This is the story of the man manager, and how he held his own until
the very last paragraph.
I had it from Sully Magoon, _viva voce_. The words are indeed his;
and if they do not constitute truthful fiction my memory should be
taxed with the blame.
It is not deemed amiss to point out, in the beginning, the stress
that is laid upon the masculinity of the manager. For, according
to Sully, the term when applied to the feminine division of
mankind has precisely an opposite meaning. The woman manager (he
says) economizes, saves, oppresses her household with bargains and
contrivances, and looks sourly upon any pence that are cast to the
fiddler for even a single jig-step on life's arid march. Wherefore
her men-folk call her blessed, and praise her; and then sneak out
the backdoor to see the Gilhooly Sisters do a buck-and-wing dance.
Now, the man manager (I still quote Sully) is a Cæsar without
a Brutus. He is an autocrat without responsibility, a player
who imperils no stake of his own. His office is to enact, to
reverberate, to boom, to expand, to out-coruscate--profitably, if
he can. Bill-paying and growing gray hairs over results belong to
his principals. It is his to guide the risk, to be the Apotheosis
of Front, the three-tailed Bashaw of Bluff, the Essential Oil of
Razzle-Dazzle.
We sat at luncheon, and Sully Magoon told me. I asked for
particulars.
"My old friend Denver Galloway was a born manager," said Sully. He
first saw the light of day in New York at three years of age. He
was born in Pittsburg, but his parents moved East the third summer
afterward.
"When Denver grew up, he went into the managing business. At the
age of eight he managed a news-stand for the Dago that owned it.
After that he was manager at different times of a skating-rink, a
livery-stable, a policy game, a restaurant, a dancing academy, a
walking match, a burlesque company, a dry-goods store, a dozen
hotels and summer resorts, an insurance company, and a district
leader's campaign. That campaign, when Coughlin was elected on
the East Side, gave Denver a boost. It got him a job as manager
of a Broadway hotel, and for a while he managed Senator O'Grady's
campaign in the nineteenth.
"Denver was a New Yorker all over. I think he was out of the city
just twice before the time I'm going to tell you about. Once he went
rabbit-shooting in Yonkers. The other time I met him just landing
from a North River ferry. 'Been out West on a big trip, Sully, old
boy,' says he. 'Gad! Sully, I had no idea we had such a big country.
It's immense. Never conceived of the magnificence of the West
before. It's gorgeous and glorious and infinite. Makes the East
seemed cramped and little. It's a grand thing to travel and get an
idea of the extent and resources of our country.'
"I'd made several little runs out to California and down to Mexico
and up through Alaska, so I sits down with Denver for a chat about
the things he saw.
"'Took in the Yosemite, out there, of course?' I asks.
"'Well--no,' says Denver, 'I don't think so. At least, I don't
recollect it. You see, I only had three days, and I didn't get any
farther west than Youngstown, Ohio.'
"About two years ago I dropped into New York with a little fly-paper
proposition about a Tennessee mica mine that I wanted to spread
out in a nice, sunny window, in the hopes of catching a few. I was
coming out of a printing-shop one afternoon with a batch of fine,
sticky prospectuses when I ran against Denver coming round a corner.
I never saw him looking so much like a tiger-lily. He was as
beautiful and new as a trellis of sweet peas, and as rollicking as
a clarinet solo. We shook hands, and he asked me what I was doing,
and I gave him the outlines of the scandal I was trying to create in
mica.
"'Pooh, pooh! for your mica,' says Denver. 'Don't you know better,
Sully, than to bump up against the coffers of little old New York
with anything as transparent as mica? Now, you come with me over to
the Hotel Brunswick. You're just the man I was hoping for. I've got
something there in sepia and curled hair that I want you to look
at.'
"'You putting up at the Brunswick?' I asks.
"'Not a cent,' says Denver, cheerful. 'The syndicate that owns the
hotel puts up. I'm manager.'
"The Brunswick wasn't one of them Broadway pot-houses all full of
palms and hyphens and flowers and costumes--kind of a mixture of
lawns and laundries. It was on one of the East Side avenues; but it
was a solid, old-time caravansary such as the Mayor of Skaneateles
or the Governor of Missouri might stop at. Eight stories high it
stalked up, with new striped awnings, and the electrics had it as
light as day.
"'I've been manager here for a year,' says Denver, as we drew nigh.
'When I took charge,' says he, 'nobody nor nothing ever stopped at
the Brunswick. The clock over the clerks' desk used to run for weeks
without winding. A man fell dead with heart-disease on the sidewalk
in front of it one day, and when they went to pick him up he was two
blocks away. I figured out a scheme to catch the West Indies and
South American trade. I persuaded the owners to invest a few more
thousands, and I put every cent of it in electric lights, cayenne
pepper, gold-leaf, and garlic. I got a Spanish-speaking force of
employees and a string band; and there was talk going round of a
cockfight in the basement every Sunday. Maybe I didn't catch the
nut-brown gang! From Havana to Patagonia the Don Señors knew about
the Brunswick. We get the highfliers from Cuba and Mexico and the
couple of Americas farther south; and they've simply got the boodle
to bombard every bulfinch in the bush with.'
"When we got to the hotel, Denver stops me at the door.
"'There's a little liver-coloured man,' says he, 'sitting in a big
leather chair to your right, inside. You sit down and watch him for
a few minutes, and then tell me what you think.'
"I took a chair, while Denver circulates around in the big rotunda.
The room was about full of curly-headed Cubans and South American
brunettes of different shades; and the atmosphere was international
with cigarette smoke, lit up by diamond rings and edged off with a
whisper of garlic.
"That Denver Galloway was sure a relief to the eye. Six feet two
he was, red-headed and pink-gilled as a sun-perch. And the air he
had! Court of Saint James, Chauncy Olcott, Kentucky colonels, Count
of Monte Cristo, grand opera--all these things he reminded you of
when he was doing the honours. When he raised his finger the hotel
porters and bell-boys skated across the floor like cockroaches, and
even the clerk behind the desk looked as meek and unimportant as
Andy Carnegie.
"Denver passed around, shaking hands with his guests, and saying
over the two or three Spanish words he knew until it was like a
coronation rehearsal or a Bryan barbecue in Texas.
"I watched the little man he told me to. 'Twas a little foreign
person in a double-breasted frock-coat, trying to touch the floor
with his toes. He was the colour of vici kid, and his whiskers was
like excelsior made out of mahogany wood. He breathed hard, and
he never once took his eyes off of Denver. There was a look of
admiration and respect on his face like you see on a boy that's
following a champion base-ball team, or the Kaiser William looking
at himself in a glass.
"After Denver goes his rounds he takes me into his private office.
"'What's your report on the dingy I told you to watch?' he asks.
"'Well,' says I, 'if you was as big a man as he takes you to be,
nine rooms and bath in the Hall of Fame, rent free till October 1st,
would be about your size.'
"'You've caught the idea,' says Denver. 'I've given him the wizard
grip and the cabalistic eye. The glamour that emanates from yours
truly has enveloped him like a North River fog. He seems to think
that Señor Galloway is the man who. I guess they don't raise 74-inch
sorrel-tops with romping ways down in his precinct. Now, Sully,'
goes on Denver, 'if you was asked, what would you take the little
man to be?'
"'Why,' says I, 'the barber around the corner; or, if he's royal,
the king of the boot-blacks.'
"'Never judge by looks,' says Denver; 'he's the dark-horse candidate
for president of a South American republic.'
"'Well,' says I, 'he didn't look quite that bad to me.'
"Then Denver draws his chair up close and gives out his scheme.
"'Sully,' says he, with seriousness and levity, 'I've been a manager
of one thing and another for over twenty years. That's what I was
cut out for--to have somebody else to put up the money and look
after the repairs and the police and taxes while I run the business.
I never had a dollar of my own invested in my life. I wouldn't know
how it felt to have the dealer rake in a coin of mine. But I can
handle other people's stuff and manage other people's enterprises.
I've had an ambition to get hold of something big--something higher
than hotels and lumber-yards and local politics. I want to be
manager of something way up--like a railroad or a diamond trust
or an automobile factory. Now here comes this little man from the
tropics with just what I want, and he's offered me the job.'
"'What job?' I asks. 'Is he going to revive the Georgia Minstrels or
open a cigar store?'
"'He's no 'coon,' says Denver. 'He's General Rompiro--General Josey
Alfonso Sapolio Jew-Ann Rompiro--he has his cards printed by a
news-ticker. He's the real thing, Sully, and he wants me to manage
his campaign--he wants Denver C. Galloway for a president-maker.
Think of that, Sully! Old Denver romping down to the tropics,
plucking lotus-flowers and pineapples with one hand and making
presidents with the other! Won't it make Uncle Mark Hanna mad? And I
want you to go too, Sully. You can help me more than any man I know.
I've been herding that brown man for a month in the hotel so he
wouldn't stray down Fourteenth Street and get roped in by that crowd
of refugee tamale-eaters down there. And he's landed, and D. C. G.
is manager of General J. A. S. J. Rompiro's presidential campaign in
the great republic of--what's its name?'
"Denver gets down an atlas from a shelf, and we have a look at the
afflicted country. 'Twas a dark blue one, on the west coast, about
the size of a special delivery stamp.
"'From what the General tells me,' says Denver, 'and from what I
can gather from the encyclopædia and by conversing with the janitor
of the Astor Library, it'll be as easy to handle the vote of that
country as it would be for Tammany to get a man named Geoghan
appointed on the White Wings force.'
"'Why don't General Rumptyro stay at home,' says I, 'and manage his
own canvass?'
"'You don't understand South American politics,' says Denver,
getting out the cigars. 'It's this way. General Rompiro had the
misfortune of becoming a popular idol. He distinguished himself
by leading the army in pursuit of a couple of sailors who had
stolen the plaza--or the carramba, or something belonging to the
government. The people called him a hero and the government got
jealous. The president sends for the chief of the Department of
Public Edifices. "Find me a nice, clean adobe wall," says he, "and
send Señor Rompiro up against it. Then call out a file of soldiers
and--then let him be up against it." Something,' goes on Denver,
'like the way they've treated Hobson and Carrie Nation in our
country. So the General had to flee. But he was thoughtful enough
to bring along his roll. He's got sinews of war enough to buy a
battleship and float her off in the christening fluid.'
"'What chance has he got to be president?'
"'Wasn't I just giving you his rating?' says Denver. 'His country
is one of the few in South America where the presidents are elected
by popular ballot. The General can't go there just now. It hurts
to be shot against a wall. He needs a campaign manager to go down
and whoop things up for him--to get the boys in line and the new
two-dollar bills afloat and the babies kissed and the machine in
running order. Sully, I don't want to brag, but you remember how I
brought Coughlin under the wire for leader of the nineteenth? Ours
was the banner district. Don't you suppose I know how to manage a
little monkey-cage of a country like that? Why, with the dough the
General's willing to turn loose I could put two more coats of Japan
varnish on him and have him elected Governor of Georgia. New York
has got the finest lot of campaign managers in the world, Sully, and
you give me a feeling of hauteur when you cast doubts on my ability
to handle the political situation in a country so small that they
have to print the names of the towns in the appendix and footnotes.'
"I argued with Denver some. I told him that politics down in that
tropical atmosphere was bound to be different from the nineteenth
district; but I might just as well have been a Congressman from
North Dakota trying to get an appropriation for a lighthouse and a
coast survey. Denver Galloway had ambitions in the manager line, and
what I said didn't amount to as much as a fig-leaf at the National
Dressmakers' Convention. 'I'll give you three days to cogitate about
going,' says Denver; 'and I'll introduce you to General Rompiro
to-morrow, so you can get his ideas drawn right from the rose wood.'
"I put on my best reception-to-Booker-Washington manner the next
day and tapped the distinguished rubber-plant for what he knew.
"General Rompiro wasn't so gloomy inside as he appeared on the
surface. He was polite enough; and he exuded a number of sounds that
made a fair stagger at arranging themselves into language. It was
English he aimed at, and when his system of syntax reached your
mind it wasn't past you to understand it. If you took a college
professor's magazine essay and a Chinese laundryman's explanation
of a lost shirt and jumbled 'em together, you'd have about what the
General handed you out for conversation. He told me all about his
bleeding country, and what they were trying to do for it before the
doctor came. But he mostly talked of Denver C. Galloway.
"'Ah, señor,' says he, 'that is the most fine of mans. Never I have
seen one man so magnifico, so gr-r-rand, so conformable to make done
things so swiftly by other mans. He shall make other mans do the
acts and himself to order and regulate, until we arrive at seeing
accomplishments of a suddenly. Oh, yes, señor. In my countree there
is not such mans of so beegness, so good talk, so compliments, so
strongness of sense and such. Ah, that Señor Galloway!'
"'Yes,' says I, 'old Denver is the boy you want. He's managed every
kind of business here except filibustering, and he might as well
complete the list.'
"Before the three days was up I decided to join Denver in his
campaign. Denver got three months' vacation from his hotel owners.
For a week we lived in a room with the General, and got all the
pointers about his country that we could interpret from the noises
he made. When we got ready to start, Denver had a pocket full of
memorandums, and letters from the General to his friends, and a list
of names and addresses of loyal politicians who would help along
the boom of the exiled popular idol. Besides these liabilities we
carried assets to the amount of $20,000 in assorted United States
currency. General Rompiro looked like a burnt effigy, but he was
Br'er Fox himself when it came to the real science of politics.
"'Here is moneys,' says the General, 'of a small amount. There is
more with me--moocho more. Plentee moneys shall you be supplied,
Señor Galloway. More I shall send you at all times that you need.
I shall desire to pay feefty--one hundred thousand pesos, if
necessario, to be elect. How no? Sacramento! If that I am president
and do not make one meelion dolla in the one year you shall keek me
on that side!--_valgame Dios!_'
"Denver got a Cuban cigar-maker to fix up a little cipher code with
English and Spanish words, and gave the General a copy, so we could
cable him bulletins about the election, or for more money, and then
we were ready to start. General Rompiro escorted us to the steamer.
On the pier he hugged Denver around the waist and sobbed. 'Noble
mans,' says he, 'General Rompiro propels you into his confidence
and trust. Go, in the hands of the saints to do the work for your
friend. _Viva la libertad!_'
"'Sure,' says Denver. 'And viva la liberality an' la soaperino and
hoch der land of the lotus and the vote us. Don't worry, General.
We'll have you elected as sure as bananas grow upside down.'
"'Make pictures on me,' pleads the General--'make pictures on me for
money as it is needful.'
"'Does he want to be tattooed, would you think?' asks Denver,
wrinkling up his eyes.
"'Stupid!' says I. 'He wants you to draw on him for election
expenses. It'll be worse than tattooing. More like an autopsy.'
"Me and Denver steamed down to Panama, and then hiked across the
Isthmus, and then by steamer again down to the town of Espiritu on
the coast of the General's country.
"That was a town to send J. Howard Payne to the growler. I'll tell
you how you could make one like it. Take a lot of Filipino huts and
a couple of hundred brick-kilns and arrange 'em in squares in a
cemetery. Cart down all the conservatory plants in the Astor and
Vanderbilt greenhouses, and stick 'em about wherever there's room.
Turn all the Bellevue patients and the barbers' convention and the
Tuskegee school loose in the streets, and run the thermometer up to
120 in the shade. Set a fringe of the Rocky Mountains around the
rear, let it rain, and set the whole business on Rockaway Beach in
the middle of January--and you'd have a good imitation of Espiritu.
"It took me and Denver about a week to get acclimated. Denver sent
out the letters the General had given him, and notified the rest of
the gang that there was something doing at the captain's office. We
set up headquarters in an old 'dobe house on a side street where
the grass was waist high. The election was only four weeks off; but
there wasn't any excitement. The home candidate for president was
named Roadrickeys. This town of Esperitu wasn't the capital any more
than Cleveland, Ohio, is the capital of the United States, but it
was the political centre where they cooked up revolutions, and made
up the slates.
"At the end of the week Denver says the machine is started running.
"'Sully,' says he, 'we've got a walkover. Just because General
Rompiro ain't Don Juan-on-the-spot the other crowd ain't at work.
They're as full of apathy as a territorial delegate during the
chaplain's prayer. Now, we want to introduce a little hot stuff in
the way of campaigning, and we'll surprise 'em at the polls.'
"'How are you going to go about it?' I asks.
"'Why, the usual way,' says Denver, surprised. 'We'll get the
orators on our side out every night to make speeches in the native
lingo, and have torch-light parades under the shade of the palms,
and free drinks, and buy up all the brass bands, of course,
and--well, I'll turn the baby-kissing over to you, Sully--I've seen
a lot of 'em.'
"'What else?' says I.
"'Why, you know,' says Denver. 'We get the heelers out with the
crackly two-spots, and coal-tickets, and orders for groceries, and
have a couple of picnics out under the banyan-trees, and dances in
the Firemen's Hall--and the usual things. But first of all, Sully,
I'm going to have the biggest clam-bake down on the beach that was
ever seen south of the tropic of Capricorn. I figured that out from
the start. We'll stuff the whole town and the jungle folk for miles
around with clams. That's the first thing on the programme. Suppose
you go out now, and make the arrangements for that. I want to look
over the estimates the General made of the vote in the coast
districts.'
"I had learned some Spanish in Mexico, so I goes out, as Denver
says, and in fifteen minutes I come back to headquarters.
"'If there ever was a clam in this country nobody ever saw it,' I
says.
"'Great sky-rockets!' says Denver, with his mouth and eyes open. 'No
clams? How in the--who ever saw a country without clams? What kind
of a--how's an election to be pulled off without a clam-bake, I'd
like to know? Are you sure there's no clams, Sully?'
"'Not even a can,' says I.
"'Then for God's sake go out and try to find what the people here do
eat. We've got to fill 'em up with grub of some kind.'
"I went out again. Denver was manager. In half an hour I gets back.
"'They eat,' says I, 'tortillas, cassava, carne de chivo, arroz con
pollo, aquacates, zapates, yucca, and huevos fritos.'
"'A man that would eat them things,' says Denver, getting a little
mad, 'ought to have his vote challenged.'
"In a few more days the campaign managers from the other towns came
sliding into Esperitu. Our headquarters was a busy place. We had
an interpreter, and ice-water, and drinks, and cigars, and Denver
flashed the General's roll so often that it got so small you
couldn't have bought a Republican vote in Ohio with it.
"And then Denver cabled to General Rompiro for ten thousand dollars
more and got it.
"There were a number of Americans in Esperitu, but they were all
in business or grafts of some kind, and wouldn't take any hand in
politics, which was sensible enough. But they showed me and Denver a
fine time, and fixed us up so we could get decent things to eat and
drink. There was one American, named Hicks, used to come and loaf at
the headquarters. Hicks had had fourteen years of Esperitu. He was
six feet four and weighed in at 135. Cocoa was his line; and coast
fever and the climate had taken all the life out of him. They said
he hadn't smiled in eight years. His face was three feet long, and
it never moved except when he opened it to take quinine. He used to
sit in our headquarters and kill fleas and talk sarcastic.
"'I don't take much interest in politics,' says Hicks, one day, 'but
I'd like you to tell me what you're trying to do down here,
Galloway?'
"'We're boosting General Rompiro, of course,' says Denver. 'We're
going to put him in the presidential chair. I'm his manager.'
"'Well,' says Hicks, 'if I was you I'd be a little slower about it.
You've got a long time ahead of you, you know.'
"'Not any longer than I need,' says Denver.
"Denver went ahead and worked things smooth. He dealt out money on
the quiet to his lieutenants, and they were always coming after it.
There was free drinks for everybody in town, and bands playing every
night, and fireworks, and there was a lot of heelers going around
buying up votes day and night for the new style of politics in
Espiritu, and everybody liked it.
"The day set for the election was November 4th. On the night before
Denver and me were smoking our pipes in headquarters, and in comes
Hicks and unjoints himself, and sits in a chair, mournful. Denver
is cheerful and confident. 'Rompiro will win in a romp,' says he.
'We'll carry the country by 10,000. It's all over but the vivas.
To-morrow will tell the tale.'
"'What's going to happen to-morrow?' asks Hicks.
"'Why, the presidential election, of course,' says Denver.
"'Say,' says Hicks, looking kind of funny, 'didn't anybody tell you
fellows that the election was held a week before you came? Congress
changed the date to July 27th. Roadrickeys was elected by 17,000.
I thought you was booming old Rompiro for next term, two years
from now. Wondered if you was going to keep up such a hot lick that
long.'
"I dropped my pipe on the floor. Denver bit the stem off of his.
Neither of us said anything.
"And then I heard a sound like somebody ripping a clapboard off of a
barn-roof. 'Twas Hicks laughing for the first time in eight years."
Sully Magoon paused while the waiter poured us a black coffee.
"Your friend was, indeed, something of a manager," I said.
"Wait a minute," said Sully, "I haven't given you any idea of what
he could do yet. That's all to come.
"When we got back to New York there was General Rompiro waiting for
us on the pier. He was dancing like a cinnamon bear, all impatient
for the news, for Denver had just cabled him when we would arrive
and nothing more.
"'Am I elect?' he shouts. 'Am I elect, friend of mine? Is that mine
country have demand General Rompiro for the president? The last
dollar of mine have I sent you that last time. It is necessario that
I am elect. I have not more money. Am I elect, Señor Galloway?'
"Denver turns to me.
"'Leave me with old Rompey, Sully,' he says. 'I've got to break it
to him gently. 'Twould be indecent for other eyes to witness the
operation. This is the time, Sully,' says he, 'when old Denver has
got to make good as a jollier and a silver-tongued sorcerer, or else
give up all the medals he's earned.'
"A couple of days later I went around to the hotel. There was Denver
in his old place, looking like the hero of two historical novels,
and telling 'em what a fine time he'd had down on his orange
plantation in Florida.
"'Did you fix things up with the General?' I asks him.
"'Did I?' says Denver. 'Come and see.'
"He takes me by the arm and walks me to the dining-room door. There
was a little chocolate-brown fat man in a dress suit, with his face
shining with joy as he swelled himself and skipped about the floor.
Danged if Denver hadn't made General Rompiro head waiter of the
Hotel Brunswick!"
"Is Mr. Galloway still in the managing business?" I asked, as Mr.
Magoon ceased.
Sully shook his head.
"Denver married an auburn-haired widow that owns a big hotel in
Harlem. He just helps around the place."