The Barbizon by Paulina Bren (best novels to read for students .TXT) 📗

Long and other young women inNew York in the 1920s, they frequented them. For the very first time in New York’shistory, women were being asked to pull up a stool at the bar. Amuraled sign over the entrance door to Leon and Eddie on West Fifty-Second read,“Through These Portals, the Most Beautiful Girls in the World Pass OUT.” NewYork’s society girls especially were encouraged to take their place at the bar,drinking imported booze procured from rumrunners off the Long Islandshores—although Lois preferred cognac after she learned it was the most difficultto fake and thus least likely to be contaminated. She left the booze brewed in NewYork’s subterranean distilleries to others.

The swankiest speakeasy of all was Marlborough Houseat 15 East Sixty-First, just off Fifth Avenue. Among New York’s Social Register,it was known simply as Moriarty’s—after the brothers who startedit. Anyone could enter the front door because it was too crass to ask who a person mightbe right there out on the street. So “in” meant only a vestibule, sealed inprecious woods, where one then pushed a pearl button and presented their credentials. Ifthey were let in, really in, they headed up the narrow stairs that opened onto asumptuous room with walls scarlet up to chair level and silver the rest of the way tothe ceiling. French wall benches ran the length of the walls, upholstered in silverleather, and mural storks of white with scarlet beaks streaked across the silversurface. Doors were enameled in scarlet too, and the lighting was dim to catch thesilver flickers. But the showstopper was the cabaret room above, done up in royal blue,copper, and mirrors. The walls there were made entirely of mirrors so wherever one sat,one could see whoever else was there. For entertainment, Moriarty’s chose noveltyover big names to wow the jaded Social Register set: an Egyptian magician, a hot-torchsinger, foreign dancers. The Moriarty brothers—Mort, Dan, and Jim—weresaloon owners turned speakeasy aficionados, who were smart enough to know how tosidestep the gangsters and keep Marlborough House free of them. When Prohibition wasfinally repealed on December 5, 1933, Jim, the remaining brother, was on the SocialRegister himself, with a country estate and a stable of polo ponies.

Others already had the ponies but still could not resist the lure of thecelebrity status of speakeasy operator. Roger Wolfe Kahn, son offinancier and railroad magnate, Otto Kahn, opened one. Walter Chrysler Jr., son of theauto king, almost bought one before he was restrained by his family. The son of thedrama critic for the New York Herald operated the Artists’ Club inGreenwich Village, and hired as the hostess Yvonne Shelton, a trouser-wearing friend ofa former New York mayor, while a plump Brooklyn-born Russian Jew, Bertha Levine, stagename Spivy, sang ditties that were far from subtle. New York’sBroadway, filled in those days with “cafeterias, electric shoe-shiningstands, nut shops, physical-culture demonstrations and five-cent dance halls,”gave way to an “invisible paradise” of speakeasies in the Fifties thatstretched from Fifth Avenue to Park Avenue. The best speakeasies began to rent outentire houses, leasing and remodeling the residences of industrial tycoons and oldmoney. Once, a debutante fell apart after her fourth cocktail as it suddenly dawned onher that this was the very house in which she had spent much of her childhood.

Altogether there were hundreds of speakeasies all over Manhattan, cateringto every class. At the Five O’Clock Club, Florenz “Flo” Ziegfeld wouldarrive with his bevy of beauties, and the orchestra would break into song. At theNapoleon Club, always popular, standing room at the bar was three to four persons deep,and included Believe-It-Or-Not Robert Ripley and Al Jolson, the “world’sgreatest entertainer,” as he was known. Marlene Dietrich often visited the EmbassyClub and Ethel Merman regularly sang there. At King’s Terrace,Gladys Bentley, a Harlem Renaissance star, played to a packed house. Gladys was anAfrican American woman who favored men’s clothes, particularly a gleaming whitetuxedo and top hat. When performing, she shockingly alternated between soprano and bass,between sentimental and risqué songs. Dark-skinned, masculine, corpulent, she wasone of the few women on the scene who was openly, defiantly gay, flaunting herpreferences as she growled popular contemporary songs whose sanitized words she switchedout for her own obscene and often hilarious lyrics. It wasn’t just the society setthat was crazy for her: Langston Hughes called her “an amazing exhibition ofmusical energy.” She’d been “discovered” byNew York society at Harry Hansberry’s Clam House in Harlem, the most overt of allof Harlem’s homosexual speakeasy dives.

For the sake of appearances, before the evening’s entertainmentbegan, it was best to start with dinner at the speakeasy; gourmet meals of butteredlobster at bargain basement prices that did not even cover the cost of theingredients but were subsidized by the illegal sale of alcohol. Delicacies were servedup by French chefs who had jumped ship from New York’s high-end restaurantsbecause, with the onset of Prohibition, they had forfeited their bottle of wine a day,explicit in their salary contracts. With law-abiding restaurants no longer able todeliver on that promise, after a year European chefs had begun to abandon their posts,returning to France, Switzerland, and Italy. The speaks, as they were known, lured themback with the promise of free-flowing wine. At the Park Avenue speak, a modernist dreamof black, green, rose, yellow, and silver that cost $85,000 to design, and that was evenwithout the furnishings, Monsieur Lamaze served dinners in a room with vaulted greenceilings and two great circular, frameless mirrors opposite each other, so that the darkroom seemed to stretch into infinity. The baby lamb on his menu camefrom a special farm in Ohio, and every morning the express train from Florida unloadedthirty pounds of pompano butter fish for his pompano bonne femme, served with mustardsauce—leftover pompanos were divided up among the staff. His lobster Lamaze wasthe talk of the town, and it wasn’t past him to offer Burgundy snails or wild boarfrom the Vosges. There was no menu, only a clipboard of the day’s groceries. Adollar for lunch, two and a half for dinner. It didn’t even cover the train farefor the pompano.

Illegal booze, premarital sexual encounters, a body