The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [51]
Hat-checking was no longer a dignified business, the Susskind brothers decided when the criticism increased. Even worse than the effect of the publicity on tipping, which fell off sharply, was the invasion of the hatcheck flied by cloakandsuiters with money to invest. Bids for concessions rose and the margin of potential profit decreased. By that time the brothers had accumulated about one million dollars and they retired. Joe Susskind died in 1930. Harry opened several large restaurants, invested in real estate, played the stock market heavily, and lost virtually everything he had. Then, a small, gnomish, grayhaired man, slightly cynical about everything, he was back in the hatcheck business. He leased the concession at a minor night club on West Fiftysecond Street, until it closed.
There is practically no illusion about the hatcheck business now. A wellfounded skepticism governs most patrons' reactions. Resentful customers often say to girls, “Here's ten cents for you and ten cents for the greaseball you work for”—a remark as unsound as it is wounding, for the girl has to surrender the twenty cents anyway. A few outoftown visitors may retain their nai'vete, but there is little consolation for the concessionaire in them. Some are so naive that they do not tip at all. Hatchecking has evolved into a cold, calculating, highly competitive industry.
The girls have a union—Wardrobe and Checkroom Attendants' Union, Local No. 135—with a scale of minimum wages. Its office is at 1650 Broadway. If a member is caught by her employer “knocking down” a tip, her union card is suspended. Mr. Benny Jacobs, business secretary of the local, acts as a casting director for nightclub proprietors. Some like blond girls, some brunettes, to match the color schemes of their places. Jacobs gets requests for pert girls or cultured types to fit places with swing or class atmosphere. John Perona of El Morocco, for example, insists on tall, cultured brunettes, although the local argued him into taking a young woman with dark chestnut hair as an experiment. Concessionaires usually let proprietors specify the type of comeliness they require. The union has seven hundred members, and there are seldom more than four hundred employed simultaneously, so a considerable range of types is always available. Many of the girls are members of Chorus Equity too.
Girls earn twentyfive dollars a week in what Local No. 135 calls Class A clubs. In this group it includes El Morocco, the Stork Club, Fefe's Monte Carlo and like places. In the smaller Class B clubs, girls get twenty dollars. Not only cloakroom girls but cigarette and flower vendors and washroom matrons belong to the union, which is affiliated with the Building Service Employees' International of the American Federation of Labor. Checkroom workers in the hotels are not organized and earn less than the nightclub girls, a condition for which various excuses are offered. Union girls in night clubs work approximately nine hours a night for six nights a week. They are entitled to one week's vacation with pay for every nine months they work, if the club lasts nine months.
All nightclub concessions now include the doorman, the washroom attendants, the cigarette girls, the girls who sell stuffed dogs, limp dolls, and gardenias, programs in places vast enough to have them, and any other little item the concessionaire chooses to peddle.
“For every girl up front taking clothes from the customers and giving them back, you got to have two people behind the counter putting coats on racks and seeing they don't get mixeds,” one entrepreneur says. “If the front girl kept the tips, who would pay the hangers? And then how about the washroom attendants? In the average night club, they don't take in as much as you pay them.” This is a routine defense among concessionaires.
Reputedly the most successful concessionaire is a vehement, youngish man named A.