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By Root 651 0

Twenties was both the sparkling world of the Algonquin Round Table and the yeggs’ kingdom of Owney Madden—“Owney the Killer.” And though these may have been more parallel than overlapping worlds, each lent its atmosphere to the other. It was the sparkle of the age that made the gangsters so glamorous; it was the lurking brutality of the age that gave the drama its edge of menace. Perhaps the single most famous play of the decade was The Front Page, a story about gangsters, cops, killers, and reporters written by a pair of hard-boiled newspapermen. It was an era that thumbed its nose at authority and turned lawbreaking into a charming adventure. Even the city’s mayor, James J. Walker, was a figure out of Runyon—a dandy, a wit, a barfly, a friend to all, a faithless husband, and a veteran of Tin Pan Alley who never missed a heavyweight bout or a new nightclub act. A biographer called him “the John Barrymore of the political stage.” Walker ordered the police to stop enforcing Prohibition, and deprecated all forms of moral crusading with the sarcasm of a true New Yorker. Placing himself in opposition to a piece of censorship known as the Clean Books Bill, Walker famously declared, “I have never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book.”

And then the bubble burst. First came the Depression, though it would take several years of hard times before people stopped buying tickets to shows or peeling off twenties in nightclubs. And then came the repeal of Prohibition, in 1933. Repeal killed many of the clubs, just as Prohibition had killed the lobster palaces. And it forced the mobsters to find less glamorous precincts in which to ply their trade. Jimmy Walker finally had to resign in 1932 after an investigation documented his habit of exchanging city contracts for quite large personal gifts; the new mayor, Fiorello La Guardia, vowed to clean up the town, and did. Florenz Ziegfeld, whose career had begun in the previous century, died in 1932—penniless, of course. Larry Fay was murdered by the doorman of his latest club in January 1933. And Tex, whose star had been dwindling since the late twenties, died later that year in Vancouver. She and the girls had been booted out of Paris for indecency, and Tex had then mounted a show called Too Hot for Paris, which turned out to be too hot for the hinterland as well. She had then bounced around Chicago, and had died on a western swing.

Tex’s demise received the kind of newspaper coverage once given to the deathwatch over J. P. Morgan. Her obituary appeared on the front page of many of the New York papers, and she was recalled as the very emblem of a world already receding into memory’s mists. Walter Winchell did not stint on behalf of his old muse. “We learned Broadway from her,” he wrote. “She taught us the ways of the Street.”

7.

“COME IN AND SEE THE GREAT FLEA CIRCUS”

ON MARCH 9, 1933, the “42nd Street Special” came roaring into Grand Central Terminal after a ten-day trip across country. Bette Davis was on board, and Tom Mix, and many of the contract stars at Warner Bros., which had chartered the train and laid on the ballyhoo to promote 42nd Street, its entry into the swelling sweepstakes of backstage Broadway movies. As many as a quarter of the early talkies—including, of course, the very first one, Al Jolson’s The Jazz Singer—were backstage shows; it was the most obvious way of working songs into a movie, as well as capitalizing on the prestige of Broadway. Three of the four biggest movies of 1933 would be shows about Broadway musicals: Gold Diggers of 1933, Foot-light Parade, and, of course, 42nd Street, starring Dick Powell, Una Merkel, Ginger Rogers, and Bebe Daniels, and featuring the kaleidoscopic choreography of Busby Berkeley.

Coming at the moment it did, 42nd Street symbolized the transfer of energy, and of glamour, from the stage to the screen, as if Hollywood had vampirically sucked the lifeblood from Broadway. The Times Square of 1933 had been ground down by the Depression and transformed by new forms of entertainment, above all the movies. Half of the street’s