In its 21st issue (July 11, 1925) The New Yorker was back to taking swipes at William Jennings Bryan and the backward ways of Tennesseans as the Scopes “Monkey Trial” drew near.
Cover for July 11, 1925, by Bertrand Zadig. It was a low point for the fledging magazine–funds were so scarce that the cover was printed in black and white. (New Yorker Digital Archive)
A four-page feature penned by Marquis James (the longest article to appear in The New Yorker since Issue #1), primarily focused on the trial’s setting—Dayton, Tennessee—and the habits and tastes of its countrified citizens:
Prosecutor and famed orator William Jennings Bryan had not yet arrived in Dayton, but the townsfolk were plenty enamored of the other star in their midst, attorney for the defense Clarence Darrow. James reported that the agnostic Darrow mixed surprisingly well with the locals:
James concluded his piece with a description of the carnival atmosphere that gripped the tiny, formerly unknown town that was now the focus of the entire country:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
An illustration by Al Frueh that preceded James’s article makes hay of the “carnival atmosphere,” likening it to a modern-day version of the Inquisition:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
“The Talk of the Town” did its usual breezy wrap up of “The Week” (including the announcement of the birth of Charlie Chaplin’s son (by Lita Grey), and offered a somber note about the dampening effects of Prohibition on the restaurant trade. It also noted that David Belasco had marked 50 years in the theater business (though his influence was waning), and Texas Guinan personally opened the door of her nightclub to opera great Mary Garden after a bit of a misunderstanding:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
“Profiles” looked at Clinton Peters, “The Daddy of Sunday Painters,” while “Moving Pictures” cheered Edmond Rostand’s “masterpiece,” Cyrano de Bergerac, starring French actor Pierre Magnier in a “magnificently well—seasoned interpretation.”
Pierre Magnier (left) starred in the hand-tinted color film, Cyrano de Bergerac. (Screen capture from YouTube)
The film was also “in color,” actually a cross between two-color technicolor and hand-coloring, sometimes using only one process or the other, sometimes both. According to IMDB:
Parts of the film were hand colored using the Pathécolor stencil process, in which groundstone glass is cut with a pantograph in the shape of an object to conform with what is on the 35mm print. A machine then passes a dye-soaked strip of velvet over the film with the glass stencil on top and the film is colored. Cutting the stencils (a stencil for every different color) was a very long and tedious process which delayed the release of the film by almost two years. The color style/scheme of the movie was to imitate the tone, color and feel of 17th Century Renaissance paintings.
In the review of another film, Paths to Paradise, the critic (TS) wrote that “Mr. Raymond Griffith establishes himself as a genuine comedian of the rank of Menjou and Chaplin.”
Raymond Griffith and Betty Compson in Paths to Paradise (1925) (travsd.wordpress.com)
The “Sports” section of these early issues of The New Yorker covered mostly polo, tennis, golf and yacht races and regattas, which I will explore more in future posts.
Fay Marbe on the cover of the June 28, 1924 issue of Movie Weekly.
In the section “When Nights Are Bold,” Charles Baskerville (signing as “Top Hat”) reviewed the tango dance performance by Fay Marbe at the Beaux Arts Restaurant: “She is easy on the eyes; and after her performance we were all patting her on the back, because it’s one of the most beautiful ones we have ever beheld.”
And now for the funnies: On the inside front cover, the musings of English cartoonist W. Heath Robinson, best known for his drawings of ridiculously complicated machines for achieving simple objectives:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
And finally, this three-act performance by staff artist Johan Bull. In her book Defining New Yorker Humor, Judith Yaross Lee writes that Bull was a Norwegian immigrant who started out as a caricaturist for the sports department, but was pressed into greater service for his ability to mimic Rea Irvin’s style:
The New Yorker rarely missed an opportunity to take potshots at rival cities such as Philadelphia or Boston, but Chicago was a special target in the magazine’s crosshairs as a notorious Midwestern backwater. The July 4, 1925 issue included a feature titled “Go Chicago,” in which Ben Hecht parodies the city’s pretensions and acts of boosterism.
Ben Hecht in 1919. (Wikipedia)
Among Hecht’s observations:
There is no city north of the Mason and Dixon line as active in the cultivation of witch-burning morality, as terrified by ideas, as Rotary Club ridden as Chicago.
I include below the entire piece for the full effect of Ben’s acid-tipped pen:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
A note on Hecht: According to IMDB, he is considered one of Hollywood’s and Broadway’s greatest writers. He won an Oscar for best original story for Underworld (1927) at the first Academy Awards in 1929 and had a hand in the writing of many classic plays and films, including the play The Front Page and the film Notorious. Although he received no credit, Hecht was paid $10,000 by David O. Selznick to perform a “fast doctoring” on the script for Gone With The Wind.
The New Yorker celebrated its first Fourth of July with a busy, two-color cover depicting Coney Island’s famous Luna Park:
July 4, 1925 cover by Ilonka Karasz. (New Yorker Digital Archive)
One wonders if the cover art was part of an arrangement for advertising revenue, given that this ad appeared on the back cover of the same issue:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
The inside front cover of the issue featured a full-page ad for the Paramount film, Beggar on Horseback, complete with joke reviews from the “Old Lady in Dubuque” and others including the film’s two writers, Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman, who were also advisory editors of The New Yorker:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
“Talk of the Town” commented on how modern artists such as Henri Matisse, Marsden Hartley, Charles Demuth and Constantin Brancusi were influencing contemporary fashion: “To-day sees the dress houses and even the Fifth Avenue department stores displaying “Cubist fashions”—scarves patterned like composite photographs of all the abstruse countenances in Euclid’s book of open curves, gowns that are marked with subtle diagrams on the variation of the triangle…sports blouses done in bands of gradated color and roundish forms which proclaim their nepotal relation to Cezanne…”
Dress at left “suggests the fractured and splintered paintings of George Braque, Marcel Duchamp and the early cubist paintings by Picasso. In both art and fashion, Cubism was the modern style” (description and image from Smith College Historic Clothing). At right, a dress from 1924 designed by Paul Poiret (Thierry de Maigret).
“Profiles” featured George Creel, an investigative journalist and politician who headed President Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda arm, the Committee on Public Information, during World War I. The profile’s author, Harvey O’Higgins, wrote that “The Incredible Mr. Creel” was often unpopular with the press as a war-time propagandist, but Creel himself was not a censor but rather a good-humored, honest man with “the ideals of an adolescent.”
Hans Stengel rendering of George Creel in “Profiles” (New Yorker Digital Archive)
In the “Of All Things” section, Howard Brubaker wryly observed: “Now that Dorothy Perkins has been sentenced to three years in prison we hope that ladies will think twice before killing gentlemen unless they are actually annoying.”
At the time, Perkins was the youngest woman ever charged with murder in New York. She was just 15 when she met 35-year-old Mickey Connors, described by blogger Mark Gribben in The Malefactor’s Register as a “truck driver and spouse-abusing divorced felon.”
Gribben writes that “Connors and Dorothy apparently met in June 1924 when he wed the mother of one of Dorothy’s girlfriends. After that marriage, Connors moved away from Greenwich Village, but kept in contact with Dorothy on the sly.”
According to Gribben, on Valentine’s Day 1925, a rival suitor for Dorothy, 26-year-old Tommy Templeton (who served with Dorothy’s father, Rudolph, in World War I), attended a birthday party for Rudolph at his Greenwich Village house. During the party, the drunken Rudolph apparently asked Dorothy, “Why do you want a bum like Connors when you can have a nice fellow like Tommy?” At some point Dorothy went to her room to fetch a .22-caliber revolver she had stolen from an aunt in Connecticut.
Dorothy Perkins (The Malefactor’s Register)
What ensued was related by the family minister, Rev. Truman A. Kilborne, in testimony to the court. Rev. Kilborne said the family told him that when Rudolph attempted to take the revolver from his daughter, she resisted and in the struggle the revolver went off. Templeton, who was standing nearby, was shot through the heart.
During her trial, Dorothy claimed that her standoffish treatment of Tommy (and being seen with Conners) was an attempt to make “(Tommy) jealous by flirting with someone else.”
On June 17, 1925, the jury rejected the state’s case that the shooting was murder and convicted Dorothy of manslaughter.
Contrary to The New Yorker account, Dorothy was sentenced to 5 to 15 years in the women’s prison at Auburn, but ended up serving just four years of the sentence, during which time she was trained as a stenographer. She was released in January 1929 for good behavior. Mickey Connors served a few months in the Tombs prison for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.
The issue also included this wonderful two-page illustrated feature by Ralph Barton, a subject in my previous blog post, The Vicious Circle. Barton was very familiar with French life and customs. According to Wikipedia, in 1915 Puck magazine “sent Barton to France to sketch scenes of World War I. It was then that Barton developed a great love of all things French, and throughout his life he would return to Paris to live for periods of time. In 1927 the French government awarded Barton the Legion of Honour.”
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
And finally, a cartoon from the issue that takes aim at New York City Mayor John F. Hylan. From the very first issue of The New Yorker (Feb. 21, 1925), the mayor (comically referred to as “Jonef Hylan”) was a frequent target:
The next great figure in the early legends of New York is that of Jonef Hylan. Hylan, in all probability, was not a real person; but it is impossible to understand New York without giving careful study to the Hylan myth. In many respects, it resembles the Sun Myth of other great civilizations; for his head was as a head of flame, and he rose early each morning from beyond the East River, bringing light into all the dark places and heat into the sessions of the Board of Estimate. The populace called their Sun God “Red Mike”; but in the frenzy of their devotions, they simply yelled “Ra! Ra!
Cartoon by Al Frueh from the July 4, 1925 issue (New Yorker Digital Archive)
June 27, 1925, cover by Julian de Miskey (New Yorker digital archive)
With a lull in the news from the Scopes Trial, the June 27, 1925 is another hodgepodge of seemingly random bits. Perhaps this is a good time to look at some of the magazine’s early artists, editors and writers.
The masthead of the very first issue listed these founding (ceremonial) Advisory Editors: Ralph Barton, Marc Connelly, Rea Irvin, George S. Kaufman, Alice Doerr Miller, Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott. Not listed was founding editor Harold Ross.
The list remained the same for the June 27 issue, minus Ralph Barton. His story is rather sad.
In his day, Barton was well known for his celebrity caricatures, the most famous being his group drawings. He was also a regular early contributor to The New Yorker of brief theater reviews that were accompanied by a large illustration:
(New Yorker digital archive)
Despite his short stint as a ceremonial advisory editor, the Kansas City native contributed often to the magazine during its first years. Barton also contributed drawings to such publications as Collier’s, Vanity Fair and Harper’s Bazaar.
Ralph Barton in 1926 (Wikipedia)
Although his work earned him an impressive income, Barton was a manic-depressive with four failed marriages. In May 1931 he shot himself through the right temple in his East Midtown penthouse. He was only 39.
According to Wikipedia, Barton wrote in a suicide note that he had irrevocably “lost the only woman I ever loved” (the actress Carlotta Monterey, who divorced Barton in 1926 and married playwright Eugene O’Neill in 1929), and that he feared his worsening manic-depression was approaching insanity.
Carl Van Vechten photograph of Carlotta Monterey and Eugene O’Neill, 1933 (Library of Congress)
Following his death, Barton’s artistic reputation quickly dropped from sight, due not only to his demise but also to the waning of the Jazz Age subjects he drew with such verve:
A 1921 Vanity Fair Hollywood caricature by Ralph Barton. (Wikipedia)
A 1928 letter from Harold Ross to Barton (posted on The American Reader website) seems to be an attempt by Ross to cheer up the artist:
Wednesday 27 June 1928
Dear Ralph,
I was on the brink of writing you when your letter came—this morning—telling me about your latest predicament. I knew, of course, that you had reached some conclusion as this. You are a creative soul and therefore a restless soul; therefore, a damn fool. I would leave this to any fair-minded banker. I wish I were a banker. I also wish I were Henry Ford or anybody who can accept the church, the government, conventions, and all those things.
I also had house trouble. I am thinking of burning the damn thing down. The insurance would net a tidy bit of cash and would enable me to get a room somewhere and fit up what I really ought to have. I am not competent to manage more space than this. I would be if I were a fairy. Fairies are the happiest people there are. All editors ought to be fairies. I fuss around with commas, semi-colons, dictionaries, and wordings, and it drives me crazy. I am too virile. I ought to be building subways. I was thinking of going to the North Pole with the Byrd expedition but that would take a year or two and I can spare, at most, only two months. It probably would be a bore anyhow. All life is a bore if you think at all…
As ever,
Ross
Others listed on The New Yorker masthead were associated with legendary Algonquin Round Table, including the playwrights Marc Connelly and George S. Kaufman and writers Dorothy Parker and Alexander Woollcott—all charter members. The writer Alice Duer Miller was also an occasional guest of this “Vicious Circle,” as they called themselves. From roughly 1919 to 1929, they met every day for lunch at the Algonquin Hotel.
Other regular Round Table members included Harold Ross, Franklin Pierce Adams, (best known for his newspaper column, “The Conning Tower”), New Yorker humorist Robert Benchley, husband-wife writers Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale, broadway producer Brock Pemberton, playwright Robert Sherwood and broadway publicist John Peter Toohey.
Those who moved in and out of the circle included feminist writer Jane Grant (who with her first husband Harold Ross co-founded The New Yorker), vaudeville comedian and later film star Harpo Marx, actresses Peggy Wood, Tallulah Bankhead, Lynn Fontanne and Margolo Gillmore, actor and director Alfred Lunt, playwrights Edna Ferber and David Ogden Stewart, humorist Frank Sullivan, writers Margaret Leech and Frank Crowninshield, illustrator Neysa McMein, playwright Beatrice Kaufman (George’s wife) and composer Deems Taylor.
It is important to make note of these various players in the “Vicious Circle,” since they figure prominently both as contributors and subjects in the early issues of The New Yorker.
Famed Al Hirschfeld illustration from 1962 of the Algonquin Round Table includes (counterclockwise, from far left) Dorothy Parker, Robert Sherwood, George S. Kaufman, Edna Ferber, Franklin P. Adams, Marc Connelly, Heywood Broun, Alexander Woollcott, and Robert Benchley. Rounding out the back row are, from left, Lynn Fontanne, Alfred Lunt, Frank Crowninshield and hotel manager Frank Case. (Al Hirschfeld Foundation)
A prominent name on The New Yorker’s masthead absent from the Round Table is graphic artist Rea Irvin, creator of the magazine’s distinctive look and its mascot, Eustace Tilley.
Rea Irvin’s Eustace Tilley on Issue #1 (New Yorker Digital Archive)
Irvin signed on as an advisory editor with the assumption that the magazine would fold after a few issues. Little did he realize that his illustrations, department headings, caricatures, and cartoons would grace the pages of The New Yorker for many years; that he would go on to illustrate 169 covers between 1925 and 1958; and that his distinctive typeface and mascot would continue to serve the magazine to this very day (Irvin died in 1972 at age 90).
Not to give the June 27 issue short shrift, “The Talk of the Town” reported Roald Amundsen had returned from his North Pole flight; “Profiles” looked at the life of theatrical producer Morris Gest; and “Books” offered a brief and somewhat mixed review of D.H. Lawrence’s new book, St. Mawr.
In The New Yorker’s “Critique” section, a terrific caricature of Russian-American actress Alla Nazimova, by Swedish artist Einar Nerman. (New Yorker Digital Archive)
In “The Theatre,” W.C. Fields continued to impress in his performances with the Ziegfeld Follies. The New Yorker noted that Fields was becoming a “talking comedian” comparatively late in life, and that after 26 years “as a straight and comic juggler,” he has become “ever so many people’s favorite comedian.” Under “Moving Pictures” it was also observed that D. W. Griffith’sSally of the Sawdust was going to “put W.C. Fields across as a big screen comedian. Wait and see!”
Sideshow “Professor” Eustace McGargle (W.C. Fields) and his ward, Sally (Carole Dempster, who was director D.W. Griffith’s real-life lover and protégée) are circus carnies in Sally of the Sawdust (1925). The movie was based on Fields’ stage hit Poppy, and featured stage legend Alfred Lunt in a rare film role. (Film Forum)
The June 27 issue offered yet another full page cartoon, this time by Gardner Rea, taking aim at the droll antics of the moneyed classes:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
And finally, we are shown the answer to the mystery drawing by Covarrubias–ahem–an advertisement for a photography studio:
Anticipation of the upcoming Scopes “Monkey Trial” continued to fill the pages of The New Yorker. In the June 20, 1925 issue, “The Talk of the Town” led with an account (titled “Martyr de Jour”) of trial defendant John T. Scopes’s visit to New York City.
The “Talk” author wrote admiringly of Scopes, if not also with a degree of condescension, noting that the Tennessee schoolteacher was “introduced in circles with which, hitherto, he had been acquainted only through his love for books and periodicals…He was fêted and lionized, this back-country school-teacher, a shrewd, slow-speaking, slow-moving individual such as novelists have misrepresented as being typical of our agricultural regions. He was lionized socially, that is. Although, of course, there was that rather distressful incident of entertainment when Mr. Scopes and Dr. George W. Rappleyea, his devoted friend, attended the “Follies” by invitation of the late press agent for the American Civil Liberties Union, and found, on arrival that while guests they were expected to pay for their own tickets.”
Rappleyea and Scopes in 1925 (Smithsonian Institution)
Scopes and Rappleyea were in town to find scientists who would be willing to testify in Scopes’ legal case. “Talk” noted that despite its humble description of the teacher, Scopes was no meek country boy; indeed he had complained to the press that his importance had been minimized by all the attention paid to the prosecuting and defending attorneys, Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan.
For the record, George Rappleyea was a metallurgical engineer and manager of the Cumberland Coal and Iron Company in Dayton, Tennessee, which was the site of Scopes Trial. It was Rappleyea who convinced a group of Dayton businessmen to sponsor a test case of the Butler Act (which prohibited the teaching of evolution in state schools) and also convinced Scopes to serve as defendant.
The trial would attract many public figures, including E. Haldeman-Julius, who was coincidentally featured in the issue’s “Profiles” section.
Hans Stengel’s “pen portrait” of E. Haldeman-Julius
Haldeman-Julius was a socialist reformer and creator of a series of small, staple-bound booklets known as “Little Blue Books,” which featured various writings on social issues and abridged reprints of classic literature.
If a book sold less than 10,000 copies in one year, Haldeman-Julius would remove it from his line. But first he would try out a lurid title for the book, and sometimes the tactic would revive sales. For example, The Tallow Ball by Guy de Maupassant sold 15,000 copies one year, but nearly 55,000 the next year after the title was changed to A French Prostitute’s Sacrifice.
A sampling of Little Blue Books (image: centerforinquiry.net)
The writer of the profile, Alexander Woollcott, noted that 75 million Little Blue Books had been published to date (according to Haldeman-Julius), and one might conclude that the famous socialist pamphleteer had “sold out to Mammon” because of the wealth generated from the sales, but Woollcott concluded that Haldeman-Julius and his wife, Marcet, were accomplished authors themselves (including their 1921 novel Dust) and even a socialist crusader would feel pride at the sight of a workman on a subway train, settling back with “his Little Blue Book.”
It should be no surprise that Haldeman-Julius was also present in Dayton for the Scopes Monkey Trial. According to the Smithsonian, he and his wife Marcet drove 200 miles from their home in Kansas to observe the trial. In this photo he is shown on the steps of “Defense Mansion,” an old Victorian house owned by Rappleyea’s coal and iron company, which had been quickly restored by Rappleyea to accommodate the defense team and their scientific witnesses. (Smithsonian Institution)
The “Critique” section offered this observation about a new show at the Colonial, featuring Johnny Hudgins (Hudgins was featured in my April 8 blog, Knickerbocker Junction:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
There was also an item about Don Q, Son of Zorro, a film starring Douglas Fairbanks that made its debut at Broadway’s Globe Theatre. The review noted that the movie is full of Fairbanks acrobatics, and “Doug does everything except play the saxophone.”
Don Q (Douglas Fairbanks) tweaks the nose of Don Fabrique (Jean Hersholt), much to the amusement of The Archduke (Warner Oland). (Scan from Jean Hersholt’s Album Of Hollywood Stars, a promotional booklet sponsored by the makers of Vaseline)
It was noted, however, that the best performance of the picture was by Warner Oland, who played a dimwitted archduke. The Swedish actor Oland would gain fame for playing “oriental” characters, most notably Dr. Fu Manchu in the late 20s and early 30s, and the detective Charlie Chan in more than a dozen movies in the 1930s. He also played the role of “The Cantor” in 1927’s The Jazz Singer, one of the first of the “talkies.”
“When Nights Are Bold” featured, among other items, this bit about the growing popularity of an open-air restaurant in Central Park called “The Casino”:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
The Museum of the City of New York blog notes that the Central Park Casino began in 1864 as the Ladies’ Refreshment Salon. About 20 years later the salon “morphed into a far pricier destination, called The Casino, and was open to both sexes. The name was used to invoke the Italian translation of “little house” rather than denoting a gambling joint.” Because of its park location and then rare outdoor seating option, it was the place to see and be seen. By the early 1920s it had declined into “a somewhat dumpy night-club,” but when flamboyant Mayor Jimmy Walker took office in 1926 he personally revived the Casino (through “a series of somewhat sketchy maneuvers”) and turned it into an exclusive nightclub for high society. The good times quickly ended with the 1929 market crash.
Central Park Casino (The New York Times)
According to centralparkhistory.com, on opening night, June 4, 1929, “a good deal of cynical talk was bandied about among the crowd who watched the socialites arrive. In the fall mayoral campaign Fiorello La Guardia had attacked Walker for leasing the “whoopee joint” in the park to his close friends for a ridiculously low rent — friends who, in turn, obtained some of their financing from gangster Arnold Rothstein (the man who reputedly fixed the 1919 World Series). The stock market crashed that same fall and federal prohibition agents raided the Casino. The elegant playground of the rich had become a symbol of decadence and corruption.” Parks commissioner Robert Moses later replaced the Casino with the Rumsey Playground, which in turn was replaced by the park’s current SummerStage.
Finally we close with some illustrations from the issue. In her book, Defining New Yorker Humor,Judith Yaross Lee writes that the magazine’s “signature caricaturists established the New Yorker’s high sense of humor and gave comic character to the texts…The New Yorker attracted first-rate artists despite its comparatively low rates because photojournalism was restructuring their work, and because art editor Rea Irvin gave it attractive layouts.”
On the inside front cover, this illustration by W. Heath Robinson takes aim at upper-class vanities:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
And here are some comic trifles; these were usually found in the center pages, sort of a “joke section” for the smart set. Note the ubiquitous “The Optimist” filler, a tired joke featured repeatedly in the first issues until Katharine (Angell) White came on board later that year and put an end to such nonsense. Also note that the second item is contributed by Julius H. Marx, better known as Groucho:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
A good example here of how another artist, Al Frueh, finds humor in how the professional elites and the moneyed classes overreact to seemingly minor incidents. In just four years this wouldn’t be so funny:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
Again we get the mysterious Covarrubias drawing, also featured in my previous post, Bryan’s Planet of the Apes:
And finally, an advertisement for “Herbert” Tareyton cigarettes. Not exactly the most the persuasive tagline:
Leading up to the famous Tennessee “Monkey Trial” of John Scopes, the June 13 issue of The New Yorker continued its jabs at William Jennings Bryan.
June 13, 1925 cover by Barbara Shermund. (New Yorker Digital Archive)
Bryan had agreed to serve as prosecutor in the case against Scopes, who was charged on May 5, 1925, with teaching evolution from a chapter in Civic Biology, a textbook by George William Hunter that among other things described the theory of evolution. For the record, Scopes, who was merely a substitute high school teacher, wasn’t even sure if he’d actually taught evolution in his class, but purposely incriminated himself so the trial would proceed with a defendant. Just in case New Yorker readers needed more evidence that Bryan was an ignorant rube, “Talk of the Town” led off with an item on WJB’s visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Art:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)Bryan as depicted by Rea Irvin in June 7th’s “Talk of the Town”.
Bryan was also the subject of a “Profile” piece by Charles Willis Thompson, who wrote “the Commoner” is “an extensively misunderstood man.”
Thompson observed that Bryan “is variously regarded as a statesman, chump, shrewd politician, bigot, liberal, scholar, knight, orator, reformer, crank and crusader who has fetched up short of his goal because of a chevalier-like hesitancy to sacrifice principle for expediency.”
Here is the piece in its entirety (caricature by Hans Stengel)
(New Yorker Digital Archive)Macfadden at age 65 in the early 1930s (yousearch)
The New Yorker was barely afloat as it entered its first summer, but that didn’t dampen its wit as it fished for new subscribers through humorous full page ads regularly featured in the first issues.
The June 13 issue opened with one such ad that appears to be a parody of a Bernarr Macfadden health and fitness promotion (Macfadden was an influential predecessor to the likes of Charles Atlas and Jack Lalanne). The ad was accompanied by a strange drawing that appears to combine McFadden’s body with–for some reason–William Jennings Bryan’s head:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
In addition to Mr. Bryan, “Talk of the Town” also offered these observations…Calvin Coolidge’s fondness for his battered felt hat…the modesty of the young golfing star Bobby Jones and his refusal to accept any money beyond barest expenses for an exhibition match at Harvard…an offer by the famed violinist Jascha Heifetz to deliver, upon his return trip from Paris, a Poiret-designed gown for opera singer Cobina Wright for her upcoming Bal Harbor engagement…and a minor money dispute between George Bernard Shaw and the Saturday Evening Post regarding the reprinting of a short story.
Sherwood Anderson (Chicago History Museum)
“Talk” also made hay about “Male Plumage” on display in the city, noting that the last time novelist Sherwood Anderson was in town (he is referred to as “the illustrious revealer of the Middle Western Subconscious”) he wore socks “of a particularly glowing brown bespread with diamond checks of an exceptionally vivid shade of green,” and he sported both brown and red feathers in his brown velour hat. It was noted, however, that this display was outdone by Rudolph Valentino, whose silk house pajamas (worn while receiving visitors at the Plaza in Paris) were of “the most vivid crimson ever accomplished.”
The New Yorker continued its assault on crooked cab drivers with this cartoon by Miguel Covarrubias:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
“Of All Things” (written by Howard Brubaker) noted that “The Queen of Rumania and the King of Swat (Babe Ruth) are both writing for the World, but fortunately for us constant readers, low-born newspaper men are still on the job.” It was also noted that silent film idol Mary Pickford “has fallen among bad characters or good press agents.” I have no idea what this refers to. Pickford was married to film star Douglas Fairbanks at the time, and their Hollywood mansion Pickfair was the center of the celebrity universe. The couple played host to heads of state and other dignitaries as well as notables in literature, the arts, and science (Albert Einstein once paid a call).
POWER COUPLE…Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in the mid 1920s. Pickford, a Canadian-American actress, was one of the 36 founding members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and a key figure in shaping today’s Hollywood. The couple formed the independent United Artists along with D.W. Griffith and Charlie Chaplin. (Wikimedia)
German cinema regularly drew favorable reviews in The New Yorker, however Fritz Lang’s Siegfried was called long and arty, “possessing many fine intervals of real beauty…that usually wins the critical adjectives. The average audience will probably be a bit bored at Siegfried’s quest. Tom Mix does this sort of thing with much more verve and snap.”
Colleen Moore in the silent film, The Desert Flower (1925) (IMDB)
And if you think the “Cinderella” story has been made and remade too many times, consider that in 1925 The New Yorker already found the theme wearing thin. A review of the The Desert Flower referred to the film as “just another variation of the Cinderella theme.” It told the story of a waif (Colleen Moore) in a railroad construction in camp who falls in love with the son of the railroad’s president. The reviewer wrote that “probably all of this will be popular. It always has been.”
Texas Guinan’s new club proved a be hit, as reported in the feature “When Nights Are Bold.” I last reported on Texas Guinan in my March 18, 2015 post, “A Dry Manhattan,” when prohibition officials put a padlock on her old haunt, the El Fey Club. As we see, things are looking up for the leading lady of New York nightlife…
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
I am guessing this illustration by Covarrubias was an attempt to fill ad space and encourage readership. I guess we will find out soon enough:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
The issue closes with a satirical piece that appears to poke fun at tenement life, or perhaps at the pretensions of art critics, or both. You be the judge:
June 6, 1925 cover by Julian de Miskey (New Yorker Digital Archive)
The June 6, 1925 “Talk of the Town” was jumble of odds and ends. There were musings on William Randolph Hearst’s indecision over a redesign of his Cosmopolitan magazine (to incorporate the defunct Hearst’s Magazine), and an update on “the Queen of Rumania”…”persuaded by Miss Zoe Beckley to write that series of articles for her newspaper which are appearing currently, in this city, in the World. Her Majesty also received a tidy piece of money for endorsing, under the royal signature, a certain facial cream much favored by young ladies ion the great Middle West, where men are men.”
The “Queen of Rumania” and her Pond’s endorsement were featured in this April 1925 ad in Motion Picture magazine. See my blog post on Issue #4 titled “The Queen of Romania” to learn more about this enterprising monarch. (Image scan)
“Talk” reported that the facial cream company (Ponds) was approaching other notables for endorsements: “Alice Roosevelt, known in some circles as Mrs. Nicholas Longworth, is reported to have succumbed to the lure of the facial cream. The sum mentioned is five thousand dollars. There will be a photograph of Princess Alice and, one hears, a statement of what she owes to the beneficent workings of the cream in question. She will be in good company, for Mrs.Reginald Vanderbilt, Mrs. Marshall Field and Lady Diana Duff-Cooper have appeared already, among others.
Also noted was the closing of Joel’s, “perhaps the last of the older order of restaurants, whose hosts were individuals, not corporations.” Frequent patrons were novelist Booth Tarkington and artist George Luks.
“The Talk of the Town” also featured drawings by Rea Irvin lampooning William Jennings Bryan’s role in the Scopes Trial, but there was no mention of the event in the “Talk” section itself. However, “Of All Things” noted that “Professor Scopes will now sing that popular ballad: ‘The truth I loved in funny Tennessee.’” The next item followed with “It is said that the KKK is a strong element in the Southern anti-evolution fight. One would expect them to fight klanfully for the Jewish tribal legends.”
Another stand-alone, full-page illustration depicted Tennessee as a dark jungle:
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
“Profiles” featured Deems Taylor, who was dubbed “Versatility Personified” for his work as both a music critic and gifted composer, among other talents. According to Wikipedia, Taylor’s operas were given more performances by the Metropolitan Opera than any other American composer (including his 1927 work The King’s Henchman, with libretto by Edna St. Vincent Millay).
Deems Taylor on the cover of Time, Feb, 16, 1931 (Time Inc.)
Taylor was well-known to New Yorker editors and writers as a friend of the Algonquin Round Table, and briefly dated Dorothy Parker. He was also friends with composers George Gershwin, Jerome Kern and novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald. He later appeared in Walt Disney’s 1940 film Fantasia as the master of ceremonies, and helped select pieces for the film’s musical score.
The New Yorker was seemingly hitting a rough patch as it entered its fifth month. The thin 16th issue (just 24 pages plus cover) reveals the editors still fiddling with the magazine’s format, including an odd new section titled “Critique” that looked variously at happenings in theater, motion pictures, art, music and books—apparently an attempt to consolidate all of these formerly separate sections into one. There was yet another reference to writer Michael Arlen, the magazine characterizing him as an author of light entertainments and thrillers whose best book was These Charming People.
It is noteworthy how much ink the writer Michael Arlen commands in the pages of early New Yorker, considering how little known he is today. And this was at the same time F. Scott Fitzgerald’sThe Great Gatsby was receiving tepid reviews, including a brief one in The New Yorker.
There was much ado at the Junior League Convention in Boston, according to May 30, 1925 New Yorker. The lead item in “The Talk of Town” concerned the delegation from New York that “wished to exercise censorship over Junior Leaguers who move here from other towns—Dubuque, Iowa*, for example—and whose memberships in the League were transferred to them.”
(*Dubuque, Iowa, as you may recall, is where resides the proverbial “old lady”–the antithesis of a New Yorker reader).
May 30, 1925 cover by Ilonka Karasz (New Yorker Digital Archive)
The New York delegates pointed out that their league was “committed to accepting into membership between eighty and ninety debutantes each year; moreover, that it was forced to accept as members, also, those young ladies whose ambitions led them to shake the Dubuquian dust from their French heels and take the train to New York.”
Debutantes practicing the proper way to pick up a handkerchief in 1925. (Buzzfeed)
To address this situation, the New York delegation proposed that such transfer members should only be accepted on a one-year trail basis. “Talk” noted that “It was not said, of course, that the object of this proposal was to allow local Junior Leaguers to inspect their guests against such provincial failings as might not be corrected in the period of twelve months…”
President Calvin Coolidge (History Today)
“Talk” also continued mining the (unintended) humor of President Calvin Coolidge. When a Washington newspaper correspondent (identified as Mr. Sullivan) asked if the president might recognize the arts and letters by inviting some poets to the White House, Coolidge responded, “Who are the leading poets?” Sullivan suggested such luminaries as Edward Arlington Robinson, Carl Sandburg, Robert Frost, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Edgar Lee Masters and Elinor Wylie. After some consideration, Coolidge replied: “When I was in College, there was a man named Smith—who wrote verse.”
Gilda Gray performed as the Hula-Hula Girl at the old Rendezvous supper club. Photo from 1922. (Wikipedia)
It was reported that the Montmartre supper club had reopened after being closed for a year by Prohibition authorities, and many of the old clientele had returned including Alice and Jimmy O’Gorman “at their usual table with the Storrs and Thelma Morgan Converse, now abroad but that evening fresh from Hollywood and the barber.” Another supper club, the Rendezvous, had also reopened, “although without the erstwhile influence of Gilda Gray’s glamourous shimmy.”
According to Wikipedia, “although the shimmy is said to have been introduced to American audiences by Gray in New York in 1919, the term was widely used before. Some stories said that her shimmy was born one night when she was singing the Star Spangled Banner and forgot some of the lyrics.She covered up her embarrassment by shaking her shoulders and hips. Although the shimmy was already a well-known dance move, Marianna appropriated it as her own: when she was asked about her dancing style, she replied in a heavy Polish accent; “I’m shaking my chemise,” which sounded to the English-speaking audience like shimmy.”
There was also a brief item on the changing fashions of men’s hats:
“Of All Things” offered its first comments on the upcoming Scopes Trial, coverage of which would be a regular feature in upcoming issues. It was noted “If the anti-evolutionists win in Tennessee, anyone wishing to drink at the fountain of truth will have to go to a speakeasy…We are not without a twinge of envy for J.T. Scopes. A young high school teacher who can give a simple lesson in biology and become a great national menace is getting into the hall of fame on an uncomplimentary ticket.”
We also have our first mention of Benito Mussolini, who “has granted women the ballot and the right to serve in war. It is understood, however, that the Italian women will not be used in actual fighting but will be saved for the heavy work.”
“Profiles” featured William Allen White, famed editor and owner of the Emporia (Kansas) Gazette. The piece was written by Edna Ferber, who concluded that “Bill White comes perilously close to being the Great American Citizen.”
1925 catalog ad for radio receivers (Ad scan from a 1925-26 Brown Lynch Scott publication)Lionel Barrymore in 1923. He mostly known today for his portrayal of Henry F. Potter, a rapacious slumlord, in Frank Capra’s It’s A Wonderful Life. (Wikipedia)
“Music” featured the review of entire radio broadcast—the first lengthy account of radio featured in the magazine. The reviewer tuned in to WEAF, “a commercial station, renting the air to affluent concerns who provide the amusement or otherwise. At least two of the attractions presented (including singers, a piano duet) on our night of earful waiting were sponsored by business interests and on some nights the whole program may be provided by accounts, Consequently, WEAF is able to inundate its listeners with paid entertainers in place of song pluggers and ambitious choir applicants.”
In “The Theatre,” Man or the Devil by Jerome Kern opened on Broadway featuring Lionel Barrymore and Marion Ballou. The character acting was described as pleasurable, but the play itself was referred to as “nothing much…Two men, you see, exchange souls. However, if you wish you can stuff your ears with cotton and make up a dandy plot for yourself as the action develops.”
A “Profile” piece by Frank Waldo (aka “Searchlight”) in the May 23, 1925 issue took a look at the 36-year-old Charlie Chaplin and his “magical popularity,” recounting how he was nearly “devoured” by an adoring crowd in Paris (Chaplin was decorated by the French government in 1921 for his film work and made Officer of the Légion d’Honneur in 1952). Chaplin dismissed the attention as “nothing,” and was reported to spend much of his time off-screen brooding and in despair.
May 23, 1925 cover by Julian de Miskey (New Yorker Digital Archive)
Waldo wrote that the “pity” of Chaplin is that “he does not understand the adoration he receives, and therefore has become a self-doubting, melancholy, haunted man…caught in a vast machine he has created and which he does not run…he has created for himself a mask (that) has satisfied the world, from China to Paris. It has failed in but a single way—a cruel one: for it has failed to satisfy its maker.”
Chaplin directs on the set of The Gold Rush (1925) in Truckee, California (Critics At Large)Conrado Massaguer’s “Profile” illustration
Waldo wrote that Chaplin seeks his answer wistfully through women or through association with intellectuals, leaving him “as will-less as a Russian romantic, in the quicksands of Los Angeles: lost in a world of which he is the king, and which he does not love and which distrusts him, knowing him different from it.”
William Jennings Bryan, “The Great Commoner,” was a frequent target of the early New Yorker. “Talk of the Town” reported that he denied making a million dollars on a Florida land deal (“it was only five hundred thousand dollars, Mr. Bryan indignantly averred”).
Villa Serena, the Miami winter home of Nebraska statesman William Jennings Bryan (State Archives of Florida)
Apparently Bryan, “the great statesman and religionist,” also controlled a choice site in Miami, toward which “a certain church cast longing glances.” The church pleaded poverty, but Bryan wouldn’t budge on the price. Instead, he said if the church bought the plot at said price and built on the site he would agree to preach eight sermons there, which, the “Talk” writer observed, “would unquestionably attract many casual worshippers, so swelling the collections.”
Cosmopolitan, June 1925
“Talk” also reported on the wedding of Mrs. David Meriwether Milton, nee Abby Rockefeller. Guests included New York Governor Alfred Smith and Mayor John Hylan. The New Yorker also reported receiving a letter from writer Michael Arlen prior to his departure for England. Referring to a previous issue that pondered what impressions of America he would relate to England, he wrote “I shall say that I found America charming. And Oh, I have!” The New Yorker dryly observed that Arlen, before boarding his ship, “made an arrangement with one of our monthly periodicals; that is to say, The Cosmopolitan.” It was reported that this rival Hearst publication was paying Arlen the princely sum of $3,500 for each short story delivered. No doubt a pang of jealousy was felt at the fledgling New Yorker.
A feature by “Susan Simple, Spinster” titled “Husbands, An Appreciation,” described various types of husbands including those who are acrobatic, helpless, doggy (“so friendly and believing”) and those who have no time for their wives (“the Metered One”).
(New Yorker Digital Archive)Scribner’s 1925 edition of The Great Gatsby.
“Books noted the passing of Amy Lowell, and briefly reviews F. Scott Fitzgerald’s latest novel The Great Gatsby; the reviewer writes that the novel “revives our interest” in Fitzgerald, though the book is “not in a Byronic promise he probably never had. He still reveres and pities romantic constancy, but with detachment. Gatsby, its heroic victim, is otherwise a good deal of a nut…Parts are solidly good, all has to be read, The young man is not petering out.”
History would not be kind to Fitzgerald, who received similar mixed reviews from other publications. The book sold only 20,000 copies in its first year, and when the writer died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work forgotten. Little did he know that he had written what many still believe to be “The Great American Novel.”
The antics of Polish actress Pola Negri were once again in The New Yorker’s spotlight in the May 16, 1925 issue. In the early issues of magazine, Negri was among the most watched celebrities including Gloria Swanson and Charlie Chaplin.
Negri’s latest activities were recounted in a “Talk of the Town” segment that began with an account of the English tenor John Coates. Upon his arrival in the U.S., it was reported that Coates “frankly noted upon his Customs’ declaration possession of two quarts of truly excellent Scotch; quite a different procedure from that followed by Pola Negri who has found it necessary, since inspectors discovered some alcoholic beverages among her baggage to (1) fail to remember their presence, (2) attribute ownership to her maid, and (3) recall that there were mild wines for medicinal use only.”
(San Francisco Sentinel, left; rag piano.com, right)
“Talk” continued with a report on Negri’s recent behavior in Paris, where “Madame, the Countess” created a traffic jam when she demanded that her driver stop to serve her “a golden drink in a beautiful goblet,” and later at the Ritz-Carlton “she engaged for herself an entire floor.” When informed that singer/actress Nora Bayes “and her latest husband” already occupied two rooms on the floor, Negri replied that they would understand that “she could not possibly live in less than an entire floor.” Then Negri herself knocked on Bayes’ door and asked the couple to move off the floor. It was not reported if they complied, but the magazine did note that “after the clinch there was a grand and most friendly party that evening.”
Article from Motion Picture magazine, April 1925 (page scan)
“Talk” also commented on “The Craze for Royalty” with the observation that “No social set feels satisfied with its activities these democratic days unless it is entertaining, has entertained, or is planning to entertain royalty. There were rumors that “Even that secluded section of our native aristocracy which is descended wholly from Colonial governors, and which hitherto has treated mere kings and princes with formal politeness proper for acknowledging the presence of inferiors, has succumbed to the craze” with a “discreet inquiry as to whether Wilhelmina, Queen of the Netherlands, would accept an invitation to visit New York in 1926.”
The royal visit was sought in conjunction with a planned celebration by the descendants of the original “New Netherlanders” of that “famous real estate deal three hundred years ago, when Manhattan Island was purchased from the Indians for some rum and a few trinkets.”
“Talk” noted previous visits by royalty, such as the “kidnapping” of the King and Queen of Belgium by the “Social Old Guard,” or the “Knickerbocker dowagers” observing “the strange preferences of His Royal Highness, the Prince of Wales,” during his visit the previous year. “Talk” also referred to the upcoming visit by “Her Majesty of Rumania” and her “shrewd plans for a matrimonial alliance.”
(New Yorker Digital Archive)
The magazine also made note of an illustration in the previous issue – a self-portrait by the famous American portrait painter George Luks, who as a joke signed his drawing “Gene Tunney.” The champion boxer was reportedly a friend of Luks.
“Talk” reported that the actor John Barrymore was back from a London season of Hamlet and was once again contemplating a movie role. It was noted that he was wearing “Le Valentino medal,” an award given him for best screen acting of the year (I’m not sure if “Le Valentino” was a real award or some joke about Rudolph Valentino, but it is worth noting that the first Academy Awards ceremony was still four years into the future). Among those traveling abroad were playwright Marc Connelly, New York Times publisher Adolph Ochs, and “Mr. Asa Yoelson,” who “booked passage as Al Jolson.” The violinist Jascha Heifitz became an American citizen, “Squire Heywood Broun” was “enjoying a nervous breakdown,” and cartoonist Jay Darling (known as “Ding”) was “convalescing under sunny Iowan skies.”
Political cartoon by Jay “Ding” Darling featuring Russian Communist leaders Lenin and Trotsky, originally published in March 1925. The caption read: “Seems as if five years ought to be enough to do the trick in even if they didn’t know how in the beginning.” Originally from Iowa, Ding worked at the New York Globe and Herald Tribune, but in 1919 he returned to Iowa to work at the Des Moines Register. He won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning in 1924 and again in 1943. (Image: Iowa Digital Library)
In a feature titled “A Mob and a Machine,” novelist and social critic Waldo Frank (writing under the pen name “Searchlight”) penned a sour account of an opening day baseball game at the Polo Grounds between the New York Giants and the Boston Braves.
Waldo Frank, circa 1923 (photo by Alfred Stieglitz/Wikipedia)
Frank wrote of the “abyss” that separated the game “from the vast crowds that watch it” and the specialized play of the game where “Batsman and fielder mechanically carry out motions whose plan and purpose are established for them.”
That is why, observed Frank, that Babe Ruth…
…ignoble, fat fellow that he is—deserves his vogue…It is such as he who enable the wistful mob to have some sort of contact with the game. For baseball is only clockwork; but the Bab is a boy—moody, clever, tangible and human…The Babe’s home run is an effort on the part of the machine to connect with the crowd. When the ball reaches the bleachers, contact is established.
Frank wrote that after the game is ended, “we can pack ourselves like grains of sand into a stifled elevated train, and read in the headlines of the paper we have just bought, what a significant national event we have just witnessed.”
Lamenting the loss of the “old-fashioned, humble game,” Frank wrote that like everything else in America “the Game’s gotten bigger—and that means better…It used to be a enjoyable means of moving our bodies. Not any more. Now, there’s a machine that does the moving, while our forty thousand bodies sit packed and rancid in the grandstands.”
The Polo Grounds in 1923 (Wikipedia)
“The Theatre” section reported that Oscar Hammerstein (later to become half of the famed Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway musical juggernaut) had engaged “two girls” for a performance at his Victoria Theatre. The “girls,” who had been arrested, tried and acquitted of shooting a W.E. Stokes in the ankle, were identified as Ethel Conrad and Lillian Graham. Their subsequent notoriety led to their hiring by Hammerstein for a singing act that The New Yorker described as “a terrible frost;” the duo reportedly left the stage after their debut performance “without a ripple of applause from the audience.” The girls’ act was arranged by Loney Haskell, who after the performance asked the opinion of song writer Jim Thornton. Thornton replied: “By golly, they’ll have to shoot a couple of men to get in next week.”
Paul Robeson in 1925 (rutgers.edu)
“Profiles” featured Max Steuer, a famed American trial attorney, while the “Music” section mentioned Paul Robeson’s “recital of negro spirituals” at the Greenwich Village Theatre, noting that “there are few artists who can equal him in getting inside a song and becoming part of it.”
“Of All Things” reports that “the Babeless New York” was in sixth place in the American League and “hobnobbing with such shady characters as Boston and Detroit. The Yanks are slumming.”
May 9, 1925 cover by Rea Irvin (New Yorker Digital Archive)
The passing of Schultz, the head of New York’s claque, was noted in “The Talk in Town” for May 9, 1925. A “claque” is simply a group of people hired to either applaud or heckle a performer, usually in theater or opera, but in the case of Schultz (he was only known by his surname) his claques were known for being heavy handed.
“Talk” continued its reporting on the comings and goings of the writer Dikran Kouyoumdjian, better known by his pen name, Michael Arlen. Exhausted from a busy social schedule (“no visitor has been so lionized since the Prince of Wales”), Arlen had retreated to Farmington to work on a play.
With Madison Square Garden slated for demolition, it was reported that the Diana figure atop MSG’s Italianate tower was to be relocated to the NYU campus. “Talk” noted that the Diana was the only nude ever completed by famed sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens. The statue is now at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and a copy is in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Diana atop MSG (Wikipedia)
At the time, the NYU campus was largely based on a design by Stanford White, also the architect of the soon-to-be demolished Madison Square Garden. “Talk” noted that although the manner of White’s death put him “in a poor light among his puritanical countrymen,” many “courageous men” including Saint-Gaudens strongly defended White as a kind, unselfish and loyal friend.
Let’s step back about twenty years for bit more on Stanford White: He was a founding partner of the architectural firm McKim, Mead & White. Although many considered him witty, kind, and generous, he also had the reputation of a middle-aged serial seducer of teenage girls. White’s desire for Evelyn Nesbit, a popular chorus girl and model, would be his undoing.
Stanford White’s Madison Square Garden, razed in 1925. The site is now occupied by the New York Life Building (right). Images courtesy nyc-architecture.com (left) and Wikipedia (right).
On June 25, 1906, White attended a premiere performance of Mam’zelle Champagne at a garden theatre he had designed on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden. Ironically, during the show’s finale, “I Could Love A Million Girls”, Nesbit’s jealous husband, Harry Thaw, shot White three times, point blank.
Madison Square Garden Rooftop Theatre where White was slain by Harry Thaw. (Lost New York)Evelyn Nesbit (Wikipedia)
It was reported that the initial reaction from the crowd was cheerful, since elaborate party tricks were common among the upper classes of New York society. Hysteria would however ensue.
Thaw would be found not guilty by reason of insanity, and would be plagued by mental illness until his death in 1947. Nesbit, who was present at the theatre the night of the shooting, would eventually divorce Thaw. She would go on to a modest career in vaudeville, film and even burlesque (when she was in her fifties). She moved on to a quieter life after World War II and died in 1967 at age 82.
“Profile” examined the life of “Ashcan School” painter George Luks, while this blurb in “Of All Things” gave us a glimpse of things to come:
On a lighter note, we end with comic commentary by Al Frueh on the Liquor Commission’s attempt to lock out patrons of New York’s speakeasies:
A New Yorker State of Mind 