Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway Book

A Jazzy Book about the Jazz Age, Ward reviews Jerome Charyn's Gangsters and Gold Diggers

Between World War One and The Great Depression, two eras of disillusionment, America had its Roaring Twenties. It was a to-hell-with-it-all decade of flapper girls, gangsters, illegal booze and speakeasies. The girls were a shocking departure from the previous decade's demure Gibson Girls. The flappers' shock was mostly intentional. They smoked and danced, petted and voted and drove cars. They swigged illegal booze out of flasks and flaunted their knees and bobbed their hair and became the symbol for an era brilliantly distilled (ha ha) in Jerome Charyn's lively, entertaining, and oh-so readable gem, Gangsters and Gold Diggers, The Birth of Broadway.

The book is primarily, although not exclusively, the decade of the twenties. It's the first third of the twentieth century. It's the people who worked and played, mostly played, along Broadway, and with so many colorful characters available, the author builds his book around the personalities, creating insightful biographical sketches of the rogues who made the Broadway legend.

So many delicious characters!

Like Al Jolsen, best known today, if he's known at all, as the star of the first talkie. Technically, it wasn't the first talkie, there'd been sound in movies for thirty years. Call it the first full-length feature with synchronized dialogue, the film that drove a dagger into the heart of the silent film era. The Jolsen presented in this book is much more than an actor in blackface, speaking. He had a long career as a singer, film actor, and comedian, and at the peak of his fame, he was big, really big. Dubbed "The World's Greatest Entertainer," you might think Jolsen was the most famous person to have emerged from St. Mary's Industrial School for Boys, in Baltimore, Md. And maybe he was, or would have been, if not for the later emergence of another boy from the school ─ George Herman "Babe" Ruth Jr.

Junior? Really? Who knew?

The book doesn't spend a lot of time with the Babe, maybe the author figures we know him well enough already, and with all those other juicy personalities to explore. Still, we see the Babe, striding like a colossus over Broadway, hell, over all of New York and America.

Babe Ruth isn't the only sports personality present. There's Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world from 1908 to 1915 and a tragic figure for years afterward. White America didn't appreciate a black champion in those days, especially a champ who refused to scrape and bow and who had an affinity for white women. America destroyed Johnson. It took a while, Johnson was a tough cookie, and not just inside the ring. The author draws an apt analogy between Johnson and a later heavyweight champ, Muhammad Ali. Another analogy would be with Vic Power, the black, Puerto Rican-born baseball player who might have become the first black Yankee, ahead of Elston Howard, except Power was no more accepting of second-class status than was Johnson, and like Johnson, Power had an affinity for white women.

Then there's John McGraw, legendary manager of the New York Giants. In the years before Babe Ruth, McGraw's Giants were the kings of New York baseball. Muggsy (McGraw) was a part of the Broadway crowd, expounding the intricacies of baseball even as he indulged in marathon card games with shysters and bootleggers. (Take that, Pete Rose.)

New York, Broadway, in the twenties, was made for the garrulous Babe, but as the decade closes with the onset of the Great Depression, the exuberance fades. The Babe fades too (on the ball diamond, not in life, never in life) and the flapper girls go away. (The gangsters manage to hang around.) The new decade, with its legal booze is, in some ways, more sober than the previous decade. There's a new king of the Yankees, the magisterial, introverted Joe DiMaggio. Joe was a fabulous ballplayer but he was no Babe Ruth off the field. And another black heavyweight champion steps onto the stage, the more compliant (outside of the ring) Joe Louis.

The book isn't really about sports. It's about everything Broadway.

There's a cogent assessment of The Great Gatsby and of the Fitzgeralds, F. Scott and Zelda, and there's the colorful Damon Runyon, a sportswriter who transcended sports, but the most fun of all are the gangsters, the bootleggers. Thank you, America, for having had the audacity to outlaw booze. There's Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein, a legend in his own time, even surrounded by legends. What about Capone, you ask? Sorry. Scarface was Chicago (although Brooklyn-born) and this is a book about Manhattan.

Back to Rothstein. He didn't smoke and he only drank milk and he maybe fixed the 1919 World Series. Fitzgerald used him as Meyer Wolfsheim in the Great Gatsby, Gatsby's mentor in the shady side of life.

What sparkles most throughout the book are those Ziegfeld girls. Call them the sun around which the rest of Broadway revolved. All the male characters, ballplayers, writers, hooligans, even the cops, drooled over the chorus line. Onstage every night, the girls were tall, leggy beauties, dancing, sometimes wearing six-foot headdresses, often scantily dressed, sometimes nude. They were a shocking sensation. The kick line was one route to marriage with a wealthy man, and sometimes it was the route to money and fame without the man. Joan Blondell and Barbara Stanwyck kicked; others ─ Joan Crawford, Hedda Hopper, Lucy, failed to make the cut.

In the final chapter of the book, the author takes us on a twenty-first century spin around the old haunts. The street and most of the buildings remain, but the exuberance, the pizazz, the audacity, the violence and the raw sexuality, are gone. Broadway meets Disney, Disney wins, and having spent a few hours with the characters of old Broadway, we ache for the loss. On May 11, 2010, the last surviving Ziegfeld girl, Dorothy Eaton Travis, who was also the youngest Ziegfeld Girl, strutting and kicking at fourteen, dies at the age of one hundred and six, and the book is closed, reluctantly, on an era.