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

Marion “Kiki” Roberts, born Marion Strasmick and a former bathing contest winner, was a show girl trying to get along when she met Jack “Legs” Diamond in New York’s Club Abbey in 1929. He asked for her phone number, and got it; and thereafter, in the many shootings that occurred with that durable racketeer on the receiving end, she was usually somewhere around. When he was finally killed in Albany, he had just left her apartment. Their relations seemed to have caused very little worry to Mrs. Legs, who knew her Legs for a temperamental fellow where women were concerned. Miss Roberts, who is now living in obscurity, once said:

  “All my life I have been a good girl. Jack was my first sweetheart.”

  • • •

  In December, 1930, two aviators found the bullet-riddled body of Stephen Sweeney, head of a gang of New York speakeasy robbers, lying near the motor parkway at Hicksville, Long Island. He had been taken there in an automobile and killed by his own gang, a leading member of which was his 17-year-old sweetheart, Margaret Murray, a blue-eyed blonde from the West Side of New York. Margaret had worked for a time as a telephone operator but had to quit, she said, because of a “weak heart”—a state of things which she remedied by becoming lookout, counsellor, and pal to a gang of killers. Her father was in an insane asylum.

  After the gang had been rounded up, Margaret was turned loose, whereupon she dropped these pearls:

  “The gangster has no respect for women. He will beat them up, shoot them as readily as he would a man. But to flirt with another gangster’s moll is recognised as the most fatal form of chiseling. It is seldom started and seldom allowed to go far.

  “I was Sweeney’s sweetheart. Never did any other man in the mob make any advance toward me. The gangster usually has a Jane or two on the side. Inside our mob there were no skirt worries. A gangster’s moll can’t really be overpaid. When her man is bumped off, is jugged, or goes cold on her, she is plenty out of luck.”

  • • •

  There was something silent, something wrong about a certain dingy, plain flat in West 104th Street, New York; and the neighbors grew curious and fearful and called the police in. It was a Sunday in August, 1932.

  The police found a grisly layout. A man and a woman lay dead there, side by side. The woman was a platinum blonde, dressed in a white crash suit, white shoes, white stockings, and a close-fitting white knit hat; she was rather pretty, and she only weighed eighty-five pounds.

  Her name was Rosemary Sanborn, and there will always be some mystery about her strange life. She never got much publicity, even when she died, but she was different from the others and exceptionally competent in her line. In her way, she was one of the greatest of all blackmailers.

  The man was Robert Conroy, alias Harry Leo Davis, Robert M. Carney, Robert Newberry, Robert Perry, and R. K. Howard, gunman and counterfeiter. What had happened was obvious—he had shot her and then himself; but there were no messages, no clues as to why he had decided on this brutal ending. There was plenty of other evidence—a hand printing press, copper plates, photographic paraphernalia, counterfeit notes; but the gem of the collection was a series of photographs, all showing Rosemary in a compromising situation with a man.

  The Police Commissioner at that time was Edward P. Mulrooney, and he was one of the first to arrive at the flat. A detective took the photographs, remarking that he had better file them at Police Headquarters. “No,” said Mulrooney, “nobody will see these again.” And the Commissioner then threw them in the stove and burned them.

  The next day he was besieged by various men of note, greatly upset, who wanted to know whether their pictures were in the collection, and who were vastly relieved to learn that Rosemary’s little Suckers’ Gallery had gone up in flames. Rosemary, it seems, used to work the hotels, even the best ones, and the best trains between New York and Washington, Chicago, and Canada. She was clever, this American Madonna of the Sleeping Cars, and curiously attractive for all that she was scrawny; and detectives say that she was the best two-fisted drinker, man or woman, ever to down a highball. Why did Conroy kill her? What was their life together like? He might at least have written a letter, and she—what a poem she could have written!

  LITTLE CARUSO

  WILLIAM SAROYAN

  FROM OCTOBER 1934

  Playing cards at Breen’s, I suddenly felt his presence in the city, like swift and sweeping excitement, all over Frisco, from the Ferry Building to the Sunset Tunnel, and a half hour later, at midnight, I saw him push through the swinging doors and walk down the length of the bar, in a terrific hurry, the way he always was, and I knew it was the same old fight, between my cousin Mano, a small dark fellow of twenty-two in a neat twelve-dollar suit, wanting to be the greatest tenor of all time, and his incredible and insane impetuosity, his everlasting unrest.

  “God Almighty,” I said.

  “We’ve got no time to lose,” he said. “I have been all over the public library looking for you. Is this where you spend all your time these days? What’s come over you, anyway?”

  “What’s the matter?” I said.

  “I got kicked out of the house this morning,” he said, “but I’ll sing from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York, if it’s the last thing I do. Can I see you alone a minute?”

  I got up from the table and walked with him to the door.

  “Let’s go up the alley,” he said. “I want to sing La Donna E Mobile.”

  “Never mind that,” I said. “Have you any money for a room tonight?”

  “I haven’t a nickel,” he said, “but wait till you hear me sing. I caught a freight this morning, and I practiced all the way up.”

  “Don’t make it too loud,” I said. “They’ll run us in for disturbing the peace.”

  “They wouldn’t dare arrest a man with my voice,” he said.

  He sang the song and made something in me laugh from the beginning of time to the end of it, because he did not sing, he shouted, thrusting himself beyond the limitations of his body, outward, into the night, into the vastness of the universe, the endlessness of time, making a marvelous noise in the city. And it wasn’t La Donna E Mobile: it was the cry of all of us who are seeking immortality on earth, in our own time, and the only thing I could think was, God Almighty.

  “My diction is better than Gigli’s,” he said. “If Otto Kahn could hear me, I’d be sent to Italy in three minutes.”

  “I’ve got a dollar and thirty cents,” I said. “I’ll get you a room for the night, and I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  I found a clean four-bit room for him in a small hotel on Columbus Avenue, and he said, “The world will remember you as the man who helped the greatest tenor of all time when he was broke and friendless. Leave me a half dozen cigarettes because I can’t wait to get going.”

  I left him half a package of cigarettes, and went home. In the morning I took him a safety razor and a half dozen blades, two pairs of socks, and three clean shirts. Playing carefully, I won enough gambling to keep him going for two weeks. He went to every theatre and night club in town, begging everybody he saw to let him sing La Donna E Mobile, but they wouldn’t let him do it.

  “They don’t know who I am,” he said, “but I’ll show them. I’m getting a boat to Italy because I want to walk in the streets where Caruso walked. Don’t you think I look a lot like him?”

  He spent a week sitting in the Seamen’s Hall on Howard Street, but there were no boats to Italy, so he took the next best thing and got a job as wiper on a boat to Rio.

  “Nothing is going to stop me from moving the hearts of people everywhere,” he said. “I wrote some letters to Otto Kahn and Deems Taylor and a couple of other people, but I can’t wait. This trip to South America is just the thing for me. The answers will come General Delivery,” he said. “Hold the letters till I get back.”

  • • •

  I went to the General Delivery window of the Post Office for two week
s, and the only letter that came addressed to him was one from a girl back in our home town. She wrote bitterly, saying that she had really loved him once, but that it was all over now because he was not the sort of person to marry and settle down and make a name for himself. I kept the letter a month, and then tore it up.

  The day he got back I was in Breen’s, and I saw him tear through the swinging doors, looking furious, and the old laugh came up in me again, and I was glad he hadn’t fallen off the boat and drowned.

  “I can’t figure you out,” he said. “I’ve been half way around the world, busting my neck trying to establish myself, and you sit in this ungodly joint playing cards. I met a singing teacher in Rio and he said I would be a sensation in the next three years, but I can’t wait. What did Otto Kahn say, anyway? Did Deems Taylor answer my letter?”

  I thought I ought to lie and tell him Otto Kahn was interested in his voice, but I couldn’t do it. Then I remembered that while he was gone Otto Kahn had died, and I said, “I’ve got bad news for you, Mano. Otto Kahn passed away while you were in Rio.”

  “Everything is against me,” he said. “Just when I need him most, Otto Kahn dies. For the love of Mike, don’t tell me Deems Taylor is dead, too. What did Deems say?”

  “Well,” I said, “I understand Deems Taylor is traveling in Europe. I think he is going to be away for another year.”

  “All I need is a decent contact,” he said. “I know what I can do, but nobody else does.”

  He had a little money saved, and he stayed in Frisco until the money was gone. Then, humiliated but angry, he went back to his home town, and during the next six months I received an average of three letters a week from him.

  “The power of my voice is increasing every day,” he said, “and it won’t be long before I can be heard from here to the Rainier Brewery, fourteen blocks away. On a clear day I can do it now, but the wind has got to be with me . . .

  “I am going to make boxes for Mouradian this summer. I’ve got to earn enough money to get to New York this fall because once I get there I will electrify everybody with my singing. If you get down this way, be sure and see me at Mouradian’s packing house, in East Bakersfield, because I want you to hear me sing O Sole Mio.”

  Two weeks ago I got fed up with the city and began longing for the valley where I was born, for the hot sun and the vineyards and the clarity of life there, the clarity that is driving the whole race of us all over the world, making us want to do tremendous things. I hitch-hiked from Frisco to Bakersfield and went straight out to Mouradian’s packing house. Mano was in a corner, at a bench, standing on a platform because he was too small to work well from the floor, furiously nailing boxes, but not singing.

  “You’re just the fellow I want to see,” he said. “I am disgusted with everything, and the way I feel now, I don’t know whether I’ll ever be able to sing again because this humiliation is getting to be too much for me. Everybody thinks I am nobody because I am in overalls, nailing boxes. Nobody can tell from the way I act that I am the greatest living tenor on earth, and it’s burning me up.”

  “What you are doing,” I said, “is only a means to an end. You’ll be in New York this fall and everything will be swell.”

  “But I can’t wait,” he said. “I hate this atmosphere. It is destroying everything fine in me.”

  He didn’t stop making boxes, but talked while he brought the hatchet down on the nails, bang bang bang, talking and moving his powerful arm with great rhythm.

  Fifty young Filipinos stood in the packing house, packing grapes, talking along in their language while they worked, making a low and steady mumble in the heat.

  “Listen to them,” said Mano. “My voice will be ruined. Never before in the history of the world has a great artist suffered such humiliation as this. I need to be alone, always, so that I can let my voice grow.”

  He was very bitter and I didn’t know what to tell him.

  Then something happened that makes me laugh every time I think of it. One of the Filipino boys was having a little fun, throwing grapes at another Filipino boy who was pasting labels on boxes just beyond where Mano was working. One of the grapes went wild and hit Mano on the neck.

  Mano was nailing away nicely, but when the grape hit his neck, the rhythm of his movements came to a sudden and furious stop, and he was mad. He got off the platform and walked around his bench, the hatchet still in his hand, lifted high.

  “Who threw that grape?” he said, only it was more than speech, just as his singing was less, and more, than singing. The old insane fury.

  All the boys were talking along cheerfully until they heard Mano’s voice. Then the whole packing house became very quiet.

  “Who threw that God-damn grape!” he said. “I’ll bust the head of any bastard who throws a grape at the greatest lyric tenor in the world.”

  A full minute he stood before them, waiting for one of the boys to say some word, or make some false move. There were fifty of them, but they knew they were in the presence of some mighty and glorious power in man, and they were afraid, and I myself was afraid.

  “If I get hit with a grape again,” he said, “I’ll find out who threw it and I’ll bust his head. You don’t know who I am, but I know.”

  He walked back to his bench, stepped onto the platform, and began again to nail. “You see,” he said sullenly. “I am humiliated because no one knows who I am.”

  “Take it easy,” I said. “I know who you are. You are the greatest lyric tenor alive, and everybody else will know it the minute you get to New York.”

  And I’m telling you, I wasn’t fooling, either. My cousin Mano is the greatest living tenor on earth because he thinks he is, and nothing is going to stop him from walking out on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House in New York and electrifying everybody with the fury of his personality, not even the untimely passing of Otto Kahn, the aloofness of Deems Taylor, or the fact that his voice isn’t worth a damn.

  TARZAN—APE-MAN INTO INDUSTRY

  DARWIN L. TEILHET

  FROM JANUARY 1935

  In purely material accomplishment, not even an Anthony Adverse or a Ben Hur can compare with Tarzan, acrobat of the jungle. Nor has any author more thoroughly exploited his literary produce than has Mr. Edgar Rice Burroughs of Tarzana, California. Some of his stories are pretty lousy, Mr. Burroughs admits, “but they sell,” he says simply. “That’s what’s important.”

  They certainly sell. The Tarzan books have been translated into twenty-two languages; they are standard items of Arabian publishers and well thought of among readers of Hindustani; they have been best sellers in England, Sweden, Australia, and Italy. They continue to be so in America. Every two years a new Tarzan volume is scheduled for publication; and before the new saga is bound in cloth covers at two dollars a copy, every yard has first been wholesaled as a serial.

  Tarzan, however, is rather more than just a literary figure. He is also a radio act; a film hero; a familiar figure to readers of the comic strips; and one whose name has lent authority to such diverse commodities as gum, garters, and inflated rubber toys. He is, in fact, a property any author would be glad to own.

  Mr. Burroughs was not always an author; he became one at the age of thirty-three. He had already been a cavalryman, cowboy, railroad policeman, gold dredger, patent-medicine salesman and vendor of a drunkards’ cure-all. He also did something not very profitable with a patent pencil sharpener. Eventually he owned half of the patent-medicine outfit; then he transferred his allegiance to a business counsel service in Chicago.

  • • •

  In 1910, while he was still with the business counsel service, a friend informed him that magazine writers received staggering sums of money. This was apparently the first time that Mr. Burroughs had heard the news; he at once decided to get a piece of this money for himself. He constructed a romance entitled The Princess of Mars, which conce
rns a young man who arrives on the planet Mars and falls in love with a Princess. Although the Princess laid eggs (very well, you read it then), the serial, on its appearance in All-Story Magazine, scarcely caused a flutter among that publication’s hardened readers.

  But Mr. Burroughs was paid for it: $400. This miracle inflicted upon him his one and only spasm of creative vertigo. He spent six months boning up on English history in order to produce a masterpiece called The Outlaw of Torn; it was thick with knights, dukes, and Tudor atmosphere; but it was pretty much of a bust financially. This taught him his lesson. Henceforth, he was to waste no time on literary background.

  In 1912, Mr. Burroughs sent the editors of the old All-Story Weekly the uncompleted manuscript of his third adventure tale, Tarzan of the Apes, having for his principal character a young man reared and cherished by the primordial apes of darkest Africa. The editors were so ravished by the original plot idea (Mr. Burroughs swears he never thought of Kipling’s Mowgli) that they purchased the story and impatiently waited delivery.

  For the Tarzan saga the author relied on what he remembered of Stanley’s Darkest Africa, and when Darkest Africa failed him he fell back on a prodigious invention. That saved time. Mr. Burroughs hates to see time or energy go to waste. An efficient and economical man, he was even able to salvage most of that six months’ historical research.

  This was done by transferring Old England to darkest Africa in the third of his Tarzan series, which revolves around the simple theme of a Tudor colony—which had somehow or other been lost in the jungle four centuries ago, and survived unchanged into the present day. A man who can have his heroine lay eggs on the planet Mars isn’t one to be troubled by his readers’ feelings when they happen upon a description of sixteenth century knights wandering through Africa in modern times.

  By 1913, with three serials marketed, he decided to devote himself entirely to fiction. So he and his family trekked to California. A year later, a publisher was finally discovered who would risk committing Tarzan of the Apes to a book. Not that it was much of a risk—America seemed to be filled with nature lovers, who took the mighty Tarzan immediately to their bosoms. The book rocketed through one edition after another, into the astonishing sales figures of three million copies. With his royalties, in 1915, Mr. Burroughs purchased the old Otis estate fifteen miles outside of Los Angeles; gratefully renamed it “Tarzana Ranch”; and, for the next decade, slaved away at his task of author, turning out 24 book-length novels, including six more of the imperishable jungle series.