The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [43]
Tex presented herself to the world as a cowgirl who found that she loved the lampposts of Broadway better than the stars of the big sky— a sort of Annie Oakley–turned–Sophie Tucker character. She said that she had been raised on a fifty-thousand-acre ranch in Texas, that she had run away with a rodeo circus, that she had knocked around the Colorado mining towns. A biographer, after much patient research, concluded that all of these claims were fabricated. Tex had a relatively genteel upbringing in Waco and Denver, and then around 1907 became a vaudeville performer and a second banana in light operas along Broadway. Trifling with the strict truth in such matters was considered, at the time, an entirely laudable proof of imagination, but the fact that Tex chose to invent a Wild West background for herself says a good deal about life on Broadway. In the demimonde, or perhaps hemidemimonde, that she occupied, certain western ideals—the ability to handle yourself with your fists, to spin a yarn, to live by your wits—became strangely mixed with the sybaritic nighttime world of the big city. A faint tang of the mining camp clung to the nightclub.
Tex perfected her two-gun persona in silent movies like The Gun Woman. She did all her own stunts and was known as “the personification of female daredeviltry.” In 1921 she formed her own production company, planning to churn out a series of two-reelers—Texas of the Mounted, The Soul of Tex, The Claws of Tex, and so on. The venture never quite panned out, and Tex returned to New York, from which she had never been absent for long. Nils Granlund claimed that he discovered her emceeing a show at a club called the Beaux Arts, and introduced her to Larry Fay, an upwardly mobile gangster. In 1924 he opened up the El Fey—no one ever knew why he chose to misspell his own name—with Tex as hostess. The club, on 45th Street between Sixth Avenue and Broadway, was a tiny room located at the top of a narrow staircase and behind a door with a peephole cut into it. Most of the chorus came from the Ziegfeld Follies at the New Amsterdam; the girls came over after the show closed up at eleven. Some were as young as thirteen, and Tex served as their mother hen. There was no soliciting in either direction at the El Fey; some of the girls said later that they never heard so much as a cussword. The customers knew they would have to answer to Tex for any infractions of the rules.
Tex herself generally breakfasted some time before midnight, and arrived at the club around one. The girls would often come out and sing “Cherries,” and while they sang they would pass through the crowd picking cherries from a basket and popping them into the mouths of customers, who would beg for a cherry. (The rule against soliciting did not extend to titillating.) Then Tex, who had a voice of brass, might get up on a chair and lead the crowd in a rousing version of an old standard, like “California, Here I Come.” Thereafter, she would sit in the middle of the crowd, teasing and heckling her customers, inveigling the more demure among them into playing leapfrog and other silly games, and sometimes blowing on a police whistle to get attention. Arriving customers were greeted with the cry “Hello, sucker!,” a tacit acknowledgment that they were about to be fleeced by Tex’s ludicrous prices—$25 for a bottle of “champagne” that consisted of cider spiked with alcohol—and an act of