proprietors are making deals with units of legitimate bodies, such as
veteran groups, labor unions, etc., whereby the clubs share some of
the profits. One, the Amvets, closed after the Hideaway shooting, its
Charter lifted by the national organization.
Bottle-clubs find customers in a variety of ways. Some employes of
licensed night clubs and restaurants hand out guest-membership cards
to patrons who inquire where they can go after two. These steerers
write their names on the cards and draw a kickback for every customer,
usually a dollar a head.
Many cab drivers shill for the bottle-clubs, as well as for gin flats.
Cab drivers’ pay varies with the size of the party. They sometimes
get as much as $5 a haul. They are the chief source of prospective
patronage for the colored bottle-clubs. More than 500 after-hour spots
in Washington are operated by Negroes or in the Negro district. All
cater to blacks and whites. The twenty to thirty white bottle-clubs
running are segregated as to Negro musicians and actors. In one club
we saw three pretty blonde girls with two Negro men. They were all
reefer-smokers, palpably.
Cabbies who hustle for the bottle-clubs not only do so in front of
hotels and licensed cabarets and restaurants, but try to pirate
customers away from opposition clubs. When they see a prospect waiting
for the peephole to open, they tout him away “to a better place, where
you won’t have any trouble.” The Hideaway, in Georgetown, depended
almost entirely on such maneuvers, as it is far out and off the beaten
track.
The pirates were acting so brazenly, police stepped in to curb the
practice by giving tickets to drivers parked at strategic spots. The
law requires cabs to cruise at all times, except in posted hack-stands,
which are only outside major hotels.
Food, dancing, entertainment, and often dames are for sale at the
clubs. Sometimes waitresses are available, but they work until 6 in the
morning, by which time the average rounder has forgotten all about it.
The price for a $10 girl picked up in a club is $20.
Some provide craps, stud poker and other games. The night we were
there, a crap game ran on the top floor of the Atlas Club, on
Pennsylvania Avenue, two blocks from the White House, and at the
Stage-crafters Club, another hangout of General Harry Vaughan. The
Atlas applied for a private club liquor license, which would permit
legal sales, but the application was held up by the ABC Board until
the club president, Sidney Brown, who was abroad, could return for a
personal appearance. It happened that Mr. Brown, the sponsor of this
after-hour spot, was abroad because he is an employe of the State
Department. Some months previously, gambler Gary Quinn said he was the
president of the Atlas. The license was denied, so it is still running
as a bottle-club.
Among the after-hour clubs operating at this writing are the Top Side,
501 12th Street, NW; the Guess Who, 811 L Street, NW; the Acropolis,
719 9th Street, NW (patronized by Greeks); the Culinary Arts, 307
M Street, NE, and the Yamasee, 1214 U Street, NW. The last two are
colored clubs.
The most notorious of the after-hour-spots speaks, the Gold Key, was
closed by Committee revelations. It has since reorganized as the
Downtown Club, with some of the same characters. Most of the others
are patronized by unimportant transients or night workers, such as
musicians, waiters and bartenders.
The Gold Key got the cream and they’re back again. Among its regular
patrons were local sports, including playboy Senators and officials.
Waitresses there made as much as $150 a week in tips, whereas they are
lucky to knock down $50 in other places. When lawyer Charlie Ford drew
up the papers for the Gold Key, its original organizers were Albert
Glickfield, alias Al Brown, Patsy Meserole, and Harry Conners, his
brother-in-law. Meserole is a former New York gangster, one of the last
surviving members of the late Legs Diamond mob. Glickfield is a gambler
and associate of Frank Erickson. The accountant for this after-hour
club was Henry W. Davis, a division head in the Accounting Division
of the Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an agency of the U. S.
Government.
Meserole left the Gold Key to open the Stagecrafters, 433 3rd Street,
NW, and took a lot of the top political and theatrical business with
him. His partner is Dominic Ferone, another ex-New York mobster.
General Vaughan is a patron. It sells liquor openly and provides
gambling, and waitresses will get women for them as wants ’em. Meserole
testified under oath that many Congressmen and Senators were customers.
When Congressional investigations indicated the club was operated
illegally, it was shuttered until the heat was off. But so heavy was
the influence of its owners, through business ties with members of the
New York Syndicate and the exalted position of its patrons, that as
soon as the investigation shut down, the club reopened, not quietly,
but brazenly.
We have before us an ad in a Washington daily which reads:
NOTICE....
Members and Their Guests
STAGECRAFTERS CLUB
NOW REOPENED
Same Place....
Same Policy....
Same Committees....
Same Benefits....
Membership Drive Now On
Help Get New Members!
EDWARD P. MESEROLE, Secretary
The Stagecrafters is the haunt of unsavory “introducers” who make
contacts with wealthy chumps there, offering girls and gambling. Police
recently arrested a lout, who, they charged, had become acquainted
with William H. Engelmann, a photo-lithographer from Baltimore, out
for a fling with friends in the Stagecrafters. The prisoner suggested
a blackjack game and took him to a room in the Ambassador Hotel, which
is owned by Gwen Cafritz’s husband. Engelmann was soon a $1,500 loser,
and asked his host to cash a check. He said he would, at the hotel
cashier’s booth, and left with Engelmann’s check. Engelmann became
suspicious when the man didn’t return after an hour. He found the man
had checked out. When the fellow was caught, police said, they found on
him a deck of marked cards.
Another bottle-club that opened after the adjournment of the
Congressional investigation is on the site of the Palm Grill, at 14th
and Q, under a new name, the Sunrise.
The shuttered Turf-and-Grid was reborn as the aforementioned Amvets.
The Turf’s owner, Richard O’Connell, has been employed by the
government since the beginning of the New Deal, in such agencies as the
original NRA, the Department of the Interior (under “Honest Harold”
Ickes) and more recently in the Red-infested Wages and Hours Division
of the Department of Labor.
Another club that operates on and off is the United Nations Social
Club. When we visited it, its chief social activity was a crap game.
Another is the Crystal Cavern.
When George P. Harding, a 39-year-old gunman and underworld fingerman,
was shot to death by Joe Nesline, notorious Prohibition era bootlegger,
in the Hideaway--an aftermath of last year’s conquest of Washington by
the Mafia--Washington’s bottle-clubs took another shellacking.
Congressmen beat their breasts, newspapers shrilled, the DA promised
action and the cops vowed to close all the joints. For a few days a
couple of clubs went easy; at this writing most were again in action.
The Hideaway, scene of the crime, was reported “closed for good” by the
precinct captain, but Joseph Horowitz, an owner, announced “business as
usual” while the cops were telling everyone the premises were empty. At
press time, the present and future status of the club was in doubt.
Legitimate clubs are a necessity until the District authorities amend
the outmoded liquor laws. One which we liked is the Lyre’s. Most
members of this club are night-workers whose hours are such that they
could never get a drink or relax if they had no place to go after
2 A.M. Among them are musicians of the big hotels and night clubs,
waiters, waitresses, hatcheck gals, government swing-shift people and
visiting entertainers. We spent considerable time at the Lyre’s and
noted everything was on the square. No patrons were permitted to enter
who weren’t members or their guests, and no drinks were served except
out of members’ bottles.
The Lyre’s is chummy. There’s a mainfloor bar and lounge and a basement
dining-room and dance floor. Most of the musicians in town hang out
there and put on jam sessions all night long. Its hosts are Vince and
Mildred Carr, former Baltimore and Philadelphia night club operators.
They have many friends in show business. The Carrs won’t tolerate
hookers and drunks, allow no soliciting, gambling or hoodlums. But
unfortunately the Lyre’s is unique.
Not all who want to drink late can afford to or can get into or know
about bottle-clubs. Those who spend an evening in a licensed cabaret
and find themselves still sober or out for fun at two, or at midnight
on Saturday, are up against it. Licensed clubs and cocktail lounges
can’t sell for off-premises consumption. If you tip your waiter
liberally he will dig up an empty Coca-Cola bottle and let you fill it
with the remaining liquor at your table.
Some people who run dry at midnight Saturdays drive to Maryland, where
bars and package-stores close at 2 A.M.
Washington is loaded with bootleggers and blind tigers. We have already
referred to the gin-flats in Black Town, where home-made gin--raw
ethyl alcohol flavored with juniper and sometimes diluted with apple
cider--is sold. Prices are reasonable, as low as 50 cents a drink
and $3 a bottle. The flats, usually five- or six-room affairs, have
juke-boxes. Parlor floors are cleared for dancing. Beds are handy. If
cops come, it’s a private party. But cops don’t come.
We pulled up in our cab to the NE corner of Popner and U Streets, and
waited five minutes. A colored man came over and asked us what we
wanted. He had gin, Scotch and corn. We bought gin, trade-marked, $2.50
for a pint.
David Douglas Davenport, self-styled “Union Station bootlegger,” has
been selling booze in the railroad terminal for years. He charges $5
for a pint of whiskey, which he keeps stashed in an automatic coin
locker. Davenport has a record for court appearances, 115 in one year.
He lost to the law once, and did two years in the District jail. The
day he got out of the can he was in business in Union Station again and
still was at this writing, though arrested again and out on bail.
Many after-hour bootleggers sell legitimate stuff, which they buy at
Washington’s low prices, and retail at 100 or 200 per cent profit.
Hundreds of other bootleggers, especially Negroes, dispense moonshine.
Most of this is acquired from mob sources in Brooklyn and New Jersey,
where the Mafia operates gigantic stills capable of producing thousands
of gallons a day. According to Carroll Mealy, capable and efficient
head of the Alcoholic Tax Unit, the rum-runners take this stuff to
Washington in 1940 Fords, with Cadillac or racing motors in place of
original power. This model is preferred for its carrying capacity,
maneuverability and inconspicuous appearance. The souped-up motors can
hit 120 miles an hour against pursuit.
Much moonshine is made in Washington, though none of the raided stills
was found with a large capacity. The stuff is cooked at 2nd and G
Streets, NW. But legitimate Washington sources supply liquor to be run
into nearby dry and semi-dry states and counties.
Not all who buy from bootleggers get drunk. Some get robbed.
“The tough part about it was that I never got the whiskey,” Army Sgt.
Filmore M. Broom, 41, moaned to police.
He said a Negro offered to sell him a bottle, but when the sergeant
pulled out his wallet, containing $190, to pay, the Negro snatched it
and ran--with the whiskey, too. This happened at 5th and Neal Streets,
NW, and police are looking for a Negro with red suspenders and a white
straw hat. No winter description available.
20. CAFE AU CORN
Foreigners who have never seen the United States dream of beholding
its wonders, of which the first two are New York and Washington. They
envision not the monuments or the Government Printing Office, but a
glittering world capital swirling with diplomats in colorful costumes,
officers in dress uniforms, and pageantry punctuated with dazzling
dames of the haute monde and the demi-monde. For this is the capital
of capitals, and it must have everything, including what none of the
others has--dough.
If there is any spectacular life in Washington, that is not for the
eye of the uninitiated stranger. The days are vapid and the nights are
stupid. Washington is dominated by elected and appointed functionaries
who are schooled to believe they must never be caught having fun.
Therefore, after dark it is more like Paducah than like Paris.
There are many hotel grills and lounges, which are night clubs after a
fashion, and some cafes; but their chief patronage depends on visitors
and government dependents. Both classes are drawn largely from farms
and villages, with only a minor proportion from centers of laughter and
light. Washington’s night life is a dull, dismal and dreary reflection
of our Main Streets, hard cider and juke-box roistering.
The few local sports and the free-fingered lobbyists seek their
pleasure at private parties and behind closed doors of hotel suites,
or fly northward to nearby New York with its El Morocco and the Stork
Club.
The two principal night clubs in Washington are operated by Chinese,
with American shows and dance bands. They are the Lotus and the Casino
Royal.
Both are built for the mass-consumption trade, with popular prices
and acres of dance floors. Hicks and tourists are dance-bugs. Dick
Lam, host at the Lotus, is one of the town’s best-known and best-liked
showmen. He was one of the original founders of the China Doll, in New
York, and has uptown manners and know-how.
The Blue Mirror, around the corner, specializes in hot jive. Kavakos,
as mentioned, features nudes, as does the Players, opposite the Center
Market.
Not only can and do some Washington cabarets get away with stuff that
would land their owners in the clink in New York, but there seems to be
no police control or regulation of acts.
For instance, Billie Holiday, the Negro singer who has served time on
narcotics and prostitution falls, is barred from New York night clubs
through the ukase of the Police License Bureau, which fingerprints all
entertainers and thumbs those with records out of town. But while this
was being written, Miss Holiday was starring in Washington’s Brown
Derby.
Washington caters to visiting theatrical celebrities. Hollywood stars,
to whom the capital spells spotlight, are flattered by attentions of
politicians who, in return for free shows and broadcasts, flatter them.
This racket was invented by President Roosevelt, and, ever since,
theatrical headliners have been welcome luncheon and dinner guests
at the White House. In Washington they generally stay at one of the
five leading hotels and may be found dining or drinking in the lounges
and restaurants of the Mayflower, Carlton, Statler, Shoreham and
Wardman Park. Autograph collecting is not a highly developed hobby in
Washington; but some juvenile half-wits plant themselves outside the
hotels when such celebs are in town.
There is nothing the equivalent of Morocco, 21, Colony, Stork, or Toots
Shor’s. The Mayflower lounge, nicknamed “The Snake Pit,” is that--the
mad gathering-place at cocktail time for the local celebs: the
Senators, lobbyists, army brass and blondest cuties.
Most Washington night-life is as flat as those who patronize it. The
headwaiters are off the beam. The major-domo of the Wardman Park’s
Caribar, typical of most of the town’s, is so provincial he doesn’t
know he could get rich trying to cater to the few spenders that stumble
in. We watched him a whole evening and didn’t see him snare a buck.
Patrons of Washington supper-clubs are lousy tippers. Most smalltown
Americans adhere to a strict ten percent. When they think they can get
away with it, they stiff even that. Captains, headwaiters, cigaret gals
and retiring-room attendants they ignore. Southerners are worse.
We were twitting one Senator from a border state about the free
haircuts the tax-payers provide for the members of the upper house in
their private barber shop. This Senator replied, in all seriousness,
“It’s almost cheaper to go outside. When you get it for nothing, you
gotta tip the barber.”
The best palm-warmers are South American diplomats, who apparently have
no regard for American money. Lobbyists, who like to flash big bills,
especially when they are entertaining impressionable legislators, run
for place.
Few Washington waiters deserve much. The service they give is as
terrible as the tips they don’t get.
Dance floors are crowded with jitterbugs. Rumbas never flowered in
Washington. When a band plays one, flabbergasted hoofers try to jive to
it.
Few clubs or rooms have rules against parties of unescorted women or
stag men. If they did, they’d starve. It is not unusual to see half
the tables in any room surrounded by all males or all females. The
larger popular-priced clubs have signs on the tables reading, “Dancing
permitted with your escort only.” This is a dead letter, or there
wouldn’t be any dancers.
Prices are cheap compared with Gotham’s. A few hotels impose cover
charges when they book expensive name acts.
No room has more than one band, which plays both for the show and
the dancing. During intermissions, the silence is broken by noisy
drunks. Like all towns with early closing, people get loaded early. In
Washington serious guzzling begins at cocktail time. Many of those who
drink are oafs who don’t know how to hold their hooch.
Most Washington saloon-goers are ill-mannered. On Saturday nights, when
the last round is announced at 11:45, many arise as one and walk out,
even in the middle of an act.
Washington has no cafe society. Its gathering places are
utilitarian--for foods and drinks. No warm camaraderie, no light good
fellowship, no wit, no animation. Corny commoners in stereotyped
surroundings. Peoria on the Potomac.
21. CALL ME MADAM
This is a brief brush-off of the social parvenus who scrambled up as
Society scrammed out--through death and Democratic administration.
Faded and forgotten are the days and nights when Washington was ablaze
with social brilliance and the gossip behind the fans reflected the
sturdy foibles and feuds and infidelities of a class in superior strata
of lineage, wealth and those graces which cannot be acquired with
sudden fortune.
Society is always the shadow of one luminous, scintillant, predominant
woman, such as Mrs. Potter Palmer was in Chicago and the dowager
Vanderbilt remained until senility denatured her in New York. In
Washington that woman, even though she seldom entertains or permits
herself to be entertained, must be the wife of the President. She
need not be a Dolly Madison. She can be a recluse, a Quaker like Mrs.
Herbert Hoover; a New England villager, like Grace Coolidge; a grande
dame like Mrs. Benjamin Harrison or an Ohio hick like Mrs. Warren
Harding. But she is the undisputed ex officio queen bee of the social
life of the capital. She sets its tempo, she elevates with a nod and
she extirpates with a frown.
Few Presidents’ wives would have won social preference had their
husbands not squirmed through the labyrinthian catacombs with that
miraculous luck which makes one man what they say any American boy can
become. But once he takes that oath, his lady assumes a crown. Whether
she chooses to wear it or not, she can and must exercise its power over
her realm, Society.
And Society withstood the hostesses of gentlemen, soldiers,
backwoodsmen, a sheriff, a tailor, a school-teacher, a rail-splitter
and a Buchanan. But it could not survive Eleanor Roosevelt.
Here came a woman of blood and millions, married to an equally
high-bred, landed manor squire, perhaps the most charming and dynamic
and handsome of all our Presidents. And the first tap of her flat heels
across the White House threshold led off the funeral march of Society
in the capital.
It is unnecessary to review her attitude and behavior; no First Lady
was ever so unendingly publicized. That she became invested with
certain homely and all-wooly virtues by the worship of millions is
precisely why she choked the last breath out of social tradition with
her Negro friends, her boondoggling, sweaty indigents, her professional
Socialists, her dedicated slum-house guardians of gutter garbage, and
her antics as the militant apostle of democracy and equality. The
bedrock of Society is inequality, the existence and recognition of an
aristocracy.
Whether it is good or not for fundamental Americanism, it was as lethal
to the remnants of a baronial stratum in Washington as the Emancipation
Proclamation was below the Mason and Dixon line.
No female in American history had ever been so despised in the
drawing-rooms and so venerated in the kitchens and furnished rooms. But
that hatred within the walls of the elegant was not enough to sustain
even a social underground. A few dauntless matrons held out. They tried
to continue executing the motions from memory, but they perished on the
inglorious field of futility. They were the last. There were no wounded
and no prisoners taken. A dynasty that had flourished for 150 years had
been wiped out as were the Romanoffs.
And, surely, Bess Truman was not sent from above for the Restoration.
From the founding of the city until the recent demise of Evelyn Walsh
McLean, who owned the Hope Diamond, Washington was celebrated for its
intrigue, romance and scandal in high Society.
Eleanor “Cissie” Patterson and Mrs. McLean were the last of the city’s
great hostesses. Mrs. Patterson retired from the tea-table wars when
she became active in newspaper work. With her death, and that of Mrs.
McLean, the Washington Society pages were taken over by the climbers.
One needs no long memory to remember when social leaders from
everywhere converged on this city. Dupont Circle was Fifth Avenue
refined and rarefied, the cream of established snobbery, wealth,
officialdom and diplomacy.
Ambitious minglers from the Middle West, such as the Pullmans, the
Leiters and others, bypassed New York’s fatuous 400 and came directly
to Washington.
Social history there begins with beauteous Elizabeth Patterson, of
Baltimore, who wed Napoleon’s younger brother. Its first tasty scandal
was whispered in Jefferson’s time, about the French Ambassador who was
reputed to have married his jailer’s daughter, who had saved him from
the guillotine.
Early Washington Society was titillated by duels among high personages.
The duel on the Hudson shore in which Alexander Hamilton was killed
by Aaron Burr, in 1804, was talked about for years, until 1820, when
a new gory sensation arose to take its place: the mortal wounding of
Commodore Stephen Decatur in an arranged meeting of gentlemen across
the District line in Maryland.
After a hundred years, Washington still talks about Peggy Eaton and
President Jackson’s Kitchen Cabinet. But, today’s mundane morsels will
make no interesting reading, leave no spice for the raconteur.
Society is on the wane everywhere. Taxes, Communist and New Deal
propaganda, the high cost of living, make it virtually impossible to
keep up huge menages. Now only rich labor leaders, black marketeers,
gangsters and grafters can afford the expense.
There are a handful of rich dowagers like Mrs. Jay Borden Harriman and
Mrs. Gifford Pinchot, but they are out of the running.
Cornelia Pinchot only entertains the “intellectuals,” and they are
legion in Washington. Where you find an intellectual in the District
you will probably find a Red. Mrs. Pinchot does not know it, but the
Commies have taken the elderly hostess over and are making hay with her
name.
She lives in a Gay Nineties mansion on Scott Circle, where she often
throws parties for the National Association for the Advancement of
Colored People, attended by white and colored college professors,
pansies and political economists. Mrs. Pinchot looks her age, though
her hair is dyed the most amazing shade of carrot-red.