Department of the Interior. They are the law in the parks and squares,
on the boulevards, and on the road in Virginia leading to the Pentagon
and the Airport.
All other government buildings are policed by the Public Buildings
Police, a Treasury unit. The National Airport, in Virginia, has exempt
status. Its own cops not only patrol the grounds, but the main road.
The Pentagon, Arlington Cemetery and other military establishments in
the vicinity are under jurisdiction of the Armed Services Police.
Hundreds of thousands are employed in this federal domain. Many more
use its facilities or live in its lee. This makes the task of policing
almost too complex to be figured out by any court.
Elsewhere, when there is a conflict of authority over the situs of a
crime, both jurisdictions fight for the right to arrest and try the
accused. In the District it works the other way around. If it’s a
borderline case, both sides duck.
For instance, if you’re pinched for anything on or along the road
leading to the National Airport there is a conflict between the
National Park Police, the Airport Police, the local Virginia Police,
municipal and county police, and possibly, the MP’s. No one wants any
part of it. So there is merry law-breaking in this federal domain.
At this writing, 27,000 people are employed in the Pentagon. It is
a city within a city. Like all cities, it has its peccadillos. Many
elevator operators are runners for bookies. Many colored messengers,
male and female, sell policy slips. Reefers can be had. The cops--all
kinds--don’t know what to do about it. The military police don’t like
to arrest civilians, even those employed by the Army. The Virginia
police say they have no authority because it’s federal property.
The same apathy that marks everything in Washington pervades the
Pentagon and other federal buildings. A high Army officer, highly
placed because his brother is close to the President, is a homosexual.
He had gathered 95 other officers of similar inclinations to form what
was known as the “Fairy Brigade.” Though scandalously abnormal acts
have been committed within the Pentagon walls, no consequences ensued.
No one knew how to go about it. Instead, the suspected fairies were
transferred to distant posts--separately, of course--in the hope that
when they got into trouble in their new stations their commanding
officers would pick up the buck.
More recently a Signal Corps captain in the Pentagon was apprehended
lurking in the stair wells, where he exposed himself to young women.
The Army took the easiest way--transferred him to Fort Monmouth, where
he was eventually chased out of the service.
The same situation applies in all government buildings in the District
and in the suburbs. No one wants to do anything about anything. There
is scarcely a government installation anywhere in Washington where
you can’t place a bet or buy a numbers slip. When elevator jockeys
aren’t selling them, clerks and typists, white and dark, are. Dates and
assignations are made on U. S. property by government girls looking for
fun or extra earnings, and by come-getters who barge in and solicit men
for dates after work--even sometimes for affairs right on overstuffed
leather couches which we own, you too.
Any punitive action in these cases is not by police officers. When
things get out of hand, department heads fire the culprits.
While the Kefauver Committee was investigating bookmaking, two elevator
operators in the Senate Office Building, in which the hearings were
conducted, were taking bets on horses with full knowledge of most
Senators, many of whom were placing wagers.
That guy you see at the corner of 1st and B, outside the House Office
Building, talking to a cop, is a bookmaker’s runner. That’s his
station. That’s where typists, messengers and other help in the House
of Representatives lay it on the line.
Many have fallen into debt because of the convenience with which
they can place bets all day. Hundreds are in the clutches of the
loan-sharks in Maryland and the shylocks, who work their trade right
in the government office buildings, exacting 100 percent interest for
a one-month loan. Many are in arrears on their income taxes for this
reason; those who owe more than what is withheld. This has posed a
serious problem for the collecting authorities, who are balked by a
quirk in the law which forbids them to garnishee tax delinquents among
federal employes.
The indifference to rules that apply in private employment results in a
sort of Alice in Wonderland atmosphere throughout the unwieldy federal
domain.
Humorist George Dixon’s story about the two crews hard at work in the
Pentagon sums it up:
One crew puts up partitions. The other crew takes them down. The paths
of the two crews seldom cross, though there have been embarrassing
occasions when they arrived at the same office simultaneously on
conflicting missions. But that was the fault of “inefficiency” higher
up, not of the putters-up and the takers-down.
Retired brass which had come roaring back to the Pentagon found itself
assigned to broom-closets because many mere swivel-chair warmers had
commandeered enough office space for a bowling alley.
That’s why the Pentagon has two crews, working independently, day and
night. One makes offices bigger for new brass, the other makes them
smaller for the old.
The confusion is proving hard on fixed Pentagon employes. They suffer
severely from wet paint.
PART TWO
THE PEOPLE (_Confidential!_)
11. THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A DAME
Women are the same everywhere, except in Washington, where they not
only are different, but there are more of them.
Females generally fall into two categories, good and bad--the good
being so because they can’t get the necessary masculine cooperation to
be bad.
We have seen them all, all over the world, but nowhere else are they
like they are in Washington. This town has 100,000 more nubile women
than men. Forty-five percent of all its females earn their own livings.
Most of them are government employes, and thus have better security
than is provided by a husband. Many support husbands, or assist toward
the expenses of the mutual establishment. Being self-supporting, they
are, on the average, better dressed than you’ll find them anywhere
else. That is on the “average.” There is little “high-fashion” except
in diplomatic and social circles, because government salaries are
average, not high.
Most Washington men are only fair wage earners, too, and that limits
the loot. It is not so easy to promote a mink coat in Washington as it
is in New York, though there are more minks per corpus in Washington
than are won, wangled or plain bought in Philadelphia, Chicago or
Boston.
Our capital is a femmocracy, a community in which the women not only
outdo the men in numbers, but in importance. Males hold more exalted
positions, but such work as is accomplished could not go on without
the efficient, well-trained and permanent secretarial corps, almost all
female.
Everything in Washington is slanted toward dames. The accent in the
stores is on things women do or buy for themselves, instead of on
home-furnishing and children’s clothes, which are the bedrocks of
department store trade in other cities.
Elsewhere, femmes are divided into specific classes. They are wives,
whores, glamor girls, home girls and office workers. Here none matches
her opposite number as you know her. The females in the capital defy
classification by other standards, and lap over into categories not
laid out by economic divisions or natural vicissitudes of physical
appeal. Prim, bespectacled bachelor-girl secretaries enlist as $10
call girls after hours or on Saturdays and Sundays--not for the money,
but for adventure, substitution for romance. A friend of ours had to
entertain visitors. He phoned for three call girls. When they arrived
he saw to his horror one was his secretary.
Washington’s biggest she-group is made up of G-girls, government girls,
who will be taken apart in later paragraphs. Running a close second
are O-girls, those who work for organizations, such as unions, charity
groups, scientific societies, trade and mercantile bodies, and those
who do the paper work for lobbies which maintain permanent offices here.
Washington proves that the emancipation of women is baloney. See what
happens here. They have jobs and make as much as most men. They have
the freedom to live alone and like it, but they don’t. They have
the opportunity to do vital work, to carve out careers in the civil
service, as some do. But all, including most of the married ones, are
desperately unhappy. They are caught in the unreality of this huge
farce. It can’t be a home, it can’t be a place to live in and love,
it’s just a rat race running the same course every day.
Tens of thousands of young and ambitious girls flock into Washington
from every state, territory and dependency, and from foreign nations.
There are even two from Samoa, pretty Laida and Marion Kreuz, whose
brother, Peter Coleman, is a policeman in the House Office Bldg., and a
night law student. The mass migration is similar in number, but not in
purpose, to that which occurs in New York and Hollywood and to a lesser
degree in Chicago and San Francisco.
The girls that come from the farms, the inland cities and the tributary
towns to the other great metropolises come with stardust in their
eyes. Having discovered that what they have is too good for the local
cow-manicurists, soda jerks and grease station monkeys, they assume it
can be used to start them on the road to fame and fortune in the big
city. Most fail to find the golden pot at the end of the rainbow or
even get anywhere near it in New York and Hollywood. The disappointed
fall by the wayside or return home and marry the mailman.
The psychological urge which uproots girls from their native
environments to come to Washington is the same, but its manifestations
are different. The youngster who pulls strings to get a government job
may be, and quite often is, prettier than her neighbor who hitch-hiked
to Broadway. But apparently she hasn’t the same confidence in her
charms as her brasher sister, so she goes to Washington instead.
The young ones who come to the capital to work for Uncle Sam are
on the whole better educated than kids who want to make careers in
show business. Most of them must have graduated from high school and
business school to get a government job. There are some among the
chorines who stuck a toe in a college, but all they need for success
is to know the difference between the right and left leg, and remember
when not to cross them.
Not all girls who come to Washington come to work for the
government. Not all are high school graduates. Washington draws more
street-walkers, who are strictly out for business, than any other town.
They set out from the nearby hills of West Virginia, Maryland and the
Carolinas, and they are purposeful as to their objectives. Many aren’t
bad-looking. So the question again arises, why didn’t they go to New
York or Hollywood and try for bigger stakes where flexible morals pay
off better and the field for a killing is bigger?
The answer again is--no confidence. They don’t feel important enough to
make good in the big league. They are afraid of the megapolis on the
Hudson. Washington has small-town ways and the whores are small-town
girls. Street-walking requires no influential connections, deals,
financial backlogs, tests, skills. They step off a bus and can be in
business before they pass a crossing.
The general belief is that when girls leave home they dream of going on
the stage. Washington proves that many leave home just to get away from
Home.
They have one commodity they can sell. And they don’t have to carry
samples in a briefcase. And they must go on the road for customers--too
many complications where they are well known, have families, church
connections, lovers or husbands.
12. G-GIRLS
_A. Government Girls_
About 200,000 women work five days a week for Uncle Sam. They come
from every corner of the nation. And no matter how long they remain
here, few of them ever really live here. They sleep in various kinds of
barracks, rooming-houses, rundown hotels, board with retired married
ones, and in all constitute a class so large and so displaced that the
city cannot absorb them as it does working-women in other communities.
They are not all physically repellant, nor do they behave generally
like spinsters are supposed to. The deadly monotony of their routine
tasks and their lonesome lives wears out their charm before it destroys
their looks. They are a hard, efficient lot, doing men’s work, thinking
like men and sometimes driven to take the place of men--in the
proscribed zones of desperate flings at love and sex. Lesbianism is
scandalously rampant, frequently an acquired dislocation rather than a
pathological aberration.
The existence of the average G-girl revolves between routine grind and
physical frustration. She leaves her job at five. If she goes home, it
is to her tiny room or apartment to heat her dinner out of tin cans and
ponder whether to wash her panties or write letters home, or get drunk.
It isn’t all wrapped up in the fact of the female overflow. Left-over
women can learn to do with half their share of men. But strangely,
where every guy ostensibly could take his pick and date alternately,
it doesn’t work that way. The Washington male clerks and middle-class
bureau employes largely avoid their opposite numbers. They, too, are
hall-room habitués, and they fraternize by some unwritten rule with
other men, usually normal men. Propinquity does not work its magic
here as the dominant factor in the mingling of the sexes.
Thousands of visitors and thousands of servicemen from nearby
installations, most of them dame-hungry, don’t have to hunt; they are
hunted. Not only that, but often they are paid, and seldom are they
allowed to pick up checks without a struggle.
One of the sights of Washington is the outpouring of the janes at five
o’clock. Many of them dash for cocktail bars, where they compete with
the harlots, who violently resent them and call them “scabs.”
A favorite after-work guzzle-and-grab spot is the Cafe of All Nations,
in the Mayfair House, at 13th and F. Wise men in the mood are there
awaiting the stampede--not only for pleasure, but for the gigolo’s
mite. Men and women are paid the same for equal work. Therefore the
income is high for females and low for males as such things are usually
adjusted. We gave the place a play at the right time and sat at a table
with a third man who had come with us. A waitress shuffled up to us,
and in voice and manner characteristic of an old-timer doing a familiar
task, said, “The young ladies at the next table would like to buy you a
drink.” We nodded, the potables were delivered, our hosts raised their
glasses, and soon they joined us. We had another round, and when we
insisted on taking the tab, not only for our drinks but theirs, too,
they left us; they knew we weren’t “regular.”
A T-man in the course of a check turned up one instance where 12
G-girls had banded together and were keeping one man, in an apartment
on Q Street.
Of course, among hundreds of thousands there are thousands not so
situated. Many are beautiful, their intelligence is beyond the average,
and even humdrum government work cannot make eunuchs of all men.
Desirable girls quickly find that they get preferential receptions and
promotions even in civil service examinations. There is a middle-aged
woman with a superior position in the General Accounting Office, who
has risen because she functions as the procurement officer for members
of Congress and other dignitaries. The G-gals hear about her specialty,
get in touch with her, and if they have appeal they find fun and get
ahead. Outstanding ones are sometimes invited to entertain legation
attachés or visiting celebrities.
Second-class lobbyists, who cannot finance dazzlers in the top
echelons, have lists of typists and file-clerks and secretaries who
are happy to be taken out, or taken in, and are not prissy over how an
evening winds up.
Beyond these escapes from a circumscribed daily existence, there is
nothing else. A couple of gals will walk the Mall on Sunday, hoping to
get picked up; or they join a church, or go to one of the countless
dances held during the winter season by state societies, where they
find everyone else as desolate as they are; or they scrimp and save all
week for a thrilling breakfast-lunch on Sunday at the Statler, where
they find to their dismay everyone else in the room is a government
girl, too, and stranded for company.
Many secretaries of Senators, Congressmen and executives are their
office wives. All Congressmen’s offices contain sofas paid for by the
Treasury.
These females, when they arrive, usually have accents, idiosyncrasies
and dress foibles peculiar to their regions of origin. They quickly
fall into the common mold. This is not surprising to your authors, who
for years have been writing about Broadway showgirls. Within six months
after one leaves the farm to join the chorus, she has acquired a new
veneer which covers all she brought with her. You can’t, in any one
chorus-line, classify the girls, except by their current hair shades.
They are as uniform as if they wore uniforms.
The government is like a chorus; instead of 20 girls there are 200,000,
and they all talk the same--mainly about favoritism shown to another
by the immediate superior whom they accuse of sleeping with her. They
dress the same--usually in suits. They eat the same--salads and dainty
desserts. They live the same--in spick and span tiny rooms, with
intimate wash hung on the line in the bathroom, which does triple duty
as a kitchenette. They drink the same--martinis.
Their sex-lives are remarkably alike, too. Some are afraid they will.
Others are afraid they won’t. And it all boils down to the same
sustained jitters, but in different wrappers.
The G-girl is in an unnatural vacuum. She has no time-limits; her
sentence is for life, usually. She isn’t home and she isn’t away. Her
marriage outlook is bleak. No family ties console her. She is more
often wooed by women than by men.
She makes a mockery of the theory that a woman’s first instinct is for
security.
_B. Girls with Glamor_
Let it not be surmised that government-girls are all the girls. There
are wives and fiancées, college co-eds, a sprinkling of debutantes and
other daughters of the rare society clans, smart saleswomen, even a few
presentable sob-sisters.
But the true glamorette, as she is known on Broadway and Fifth Avenue,
Vine Street and Sunset Boulevard, and even in such remote oases of joy
as Galveston, Texas, is virtually non-existent.
Chorines are but a memory of leg and lavender for the old inhabitants.
Except for a rare transitory line in a night club, there is no such
thing. Occasionally an imported single or sister-act plays the
vaudeville house. Some of the painted peelers who work in the suburban
dives sleep in Washington hotels. A movie celeb popping in for
publicity, to attend a birthday ball or be photographed smiling down on
Truman from the top of a piano, is an event. If there are any gorgeous,
dangerous, slinky spies, we didn’t find them. Judy Coplon, by the men
who specialize in the field, was called exceptionally lush for that
trade. So we stopped looking.
The indigenous flora shape up about as they do in Brooklyn, except that
they are better dressed and have less sooty complexions. They do not
come downtown in slacks. Sloppy galoshes are de trop. Most girls at 16
appear and behave grown up.
But few can enter the accepted avenues where beauty may command a
respectable commercial return. In any ranking hierarchy of glamor the
model comes first, having long since passed the chorus girl, because of
the more stable rewards and higher standards brought about by the great
advertising demands. Washington has little need for animated manikins.
Some of the choicer shops employ them to demonstrate clothes. There is
no extensive advertising field.
The most lucrative and the steadiest calls for models come from sources
not seeking those who might be employed in industrial cities for
modeling. They hook on as hostesses, guides, ushers, and to decorate
the booths and exhibits at conventions and trade shows, which are
numerous. Those who are engaged sporadically earn a minimum of five
dollars an hour, plus indeterminate tips. Their morals vary with the
personal equation. The models who are willing to pose in the nude
at stag-parties get fifty dollars an evening. These register with
surreptitious characters of the middle-world between flesh-market
procurers and shady promoters.
Among the better-known models’ agencies are Models Bureau, in the
Chastleton Hotel; Ralston, 711 14th Street, NW, and Phyllis Bell, 306
13th Street NW.
The girl who sets out to be a model in Washington is usually one of
those rare creatures--the native. An out-of-towner with such ambitions
would naturally head to New York.
(_Note_: Most model agencies are schools instead of employment
agencies. They seek to sign job-seekers to contract to learn how to
walk, instead of sending them out to work. Some, billing themselves as
agencies, provide girls--but not for modeling.)
Another reason for the shortage of really high class cheesecake is that
there is almost always a displacement movement in effect.
The trains and planes to Hollywood are loaded with lookers, sent there
with entree obtained for them by such influential VIP’s as cabinet
officers, four-star generals, bureau heads, etc. When a prominent daddy
gets fed up with his dame, he can’t just brush her off; she might make
trouble, and that might get into print.
So the procedure is to phone Hollywood, where a liaison contact is
instructed to obtain a job at a studio for the chick. The big film
companies employ scores of so-called “contract” gals at $150 a week or
so, who do nothing but pose for publicity stills, date chosen visitors,
like out-of-town exhibitors, and otherwise make themselves useful and
amiable around the lots. One in a thousand rises and may become a star.
The movie industry is always skating on such thin ice, what with
anti-trust laws, etc., that a request from Washington is a command. So
it’s a happy out all around. Mr. Big gets rid of his discarded girl,
she goes willingly because no girl can turn down a film contract, and
Hollywood stores up a favor for the next time it needs one.
Many girls with talent originated here but they scrammed as soon as
they were old enough to know better. Among them were Helen Hayes, Kate
Smith and Mary Eaton, all members of the St. Patrick’s Players.
Washington has no clubs or theatres with lines of girls. The best a
babe with light feet can do is get in as a teacher at a dance studio,
quite a business in Washington. The local classified phone directory
has four pages of listings of dance instructors. That’s because dancing
schools are a swell way for lonesome people to meet each other, and
that’s what Washington has plenty of. The local Arthur Murray licensee,
across the street from the Mayflower Hotel, is the largest Arthur
Murray studio in the world. At least 2,000 girls find full or part-time
employment working as instructors in the dozens of studios. Many of
these girls are little more than taxi-dancers.
Pretty, personable ones can make up to $100 a week with tips. Those who
take dates after hours do even better.
The real Washington glamor girl is the kept woman. You’d be surprised
how many there are. All the bigger hotels and the glossier apartment
houses around Dupont Circle and out Connecticut Avenue are loaded with
them. They are the ones you most often see in mink coats, in expensive
beauty parlors and fine shops. They are maintained mainly by important
government officials, Senators, sports and millionaires from all
over the country who make their headquarters in Washington. Many an
executive who commutes to the capital keeps a cutie there full time.