The Telephone Booth Indian Page 11
Because of his apparently excellent connections, Tim in 1926 became a figure in national politics as manifested in the professional prize ring. James A. Farley was then Chairman of the New York State Athletic Commission. Farley, who had always dreamed of luring the colored voters away from the Republican party, had recognized Harry Wills as the leading contender for the world's heavyweight championship, then held by Jack Dempsey, who was in notoriously poor shape. Gene Tunney, an IrishAmerican heavyweight born in Greenwich village, also was challenging Dempsey. Tex Rickard, the promoter, preferred this match. But since the New York Irish always voted Democratic anyway, there were no votes to gain by aiding Tunney. Tunney's manager, Billy Gibson, was a bookmaker of the common grandstand variety. Scrambling for political support, Gibson thought that Mara could induce Governor Smith to overrule the Athletic Commission. In return for Tim's influence, Gibson and Tunney promised him twentyfive per cent of the fighter's earnings as champion if Tunney beat Dempsey. The influence didn't work. Eventually, however, Rickard put the match on in Philadelphia, where it drew more than a million dollars, and Tunney won the title. When Mara asked for his share of the earnings, Tunney said that since Mara had not done anything for him, he owed nothing to Mara. After Tunney retired as champion, in 1928, the bookmaker brought action against him for $405,000. The MaraTunney suit came to trial in the New York Supreme Court in the fall of 1930. The jury found for Tunney. Mara's attorneys appealed for a new trial. Tunney in 1932 paid Mara $30,000 to settle the case, and since then both men have claimed a victory.
Before the autumn of 1925, Mara had never seen a football game. In that season he became the owner of New York's first bigleague professional football team. Bookmakers, like clergymen and physicians, are famous for their susceptibility to new forms of investment. So when promoters of the National League of Professional Football Clubs, which had begun in the Middle West, decided to invade New York, they offered the franchise to Mara. He bought it because it cost only $2500. He hired Bob Folwell, former coach at the Naval Academy, to assemble a team.
The first edition of the Giants included a glittering set of names, but wasn't a particularly good team by professional standards. Mara's publicity man distributed vast numbers of complimentary tickets. He even supplied a band and a cheering section of small boys to simulate college atmosphere. But the Giants lost money until the postseason game against Red Grange and the Chicago Bears. In 1925, Grange was America's leading hero. When, at the end of the 1925 intercollegiate season, he turned professional and his New York debut was announced, the ticket line began to form at Mara's office in the Knickerbocker Building. Thousands of enthusiasts were turned away from the Polo Grounds on the Sunday of the game. The contest drew $56,000 and gave Tim such a millennial vision of what professional football might eventually be that he became an irrepressible football fan. On one occasion, when his Giants beat the Bears in Chicago, 30, he rushed out on the field like a freshman to grab the ball from the referee. “The winning team gets the ball!” he yelled, a stickler for campus tradition. The referee didn't know him and waved him away. Tim grappled with him; some Chicago players joined the scuffle, and when Tim broke away, there were cleat marks on his habitual spats. But he had the ball under his arm.
The president of Mara University, as those whimsical fellows, the sports writers, sometimes term the football Giants, usually watches the games from a window of the baseball Giants' clubhouse behind center field. He gets enough fresh air at the race track in summer, he says. Ever since Tim started the team, his immediate family has gone footballmad. Mrs. Mara, an attractive, younglooking woman whom Tim married in 1907, made an important suggestion at the first game she saw. She noticed that the Giants' bench was on the south side of the field, and as twilight came on was in shadow. She said the Giants ought to move to the warm side and let the visiting postgraduates suffer. Tim's sons, although neither played football at Fordham, have developed into subtle theorists from attending Giant practice.
Mara's most startling peculiarity does not at once meet the eye. It takes time to explain, and most people are incredulous even after he explains it. Mara is destitute. His only assets are about one hundred dollars in pocket cash and two watches. This poverty, in which he takes a good deal of honest, jovial pride, stems from another law suit, which closely followed his wrangle with Tunney. In 1928, after Al Smith had been nominated for President on the Democratic ticket, outoftown Democrats showed a marked reluctance to contribute to the Smith campaign fund. John J. Raskob, National Chairman of the party, turned for aid to the County Trust Company of New York, a bank friendly to Tammany. A state law forbids banks to lend funds to political parties. The County Trust officers, however, said they saw no objection to lending money to responsible Democrats on their own notes, endorsed by Raskob. In spite of Smith's having disappointed him in the Tunney affair, Mara signed a note for $50,000, and the bank turned the cash over to the Democratic National Committee. Other Tammany men of substance signed similar notes. After the election, the bank moved to collect on the notes. Mara and several of the other signees were at first astonished, then indignant. They protested that the notes had been dummies, made so that the bank might have collateral to show for its loans to the party. They admitted an agreement that, if the National Committee failed to raise $4,000,000 for its campaign, it might use the notes. But, Mara said, the records of the committee showed it had raised $4,006,000 in cash. The bank sued Mara and Patrick Kenny, a Yonkers contractor, in a test case. Smith administered the coup de grace to his beautiful friendship with Mara by appearing on the stand for the County Trust.
“The jury didn't believe him,” Tim recalls with relish. “They believed me.” But although the jury absolved Mara and Kenny, the bank wouldn't. For two years the case dragged through the higher courts, and the County Trust won its appeal. When it tried to collect, the bank found that Mara was legally destitute, although he appeared the picture of prosperity. He had founded a large and flourishing coal firm, the Mara Fuel Company; his wife and his brother owned all the stock in it. His sons owned the football team, now consistently profitable. As for the bookmaking business conducted under his name, Tim said he had no financial interest in it; he was just a manager. Tim's credit customers of the track received weekly statements and settled by check, but he had no bank account. When the customers won, they got checks signed by Walter Kenny, Tim's cashier, who is a son of his codefendant.
Tim's destitution does not interfere with his enjoyment of life. Daily he visits the various business enterprises in which he has no financial interest. During the racing season, he still spends all his afternoons at the track, nowadays in the character of a simple bettor. Periodically he makes trips to Washington, from which he returns with casual anecdotes of what he said to important politicians and what they said to him. Occasionally he plays golf. Last fall, shortly before the Elks made him an honorary life member, he presented them with an organ. Jimmy Walker accepted the gift in the name of the lodge.
Tim has his sentimental side. He enjoys singing ballads like “The Rose of Tralee.” He even has his softer moments at the track. During one spring meeting at Jamaica, he was touched to the core by the fine spirit of a man who insisted on paying him fifty dollars which the man said he had borrowed from Tim fifteen years before. Tim accepted the money under protest. In the next race, the mysterious stranger bet him two hundred dollars on a horse named Galloping, 2 to 1 to show, and won four hundred dollars from him. “Maybe,” Tim says, “it would have been better if I'd never seen the bum.”
• Your Hat, Sir? •
n the year 1904 a man named Harry Susskind, then in his early twenties, looked through a window of Captain Jim Churchill's crowded restaurant at Fortysixth Street and Broadway. He noticed that the male patrons laid their overcoats and hats on chairs and balanced their walking sticks precariously against tables. This represented a loss of income to Captain Churchill, a retired police officer, since obviously if every third or fourth chair was occupie
d by an overcoat, the space available for customers was reduced by a third or a quarter. To Susskind, the overcoats represented a financial future. He went in and proposed that Captain Churchill set aside a corner of the vestibule for coat racks. He offered to provide a couple of girls to help customers off with their coats, to check them, and return them as the customers went out. This would, incidentally, relieve Captain Churchill of responsibility for hats that customers sometimes exchanged by mistake and for canes that bibulous owners insisted they had brought into Churchill's when as a matter of fact the sticks were safe in the umbrella stand at home. Susskind promised to wear a uniform and personally supervise the checking. Over and above all the services he proposed to render, he offered Captain Churchill three thousand dollars a year. Churchill had considered hiring a couple of wardrobe attendants himself, but had boggled at the extra expense. He accepted Susskind's offer on the spot, and the young man became the first lessee of a hatcheck concession in New York. Susskind made a profit of about twentyfive thousand dollars in his first year at Churchill's.
Susskind had a good idea of the true value of such a concession because he had worked as a hatcheck boy, in pea jacket and tight pants, at the Cafe Martin on Fifth Avenue, and later at the brandnew Astor. At these smart resorts and a few others, hatchecking had existed for a long time, but the managements had never thought of renting out the concession. In some places, attendants were allowed to retain their tips in lieu of salaries. In others, hatcheck rights were granted to a headwaiter or doorman as a perquisite of office. The owners of these gratuitous concessions paid the salaries of the hatcheck boys and received from them what proportion of their tips the boys thought it prudent to yield. Only an exhatcheck boy could understand the vastness of the possibilities.
The titular vestiaire at Martin's was an old retainer named Louis, who paid nothing for the concession. Louis' boys used to palm alternate tips and drop the coins inside their uniforms. They wore long underdrawers in those days, and coins would remain safe between the legs of the drawers and the skin of the wearer. Despite the leakage of silver, the concessionaire grew wealthy. Susskind had had opportunity to study the Broadway mentality at the Astor and decided that pretty girls would draw heavier tips than boys. He had also learned that it was extremely flattering to regular patrons to memorize their faces and say, “No check,” when they gave him their wraps. Recognition enhanced their selfesteem, and they tipped generously. He taught this mnemonic method of boosting tips to his employees at Churchill's, where he paid his girls twentyfive dollars a week.
When the concessionaire, wise to the ways of checkers, was in personal charge of his business, he could exercise a vigilance impossible to a hotel functionary with other duties. If he thought a girl was stealing an unreasonable amount, he could discharge her. By trial and error he could build up a fairly reliable personnel. Susskind bought more concessions with his profits from Churchill's. When George Rector seceded from his father's restaurant and opened his own place on Fortyeighth Street, Susskind paid him three thousand dollars for his coatroom concession before he opened. Shortly before the United States entered the World War, Susskind, in partnership with his brother Joe, ran the cloakrooms of sixty restaurants and employed six hundred men and women. Harry continued to wear his uniform at Churchill's, which had moved to larger quarters twice since he opened shop there. Joe wore the livery of the Hotel Knickerbocker, where the brothers had an extremely profitable concession. The Susskinds put managers in their concessions in other restaurants, paying them a small percentage of the profits. Complete honesty is not expected in the hatcheck business, and most of the managers stayed within reason.
The public was more ingenuous then than now, and most restaurant patrons believed that the Susskinds' girls retained their tips. The girls wore a kind of musicalcomedy Frenchmaid costume and put their tips in their apron pockets as they received them. The Susskinds were wise enough not to install the locked boxes into which many presentday hatcheck operatives drop their tips as soon as they get them. But the arrangement could not be kept a secret indefinitely. S. Jay Kaufman of the old Globe and Karl K. Kitchen of the Evening World, who were the Broadway columnists of circa 1917, gave the true state of affairs considerable publicity. Harry Susskind began to sense an undertone of antagonism. People kidded him about driving to work in a specialbody Cadillac and then donning a hatcheck attendant's uniform. Susskind lived in style in those days. He had an apartment on Riverside Drive, then fashionable, a house in Pelham, and a camp in the Adirondacks. His two children attended the Edgewood School in Greenwich, where, he likes to recall, they were classmates of a Rockefeller child.
Hat-checking was no longer a dignified business, the Susskind brothers decided when the criticism increased. Even worse than the effect of the publicity on tipping, which fell off sharply, was the invasion of the hatcheck flied by cloakandsuiters with money to invest. Bids for concessions rose and the margin of potential profit decreased. By that time the brothers had accumulated about one million dollars and they retired. Joe Susskind died in 1930. Harry opened several large restaurants, invested in real estate, played the stock market heavily, and lost virtually everything he had. Then, a small, gnomish, grayhaired man, slightly cynical about everything, he was back in the hatcheck business. He leased the concession at a minor night club on West Fiftysecond Street, until it closed.
There is practically no illusion about the hatcheck business now. A wellfounded skepticism governs most patrons' reactions. Resentful customers often say to girls, “Here's ten cents for you and ten cents for the greaseball you work for”—a remark as unsound as it is wounding, for the girl has to surrender the twenty cents anyway. A few outoftown visitors may retain their nai'vete, but there is little consolation for the concessionaire in them. Some are so naive that they do not tip at all. Hatchecking has evolved into a cold, calculating, highly competitive industry.
The girls have a union—Wardrobe and Checkroom Attendants' Union, Local No. 135—with a scale of minimum wages. Its office is at 1650 Broadway. If a member is caught by her employer “knocking down” a tip, her union card is suspended. Mr. Benny Jacobs, business secretary of the local, acts as a casting director for nightclub proprietors. Some like blond girls, some brunettes, to match the color schemes of their places. Jacobs gets requests for pert girls or cultured types to fit places with swing or class atmosphere. John Perona of El Morocco, for example, insists on tall, cultured brunettes, although the local argued him into taking a young woman with dark chestnut hair as an experiment. Concessionaires usually let proprietors specify the type of comeliness they require. The union has seven hundred members, and there are seldom more than four hundred employed simultaneously, so a considerable range of types is always available. Many of the girls are members of Chorus Equity too.
Girls earn twentyfive dollars a week in what Local No. 135 calls Class A clubs. In this group it includes El Morocco, the Stork Club, Fefe's Monte Carlo and like places. In the smaller Class B clubs, girls get twenty dollars. Not only cloakroom girls but cigarette and flower vendors and washroom matrons belong to the union, which is affiliated with the Building Service Employees' International of the American Federation of Labor. Checkroom workers in the hotels are not organized and earn less than the nightclub girls, a condition for which various excuses are offered. Union girls in night clubs work approximately nine hours a night for six nights a week. They are entitled to one week's vacation with pay for every nine months they work, if the club lasts nine months.
All nightclub concessions now include the doorman, the washroom attendants, the cigarette girls, the girls who sell stuffed dogs, limp dolls, and gardenias, programs in places vast enough to have them, and any other little item the concessionaire chooses to peddle.
“For every girl up front taking clothes from the customers and giving them back, you got to have two people behind the counter putting coats on racks and seeing they don't get mixeds,” one entrepreneur says. “If the front girl kept the tips
, who would pay the hangers? And then how about the washroom attendants? In the average night club, they don't take in as much as you pay them.” This is a routine defense among concessionaires.
Reputedly the most successful concessionaire is a vehement, youngish man named A. (for Abraham) Ellis, who does business under the name of Planetary Recreations, Inc., from an office on an upper floor of the Manhattan Opera House, which he now owns. He bought the old theater with profits from the hatcheck business. He operates the ballrooms and banquet halls at the Opera House, and his customers check a lot of coats. Ellis leases the concessions at half a score of other restaurants. He became involved in theatricals in 1935 when he paid $15,000 for concessions at The Eternal Road, the big Reinhardt production that was delayed for a year by money troubles. Before the show could open, Ellis had to contribute $4000 toward the Equity bond to cover actors' salaries. He lost $10,000 on the deal. If the show had had a long run, he says, he would have made “a fortune of money.” For the three years of the French Casino's success, Ellis had the concession there. He paid a flat sum of $31,000 a year, with a percentage arrangement that brought the total up to $50,000 annually. When Billy Rose took over the place during the winter he raised Ellis' rent to $40,000 in advance and a percentage. Ellis paid about $20,000 for the Cotton Club.