VARIETY DIVES AND CONCERT SALOONS.
Outside of the legitimate theatres there is a large variety of places
of amusement--that is, they are called places of amusement, but the
fumes of vile tobacco, the odor of stale beer, the fiery breath of
cheap whiskey, the sight of filthy women and filthier men, and the most
excruciating and torturesome kind of music, all combine to make the
resort anything but pleasant and the while the incidents that attract
the visitor's attention are anything but amusing. There is, of course,
no complaint of this sort to urge against the first-class variety
theatres. These cater in a modest way to a low standard of intellect,
but usually their programmes are chaste enough, and unless a person
has an aversion to having beer spattered over his clothes by unhandy
waiters while ministering to the thirsty wants of a neighbor in the
same row, or objects to the attention of the gay girls who open wine in
the private boxes and flirt with the people in the parquette, he will
find a first-class variety show as pleasant a place as a good, long,
mixed programme with the Glue Brothers in song and dance at one end,
the Irish Triplets, in "select vocalisms and charming terpsichorean
evolutions," in the middle, and a lugubrious sketch at the other end
can make it. By some mysterious law known only to variety performers,
the variety stage only about once in a century produces anything new
or anything attractive. In the good old days of the ballet there
was drawing power in the display of shapely limbs and the graceful
music-of-motion like manner in which the girls tip-toed or pirouetted
across the stage; or when the variety theatre was as much the home
of spectacle as the legitimate houses pretended to be, and on the
Vaudeville stage scenes were presented that belonged to the same class
of labyrinthine scenery and profuse female beauty that the "Black
Crook" and "The Green Huntsman" were the representatives of. When
spectacles were the rage and the fencing scene in the "Black Crook"
would set the boys at the top of the house wild with joy, the variety
theatre had among the bright stars of its stage actors and actresses
who are now among the most popular, and certainly among the heaviest
money-makers, who appear in the legitimate houses.
[Illustration: FENCING SCENE IN BLACK CROOK.]
Joe Emmett graduated from the variety theatre. Gus. Williams was a
shining light on the same stage. J. C. Williamson was a variety artist.
Geo. D. Knight did "Dutch business" in the minor theatres before he
got to be famous as _Otto_. I recollect having seen Knight play _Rip
Van Winkle_ in Deagle's old variety theatre on Sixth Street, in St.
Louis, and he played it well--not like Jefferson, of course, but it
was his first attempt at the part, and if Jefferson did any better the
first time he must not have improved very much since. This was twelve
years ago. Mrs. Geo. Knight (Sophie Worrell) danced on a concert saloon
stage in San Francisco. So did Lotta, and so did Mrs. Williamson. Den
Thompson, whose _Joshua Whitcomb_ is a perfect picture of the New
England farmer, first tried this same character in the variety theatre,
and Neil Burgess and the "Widow Bedotte" were first introduced to the
public as the tail-end of a nigger-singing and specialty programme.
[Illustration: MAD. THEO.]
Those were the palmy days of the variety show before negro ministrelsy
had grown to its present enormous proportions and before plays were
written so as to take in a whole variety entertainment, and under the
disguise of comedy or farce or burlesque foist a lot of specialty
people from a first-class stage upon an intelligent audience. The
musico-mirthful pieces that began to blossom forth in 1880 made a
heavy demand upon the resources of the variety houses, and within a
year threaten to leave them entirely at the mercy of "ham-fats," as the
lower order of this kind of talent is designated. "Fun on the Bristol"
and fifty more flimsy patchworks of the same kind were sailing around
the country in a short time, and every "team" that had a specialty
act of fifteen minutes duration wanted a play built to fit it and
went around telling friends that they guessed they'd go starring next
season. A great many of them did not go, but a great many others did.
The worst were left behind, and the result was poor variety programmes
and in consequence poor patronage for them.
[Illustration: GUS WILLIAMS AS JNO. MISHLER.]
I picked up a programme the other day, belonging to what was once a
first-class house, and is so still in all except the standard of the
performance, and found such old and worn-out features as a lightning
crayon artist and a lightning change artist, both of which are so
threadbare that even a ten-cent theatre wouldn't care to give them
stage room. It is an easy step from this kind of thing down to the
dives. The latter, as an institution, flourishes wider and pays better
than places of less savory notoriety. There is such a charm to vice
that even the saintly do not hesitate to linger in its neighborhood a
while, and take a sniff of its pungent atmosphere. Anybody who drops
into Harry Hill's place in New York, any night in the week, will see
some remarkably churchy looking gentlemen standing around studying
the aspect of the establishment and dwelling with melting eyes upon
some of the painted faces that look up from the beer tables ranged at
one side of the hall. A correspondent who visited Harry Hill's very
recently, gives the following description of the place, its proprietor
and its frequenters: "Harry Hill's grows bigger as its notoriety
extends with years, but it never changes. It is not a bar-room, not
a concert saloon, not a pretty waiter-girl establishment, and not a
free-and-easy. None of these terms describe it, for it is all those
things in one and at once--big second-story room, containing a bar,
a theatrical stage, which can quickly be made into a prize ring, a
bare space for dancing, tables, seats, a balcony, and a few so-called
wine-rooms. There are always as many women as men in the place. The
women are admitted by a private entrance, free. Men pass through a
neglected bar-room on the ground floor at a cost of twenty-five cents.
Prosperity has added a mansard roof and a clock-tower to the original
structure, and Hill has taken in an adjoining building, and turned its
best apartments into billiard and pool-rooms and a shooting gallery.
Let us go in through the bar-room, up a winding stair and suddenly
into the glare and bustle and merriment of the so-called theatre. On
the stage two women are exhibiting as pugilists, with boxing-gloves,
high-necked short dresses, soft, fat, bare arms, and a futile effort to
look very much in earnest, and as if they did not realize how apparent
it was that their greatest effort was to avoid hurting one another's
breasts or bruising one another's faces.
"In the chairs around the tables are many men, and an equal number of
women. The men are mainly young, and a majority seem to be country
youths or store clerks. There are others evidently country men or
foreigners. The women wear street-dress, hats and all. They are
Americans, often of Irish or German extraction. As a rule they are
not pretty, but they are quiet and mannerly. They know the cast-iron
rules of the house--no loud or profane talking, no loud laughing, no
quarreling, "no loving." These are printed and hang on the walls, and
all who go there either know or speedily find out that the slightest
breach of them results in prompt expulsion from the house. All are
drinking, and many of the women are smoking big cigars or tiny
cigarettes. Other women, without hats or sacques, but wearing big white
aprons, serve as waiters and as bartenders.
"Harry Hill himself, a smooth-faced old man, broad, big and muscular,
who shares with Lester Wallack the secret of looking twenty years
younger than he is, sits at a table with a detective and a chief of
police from some suburb. Hill is always there, and is ever entertaining
distinguished strangers. Clergymen from the cities drop in at the
rate of one a night. The women, as they come and go, stop and salute
or speak with Hill. He knows them all, is kind to all, and is liked
by all. He has nothing to do with them or their affairs, however, his
place being merely their exchange, and their duty being merely to
behave while there. The boxers bow and retire, and a young woman, who
was a few minutes before at one of the tables with a broker, who was
opening champagne, now faces the foot-lights in a short silk skirt,
bare arms, bare head and red clogs. She sprinkles white sand on the
boards from a gilt cornucopia, the music of a piano and three violins
strike up, and she rattles her heels and toes through a clog dance. It
is a waltz tune that she is keeping time to, and a tall young woman of
extremely haughty mien and rich apparel seizes a shy and seedy little
product of the pavement and whirls her round and round in the bare
space on the floor. The lookers-on gather there, and a callow stripling
from the country, without previous notice or formality, grasps a
snubnosed, saucy-looking girl in the throng and joins the dancers.
"'Some of these girls 'as bin a-coming 'ere ten or fifteen years,' says
Harry Hill, 'and looks better to-day than others which left their 'omes
a 'alf year ago. Hit's hall hacordin' to 'ow they take to drink. Hif
they go too farst they're sure to go too far.'
"Do they reform? Well, Mr. Hill says there are so many notions of what
reform really is, that he can't say. Some of them reform and become
mistresses when they get a chance, and some of them reform and return
and reform again by spells. He points out one whom he calls Nellie,
and says she went away and was going to lead a strictly honest life,
disappeared for six months, and the other night came back again.
"I kept my eye on Nellie, and, needing no introduction, seized a chance
to talk with her.
"'I got married, and was as straight as a string for six months,' said
she; 'but I had misfortune, and had no other way to support myself but
to come back here.'
"'Husband leave you?'
"'He got caught cracking a dry goods store, and is up for two years.'"
The patrons of the variety "dives" are usually young men, clerks,
salesmen, and sometimes the trusted employee of a bank or broker's
office will get "mashed" upon one of the almost naked women who appear
upon the stage, and will thereafter be numbered among the patrons of
the resort. Those who have gone into the private boxes once and find
the girls obliging enough to sit on their knees and ask them to treat
will go there again if they can possibly get the fifty cents that is
asked as an admission fee.
Sometimes a party of really Christian men unfamiliar with city ways
will get into a variety dive by mistake, and what is more, into the
boxes. The glaring sign over the front of the house which simply
announces that the place is a theatre attracts them to the box-office.
"Say, Mister, what do you tax us to go in?" one of the party asks.
"Tickets are twenty-five, thirty-five and fifty cents," answers the
dapper little man in the box-office who looks as if he ought to be a
bar-keeper or a barber.
"Give us five of your half-a-dollar chairs," says the spokesman,
throwing down his money, and they are forthwith led to seats in the
private boxes, which are no more than long galleries walled in and
having two or three windows to which the occupants crowd when anything
interesting is going forward on the stage. As I have already said
these boxes are connected by doors with the stage and the serio-comic
vocalist who has a few minutes to spare will loiter in to strike
somebody for a drink.
"Say, baby, can't I have a wet?" one of the female wrestlers remarks as
she plumps herself down in her tights on the quivering knee of a weak
little fellow who appears young enough to be fond of molasses candy
yet, and throws her arms around his neck and hugs him to her flabby
breast violently enough to disarrange the black curly hair he had
slicked down at the barber shop just before he came in.
"A what?" he asks, trying to get his neck sufficiently released to be
at least comfortable.
"A drink, darling," and she hugs him again and begins playing with a
little curl over his forehead.
"Why, of course you can," is the overwhelmed young man's reply.
Now she looks fondly into his eyes and with the most affectionate
expression at her command asks: "And how about my partner, baby. Can't
she have a drink?"
"I suppose so," responds the victim; and there is a loud shouting at
the stage-door for "Ida," or somebody else, and Ida, knowing what she
is wanted for, hurries to the spot. In the meantime "Johnnie," the
waiter, has been summoned.
"Give me a port wine sangaree," says Ida's partner.
"And give me a stone fence" (cider and brandy), says Ida.
"And what are you going to drink, baby?" the wrestler sitting on his
knee asks.
"Give me glass of beer," says the "baby," in a tone sufficiently
disconsolate to suggest that he was afraid he might not have enough
money to pay for the treat.
[Illustration: "SHE TICKLED HIM UNDER THE CHIN."]
One night a party of saintly looking grangers from Indiana,--five of
them,--who appeared as if they were a delegation to some sort of a
religious convention, got into a Bowery dive by some mistake, but made
no mistake in remaining there. They got in early and it was late when
they left. The whole thing appeared novel, startling to them. They had
never before seen so much unstripped womanhood exposed to the naked
eye. They hired a cheap opera-glass from the peanut boy, and they
bought "pop" the whole night long. During the first part, when all the
girls and the "nigger" end-men sit in a circle and sing dismal songs
and deal out smutty jokes, the grangers were in a perfect ecstasy of
wonder and admiration for the shortness of the women's dresses and the
symmetry of their padded limbs; but when the first part was over and a
serio-comic singer came tripping out upon the stage without any dress
at all on--nothing but a bodice, trunks and flesh-colored tights--and
sang "Tickled Him Under the Chin," they were in a frenzy and did not
know what to do with their hands, or how to sit still, because the
singer kept throwing glances in the direction of their box. Then came
the supreme exaltation of their feelings; the serio-comic danced over
to the box as she sang, and actually tickled the most clerical member
of the quintette on his fat, white chin, while the four others looked
on in astonishment, and the audience fairly howled.
The grangers were "guyed" pitilessly by the audience, but they paid
little, if any, attention to it. As soon as the serio-comic had done
her "turn" she rushed for their box, and before long the five Hoosiers
were as happy as the lark when it trills its song to the morning.
[Illustration: M'LLE GENEVIEVE.]
The "dive" audiences are mixed in their character, as has been already
suggested, and the proximity of a well-dressed young man to a crowd of
hoodlums in jeans pants and braided coats often precipitates a row.
Scarcely a night passes in the flash variety shows that there is not
some trouble. A "bouncer" is connected with each establishment, whose
business it should be to quell disturbances, but who, like hot-headed
Irish policemen, do more towards increasing the dimensions of a row
than forty other men could do. It is bad policy to attempt open
criticism of the performers or performance in one of these dens. A hiss
will attract the attention of the bouncer, who will come down to the
sibilant offender and say:--
"Young man, do ye expect us to give ye Sary Burnhart an' Fannie
Divenpoort and Ed'in Booth fur twinty-five sints. Af ye don't loike the
show lave it, but af ye open yer mug ag'in, or say so much as 'Boo,'
I'll put ye fwhere ye'll have plinty toime to cool yersel' aff."
If the offender dares to argue the point the "bouncer" will catch him
by the neck, and then a struggle ensues, canes are flourished, the
audience rise to their feet, some of the girls run in fright from
the stage, and there is pandemonium in the place for ten or fifteen
minutes, by the end of which time the "bouncer" has taken his man out,
and returning to business, triumphantly answers a question as to the
whereabouts of the hisser:--
"Oh, I left him lyin' out there in the gutther where the collar 'll
come along an' get 'im."
Occasionally there will be an incident of a more dangerous kind, but
tinged slightly with romance. It is related that a cowboy went into a
variety show in Marshal, Texas, one night and made quite a scene. His
"mash" was a "chair sweater" in the show. Entering the place one night
considerably under the influence of brine, he called to his love in
stentorian tones:--
"Mary, get your duds on and come with me."
"Sh-h-h!" said Mary.
[Illustration: ARMADO AND JAQUENETTA.
ARM.:--I love thee.
JAQ.:--So I heard you say.
_Love's Labour Lost, Act I., Scene 2._
]
"Sh-h, nothing," was the lover's response. "You jest tog up quicker'n
h--, or I'll douse these glims."
"I'll be through in an hour," urged Mary pacifically.
"This show'll be out sooner than that," was the cowboy's answer, as
he pulled his barker and began shooting the tips off the side lights.
He had just emptied his "weapin" and was about loading up again, when
the frightened audience was reassured by the stage manager stepping on
the stage and saying, "Mary, you are excused for the remainder of the
evening. Go dress right away."
A "chair sweater," or "stuffer" as she is called out West, is a girl
who sits in the first part, and who has nothing else to do than wear
skirts short enough to display her limbs, and join in the choruses if
she can do so without knocking the life out of the selection. After the
first part she sits in the boxes and "works" the boys for drinks. If
she can't make anything in the boxes she goes out into the audience--in
the lowest of these dens--and flits from one place to another getting
a drink here, and by that time "spotting" somebody over there whom she
esteems worthy of "striking." She keeps this up all night, until the
after-piece--the cancan, or whatever else it may be--is reached, when
she goes behind the scenes and appears on the stage in the same street
costume she has worn out in the audience. The "chair sweater's" lot is
not a happy one. While pursuing her sudorific vocation she innocently
imagines that she is making an actress out of herself, and I guess she
is--a "dive" actress.
Now and then the "chair sweater" combines her own business with that of
her employer by selling her own or other photographs to "grays." Some
of these pictures are of the vilest kind, but they sell readily to the
patrons of the "dive," and as the sale is effected quietly, even an
honest granger now and then buys one, "just to show 'em up around the
grocery."
[Illustration: LAURA DON.]
The variety "dive" usually closes its performance with a fiery and
untamed cancan, all the people of the company joining in the dance, the
men usually in the character costumes and "make-up" in which they have
appeared before in their sketches or acts.
[Illustration: BENEDICK AND BEATRICE.
BEATRICE:--Talk with a man out of window?--a proper saying
BENEDICK:--Nay but Beatrice;--
_Much Ado About Nothing, Act IV., Scene 1._
]
Then follow the orgies behind the scenes. Sometimes it is a wine
supper with champagne from the bar of the house flowing so freely that
the undressed divinities do not hesitate to empty bottle after bottle
over their heads as if they were Roman candles, thereby giving the
assemblage a shower of Mumm's Extra Dry; or perhaps they will shampoo
the swelled head of one of the gentlemen.
[Illustration: MATERNA.]
In the wine-room, which is an adjunct of all these houses, and which
is a place that affords seclusion to those who want to be out of the
way of meeting friends or attracting the notice of strangers, many
extraordinary exploits are to be witnessed. Plenty of drink, however,
is necessary to stimulate the fun, and when the girls got an old victim
into their clutches they "play" him so nicely that he believes the
whole lot of them are in love with him, and every few minutes comes the
cry, "Let's have another bottle," and they have it. They sit on his
lap or play circus riding on his shoulders, and until the last bottle
has come, and the victim has run dry of funds they keep him in good
humor; then they show him the door, coldly say "Ta, ta! Baldy," and
laugh heartily at his verdant innocence as he staggers away.
[Illustration: THATCHER, PRIMROSE AND WEST.]
The man who allows any of these women--these cancan dancers or
"chair sweaters"--to entice him to their home is lost. If he has
money and they know it they will not take him to their home, but to
some lodging-house with the proprietor of which the cancan dancer is
acquainted, and whom she knows she can trust. A pitcher of beer and a
bit of drugging for the victim's glass does the business. While she is
stroking his beard and kissing the end of his nose the drug is flowing
gently into the goblet of beer. They drink, and in a short time the
soporific has its effect, and the slumbering man is relieved of his
valuables and cash. He appeals to the police, and they promise to do
something for him, but they don't. He sees the cancan dancer again
the next night but she knows nothing about it. The proprietor of the
lodging-house is dumb as an oyster. All the victim can do is to balance
the account by putting experience on the debit side of the ledger and
damphoolishness on the other.
[Illustration: A "BOWERY" ON A "LARK."]
In New York the Bowery is the great place for these dives. There
are any number of them, and the Bowery actress who is brazen enough
to smoke her cigarettes in the street, especially when she is "on
a lark," may be distinguished by the boldness of her face and the
almost masculine atmosphere that surrounds her. She seems to care for
nobody and nothing except her small dog and the loafer who spends her
money, and looks upon herself as the equal of the best woman in the
profession.
[Illustration: CONCERT SALOON BAND.]
The boy theatres which flourish in all large cities, and which are
dirty, dingy miniature places with gallery and pit, and six by nine
stages upon which the goriest of blood-curdling dramas are enacted,
have a variety phase to them, specialty performers preceding the
dramatic representations, and half-nude women mingling and drinking
with beardless youths in the boxes.
[Illustration: FEMALE BAND.]
[Illustration: FEMALE ORCHESTRA.]
The concert saloon, as some of the low places that have a fat German
with pink-spotted shirt and stove-pipe hat playing the piano, while
a chap that has the outward appearance of a speculative philosopher
is blowing a cyclone through a cracked cornet, is called, has its
attractions for many; and if there are ladies to eke out the
entertainment by squeezing discord out of an accordeon with flute
obligato of an ear-piercing and peace-destroying kind--or, in fact, if
there are any female musicians on the grounds, the proprietor of the
establishment may count on liberal patronage. The female orchestras to
be found in the Bowery, New York, where a squad of pretty girls all
dressed in white, with a female leader wielding the baton with as much
nerve as if she were old Arditi himself, are irresistible attractions
to those whose tastes lead them to lager beer, and who like to partake
of the beverage particularly in pleasant surroundings. A person does
not get very much beer, but he hears a great deal of wild music, and
unless he is over-sensitive he will forgive the music and forget the
beer--if he can. It is but a few years since that the keeper of a beer
garden first introduced these institutions into American life. His
venture proved so successful that imitators sprang up all along the
Bowery. The tenements of the East Side were explored, and every female
who could torture the neighbors with an accordeon, scrape the catgut
or bang the piano was enlisted in the grand scheme of catering to the
musical tastes of Gotham's beer drinkers.
[Illustration: JAMES O'NEILL.]
[Illustration: AN IDEAL "MASHER."]
"Over the Rhine," in Cincinnati, is a great place for cheap and vicious
amusements. A correspondent writing from there says: "The places of
amusement "Over the Rhine" line Vine Street for half a dozen blocks.
They are of the democratic and, with one exception, rude order,
more familiar to the backwoods than to the civilization east of the
Mississippi. Some are large establishments with all the fittings of an
East Side variety theatre. Others are mere halls with a limited stage
at one end. To some an admission is charged, ranging from ten cents
up to twenty-five cents, but most of them are free. The performers
include many familiar stars of the variety stage, for the salaries paid
are of the best. The performances, though vulgar, are clean enough.
The drinks pay all expenses, of course. Beer is served throughout the
house and smoking is perpetually in order. In most places there is a
gallery of boxes where the young women from the stage mingle with such
of the audience as, by their generosity, deserve such honor. These are
"stuffers," or as they call them here "chair warmers." One of them has
conquered the soul of a local critic and he is actually puffing her
into prominence in her peculiar line through the columns of one of the
leading papers."