Sign In to Your Account
Subscribers have complete access to the archive.
Sign In Not a Subscriber?Join Now; ;
THE CABARETS OF NEW YORK
And the Nomadic Life of Our Midnight Sons
BRIGHTON AIRLY
I AM qualified to write at great length on the Bedouins of New York. By that I mean the eager and restless thousands whose night-life is made up of a continuous and nomadic shifting of their tent-sites.
Starting at one cabaret, they no sooner become ensconced at a table, and find out from the waiter who the persons are at the next table to them, than they are up and away to the next place on the trail, where they spend half an hour or so in nudging their way about the dance-floor and consuming something to eat in order to pay the management for keeping the lights going. * Then on again, stopping and starting again, checking their wraps and bailing them out again, hailing taxis and dismissing them, until Jack's, the cabaret of last resort, is finally reached, and old Mrs. Thomas W. Aurora is gilding the East with her famous preparation of Sunrise and Morning Blush.
And it is of the journeyings of two of these cabaret wanderers that I would write. I would show what were the forces that ever urged them on. I would describe the abnormal restiveness which possessed them, and paint a vivid penpicture of the oases along the route. I will try to do it in a charming style— perhaps like George Borrow's, so that it may go down through the ages as a precious record of the life of two Nomads in New York.
MY recollections of our first stopping place are vague and confused, for I was very young then. You see, it was only a little after eleventhirty. But I do remember feeling a certain childish wincing at the thought that the lady dancer who was performing a Greek Saraband might possibly get a sliver in her heel if she went prancing about like that in her little bare feet. I remembered once getting a sliver in my own heel, as I was goings from the bath-house to the bathingbeach, and ever since then I have wanted to warn ladies when I saw them going about barefooted.
I merely mention this to show how immature and unformed my first impressions were, and how closely allied to elementary emotions. J anet has since told me that it was at the Cocoanut Grove that we started, and I believe that she is right. She follows those things much more closely than I do.
I don't remember what it was that sent us from there. I think maybe that it was the hammers. Each table was furnished with little hammers for the purposes of applause. Now, it so happened that a man had been all the afternoon just outside Janet's window nailing up a trellis while she was trying to snatch a nap, and when the guests started expressing their delight at the ripe blending of the voices of Messrs. Van and Schenck, Janet was on her feet in an instant and headed for the hat-girl. And anyway, we had been there almost an hour.
FROM that time on, my impressions became more vivid. I was growing older, and felt less conscious of the fact that I wasn't wearing the best possible style of collar with my dinnercoat. At the Cocoanut Grove this had been a constant source of mortification to me.
I have good reason to believe that it was Reisenweber's that we next moved to. The morning was yet young; we were fresh and gay, and we moved about for the very joy of moving. But somehow we were never happy there. Heaven knows, we had enough to be happy with, and often now, as we sit together by the elevator-shaft of a cool evening, Janet and I wonder to ourselves what there was that came into our lives at Reisenweber's that palled. It may have been the chicken salad. It may have been because we had a table to the windward of the orchestra. Perhaps it was because five persons, at five different tables in our bailiwick, persisted in helping the orchestra along by humming "Poor Butterfly." We have never been able to locate definitely our disaffection.
But there was one thing that we did find as we sat there, something that comes but a few times to a man in the course of a year: the ingredients of a bon mot. On each table at Reisenweber's was a little card saying, "On account of the elaborate entertainment we are obliged to make a couvert charge of 25 cents per person, unless an order for food is given." Now, the similarity between the words "couvert" and "overt" is simply staggering, and, if one could only bring the conversation around to it, so that it wouldn't sound forced, one could refer to this as an "overt charge" or something like that. But I have never been able to get things to a point where it could be said in a sufficiently off-hand manner, and so here I am, with a perfectly good line left on my hands, like a drug in the market. Out of fairness, I ought to say that the idea was Janet's in the first place.
So we hadn't been at Reisenweber's long before the cosmic urge swept over us, and we called for our check and departed.
OUTSIDE, the night was drizzly, and with a shudder we dove into a taxi for a ride of two blocks to "Au Caprice," which was to be our next tenting-ground. Home-life is all very well in its way, but there is a certain feeling of getting about which one has when going the rounds of the cafes, that a man who stays at home every minute of the night, or even a few minutes of the night, never experiences. It is the spirit of the Arab, the lure of Rommany Rye, the Call of the Tsigomes; the whisper of the carefree Gypsies.
At "Au Caprice" we found that one must be a member of the "Club," before ascending to the Domino Room, but what is one club more or less, when you haven't any home? We settled here, and proceeded to scour the woods in the vicinity, for something to eat. Janet came back first, dragging a small green mint, while I, being a poorer marksman, had to content myself with a few unpretentious oysters. 'It really didn't matter so much what we had, so long as the waiter was pleased and we had a clear path to the dance floor.
I remember feeling quite flattered that, when we entered the arena for our first dance, the orchestra stood up as one man and continued to play on their feet (you know very well what I mean) the whole time we were dancing. A rather pretty way to make new-comers feel at home, I thought.
OUR stay at "Au Caprice" was very happy, and I even thought for a while that we had found the ideal home where we might settle for good and bring up our little ones in the subdued atmosphere of the black and white mural decorations. But the God of the Nomads had something else in store for us. For, in spite of the fact that we sat at the next table to Joan Sawyer herself—so near, in fact, that we could hear distinctly (by inclining the head slightly in that direction, as if looking at the design on the wall) the terms of some business deal she was discussing with a small man in a sack suit—in spite of this big advantage in our life, we were beset by a dreadful depression, the cause of which can be set forth in a few words (as words go) and the resuU of which was to drive us on in our never-ending pilgrimage.
It came about in this way. We had been looking about to see what people we could find who would make good telling-about at luncheon the next day. Such were not hard to find. Here was Olive Thomas; there was Mae Murray, and over there, escorted by two stalwarts, could it be? . . . yes, there was no doubt . . . it was ... it was one of the Dolly Sisters. For any purposes of mine it made no difference which one. The important thing was that there was only one—and that she was in a blue dress.
Continued on page 132
Continued, from page 69
It wasn't so bad at first. One could just glance in that direction and say, "There's one of the Dolly twins." But then, after a while, the question arose, "Where's the other?" Now, once you had started on this line of thought, the further question, "How do you know that this one isn't the other?" was inevitable. You can imagine that, after a while, this sort of thing would become wearing, even to a phlegmatic man.' I was like the nervous person who nearly died of fidgets waiting for the man in the room above him to drop his other boot on the floor. Here was only one Dolly Sister. It wasn't natural. One kept waiting, all on edge, for the other one to show up or else for this one to disappear. There was a frightful lack of finality about it that nearly drove me mad. I tried not to look at her, but that is quite a task to set one's self, even when one is with Janet. So finally, when I could stand it no longer, I seized my hat check and, beckoning in a lordly manner to Janet, we made for the elevator and were off again.
LET US pass over the long skidding ride to Montmartre. Here we were again elected to a club. I don't know who it could have been who said that New York clubs are so exclusive. We had hardly checked our things when we were notified of our election and presented with membership card No. 3926. Why, it took me no more time than it took me to break into the National Geographical Society.
We might now be said to have reached the noon time of our existence. Here we were, two beautiful, pulsating creatures, eating consomme with noodles, at a table covered with a red and white cloth at three fifteen in the morning. I was a man now and was able to point out two of the dancers as members of the cast of "You're In Love," a play which I had seen only the week before. It lends a great deal of authority to be able to do that. I felt that at last we were settled, that we could go right on from noodle soup to noodle soup for the rest of our lives and still keep young.
And then a terrible thing happened. I looked toward the entrance, where the membership committee of the club was sitting in executive session, and saw them electing three new-comers. There were two men and . . . yes, yes . . . two men and . . . one small, dainty slip of a girl in blue! I choked and clutched at the red tablecloth.
"A Dolly Sister!" I screamed and hid my face.
Was it the one I had seen before, or the other? At any rate, they were not both there, and I couldn't bear to think of sitting through another hour of what I had just experienced at "Au Caprice." I am naturally a man of great self-control, but I couldn't trust myself to remain there in the face of this, one of the greatest nerve strains of the age. I had once seen a futurist portrait entitled "Absence of Mable Dodge." I thought it was funny at the time. But now I would have given half of my noodle soup to have been able to put my shattered condition into a picture and to call it "Absence of One Dolly Sister." With a sob we left the place—without paying the bill.
FROM that time on our lives were changed. I had gone through the fire, and although Janet stood by me, I could see that she, too, was different. We moved on to Healy's and sat in "The Balconades" and nibbled solids, but the old verve was gone. We didn't even smile at a very old couple whom we saw two-stepping. I tried to assume an air of gaiety, but it fell flat, and once I came very near leaping at the boy who sold pechili nuts, when he thrust his little tray in my face. I could see by Janet's expression that I was growing gray and feeble. It is a terrible thing to see this coming on and not to be able to stop it. And so, without enthusiasm for the present, or hope for the future, we gathered up our things and went to Jack's.
And here we are, at the end of our wanderings. It was a beautiful route, but we are done with it. Five-fifteen A. M.! How far ahead that seemed when we started out. How we said to each other, "When we are old and shall have reached Jack's, we shall still be the same, and still order the same things, won't we, dear?"
But we are not the same, and we are eating scrambled eggs—and bacon. Slowly the front of the Hippodrome assumes a tint of gray. It is morning . . . and almost bed-time.
Subscribers have complete access to the archive.
Sign In Not a Subscriber?Join Now