City of Devils

by Paul French

  Jack has told the doc to stop slipping Babe Cadillac heroin pills. Nellie hears from her chorus-line girls that Leong has cut Babe off from her long, long lines of credit at the Moon Palace den. Now Babe is ranting and raving and tearing the place up. Joe finds Jack stocking the bar at his new joint, and they head over to Leong’s place. The Chinaman’s moaning that Babe is scaring off punters, and they find her rolling on a divan with stomach cramps and sweating like it’s high summer. Jack is mad at her, tells her they’re finished if she can’t quit the dope. Babe screams and begs for just one more pipe. Jack walks out, and Babe tears up and collapses. Joe calls Doc Borovika, who knows a German hypnotist guy who cures dopers. Joe pays off Leong and checks Babe in with the German. He tells her to forget Jack, concentrate on the cure, get herself together.

  * * *

  A week later, outside DD’s on the Avenue Joffre, the Little Russia strip, a gaggle of Natashas—all blonde, approximately half of them natural, are flirting. Yank Marines salute them, Brit squaddies wolf-whistle them, Italian Savoia Grenadiers push their greased hair back under their tousled kepis and wink big at them.

  Jack greets them from the door. ‘Come in sometime, boys, plenty more where they came from. We’ve got a surfeit of Natashas nightly. But ditch the uniforms, it scares the swells.’ They chorus back, ‘Indeed you do, Mr. Riley, indeed you do; indeed we will, Mr. Riley, indeed we will.’

  But they won’t. DD’s isn’t really for the Army boys; the drinks are five times the price of what they are in Blood Alley—think champagne at a whopping forty bucks a bottle; cocktails with large measures; the kind of place the swells like to patronize before the late-night frolics, taipans with their secretaries on Friday nights, the moneyed dames like Alice Daisy Simmons and the griffins looking to impress them.

  Jack knows better than to front DD’s himself. He’s got a Russian émigré girl to really bring in the quality, a class act with all the charms and graces of the old world. Nazedha is a sweet gal who keeps the books straight in the shroff and captains the taxi dance girls, who dance for ten cents a ticket. At the front there’s a liveried Sikh and an old-school St. Petersburg maître d’ bowing to the big cheeses. The girls come and go, Russian mostly, and Nazedha keeps them in line. They earn fifteen per cent of what their partners spend at the bar, and the Natasha who cashes the most dance tickets come end of the week gets a ten-dollar bonus. Jack likes Nazedha’s looks and how she keeps the girls in line. Might even the Slots King be in love?

  Meanwhile, Jack and Mickey take care of the slots and stay mostly ensconced in the Bamboo Hut or the Manhattan with the Friends. DD’s earns its own legit coin, no need to interfere. And Jack’s got new Friends now, including one who wants plenty of gossip and insider schtick, former Baltimore tabloid hack turned Shanghai entrepreneur Robert ‘Don’ Chisholm. Jack has put in some cash to help Chisholm set up a newspaper telling all about the cabarets and the nightclubs, the tiffins and the fire sales, with money-off coupons and plenty of advertising. It’ll be called the Shopping News, with dodgy Don writing the scurrilous editorial. He’ll lambast the titans of the gas company, the tram company, and the phone company till they take full-page advertisements at high, high rates. He’ll trash-talk the Municipal Council and then he’ll titillate his readers with innuendo, dishing the dirt of their private lives, peccadilloes, mistresses, and drunken night-time misfortunes unless they care to place an advert or make a donation. It’s an old-school sting. Make the chit payable to Mr. R. Chisholm. What Don needs is tittle-tattle of the highest order, and Jack’s a supplier.

  * * *

  SHOPPING NEWS —‘BREVITIES’—

  MONDAY, OCTOBER 15, 1934

  We don’t have to tell you, dear reader, that the cost of living is soaring in the Settlement. Our investigations have discovered some local firms exhibiting an attitude of generous sympathy towards their employees. For instance, we find the Asia Theatres (who haven’t increased admissions) increasing the wages of their Chinese employees by 19%, their foreign employees by 15%. On the other hand we find the Shanghai Power Company dishing out a 250% increase to some of their employees entitled to home leave. WHICH MAY EXPLAIN ONE OF THE CAUSES OF THE 120% SURCHARGE NEXT MONTH, a 25% increase to locally employed Chinese and foreigners alike. To our way of reckoning a 40% pay increase will just about let the average wage earner break even.

  The North-China Daily News Women’s Page says crochet turbans are all the rage this winter from London to Paris to New York to … Shanghai, of course. Shopping News offers you 30% off all new arrival crochet turbans for ladies, in all colors at CLEO CROCHET, 944 Bubbling Well Road. Just take this issue in with you. And don’t forget they have all your pillow, bedspread and tablecloth needs covered. Tel: 36755 for an appointment.

  If, and when, the Municipal Council’s Old Guard gets busted open like a termite tasted leg of rotten timber, it will be a direct outcome of their own blind avarice and their increasing diligence in safeguarding and increasing their own riches. The Council, besides being a gathering of the people … says who?… is the finest Big Business Club in town. Well represented are landlords, public utilities, shipping, insurance, banking and the membership of the venerable old Shanghai Club. The first principle of justice is that ‘No man shall be a judge in his own house’ … or are we wrong?

  Got a tale to tell? Editorial: Rm 540, 233 Nanking Rd. Tel: Shanghai—10695

  * * *

  8

  Joe is called to the phone while busy rehearsing the Paramount’s new Christmas show for 1934. He can hardly believe his Viennese ears: Laurel and Hardy, the two Chinamen Jack had introduced him to at the Majestic way back when, are for real. All Mr. Tung and Mr. Vong have ever wanted to do, it seems, is run the hippest joint in Shanghai. Knowing early that the Majestic was going to close down, they’d sold their shares to mugs less knowledgeable and moved on. They have the cash; they have the connections. Tung and Vong are blood brothers with Du Yuesheng, the man who really pulls the strings in Frenchtown.

  Big-Eared Du is a Pootung wharf rat risen through the ranks of the city’s Green Gang to become Shanghai’s undisputed Chinese gangster king—the zongshi, the grand master of crime. He is a freakish looking man—ugly, short, coarse—but feared. It is believed that every prostitute, robber, drug dealer, lottery ticket seller, and sing-song house owner pays Du in one way or another. He has forged the Green Gang into Shanghai’s dominant underworld force. He is the city’s premier extortionist. He is said to control the Frenchtown detective bureau, the city’s largest shipping firm, and at least two banks. But more important, Du is connected politically to the government and personally to Chiang Kai-shek, the leader of Nationalist China. Chiang rules China, but in 1927 when the communist-controlled unions tried to overthrow his rule in Chinese Shanghai, Du’s Green Gang thugs massacred the leftists, beheading them in the streets. Chiang Kai-shek owes Du Yuesheng. How else to explain that Du is both a member of the city’s Board of Opium Suppression supposedly committed to eradicating the vice of dope trafficking and addiction in the city, and also Shanghai’s largest drug dealer? How else to explain that he is a man who owns his own temple—dedicated to his ancestors—but operates China’s largest heroin factory within it with seeming inpunity? He is a massive Frenchtown property owner, landlord to thousands, and anyone wanting to operate in the French Concession ultimately needs Du’s permission.

  Du is himself an opium addict, spending his days holed up in his European-style modernist mansion on Frenchtown’s Route Doumer. Tung and Vong sit down with him, are granted an audience. He favours them with permission to run the Canidrome Ballroom, up on Rue Lafayette, next to the dog track and where there’s quality boxing on Wednesdays and Fridays, and super-fast jai alai with the slick Basque, Catalan, and Argentine boys every night and twice daily on the weekends—sixteen quinielas daily, twenty-five points partidos on Saturdays.

  Soft-spoken Mexican gambling impresario Carlos Garcia is behind the Canidrome. Garcia is a Shanghai crime ve
teran—he’d had a casino until ’29, when he was busted by the SMP. After a one-year stretch in the city’s Ward Road Gaol, he’d parlayed his profits, and friendship with Big-Eared Du, into building the Canidrome. The complex took up the whole Frenchtown block of Lafayette, Rue Cardinal Mercier, Avenue du Roi Albert, and Route Hervé-de-Sieyès. It’s a genuine Shanghai gold mine. It’s all fronted by a straight-as-a dye French banker called Louis Bouvier whom you’d trust with your life savings, unless you knew that Du considers him a blood brother too. Garcia keeps a low profile but oversees the whole thing—the dogs, the jai alai fronton, the fights and the nightclub—through his own straw men on the board.

  With financing from Du, Tung and Vong were now on board, and Garcia tells them to get the best showman in town. The man in question, Joe Farren, asks for a Buick with a chauffeur thrown in, like Whitey Smith had at the Majestic, and he gets what he wants. Garcia tells them to keep it classy: black tie for men, dresses for women, a sophisticated show, no shimmy girls or cooch dancers; no brawling or whoring, no dealing or watering down the booze.

  It has all the makings of Frenchtown’s best joint, but there’s competition for Shanghailander attention. Sir Victor Sassoon is oozing class over at Ciro’s, while Jack has DD’s. Meanwhile, the Elite gets the late-night European moneyed crowd, the old Chapei joints like the Venus still kick, and Sol Greenberg’s Casanova club down on Avenue Eddy pulls in the after-hours Chinese money. In between are all manner of dives, blind pigs, juke joints, cabarets, and holes in the wall. Joe’s mandate is simple: he needs to come up with something that will rip the shit out of the other joints, and that includes the Paramount. This has to be swanker, cooler, sexier, and altogether more spectacular than anything he’s done before—the Frolics, the Follies, the Majestic, the Peaches, the Del Monte. Joe thinks back to that day back in ’26, in town with the Frolics, watching Teddy Weatherford and Valaida Snow at the Plaza Hotel, and he decides he wants a black band. Negro syncopation, the Turkey Trot, the Charleston, the Black Bottom, the Twelfth Street Rag, the Rumba … that’s the thing Shanghai needs, and Joe will provide it to put the Canidrome at the top of the pile.

  Joe’s prayers are answered when black Buck Clayton, his girl Derby and his band, the Harlem Gentlemen, decide to blow California and take ship to Shanghai. Buck and his crew are the real deal: Negro musicians who roll Cab Calloway, Louis Armstrong, and all that good jazz vibe into one set, and have Derby with her Ethel Waters routine to boot. It’ll be like the good old days at the Plaza all over again, but with better suits and someone to clean the ashtrays more regularly. Joe signs them up; Tung and Vong advance the money but moan about the cost—Buck wants American salaries in American dollars; they grudgingly agree. Chinese Laurel and Hardy, one fat as a Buddha, the other skinny as a rake, and both rich as Croesus, are known to be mean with money. Carlos Garcia, up in the Canidrome’s tower, smoking a Cuban cigar, looks out over his dog track and smiles.

  Buck and his troupe dock on the President Hoover, clear customs at the Dollar Line shed, and head over to Frenchtown. Buck is grinning ear to ear, newly wed to gorgeous Derby, the pair all loved up and smooching dockside. The Harlem Gentlemen have had a high time onboard, shooting the shit with big-mouthed Hollywood actor Joe E. Brown, who clowned his way to Hawaii with them. A stopover in Kobe saw some antics ashore before the leg to Shanghai. Tung and Vong pull some strings in quickfire Shanghainese and get the band through customs fast. Black American Shanghai legend Teddy Weatherford, who’s been playing piano in town since the early twenties, turns up for a Tung and Vong banquet and teaches Buck and the boys how to hold those pesky chopsticks, spin the Lazy Susan, and show they enjoy the chow.

  Joe takes them on a tour of the town—Buck and Derby in his chauffeured car, the boys following in taxis—past the burgeoning neon of the city that lights up from sunset till dawn. They eat up the Shanghai nightlife, ogle the White Russian chicks, spit melon seeds like the locals, and check out the musical competition—Filipino, Chinese, and Russian. Joe shows the boys the Canidrome, and they are impressed: a big art deco barn of a place with lawns for tea dances in the summer, the roar of the crowds from the dog track behind. Carlos Garcia shows up, backslaps all round, and pours tequila from his own distillery back in Mexico for all while offering a box of Cubans to the boys. The Harlem Gentlemen are wide-eyed. They take in the jai alai and watch those lean Basque boys move slick as lightning; at the Wednesday night fights they see Billy Addis, the ‘Marine Ace’, deck his Japanese marine opponent and wrap himself in the Stars and Stripes for the assembled crowd. Joe takes them to his tailor, Pingee, and gets them all handmade pieces on the Tung and Vong account—white tuxes, black-and-grey dress suits, scarlet tails with satin hems. Pingee is barely five feet tall and stands on a tea chest to reach Buck’s broad shoulders to fit him. There are a dozen white shirts for each band member, and Derby orders up a rack of silk gowns from the Parsee woman in Hongkew who stitches for Nellie sometimes. Joe wanted a real swank jazz troupe looking fine—Derby, Buck, and the Gentlemen were the real McCoy.

  Joe lines up a mixed show for Tung and Vong. Mistress of Ceremonies is Ursula Preston, a British exhibition dancer with a cut-glass accent. She handily does a Fred and Ginger act with her boyfriend to ‘Bolero’ when Joe and Nellie don’t want to take a turn themselves. The band plays straight payday classical from nine, then out come a dozen long-legged girls in a chorus line called the Hollywood Blondes, all supposed to be purebred California girls, though a few have telltale Russian accents. After nine-thirty it’s pure Harlem. Joe sits down with Buck and works out a killer set that blows the roof off Frenchtown from the first night.

  The Canidrome’s position as the premier nightspot of Frenchtown is assured when Soong May-ling with her retinue take the best tables while Tung and Vong bow low to China’s First Lady. The generalíssimo is in total control of China, and May-ling is his wife, translator, and closest confidante. He is the leader of China’s government and military; she is China’s most photographed and admired woman. The press photographers follow her wherever she goes. From the capital in Nanking Chiang maintains a wary relationship with the foreign powers controlling the concessions as well as Du Yuesheng’s Green Gang—a triple alliance founded on their mutual opposition to the emerging communists. Madame Chiang maintains and bolsters the relationship with the foreigners, with her American education, flawless English, flaunting of Western ways, and being a daughter of the Soong family, perhaps Shanghai’s most influential Chinese family. Madame Chiang loves everything she sees at the Canidrome—the stage, the dance floor, Buck and the boys, Derby, the Hollywood Blondes, Joe and Nellie gliding under the spotlight, the sophisticated crowd. Her patronage guarantees that Shanghai Chinese high society flocks in. She hits on the band for tap lessons, charms them all with her Wellesley accent, and is the only woman allowed in wearing slacks—even Carlos Garcia wouldn’t think of imposing a dress code on Madame.

  Joe hooks Buck up with some local musicians so he can build in some Chinese sounds, like Whitey did over at the Majestic years before. It’s Oriental swing—and the cashed-up Chinese come out to hear it. Joe persuades Teddy Weatherford, still working four clubs a night, to add one more nightly gig and come in and sit down with Buck and the boys for the first few numbers. They’ll do a big version of ‘Rhapsody in Blue’ and then Teddy can vamoose to his next gig. The guy never sits still, even when he is at the ivories.

  Nowhere swings like the Canidrome swings—Tung and Vong just sit back and watch the money roll in. Joe schmoozes nightly with Nellie, charming all and sundry. Buck and the Harlem Gentlemen love Shanghai, and Buck and Derby become celebrities overnight—her honey voice contrasting with her lowdown dirty manner. The crowd whoops when she raises her skirt to show her thighs and shimmy for a tap number. Joe makes her centre spot, and the lighting guys are told to stick on her like glue. Derby looks amazing in those dresses, pure silks and satins, her hair straightened with Mary’s Congolene, the Conk pasted on each night, noxious
up close, but looking good under those gels. Betty Wang, who does the women’s page for the China Press, says Derby looks ‘heavenly’ and Buck is perhaps the handsomest man in all Shanghai. Men ogle Derby’s curves, and the ladies love Buck and the Gentlemen in their L.A.-style zoot suits (courtesy of Pingee, who pored over American magazines and got the cut just right), straightened hair and pencil-thin moustaches like Negro Clark Gables. The crowd won’t let them leave the stage. A couple of weeks in and the Canidrome Ballroom is the place to be.

  Through Christmas and the New Year, as ’34 slides into ’35, hot swing jazz keeps the place packed. Buck and the boys want a raise, in American dollars, and Joe argues they deserve it. Tung and Vong whinge but eventually cough up. To celebrate, Joe lets Buck and the boys cut loose after the show. Derby goes home to wash out the Conk before it burns her scalp. The fun starts with a few toots of good-grade Cadillac backstage, a few speedy hands of tonk, before hitting Frenchtown for high times and low life. The boys party hard. They get into fights with the marines at the Santa Anna. When fights break out, the house band’s instruction is always to keep on playing, loud. Then they’re off to the Golden Eagle just off Szechuen Road, a wild hop for the sailors on shore leave. Farther north into Chapei and they’re at the Wiengarten brothers’ Red Rose Cabaret for smallbottlsvine at twenty dollars Mex a quart. They scarf late-night chow at the Nanking on Foochow Road and then cruise the nearby brothels of the ‘Golden Circle’ for Chinese girls. They sling dice out back of the Isis with the Italian marines. They feast on sukiyaki and Asahi in Little Tokyo’s beer halls; they chase Chinese and white dames at the Casanova Club—Korean girls and Natashas hurling ‘Americanski durak!’ after them as they dance and then split without buying anything. They’re not welcome at the Cathay Hotel—no coloureds—so in the early hours they generally go to Sam Levy at the Venus, with his traditional ham and eggs, or have breakfast at Teddy’s crib—home-style fried chicken, hot biscuits, and gravy washed down with freshly mixed highballs.