Prohibition New York City

Speakeasy Queen Texas Guinan, Blind Pigs, Drag Balls & More

David Rosen

• Publisher: The History Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781467146418
• eBook ISBN:
  9781439671740
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

"The drunken '20s started roaring almost immediately, but they were loudest in Manhattan. David Rosen's [book] has all the snazzy, jazzy details." — NY Daily News
Texas Guinan was the queen of New York's speakeasies in the Roaring Twenties. Her clubs were backed by leading gangsters and welcomed some of the city's biggest sharks and swankest swells. Movie stars, flappers, madams, musicians and more flocked to midtown's "Wet Zone," Greenwich Village and Harlem for inebriated entertainment. Patrons threw cultural norms aside as free-flowing hooch lubricated the jazz joints, sex circuses and drag balls that fueled the era's insurgent spirit. At the center of the party was Texas with her trademark catchphrases and guarantee to have a good time. Author David Rosen recounts Texas's adventurous life alongside tales of Gotham's nightlife when abstinence was the law of the land and breaking the law an all-American indulgence.

1

PARTY TIME

PARTY GIRL

In 1922, as Prohibition descended on New York, Emile Gervasini, impresario of the Beaux Arts Café, a cabaret on West 40^thStreet, invited Texas Guinian to attend the opening night party for his new speakeasy, the Gold Room. At one point during the festive evening, Guinan, a local theatrical and movie talent, was encouraged to take the stage. She mixed song with storytelling, and the patrons wouldn’t let her stop! Entranced by her captivating presence, they forced Gervasini to keep his speakeasy open until 5:30 a.m., well after curfew. Gervasini was so impressed he offered Tex a job as the club’s greeter. New York nightlife would never be the same.

Texas was then performing her cowgirl act at Broadway’s Winter Garden Theatre. A real cowgirl from Texas who had costarred with William S. Hart in many early one- and two-reel westerns, Guinan came to New York more than a decade earlier to pursue a career on Broadway and found modest success. Big, brassy and a bottle blond, she played her cards in Gotham, Europe and Hollywood; at thirty-eight, just as Prohibition was being imposed, she was hitting her prime. A lifetime in entertainment led to a night that changed her life and the city’s nightlife.

At the Gold Room, Texas furthered the role of the female onstage hostess, the master of ceremonies pioneered by Sophie Tucker. What is more, she created the floor show, a Broadway staple. While Tex was the host and main attraction, she added Joe Fejer, a Hungarian violinist, and the noted pianist and composer Sigmund Romberg to her show. As host, Tex received $100 a week, plus tips—$1,542 in 2020 dollars. “Shaking hands with her customers was about Texas’ only method of allurement,” recalled John Stein, her manager. “She began speaking to her guests as they entered,” he added. “Texas never forgot a face or name and often some celebrity or millionaire would find himself blushing at an unexpected familiarity but she would shortly turn his uneasiness into a sort of thrill at the precocity.”²⁷

Tempted by a competing offer from Joe Pani, who ran the King Cole Room, she moved her show, with Joe Fejer and his combo, to the Knickerbocker Hotel. It was a smashing success. A lucrative counteroffer quickly followed from Gervasini, and she returned to the Gold Room. Texas was the city’s hottest attraction.

The reopening of the Gold Room was a major social event. As an attendee recalled, the gala was “jammed with glitter and exotic fragrance.” Among those in attendance were former president Woodrow Wilson’s daughter Margaret; Dorothy Caruso, the wife of the legendary tenor; the celebrated actor John Barrymore; and Mrs. Anne Harriman Vanderbilt, one of America’s wealthiest women. Tex extended a special invitation to Rudolph Valentino, who earlier had worked for her as a flower boy when he first arrived in America and now was at the height of his fame. Valentino insisted that he would only attend with his second wife, Natacha Rambova, if Texas made sure that his first wife, Jean Acker, would not be present. Acker had a habit of greeting Rudi and Natacha “with a loud and pronounced hiss.” Texas persuaded Acker not to attend.

Rudolph Valentino and Natacha Rambova, 1923. Wikimedia Commons.

Amid the opening night festivities, however, a strangely dressed woman accompanied the socialite Peggy Hopkins Joyce. The guest was “about the wildest looking woman that Texas had ever seen,” a participant observed. She wore a garish red wig, a low-cut black velvet evening gown and a diamond necklace and earrings. Most striking, her makeup was glaringly drawn in red, white and blue.

Greeting Tex, Joyce introduced the mysterious guest as the Countess of Itch from Cuba. Texas immediately recognized her as none other than Acker and saw catastrophe in the making. She warned Valentino and then made an ingenious proposition. Stein, who attended, vividly recalled the scene:

Miss Guinan led Miss Acker out on the floor and introduced her as the Countess of Itch, the former wife of Rudolph Valentino. Mr. Valentino then came forward. “There is a gentleman who desires the honor of your partnership in the next dance, Countess,” Texas said. “Let me present the Count of Scratch.”

To the song “The Girl I Left Behind Me,” the couple began to dance.²⁸

“HELLO, SUCKER!”

Texas Guinan fronted New York’s most notorious speakeasy, the El Fey Club, located at 123 West 45^th Street, as the second phase of Prohibition got underway. Nils “Thor” Granlund—long known as “NTG”—introduced Texas to rackets boss Larry Fay, who offered her an opportunity to host his new club, which had opened in 1922. Described as the “horse-faced racketeer,” Fay was the boss of the taxicab racket and called “Sweetheart” by those who dared.²⁹ No one forgot that one of Fay’s backers was Owney “the Murderer” Madden, one of the city’s leading mobsters. The El Fey had a peephole and required a membership card to get in. It featured silk-covered walls, food and drink, skimpily clad showgirls and a tiny dance floor “the size of a small white envelope.” Popular entertainer Jimmy Durante found it “more like an intimate party.” Texas became the El Fey’s hostess on May 1, 1924.

Stanley Walker, an editor of the New York Herald Tribune and author of the Jazz Age classic The Night Club Era, knew Texas well. His observation gives a sense of this bigger-than-life speakeasy legend: “Texas Guinan, in her fashion, during the boom times of the twenties combined the curious and admirable traits of Queen Elizabeth, Machiavelli, Tex Rickard, P.T. Barnum and Ma Pettingill.” (George “Tex” Rickard ran Madison Square Garden in the ’20s and is credited with staging the first $1 million boxing match; Ma Pettingill is a character performed by Maude Eburne, who acted in dozens of films between 1930 and 1949, in Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), costarring Charles Laughton.) As Walker observed, “The secret of her success was her candor. She told people they were fools, and were being rooked, and they liked it.…Turned loose in a night club she could perform wonders.”³⁰ Sophie Tucker recalled that Texas “had something that made everybody feel instantly at ease and ready for a good time.” Edmund Wilson had a cooler perception, finding her a “formidable woman, with her pearls, her prodigious gleaming bosom, her abundant and gleaming beautiful bleached yellow coiffure, her bear-trap shining white teeth.”

Nils Thor Granlund, Billboard January 10, 1942. Wikimedia Commons.

Texas was celebrated for her legendary catchphrases such as “Don’t give a sucker a break!” She made famous a host of other sayings that became part of the ’20s lexicon. “Butter and egg men” referred to generous tippers, and “Give the little lady a great big hand” was asked of patrons in recognition of a showgirl’s performance.³¹ Other memorable cracks of hers were: “Remember he may be all the world to his mother, but he is just a cover charge to you”; “Never let a fool kiss you and never let a kiss fool you”; “Virtue pays—if you can find a market for it”; and “Home is a great place—after all the other places have closed.” Her toughness is enshrined in the alleged comment of one of her regulars: “Reach down in your heart, Texas, and get me a piece of cracked ice.”³² (See Appendix 1 for some more of Texas’s one-liners.)

PARTY TIME TEXAS STYLE

The El Fey was formally incorporated as the El Fey Club and, according to Stein, “the first sophisticated organized rendezvous for selling liquor. It gave the public a taste of the brew which Mr. Volstead had put his curse upon and it also gave the public a peep over the transom into the glamour of the underworld.”³³ Stein was an El Fey late-night regular and intimately familiar with its upscale culture. He described it as “a long smoke filled room festooned with bright colored hangings.” The club was tightly packed with small tables and chairs and crowded with festive, inebriated patrons. Showgirls selling cigarettes and various trinkets slithered through the club in scanty outfits. Stein knew a cigarette girl, Ethel, whom he recalled as “a charming girl in blue satin trousers and wearing a crimson sash [who] comes offering cigarettes, arriving at each table like a blown wisp of silk or a moth to a flower.” Another girl wandering among the tables was Kitty Cripps, “a smart girl in black with silver flowers on her hips,” who offered large dolls that ever-gallant male customers bought for their female companions.

The dance floor was jammed with merry partygoers. Stein paints a clear picture of the festive atmosphere:

In a little open space, scarcely large enough for a dozen people to stand, twenty couples, with heads or ears or lips pressed tightly together, managed somehow to move in a cheek to cheek mockery of a dance.

The dancing was so thick that collision was inevitable. One couple, bumped strongly in postern at an unstable moment, rolled deliciously on the floor. Their eyes looked upward with most humorous surprise and appeal but no anger. They were like government bonds, begging not to be walked upon.

A jazz band blazed blatantly an unending rhythm. Waiters pushed their way through the throng, red faced and nervously trying to balance their trays of silver topped bottles and elaborately prepared sandwiches above the heads of the revelers.

However, past midnight, a stir filled the club: the Queen had arrived. Stein captures the excitement of Texas’s appearance:

Suddenly there crashed in a long, loud blast of sound from the basses; the pianist dug his slender fingers into the ivories; the leader’s baton was held high and trembled like a Florida palm in a hurricane.…

“Ya—a-a-ay, Texas,” bawled the crowd.

She made her entrance, with all the night-owl energy of her roistering personality. She was gowned in clinging, flaming red. Her hair—burnished gold—tumbled, brushed and curled in riotous unconventionality.

You knew she was close to forty, yet she looked rather ageless. She pranced in, her arms aloft, her crimsoned lips broadened in a brilliant smile—Why not? Look at the capacity business. And at her heels a dozen or so more semi-nude dancing girls, laughing, chattering, fluttering.

“Hello! Sucker!,” the Queen has shouted, then stood beaming, sparkling, effervescing.³⁴

Officially, New York nightlife formally ended at 1:00 a.m., and many speaks stayed open until 3:00 a.m. But the El Fey didn’t close until 5:00 a.m., keeping the party going til dawn. While the club legally could hold only eighty patrons, it often jammed in two hundred or more people. Alcohol passed through a hole in a wall that connected the speak to a tenement building next door to keep liquor storage off the premises. Popular legend suggests that the El Fey offered watered-down scotch for $1.50 a drink and charged $25 for a bottle of ginger ale champagne. Rumor has it that Guinan and Fay took in more than $700,000 during one ten-month period; this would be equivalent to $10.5 million in 2020 dollars.³⁵

The club featured a troupe of forty scantily clad fan dancers dubbed the “Guinan Graduates”; they performed at Texas’s many other clubs. Ruby Keeler and George Raft got their starts at the club...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Party Time
• 2. Speakeasy City
• 3. From Cowgirl to Showgirl
• 4. Party Time in the Wet Zone
• 5. Party Time Downtown
• 6. Party Time Uptown
• 7. Party Time in the Other Gotham
• 8. Sex and Other Pleasures
• 9. Pansy City
• 10. Gangland City
• 11. Party’s Over
• Conclusion: Twenty-First-Century Prohibition
• Appendix 1. Texas Guinan Sayings
• Appendix 2. Glimpses of Texas Guinan
• Appendix 3. Gotham Speakeasies
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author