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By Root 602 0

and he spoke of going into politics, of starting a businessmen’s party, of delivering lectures over the radio. He once described to The New York Times a Times Square with wind machines blowing trees and flags, artificial snow and fog, signs that emitted smells, live animals, three-dimensional signs—the kind of brilliantly orchestrated fantasy we would now expect from Disney, or Las Vegas. He had an instinct for the new. In the late thirties, he purchased the rights to a new lighting technology called Epok, which allowed him to stage five-minute animated cartoons on the gigantic dimensions of a Times Square spectacular; it was an early version of the LED technology that has increasingly come to dominate today’s Times Square. Immediately after the war, he bought from the Navy dirigibles that had been scheduled to be cut up into raincoats; he attached rubberized fixtures lined with fifteen thousand tiny lightbulbs, and rented them to advertisers as spectaculars in the sky. MGM used one to promote National Velvet.

Leigh was also responsible for the most famous sign in the history of Times Square: the Camel cigarettes sign, atop the Claridge Hotel on the east side of Broadway between 43rd and 44th Streets. The ingenuity of the sign lay more in its conception than in its fabrication, for it consisted of a red-painted plywood billboard with a picture of a handsome, deeply contented smoker with a hole in place of a mouth. And through the hole, every four seconds, issued a perfectly formed smoke ring, made of steam, collected from the hotel’s heating system and driven by pistons through a yet smaller hole. Perhaps the most ingenious thing about the sign was that it didn’t depend on light. It was completed three days before Pearl Harbor, and six months before a blackout that switched off the lights in Times Square. But the smoker kept blowing his rings. Indeed, he continued until 1966, when, after a remarkable run of twenty-five years, the sign finally came down.

Leigh’s last masterpiece, and arguably his greatest, was mounted atop the Bond Clothing store, one block north of the Camel smoker, in 1948. Bond was the closest thing to an elegant haberdasher in Times Square, a place never noted for its stores. And what Leigh devised for his client was a block-long, ninety-foot-high montage of sex and swank, one of the most eye-popping tableaux ever seen in Times Square. Leigh ordered up fiftyfoot-high plaster casts of heroically proportioned nudes, a man and a woman, with swags of golden neon draped across their torsos like togas. At night, they seemed to be wearing evening gowns of light, and nothing else. The statues were posted on either side of a real waterfall, 27 feet high and 132 feet across. Ten thousand gallons of water tumbled over the falls and was recirculated by pumps at the base, while the scene was illuminated by 23,000 incandescent lamps as well as neon tubes. In Signs and Wonders, Tama Starr, whose family firm, Artkraft Strauss, built the Bond sign as well as many other Leigh inventions, explains that the waterfall was meant to conjure up Niagara Falls, and thus honeymoons, and thus sex.

Like Irving Berlin, Douglas Leigh ultimately became one of the Methuselahs of Broadway. In the early 1960s, he bought the Times Tower, stripped off its marble cladding, and turned the building into a giant signboard, which of course is just what it ultimately became thirty years later. In 1979, with Times Square in a state of what must have seemed like irreversible decay, he sold his seventeen prize sites there to Van Wagner, a big national billboard firm, and embarked on an entirely new career doing exterior lighting for big buildings, including the Empire State Building. As late as the mid-nineties he was planning a light show for the 1996 Summer Olympics in Atlanta. Leigh died in 1999, at age ninety-two. He was like Berlin, too, in his combination of canny salesmanship, creative brio, and almost childlike access to the wellsprings of pleasure. He was a genius of the lively arts, and a demiurge of Times Square.

9.

THE POKERINO