Once Upon a Time in New York

by Herbert Mitgang

  With her incandescent smile, Betty stood in contrast to Jimmy’s faithful, long-suffering, sweet, but dowdy wife, Allie. And the Walkers were childless.

  Betty Compton was in her early twenties when Mayor Walker, an inveterate theatergoer, spotted her in the hit Broadway musical Oh, Kay! With her caplike hairdo and Chiclets smile, she was as smart-looking as any ingenue in the big-time theater. The play’s opening night was at the Imperial Theatre on November 8,1926. The sumptuous stage set was a Gatsbyesque Long Island estate used for rum-running; the audience cheered the lighthearted, mindless girl-meets-playboy theme. The critics admired the contemporary flavor of the words and music:

  We’ll hail each Prohibitionist a brother,

  And sell a dozen cases to his mother!

  When our ship comes sailing in—

  Full of Haig and Haig and gin!

  Oh, Kay! was loaded with talent in every department. The book was by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, the music by George Gershwin, and the lyrics by his equally talented brother, Ira. The cast starred the suave comedienne Gertrude Lawrence (as the Kay of the title), in the role of an English duke’s sister who is disguised as a housemaid, singing the sentimental hit song “Someone to Watch Over Me,” and Victor Moore, one of the best double-take comedians in the business, playing a butler-bootlegger.

  Oh, Kay! was one of those silly, happy, funny, singable shows that symbolized the carefree 1920s. The chorus boys wore tennis, anyone? sweaters and black-and-white shoes and their hair shone with brilliantine; the chorus girls wore big hats and flouncing skirts and showed a little leg, but otherwise they didn’t expose much more than wide-eyed smiles.

  Betty Compton was a featured player in Oh, Kay! By a coincidence, one of the songs she sang was addressed to her character’s boyfriend, “Jimmy Winter.” The real Jimmy in the audience must have listened with delight as he watched Betty sing:

  Whoop it up! Tonight is the night!

  For dear old Jimmy’s coming home!

  Clear the floor!

  For Jimmy’s a pal, that every gal

  Must adore!

  At the cast party afterward, Mayor Walker singled out the captivating young actress. He was immediately smitten and invited her to a supper party that he claimed to be giving that night. She politely declined.

  Over the next few weeks, Betty continued to ignore Walker’s overtures. But by avoiding his City Hall desk during his short working day and frequenting Manhattan’s pleasure domes after dark, he showed Betty that she was more important to him than the dreary business of government.

  In the meantime, following her husband’s style of cost-free vacations, Mrs. James J. Walker, usually accompanied by her mother, was junketing around Europe. As a guest of the Hotel Owners Association, Allie met presidents and crowned heads and had an audience with Pope Pius XI in Vatican City. In 1927, she sailed to Germany, this time to christen the New York, a newly built transatlantic liner. In front of the clunky Speed Graphic cameramen with press passes stuck in their hatbands, Mayor Walker dutifully greeted Allie after the ship docked at its North German Lloyd berth on the Hudson. (Not long afterward, the same German liners would be proudly flying the Third Reich’s swastikas.)

  A half-year passed before Betty Compton succumbed to Jimmy Walker’s celebrated charms. After serving as toastmaster at a fund-raising event for Mrs. William Randolph Hearst’s Free Milk Fund for Babies, he offered to give Betty a lift home through the crowded Times Square traffic. As they drove slowly, the mayor ordered his chauffeur to turn on the siren—something he seldom did. Betty immediately recognized what he was up to.

  “All right,” she said, smiling. “I’m impressed. Now you can stop the siren.”

  Several days later, Betty finally consented to have dinner with him. The owner of an expensive restaurant bowed and scraped before them. Their friendship blossomed. Jimmy nicknamed his new love Monk. It did not hurt the mayor’s romantic cause that he had clout in the theatrical community. Once, during a rehearsal, Betty complained about her role and billing in the cast. With the help of his producer friends—some of whom needed real estate variances and tax abatements for their theaters—Walker was able to get her a larger dressing room at the drop of a hint and a wink.

  Oh, Kay! ran for 256 performances on Broadway before moving on to His Majesty’s Theatre in London for another 215 performances. Betty Compton did not go abroad with the company; Jimmy Walker preferred to keep her closer to home.

  They were, in the gossip columnists’ word, an “item.” The liaison did no harm to Betty’s career. Her photographs were regularly featured in the Sunday newspapers. But thanks to some of Mayor Walker’s publisher friends, Betty was coyly shielded from unwanted photographs with him at public events. Allie loyally turned up at official ceremonies; unaware, she served as a beard for her philandering husband.

  A certain chivalry prevailed among the hard-boiled newspapermen of that day. They agreed never to mention the indiscretions of any man—or woman—unless one party or the other was headed for the divorce court, according to Gene Fowler of the Morning Telegraph, a horse-racing sheet with literary pretensions. Even Walter Winchell abided by this unwritten code. The reporters tried to shield the mayor from himself, not wanting to penalize him for his lack of hypocrisy. Unlike others in public life, Jimmy Walker was quite open about his private affair.

  To the dismay of Tammany Hall and the St. Patrick’s Cathedral “powerhouse”—both equally influential in controlling the destinies of Democratic politicians in New York—this romance was not just another passing fancy but the real thing. Both groups pressured Walker to break off the relationship; they warned him that he had become an embarrassment not only to the church and the party but to the faithful electorate.

  Governor Al Smith cautioned him: “The only thing that’s worse for a public man than being funny is for him to chase women if he’s married.”

  Jimmy responded: “Could you by any chance be thinking of one of the neighbors’ children?”

  Governor Smith: “Jim, I have a genuine deep-down affection for you. It’s a shame you won’t listen to reason.”

  Inevitably, the arrangement had its problems. Betty wanted marriage and a family. Jimmy’s religion would not permit a divorce; he did not want to sever his ties to the Church. The valiant Allie kept up the pretense of a happy married life to the husband she cherished.

  In 1928, two years after that fateful premiere of Oh, Kay!, Jimmy left his wife and home in St. Luke’s Place in the Village and moved into a suite at the swank Ritz-Carlton Hotel overlooking Central Park. Betty Compton’s apartment was on East seventy-sixth Street, a few minutes away. Walker’s valet, Roberts, helped him carry his vast wardrobe into his elegant new quarters.

  Before the Great Crash and the Depression, it seemed as if the good times would never end. In the sports, entertainment, and business worlds, New York could rightfully be called the capital of the United States.

  If there was no joy in Mudville, the mighty New York Yankees delivered nothing but pleasure to the city’s baseball-mad fans. Led by Babe Ruth, who hit a record-breaking sixty home runs, the Yankees won the World Series in 1927, beating the St. Louis Cardinals four games in a row. The powerful bat and winning personality of the “Sultan of Swat” helped fans forget the 1919 Black Sox scandal.

  During many a long afternoon, Mayor Walker could be found at the newly inaugurated Yankee Stadium, watching the Bronx Bombers field the most memorable team in baseball history. On April 12, the opening day of the ‘27 season, the lineup of dangerous batters—“Murderers’ Row”—led off with center fielder Earle Combs (.356), followed by shortstop Mark Koenig (.285), right fielder Babe Ruth (.356, with his 60 homers), first baseman Lou Gehrig (.373, not to mention his 47 homers), left fielder Bob Meusel (.337), second baseman Tony (Push ‘Em Up Tony) Lazzeri (.309), third baseman Joe Dugan (.269), and catcher John Grabowski (.277). Nor was the pitching staff in the shadows of the ballpark that became known as the House That Ruth Buil
t. The Yankee hurlers were brilliant that season: Waite Hoyt (22 wins), Wiley Moore (19), Herb Pennock (19) and a pitcher with the unlikely name of Urban Shocker (18), who was an ancient thirty-six years old.

  In the same year that Jimmy Walker was flying high, Charles A. Lindbergh became the hero of the decade. After taking off from Roosevelt Field on Long Island in his single-engine Spirit of St. Louis on May 20, 1927, Lindy flew nonstop to Le Bourget, outside Paris, in thirty-three and a half hours. When he returned to New York, Mayor Walker and a million other people gave him an unforgettable reception. As the mayor and the aviator rode uptown from Lower Broadway, eighteen hundred tons of ticker tape, newspapers, and toilet paper rained down upon them from office buildings.

  Introducing the “Lone Eagle” at a dinner at the Commodore Hotel, Jimmy Walker managed to put in a plug for his hometown. He called New York City the Gateway of America. The leading businessmen and politicians in the audience loved the phrase; they saw it as an inducement to move more of their merchandise and services. Turning to Lindbergh, Walker said, “So while you took the Spirit of St. Louis abroad, you found out something of the Spirit of New York before you left and after you returned. Thank God!”

  (Lindbergh’s heroic image was later tarnished after he visited Nazi Germany three times in the mid-1930s, accepted a medal from Hermann Goering, made anti-Semitic remarks, and became an outspoken advocate of American isolationism. In his final years, he partly redeemed himself by working for environmental causes.)

  On Wall Street, the stock market was soaring. The economy seemed headed in the right direction, but there were warning signs. Cautious analysts believed that investments in the market were fueled by too much optimism and too much buying on margin. In some industries, wages were not keeping pace with profits. Small farmers were overextended on credit. Consumers bought durable goods in large quantities for the first time—on credit.

  The Federal Reserve’s attempt to raise interest rates to discourage speculation brought on an initial recession. President Hoover and his Treasury Department economists expected that recession to be self-limiting. Instead, prices fell and set off contractions in production. Investors panicked. The decline of prosperity in rural industries such as mining and farming and the unprecedented boom in consumer credit presaged the Great Crash of October 29,1929. The overheated securities market collapsed; by mid-November $30 billion had been erased from the value of stocks. A famous headline written by Sime Silverman, editor of Variety, the show business weekly, summed up the situation:

  WALL ST. LAYS AN EGG

  A worldwide depression followed. The game of business as usual, as it was played during the reckless Roaring Twenties, no longer worked. Unemployment contributed to changed attitudes about the need for government intervention. There were no large-scale social insurance programs to cushion the shock for businessmen, working-people, and families. Tough federal measures to promote national recovery would have to await another presidential election and the Roosevelt administration in Washington.

  In good times and bad, for Mayor Walker the focus of his free hours was the Great White Way. Jimmy was a habitual Broadway first-nighter, part of the show in the audience as well as during the revelries afterward. He believed in the world of entertainment for himself and the public. The producers and performers showed their gratitude by making sure that he had two on the aisle in the most visible orchestra seats.

  During Walker’s first term in office, the Broadway stage was alive with the sound of music. In 1927 Jerome Kern’s Show Boat opened and influenced not only critics but other composers. George Gershwin wrote the score for George S. Kaufman’s Strike Up the Band, a musical satire that portrayed the United States as a jingoistic country willing to go to war for the sake of big business. Ira Gershwin’s lyrics underscored that theme:

  Whoops, what a charming war!

  Whoops, what a charming war!

  It keeps you out in the open air.

  Oh, this is such a charming war! etc.

  We’re glad that we’re over here over there,

  We sleep in downy feather beds, we never see a cot;

  Our contract calls for ice-cream soda

  When the weather’s hot;

  And very good publicity if we ever get shot!

  Oh, isn’t this a charming war!

  If the theme and lyrics sounded cynical even to New Yorkers, they exemplified the freedom of the post-World War I era. Kaufman, former drama editor of The New York Times, considered himself a newsman as well as a wit. He also happened to be a former colleague of Brooks Atkinson, in the newspaper’s theater department. The Great War had ended only a decade before, and some veterans were offended by the tone of the musical. Strike Up the Band displeased so many people during its two-week road career that it was taken off the boards; America, said Atkinson, was “not yet ready for such acid icon-oclasm.” It was later rewritten by Morrie Ryskind, who softened Kaufman’s book, and ran for 191 performances.

  Gershwin, Ryskind, and Kaufman continued their brilliant collaboration with an acerbic, jeering musical comedy, Of Thee I Sing, that became emblematic of Calvin Coolidge’s and Herbert Hoover’s do-nothing tenure in Washington—and, by extension, of Jimmy Walker’s mayoralty in New York. Indeed, the painted curtain read: “Put Love in the White House.” The sign seemed to apply more to City Hall than to Washington.

  In their time, the lyrics were outspoken but their underlying humor prevented the padlockers from closing the show. In fact, the Pulitzer judges gave a prize to Of Thee I Sing, saying that the musical was that year’s best representative of “the educational value and power of the stage.” The song “Wintergreen for President” included such lines as: “He’s the man the people choose / Loves the Irish and the Jews.” Another number, “Who’s the Lucky Girl to Be?,” went: “If a girl is sexy / She may be Mrs. Prexy.” (“Prexy” meant “President,” and, of course, rhymed with “sexy.”) There was plenty of satire, but no nudity.

  To avoid the bluenoses and the possibility of a police raid, there was an unwritten rule in the legitimate theater that the tall, motionless showgirls in the back row were allowed to give audiences a peek at their bosoms as long as they (the girls) didn’t cause them (the bosoms) to jiggle. For $5.50 for the best seats in the house and 50 cents in the second balcony, the Broadway houses were filled with appreciative patrons who could afford to go to the theater regularly. Both musicals and straight plays flourished.

  While Mayor Walker was in office, the public had between 200 and 250 productions a year to choose from. In one season, theatergoers could see Noël Coward in The Vortex, Marilyn Miller in Sunny, Ethel Barrymore and Walter Hampden in The Merchant of Venice, Lionel Barrymore in The Piker, and Humphrey Bogart in The Cradle Snatchers. Jimmy Walker was present at the creation when the movies first began to talk, at the Warner Theater in October 1927, as Al Jolson stunned audiences with his historic performance in The Jazz Singer.

  Not everything in the sexy world of entertainment was without controversy. Some Broadway numbers were considered a little too raunchy for the general public. To show his power in the theatrical community, Mayor Walker once threatened managers with punitive action unless they cleaned up their acts. Some civic and religious leaders called Broadway “unchaste and lustful.” (As Brooks Atkinson later observed, “Jimmy Walker himself was both of these things.”)

  The hypocrisy of certain public officials was exposed when a citizens’ panel of three hundred members, appointed by Joab H. Banton, Mayor Walker’s district attorney, passed judgment on the “moral content” of various theater productions. The panel denounced an insignificant revue that was aptly titled Bunk of 1926. But instead of closing it, as the district attorney advised, the management applied for a court injunction, which it got, and the revue kept on playing until the public wisely stopped buying tickets.

  Next the district attorney handed the mayor a list of shows he regarded as “morally unacceptable.” With a straight face, Jimmy Walker agreed that
the shows were too sexy for the delicate sensibilities of New York theatergoers.

  The condemned dramas included Philip Kearney’s dramatization of Theodore Dreiser’s classic novel An American Tragedy; Lulu Belle, by Edward Sheldon and Charles MacArthur (co-author with Ben Hecht, of The Front Page); Arthur Hornblow, Jr.’s adaptation of Edouard Bourdef’s The Captive (the story of a French diplomat’s daughter seduced by another woman and finally involved in a permanent lesbian relationship); William Dugan’s The Virgin Man; Roland Oliver’s Night Hawk, which told the familiar tale of a noble prostitute, and Sex by Mae West and Jane Mast.

  The producers of these shows refused to take any action, and the plays continued on stage without causing any noticeable physical or mental harm to their audiences. Frustrated, the district attorney raided three of the shows that he regarded as “socially degrading”—Sex, The Captive, and The Virgin Man. Mae “Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It” West paid a fine of $500 and actually spent ten days in the workhouse. The author and producer of The Virgin Man paid fines of $250 each and briefly languished in jail. The Captive played for 160 performances before police wagons backed up to the stage door of the Empire Theatre and carted off the actors and management. It was a carnival for photographers, reporters, policemen, and lawmen who enjoyed the offstage scandal. Rather than fight the case in the courts, Gilbert Miller, the producer, closed down the show.

  In the 1927 season, Broadway suffered another blow when the state legislature passed a censorship act popularly called the Wales Padlock Law. By the district attorney’s loose standards, the law allowed the cops to arrest any producers, actors, and playwrights they considered immoral and to padlock a theater if the courts brought in a guilty verdict. Maya, a philosophical drama about the dreams that a French prostitute induced in her patrons, was promptly closed. To avoid having the theater padlocked and everybody concerned arrested, the producers withdrew the play.