Guys and Dolls and Other Writings

by Damon Runyon

  “Social Error” (March 22, 1930, Collier’s) features Waldo Winchester, the Winchell surrogate, who, like Winchell, uses the term “underworld complex” to convey romantic fascination with the criminal world—a fascination held by no one more than Runyon and Winchell. Florenz Ziegfeld was the impresario of Ziegfeld’s Follies, vaudeville revues featuring beautiful women and more than a touch of burlesque; the Follies outlasted Ziegfeld, who died in 1932.

  “Blood Pressure” (April 3, 1930, Saturday Evening Post) is the basis for the dice game in Guys and Dolls, in the posthumous musical derived from Runyon’s stories that was written by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows with songs by Frank Loesser. In the musical Big Jule (not, as in this story, Rusty Charley) intimidates his fellow players.

  “Butch Minds the Baby” (September 13, 1930, Collier’s) was the source of a 1942 film of that name that Runyon produced during his Hollywood days. In this story he introduced the recurring Brooklyn-based gangster Harry the Horse and his accomplices, Spanish John and Little Isadore.

  “The Hottest Guy in the World” (November 8, 1930, Collier’s) introduces the detective Johnny Brannigan, who grew up in the same neighborhood as Big Jule and who loves the same woman. Big Jule is foregrounded in Guys and Dolls.

  “The Lily of St. Pierre” (December 20, 1930, Collier’s) is one of a series of Christmas stories—along with “Dancing Dan’s Christmas” (1932) “Three Wise Guys” (1933), and “Palm Beach Santa Claus” (1938)—that were published in Collier’s in December and that sentimentally evoke domestic values in juxtaposition to gangster violence and cynicism.

  “The Bloodhounds of Broadway” (May 16, 1931, Collier’s) is a story in which Runyon uses the high-spirited farcical technique of the early western tales that he wrote before he arrived from Colorado in 1910. But the central point is Runyon’s resentment of old money and inherited wealth, personified by the exploitative Marvin Clay. Runyon is typically sympathetic to women as victims and to such powerless and poor women as Lovey Lou as well as her sister (a dancer for Missouri Martin at what now is called the Three Hundred Club rather than the Sixteen Hundred Club as in “Romance in the Roaring Forties”) and John Wangles.

  “Gentlemen, the King!” (April 25, 1931, Collier’s) shows Runyon’s characteristic soft spot for children, especially orphans. Here violent hoodlums—Izzy Cheesecake, Kitty Quick, and Jo-jo from Chicago—are captivated by a child who reminds them of their youth. Al Capone was the Chicago gangster whom Runyon treated sympathetically in a series of columns later in 1931, when he was on trial for income tax evasion (see “Al Capone” on pages 527-48 in this book). These columns were originally collected in Trials and Other Tribulations.

  “The Brain Goes Home” (May 1931, Cosmopolitan) depicts The Brain’s murder, which closely resembled actual events in Arnold Rothstein’s demise. Rothstein was shot at the Park Central Hotel on November 4, 1928, by George McManus in what seemed an underworld execution. McManus had lost a large sum of money in a poker game in which they had both participated. Runyon covered that trial. (See “Arnold Rothstein’s Final Payoff” on pages 509-26 in this book. Some of these columns are collected in Trials and Other Tribulations.) The judge, before jury deliberations, exonerated McManus; the state lacked the evidence to prove its case, in large part because Rothstein, while still alive, had refused to identify his assailant.

  “The Snatching of Bookie Bob” (September 26, 1931, Collier’s) is a noir story whose opening paragraphs refer to the desperation caused by the Depression, which began in earnest in 1930. Waldo Winchester, who had been kidnapped in the earlier story “Romance in the Roaring Forties,” takes a dim view of snatching. We also have a reprise of the Brooklyn-based gangsters Harry the Horse, Spanish John, and Little Isadore from “Butch Minds the Baby.”

  “Hold ’em Yale” (November 14, 1931, Collier’s) is one of three stories (the others being “Undertaker Song” and “A Nice Price”) that juxtapose the elite Harvard-Yale-Princeton upper-class social world with Broadway’s demimonde. Runyon loved the ethnic variety of New York. Sam the Gonoph—his name is based on the Yiddish word for “thief” (also spelled gonif, ganef, or ganof)—is from Essex Street on the Jewish Lower East Side. He and his crew scalp tickets for major sports events; that is, they buy them at cost and sell them well above cost.

  “For a Pal” (January 9, 1932, Collier’s) is a touching story about homosocial male bonding among lonely men. It is also one of the few in which the self-dramatizing narrator doesn’t explain how he knows the principals.

  “Broadway Financier” (January 30, 1932, Collier’s) captures the hum and buzz of the overpopulated Lower East Side during the Depression. In 1900 that section was more populous than Bombay. It focuses on the event that nearly all people feared before the New Deal rescue operation began in March 1933: namely, the collapse of their bank. Between the 1929 stock market crash and the 1933 legislation, five thousand banks failed, costing depositors $7 billion. For those living outside the New York region, Runyon’s stories helped establish the Lower East Side as a Jewish area in the popular imagination.

  “Little Miss Marker” (March 26, 1932, Collier’s) is a parable about the restorative power of love and the depressive blight of loss. One of Runyon’s signature stories, it is the source of three separate films: the 1934 Little Miss Marker—in black and white like all movies of that time—with Shirley Temple and Charles Bickford, which was rereleased in color in 1961; Sorrowful Jones, a 1949 Bob Hope vehicle; and a star-studded 1980 Little Miss Marker with Walter Matthau, Tony Curtis, Bob Newhart, and Julie Andrews.

  “Dream Street Rose” (June 11, 1932, Collier’s) takes place on West Forty-seventh Street between Sixth and Seventh Avenues, where Rosie lives. A grim area during the Depression, it was known as Dream Street because the theater magazine Billboard was located there and Actors Equity was nearby on Sixth Avenue and West Forty-seventh Street.

  “Tobias the Terrible” (December 10, 1932, Collier’s) illustrates what Winchell called the “underworld complex,” in which the world of criminal violence and shady dealings seems more exciting and attractive than the pedestrian world of ordinary citizens. This is another Runyon story in the mode of what I call gangster chic, where the gangster demimonde is more admirable than the respectable world.

  “Dancing Dan’s Christmas” (December 31, 1932, Collier’s). See my comments above on “The Lily of St. Pierre.”

  “Earthquake” (January 1933, Cosmopolitan) focuses on the pursuit by the recurring police figure Johnny Brannigan of a cop killer named Earthquake.

  “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” (January 28, 1933, Collier’s) is the principal source for the musical comedy Guys and Dolls and the successful film version in which Marlon Brando played Sky Masterson and Frank Sinatra played Nathan Detroit. The drama and film character Nathan Detriot is based as much or more on Runyon’s Dave the Dude than on any of his other fictional characters, including Nathan Detroit.

  Toward the end of the nineteenth century the Salvation Army began to play a proselytizing role in New York among the urban immigrant poor. They used the hoopla and chutzpah of Broadway performance—with religious texts set to popular melodies, minstrel tunes, vaudeville songs, and even drinking ballads—and advertising to convey their orthodox Wesleyan message of temperance, grace, and forgiveness.

  “The Old Doll’s House” (May 13,1933, Collier’s) features a recurring Runyon theme: the corruption and ineffectuality of the legal system. The trial of Lance McGowan, who executed two gangsters at Good Time Charley’s speakeasy, recalls that of the aforementioned George McManus. Here Judge Goldstein, “one of the surest-footed lawyers in town” (who helps Silk make restitution for money that her sugar daddy Israel Ib stole in “Broadway Financier”) manipulates the legal system to get his client, McGowan, off.

  “It Comes Up Mud” (June 10, 1933, Collier’s) is a hilarious satire of the culture of materialism where wealth matters and where people adopt whatever names and identities suit them. Beulah is one
of Runyon’s many gold-digging women.

  “The Brakeman’s Daughter” (July 8, 1933, Collier’s) is a noir story dealing with the period immediately after the lifting of Prohibition, when the once-illegal distributors of alcohol fought over control of the now legal manufacture and distribution of alcoholic beverages. It is one of Runyon’s most tightly and intricately plotted stories. When we are told that Big False Face “comes from the Lower East Side,” Runyon’s readers would have known this as code for his being Jewish.

  “What, No Butler?” (August 5, 1933, Collier’s) is the first of the five Ambrose Hammer stories—the others are “Broadway Complex” (1933), “So You Won’t Talk!” (1937), “Broadway Incident” (1941), and “The Melancholy Dane” (1944)—and Hammer also makes a cameo appearance in a sixth story, “Princess O’Hara” (1934). A journalist, Hammer is a kind of fictional comic surrogate for Runyon. Hammer has Runyon’s dandyish appearance, short stature, obsessive curiosity, and fascination with crime, iconoclastic cynicism, and strong attraction to sexy younger women with weak intellects. Like Runyon, Hammer uses his knowledge of other people to manipulate events. His name has the same number of syllables as Runyon’s, and each begins with a stressed syllable—in other words, each name is a double trochee. With the story’s implausible plot reversals, Runyon is poking fun at the crime stories of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.

  “Broadway Complex” (October 28, 1933, Collier’s) focuses on Hammer, who has been writing a play for years. Writing a Broadway play was one of Runyon’s fantasies, which he fulfilled in 1935 when he collaborated with Howard Lindsay on A Slight Case of Murder. Hammer, as a Harvard graduate, has the credentials Runyon earned in the school of hard knocks.

  “The Three Wise Guys” (December 23, 1933, Collier’s), one of the aforementioned Christmas stories, is an exceptionally rich and well-crafted story that plays with the name of an actual place, Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The populist Runyon satirically compares the gangster Blondy to business moguls like John D. Rockefeller, Henry Ford, and J. P. Morgan, who he felt were not ethically superior to some of his criminal friends such as Rothstein and Capone.

  “The Lemon Drop Kid” (February 3, 1934, Collier’s), a poignant, dark tale, is one of Runyon’s best race-track stories. It tells of the toll taken by the Depression. Because the title character lacks funds for proper medical care, his wife and child die in childbirth. The 1951 film The Lemon Drop Kid was a Bob Hope vehicle.

  “Princess O’Hara” (March 3, 1934, Collier’s) foregrounds the world of horse-drawn carriages that even today take people through Central Park, including the 66th Street transverse mentioned in the story. The 1943 Abbott and Costello slapstick film It Ain’t Hay is loosely derived from the story.

  “A Nice Price” (September 8, 1934, Collier’s) owes much to the prior and more deftly plotted “Hold ’em Yale.” It focuses on class distinctions between marginalized characters of Jewish heritage, trying to make a buck in the Depression any way they can, and the WASP establishment. Benny South Street’s class resentment has a Marxist tinge.

  “Sense of Humor” (September 1934, Cosmopolitan) is a noir story about committing murder by putting the victim into a sack trussed up in a bundle with a cord or wire around his neck, which will strangle him when he tries to escape. Strewn with corpses, this is one of Runyon’s darkest stories.

  “Undertaker Song” (November 24, 1934, Collier’s) includes Ivy League characters, and as in all stories with Ivy League characters, the principal figure from the Broadway demimonde is Jewish—here he is called Meyer Marmalade.

  “Breach of Promise” (January 1935, Cosmopolitan) portrays Judge Goldfobber (who is not a judge) as probably an amalgam of greedy lawyers who defend and consort with criminals. As with some Mafia lawyers today, the line between advocacy and a lawyer’s participation in criminal activity is not always clear.

  “A Light in France” (January 15, 1944, Collier’s) takes place in the summer of 1940, when Americans were regarded as neutrals even though their strong sympathies lay with the British whom they were supplying. On the Nazi-occupied Atlantic coast of France, German U-boats (a term taken from the German word for submarine, Unterseeboot) were sinking British ships five times faster than new ships could be constructed. Rarely has Runyon written such a grim and cynical tale with so little humor as the ironically titled “A Light in France.” Devoid of sentiment, the story combines the senseless violence of war with the perfidious behavior of every figure except the innocent Marie. Runyon gave this noir story a patriotic reversal appropriate for a wartime story in an American popular magazine. Marie is the bold and proud resistance figure who won’t submit to German occupation.

  THE TURPS

  “A Call on the President” (August 13,1937, Saturday Evening Post) is about a middle-class couple living in Brooklyn, Ethel and Joe Turp. In the Turp stories, most of which are imaginary letters that Joe Turp writes to an editor about his working and married life, Runyon demonstrates his understanding that New York reached beyond Manhattan and that he had to date given the customs and conventions of greater New York, and in particular Brooklyn, scant attention. These stories show us that Runyon was more of a divided self than has been recognized. One part of his psyche envied the conventional middle-class marriage, where the working male lived on a daytime schedule. Runyon was fascinated by what he called “little people” of modest means, semi-educated people who were trying to make their dreams come true and who enjoyed the pleasures of decent meals, new clothes, movies, and companionship.

  The Turps are the kind of people for whom Runyon wrote, the people he imagined reading his columns. He often extols their simple lives and stresses their separation from the cultural elite. In these mostly epistolary stories he shows an awareness of social mobility and social stratification within America. The Turps have a strong sense that they belong to Brooklyn, not New York.

  It is worth remembering that until January 1, 1898, Brooklyn was a city separate from Manhattan, and that Runyon arrived in New York in 1910, only twelve years later. Living in Brooklyn, the Turps are recused from the Broadway world and from some of the razzle-dazzle of Manhattan. Runyon neither condescends to the Turps, nor does he step back to moralize. While he does not completely restrain his characteristic cynicism, the dominant tone is a boundless American optimism that, no matter what happens this time, next time everything will work out.

  “A Call on the President” did not appear in any version of the Turp columns but, along with the 1938 “Nothing Happens in Brooklyn,” does appear in the collection More Guys and Dolls (Garden City Books, 1951). Nor does Runyon use the convention of writing to an editor that he used in all the other Turp stories except “Nothing Happens in Brooklyn.”

  In some ways “A Call on the President” is a paean to Franklin D. Roosevelt. It shows the Turps’ ingenuous but well-founded faith in democracy. The story is told in Joe Turp’s usual digressive manner, one that is taken further off track by his wife’s even more digressive comments; the narrative decision to include those comments results from Joe’s respect for—and even awe of—his wife.

  The Turps protest what they feel is the unfair firing of their mailman and go down to Washington in their car to straighten things out. When Joe arrives, he speaks for everyone who is a citizen, and thus has the right to speak up, when he says to the man in striped pants in front of the White House: “I am a citizen of the United States of America and know my rights. . . . I ses Mister, what is so tough about seeing the President of the United States? When he was after his job he was glad to see anybody. I ses is he like those politicians in Brooklyn now or what?” Joe is an innocent, expecting the Bill of Rights and the Constitution to work for him. Runyon—perhaps as a vestige from his wilder western days, perhaps from his intimacy with criminals in his newspaper career—has Joe express suspicion if not outright disdain for the police.

  The Turps meet the president, who is not identified by name as Roosevelt but is Runyon’s version of a presid
ent who cares about the average American or “little fellow.” The president personifies a caring paternal government to which little people like the Turps can look for recourse. He represents security in the face of the vicissitudes of life. He is able to set things right when they go wrong and restores the mailman to his position. In the story the president is a metaphor for interventional government that can overturn arbitrary decisions made in the interests of predatory capitalism. Runyon depicts the federal government as the ultimate refuge for citizens from the travail brought on by the Depression, a travail that hit New York City harder than most cities.

  Public employment in the postal service and in elaborate public works projects, along with such New Deal programs as Social Security and unemployment insurance, turned the U.S. government from an indifferent distant relative into a paternal figure personified by Roosevelt in his fireside chats, the very kind of figure portrayed in “A Call on the President.” That Roosevelt was a former governor of New York and had taken a hand in the removal of corrupt Mayor Jimmy Walker accentuated the link between New York City residents and the president.

  EARLY FICTION

  “The Defense of Strikerville” (February 1907, McClure’s) displays the beginnings of Runyon’s lifelong attraction to society’s outcasts; old soldiers take the side of the strikers they were sent to suppress. The story is basically told by Private Hanks, one of the strikebreakers who sides with the strikers; he is introduced somewhat awkwardly by a nameless narrator. As if Runyon were searching for ways to attain the immediacy of the present—and anticipating the characteristic present-tense technique of his New York stories—Hanks moves into the present tense for a time but returns to the past.