by James Traub
Times Square was in many ways the movie capital of the country. As the center of the entertainment world, Broadway had the grandest movie houses in the country; as the favorite source of Hollywood’s material, it served as the eastern headquarters for virtually all the big film companies. But Broadway didn’t make the movies; Hollywood did. And so Broadway didn’t matter as it had before; the expressions that Americans had on the tips of their tongues, their favorite characters, their jokes, and their gossip, no longer issued from Times Square. The beloved stars moved to Hollywood. The glossy magazines glorified the sun-shot world of Hollywood, not Tin Pan Alley or the Main Stem.
And just as the movies were displacing 42nd Street from the center of the universe, the rabble was laying siege to the street’s fabled charms. The street, and Times Square itself, had long lived in a fine balance between the mob and all that was inaccessible to the mob—between the lobster palace and Hammerstein’s Victoria, between the dance hall and the roof garden. But gradually the elite had begun to exit Times Square in favor of the more sheltered precincts of Fifth Avenue; and the masses increasingly filled the vacuum. The decline of 42nd Street can be dated to as early as 1925, when Murray’s Roman Gardens, a relic from the age of the lobster palaces, closed up and was quickly replaced by Hubert’s Flea Circus, a Coney Island–style dime museum with sword swallowers and freaks and, of course, trained fleas. But it was the Depression that really killed the old elegance, because cheap and crude forms of entertainment like the dime-a-dance hall and burlesque quickly replaced more expensive and refined ones.
Burlesque traced its lineage back to The Black Crook and Lydia Thompson’s Blondes, and then forward to the hootchy-kootchy dance that made “Little Egypt” the sensation of the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893. Burlesque was a world of dirty songs, crude jokes, and women in frilly underthings shaking whatever they had (and that was usually a very great deal). Irving Zeidman, a historian of the form, crisply sums up its place in the galaxy of the arts by noting that “while variety became vaudeville and aligned itself with talent, burlesque became itself and aligned itself with dirt.” Burlesque gradually moved northward from the stews of the Lower East Side to Union Square, and thence to Harlem. And then, in 1931, Billy Minsky, the Ziegfeld—or perhaps the Hammerstein—of burlesque, breached the final barrier when he took over the Republic Theatre, which Hammerstein himself had built, and which for many years had served as the headquarters of David Belasco. The arrival of burlesque on 42nd Street was as shocking a proof of decline as the conversion of the Palace to a movie house.
By this time, the erotic dance had given way to the striptease; the girls stripped down to a G-string, and nothing else. Artists of the strip like Gypsy Rose Lee and Sally Rand hadn’t yet come along to give burlesque its air of tawdry glamour. Variety, no nest of prudes, described the girls at Minsky’s opening as “too inelegant, too dumb and too dirty to be called a troupe,” and called the show “the cheapest dirt, the dirtiest coochers ever forced upon a stage or platform.” Minsky’s was actually considered high-class burlesque; the dearth of both plays and vaudeville meant that he could feature actual Broadway talent in the chorus and charge as much as $1.50 for seats. But when the Eltinge, at the other end of 42nd Street, began to offer four-a-day shows with cheap seats, Minsky was forced to follow suit. And then the Apollo went burlesque, and then the Central, at 48th Street, and the Gaiety, at 46th. Times Square seemed to be returning to the lubricious men-only world of early vaudeville.
The Times Square of the mid-1930s still had glamorous nightclubs and black-tie openings and giant spectaculars lighting up Broadway in a hundred colors; but the character of the place, and especially the character of the place in the harsh light of day, had become irretrievably tawdry. The Depression had burst, and burst forever, the glittering bubble blown by Ziegfeld and Hammerstein and George Rector and the Castles. And this collapse, so sudden and so sweeping, wrung the heartstrings of Broadway’s leading citizens. A new form of literature came to flourish in Times Square—the dirge, the woeful lament of “O tempora!, O mores!” In 1933, the great George M. Cohan, a child of Broadway if ever there was one, wrote an impromptu and thoroughly disgusted ditty:
It means the increase in honky-tonk joints,
The blast of the radios from the amplifiers hanging over dance-hall
doorways,
The pedlers and the barkers shouting at the top of their lungs:
“Buy a balloon an’ act natural”;
“Come in and see the great flea circus”;
“This way for a good time, folks”;
“No tights in this show”;
“Plenty of seats in the first balcony; ‘She Kissed Him to Death’ just
starting”;
“Magnificent love story; bring the children.”
The decline of Broadway provoked Stanley Walker, hard-boiled city editor, into a mighty blast of dismay. The street, he wrote, “has degenerated into something resembling the main drag of a frontier town. . . . There are chow-meineries, peep shows for men only, flea circuses, lectures on what killed Rudolf Valentino, jitney ballrooms and a farrago of other attractions which would have sickened the heart of the Broadwayite of even ten years ago.” The great old chophouses had given way to penny restaurants, “where a derelict just this side of starvation may get something known as food for as little as one cent.” The very faces on the street had become grotesque: “cauliflower ears, beggars, sleazy crones, skinny girls who would be out of place in even the cheapest dance hall, twisted old men, sleek youths with pale faces, the blind and the maimed.”
Broadway had, in short, turned into Coney Island, a street carnival staged for the tourist and the boob. Runyon had adored and immortalized the Broadway street life, but by the early thirties Runyon was spending more time in Miami than at Lindy’s. Where were the hoods of yesteryear? This new world was a ceaseless yammer of religious nuts and self-styled magicians and novelty salesmen—itching powders and exploding cigars— and hot dog vendors and con artists and even, late at night on the east side of Broadway, dope peddlers. Runyon’s Dream Street, the block behind the Palace, was no longer, just as the Palace itself was no longer. The gossip columnists Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer wrote, “Its 200 yards are lined almost unbrokenly by cheap hotels and rooming houses sheltering all manner of strange characters: retired vaudevillians, down-and-out horseplayers, dope fiends, grifters and grafters, pickpockets, derelicts (male and female), drunks, stage widows, miserly recluses, tars and their tarts, crap-game-steerers and bottom-dealers.” Here, by the way, was a subspecies of the new literature of decline: the epic enumeration of depravity.
Nowhere was the change more drastic than on 42nd Street, increasingly the home of shooting galleries and peep arcades and dumb movies. As the theaters passed into the hands of the banks, they emerged with very different owners. In 1931, William and Harry Brandt, who had made a living in movies and low-grade vaudeville in the city’s more humble neighborhoods, bought the Lyric Theatre, tried a diet of four-a-day vaudeville, and then switched to second-run movies. The Brandts took over the Apollo in 1932, and then the Times Square, the Selwyn, the Eltinge, and the Republic—the block of theaters that would later form the core of the porn empire of the 1960s. The Rialto, which had been showing movies at the northwest corner of Broadway and 42nd since 1916, was torn down in 1935 to make way for the New Rialto, whose first feature was Fang and Claw. The New Rialto was open all day and well into the night, and charged as little as 25 cents a ticket. These theaters, like the burlesque shows and the dime-a-dance halls and the penny restaurants, brought a very different kind of customer to 42nd Street: the lowlife whose many faces Stanley Walker had catalogued.
Burlesque actually had a very short life span in Times Square. Here was a species of show so crude that many of the critics found it as deplorable as the moralists did. But what killed burlesque was not so much dirt as menace. The burlesque theater spilled out into the street in the form of barkers and steerers
who tried to whip the customers inside; giant posters of half-naked girls blared from under the marquees. The burlesque theater seemed to degrade the street in the same way as the sex shop and the porn movie house would in the 1960s; it posed, in effect, an ecological danger. At hearings in 1932, the New York City license commissioner, James F. Geraghty, said that the lobbies of the burlesque houses served as “loitering places for men who trade on the shady side of night life.” A New York Times editorial complained, “The alleged obscenity of the burlesque shows is exceeded by their external frowsiness. The neighborhood of such theaters takes on the character of a slum.”
The crusade against burlesque, later mocked and memorialized in The Night They Raided Minsky’s, was fueled by fears that Broadway was sinking beneath a mighty wave of trash. Fiorello La Guardia’s license commissioner, Paul Moss, whose brother B. S. Moss was an old nickelodeon operator who had become a producer and movie house owner, devoted himself to cleaning up burlesque; when that proved hopeless, on May 2, 1937, he revoked the licenses of all fourteen of the city’s burlesque houses. “This is the beginning of the end of incorporated filth,” said the mayor. And it was—for the nonce. The houses were reopened under regulations prohibiting the striptease. Clean burlesque was, of course, a contradiction in terms, and by 1942 the brief reign of burlesque had come to an inglorious end.
As burlesque waned on 42nd Street, so did legitimate theater. By the mid-1930s, the only house still showing plays on 42nd Street was the redoubtable New Amsterdam. In January 1937, Walter Huston starred in Othello; and that would be the last play mounted on 42nd Street for over forty years. In July, the New Amsterdam reopened under new ownership as a movie theater. The first feature was A Midsummer Night’s Dream— the very same show which, in a different medium, had inaugurated this art nouveau castle in 1903.
IT SEEMS A STRANGE irony that the quality of theatrical writing improved markedly as the cultural power of theater declined; but perhaps it’s no irony at all. As Broadway lost its status as the proving ground for national culture, where plays were hatched to be distributed to the hustings, theater became an increasingly local medium, needing to please only a local, and of course, sophisticated audience. Movies took on the burden of suiting the lowest common denominator. And as the grip of Broadway culture on the national imagination weakened, or perhaps as viewers counted on the movies to glorify that magic world, dramatists began to look far beyond the confines of Times Square for their subject matter. Few of the leading playwrights of the thirties were themselves Broadway figures, as George S. Kaufman and Marc Connelly and Moss Hart were; they were biographers, essayists, advocates, novelists, and whatnot. Some of them, like Elmer Rice, professed to despise the theater as a thoroughly compromised medium of expression, while others tried their hand at plays to earn their keep while doing something they deemed more important, like crusading for justice. The 1930s was the era of Depression and the onset of war, and thus of intense ideological mobilization, at least within the intelligentsia; the drama of the time was exalted, and sometimes banalized, by those profound concerns.
There can be little question about the difference in quality. Very few plays from the 1920s or earlier have made it into the semiofficial canon of school anthologies and beloved revivals, but at least a dozen Broadway shows from the 1930s have achieved that status. The list includes, but is scarcely limited to, Maxwell Anderson’s High Tor, William Saroyan’s The Time of Your Life, Clifford Odets’s Golden Boy, Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes, and George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess— almost certainly the greatest musical work mounted on Broadway up to that time. In the 1933–34 season, when 42nd Street was stealing Broadway’s thunder and the number and profitability of shows was dropping like a shot, theatergoers could attend O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!, Sidney Howard’s Yellow Jack, Gershwin and Kaufman’s satirical musical Let ’Em Eat Cake, and Tobacco Road, Jack Kirkland’s adaptation of Erskine Caldwell’s bleak novel of sharecropper life, which ran for 3,182 performances.
The best plays of the thirties were both more serious and more literary than the drama of the previous generation. Plays like Of Mice and Men and Tobacco Road exposed theatergoers to a world of rural immiseration utterly foreign to them. In They Shall Not Die, John Wexley bluntly condemned the police, attorney, and judges responsible for locking up the Scottsboro Boys, nine young black men who had been falsely, and sensationally, charged with raping two white women in 1931. In There Shall Be No Night, of 1940, Robert Sherwood, who in previous works had denounced militarism and declared an equal pox on all the houses of Europe, reversed himself and urged his listeners to accept the necessity of war to defend democracy against totalitarianism. Meanwhile, the protean Orson Welles was shocking audiences with a haunting voodoo version of Macbeth set in Haiti, as well as a modern-dress interpretation of Julius Caesar.
As Kaufman, the master satirist and wit, was the prototypical playwright of his age, so Clifford Odets, the inflamed pamphleteer, was the emblematic figure of Broadway in the thirties. Odets was a struggling actor who in the early thirties had joined the Group Theatre, a cooperative that brought together actors like Lee J. Cobb, John Garfield, and Franchot Tone; directors like Elia Kazan; and instructors like Sanford Meisner and Stella Adler. Though the Group Theatre was not originally politicized, many of its members, and above all Odets, were deeply marked by the growing radicalization of the time. In 1934, Odets, who had never had a play produced, wrote Waiting for Lefty, an anticapitalist tract barely disguised as a drama. In a thrilling coup de théâtre, the actors turned to address the audience directly, turning the theater into a union hall and the spectators into fellow workers; at the climax, when word arrived that the heroic Lefty had been murdered by company goons, first the actors, and then the patrons in the seats, took up the cry “Strike! Strike! Strike!”—and the identification was complete. Waiting for Lefty ran for 168 performances on Broadway and was subsequently performed by special troupes all over the country, several of whom were dragged off to jail by outraged local authorities.
Odets turned out to be a gifted playwright who knew how to reproduce real feelings and real speech; he quickly learned to embed the doctrine in the narrative. Jacob, the embittered patriarch of Awake and Sing!, views capitalism as legalized theft and is given to such stony pronouncements as “If this life leads to a revolution it’s a good thing. Otherwise, it’s for nothing.” Odets seems to share Jacob’s views, yet Awake and Sing! is far from the blunt agitprop spirit of Waiting for Lefty, which it followed by only a year. The play revolves around the struggle of a young man to break free from his all-consuming mother. Awake and Sing! has something of O’Neill’s harsh realism, though it is at the same time infused with Odets’s fervid romanticism about human prospects. The dialogue abounds with the Yiddish turns of speech—“You gave the dog eat?”; “He should talk to you an old man?”—that Moss Hart and S. N. Behrman must have heard at home every day, but would never have dreamed of putting into a play. The world of Broadway is all but invisible from the family’s Bronx tenement; Jacob’s son Myron absentmindedly picks his teeth as his daughter reads of the doings of Sophie Tucker. What matters, finally, is not political revolution but personal liberation—“Get-what-it-takes,” as one character puts it. Myron doesn’t have it; life has squashed him flat. But Ralph, Myron’s son and the play’s protagonist, just might. Jacob makes Ralph the beneficiary of his will and then, horribly, arranges his own death. And Ralph, finally independent, accepts the dreadful sacrifice with joy. “I saw he was dead and I was born,” he declares, in the kind of melodramatic speechifying to which Odets was much given. “I swear to God, I’m one week old!”
The plays of the thirties were notoriously engagé, but they were also very often set at a great distance from the audience’s place and time, in Lincoln’s day or in that of Mary, Queen of Scots. They aspired, as literature does, to universal truths rather than to
the kind of immediacy and familiarity that delighted the audience of The Front Page, not to mention Earl Carroll’s Vanities. Theater traditionally depends on topicality to forge a bond with the audience. And yet Thornton Wilder, a novelist whose subject was almost always “the human condition” rather than any particular transitory state of affairs, devised in Our Town a form of drama wholly removed from the particular. The village in which the play is set, Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire, has the generality of allegory; it could be—indeed, is—anywhere. Wilder even dispenses with incident itself, an act of daring and a conscious flirtation with tedium that few authors before Samuel Beckett even thought to attempt.
The stratum of life Wilder seeks lies below the busyness and turbulence of event. “This is the way we were,” says the Stage Manager, who narrates the comings and goings of Grover’s Corners: “In our growing up and in our marrying and in our living and in our dying.” The prose itself aspires to a kind of stately, reverential quietude. Our Town has no wit, no politics, no “views.” The small-town folk talk endlessly about the weather and express themselves in the kind of earnest aphorisms that would have marked them as oafs in the sparkling drama of an earlier generation. The play’s faith in common wisdom is a rebuke to urbanity itself. But Wilder doesn’t mean the rebuke: Our Town wishes to recall us to our common humanity, and to remind us that death settles all differences and stills all vanity. And the wiseacres of Broadway, to their great credit, recognized Our Town for what it was. Jed Harris, who had produced and directed many of Broadway’s wittiest and most self-referential shows, directed the play with the softest of hands. And the work was hailed as “a gentle masterpiece” by that most prolix and noisy of critics, Alexander Woollcott.
Men like George M. Cohan and Stanley Walker and the columnist Jack Lait, who recoiled in horror before the new Broadway of dance halls and penny arcades, had been raised in, and in some cases had helped shape, the old Broadway of the lobster palace and the roof garden. But younger men could not share their nostalgia, or their horror. A. J. Liebling was born in 1904; the Times Square he knew as a rich kid growing up on Park Avenue was the Times Square of the speakeasy and of the fight crowd hanging out at Jacobs Beach. Liebling was an impudent and mischief-making character who loved the con artists and sidewalk mythologizers of Times Square. All forms of fabrication, so long as they were ingenious or at least preposterous, appealed to him; and as a young reporter on The World-Telegram, he returned again and again to the petty characters of Broadway. He covered Commissioner Geraghty’s 1932 hearing on burlesque and quoted Geraghty heartily defending Professor Heckler’s Flea Circus, the star attraction of Hubert’s Museum, whose license was also up for renewal. Billy Minsky sniffed, “I will not tell my girls that they have been compared with fleas. They would be much offended.” “Well,” one of the lawyers cracked, “at least the fleas wear clothes.”
