ALL this while of course there had been much talk as to the character of
those we met, the wealth and fashion that purchased at Tiffany’s or at
Brentano’s, those who loafed at the Fifth Avenue, the Hoffman House, the
Gilsey, the Normandie. My brother had friends in many of these hotels
and bars. A friend of his was the editor of the _Standard_, Roland Burke
Hennessy, and he would take me up and introduce me. Another was the
political or sporting man of the _Sun_ or _World_ or _Herald_. Here came
one who was the manager of the Casino or the Gilsey! One was a writer, a
playwright, a song-writer or a poet! A man of facile friendships, my
brother! As we passed Twenty-third Street he made it plain that here was
a street which had recently begun to replace the older and more colossal
Sixth Avenue, some of the newer and much smarter stores—Best’s, Le
Boutillier’s, McCreery’s, Stern Brothers’—having built here.
“This is really the smart street now, Thee, this and a part of Fifth
Avenue about Twenty-third. The really exclusive stores are coming in
here. If you ever work in New York, as you will, you’ll want to know
about these things. You’ll see more smart women in here than in any
other shopping street,” and he called my attention to the lines of
lacquered and be-furred and beplushed carriages, the harness of the
horses aglitter with nickel and gilt.
Passing Daly’s he said: “Now here, my boy, is a manager. He makes
actors, he don’t hire them. He takes ’em and trains ’em. All these young
fellows and girls who are making a stir,” and he named a dozen, among
whom I noted such names as those of Maude Adams, Willie Collier, Drew
and Faversham, “worked for him. And he don’t allow any nonsense. There’s
none of that upstage stuff with him, you bet. When you work for him
you’re just an ordinary employee and you do what he tells you, not the
way you think you ought to do. I’ve watched him rehearse, and I know,
and all these fellows tell the same story about him. But he’s a
gentleman, my boy, and a manager. Everybody knows that when he finishes
with a man or a woman they can act.”
At Thirty-third Street he waved his hand in the direction of the
Waldorf, which was then but the half of its later size.
“Down there’s the Waldorf. That’s the place. That’s the last word for
the rich. That’s where they give the biggest balls and dinners, there
and at Delmonico’s and the Netherland.” And after a pause he continued:
“Some time you ought to write about these things, Thee. They’re the
limit for extravagance and show. The people out West don’t know yet
what’s going on, but the rich are getting control. They’ll own the
country pretty soon. A writer like you could make ’em see that. You
ought to show up some of these things so they’d know.”
Youthful, inexperienced, unlettered, the whole scroll of this earthly
wallow a mere guess, I accepted that as an important challenge. Maybe it
ought to be shown up.... As though picturing or indicating life has ever
yet changed it! But he, the genial and hopeful, always fancied that it
might be so—and I with him.
When he left me this day at three or four, his interest ended because
the wonders of Broadway had been exhausted, I found myself with all the
great strange city still to be explored. Making inquiry as to directions
and distances, I soon found myself in Fifth Avenue at Forty-second
Street. Here, represented by mansions at least, was that agglomeration
of wealth which, as I then imagined, solved all earthly ills. Beauty was
here, of course, and ease and dignity and security, that most wonderful
and elusive thing in life. I saw, I admired, and I resented, being
myself poor and seeking.
Fifth Avenue then lacked a few of the buildings which since have added
somewhat to its impressiveness—the Public Library, the Metropolitan
Museum façade at Eighty-second Street, as well as most of the great
houses which now face Central Park north of Fifty-ninth Street. But in
their place was something that has since been lost and never will be
again: a line of quiet and unpretentious brownstone residences which,
crowded together on spaces of land no wider than twenty-five feet, still
had about them an air of exclusiveness which caused one to hesitate and
take note. Between Forty-second and Fifty-ninth Street there was
scarcely a suggestion of that coming invasion of trade which
subsequently, in a period of less than twenty years, changed its
character completely. Instead there were clubs, residences, huge quiet
and graceful hotels such as the old Plaza and the Windsor, long since
destroyed, and the very graceful Cathedral of St. Patrick. All the cross
streets in this area were lined uniformly with brownstone or red brick
houses of the same height and general appearance, a high flight of steps
leading to the front door, a side gate and door for servants under the
steps. Nearly all of these houses were closely boarded up for the
summer. There was scarcely a trace of life anywhere save here or there
where a servant lounged idly at a side gate or on the front steps
talking to a policeman or a cabman.
At Fiftieth Street the great church on its platform was as empty as a
drum. At Fifty-ninth, where stood the Savoy, the Plaza, and the
Netherland, as well as the great home of Cornelius Vanderbilt, it was
all bare as a desert. Lonely handsome cabs plupped dismally to and fro,
and the father or mother of the present Fifth Avenue bus, an overgrown
closed carriage, rolled lonesomely between Washington Square and One
Hundred and Tenth Street. Central Park had most of the lovely walks and
lakes which grace it today, but no distant skyline. Central Park West as
such had not even appeared. That huge wall that breaks the western sky
now was wanting. Along this dismal thoroughfare there trundled a dismal
yellow horse-car trailing up a cobble-paved street bare of anything save
a hotel or two and some squatter shanties on rocks, with their attendant
goats.
But for all that, keeping on as far north as the Museum, I was steadily
more and more impressed. It was not beautiful, but perhaps, as I
thought, it did not need to be. The congestion of the great city and the
power of a number of great names were sufficient to excuse it. And ever
and anon would come a something—the Gould home at Sixty-first, the
Havemeyer and Astor residences at Sixty-sixth and Sixty-eighth, the
Lenox Library at Seventy-second—which redeemed it. Even the old red
brick and white stone Museum, now but the central core of the much
larger building, with its attendant obelisk, had charm and dignity. So
far I wandered, then took the bus and returned to my sister’s apartment
in Fifteenth Street.
* * * * *
If I have presented all this mildly it was by no means a mild experience
for me. Sensitive to the brevity of life and what one may do in a given
span, vastly interested in the city itself, I was swiftly being
hypnotized by a charm more elusive than real, more of the mind than the
eye perhaps, which seized upon and held me so tensely nevertheless that
soon I was quite unable to judge sanely of all this and saw its
commonplace and even mean face in a most roseate light. The beauty, the
hope, the possibilities that were here! It was not a handsome city. As I
look back on it now, there was much that was gross and soggy and even
repulsive about it. It had too many hard and treeless avenues and cross
streets, bare of anything save stone walls and stone or cobble pavements
and wretched iron lamp-posts. There were regions that were painfully
crowded with poverty, dirt, despair. The buildings were too uniformly
low, compact, squeezed. Outside the exclusive residence and commercial
areas there was no sense of length or space.
But having seen Broadway and this barren section of Fifth Avenue, I
could not think of it in a hostile way, the magnetism of large bodies
over small ones holding me. Its barrenness did not now appall me, nor
its lack of beauty irritate. There was something else here, a quality of
life and zest and security and ease for some, cheek by jowl with poverty
and longing and sacrifice, which gives to life everywhere its keenest
most pathetic edge. Here was none of that eager clattering snap so
characteristic of many of our Western cities, which, while it arrests at
first, eventually palls. No city that I had ever seen had exactly what
this had. As a boy, of course, I had invested Chicago with immense color
and force, and it was there, ignorant, American, semi-conscious,
seeking, inspiring. But New York was entirely different. It had the
feeling of gross and blissful and parading self-indulgence. It was as if
self-indulgence whispered to you that here was its true home; as if, for
the most part, it was here secure. Life here was harder perhaps, for
some more aware, more cynical and ruthless and brazen and shameless, and
yet more alluring for these very reasons. Wherever one turned one felt a
consciousness of ease and gluttony, indifference to ideals, however low
or high, and coupled with a sense of power that had found itself and was
not easily to be dislodged, of virtue that has little idealism and is
willing to yield for a price. Here, as one could feel, were huge dreams
and lusts and vanities being gratified hourly. I wanted to know the
worst and the best of it.
During the few days that I was permitted to remain here, I certainly had
an excellent sip. My brother, while associated with the other two as a
partner, was so small a factor so far as his firm’s internal economy was
concerned that he was not needed as more than a hand-shaker on Broadway,
one who went about among vaudeville and stage singers and actors and
song-composers and advertised by his agreeable personality the existence
of his firm and its value to them. And it was that quality of geniality
in him which so speedily caused his firm to grow and prosper. Indeed he
was its very breath and life. I always think of him as idling along
Broadway in the summer time, seeing men and women who could sing songs
and writers who could write them, and inducing them by the compelling
charm of his personality, to resort to his firm. He had a way with
people, affectionate, reassuring, intimate. He was a magnet which drew
the young and the old, the sophisticated and the unsophisticated, to his
house Gradually, and because of him and his fame, it prospered mightily,
and yet I doubt if ever his partners understood how much he meant to
them. His house was young and unimportant, yet within a year or two it
had forged its way to the front, and this was due to him and none other.
The rest was merely fair commercial management of what he provided in
great abundance.
While he waited for his regular theatrical season to resume, he was most
excellently prepared to entertain one who might be interested to see
Broadway. This night, after dinner at my sister’s, he said, “Come on,
sport,” and together, after promising faithfully to be back by midnight,
we ambled forth, strolling across Fifteenth Street to Sixth Avenue and
then taking a car to Thirty-third Street, the real center of all things
theatrical at the time. Here, at Broadway and Thirty-fifth, opposite the
_Herald_ building and the Herald Square Theater, stood the Hotel Aulic,
a popular rendezvous for actors and singers, with whom my brother was
most concerned. And here they were in great number, the sidewalks on two
sides of the building alive with them, a world of glittering, spinning
flies. I recall the agreeable summer evening air, the bright comforting
lights, the open doors and windows, the showy clothes, the laughter, the
jesting, the expectorating, the back-slapping geniality. It was
wonderful, the spirit and the sense of happiness and ease. Men do at
times attain to happiness, paradise even, in this shabby, noisome,
worthless, evanescent, make-believe world. I have seen it with mine own
eyes.
And here, as in that more pretentious institution at Forty-second
Street, the Metropole, my brother was at ease. His was by no means the
trade way of a drummer but rather that of one who, like these others,
was merely up and down the street seeing what he might. He drank, told
idle tales, jested unwearyingly. But all the while, as he told me later,
he was really looking for certain individuals who could sing or play and
whom in this roundabout and casual way he might interest in the
particular song or instrumental composition he was then furthering. “And
you never can tell,” he said. “You might run into some fellow who would
be just the one to write a song or sing one for you.”
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