Rothstein (6 page)

Hotels opened. Some, like the Algonquin on West 44th, were quite respectable. Most weren’t. Prostitutes operated out of the Delavan, the Plymouth, the Garrick, the Valko, the Lyceum, the Churchill (run by an ex-police sergeant), the King Edward, and the Metropole. The Metropole, run by Tammany boss Big Tim Sullivan and the Considine brothers, George and Bill, featured not only prostitutes but gamblers. In 1904 Lord William Waldorf Astor brought the city’s biggest and grandest hotel to Times Square-the opulent Astor, at Broadway and West 44th. Its bar soon would be among Manhattan’s most prominent homosexual gathering places.

Times Square, however, could never have become Times Square without the Times. The New York Times relocated from Park Row to its new $1.7 million (budgeted at $250,000) Times Tower on New Years Eve 1904. At 375 feet, the paper’s new headquarters was Manhattan’s second tallest structure, just 10 feet short of the recently opened Flatiron Building at East 23rd and Broadway.

Now in his early twenties, A. R. loved everything in the new heart of the city. The clatter of the newly opened subways, the glamour of the grand hotels and theaters, the bantering crowds in the restaurants, and the boisterous gaiety of area’s many theaters. Some sites he favored more than others. The Metropole was his kind of place. It made no secret that it catered to gamblers, and with Big Tim’s political and police connections it didn’t have to. Hammerstein’s Victoria had similar charms. Monday matinees attracted smallish crowds, and they weren’t there to see Blanch Walsh in Tolstoy’s Resurrection. In the theater’s basement, each Monday afternoon, bored stagehands and ushers organized a crap game. Soon toughs from the audience left the auditorium and joined the action, including gang members Monk Eastman, Whitey Lewis, and Dago Frank Cirofici, and gamblers Herman “Beansie” Rosenthal and Arnold Rothstein.

A. R. was already expert at virtually any card game, could handle a cue to his own profit, and would bet on anything that moved. At the Victoria, he learned to shoot craps-and he learned something more. The Victoria’s basement was a fine place for Monday-afternoon gaming, but there remained an overall shortage of places to roll dice safely. A. R. recognized that he could profit in hosting such events and found a derelict barn downtown on Water Street-close by the Brooklyn Bridge and near his father’s Henry Street birthplace. For three dollars, the barn’s night watchman would look the other waya small price for A. R. to pay for a percentage of the handle.

On Water Street and at the Victoria, A. R. also learned the value of the Big Bankroll. A big wad of bills was good for the ego and good for impressing one’s peers, but it had concretely tangible uses. When A. R. arrived at card and crap games, brandishing carefully husbanded savings from day jobs or other games, as often as not, he put it to work not by wagering on dice, but by lending it to those who would. Rates were steep: 20 percent by next Monday’s matinees.

Growing businesses add employees, and Arnold’s business was growing. He needed friends to collect for him because when people owed you money, they avoided you. He hired big, hard, ruthless friends like Monk Eastman, men he had long cultivated. “It was always the biggest, toughest boys whom he treated [to favors],” brother Edgar recalled of Arnold’s school days. “I guess he wanted to get them on his side.”

So some of the players in Rothstein’s story were starting to come together. It’s instructive to present a physical description of the main character in the drama. One of the best physical descriptions of Arnold Rothstein appeared in Donald Henderson Clarke’s biography, In the Reign of Rothstein. Written shortly after A. R.‘s death, it describes him very near to this point in time:

When he first appeared in the news [c. 1908], Rothstein was a slim, young man of twenty-six, with dark hair, a complexion remarkable for its smooth pallor as if he never had to worry about razors-white, skilful hands, and amazingly vital, sparkling, dark brown eyes.

The Rothstein eyes were features above all others that those who met him recalled most faithfully-those laughing, brilliant, restless eyes glowing in the pale but very expressive face.

He laughed a great deal. He looked worried when it suited him to appear worried. A casual observer might have said that Rothstein’s face was an open book. It certainly was far from the ordinary concept of a “poker” face. In the course of an evening at table, or at play, it ran the whole gamut of expressions. But, mostly, it was a smiling, a laughing face….

He was about five feet seven inches tall, slim of figure, most meticulously garbed, not in the garish style of Broadway, but in the more subdued method of Fifth Avenue, and was extremely quick in his movements. In his later years, although most abstemious in eating, he gained weight, but he never lost anything of that pantherish quickness, which was more like the catlike suavity of muscular coordination that is Jack Dempsey’s than anything else.

Rothstein put on a little paunch in later years, but never changed greatly from Henderson’s description of the young man. He retained his unhealthy pallor, his grace, his charm, and a quality that Henderson did not here describe: an overarching ego that manifested itself in a cutting remark, an arched eyebrow, in cruelty and in toying with those unfortunate enough to need his cash or protection. As he grew wealthier and more powerful, his ego and cruelty grew: particularly in regard to money. When he died, a reporter for the New York World wrote:

He loved, almost viciously, to collect, and he hated, almost viciously, to pay. He took an almost perverted delight in postponing the payment of losses. There was something cruelly satisfactory to his senses in tantalizing and teasing the persons to whom he owed money. This perverted pleasure grew on him in his later years.

As Rothstein increased in confidence and in what passed for stature in Times Square, his supercilious manner grated upon those who considered themselves at least as crafty, and perhaps more so. One such group of wits congregated at “the big white room” at Jack’s. A decade later, a similar clique formed at the Algonquin Hotel. The Algonquin Circle’s members-poetess Dorothy Parker, humorist Robert Benchley, playwrights George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, and Robert Sherwood, critic Alexander Woollcott, columnists Franklin Pierce Adams and Heywood Broun, comedian Harpo Marx, and New Yorker founder Harold Ross-are remembered today. But back around 1907, the group that gathered at Jack’s proved just as clever, and just as cutting and witty-and rising young gambler Arnold Rothstein settled comfortably in their midst.

Rothstein didn’t patronize Jack’s just for conversation. He wanted customers for his new card games and for his primitive Water Street gambling house. But his already-large ego demanded he match wits with Broadway’s cleverest lads. He found them at Jack’s-newspapermen like “Spanish” O’Brien, Frank Ward O’Malley, Ben de Cassares, and Bruno Lessing; songwriter Grant Clarke, cartoonists Hype Igoe and “Tad” Dorgan; and all-around scamp Wilson Mizner.

In their time they more than had their followings. Despite his nickname and surname, editor “Spanish” O’Brien was born in Paris. Donald Henderson Clark pegged him as “a handsome, irresponsible Irishman … who worked at editing newspapers as a sideline to his vocation of indulging in Homeric conversations with his friends.”

New York Sun reporter Frank Ward O’Malley was too nice for the Broadway crowd. “There was never a man on Park Row,” the Times later wrote, “who was more friendly or more sensitive to human nature.” H. L. Mencken called O’Malley “one of the best reporters America has ever known.” When O’Malley wasn’t reporting, he was phrasemaking, providing us with the observation, “Life is just one damned thing after another”-and the term “brunch.” O’Malley didn’t enter journalism until age thirty-one after having “flopped,” as he put it, in art (“Commercial illustrator … for four years, drawing full-length portraits of vacuum cleaners and canned soup”). He described his newspaper career:

Reporter, New York Morning Sun, for fourteen years, thirteen of which were spent in Jack’s restaurant.

Ben de Cassares, a collateral descendent of the philosopher Spinoza, worked for the Herald having just returned from Mexico City, where he founded El Diario. De Cassares, wrote Rothstein biographer Leo Katcher, would “balance a Seidel of Pilsner on his head and take the solar system by the oratorical tail and whirl it around the room to the dazzled delight of all and sundry.”

When Rothstein wasn’t listening to these gentlemen, he met songwriters like Clarke Grant and other newspaper people like Bruno Lessing. Grant wrote Fanny Brice’s signature song “Second Hand Rose” and Ethel Waters’s “Am I Blue?” Lessing wrote a daily column for William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers, but that wasn’t his real value to the journalistic empire. He edited-not news, opinion, theatrical reviews, or sports-but something of far more important to Mr. Hearst’s readers: the Sunday comics.

Hype Igoe and Thomas A. “Tad” Dorgan were two friends who migrated east together from San Francisco and were now immensely talented cartoonists for Hearst’s Evening Journal. Igoe dabbled at sportswriting among any number of odd activities. Playing the ukulele at Jack’s was one. Refusing to wear an overcoat in even the coldest weather was another. This foible hospitalized him several times with pneumonia. Hype loved the cold, even refrigerating his ukulele to improve its sound.

Tad Dorgan was master of the early-twentieth century catchphrase. “Hot dog,” “cat’s pajamas,” “yes, we have no bananas,” “twentythree skidoo,” “dumbbell,” “drugstore cowboy,” and “skimmer” are all Dorganisms.

Wilson Mizner proved to be a more memorable wordsmith than Igoe, Dorgan, or the entire bunch put together. But beyond that, he was simply a great character. Consider this description of Mizner, provided by his biographer, Alva Johnson:

Mizner had a vast firsthand criminal erudition, which he commercialized as a dramatist on Broadway and a screenwriter in Hollywood. At various times during his life, he had been a miner, confidence man, ballad singer, medical lecturer, man of letters, general utility man in a segregated district, cardsharp, hotel man, songwriter, dealer in imitation masterpieces of art, prizefighter, prizefight manager, Florida promoter, and roulettewheel fixer. He was an idol of low society and a pet of high. He knew women, as his brother Addison said, from the best homes and houses.

That’s a lot to say about any one person in any one paragraph, but (and this is no criticism of its author), nonetheless, it shortchanges its subject. The 6′4″, 250-pound Mizner was the son of Benjamin Harrison’s minister plenipotentiary to Central America and the brother of an Episcopalian clergyman, but those were the last respectable facts about him. He soon took up opium smoking, and participated in the Klondike gold rush, operating badger games; robbing a restaurant to obtain chocolate for girlfriend “Nellie the Pig” Lamore; and grubstaking fellow prospector Sid Grauman (of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre Fame).

Returning state side in 1905, the twenty-nine-yearold Mizner married forty-eight-yearold Mary Adelaide Yerkes, widow of traction magnate Charles Tyson Yerkes. The new Mrs. Mizner was worth between $2 million and $7.5 million. Mr. Mizner was penniless. They had been introduced by his brother Addison at Madison Square Garden, at the National Horse Show. When Addison asked Wilson where he was staying, he replied, “In a house of ill fame on FortyEighth Street.” Mary Yerkes thought this amusing, but it was more amusing to be introduced to such a fellow than to be married to one. Mizner hired an artist to produce copies of the Yerkes mansion’s artistic masterpieces and proceeded to sell them as originals. Pickings proved slim. At auction, a fake Last Supper was fetching just $6.00. “Six dollars!” Mizner exclaimed. “Can’t I get at least one dollar a plate for this banquet?”

Mizner was next seen supervising the hauling of debris from the San Francisco earthquake. Returning to New York, he managed a sleazy Times Square hotel called the Rand, posting signs about the place with such mottos as “No opium-smoking in the elevators” and “Carry out your own dead.” From there he moved to fight promotion and playwriting. Critics found his plays trashy.

Had Wilson Mizner bothered to write better plays, we would remember him at least as well that other great aphorist, Oscar Wilde. That may seem hyperbole, but the list of Mizner bon mots is lengthy. If his name is not particularly remembered, his witticisms are:

Always be nice to people on the way up; because you’ll meet the same people on the way down.

Copy from one, it’s plagiarism; copy from two, it’s research.

The best way to keep your friends is not to give them away.

I respect faith, but doubt is what gets you an education.

I can usually judge a fellow by what he laughs at.

The worst-tempered people I’ve ever met were the people who knew they were wrong.

A fellow who is always declaring he’s no fool usually has his suspicions.

Don’t talk about yourself; it will be done when you leave.

Life is a tough proposition and the first hundred years are the hardest.

A good listener is not only popular everywhere, but after a while he gets to know something.

For an aspiring young gambler like Arnold Rothstein to hold his own against Mizner, Dorgan, Igoe, and their acquaintances was no mean feat. A. R. could. Although both quick-witted and charming enough to gain admittance to this informal society, he was not well-liked. Some found him too cute, too cutting with his remarks, too full of himself-and, yes, a bit too Jewish. Mizner, for one, wanted to teach this “smart-aleck sheenie” a lesson. So did Dorgan and Igoe and a well-heeled gambler named Jack Francis.

They decided to put A. R. in his place, early on in their relationship, and turn a profit in the bargain. Among Rothstein’s many strengths was his skill with the pool cue. Among his weaknesses was his ego. Mizner’s friends imported wealthy, young Philadelphia stockbroker Jack Conaway to set Rothstein up. Conaway played pool, played just about anything actually, just for the thrill of it. He was an expert amateur jockey and just as expert a pool player, the champion of Philadelphia’s elegant Racquet Club.