Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair Read online

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  It is easy to trace the sources of Jimmy’s popularity. His personality made its impression on the whole country. Probably no mere city official has ever before captured the interest of the nation as Walker did. It was news from Bangor to San Diego when Jimmy was nipped by a pet alligator in Florida; when the Reverend Dr. Christian F. Reisner announced from his pulpit as an important scoop that Jimmy had gone on the water-wagon; when Jimmy kept the Lord Mayor of Dublin waiting for an hour; when he charged that our State Department had spies dogging him nightly in Paris; when he appeared at the City Hall with a black eye and explained that he had slipped in his bathtub; when he was just grazed by constables who raided a floating casino off Montauk Point. The American and European interest in Jimmy reacted in his favor in New York. Like all provincials, New Yorkers are grateful to anyone who puts their town on the map.

  But the great basis of Walker’s popularity was his passion for making everybody happy. In spurts he handled the city’s business impressively, but his chief task was that of spreading sunshine in the metropolis. New York—at least the New York of the Jimmy Walker Era—demanded that the Mayor be a cornerstone-layer, not an administrator. Jimmy was not the loafer that he has sometimes been painted; he toiled and moiled and sweated and slaved at laying cornerstones, dedicating buildings, receiving celebrities and speaking at luncheons and dinners. He rushed madly about the city to show himself at the quilting parties, husking bees, church sociables and other innocent diversions of his constituents. He popped in on the pageants and feasts of the twenty-four important nationalities of New York City.

  It was usually 1 or 2 in the morning before he began to have any free time to himself. Other officials, trotting around to varied functions, conserve their mental energy by declaiming tripe from manuscripts prepared by their secretaries. Jimmy always made his own speeches and was nearly always at the top of his form. He has a sixth sense for catching the mood, the atmosphere, the prevailing sentiment of any gathering and rendering it in felicitous sentences. A B’nai Brith convention would instantly perceive that Jimmy was a Jewish boy at heart; the Liederkranz would gather that he was a Teuton snatched from his cradle in infancy; the Southern Society would see Confederate Generals in his lineage. Jimmy never shirked his welcoming, congratulating and condoling work. When, to give an example, forty-eight boys from forty-eight states, each boy the winner of a Thomas A. Edison scholarship, called at the City Hall, Jimmy tried to improvise a bright line on each state. Some of his lines were good, some were pathetic, but Jimmy is the only man alive who would try to turn out forty-eight split-second wisecracks to please forty-eight boys not yet of voting age. And Jimmy does not turn out his work with the facility of the complacent expert; he always spurs his mind to its highest activity. He has a rare gift of establishing a comradeship between himself and a hearer. Valentino’s greatness on the screen was an expression of profound intimacy which gave multitudes of women the illusion that a special bond of sympathy existed between each of them and the cinema star. Walker achieves a similar freemasonry, both with men and women, by impish leers and sly allusions which flatter the hearer into the belief that he and Jimmy Walker understand each other; that they are two kindred souls; that they are two, and the only two members, of a secret mysterious order. Hundred of thousands, if not millions of New Yorkers, firmly believe that they are among Jimmy’s closest friends. In fact, men who have never heard Walker except over the radio will say, “Jimmy Walker told me thus and so.”

  Jimmy could not have achieved his greatness in an earlier decade. In the pre-war and pre-Volstead period, he might have been tolerated, but he would never have been glorified. Less than ten years ago, one of the sagacious elder statesmen of Tammany, while admitting Walker’s brilliance and his services to Tammany, asserted that the young fellow had no future. The aged chieftain’s theory was that, to rise in New York politics, a man must be either Puritanical or cautious. That principle did formerly prevail, but it lost its force in the last decade. The attempt of reformers to legislate liberty out had legislated license in. It produced the Jimmy Walker Era. The depression has now finally ended that era. The idol of the newer epoch is the forbidding type with wrathful countenance and a spade beard, with a curtailing, slashing, reprimanding vetoing temper, and with an eloquence which consists wholly of the word “NO.”

  Walker was the emblem of the reaction against reformers. As a State Senator, he gave New York Sunday baseball and Sunday movies. He defeated the crusade to censor books. He is the one conspicuous politician in America who came out flat-footedly in favor of the return of the saloon. It was the Walker Act which re-established prize-fighting after the reformers had abolished it. The long whiskers, the frock coats, the black gloves, the reversed collars, the sour visages left Albany year after year joining in the prayer that something serious would speedily happen to Senator Walker.

  Later, as Mayor, Jimmy became the embodiment of New York’s, and to some extent of the nation’s, growing dislike of Prohibition and Puritanism. He became the foremost American champion of a man’s right to be himself. His life was an antiseptic against hypocrisy; it was a standing rebuke to the Anti-Saloon League and the Methodist Board of Temperance, Prohibition and Public Morals; it was holy water to the devils of intolerance and persecution; it was a whiff of insecticide to snoopers, sniffers, wowsers, informers, meddlers and all similar canaille.

  To dislodge an idol of such rare merit was a difficult proceeding. Seabury’s revelations were enough to sink ten ordinary Mayors, but they failed to turn sentiment against Walker. The composite mind of New York worked at racing speed to invent fresh excuses for Jimmy after each fresh Seabury exposure. It was demonstrated clearly that the former Mayor had mingled his private finances in strange ways with the finances of interests seeking important favors from New York City. What of that? It was computed that, taking Seabury’s allegations at their face value, fewer than a million mysterious dollars had found lodgment in Jimmy’s iron safe. Is a great metropolis like New York interested in petty cash items of that sort? Judge Seabury’s well-meant strivings would have been laughed to scorn except for one circumstance. That circumstance was the revolt of New York’s long overtaxed real estate. It was this which brought sudden unpopularity and peril to Walker. With rents cut in half, with thousands of buildings in receiverships, with the real estate interests already bleeding to death from overtaxation, Jimmy wanted $697,000,000 to run New York for one year. That was the last straw. The Sunday supplements used to entertain their readers with speculations on whether the weight of the skyscrapers would not some day push Manhattan Island down into the ocean; to-day the weight of taxes and mortgages is doing practically that. Jimmy had painted the town red in more ways than one. The bedrock of Manhattan rose and mutinied, as the stones of Rome were invited to do by Mark Antony. It was Mother Earth, not Seabury, that finally shook Jimmy out of City Hall. Jimmy may come back; if so he will be a very much altered Jimmy. But, in any case, the old Jimmy Walker Era is over.

  WHEN LOVELY WOMEN STOOPED TO THE FOLLIES

  HELEN BROWN NORDEN

  FROM FEBRUARY 1933

  The editors of Vanity Fair have been assured that sometime this spring, if all goes well, there will blaze a new sign on Broadway, whose brilliant lights will form the word FOLLIES—a word which the Tenderloin has imagined banished forever from its demesne. In all probability, this will be its last public appearance. In memory of the man who once gave her a job, and who later became her good friend, Peggy Fears Blumenthal will produce a memorial to Florenz Ziegfeld, The All-Time Follies. [Ziegfeld had died the previous summer.] Follies performers of another day will flock to the standard: Marilyn Miller, Leon Errol, Fannie Brice and the others. They will do again—for the last time—the numbers which first gave them fame under the Ziegfeld banner—the old songs, the old sketches, the half-forgotten dances. And a bright ghost will kick its gleeful heels about the neon bulbs—a naïve ghost of other
days, the spectral symbol of early-century gaiety. Ring—oh bells of memory. Dimly, ghosts, burn back to life . . .

  • • •

  In the year 1907, Klaw and Erlanger turned the roof of their New York Theatre over to a young theatrical manager named Florenz Ziegfeld, and there, on the night of July 8, a new species of creature sprang full-blown into the world and a new class-word was given to the language:—the Follies Girl.

  Every once in a while, a nation coins a phrase which grows beyond its original descriptive significance and becomes a symbol of certain integral manifestations of that country’s social culture. Rome had its Vestal Virgins and Japan its geisha girls; India flowered forth the soft-eyed temple dancers, and there were witches in Salem. Without going quite so far as to compare the late Mr. Ziegfeld’s houris with the Vestal Virgins, it is still possible that in the anthropological sense, they too have given us an example of the phrase historic: a Follies Girl.

  Now that the institution of the annual Follies is no longer a part of our national scene; now that there are no more glamour-girls in training for that proud, exciting title of Ex-Glorified—the time has come to pass in review a few of those astonishing personalities whose Ziegfeld background was the starting-point which led them on a fragile, perilous chain to fame or wealth or death—or backward to the dark obscurity once more. From these examples there may come some flickering glint of the curious potency of the Follies trademark.

  For the past twenty-five years, this species of feminine phenomenon has existed in America, unique and indigenous. There is no classification in the language which has the particular import, the peculiar, glittering magic of this one phrase. Its nearest counterpart in the modern world was the nimbus attached to the dancers of the Imperial Ballet of Czarist Russia. But the significance of the latter was neither so far-reaching nor so cogent.

  Glamorous and already legendary are the image connotations which arise from the mere sound of the word “Follies”. Chinchilla and orchids and ropes of pearls. Champagne drunk from red-heeled slippers at Rector’s (If a Table at Rector’s Could Talk—ta-de—dum-dum-dum . . .) and breakfasts at Jack’s. The bunny-hug, the turkey-trot, the grizzly-bear (It’s a Bear, It’s a Bear, It’s a Bear!), the tickle-toe, the shimmy and the Black Bottom. I Just Can’t Make My Eyes Behave—Swing Me High, Swing Me Low, Dearie.

  So much of America is implicit in the phrase: the lavish display, the mushroom leap to fame and fortune, the quick oblivion. Just as every small American boy could hope to be President, so every American girl from rock-ribbed Maine to the Barbary Coast could dream of eventual apotheosis as a Follies Girl. The Follies were an institution—a training-school—an Alma Mater whose graduates wore the words, “a former Follies Girl,” like a bright badge of merit for the rest of their lives; and even in death, that phrase alone, attached to their names, was enough to bring them front-page obituaries. A Follies Girl is always good copy, and the lustre of the name has shone on its bearers in the police courts, in Burke’s Peerage, in the Social Register and in Hollywood. Follies graduates made the millionaire-chorus-girl marriage popular in America and injected new blood and beauty into many an otherwise effete old family name. But whether they married millions or whether they went into opera, they brought with them the glamorous heritage of their training-school. Even in death, they were decorative and dramatic.

  To the observer of casual glance—and other outlying districts—it may look as if every well known woman of the Twentieth Century were once a Follies Girl. This, of course, is not true. It is only almost true. Let us take a few of the more famed examples and see how they have penetrated into the veins of the world as no other specialized group of women has ever done. As another typical American symbol would say, “Let us look at the record.”

  THE PATH TO FAME

  Back in Evansville, Indiana, at the age of five, Marilyn Miller used to climb on a chair in front of a mirror and practice dancing steps. With her parents, sister and brother, she went on tour as “The Four Columbians”. The act played Europe for seven years, until Lee Shubert brought them back to America. Then, as it must to all pretty girls of that era, came the Follies. For years, Marilyn was Ziegfeld’s première danseuse. She married, and her husband was killed in an automobile accident. Later, she married Jack Pickford, probably—as she once admitted—because Ziegfeld told her he’d fire her if she did. After their divorce, she went to Hollywood, where she made pictures at the publicized rate of $150,000 a picture, a sum which was not justified by the subsequent box-office receipts. Of late, she has been more or less in the news background, emerging sporadically to affirm or deny her engagement to Don Alvarado—a movie hero, darkly sleek. One of these spurts of publicity occurred recently, when she and Alvarado sailed for Europe on the same boat, causing furious rumors of a secret marriage.

  Mary Lewis’ father was a Methodist minister in Little Rock, Arkansas. At eight, Mary was singing I’ll Be a Little Sunbeam for Jesus in her father’s Sunday-school. Eleven years later, she ran off with a road-show and was stranded in San Francisco, where she got a job singing in Tait’s Cafe. First a chorus girl, then a prima donna, she left Ziegfeld for the concert stage. Then she came East. Her Metropolitan début was in 1929. Critics tossed their verbal violets at her feet and for a while she basked in that sweet sunlight. Last fall, attempting a comeback, she was present at the opening of the supper club of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in New York and was asked to sing. In the midst of Carry Me Back to Old Virginny, a drunk tossed pennies at her feet. Gallantly she smiled, stooped to pick them up, and finished her song. Now she is again at leisure.

  Bernard Douras was a South Brooklyn magistrate. He sent his blonde daughter, who had been posing for Howard Chandler Christy, to Ziegfeld with a note of introduction. From then on, she was a Follies feature for three years, under the name of Marion Davies. The rest is unofficial history. Her movie career has been long and flourishing; her establishments lavish; her home-grown orchids the most famed in America; and her reputation as a Hollywood hostess without peer. Last year, the government sued her for $1,000,000 income taxes. They compromised on $825,000.

  Ina Claire, whose latest Broadway show is Biography, is one of the most famed of the Ziegfeld graduates. At thirteen, she was Ina Fagan of Washington, doing imitations of Harry Lauder. She was a Follies star in the days when W. C. Fields was presenting his amiable Jewish comedy, long before Montague Glass sold his birthright for a mess of Potash and Perlmutter. Her Hollywood interlude—which included marriage and divorce with John Gilbert—the screen’s one-time Great Lover—is now a part of the cinematic archives.

  Most of the $30,000,000 of Sir Mortimer Davis, plump Canadian tobacco magnate, evaporated two years ago. Rosie Dolly sued him for divorce. But the marriage, with its tales of disinheritance, of parental wrath, of Lucullan splendor on the Riviera, had served its function in the public prints. Rosika and Jancsi Dolly, Hungarian twins, are world-celebrated figures now, but they got their start in the Follies. They are always good newspaper copy, whether they are marrying millionaires, breaking the bank at Monte Carlo, dancing with princes or lending their decorative bare brown backs to the Mediterranean sands. When the Moulin Rouge in Montmartre played up Mistinguette’s legs ahead of the twins, they sued for 500,000 francs and got it. They are garlanded with bright legends and are practically a modern saga in themselves.

  Dorothy Mackaill of the drooping mouth and Botticelli cheekline came from the music-halls of England to the Ziegfeld offices and the Midnight Follies. Marshall Neilan took her to Hollywood. Lilyan Tashman used to give imitations of Frank Tinney. She came to the Follies from a Brooklyn high school. Billie Dove’s lucid features gazed serenely from magazine covers until the 1917 Follies, when she could be seen any night, swinging in a hoop hung from an elaborate artificial tree.

  Then there are the others: Fannie Brice, whose great Follies song was Lovey Joe; Norma Talmadge, now making personal appearances at picture houses; Gladys Gla
d, the Bronx Venus who came out of an Elks’ carnival to the Follies and now conducts a beauty column on the Daily Mirror; Helen Morgan, who just got off the Showboat piano; Mae Murray of the bee-stung lips and Prince Mdivani; and Ann Pennington, who was September Morn in the Follies of 1913 and is still showing her historic knees in 1933.

  THE PATH TO WEALTH

  Peggy Hopkins Joyce, a unique American symbol in her own right, apart from the Follies connotation, was a barber’s daughter from Norfolk, Virginia, who ran away with a trick bicycle rider when she was fifteen. On the train she met another man. This was Everett Archer, whom she married in Denver. It lasted six months. In Washington, she met, married and divorced young Sherburne Hopkins. Thence to New York, where she met Ziegfeld. She couldn’t sing, she couldn’t act, and she certainly couldn’t dance, but in the Follies of 1917, she blossomed forth as an American beauty. Since then, her matrimonial career—America’s eighth largest industry, it has been called—is public record. To have been a Joyce consort is almost as great a badge of distinction as to have been a Follies Girl—and there are almost as many of them. At present, the lady is singularly single and has just returned from the Riviera, where she finished another book, the sequel to Men, Marriage and Me—a curious document of Americana and commentary on our cultural structure.

  Peggy Fears came from New Orleans, met Noel Francis, a Follies Girl now in the Hollywood ranks, and, through her, became the youngest prima donna in the Follies. She left the stage to marry A. C. Blumenthal (“You can have your city hall, I’ll take A. C. Blumenthal”)—the real estate and film magnate. At present, Mrs. Blumenthal is the busiest theatrical producer on Broadway in her own name, with Music in the Air, one of the few authentic hits of the season; Party in the near offing; The Establishment of Mme. Antonia on her list; and the All-Time Follies in her mind.