Rothstein (8 page)

“I’d like to,” she responded. Meeting her potential in-laws was fairly standard for two people pledged to marry each other.

“I’ve got to take you there,” he said. “Believe me, it doesn’t matter what they say or think. I’m a stranger to them. I live my own life.”

Now she caught his meaning: “But you say you have to take me to them.”

“That’s right. It doesn’t make any sense, but that’s the way it is. It’s something I have to do.”

“Maybe you’re not such a stranger to them after all.”

He took her home, and Abraham Rothstein asked the inevitable question. He was, as Carolyn Rothstein bluntly put it, “an intensely religious man, a religious zealot.”

“Are you Jewish, Miss Green?”

She explained that her father, Meyer Greenwald was Jewish; her mother, Susan McMahon, Catholic. “I have been brought up as a Catholic,” she told the Rothsteins.

“But you will change your religion if you and Arnold should marry, will you not?”

“No, Mr. Rothstein,” she responded-and she meant it. In her autobiography she wrote:

I was brought up in the [Catholic] religion, and regularly partook of communion until my marriage with Arnold. After that I continued to attend church more or less regularly and, at times, as in the lovely Cathedral of Milan, have gone to church as often as twice daily. I have always found in church the deepest sense of peace and contentment. It has been, and still is, a place of refuge and help.

She would not give up that sense of security. Abraham Rothstein could respect her feelings. But he respected his own religion more. “My son is a grown man,” he responded. “I cannot live his life for him. If you should marry him, you have all my wishes for your happiness, but you cannot have my approval. How could I approve losing my son?”

“But you would not be losing him.”

“If he marries outside his faith, he will be lost to me. That is The Law.”

That was that. Carolyn and Arnold left his parents’ home with Carolyn particularly discouraged. “Someday you’ll hate me for coming between you and your family,” she told her fiance. “I don’t want that to happen. Maybe we ought to stop seeing each other.”

“It was just the way I knew it would be,” said A. R. “Maybe I just wanted to hurt myself. But I won’t let it change anything about us. I love you. I want to marry you. My father said I lived my own life. Well, it wouldn’t be much of a life without you.”

“You’re always talking about percentage. This time it’s against you. Have you thought of that?”

“Sometimes I buck the percentage. There are ways to even things up. I love you. Will you marry me?”

Carolyn Green said yes.

Their courtship continued, both maintaining their professional lives. A. R. gambled. Carolyn acted. In February 1909, producer and theater owner J. J. Shubert helped her secure a role in Leslie Stuart’s Havana. Carolyn described it as “the sensation of the theatrical year.” She was one of eight “Hello” girls, chorines often compared to the old Floradora Sextette, a natural comparison since Stuart had written both Floradora and Havana, but Carolyn had another comparison in mind. As in the case of the Floradora Sextette, she noted, most “Hello” girls made “successful marriages.”

She soon made a successful marriage herself, at least financially. One night after Carolyn was through with Havana, she and Arnold dined at Rector’s. A. R. proposed formally, presenting her with a ring featuring a “cluster of white diamonds around a brown four-carat diamond which gave the effect of a daisy.” Carolyn accepted again.

Carolyn met many of A. R.‘s friends, or at least the more respectable among them like Wilson Mizner, Hype Igoe, Tad Dorgan, John McGraw, Ben de Cassares, and Frank Ward O’Malley. But she found reporter Herbert Bayard Swope to be the most interesting. Swope was just plain brilliant. Born in St. Louis to immigrant German-Jewish parents (Schwab was the actual family name), young Herbert considered Harvard, briefly attended the University of Berlin, and returned home to cashier at a local racetrack. Swope enjoyed the company, the atmosphere-and the gambling-but his chosen occupation disconcerted his bourgeois family, who wanted him in more respectable pursuits, their best suggestion being an $8-a-week reporting job with Joseph Pulitzer’s St. Louis PostDispatch. The PostDispatch soon noticed that Swope spent more time at the track than in the newsroom and fired him, but not before the newspaper business had entered his blood. He moved to Chicago, working for the Tribune and the Inter-Ocean. Hunting for young talent, the New York Herald lured Swope east. He moved to Manhattan, shared a flat with actor John Barrymore, continued gambling, and soon was fired again. He became a theatrical press agent, spent even more time gambling, met all the best-and worst-people, and returned to the press room, first to the Morning Telegraph, a racing paper, and again to the Herald.

Swope and Rothstein had much in common. Born just twelve days apart, both came from middle-class, German-Jewish Orthodox families. Both loved gambling and being just a little smarter than the next person. Both would become the biggest men in their fields.

Arnold and Carolyn often double-dated with Swope and his girlfriend, Margaret Honeyman “Pearl” Powell. Pearl would eventually reach the highest levels of society, while Carolyn remained a gambler’s woman, albeit a phenomenally rich gambler’s woman. Still Pearl never lost respect for her friend. “She was,” Pearl would say of Carolyn, “more of a lady than most ladies I know.”

Carolyn Rothstein recounted that in August 1912 she and Pearl visited their beaus for a weekend in Saratoga. The truth is less chaste. Swope actually invited Pearl to live with him for the spa racing season. Pearl coyly asked who her chaperone on the trip would be, though she honored such niceties only when necessary.

“Arnold Rothstein,” replied Swope.

“Thanks,” Pearl shot back. “My mother will be so relieved. Do you think white slavery is preferable to black slavery?”

“I’m an abolitionist,” Swope retorted lamely, but Pearl wasn’t dissuaded. She wanted to be with Swope, and middle-class conventions were not about to keep them apart.

It’s reasonable to assume that Carolyn Green also spent that August in Saratoga; that it was not three in a cottage, but four.

In any case, on the couples’ return from the track on August 12, 1909, Arnold bemoaned the fact that Carolyn would soon leave for the city and they would be apart; at least, that was Carolyn’s version.

“If we were married we could be together, Sweet,” said A. R., “why not get married?”

That made sense to Carolyn, though A. R., after a bad day at the track, could barely afford a license.

Arnold acquired the necessary document, and the foursome drove to almost the city line, to 185 Washington Street, the “little white house,” as Carolyn described it, of Saratoga Springs Justice of the Peace Fred B. Bradley. Arnold gave his occupation as “salesman.” Both newlyweds gave their residence as “Saratoga Springs.”

Most likely the groom wore standard business attire on that Thursday night. The bride depicted her wardrobe:

I was wearing a large black hat of Milan straw, a black-andwhite silk dress, black patent leather shoes, and black stockings. There were no flesh-colored stockings in those days, and well I remember my sense of shock when I saw flesh-colored stockings being worn for the first time. They seemed indecent.

I always wore black and white in those days. We all wore corsets, of course, and I have a memory that my sleeves were rather large, and my skirts rather long.

Arnold Rothstein and Carolyn Greenwald might have waited until morning to become man and wife, but no gambler would have made that play: marrying on Friday the thirteenth. Swope and Pearl Powell were the ceremony’s only witnesses. The new couple retired to Rothstein and Swope’s rented cottage.

In New York, the Morning Telegraph’s account of the ceremony concentrated more on the bride than the groom (whom it characterized as a broker), and noting her showgirl friends’ chagrin at being excluded from the festivities.

Carolyn Green’s dreams had been answered. She soon woke from her reveries. Before leaving Saratoga, husband Arnold approached with a question. His luck at the track had not improved. Could he pawn her jewelry? Her engagement ring?

She agreed. They barely had money for train fare to Manhattan and for establishing a home, at the new Hotel Ansonia, up at West 73rd and Broadway. The Ansonia was a fine place. Their single room wasn’t. A flimsy partition separated the bed from “what might be called the dressing section.” A suite it was not.

It took Arnold six months to retrieve Carolyn’s engagement ring. It would not be the last time he’d pawn her jewelry. Sometimes his back would be against the wall. That was understandable. Other times, he merely wanted to fatten his bankroll or possess more cash to put to work. “I don’t need the money,” he’d explain, “but I might. It gives me room to maneuver. Besides, it’s one way of using someone else’s money. I can lend it out at a lot more interest than I’m paying.”

Pawned jewelry was but part of Carolyn’s problems. A. R. kept gambler’s hours, living by night, arriving home at five or six each morning, and when no pressing business such as a horse race caused him to rise, sleeping until three in the afternoon. “I had this black hair,” Carolyn Rothstein would recall of her wedding day, “and in two years it turned gray. Gambling did it.”

For a man who did not drink, his first words on awakening were invariably of discomfort: “I don’t feel well.” To salve his pain, A. R. would swig down some milk of magnesia, or perhaps, just milk. He loved milk and drank immense quantities of it. He loved sweets too, particularly cakes. Carolyn hid them from her husband or he would have lived on them.

She did not have to hide herself from her husband, however. He hid from her. He slept, then he arose to tend business. Carolyn spent time with friends, mostly from her show-business days. Dark-haired Edith Kelly, choreographer of Havana, had married and gone abroad, but Brownie Selwyn, and her husband, producer Archie Selwyn, remained. So did Pearl Honeyman. But A. R. demanded that his bride remain home evenings. So Carolyn spent virtually every night alone, becoming a voracious reader.

In due course, things picked up. A. R. promised Carolyn that when he had $100,000 dollars, he’d walk away from gambling. The Rothsteins would live a normal life. They would spend evenings together, have a semblance of security, maybe even a family.

He was lying.

SHORTLY AFTER A. R. and Carolyn’s wedding, Rothstein’s gambling business picked up. “Your husband is going places,” he announced cheerily. “I’ve got plans.” Arnold didn’t mean plans for a respectable occupation. He now possessed a $12,000 bankroll, nearly enough for his own gambling house.

He was still short a couple of grand to start his business, and in the Fall of 1909 his new father-in-law loaned it to him. A. R. leased a threestory brownstone at 106 West 46th Street, just off Sixth Avenue, to serve as both home and gambling house. Thomas Farley, A. R.‘s black retainer, would help run the place. A maid was hired to assist Carolyn and to clean the gambling parlor itself. Even with the luxury of domestic help, Carolyn found it barely habitable. The house was shabby, its mahogany dining-room furniture worn. She purchased some white bedroom furniture, but wasn’t satisfied with her choice.

The first floor contained two parlors, A. R.‘s gambling rooms. The second floor featured two bedrooms and a bath. The Rothsteins slept in the rear bedroom, away from the street. With the odd hours he kept, Arnold needed to be as far from street noise as possible. To insulate himself from light and sound, he jammed a large leather screen against the window.

The block was crowded with noisy songwriting firms and worse. The garage next door had previously been a stable. Each night Carolyn heard noises. “Rats, Mrs. Rothstein,” Tom Farley explained. “Rats always hang around a stable.”

Carolyn felt isolated. In the daytime her husband slept; evenings he worked. During the day she shopped and visited friends, but he forbade her to leave their living quarters after 6:00 P.M. It was the beginning of an increasingly lonely life and an unsatisfactory marriage.

Meanwhile, A. R. had his own troubles. Gambling was illegal. Therefore, he needed protection. Luckily, he remained on excellent terms with Big Tim Sullivan.

Sullivan never formally headed Tammany. He didn’t need to. His own Lower East Side fiefdom was lucrative enough, and Big Tim wisely realized that if he ever took charge of Tammany, he’d inevitably serve as a lightning rod for reformers’ ire.

Sullivan’s was a rags-to-riches story. When Tim was four, his father died. At eight, he peddled newspapers on the street. His energy and charm quickly attracted the attention of local politicians, and he began ascending Lower East Side society. By twenty-two he owned his own saloon. At twentythree he won election as Assemblyman in the old Third District. In 1892 Tammany boss Richard Croker anointed Sullivan as leader of his assembly district, making him de facto boss of the entire Lower East Side. That fall Sullivan’s district voted for Democrat Grover Cleveland over President Benjamin Harrison 395 to 4. “Harrison got one more vote than I expected,” Sullivan apologized to Croker, “but I’ll find that feller.”

Sullivan served briefly in Congress, finding it dull aside from his campaign to capture the congressional pinochle championship. He left after one term. For most of his career, he held the title of state senator, but it was from district leadership that his power flowed. Big Tim ruled by sheer force of charity. Need a turkey at Thanksgiving or a load of coal to help you through a cold winter? Big Tim would help. Need a job with the city or with a company that had city business? Big Tim assisted happily.

Tim’s fiefdom contained the legendary Bowery. Besides saloons and theaters, stuss houses and whorehouses, it contained most of New York’s bums. Sullivan never forgot them. They were human beings like everyone else-and voters, too. Each Christmas, he hosted a magnificent feast in their honor. The 1909 event served 5,000 indigents 10,000 pounds of turkey, a 100 kegs of beer, 500 loaves of bread, 200 gallons of coffee, and 5,000 pies. Each man also received an array of presents to help tide him over during the coming winter: a pair of shoes and socks, a pipe, and a sack of tobacco.