The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (5 page)

Willie understood that the daily newspapers, which were exploding both in number and in circulation, had created an insatiable appetite for scandal. He invented what was known as the freak or nut act, which the vaudeville authority Joe Laurie, Jr., describes as an engagement “made with the deliberate object of promotion, the financial profit being secondary”—the ultimate object being to expand the vaudeville audience by playing on the news of the day. Willie specialized in female murderers or would-be murderers, including two women who had shot a socialite and whom he billed as “The Shooting Stars.” After Harry Thaw killed Stanford White, Willie hired Evelyn Nesbit at an unheard-of $3,500 a week to do some dancing. He booked the wife of Lord Hope, who owned the Hope Diamond, and then paid Lord Hope $1,500 a week to stand in the Victoria lobby during performances. Willie’s greatest genius was in the manufacture of publicity. In 1905 he persuaded an itinerant Swiss sketch artist to pretend to be court artist to the Turkish sultan, hired three women as his wives, and then orchestrated a massive publicity campaign for
Abdul Kardar and His Three Wives;
Willie arranged to have the troupe detained by customs, and then furiously petitioned for their release. Three years later he repeated the gag, booking the famous Gertrude Hoffman to play Salome, and then arranging to have her arrested for indecency.

The Victoria was scarcely Times Square’s only great experiment in popular culture; the Hippodrome, on Sixth Avenue at 44th, offered fantastic extravaganzas to six thousand spectators at a time. But the Victoria, located literally on top of the Times Square subway, offered entertainment that even an unlettered immigrant could enjoy—and it was identifiably American, unlike the Yiddish or Chinese or German theater downtown. You could teach yourself English at the Victoria, and you could keep up with the news of the day. Willie never lost contact with his audience. Joe Laurie, Jr., says that in its seventeen years of operation the Victoria grossed $20 million, of which $5 million was profit.

Almost directly across the street from the most tumbledown and loutish theater in Times Square lay the most beautiful and refined theater in Times Square—indeed, in the country. The New Amsterdam, designed by two gifted young architects, Henry B. Herts and Hugh Tallant, and completed in 1903, was the first example in the United States of art nouveau design, from the horticulturally accurate roses carved into the woodwork to the Shakespearean figures peering from jade-colored terracotta balustrades to the great mural over the proscenium illustrating the progress of the arts. The sinuous line and stripped-down ornamentation of art nouveau was the very look of modernity for the forward-thinking aesthetes of the early years of the century, and the New Amsterdam was considered a building of the first importance—a building that might well “mark an epoch in the history of art,” as one penetrating if breathless account put it. This was also, of course, an era of opulence and show, and the New Amsterdam was intended to dazzle even the most blasé theatergoer. The gentlemen’s retiring room featured a “fireplace of Caen stone, floor of Welsh quarry tiling, wainscot of nut-brown English oak,” while that of the ladies was rendered “in tones of the tea rose, with decorations and carvings of conventionalized roses with leaves and stems entwined.”

Opening night was a magnificent affair, with carriages disgorging a steady stream of men in top hats and tails and women in furs and long gowns. The New Amsterdam’s owners, Marc Klaw and Abe Erlanger, two of the most powerful men on Broadway, had chosen to open with
A Midsummer Night’s Dream—
an apt choice, for the architects had said that they intended to evoke that play’s sense of magic. And indeed, one critic who attended the opening described the theater as “the most airy, fairy beautiful thing in the way of a playhouse that the New York public has ever seen.” The play, on the other hand, received fairly poor reviews, and gave way after three weeks to
Mother Goose,
a Christmas pantomime. Soon the New Amsterdam was showing dopey musicals like
Miss Dolly Dollars.
In fact, nothing produced at the New Amsterdam during the first decade of its existence demonstrated anything like the creativity and daring of the building itself. Franz Lehár’s
The Merry Widow
was a huge hit in 1907–1908, and set off a waltz craze that lasted for several years; but their other big successes were mostly harmless froth.

By 1910, the passion for playgoing had reached such a pitch that forty first-class theaters were operating in and around Times Square; and yet few, if any, of them showed more distinguished fare than the New Amsterdam. A combination of stifling Victorian respectability and the absence of a sophisticated urban culture ensured an endless tide of mediocrity. Though figures like Dreiser and Howells, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Stephen Crane were forging a new kind of American literature at the time, Broadway showed no interest in their work. The art of playwriting, and for that matter the etiquette of theatergoing, remained stuck in the high artifice of the Gay Nineties. Audiences hissed the villain and shouted warnings to the endangered hero. Though Klaw and Erlanger had the courage to show
Peer Gynt
at the New Amsterdam, Ibsen, like Shaw and Strindberg, was generally considered either too difficult or too wicked for Broadway. Probably the most important theatrical development of those early years was the rise of George M. Cohan, a veteran of vaudeville who turned out the first truly American musicals
—Little
Johnny Jones, George Washington, Jr.,
and others, which featured rousing, foot-stomping tunes, among them “Give My Regards to Broadway,” “Yankee Doodle Boy,” and “You’re a Grand Old Flag.”

Broadway in the early years of the century was a factory, just as Hollywood was to become several decades later. Theater—whether vaudeville, operetta, or melodrama—was the popular culture of the day, and people all over the country demanded performers and productions “direct from Broadway.” In the 1890s, managers of theaters from across the country would sit in the saloons of Union Square dickering with producers for the rights to put on shows. Often, to be on the safe side, they would book two shows for the same period; or the producers would promise the same troupe to two different managers. Out of this chaos came a centralized booking organization known as the Syndicate, a partnership among six of Broadway’s leading producers. The Syndicate’s members owned theaters in New York and elsewhere, but its real power came from its control over the contracts of Broadway performers. If you wanted to book a Broadway show, you had to pay court to Abe Erlanger and Marc Klaw, who dominated the organization, and thus much of American theater, from their offices in the New Amsterdam. By 1905, Erlanger and Klaw were said to control 1,250 of the country’s 3,500 theaters, including almost all the first-class ones. Thereafter, a group of brothers from Syracuse, the Shuberts, began to build up a rival chain of their own, forging alliances with powerhouses like the producer David Belasco. Small-town theaters would “go Shubert,” or “go Syndicate,” until the twenties, when the Shuberts gained dominance (just in time to see the movies and radio degrade the value of their monopoly). The one thing that didn’t change was Broadway’s control over “the road.”

Broadway exercised a similar, but even more all-encompassing, control over vaudeville. In 1906, two vaudeville operators, B. F. Keith and E. F. Albee, incorporated the United Booking Office in Maine, which operated according to the same principles as the Syndicate. The Keith-Albee combine soon came to control virtually the entire vaudeville circuit east of Chicago. A rival circuit, the Orpheum, dominated vaudeville in the western half of the country. In 1913, Martin Beck, who ran the Orpheum circuit, built the Palace, Broadway’s vaudeville house nonpareil. Keith and Albee almost immediately wrested control of the Palace from Beck and moved their office to the theater’s sixth floor, which for many years thereafter remained vaudeville’s epicenter. The UBO’s bookers manned twenty desks on the floor, each responsible for a group of theaters in a particular part of the country. It was the bookers who composed the actual lineup of acts for the theaters, so vaudeville agents would hop from desk to desk, peddling their talent. In its own domain, the UBO exercised a supremacy no less complete than that of the steel trust. Vaudeville acts that declined a salary offer, or played at rival houses, or even played at Keith-Albee theaters through rival booking offices, put their careers in mortal peril. On the other hand, the Keith-Albee monopoly ensured that theatergoers in Kankakee or Altoona would see honest-to-God Broadway vaudeville.

TIMES SQUARE WAS, from the very beginning, a “theatrical” environment—a place that not only had theaters but was a theater. It was lit up by electric lights, and it throbbed with life until the early hours of the morning. It was vastly bigger, grander, and gaudier than Union Square, vastly more vivid and heterogeneous than Madison Square. The area was choked with actors, chorus girls, street urchins, newspapermen, gamblers, Wall Street barons, first-nighters in silk hats, and Fifth Avenue ladies in long gowns. Theater people gathered on the sidewalk in front of the Knickerbocker Hotel on the southeast corner of 42nd and Broadway, and at the Knickerbocker’s famous bar. The side streets to the east and west of Broadway were jammed with saloons, cheap hotels, and whorehouses, which serviced both the longshoremen who worked and lived in Hell’s Kitchen, to the west, and the tourists who poured in from all over. Times Square offered something for everyone.

In many ways, the most thrilling environments on Broadway in the early years of the century—the most theatrical ones—were not theaters, but restaurants. These were the “lobster palaces” of Times Square: Rector’s, Reisenweber’s, Bustanoby’s, Murray’s Roman Gardens. The lobster palaces were temples to the god of conspicuous consumption, where the freshly minted millionaires of the age went to flaunt their wealth by eating staggering meals and leave staggering tips; a headwaiter might clear upwards of $15,000 during the holidays. The settings were strictly Gilded Lily. The downstairs dining room at Rector’s, which accommodated one hundred tables, featured floor-to-ceiling mirrors and Louis XIV furnishings; both the table linen and the cutlery bore the “Rector griffin.” The Café Maxim, at 38th and Broadway, clad its waiters in its own version of Louis XIV: ruffled shirts, black satin knee breeches, silk stockings, pumps with silver buckles. Most of the dining rooms were below ground level, so that the patron reached his table via a grand stairway. The producer and impresario Florenz Ziegfeld had popularized the triumphal entry, with huzzahs and bravos and trumpet flourishes and bowing and scraping. Here the man about town with the actress of the day on his arm, or the budding plutocrat and his wife, could make just such an entrance, usually accompanied by the house orchestra. Here every man could be the star of his own drama.

This was an era of epic eating, when the plutocrat, like the Hawaiian prince, demonstrated his wealth by the dimensions of his belly. Diamond Jim Brady became one of the great celebrities of the age simply by out-eating everyone around him. Brady once explained his philosophy of dining by saying that he started each meal with his stomach four inches from the table and ate until the two made contact. When Diamond Jim returned from Paris with a mania for
filet de sole Marguery,
George Rector’s father sent him off to France to learn how to prepare the dish. When Rector returned two years later, a virtuoso of sole, he was met at New York harbor by Diamond Jim and Rector’s Russian orchestra. Whisked directly to the kitchen, he prepared perhaps the single most famous meal of an age famous for its meals. Diamond Jim was joined by Sam Shubert, the theatrical impresario; Marshall Field, the department store magnate; Adolphus Busch, the brewer; and the composers Victor Herbert and John Philip Sousa. Diamond Jim pronounced himself ecstatic.

The Rectors had made a fortune running the only restaurant permitted at the Chicago Exposition of 1893; the family was already well established by the time it opened its ornate palace, in September 1899, on the east side of Broadway between 43rd and 44th, immediately south of Hammerstein’s Olympia. Rector’s was the first, and the greatest, of the lobster palaces. (Rector claimed to have been the first to actually serve lobster, their signature dish.) Despite the magnificent setting, Rector’s offered a vastly headier social milieu than the stodgy world of Delmonico’s. Everyone who mattered dined at Rector’s—the Floradora Girls and their cattle-baron escorts, O. Henry and Stephen Crane, Oscar Hammerstein and the Whitneys, Diamond Jim and Lillian Russell. There was gambling in the private dining rooms in the rear, and manic stock speculating—it appears to have amounted almost to the same activity—at the tables upstairs and down. Whatever news there was on Broadway could always be gleaned among the tables at Rector’s. In his memoirs—for restaurateurs then were at least as celebrated as ours are today—George Rector says, “It was the cathedral of froth, where New York chased the rainbow, and the butterfly netted the entomologist. It was the national museum of habits, the bourse of gossip, and the clearing house of rumors.”

At a time when the theater itself was almost absurdly stylized, dining was a kind of free-form drawing-room comedy; and as the hour drew later, the drama became more intimate and more risqué. The light posttheater supper came to symbolize the sophistication, and the nocturnal habits, of the Broadway crowd. The stage door Johnny, the young swain or incorrigible roué besotted with an actress or chorus girl, was expected to preen with his catch in the racy setting of the Broadway restaurant. This late meal was widely known as the Bird and a Bottle, the “bird” standing both for the meal and the young lady. Chorus girl was, in fact, the principal dish served at the lobster palaces, at least late at night. Many of the restaurants kept rooms upstairs so that the gentleman need not suffer the inconvenience of a hotel. Murray’s Roman Gardens, a palatial setting that would have made Nero blush, offered “24 luxuriously furnished and richly appointed bachelor apartments.”