The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square (8 page)

The poet Rupert Brooke came to New York in 1914 and described “the merciless lights” of Times Square in accents Theodore Dreiser would have understood very well. “A stranger of another race, loitering here, might cast his eyes up, in a vague wonder what powers, kind or maleficent, controlled or observed this whirlwind,” he writes. And the terrible, ludicrous answer is that the gods of the heavens have retreated before the gods of commerce. A “divine hand” writes its “igneous message to the nations, ‘Wear Underwear for Youths and Men-Boys.’” And then “a youth and a man-boy, flaming and immortal, clad in celestial underwear, box a short round, vanish, reappear for another round, and again disappear.” Nearby, Orion “drives a sidereal golfball out of sight through the meadows of Paradise.” Here, in Times Square, modern man had orchestrated the sky itself, the region that teems with the divinities of Western mythology, to sell toothpaste. This was a death of the gods which Nietzsche had not anticipated. Brooke could still summon a deep sense of dread at the thought; but Arnold Bennett’s shrug was soon to become the more familiar response.

The great threat to the electric sign, however, came not from partisans of Olympus but from advocates of the city beautiful. The Municipal Art Society, a civic organization consisting of many of New York’s leading citizens and dedicated to preserving the city’s beaux-arts elegance and decorum from the depredations of popular culture, began a campaign against billboards as early as 1902. By 1912, public outcry had led Mayor William Gaynor to establish the Mayor’s Billboard Advisory Commission. The commissioners turned Gude’s arguments for the virtues of outdoor advertising against the industry, noting that the billboard or electric sign “thrusts itself upon unwilling and offended vision by day,” and “glares and winks and radiates its often uninteresting messages” by night. The commission proposed an ordinance that would prohibit large electric signs in residential neighborhoods and regulate their hours elsewhere, limit the height of roof signs to ten feet, and prohibit virtually all outdoor advertisements on or near parks, squares, public buildings, schools, and boulevards and streets of exceptional character (that is, Fifth Avenue). In short, it would have crippled the sky sign.

It was O. J. Gude, more than anyone else, who came to the industry’s defense. By this time, Gude was one of New York’s leading business figures, wealthy and respectable, an art collector, a horseman, and a clubman in good standing. He was a broad-shouldered man with thick hair, a clipped mustache, rimless spectacles, and a solemn mien. Promoter though he was, Gude was neither a cynic like Willie Hammerstein nor, certainly, a libertine like Ziegfeld. He seems genuinely to have viewed advertising as a source of moral and aesthetic improvement, and he had the gift of using the late-Victorian language of uplift without abandoning commercial candor. He once paid tribute to “19 centuries of the most effective outdoor advertising that the mind of the greatest advertising genius could conceive,” by which he meant the church steeple. When he testified before the mayor’s commission, he unfurled from the balcony an early public-service ad: a poster showing children going off to church, with the caption “Take your children to church, give them the right start.”

Gude believed that the solution lay in the promotion of high aesthetic standards among sign men. He believed that beautiful signs were more effective than plain ones, and he argued that outdoor advertising had “felt and shown the effects of the awakening of the artistic spirit in the people of this country”—a claim that he, at least, had every right to make. In 1913, Gude had the inspired idea of joining the Municipal Art Society and getting himself placed on its Committee on Advertising. There he made a raft of improving suggestions: that some prominent billboard locations be used as outdoor art galleries, that the Gude Company and the society jointly sponsor a sign design competition, that leading artists lecture Gude employees with the goal of “making advertising displays less offensive and more artistic.” None of this got him anywhere, and he soon quit. Nevertheless, the outdoor advertising industry, with Gude’s leadership, fought the forces of regulation to a draw; the city fashioned a much less restrictive ordinance in 1914, and then incorporated its principles into the new zoning ordinance of 1916. The zoning rules declared many areas of the city off-limits to electric signs, but otherwise placed few limits on their use. Times Square thus became New York’s electric light district, as the Ginza was later to be in Tokyo, or Piccadilly in London. The brilliance and beauty and technical daring of the signs that Gude and others raised along the roofline of Broadway more than justified the city’s ruling.

Gude’s most stupendous achievement came in 1917, at the very end of his career as Times Square’s master spectaculator. One of Gude’s prize locations was the space atop the Putnam Building, on the west side of Broadway between 43rd and 44th Streets. William Wrigley agreed to pay $100,000 a year to lease the space, and Gude designed for him the largest electric sign on the face of the earth, two hundred feet long and almost a hundred feet high. Here is the indispensable Tama Starr on the Wrigley’s sign: “Twin peacocks faced off on a tree branch, their tails forming a feathery canopy over the central portion of the display.” Beneath were the Wrigley’s logo and the actual ad copy. On either side of the text were six “Spearmen” in pointy hats. “Brandishing spears, they comprised a drill team that went through a series of twelve calisthenics the populace quickly dubbed the Daily Dozen. Flanking them were fountains spraying geysers of bubbling water, and the whole spectacle was framed in vinelike filigree.”

Gude, who was in poor health, sold his business in 1918, gave his art collection to the Lotos Club, went off to Europe, and died in Germany seven years later, leaving an estate worth a million dollars. He was much eulogized as “the creator of the Great White Way,” a title he deserved not simply because he lit up Times Square—that would have happened anyway—but because he combined art and commerce to forge the new form known as the spectacular, and thus gave Times Square the look for which it has ever after been known. Gude seems to have left no record of his own process of creation, but this astute and tough-minded businessman devised some of the most whimsical and fantastic works of art ever seen in Times Square. And he
was
a businessman, and a promoter, like Ochs and Hammerstein and Ziegfeld. In other parts of New York City—in Greenwich Village, for example—the motto may well have been “Art for art’s sake.” Not in Times Square. The motto of Times Square was, and always has been, “Keep the turnstiles clicking.”

5.

“BUY 18 HOLES AND SELL ALL THE WATER HAZARDS!”

ON AUGUST, 13, 1921, Dulcy, a play written by George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly, opened at the Frazee Theatre.
Dulcy
was a satire—a genre familiar in European theater from the time of Molière, but quite novel, and even shocking, on Broadway, where authors were not wont to mock their own main characters. Most of
Dulcy
’s cast of characters either mouth stock inanities or nod sagely at the humbug of the others. Leach, who writes movie scripts, insists on reciting to the guests of a dinner party the ludicrous plot of his latest work, “Sin,” which begins with Noah’s Ark and then proceeds through world history: “And to keep the symbolism at the end, just as Jack kisses Coralie there in Chicago, Marc Anthony kisses Cleopatra in Ancient Egypt”—Leach speaks in capital letters—“And George Washington kisses Martha Washington at Mount Vernon.” The hostess, Dulcy, is modeled on a preposterous character invented by Franklin P. Adams; her speech consists entirely of the clichés that pass for conversation among the stupid rich. If someone praises a book, Dulcy is sure to say, “My books are my best friends.” Dulcy is, at bottom, a thoroughly lovable meddler, in the spirit of Austen’s Emma, and she reduces the play’s genteel suburban setting to a shambles before she and her husband are implausibly rescued by the gods of comedy.

Dulcy
is a largely—and not unfairly—forgotten play, but in its breezy irreverence and its witty contempt for mediocrity it broke through a cultural crust and left Broadway a slightly different place. James Thurber later said that it was
Dulcy
that showed him how to wield his own satirical weapons.
Dulcy
reproduced in narrative form the urbanity, the irony, and the wit of the best of the revues; in retrospect, it turns out to have been the first ripple from the mighty torrent of witty and urbane plays and movie scripts and radio programs and magazine articles that was to come roaring out of Broadway in the burst of creativity that began in the years after World War I, and that ushered American culture out of the Victorian hinterlands and into the modern age. The 1920s on Broadway was, above all, the era of wit, and of the wits. If there was a wit-in-chief, it was George S. Kaufman, a beanpole who scrutinized the world from beneath a great, shocked thicket of hair, an ironist with an allergy to sentimentality, a neurotic perfectionist driven by a dread of failure. One of Kaufman’s biographers writes that when
Dulcy
opened in Chicago, Marc Connelly discovered Kaufman, between acts, “huddled against a rusty pipe in the dusty, deserted scene deck . . . staring blankly at the floor and running his fingers through his thick hair.” He could only mumble abject apologies while Connelly assured him that the play was, in fact, a hit.

IN “MY LOST CITY,” an elegiac account of the accumulating wreckage of his own life, F. Scott Fitzgerald recalled Manhattan in 1920. Already, he wrote, “the feverish activity of the boom” had fired the city with life, but the “general inarticulateness” of the moment, its raw novelty, denied it any larger sense of meaning. Here was energy without voice.

Then, for just a moment, the “younger generation” idea became a fusion of many elements of New York life. . . . The blending of the bright, gay, vigorous elements began then, and for the first time there appeared a society a little livelier than the solid mahogany dinner parties of Emily Price Post. If this society produced the cocktail party, it also evolved Park Avenue wit, and for the first time an educated European could envision a trip to New York as something more amusing than a gold-trek into a formalized Australian Bush.

In those years immediately after World War I, the country appeared to be shedding its old, familiar ways like a dried-up skin. Indeed, the very fact of drastic change, the widespread consciousness of it, was a central aspect of the new. American culture was rapidly taking on the jazzed-up, fragmentary rhythms of urban life. The census of 1920 showed that for the first time more Americans lived in cities than in the country. New York was the nation’s colossus, and the world’s. The city’s population swelled almost to eight million. Economic growth was stupendous. Between 1918 and 1931, the number of cars registered in New York leaped from 125,101 to 790,123—more cars than in all of Europe combined. New York was the factory of the new at the moment when novelty itself had become a craze. The emerging cultures of fashion, design, advertising, and magazine publishing were all centered in Manhattan. It was as if the city were inventing the idea of urbanism, and then retailing it to the rest of the country. As the urban historian Ann Douglas writes, “Trendsetter to the nation and the world, New York finds its job in the commercialization of mood swings: the city translates the shifting national psyche into fashions of all kinds, from ladies’ frocks and popular music, to Wall Street stocks, ad layouts and architectural designs, on a yearly, monthly, weekly and daily basis.”

Only rarely does the national life change this fast. It did so in the late teens and early twenties because so many things happened at once—the stock market boom, which showered sudden wealth in all directions, and especially in the cities; a large-scale urban migration; the creation of a national culture through the new media of radio and the movies; the arrival of modern ideas, and above all those of Freud, who reduced the great edifice of Victorian morality to the status of drawing-room comedy; and the return of several million young men and women from World War I, an event which for many of them had proved at least as liberating as it had been disillusioning (or perhaps disillusion itself had proved liberating). Not only had they saved Europe, but Europe had taught them a thing or two about life. Some had been exposed to what were delicately known as Continental moral codes; the intellectuals among them had been exposed to Continental ideas.

It was a world that the young had seized from the old. In
Only Yesterday,
a retrospective account of the Roaring Twenties, Frederick Lewis Allen describes the era in language that would be familiar to anyone who lived through the 1960s, another era when mass prosperity freed children from their parents’ routines while a radical shift in values inspired young people to use that freedom in ways that horrified their elders. “Fathers and mothers lay awake asking themselves whether their children were not utterly lost,” Allen writes, “sons and daughters evaded questions, lied miserably and unhappily, or flared up to reply that at least they were not dirty-minded hypocrites.” In a 1927 magazine article entitled “A Flapper Set Me Right,” the theatrical impresario David Belasco recalled receiving a visit several years earlier from a young and possibly fictitious woman who explained to him, “The old folks call us ‘flappers’; we call them ‘oldtimers’ and worse. They sit back and roll the cud of Victorian virtue under their musty old tongues, and never once have they tried to realize what it is we are demanding.” The demand, she said, was for “honesty.” Girls had had it with feigning “a sweetness and innocence totally foreign to their natural impulses.” They would make themselves the equal of men in word and in deed.

Of course, the seeds of this epochal change had been sown in the years before World War I, when Persis Cabot and her merry friends were turkey-trotting the night away in various dives and nightspots. As New York City was the mother lode of national trends, so it was in Times Square that New York first broke in its new habits. Another way of explaining the spirit of the twenties is to say that it took about a decade for the abandon, the heedlessness, that first showed itself along Broadway to become a national phenomenon.

By the early twenties, the cosmopolitan nonchalance toward the proprieties that Florenz Ziegfeld had championed had become the stock-in-trade of Broadway. It was the era of girls in rhinestones—and not many rhinestones, at that. The theatergoer of the day could almost always choose from among three, four, or five revues in the manner of the
Follies.
There was
George White’s Scandals,
and
Earl Carroll’s Vanities,
and the Shuberts’
Passing Show,
and
The Garrick Gaieties,
and Irving Berlin’s revue in the Music Box Theatre, which he had built expressly to showcase his own songs. Like vaudeville a generation earlier, the revue, with its unending appetite for material, offered a proving ground for the performers of the era—but these were performers of supreme gifts. Irving Berlin was writing songs not only for the
Music Box Revue
but for the
Follies;
George Gershwin was writing and performing songs for the
Scandals;
and Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart were turning out tunes for the
Gaieties.
The
Music Box Revue
of 1923 featured comic skits by Kaufman and Robert Benchley, soon to be one of the famous wits of the Algonquin Round Table and
The New Yorker.
The Paul Whiteman Orchestra, one of the first of the great jazz bands, performed in the
Scandals.

The revues of the twenties were immensely more urbane than those of an earlier generation; they were also several orders of magnitude naughtier. At
Earl Carroll’s Vanities,
by far the most shameless, hostesses in short skirts and sheer stockings danced with the customers, and show-girls were supplied to the better tables. The show itself adhered to the Ziegfeld principle of “nothing but girls,” with seminude or thinly draped chorines posed, according to one authority, “against plume curtains, hanging gardens, gates of roses, swings, ladders, bejewelled ruffles, chandeliers, horns of plenty, the prehistoric, the futuristic . . . ,” and so on. The Shuberts featured nude girls as lights in a chandelier and as fruits in a fruit basket. The skits were often just as transparent as the costumes. The Keith-Albee syndicate, which controlled many of the acts, eventually drew up a lengthy list of taboos, which included the stock joke of a girl walking onstage carrying an oar and announcing, “I just made the crew team.” The 1923 edition of the show
Artists and Models
featured women nude from the waist up disporting themselves as “models.” The market for sexual candor finally became so glutted that Ziegfeld himself began putting the clothes back on the girls. “This was not a moral standpoint on my part,” as the Olympian one explained in a 1927 magazine article, “but an artistic one. I realized that a charming girl will not appear in public undressed.”

A play like
Dulcy
could not have been presented on Broadway in an earlier age, both because sardonic wits like George S. Kaufman weren’t writing for the stage—or perhaps didn’t yet exist at all—and because the audience wasn’t ready for such pitiless debunking. Everything made on Broadway, whether cafés or signs or plays, was, and still is, made with an audience in mind; and the audience of 1910 got the fun-loving but formulaic theatrical experience it craved. But the new generation, disgusted with received wisdom—and much enjoying its disgust with received wisdom —signaled an almost unlimited willingness to be challenged. The essayist and critic and wit-about-town Alexander Woollcott, who himself served in World War I and then lived briefly in Paris, along with many of the leading columnists and editors of his generation, observed in 1920 that “there has grown up an alert, discriminating, sophisticated public, numerous enough at last to make profitable the most aspiring ventures of which the theater’s personnel is capable.”

The bohemians of Greenwich Village had long scorned the overtly commercial culture of Times Square; but in 1918 a group of sophisticates from the Village established the Theatre Guild in order to bring serious English and continental drama to Broadway. In 1920, at a time when George Bernard Shaw was considered a rank immoralist both here and in England—he had condemned World War I as brutish militarism—the Theatre Guild mounted a famous and immensely successful production of Shaw’s
Heartbreak House
on Broadway. The Guild staged Ibsen’s
Peer
Gynt
and Strindberg’s
Dance of Death,
and virtually everything of Shaw’s, as well as works by serious American and English writers like Sidney Howard and S. N. Behrman and A. A. Milne. Most of these works, presented in a spirit of brave artistic purity, found a Broadway audience. By 1925, the Guild had built its own theater, on West 52nd Street, and had traveling companies both here and in London; the Guild was supported by thirty thousand subscribers in New York, and thirty thousand more elsewhere in the country. Nor was the Theatre Guild the only source of high culture. Broadway audiences went to see plays by Somerset Maugham, Sean O’Casey, and John Galsworthy, as well as plays presented in Italian, German, French, Russian, and Hebrew.

Eugene O’Neill was not only a Broadway playwright, but a hugely successful one. His first full-length play,
Beyond the Horizon,
was staged at the Morosco Theatre in 1920. The play was so difficult and unsettling that initially it was seen only at matinees, when the regular play at the Morosco was not being performed.
Beyond the Horizon
told the story of two brothers on a farm: Robert, a poetic soul who dreams of the world “beyond the hills,” and Andy, a creature of prose, wedded to the land. But their destinies are reversed, and their lives wrecked, by love. Robert, who had planned on going to sea, instead stays on the farm in order to marry the girl he loves, while Andy, in love with the same girl, bitterly renounces both farm and family and takes Robert’s place aboard the ship. In the highly feminized and Christianized Victorian drama still then popular on Broadway, love had always been understood as the highest good, and home and hearth the final destination toward which the heart yearned. But for Robert, love is a terrible act of surrender, a betrayal of his deepest nature; and home quickly becomes a living hell as the farm collapses and his wife, Ruth, comes to despise him.

Beyond the Horizon
is a resolutely un-Christian, uncomforting play in which only the tiniest scraps of human will escape the crushing force of fate. The most thoughtful critics immediately recognized the play as a work of genius. Alexander Woollcott wrote in
The New York Times,
“The play has greatness in it, and marks O’Neill as one of our foremost playwrights.” Heywood Broun, an equally influential figure, hailed it as a breakthrough in drama. But what is more remarkable still,
Beyond the
Horizon
was a genuine success, running for 111 performances. An audience that had been satisfied with bonbons was now eager for meat. As Brooks Atkinson remarks in his history of Broadway, after
Beyond the
Horizon,
“hokum dramas like
The Easiest Way, Salvation Nell
and
The
Witching Hour became impossible.” The demonically productive O’Neill would have nineteen plays produced on Broadway over the next fourteen years.