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By Root 614 0

blinked at hoods pumping bullets into one another, though he had sentimentalized street urchins like Dream Street Rose. But now that hedonism was itself a distant memory, and the remaining hoods were small change, Liebling neither excoriates nor sentimentalizes; he records, with anthropological care and journalistic zest, the innumerable, and only rarely legal, means by which the residents of the Jollity Building earn their precarious living. Liebling notes that in the precincts of the Jollity, a “promoter” is understood to be “any man who mulcts another man of a dollar, or any fraction or multiple thereof,” and that the highest praise among the residents is “He has promoted some very smart people.” Liebling’s gallery of small-time promoters includes Hockticket Charlie, a booking agent who on the side sells pawn tickets enabling the holder to redeem objects that are, in fact, trash, and Lotsandlots, who sells phony land lots secured by phony deeds. But the noblest figure in the rogues’ gallery is surely Maxwell C. Bimberg, known as the Count de Pennies, owing both to his waxed mustache and his reputation for tightfistedness. The Count is a publicity agent who cons everyone he comes across, including such otherwise unpromotable figures as strippers, bookmakers, and nightclub owners. After the Count steals several thousand dollars, he gambles it all away at the track and is soon back to begging nickels for phone calls. Even his marks admire the Count’s bravado. “The Count de Pennies was never no good to nobody,” says Marty, “but he was the champion heel of the Jollity Building.”

It is Liebling’s characters, not Liebling himself, who invent the nicknames and the slang that pepper his prose—or at least, he puts the words in their mouths. An exotic language seems to arise almost unconsciously from the exotic lives they lead in the sheltered village of Times Square. “I like the country,” says Whitey Bimstein, a fight manager of ancient vintage. “It is a great spot.” Times Square’s language was a Yiddish, showbiz, midway patois; but not only that. Innumerable flavors made the Broadway stew. Liebling’s only rival as a Broadway folklorist, his friend and New Yorker colleague Joe Mitchell, quotes the bearded lady of Hubert’s Museum, an ex-Tarheel like himself, as follows: “When I was a young’un I taken the name Princess Olga. After I first got married I changed to Madame, but when every confounded swami-woman and mitt-reader in the nation taken to calling herself Madame So-and-So, I decided Lady was more ree-fined.”

It was language that became Broadway’s great cultural export when theater lost its salience. In the twenties, Damon Runyon and Walter Winchell and Ring Lardner and the staff of Variety began to reproduce the village slang of Broadway, and soon the knowing cosmopolites back in Evansville were talking about rats who got bumped off when they squawked. As the cultural historian William Taylor has written, “Press replaced theater as the voice of the area, a transfer of energy . . . from stage to page.” But Runyonese, or Winchellese, was a cartoon language, a language more invented than overheard; it was a theatrical product every bit as much as what Kaufman was offering on the stage. Liebling and Mitchell, and Mark Hellinger and Ben Hecht and Myron Berger, were newspapermen, with a gifted reporter’s ear for the peculiarities of speech and behavior. In their language, the reader could feel the strange combination of provinciality and cosmopolitanism that made Times Square.

It is from Mitchell, as much as from Liebling, that we receive the sense of Times Square in the years just before World War II as an enclosed garden in which the strangest, the most endearingly misshapen, flowers bloomed. Mitchell was a quiet and gracious Southerner, a meditative character who seemed to identify with the sadness of the oddballs he portrayed. His profile of Jane Barnell—Lady Olga—is an act of loving observation; the hyperbolic sense of dignity of this woman who carefully wraps her beard in a scarf when heading out for a cup of coffee is