selected few of the Hollywood girls to double into the "Follies," an equal number of the glorified doubling into the Hollywood.

No liquor was sneaked at the club, but if you brought your own you were sold a set-up for a buck.

The Hollywood's success was immediate, and before the club expired more than a decade later, it had lived to see the cover charge die.

Club after club in New York, Chicago, Hollywood, Europe, Asia, South America, followed the policy of elaborate shows and minimum charge. The Hollywood was the daddy of practically every cabaret in business today.

This revolution, plus the hard times following 1929, again changed the face of Rue de Revelry and environs. Even before Repeal, many clubs of the Guinan era and stamp folded, including Guinan's. On one side, they were hammered by the depression; on the other they were against the competition offered by the Hollywood and its imitators.

A new crop of lovelies had come up, were displayed and went on to Hollywood. To mention one, Alice Faye--a Hollywood Restaurant pony.

Alice, who had dark brown hair in those pre-blonde days, did one bit number. It was enough, with Rudy's backing, to show trained talent scouts.

Soon came the equally large and elaborate Paradise Restaurant, across Broadway from the Hollywood, to compete. The syndicate which built it lured N.T.G. away from the Hollywood, some said at the point of a gun. There were times during those shimmering nights when show girls, those with followings, were paid as much as 0 a week simply to undulate across the floor. Many were driven to work in Rolls-Royces.

Minks--even sables--were a dime a dozen. Naked was the doll whose arms weren't covered with diamond bracelets.

Fifteen years ago, the hegira to the East Side had not gotten under way. Playboys, head salesmen, mobsters, visiting firemen--all fast with a buck--nightly made happy the hearts of headwaiters.

Though what the world calls "Broadway" is not a street, but a condition, the purpose of these few pages is to tell you about the thoroughfare named Broadway, and more specifically, that part of it now the Rialto of the western world.

This meandering bit of avenue, following the tortuous curve of an ancient cow path, is delimited south of 42nd Street by the flourishing wholesale garment industry; and, north of Columbus Circle, by Central Park and automobile row, some of which extends south of the Circle, encroaching into the White Way as far as 54th Street. So, all the Glittering Gash can honestly claim for its own is 12 short blocks, measuring exactly three-fifths of a mile.

This is the street of a million lights, of a broken heart for every bulb, and more bulbs every night.

This is Gotham's Main Drag; strangely, save for the milling crowds and the blinding Mazdas, it has not now and has not had for the past decade those features which are universally supposed by all the people "in the know" all over the world, except in New York, to be on Broadway.

At this writing, on the whole "street," there are but two theatres permanently devoted to the legitimate stage.

But there are more than 30 legitimate theatres in New York. All, except the aforementioned and a handful on parallel avenues, are located east and west of Broadway, in narrow side streets in the 40's and 50's.

Of about 1,500 licensed cabarets in New York, there are at this writing but four with entrances on the Stem.

If, from seeing the film of that name, you thought 42nd Street--where it crosses Broadway--is the center of Manhattan's mad gaiety, you have much to learn.

That thoroughfare, once the home of a dozen proud theatres including the New Amsterdam of red plush and wonderful memories, is now devoted exclusively to "grind" movie houses, penny arcades, flea circuses, army and navy goods stores, orange juice stands and frowzy but friendly dames.

Broadway teems with dime dance halls, open air hot dog counters, photo and shooting galleries, souvenir and novelty holes-in-the-wall. It is the honky-tonk that was Coney Island, the crossroads carnival.

But, strangely enough, in the daytime, when the bright lights that draw the rubes are off and Broadway's sidewalks are comparatively free, it reverts to its old estate as the home and capital of the entertainment world.

For here, and nearby, are the offices of the theatrical producers, the agents who sell the acts, the dance studios where embryo chorus fillies learn to hoof; the costumers and the hooters, the scenic artists and designers--and Tin Pan Alley.

When Mike Jacobs moved his handmade teeth and his principality of pugs a few feet west to Madison Square Garden, he broke up a mongrel marriage of sock and song, which had long been the Brill Building.

An old-fashioned, ten-story structure, smoke-grimed, with creaking and groaning elevators, it had become the stronghold and nerve center of two giant industries.

Prize-fighters, the tycoons and tramps who manage them, rubbers, sponge-carriers, trainers and the motley mob which gathers around the boxing racket rubbed against music publishers, composers, lyric writers, piano players, arrangers and the others of the equally heterogeneous individuals engaged in creating and selling the songs of the world.

On the main floor, facing Broadway, are two caf?s--the Turf, hangout for musicians, and Dempsey's, rendezvous of pugs.

Across the street, on the 49th Street side, is the Forrest Hotel, long the secondary concentration headquarters for the boys of Jacobs' Beach. Up the street and across Eighth Avenue is the Garden, the Taj Mahal of the biff business.

In the dingy Brill Building, day and night, swarm the unsung individuals of the singing empire, in every respect unique and little known outside its own realm.

There are 320 firms in New York City that publish music. Of these a dozen are highly successful, another half dozen do well and the rest are mostly shoestring affairs, picking up the ragged edges and discards of the leaders.

Getting these songs before the public, or as the trade terms it, the "plug," is perhaps the soul of the industry. There are scores of men and women infesting every radio station and theatre where "flesh" performances still remain. Their business is to get their songs sung or played or whistled or even ground out on a hand organ. The big stars are hard to approach and the business, which is organized, has long ago put a foot down on what was formerly an elaborate system of bribery, so that personality, pleading, pull, as often as actual merit and fitness, go to place songs with leading orchestras and ace headliners.

But a late development in the business, one which suspiciously smacks of a restraint of trade violation, is the practice of some publishers of giving a stock interest in their firms to noted crooners, band leaders and disk jockeys, who in return "plug" the latest publications of the companies in which they are interested.

An offshoot of this kind of tie-up, which has the further effect of keeping the compositions of the unknown or the unelect from the market, is off-the-record agreements between the principal publishing houses tied up with singers and band leaders to play only the product of the companies in the charmed circle. You scratch my back and I'll scratch yours.

The demonstrating offices are besieged by ambitious youngsters, failures and never-could-be's who think that they can find a "Yes, We Have No Bananas" or "Smoke Gets in Your Eyes" to draw them to the top overnight. These are inconsequential persons and they are insulted and refused, but they break through here and there.

For a bad singer, all songs are bad. Yet it is in the nature of the stage-struck never to admit that they have failed, but to carry the deathless conviction that it is the "material." They haunt the music publishers, fighting for a chance at the latest, always with high expectations that this time this will be it.

So the Brill Building, overrun as it was for years with every element of the prize ring and the sheet music world and its vocalists and hoofers and bandsmen, naturally became a beehive for minor agents, who pick up shabby fees from unimportant performers.

Some of these have offices in telephone booths and some of them only in their hats. For a commission they will try to sell anything to anybody. They watch the cheap saloons for a "disappointment"--which means that an act has fallen out temporarily or permanently because of delirium tremens, dismissal or death; they try to induce other saloons, without entertainers, to try some--find small, off-key dens and seek to sell them a singer or a sister act. The amount of aggressiveness and persistence they put into their misspent endeavors would probably get them a good income anywhere else--but they would be out of "show business," and they never will be.

Tin Pan Alley has its own glossary. All songs are "numbers." Love songs, mother songs, anything romantic, are "ballads"--a remote adaptation of the original word. All songs of regret and revenge and love's bitter grief are "torches." All crazy songs, which make no sense, are "freaks." All crazy songs which make some sense are "novelties." War songs are "flag wavers." All songs about the south are "Dixies."

The overnight possibilities of radio and millions of juke-box and parlor records have revolutionized the arts and wiles and guiles of "plugging," which is too bad in some ways, though the members of the craft were generally about as venal vultures as the morasses of Manhattan have disgorged.

Their vocation gave them license to knock on dressing-room doors, and many pressed their advantage beyond the call of duty.

They had expense accounts, some professional standing and a fund of that gutter shrewdness and knowledge which are perilous possessions of the unprincipled, yet licensed, scavengers who infest the outer rims of a world which holds forth a few miraculous rewards and an untold number of sordid soul-searings to young, impressionable, overoptimistic girls who reach so desperately for that one chance in a million.

Such girls are exposed to contacts in getting costumes, make-up, dancing shoes, printed "notices," their very jobs. They are hectic, striving, not subject to the reactions and restraints of sheltered, normal living.

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