September/October 2004 Feature

Jerome Charyn’s Early Broadway and its Jewish Luminaries

Why Broadway? Why the Jazz Age? And why now? In the last chapter of his lyrical, erudite, altogether captivating Gangsters & Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway, Jerome Charyn writes that he got the idea for the book during those awful first few days after 9/11, when, as luck would have it, he was stranded in Paris. He had never particularly cared for the Twin Towers, he says, (though obviously he deplored the loss of life and property that their destruction entailed), so a paean to them was out of the question. Instead, as he puts it, he “latched onto one particular place, Broadway, which had defined so much of New York. Its brashness, its melancholy, its rapid-fire speech.”1

Charyn recognized that “Broadway,” like “Hollywood,” “Madison Avenue,” and “Fleet Street,” is more than just a place. It is, to use the lit crit term, a signifier, or, as the rest of us would say, a brand name. And, as opposed to Hollywood, California, where very little filmmaking actually takes place, Broadway still is the epicenter of the theatrical works and nightlife that have made it a byword for entertainment and fast living for over a century.

Broadway meant “Broadway” even when “Broadway” wasn’t situated where it is now — on a roughly ten-block stretch in Manhattan’s West 40s and 50s. Legitimate theaters of the Gilded Age had clustered around Union, Madison, and Herald Squares, and the business part of show business had been centered in Tin Pan Alley — West 28th Street between Broadway and Sixth. When George M. Cohan asked us to give his regards to Broadway, “Broadway” started in the teens and reached as far north as Times Square, as Longacre Square was rechristened in 1904, the year of Cohan’s song.

The march northward eventually stopped when the Jazz Age fixed “Broadway” in its current location once and for all. It’s no coincidence that the 1900s through the 1920s, roughly the period of Gangsters and Gold Diggers, saw the construction of almost all the Broadway theaters we attend today. The teens and twenties also saw the emergence of America’s first great playwright, Eugene O’Neill, and the creation of the first canonical Broadway musicals and oldest show tunes that have come to be considered “standards.” The Jazz Age was also the period when, because movies began to dominate mass entertainment elsewhere, American theater became centralized as never before in New York — meaning on Broadway.

In focusing on the Jazz Age, then, Charyn has zeroed in on what may be the linchpin of the Main Stem’s history. More to the point, he also picked the Broadway epoch that (despite stiff competition) appears to have been the most rollicking, the most outlandish, the wickedest, the most notorious, and Rabelaisian and improbable — in short, the most fun. Fun isn’t all that Charyn is up to, need I add; the tone of Gangsters and Gold Diggers is by turns, mischievous, touching, riotous and elegiac. But the book is above all great fun, the most fun you’re likely to find between two covers for a long time.

Here they all are, captured in indelible prose snapshots, and leaping ebulliently off the page — a dizzying procession of the moguls, singers, dancers, artists, hacks, gangsters, writers, athletes, and hucksters who, collectively, defined an era. Charyn gives us, among others, Arnold Rothstein, a.k.a. The Brain, the mob boss with a head for figures who started out as a protégé of Nicky Arnstein, fixed the 1919 World Series, and ended up immortalized as Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby, though Charyn says that Fitzgerald, perhaps blinded by his antisemitism, got Rothstein dead wrong. (Damon Runyon did better in “The Brain Goes Home.”)

Charyn also gives us Fanny Brice, the gawky clown who married Nicky Arnstein and, when he was sent to Leavenworth, “stood in front of a bare black curtain at the Palace and sang ‘My Man’ to a mesmerized, weeping audience,” as well as Arnstein himself, the charming, hapless con man who “could talk like a college professor and art historian but had barely gone to school.”2 He also gives us Sime Silverman, the founder of Variety, and Florenz Ziegfeld, the glorifier of the American girl, who started out exhibiting a strongman at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, and whose first leading lady wasn’t American at all — she was Hannele Held, a traveling Yiddish singer from Warsaw whom he presented as Anna Held, a French star of the Folies Bergère. We also meet Billy Rose, the shorthand whiz who co-wrote “I Met a Million Dollar Baby in a Five and Ten Cent Store” and whose nightclub, Back Stage, had such a small stage that the only place Helen Morgan could find to sing was atop the piano (which, of course, became her signature pose).

Their stories, and by extension that of the Great White Way itself, are told in Charyn’s signature writing style — a mixture of urbanity, sly wit, and tough-guy savvy, whose appearance of carelessness can only have been the product of prodigious craft and cunning. Charyn’s language bobs, weaves, and dances, never slackening, never losing its footing, and never turning trite or maudlin. The book manages both to set a breathlessly readable pace and to find time for probing explications du texte of, among others, The Great Gatsby, Save Me the Waltz, several Runyon stories, as well as the movies Alexander’s Ragtime Band, Cotton Club, and even Chicago. Strewn profligately throughout the book are brilliant descriptors that effortlessly cap-ture the essences of things, making the reader see them as if for the first time: the Broadway as conjured up by Damon Runyon’s stories is “Breughel-like”; the Wool-worth Building is a “kind of Gothic cupcake”; Louise Brooks “had the power and the curse of reflection.”3

Gangsters and Gold Diggers includes passages on figures one wouldn’t necessarily have associated with Broadway. Sometimes Charyn manages to convince us that these people do belong here, as in the case of Babe Ruth, who went on the vaudeville circuit with a bogus mind-reading act during periods when he was banned from baseball, and William Randolph Hearst, who bought two seats — one for himself, one for his hat — to the Ziegfeld Follies every night for eight weeks to watch Marion Davies, his future maîtresse declarée, in the chorus line. The inclusion of Jack Johnson, the pioneering African-American boxing great, strikes one as less persuasive; it seems somewhat of a stretch when Charyn boldly states, “There might not have been a modern Broadway or a Jazz age if Johnson hadn’t come along and shoved himself against a white world and developed his own secret language and showmanship.”4

Still, it is salutary to be reminded of the corrosive racism that men like Johnson, Paul Robeson, and Bert Williams — the light-skinned African-American entertainer who was accepted by white audiences only when he performed in blackface — had to endure.5 Effervescent though his book may be, Charyn doesn’t slight the period’s viciousness, misery, and brutality — the violence, the alcoholism, the drug addiction, and the chaotic, wasted lives — as well as the pathological terror of being alone that seemed to characterize a Walter Winchell or an Al Jolson.

Winchell and Jolson are just two of the iconic people, places, and works of art turning up on these pages again and again, haunting the book as if they were dreams or, sometimes, nightmares, that Charyn can’t seem to get out of his head: Rothstein; Runyon; F. Scott and Zelda Fitzger-ald; Gatsby; the Ziegfeld Follies; the near-forgotten gangster Owen Madden, whom Charyn sees as the real-life figure most similar to the mysterious Jay Gatsby; and Lindy’s — not its latest theme-restaurant incarnation, but the real Lindy’s, whose cheesecake Fanny Brice had shipped to her whenever she was on tour, and on whose phone Rothstein got the fatal call summoning him to the Park Central Hotel, where he would be gunned down by Hump McManus.

As is to be expected, the book is studded with names of Jewish men and women, on both sides of the law, who helped make Broadway “Broadway.” Many of their names, like Sime Silverman, Izzy Einstein, and Monroe Rosenfeld (who coined the term “Tin Pan Alley”) were allowed to stay Jewish, but far more plentiful were the Jews who changed their names to make them sound more “American.” Thus Lenore Goldberg became Nora Bayes; Fanny Borach became Fanny Brice; Asa Yoelson became Al Jolson; Sophie Kalish became Sophie Tucker; William Samuel Rosenberg became Billy Rose; Edward Israel Iskowitz became Eddie Cantor, and so on and so on. Sometimes the change had occurred a generation earlier: George Gershwin’s father was born Morris Gershovitz; William Abraham added “Rodgers” as his surname in 1892, ten years before the birth of his son, Richard; and the father of Richard’s first great collaborator had already changed his name from Max Hertz to Max Hart by the time Lorenz was born.6,7 Walter Winchell’s father changed the family name from Weinschel to Winschel, and Walter eventually dropped the “s” and added the extra “l” when he was trying to make it in vaudeville.8

The fact that so many seminal figures in American show business were Jewish is, of course, not news to anyone, and it has, understandably, sparked a new and perhaps unanswerable “Jewish question”: How crucial, if at all, is the Jewishness of these extraordinary Jewish men and women to understanding their extraordinary accomplishments? The question is, if anything, more pressing when talking about early Broadway than about early Hollywood, since, if possible, the impact of Jews on the world of theater was even more fundamental. True, Jews did invent Hollywood, but on the business side of things, not the creative. Studio heads like Laemmle, Zukor, Mayer, Cohn, Goldwyn, Fox, Thalberg, and Selznick were all Jewish — Darryl F. Zanuck was the exception who proved the rule — but the most influential writers, directors and actors (Griffith, Chaplin, Ince, DeMille, Tourneur, Sennett, Pickford, the Gishes, Swanson, Langdon, Keaton, Lloyd), who actually made the films the moguls financed during Hollywood’s first decade-and-a-half, were not.9 On Broadway, it wasn’t just most of the producers and theater owners who were Jewish; most of the great lyricists and composers who came to dominate the new American musical were, too: Kern, Hammerstein, Berlin, Rodgers, Hart, Dietz, Schwartz, Youmans, the Gersh-wins. (Again, there was a gentile exception who proved the rule; his name was Cole Porter, though he didn’t enter his glory years until the Depression).

In his important and informative book, An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood, Neal Gabler strains a bit, in my opinion, in his effort to explain what it was about their Jewishness that made it possible for the pioneering cinema moguls to achieve what they did. As best as I can summarize Gabler’s complex argument, he posits that it was their perception of their own separateness as Jews that gave early film executives both the insatiable wish to fit in, and the necessary perspective on the American dream and way of life, to enable them to imagine a new art form depicting a fantasy America that became more real to moviegoers than the realities around them.10 Gabler’s thesis seems to me to beg the question of why it was a group of Jews, and not members of some other religious or ethnic minority, who created the big Hollywood studios. Also, as I’ve said, the Jews may have formed the institutional structures that made the movies America watched, but it was primarily non-Jews who made the movies themselves.

Andrea Most’s Making Americans: Jews and the Broadway Musical, a monograph about the first golden age of musicals, from 1925 to 1951, similarly states that as a group, “first and second-generation American Jewish writers, composers, and performers used the theater to fashion their own identities as Americans. In the musical, they discovered a theatrical form particularly well suited to representing the complexity of assimilation in America.... The Broadway stage was a space where Jews envisioned an ideal America and subtly wrote themselves into that scenario as accepted members of the mainstream American community.”11

Charyn, wisely in my opinion, doesn’t propose an overarching theory about Jews’ decisive contribution to the Jazz Age, preferring simply to pay brief tribute to that contribution, noting that “there might not have been a modern Broadway without the [Jewish] comedians, gossip columnists, songwriters, and singers that grew out of the ghetto, whether it was on the Lower East Side, Harlem (a Jewish ghetto before it was a black one), Newark, or Washington, DC.”12 He does offer a perspicuous analysis of the effect of Jewish entertainers’ Jewishness on their art: “Jewish comics and singers would develop into the fiercest imitators of all, as if their mockery were hiding a certain hysteria, an obsession to succeed at any cost, an eagerness to play the clown and the fool, because it was an excellent cover for one’s aggression.”13

One reason — not the only reason, but an important one — that the Jews achieved so much in show business is simple: because they could. The genteel antisemitism of the day may have thrown roadblocks in the paths of Jews trying to make it in respectable fields like law, banking, medicine, and academia, but when it came to entertainment, systemic antisemitism bordered on being a non-issue.

The lordly Alexander Woolcott could (and did) call George S. Kaufman “Christ Killer” to his face, but this may have been the dyspeptic critic’s idea of a joke, and besides, it didn’t stop him from becoming Kaufman’s great and good friend and Irving Berlin’s first biographer.14 Henry James may have been speaking for an entire generation of turn-of-the-century gentile intellectuals when he railed against “the Hebrew conquest of New York,” but this didn’t stop audiences, Jewish and non-Jewish alike, from making Smith & Dale’s Yiddish-inflected “Doctor Kronk-heit” sketch a huge hit.15 Would gentile audiences have responded as well to their antics if Smith & Dale had gone by their original surnames of Sultzer and Marks? Would Jewish audiences? We’ll never know. Certainly, most of the entertainers who did change their names made no secret of their Jewishness, and they, and their audiences, delighted in songs like “Sadie Salome, Go Home,” “Cohen Owes Me Ninety-Seven Dollars,” “At the Yiddishe Cabaret,” and “Who Married My Sister, Thomashevsky?”

Impresarios, and audiences, seemed not to care about ethnicity so much as talent. When the composer Harry von Tilzer hired a fourteen-year-old Izzy Baline (not yet Irving Berlin) to plug his songs, he didn’t ask whether Baline was Jewish, but whether he could carry a tune and had the gumption to sit among a group of perfect strangers and start singing at the top of his lungs.16 And a dozen years later, when the Episcopalian producer Charles Dillingham needed a composer for his big 1914 musical at the New Amsterdam, he too hired Broadway first-timer Berlin, presumably not pondering whether Berlin was Jewish or not, because Berlin was the top songwriter in Tin Pan Alley.17

And in fact, it often wasn’t gentiles, but Jews, who were doing the hiring. The Ziegfeld Follies, Rose’s nightclubs, the Shubert theaters, the Klaw and Erlanger vaudeville houses, the Orpheum circuit — all were in Jewish hands.18 The old canard about Jews controlling large sectors of the entertainment industry was, to a large extent, true — at least on Broadway, at least during the Jazz Age.

Significantly, for several of the Jazz Age greats, it was only later, when they ventured outside relatively tolerant, polyglot Broadway, that they encountered antisemitism at its intractable worst, as when Berlin discovered that merely being the most celebrated, wealthiest songwriter in American history didn’t mean that telegraph-czar Clar-ence Mackay would actually allow the Jewish genius to marry his daughter.19 And, in a famous, presumably true incident that has launched a thousand different retell-ings, Groucho Marx was rejected by a restricted Los Angeles country club because of his religion. (“My daughter’s only half-Jewish. Can she wade into the pool up to her waist?” asked the immortal clown.)

All this was a far cry from the meritocracy of talent — always with the lamentable exception of the exclusion of African-Americans — that Broadway provided during the first decades of this century to Jews and other ethnic groups. There had never been such an explosion of popular culture, let alone of Jewish popular culture, in American history. Some might say that there has never been a comparable efflorescence since then. Now, thanks to Jerome Charyn’s scrupulous, invigorating, warts-and-all account, readers can experience the sights, the sounds, the very soul, in fact, of that incomparable time and place all over again.•

About the author
Joseph Triebwasser is a writer and psychiatrist living in New York City. His first film, Friends and Family, is available on VHS and DVD. He is currently working on a film adaptation of Penelope Fitzgerald’s novel, At Freddie’s.