by Paul French
Shanghai’s got dance madness, and they’re the best exhibition dancers in town. Joe and Nellie make it seem so easy, so refined. Eight hundred swells sit down to dinner, and Joe and Nellie are part of the show, along with singers and comedians, accompanied by a ten-piece orchestra led by Whitey. The Majestic comps their food and cleaning bills, Whitey’s boy shines Joe’s shoes, and Nellie has her own seamstress. After the exhibition you can dance with Joe if you’re a lady of a certain age or a wife with a roving eye for a slick continental with the accent to match. The men, dance tickets clutched in their fists, queue to dance with Nellie, to hold her slim figure in their arms, to dance with a woman who knows what she’s doing. They look into her round, dark eyes, highlighted by crow-black kohl, breathe in her scent, and think they might have a chance. But those eyes are only for Joe and for the tips they’ll make. Occasionally she and Joe catch each other’s eye and share a lightning-quick smile.
They’ve got a single-room cold-water place on Woo Foo Lane, not far from the Majestic. Typical Shanghai: a lane house with creaky wooden stairs, boiling in summer, freezing in the winter. The old oak bed is draped with mosquito nets that never really keep the bastards out, the legs in old tins of kerosene laced with arsenic to stop the bugs crawling up into the mattress. Nellie hates the flies, whose bulbous corpses await them on the flypaper Joe has hung up. She can’t get used to the strange sour taste of the milk from the Shanghai Dairy or the smelly petroleum lamp that casts long shadows across the eaves. The raggedy curtains barely cover a window that is not quite three feet from the apartment opposite. They keep the drapes permanently closed, but the piercing Shanghai sunlight slices in. There’s a stained oak dressing table, the drawers lined with old copies of the Deutsche Shanghai Zeitung chewed at the edges by voracious ants. The mirror has foxing creeping from the edges, which distorts Nellie’s face as she tries to make up. There are two rickety cane chairs and a table, a small porcelain washbasin with a tap, chipped, of course; they get hot water from a shop at the end of the lane. It’s a couple of cents for a Chinese coolie to fill the enamel sit-and-soak bath; they cook on shared charcoal-fuelled hibachi stoves on the landing one floor down. It’s a noisy place, stuffy with charcoal fumes, populated by a mix of Chinese not long from the countryside, several White Russian families who seem to live on a shoestring, an argumentative Portuguese woman formerly of dubious employ, and an old Englishman who never leaves his room.
They usually get to sleep about the time the Shanghainese early-risers start caterwauling across the lanes at full volume. Each morning they hear the cacophony of raucous throat clearings, coughing with the first smoke of the day, the clank of tooth glasses on porcelain, the swilling and spitting, the sizzling hot plates, the shouting in Russian and guttural Shanghainese, the nose-blowing and the feet stamping to the shared privy out the back. Boiling kettles whistle, pans clank, and tin mugs slosh with the morning tea. But it’s just a start, Joe promises. They’ll save, they’ll move on. Shanghai is a place where you can do that.
* * *
The crisp chill of a Shanghai winter morning, the first of the new decade. A celebration. A first anniversary in Shanghai. Joe breaks his regular hours and is up early and out shopping. Brioches from Bianchi’s on the Bubbling Well Road, Nellie’s favourite taro cakes from a Shanghainese street vendor, Turkish delight from the Velvet Sweet Shop (where, Jack tells him, the Chinese confectioner is known to sell a white powdery substance under the counter to his more red-eyed regulars), salted almonds, champagne on ice from behind the bar of the Manhattan (courtesy of recently installed proprietor Jack Riley), kir from Egal & Cie, Frenchtown’s best vintner—a collection of all Nellie’s newfound favourites, the sort she’d only dreamt of as a young girl.
Nellie Farren is Shanghai’s heartbreaker—sweet, dark, Russky Nell. There isn’t a member of the Volunteer Corps, an off-duty SMP man, or a fresh-off-the-boat griffin who doesn’t fall hard for Nellie. Joe puts up with it; it’s good for business. She takes the orchids and the Nestle’s chocolates. She flirts, laughs, plays the coquette, improves her English, rounds out her vowels, flutters her big, dark eyes. Male hearts break a little when she comes out in silk and slides across the floor in Joe’s arms. By now they all know she’s his, even if Joe isn’t always hers.
A year in Shanghai, through the dripping heat of the city’s long, humid summer, the short-lived balmy autumn as the leaves fall from the London plane trees of Frenchtown. Then a bone-chilling winter with snow at Christmas before the rainy spring and then, every year with no exception, the furnace of another long Shanghai summer. They’ve realised the Majestic’s a sweet gig. Good wages, topped up with tips from the swank crowd—Shanghai’s elite, the so-called ‘400’, the wealthiest and most influential foreigners in the International Settlement, the richest razzle-dazzlers of the town. There are Frenchtown’s nouveau riche looking for new nighttime thrills and curious wealthy Chinese after jazz and Western-style dancing. The crowd sits on big rattan chairs around plain deal tables laid out on a thick Peking carpet, among palm fronds set in bamboo boxes. They sip drinks in the Winter Gardens conservatory on tables layered in white linen. Joe and Nellie even dance one night for Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, who are visiting town selling their silents. Joe dances with ‘America’s Sweetheart’, her rubies and sapphires against his chest, while Nellie takes a turn with Fairbanks for the press, and Joe and Mary watch that old dog goose Nellie’s backside.
Even at the Majestic, summer is a trial. The place is a sweatbox despite the rattan fans worked all night by unseen white-gowned coolies. There are a dozen large blocks of ice in the middle of the dance floor to cool off the dancers, and Chinese with mops clear the water off the floor between dances. Joe and Nellie slide round the blocks like they’re on skates. But it still gets so men sweat buckets and the ladies’ makeup streams. By midnight it’s sodden collars and panda eyes, the men stepping out to switch damp collars for fresh—on humid Shanghai summer nights the men bring maybe a half dozen additional collars with them in anticipation of having to change them. Backstage Joe does as much ‘tidying’ as Nellie—powdering his nose to stop the shine under the lights, darkening the eyebrows, a little spot of colour on the cheeks. After midnight the band steps it up and cuts loose. The management installs a model train that runs round the dance floor, and Whitey calls out the name of Chinese train stations through a megaphone, with his band all hollering ‘choo-choo’ every time. The big-shot Chinese lap it up; they spritz on any kind of gimmick. They soak up the band’s closing number, ‘When it’s Night Time in Dear Old Shanghai and I’m Dancing, Sweetheart, with You’.
Joe and Nellie choreograph a dozen White Russian girls Babe knows from the Moon Palace for a chorus line. They call them the ‘International Review’, and the girls high-kick across the Majestic’s floor before knocking out the crowd with a can-can to a Gay Paree backdrop. Then the clincher. Forget yesterday’s vogue for prim ‘grass skirt dances’; Joe has Nellie come out dressed—or virtually undressed—as an Aztec princess, to shimmy across the floor showing almost all God gave her. She’s Shanghai’s Josephine Baker and, had she been on the Champs-Élysées, she’d have given La Baker a run for her money.
Jack and Babe drop by most nights; Jack is making it his business to know everyone who counts, since Blood Alley is only the start. He introduces Joe to two Chinese guys who love the whole Majestic setup. The two look like some kind of Oriental Laurel and Hardy. They call themselves Tung and Vong, wear Western-style suits, with their thumbs in their trouser pockets, gold watch chains on show, sesame cake crumbs on their shirtfronts. They’re aiming to start a new club in Frenchtown, and they want the best dance-and-dine in Shanghai. Maybe Joe’d like to come over and supervise, bring Nellie, line up some music and chorus lines. Jack says that’s where the real money is; Joe says sure, maybe, call me when you’re up and running. That’s Shanghai—city of big dreams and bigger dreamers. He figures he’ll never hear from those two clowns again.
&nbs
p; Now, one year in, Nellie and Joe sit at the small table on their two rickety chairs and watch the sun rise through the window, drinking the champagne and kir out of their tooth glasses. Joe passes a small, dark-red Morocco leather box across the table to Nellie: it’s a travel alarm clock, not cheap, a Movado Pullman with a gold face. A month’s tips from eggy-breathed old taipan wives waltzing in his arms right there.
Jack has tipped Joe that he’s heard that the Majestic is bust and will close soon. He tells Nellie he thinks they should form a troupe of their own, take it on tour round the outports and cities of the Far East. ‘Farren’s Follies’—their own thing. Nellie likes the sound of that. They’ve got enough to front it—all those tips and taxi dances; putting up with the bugs, smuts, and hawk-spitters in their building. And lately Joe and Nellie have been making extra gelt on late-night parties for select groups. Ragtime parties, Dixieland swings, with Dusky Nell and Gentleman Joe hosting—he in silk pyjamas and a cravat; she in a scarlet silk kimono bagged in Yokohama on the Frolics tours. Everybody’s doing it, aping the pyjama parties of London’s West End and Manhattan with Shanghai twists: cheap, cheap local opium wreathing the room with blue smoke and its distinctive treacly odour. Endless highballs and stengahs mixed by Nellie, opium courtesy of Babe’s friend Leong, the Victrola cranked up for Nellie to lead the select few in the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear, the Oriental fox-trot 78s. Nellie takes a toot or two—everyone knows it’s slenderising, and of course Joe wants his Dusky Nell to keep her figure. Wild nights, lazy days. Time to plan for the future.
3
A big weekend, the Double Fifth—fifth day of the fifth month. Shanghai’s 1932 celebration of Chu Yuan, the Dragon Boat Festival, is in full swing. And Jack’s got something to celebrate: he has turned the Manhattan into the top bar on Blood Alley.
It’s more a strip than an alley, really; 110 yards max. Two dozen bars, maybe more, mostly holes in the wall; plenty haven’t even got electricity and you don’t want to think about the latrines out back. Punters wander from one to another, crawl from one counter to the next. Stick to the hooch, however bad it’s watered down, because the local water’s got cholera and amoebic dysentry. Each bar stinks of sweaty linen, hair oil, pomade, brilliantine, cigarette smoke, rotten breath, cheap working-girl perfume. Mix that with the petrol stink from the paraffin vapour stoves and kerosene lamps, and there’s a hell of a funk. These dive bars aren’t afraid to give themselves some grand names, though—the Palais Cabaret, the ’Frisco, Mumms, the Crystal, George’s Bar, Pop’s Place, Monk’s Brass Rail, the New Ritz … and, of course, the Manhattan. The working girls are a League of Nations—Cantonese from the south, unfussy fat Koreans, French-speaking Annamite girls with wide hips, and really skinny, gorgeous ‘Natashas’, the collective Shanghailander noun for White Russian women of dubious occupation. The latter are double the price of any other girl, except the Americans tucked away in the higher-end bordellos on Kiangse Road and away from the groping paws of the soldiers and Navy boys. They all work the bars alongside dead-eyed Eurasian Macanese and hardworking Filipinas and Formosans. The dim lights of Blood Alley disguise the track marks and pox scars.
Jack is straight in for the army crowd—Fourth Marines, Seaforth Highlanders, Welsh Fusiliers, Savoia Grenadiers, and French matelots, along with the men of the Liverpool tramps of the Blue Funnel Line. They love him and his hooch. Jack lays out plates of ham sandwiches and bowls of watery slumgullion stew, gratis, for the boys to keep them drinking. Men with empty bellies don’t booze hard, they just fall over early and get picked up by the shore patrol. A marine private is pulling in thirty bucks a month, a gunnery sergeant maybe eighty bucks, and Jack is selling beer at two cents, a bottle of top-shelf London gin for sixty-seven cents, and a bottle of legit Johnnie Walker for under a dollar. Meanwhile back home they’ve got the Great Depression and Prohibition. The Alley’s a slum, but these schmucks think they got lucky winding up on it.
Jack’s got a small combo playing on the tiny stage—Manilamen with a wailing sax and blasting trumpet. The Manhattan and Pop’s Place are the two best joints to hit on Blood Alley, but if you’re smart and sober, you keep your hands on your wallet at all times. Jack’s barman and bouncer is Mickey O’Brien, his old pal from the door over at the Venus Café. Mickey is Jack’s equal in the muscleman stakes and keen on the work too. Babe, also from the Venus, is his main girl. When she’s not off on the end of the pipe, she sits in the window and pulls in plenty of randy marines and Highlanders. Jack buys her white linen dresses from Madame Greenhouse’s on the Bubbling Well Road to keep her looking good. He tells her to quit the smoke, it gives her a runny nose and glassy eyes, but she just smiles and avoids his glare.
There’s a hierarchy to Shanghai bar streets. Bottom of the heap is Jukong Alley up north of the Soochow Creek—‘Varicose Alley’, Jack jokes—with bathtub gin that’ll blind you. That year Aimee Semple McPherson and her band of holy rollers hit ‘the wickedest city in the world’ and started patrolling Jukong Alley looking to save souls and baptise the working girls. Jack makes a donation to keep the Bible-thumpers out of Frenchtown. To everyone’s surprise, McPherson does actually baptise and save the souls of eight working girls and one poor punter before she sails back to America.
But too many drunk squaddies are getting rolled for their pay, so Jukong gets declared out of bounds by order of the British Army Red Caps and the American Miltary Police. Also to the north of the Settlement is Scott Road, which has been called ‘the Trenches’ since the 1890s and isn’t much better. It too is out of bounds for any man in a uniform. Consequently Blood Alley, marginally a step up from Jukong and the Trenches, gets the soldier and sailor traffic.
Jack branches out. He invests his Blood Alley profits and opens Riley’s Bamboo Hut up on the North Szechuen Road, not too far from the Venus—kind of a luau theme mixed with rattan furniture round the bamboo-lined walls, waitresses wearing Honolulu leis and not much else. North Szechuen in Hongkew is marginally classier than Blood Alley, though far from top drawer. Jack taps Nellie to get in some dancers who didn’t quite make the cut for the Follies; Joe finds him a band looking for a gig who can work up a few ukelele tunes to fit the theme. Hongkew is mostly out of bounds to squaddies and leathernecks, but not to officers. And so Jack covers the bases—the Manhattan coins it in from the leathernecks and the ranks; the Bamboo Hut gets the NCOs and the brass.
The money is rolling, and Jack is building a stash as 1932 rolls into 1933. But he’s still trying to wipe out his past. He takes a steamer to Yokohama. Some all-American dollars get Jack T. Riley a Chilean passport from the consul general before he’s inevitably recalled after, equally inevitably, another military coup in Santiago. Jack stays and relaxes in the Grand Hotel, wastes a few nights in the famous Nectarine bordello, gets bored and jumps a steamer back to Shanghai. At dockside he tells customs he’s Jack T. Riley, bar proprietor in Shanghai and proud to be a Chilean citizen. He is waved through with a low bow and a smartish salute.
Tonight he’s out back of the Manhattan decanting cheap apple cider into champagne bottles. He’d have gone for apple juice at half the price, but it needs a little fizz when it comes out of the bottle to look real. Still, apple cider knocked out at champagne prices is a good margin for the Manhattan. Later on he’ll baptise the whisky with a little holy Shanghai water to boost his margins a touch more.
He can’t stop thinking of those lines of slots pouring coin into buckets back in Manila, with that lanky Canadian collecting the dough. There aren’t any slots in Shanghai, just illicit high-end roulette for the swells, which keeps on getting busted by the Shanghai Municipal Police, and the Hwa-Wei Chinese lottery for everyone else. Business has been booming in Manila, with the rackets down there running booze across the Pacific into Prohibition-dry San Francisco and bringing back three-reel ‘Liberty Bell’ slot machines in parts in the empty whisky barrels. Jack wires Joe, who’s on tour down in Manila with Nellie and their Follies. Maybe Joe can look into it? Joe wires b
ack, sure thing, finds a supplier; Jack orders his first shipment, wires the guy the money, and they arrange delivery. Shanghai is about to welcome the reign of the Slots King.
4
The rumours had been true: the Majestic folded, was pulled down, demolished, the four-leaf-clover-shaped ballroom reduced to rubble. Where once Shanghai taipans danced, Hagenbeck’s Circus pitched its tent and hawked tickets for coppers to Chinese and Shanghailanders alike to gawp at the listless Indian elephants. It had been a good time for Joe and Nellie to go on tour.
Joe hires the Russian girls from Al Israel’s joint, the Del Monte. California-born Al has been in Shanghai since before the Great War, running the joint with his wife, Bertha, and his two-hundred-pound Great War vet brother-in-law ‘Demon’ Hyde. Folks said Al was crazy to open out in the western suburbs, but he laid out a car park, hired a turbaned Sikh watchman, and strung coloured lights up to the entrance. Shanghai duly fell in love with the automobile. Now Al has a long line of Buicks, Packards, and Caddies driving out to his Versailles-themed place, where things don’t get going till two a.m. Al is a mensch and doesn’t mind Joe poaching his girls—they’re tight up at the Red Rose early mornings kvetching with the Wiengarten brothers or at the Venus for the ham and eggs, and Al knows there are always new hoofers up in the White Russian slums of Harbin and Dairen ready to tread the boards of the Del Monte.
