The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub Read Free Book Online

crowded, more turbulent and volatile, more democratic. Men and women, the middle class and the poor, were all flung together on the subway, as they were in the other rising institutions of the early part of the century—the department store, the office building. Barriers that had long seemed impermeable, and that had been treated as moral principles, were rapidly being lowered, if scarcely eliminated.
    And then there were the facts of urban geography. Times Square could never be as genteel as Madison Square had been. Madison Square was, after all, a park, a grassy spot with fountains and flowers and tables, which in turn attracted the city’s finest hotels and theaters and restaurants. Times Square, by contrast, was a great, eddying mass of people and vehicles, already, in the early years of the century, said to be the busiest street corner in the world. And so the ethos of Times Square always included a glorification of the inevitable mixing. The restaurateur George Rector liked to say, only a little bit hyperbolically, that his establishment attracted both Mrs. Astor’s Four Hundred and O. Henry’s Four Million.
    Oscar turned the Victoria over to his son Willie, who had learned the vaudeville trade from the famous agent William Morris. At first Willie featured top-billing vaudeville stars like Eva Tanguay and Nora Bayes. But Willie, who seems to have shared his father’s gift for populist entertainment but not his loftier aspirations, continued further down the path of least resistance. Soon the Victoria, which charged 25 cents a ticket, was showcasing acts like Don the Talking Dog, the Man with the Seventeen-Foot Beard, and the Cherry Sisters, billed as “America’s Worst Act”; Willie posted a net to catch the fruits and vegetables that audience members were encouraged to throw at the girls. Willie combined the roofs of the Victoria and the neighboring Republic Theater, which Oscar had built in 1900 (and which lives today as the New Victory Theater), to form the Paradise Roof Garden, which featured a “Dutch farm” with comely milk-maids and real cows. Later on, he installed “Mock’s Corner,” a jury of monkeys who provided a running commentary on the performers’ work. Willie himself was a gloomy and apparently charmless character who was quite content playing cards with the stagehands, but he had a Barnum-like gift for inspired flimflam: in the hottest days of the summer he placed a thermometer conspicuously on top of a block of ice, its low temperature demonstrating the virtues of the theater’s “air-cooling” system.
    Willie understood that the daily newspapers, which were exploding both in number and in circulation, had created an insatiable appetite for scandal. He invented what was known as the freak or nut act, which the vaudeville authority Joe Laurie, Jr., describes as an engagement “made with the deliberate object of promotion, the financial profit being secondary”—the ultimate object being to expand the vaudeville audience by playing on the news of the day. Willie specialized in female murderers or would-be murderers, including two women who had shot a socialite and whom he billed as “The Shooting Stars.” After Harry Thaw killed Stanford White, Willie hired Evelyn Nesbit at an unheard-of $3,500 a week to do some dancing. He booked the wife of Lord Hope, who owned the Hope Diamond, and then paid Lord Hope $1,500 a week to stand in the Victoria lobby during performances. Willie’s greatest genius was in the manufacture of publicity. In 1905 he persuaded an itinerant Swiss sketch artist to pretend to be court artist to the Turkish sultan, hired three women as his wives, and then orchestrated a massive publicity campaign for
Abdul Kardar and His Three Wives;
Willie arranged to have the troupe detained by customs, and then furiously petitioned for their release. Three years later he repeated the gag, booking the famous Gertrude Hoffman to play Salome, and then arranging to have her