blonde whose bills were paid by a Cuban sugar millionaire, and who fell
in love with an assistant manager of the Shoreham Hotel, where she was
living in high style. Her Latin lover found her in flagrante delicto
with the hotel employe. The men squared off for a fist fight, but
first locked the babe in a clothes closet. They blacked each other’s
eyes--but she fractured her ankle trying to kick the door down.
To add to the embarrassment of the unhappy Cuban, his wife had been
spying on him and his love through high-powered binoculars from Rock
Creek Park, across the street. She sued him for divorce in New York.
A genuine glamor-gal does pop up now and then. One was Evelyn Knight,
the radio and record star, who warbled for $75 a week in Washington
hotels until a couple of years ago, then clicked in Manhattan and is
now dragging down thousands.
Bette Woodruff, another home-grown dish, seems to be on the upgrade. A
dress model, Bette had a yen to sing. One day, on a dare, she phoned
maestro Dick Williams to tell him she was available. He didn’t know
her from Eve, took her name to shut her up. Next day his vocalist got
sick. He phoned Bette in a hurry. That was less than a year ago. Now
she’s thrushing regularly, and well.
But Jan Du Mond, a five-foot-three night club canary, pianist and
composer, drives a cab by day.
“My little coupe broke down,” she told a reporter. “I couldn’t afford
a new car. Becoming a taxi-driver provided me with transportation at
night to get to my engagement--the company lets me take the car home.”
Besides, she meets the most interesting people!
Sometimes a government gal switches to a glamor gal. One was Sandra
Stahl, “Miss Washington,” in last fall’s Atlantic City beauty contest.
Sandra was a secretary for Air Force Intelligence, but she has a face,
a figure, a noodle and a voice. She was the dark horse when she sang
before 3,000 people in Rock Creek Park, but 14 judges, including the
Treasurer of the United States, sent her to Atlantic City.
Sandra comes from Long Beach, California. In our “New York,
Confidential,” we noted that many of Gotham’s orchids on display come
from Southern California. Maybe Sandra got on the wrong train.
13. COMPANY GIRLS
This is a specialty known only to Washington.
With the procuring situation as it is, the business of getting girls
for fun, friendship, or what have you in mind is so commercialized,
it’s incredible.
In our excursions into life in New York and Chicago, we found that
girls you pay for an evening can be divided into two classes:
party-girls and call-girls.
You summon the former, but they are not necessarily whores. You whistle
for the others only when there’s to be a party.
If this seems contradictory, it’s because the dividing line is so
tenuous, it usually isn’t there. But for our purposes, we shall group
them together and call both “C-girls,” which stands for company girls,
which is just what the womanless men who call them want them to be.
There are as many kinds of C-girls as there are kinds of women. They
range from the lowest, who will come to your room for $5 for a quickie,
to the most ultra, who expects $100, plus expenses, as a fee for her
company for an evening, and nothing guaranteed. If it happens, it must
be romanced or financed with honorarium.
The C-girls include the cheapest cocottes and some of the smartest,
prettiest New York models. The only thing they have in common is you
can phone them or someone who acts as an agent to make a deal, sight
unseen, for their presence. The more they get the less they give. The
true party-pretty undertakes only to appear for the evening, maybe
entertain an important customer or that Congressman who’s going to
investigate you or that general who places the orders. The call-dames
are cheaper and more reliable.
They are available from all hotel bell-boys. A friend who lives
in Washington said they weren’t necessary, for you can find a
street-walker on any avenue or a hustler at almost any bar. We asked
how about the transient, who doesn’t know that, so doesn’t know
where to look, or is afraid. The bell-captain, who can get anything,
including booze after hours, is the functionary out-of-towners over the
age of puberty call. Using his services also means no raid from the
hotel dick, who is an ally.
Lobbyists have lists of company-girls whose services they utilize as
required. They exchange names with each other, so most of them have
a master-list. In addition, there are agents, quite often apparently
respectable, middle-aged women, who run “secretarial bureaus” that
supply company-girls, often do contract businesses with large users,
whom they bill by the year.
The secretarial bureau is important in the blind date business in
Washington. Without much trouble, you can get the kind of girl you want
by calling almost any of them. The procedure is this: You phone for
a stenographer to be sent to your hotel room. She, however, is never
the “date.” After giving her a nominal amount of dictation, you remark
you are alone and friendless. She tells you one of her girl friends is
lonesome, too, and would consider a date. You wait in. She arrives.
A problem for those who must entertain men of class is the low quality
of the female commodity obtainable except from specializing agencies.
Government gals, many of whom are on call, are superior intellectually,
have better manners, though the professional predators run prettier.
With the short supply of charmers, those who maintain a superior
standard import them. Many big lobbyists and others who entertain
frequently have lists of New York models and showgirls who will come
down to Washington for fun, expense money, and maybe a mink.
There is a middle-aged woman in New York, who gives her name as Mrs.
Hansen, who makes regular monthly trips to such Eastern cities as
Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, where she meets prominent
businessmen and offers to introduce them, at a fee of $10 each, to
any of a hundred Powers and Conover models whose photos she has in
a scrapbook and whose names she has on a typewritten sheet. She
guarantees to produce any girl thereon in Washington within 24 hours,
the girls to receive $100 and expenses for each day’s company.
But that is still run-of-the-mill. A babe named Teddie, with an
apartment in the building on the southwest corner of 16th Street, in
the 1600 block, handles knockouts, some married, for as much as $250 a
night.
Virginia Wall, who lives at 2500 Q Street (phone Hudson 8783) at this
writing, was chosen by those who know her as--“the most promising
younger company-girl in Washington.” She knows many other company girls.
Florence Bowers, a Southerner who lives at 1716 Newton St., phone
Hobart 5634, is a well-known company girl who will get others when
needed.
Elizabeth Morley, 2124 P St., phone Hobart 7421, will get company-girls.
Mary Lou Vane, 1205 Clifton St., NW, is a superior company girl.
Washington has its corned beef and cabbage, but don’t say we don’t
bring out its caviar.
14. FOR IMMORAL PURPOSES
It may startle you, though not necessarily stop you, to know what very
few know--it is a felony to transport a female one step up or down or
sideways in the District of Columbia with what grandma used to call
“dishonorable intentions.”
The Mann Act was invented by a Chicago blue-nosed representative named
Mann, after a hophead parlor-whore in melodramatic mood threw a note
out of the window of the late Harry Guzik’s cathouse on which she had
written “I am a white slave.” A milkman found it and turned it in at
the 22nd Street police station. A puritanical young prosecutor named
Clifford Roe, instead of laughing, made it so scandalous that the
term “white slave” became the common synonym for a prostitute. Mona
Marshall, the girl, was no slave at all, and when she came out of her
fog she proved it. Her case history showed that she had been seduced
in Wisconsin and brought to Chicago and placed in the house, quite
willingly, by a traveling man who thought it was wasteful to give it
away.
That came out in testimony and Congressman Mann fathered the law making
interstate transportation a penitentiary offense. Too many jokes about
crossing state lines have gone into the legend since then for anyone
not to understand the possible consequences of taking ’em in one state
and making ’em in another. But what has been very sparsely advertised
is a phrase in the Mann Act which states, “or on federal territory.”
Washington is federal territory.
So, if you meet one in the lobby and take her up in the elevator,
you’re a candidate for Atlanta.
This clause has been enforced with ultimate results. But for many
years, by unwritten policy, the Department of Justice stopped paying
attention to private, non-commercial infractions. But in no way has the
letter been ameliorated, and at any time this statute could be applied,
as the income tax evasion law was used to convict murderous gangsters,
if an Attorney General so instructs. It can be used without even the
technical provisions required to substantiate an attempted rape. The
language states, “for immoral purposes.” Such purposes need not be
successful. There is a mistaken notion that paying a female’s fare has
something to do with it. It has not, except as evidence of the intent,
which is the res gestae.
Let it not be assumed that this is a major deterrent for the Washington
wolf, before whom is spread a field alabaster with white lambs
generously interlarded with black sheep. Yet the fine art of subtle,
sophisticated flirtation, with skill, poise and aplomb, which has
illuminated the finest works of the masters through the ages in every
form of expression, seems extinct here.
Those in residence are boors; the transients are in a hurry; and the
distaff defense being negligible, no true swordsman deigns to fence
when he can hit a broad on the head with the handle.
Chief among Washington ladies’ men is handsome Warren Magnuson,
bachelor Senator from the state of Washington, where some of his I.W.W.
constituents would probably kick over the traces if they saw the
highfalutin’ fillies he runs with in Washington. The Senator is a man
among men, with the reputation of seldom wooing one girl at a time. He
often entertains several in one evening in his Shoreham apartment. We
know. They talk.
Not all wolves are single. We will not divulge names, or tell how
they cover up. Your imagination will picture how easy it is in a town
where so many are seeking favors, to get a stooge to come along as the
cutie’s alleged “date,” while the principal apparently came along only
for the ride.
Not all wolves, of course, are Senators or such with official immunity.
A simple way to get acquainted is to watch the papers for announcements
of State Society dances. Most lonesome G-gals belong to these
societies, composed of expatriates from their home states. Once every
week, throughout the year, one of these groups throws a party or a
dance. Admission is open to all. The Officers’ Service Club dances are
swell, too.
At this writing there are no public ballrooms of the type of Roseland
in New York or the Aragon in Chicago, not because they’re illegal,
but because they have been unprofitable. In the summer this lack is
filled by moonlight cruises of the Wilson Steamship Line on the river.
The boats leave from the 7th Street wharf nightly, at 8:30, and the
charge, including dancing, is one buck. Plenty of unattached women go.
The Potomac is mighty important to wolves. Practically the last of the
night-boats in the country plies from Washington to Old Point Comfort
and Norfolk, Virginia, summer and winter.
In years gone by, the fabled Albany and Fall River boats to Boston
could have told such stories.
Steamers of the Old Bay Line charge $4.67 each way, with staterooms at
from $1.50 to $5.50.
Last fall, a couple of evangelists chartered a Wilson liner for an
evening prayer service on the Potomac. Many pious people showed up, but
so did a swarm of scarlet sisters.
With all the game flying low you’d scarcely think it worth while for
entrepreneurs to promote stag-parties. Yet many hotel ballrooms are
engaged for shows at which talent, imported from Baltimore, is seen and
appropriately appreciated. These nude nymphs perform also at Waldrops
on Rhode Island Avenue, across the Maryland line.
Lots of smooth, mysterious guys in Washington, not pimps, make livings
introducing lonesome men to pretty babes. One, named Al Walters, ran
a series of dances called the “UN Victory Girls.” He was investigated
by the Washington vice-squad, which found nothing illegal, though it
did determine that his net income from promoting these get-togethers
was $325 a week. Walters is still around town, always surrounded by
eight or ten pretty bimbos, usually blonde, and he can get to the right
people because he is a great introducer.
Young love gets a break in Washington, too, because the burg with its
environs is small-town in construction, with front and back porches,
lawns and alleys, and plenty of dark streets and nearby country nooks
to drive to. Chief among the lovers’ lanes are Hains Point and the
Anacostia Flats, along the Anacostia River, where the Bonus Army of
’32 made camp. Not all who court Eros in these secluded spots are
juveniles. Many adults take their occasionals there, especially white
men afraid or ashamed to check into free-for-all assignation houses.
We got the following story from a cop who worked the case. A
blonde waitress at the Copacabana restaurant, a rendezvous for
Latin-Americans, went with a stranger in his car to the Anacostia
Flats. A woman’s screams tore the night air. Startled householders in
the vicinity, rape-conscious because of the front-page sex murder of
a girl the day before, phoned police. The squad car cops sped to a
surprised girl and an embarrassed gent. “I always scream at a time like
that,” she elucidated, with indignation.
WISDOM OF A WASHINGTON WOLF
When you see someone waiting for a bus or streetcar, it’s considered
polite to offer a lift in your car. Washington gallants are very
polite, especially if the hitch-hiker is cute.
* * *
We noticed Washington wolves seldom ply their dates with flowers. This
may be because the girls are so anxious they’d give the guy orchids. Or
maybe because Washington is an Eastern city, and in the East--New York
especially--few well-dressed women wear corsages.
* * *
Most G-gals start work early in the morning. The wise Washington lupo
learns to date them for cocktails at five in the afternoon.
* * *
Some characters tap the female college alumnae lists for recent
graduates resident in Washington, then pick names at random and phone
with an invitation to a Yale or Princeton hop which never seems to come
off.
* * *
HOTELS FOR WOMEN ONLY: Hattie M. Strong Hall, (YWCA) phone ME 2100,
Meridian Hill, CO 1000; All States (cooperatively owned) NA 2483. (If
the gal you’re phoning isn’t home, ask the switchboard operator if
anyone else wants a date. She could know one.)
* * *
The abortion racket is wide open in Washington, with illegal
practitioners protected from high-up. Prices run from $35 to $500 a
job, depending on your color and your bank-book. The lowest charge is
for Negroes. Unmarried G-gals can get by for $75. Married women with
husbands who work are charged $100. Single ones in a jam who have rich
or important paramours are nailed for as much as $500. (In New York
$1,000 isn’t unusual.)
15. GARDEN OF PANSIES
If you’re wondering where your wandering semi-boy is tonight, he’s
probably in Washington.
The good people shook their heads in disbelief with the revelation that
more than 90 twisted twerps in trousers had been swished out of the
State Department. Fly commentators seized on it for gags about fags,
whimsy with overtones of Kinsey and the odor of lavender. We pursued
the subject and we found that there are at least 6,000 homosexuals on
the government payroll, most of them known, and these comprise only a
fraction of the total of their kind in the city.
The only way to get authoritative data on fairies is from other
fairies. They recognize each other by a fifth sense immediately,
and they are intensely gregarious. One cannot snoop at every desk
and count people who appear queer. Some are deceptive to the
uninitiated. But they all know one another and they have a grapevine
of intercommunication as swift and sure as that in a girls’ boarding
school. Since they have no use for women in the main, and are uneasy
with masculine men, they have a fierce urge, even beyond the call of
the physical, for each other’s society. They have their own hangouts,
visit one another, and cling together in a tight union of interests and
behavior.
Not all are ashamed of the trick that nature played on them. They have
their leaders, unabashed, who are proud queens and who revel in their
realm. Your reporters, after years around show business, are familiar
with those of their breed, unembarrassed in their presence. But, with
the exception of crude male prostitutes whom they have encountered
in police courts and on the sidewalks of New York’s Lexington Avenue
and in Harlem, they still had a whisper of an illusion left: they got
the idea, because they had met so many with marked talent, that by a
pathological compensation many of them possessed artistic traits.
In Washington they found this false. The exceptional ones do drift to
Broadway and to Hollywood. But they are no more representative of
their numbers than are the gifted men and women who find their places
in the arts of the great mass of people from whom they become detached
to follow the livelier professions.
Now we have found out where the dull, dumb deviates go. We had assumed
that, as they grew up in small communities where they soon became
obvious and odious, they took flight for the stage, the screen,
interior decorating, exotic literature and other fields centered in the
metropolitan market-places. That is not true. Only a few can and do
enter the avenues where their talents make them equal, often superior.
So, what becomes of the marked twilight-sex, unwelcome at home, pariahs
afar? We might ask what becomes of the club-footed or pock-marked girl
similarly situated. She is in a panic about the present, still more
so about the future, and she searches for security. Where can that be
captured? Nowhere else as surely as in the civil service. There, in the
mediocrity and virtual anonymity of commonplace tasks, the sexes--all
four of them--are equal in the robot requirements and qualifications.
There is no color line, no social selectivity; not even citizenship
is always a prerequisite. Once the precious appointment is filed in a
machine which knows no discrimination, there it stays for life.
Like immigrants from foreign lands, for these people are aliens in
their own, they attract--more often send for and finance--those who
speak their language and live their kind of lives. Congressman A. L.
Miller, of Nebraska, a physician, author of the District’s new bill
to regulate the homos, enunciated with an oratorical flourish the
deathless statement that, “birds of a feather flock together.” William
Jennings Bryan came from Nebraska, too.
The 6,000 who made the perennial payroll drew many more thousands who
flunked it. Like pug-nosed, freckle-faced girls of no distinction, who
become waitresses and car-hops, these inverts who are washed in with
the tide and beached in the mud become clerks in shops, hairdressers,
waiters, bartenders, most often in the places habitually patronized by
those of their own stripe.
The Washington vice squad had listed 5,200 known deviates. Dr. Ben
Karpen, psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, believes they are in
the tens of thousands.
Their chief meeting place is in leafy Lafayette Square, across
Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. They make love under the
equestrian statue of rugged Andrew Jackson, who must be whirling on his
heavenly horse every time he sees what is going on around his monument.
Lafayette Square is no bohemian section, like Washington Square in
New York. The three sides not surrounded by the White House have such
buildings as the Cosmos Club, formerly the home of Dolly Madison; the
national headquarters of the League for Political Education of the
American Federation of Labor; the Hay-Adams House, one of Washington’s
finer hotels, and other dignified structures.
How the fairies happened to pick this place for their rendezvous, and
how the cops let them get away with it, no one can trace.
The police keep making arrests, but it does not deter the homos from
hanging out around the square. They make pick-ups there and quite often
engage in immoral acts practically under the eyes of the sparrow cops.
They also foregather in Franklin Park, a few blocks away, in the center
of the business district.
There is no geographic section where degenerates generally live. That
is part of the general picture, everything, everywhere, in Washington.
Many rich fairies and lesbians live in expensive remodeled Georgetown
homes, the nearest thing to a left-bank neighborhood. This is also a
left-wing center.
Some parties which take place in Washington pervert sets are orgies
beyond description and imagination. Every invention of Sacher-Masoch
and the Marquis de Sade has been added to and improved upon, and is in
daily use. Weekends find the pansies and lady-lovers on broad, baronial
estates of wealthy perverts in nearby Virginia and Maryland. Many of
the third sex journey regularly to New York, where they have friends in
esoteric circles.
Washington has its transvestites, who get their thrills from appearing
in the clothes of the opposite sex. Some of the ritzier dress shops on
Connecticut Avenue couldn’t exist if it weren’t for the fairies who buy
French imports. Many dress in drag on Thanksgiving Day and mingle in
the holiday crowds with the costumed young folk.
While these lines were being typed, a member of the staff of Democratic
Senator Edwin C. Johnson, of Colorado, who recently made front pages
when he attacked the morals of the movie industry, was arrested
by two vice squad officers in the men’s room in Lafayette Square
and charged with committing indecent acts. Booked in $500 bail, he
pleaded not guilty. He and Senator Johnson, who appeared with him in
the preliminary hearing before the United States Attorney, made no
statements. He was later acquitted by a jury.
The same day, Assistant U. S. Attorney Warren Wilson asked for the
night closing of public comfort stations, calling them breeding places
of perversion. Commenting on the increase of such cases, Wilson said,
“90 percent of these offenses are committed in men’s rooms operated by
the Federal government.”
Wilson mentioned Lafayette Square, Stanton Park, Dupont Circle and
Franklin Park. He recommended that all these comfort stations be closed
as soon after 4 P.M. as policemen on the 4–12 shift could do so, and be
kept closed until 8 A.M.
“These stations were constructed when there were no other facilities
in downtown Washington,” Wilson said. “Today, hundreds of restaurants
are required to have toilet facilities by law. Many hotels have been
constructed since the comfort stations.
“Public places are becoming cesspools of perversion.”
Many cocktail lounges and restaurants cater to irregulars. Most of them
are near the Mayflower Hotel. The most popular resort is the Jewel Box,
near 16th and L, NW, formerly known as the Maystat. It is a cocktail
lounge with entertainment by a piano-player, who sings semi-risqué
lyrics.
The waiters are obviously fairies. Most customers seem to fit into the
pattern. The night we went there, a police car, with siren screaming,
pulled up. We figured it was a pinch. After the cop threw out two
customers, a waiter told us everything was o.k.
“Those boys got fresh,” he said. “They tried to flirt with those two
women sitting there. We don’t tolerate flirting--anyway not with women.”
Then he minced off, hand on hip.