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

  Ziegfeld’s stately Dolores, the best known showgirl of them all—famed for her peacock walk—is now Mrs. Tudor Wilkinson, holding salons in the Rue St. Honoré in Paris. Ethel Amorita Kelly married Frank Gould. Jessica Brown is Lady Northesk; Justine Johnston, who bore, in company with half her countrywomen, the Alfred Cheney Johnson sobriquet of “most beautiful woman in America”, now studies medicine and is the wife of Walter Wanger, formerly one of the bigger cinema magnates; Mary Eaton married Millard Webb, cinema director; and Florence Walton, once the dancing partner of the celebrated Maurice Mouvet, married wealth and lives in Europe, as does Anastasia Reilly of the lovely shoulders. Miss Walton is about to publish her memoirs.

  THE PATH TO OBLIVION

  Beauty contests recruited many of the latter-day Follies Girls. Such a one was Dorothy Knapp, “The American Venus”. A convent girl—as what Follies Girl wasn’t?—from Illinois, she came to New York to study art, was featured by Earl Carroll in his 1922 Vanities, and two years later, she was in the Follies. Later years have seen her fame confined to a series of law suits, an esoteric battle at a Beaux Arts ball, a mysteriously battered face.

  One of the loveliest faces ever to bloom in the Follies was that of Imogene Wilson, the blonde “Bubbles”. She came to New York at fourteen from a Missouri orphanage and entered the Follies via the posing route. Linked with Frank Tinney in what was the scandal of the decade, she went to Germany, changed her name to Mary Nolan and became a motion picture actress. Later, she returned to America and Hollywood. Her particular gift for tragedy followed her there, and she became implicated in a slander suit. Shunted out of pictures, she and her husband opened a dress shop which ended in a series of suits brought by their creditors—and eventual bankruptcy. Recently, Mary did a personal appearance tour of the subway-circuit.

  Two other former Follies names have recently made news. Helen Lee Worthing of the cameo profile married a Negro doctor, whom she divorced not long ago and who is now suing her, in turn, to have the divorce set aside and the marriage annulled, instead. And Eva Tanguay, who “didn’t care” in the Follies of 1919, was a month or so ago the beneficiary of a charity performance held in Manhattan.

  THE PATH TO DEATH

  When Ziegfeld brought Anna Held of the convex eyes from Paris, the song which made her the toast of New York was this:

  “I’m fond of romps and games, you see,

  I wish you’d come and play wiz me.

  For I have such a nize leetle way wiz me,

  I wish you’d come and play wiz me.”

  This was considered very provocative. (Remember, it was the “I love my wife, but oh you kid!” era.)

  Anna Held was born in Paris, of Polish immigrant parents. At fourteen, she began playing tragic rôles in a Yiddish theatre in London’s unsavoury Whitechapel district. Later, she drifted to music-hall shows, where Ziegfeld discovered her. She married him in 1896 and divorced him in 1912. Now she is dead—and so is he—but there are many who still retain the glittering memory of her days—the story of how she chased a runaway horse on her bicycle and rescued a Brooklyn magnate—pure Ziegfeld fiction—and of the times when all downtown New York traffic stood still so that Anna Held could cross the street.

  Death came also to other lovely bearers of the Follies brand. Bessie McCoy, the original Yama Yama girl, died only a year or so ago. Martha Mansfield was burned to death, and rumor dubbed it suicide. Allyn King jumped out of a window; Lillian Lorraine of Blue Kitten fame fell downstairs and broke her back; Helen Walsh burned to death last year in the explosion of Harry Richman’s yacht; Olive Thomas found tragedy and death in Paris, at the time she was the wife of Jack Pickford; and Kay Laurel died in Paris, winning for her illegitimate son a substantial inheritance.

  There they are—the three-score or more whose names have spelled beauty and the high life. They have swung in flower-wreathed swings out over the bald-headed row: they have draped themselves in “living curtains” against incredible backgrounds of Joseph Urban blue; they have pranced across the stage and kicked their heels to metronome beat. And, later, they have gone on into life—to sing, to dance, to act, to marry or to die. And always there has followed them that significant aura, that ultimate encomium: She was once a Follies Girl.

  THE MOLL IN OUR MIDST

  STANLEY WALKER

  FROM AUGUST 1934

  In spite of the rumors of war and revolution, the steel strikes, the Washington investigations, the rout of Tammany, the death of Stavisky, the arrival of Insull, and all those items which have made this a particularly newsy year, a certain creature—female in species, unsavory in background—has persistently tripped and triggered its way into the newspaper headlines.

  Last May, when a red-headed gun-girl called Bonnie Parker was shot to pieces in Louisiana, even the most cautious were obliged to admit that there had been a minor coup d’état in our underworld. The night-club queen had abdicated, she wasn’t news any more; the gunman’s moll had climbed into her warm but empty throne.

  In the days of yore, there was no such thing as a gunman’s moll; the old-time bad man may have had a wife hidden away in some rose-covered cottage—or a paramour living two doors from the saloon, one flight up and ring Doake’s bell; but his calling was essentially masculine, and he rode the trail with companions as male as himself. Jesse James, for instance, that home-loving Baptist who invented train robbery—he lived a mild, monogamous home-life after his marriage to Zerelda (“Zee” to Jesse) Mimms. Whatever else Zerelda may have been, she was no moll.

  • • •

  It was not until this year that the word “moll” really came into its own. It used to mean a woman pickpocket, or a woman associate of pickpockets; then it became “gun-moll”; then it lost the “gun-”, got involved with the Seventh Commandment, and came to mean the light o’ love of any mobster, killer or thief. The word has been public property for some years now, but it was only during the last few months that we realized how public it was. The contemporary criminal, we have learned to our cost, must have a girl friend to ride along on his wild escapes, encourage his artistry with the tommy-gun, and make up a rubber at bridge—just between bank robberies.

  The great Dillinger was a shining example of this—“Just one woman after another,” that was his motto. True, he started his amorous career with a marriage—to Miss Beryl Ethel Hovis, sixteen years old and a home-town girl, who divorced him in 1929. But, once he began to make money by sticking up banks, Dillinger’s passion for brunettes got the better of him. Most of the ones he chose came from small Middle-western towns, where there was little chance of their picking up worldly ideas, and they were more loyal to him than their city sisters would have been.

  The most charming of them all was Evelyn Frechette, the daughter of an Indian woman and a French-Canadian laborer. She used to make occasional week-end trips to Chicago, and it was probably on one of these that she first met Dillinger. “I just drifted until I met Jack,” was the way she put it afterwards. “He gave me love.”

  She was twenty-three years old when they captured her last April. She had been given the credit for supplying Dillinger with that famous wooden pistol which terrified the woman-managed jail at Crown Point; and among her possessions, in the Chicago flat where she was run to earth, were keys to Hollywood police stations. Nobody could say she wasn’t a resourceful girl.

  She was boastful and defiant in jail, waiting for her trial. “They won’t have me here for long,” she said. “If Jack won’t get me out of here I can beat the rap when they take me to court. All I did was to go to the man I loved when he needed me. I’ll do it every time I can. He is my man.”

  But Jack didn’t come. And she didn’t beat the rap. She was found guilty of harboring Dillinger, and sentenced to two years’ imprisonment.

  Girls like Evelyn take terrible risks, but they are realists for the most part. It is better to have clothes and money to go places, they
argue, than to sit in a little town and parry the advances of some cloddish swain, or live hungrily but honestly in a hall bedroom, or wash dishes, or stand behind a counter. Coming, as they nearly always do, from surroundings where there is little but poverty and brutality, they can hardly be blamed for making no distinction between virtue and chores.

  When it comes to bounce and kick, no Dillinger woman, not even the Frechette herself, could hold a candle to the late Bonnie Parker, known to admirers as the “Cigar-Smoking Gun-woman of the South West”. She and her friend, Clyde Barrow, were very thoroughly killed last May in Louisiana; but while they lasted they made an enterprising team. Bonnie was a redhead, not unattractive in a freakish way, and easily recognizable by her striped sweater, which gave her the look of a slim hornet, an insect with which that female sharpshooter had much in common.

  Her background follows a familiar design; she was brought up in that section of Dallas, Texas, which borders on the foul swamps of Trinity River. On her thigh was a tattooed heart with “Roy” in it, a memento of her first love, Roy Harding, who went to prison for murder. Her next squire was Barrow, who had been known in the community since before he was fifteen as an incorrigible liar, a loafer, a cheat, and a thief. She worked with him over ten states, and omitting all their other assorted crimes, they were wanted for twelve murders.

  The end came when they were ambushed by a group of officers led by Frank Hamer, former Texas ranger, who has killed sixty-five men, and is probably the finest gunfighter since the days of Wyatt Earp, Bat Masterson, and the other immortals. This time he was taking no chances: he and his men pumped 167 bullets into the car which carried Bonnie and Clyde. Bonnie died with her head between her knees, a machine gun across her lap, and a package of cigarettes in her left hand. She had gone to her death all in red. She had on a red dress, red shoes, a red and white hat; under her clothes, on her thin chest, there lay a crucifix, hanging from around her neck; her fingers glittered with diamond rings, and she wore a costly wrist watch.

  She was the literary member of the team. Months before the end she had written a poem called “The Life of Bonnie and Clyde”, the last verse of which runs:—

  “One day they will go down together,

  And they will bury them side by side.

  To a few it means grief,

  To the law it’s relief,

  But it’s death to Bonnie and Clyde.”

  All this came true, except the second line, for the mothers of the precious pair refused to allow them to be buried side by side, and Bonnie’s body lies in the little Fishtrap Cemetery, a full mile from Clyde’s. Thousands of people swarmed to his funeral, while only a handful attended hers: it’s still a man’s world, say what you will. Her tombstone is to bear this epitaph—“As the flowers are all made sweeter by the sunshine and the dew, so this world is made brighter by the lives of folks like you”.

  • • •

  Gunmen, fools that most of them are, forget all the precedents which should warn them against association with women. Their girls may be handsome creatures, devoid of all the more discouraging inhibitions, but each one carries a gallows in her handbag. The average moll is a nuisance when it comes to making a rapid get-away, she talks at the wrong time, and the day may come when, sitting in the witness stand, she will send her Robin Hood to hell. That is what Helen Walsh did.

  Helen was the sixteen-year-old sweetheart of Francis (Two-Gun) Crowley, the boy who hated cops because he knew, or thought he knew, that he was the illegitimate son of a former policeman. “Such a nice young man”, was Helen’s mother’s opinion. Helen’s mother had given her daughter money, in the hope that she would study interior decorating. Instead of that, Helen went out riding with Two-Gun.

  One night, they were happily parked in Black Shirt Lane, North Merrick, Long Island. The only trouble in this paradise was the fact that the police were after Crowley for one thing and another; and when a young patrolman named Hirsch came up, peered into the automobile, and recognized Crowley, he was shot dead. The killer and his girl friend sped away; and then the police began to hunt in earnest.

  Crowley took a furnished apartment on West End Avenue, New York City, where he lived uneasily with a woman named Billie Dunne and Rudolph Durninger, a 220-pound oaf of a truckman, who had recently killed a dance hall girl and thrown her out of a car in Yonkers. One day he told the Dunne girl that he was through: “I’m bringing a real girl home with me,” he said, “you can go with Durninger.” Bad stuff; it led to his capture. The police surrounded the apartment, one hundred strong, and there was a big show, with shooting—something of a Roman holiday for thousands of New York citizens.

  The police got Crowley, Helen Walsh, Durninger, and a rare literary fragment or two—the beleaguered Helen had been doing some writing.

  As the police were closing in, the frightened little exhibitionist wrote this:

  “I bet Legs Diamond dies upon something different from bullets. I’ll see you in heaven if there is such a place. Everybody thinks he’s hard but he can’t be. He (Crowley) cooked my breakfast this morning and washed my pajamas so I could sleep in them. If I should see Vivian Gordon I will ask her who shot her. Love to Mother, Father, and Sister. P.S. Show this to my sister so that she will know I died smiling. Please don’t talk about me when I’m gone.”

  Looking like a schoolgirl, Helen sat in the witness stand, and sent Crowley to the electric chair; she herself went free because of her testimony. Just before he was put to death, Crowley got word that she wanted to see him; she hoped to write an article about his execution, so he heard, for one of the tabloids—worse still, there was a rumor that she had been keeping company with a policeman. “All she wants to do is to sell some stories, or go on the stage, or something,” said Two-Gun, bitterly. “The hell with her!”

  • • •

  The Millen brothers—Murton and Irving—with their partner, Abe Faber, were recently convicted of murder in Massachusetts. When the brothers were captured in a New York hotel they had Mrs. Norma Brighton Millen, Murton’s bride, along with them. Their capture came about when police found a postcard which Norma had written to her stepmother at Natick, Mass. “Murton and I are staying here. We are buying radio parts.”

  After the gang’s arrest, the Rev. Norman Brighton came to New York to take charge of his daughter. “Ah,” he sighed, “if only I knew how to protect her.” Ah, indeed, Papa Brighton. Norma was only nineteen, and she enjoyed the publicity; she even talked of going into motion pictures. While she was in jail, as a supposed accessory after the fact to a bank robbery, she complained about the prison garb and kicked because there was no sugar in her coffee; and when she was interviewed, she spoke out in the grand old tradition:

  “I loved Murt, because he was so gentle and kind to me. He used to do the dishes every night. We’d have such fun—it was like playing house. He used to put on an apron and make me sit in the kitchen chair and watch him. And he was so generous. He gave me everything I wanted. He used to take me to the big department stores and say, ‘Look around, Kitten, you can have anything in this store’.”

  • • •

  Ten years ago, there was much excitement in New York over the original “Bobbed-Hair Bandit”—Celia Cooney. Celia was working in a laundry when she met Edward Cooney and married him, and it didn’t take them long to decide that his $30 a week as a mechanic wasn’t enough. Besides, there was a baby coming. For a while they practised the technique of holdups in their little furnished room, and then went out to do their stuff in public; she wasn’t sure who had the idea first.

  Celia was known as a “one-rig woman”—that is, she always wore a seal-skin coat, a gray crêpe de Chine gown, and a pink turban. She was twenty years old and as impudent as they come; she used to write taunting notes to the police and her victims. There was a lot of the primitive woman in her, too—ten days before the baby came, she held a gun in her hand and helped her husband to rob
the National Biscuit Company in Brooklyn.

  The baby died in Florida just before Celia and Edward were captured there and sent to prison, where Celia consoled herself with all the crime fiction she could lay her hands on. They are out now, and said to be going straight, with the powerful aid of a $12,000 reward which Cooney got from the State because he lost a hand in an accident in the prison factory.

  • • •

  Out in the Bronx, in the summer of 1933, some thugs were attempting to rob Isidor Moroh, a jewellery salesman, when a girl named Betty Schwarz strayed into the line of fire and was killed. Two days later, detectives walked in on Lottie Kreisberger Coll and two companions, Thomas Pace and Joseph Ventre, in a Broadway hotel, and arrested them for the murder of the Schwarz girl. Lottie and her boy friends had their guns with them. She pleaded guilty to manslaughter and was sent to the reformatory for from six to twelve years.

  Lottie was of exceptionally tough fibre. Brought here from Germany at the age of two, she was dragged up in the Hell’s Kitchen district, and much of her girlhood was spent among the wild roosters of New York’s West Side. She married Vincent Coll, the smiling killer, the man who was shot down in a telephone booth just a few hours after Mr. Walter Winchell had predicted something of the sort. Coll wasn’t her first; there had been at least one marriage and several alliances before he came into her life, and she was only 24 when he died. Of him she said:

  “I would rather have lived with Coll on bread and coffee than with anyone else on millions.”

  • • •