Ain't We Got Fun!
How the New York City Nightclubs Were Born

On June 9 the Catskill Mountain Foundation launches its 3rd annual Mountaintop Celebration of Song with the new musical revue “Ain’t We Got Fun?” - How the New York City Nightclubs Were Born. Featuring the great music of an unforgettable era, the show captures the excitement of the Roaring Twenties and the speakeasies that made them roar – that scintillant decade when New York City became the center of the world, and when its hottest nightspots were not just exclusive, but illegal.

When Prohibition went into effect on January 16, 1920, everybody thought that the good times were over. New York City mourned. At Maxim’s, the waiters dressed as pallbearers, at Reisenweber’s there was a funeral ball, and in parties across the city people lamented the dry years to come.

They couldn’t have been more wrong.

The 18th Amendment may have made it an offense to sell alcohol, but not to buy it. So the sellers went underground, the buyers went with them, and the great party that was the Roaring Twenties began. At the height of Prohibition there were 100,000 speakeasies in New York, and they said you couldn't get drunk there unless you walked 10 feet in any direction.

The City’s nightclubs were legion, with a different club to suit every taste – places like Gladys’ Exclusive Club, where the drinks were pricey and the songs filthy; The Club Durant named for Jimmy Durante and his insane blend of music and humor; The Club Richman, which featured nearly naked dancers, and the vaudevillian shtick of its owner; The Owl Club, which had four different chefs – Mexican, Chinese, Italian and American – and waiters that would put on a show for no reason at all; and other wonderfully named places like The Jungle Room, The Bath Club, The Midnight Frolic, and The Drool Inn.

The clubs were expensive - cover charges of $15 plus, $10 for a pint of whiskey and $2 for a pitcher of water - but the patrons seemed convinced that money was merely made to be spent as quickly as possible, to be immediately replaced by more money to be gotten rid of in the same way.  Some of those patrons were odd. One big spender was a quiet accountant who lived with his parents in Queens. He rarely drank, and spent most of his money paying various women to sing his favorite song, “Mother Machree”. He was eventually arrested for embezzling $60,000 from the bank that employed him.

Of course, as in any underground business, patrons ran the risk of being taken advantage of. There were numerous “clip joints”, where pretty “hostesses” would join a guy at his table and order expensive drinks. The poor sucker who paid for them thought he was having a great time getting the girl drunk, but the drinks were actually colored water, and the girls always disappeared around the time the check arrived. Those who were hustled in this way could consider themselves more fortunate than the ones who had “Mickey Finns” dropped in their drinks, and would wake up in a back alley with their pockets emptied. “My motto is ‘take everybody easy”, one of the old hoodlum operators used to say, “and take the easy ones twice.” He said this every time he opened a new nightclub – about every two months.

The Prohibition era was rife with the colorful characters who operated in and around the speakeasy business. First and foremost were the gangsters, who turned the people’s desire for bootleg liquor into the most profitable underworld business ever. Perhaps the most notorious of this bunch was the brutal Jack “Legs” Diamond, who controlled the Hotsy Totsy Club on 54th Street. The Club was a goldmine – hugely popular with no overhead. One night two men were gunned down at the bar, allegedly by Diamond himself. “Legs” disappeared, and by the time he turned himself in months later all eight witnesses were either missing or dead. Diamond was released and moved to Acra in the Catskills. In April 1931 he was shot 81 times on the porch of the Arratoga Inn in Cairo. He survived that attempt on his life, but not another one in Albany later that year.

On the side of the law, there were Izzy and Moe, two Federal agents who raided speakeasies using an amazing variety of tricky devices and impersonations. Izzy – 5 foot five and 225 pounds - was the master of disguise; Moe, slightly taller and almost as fat, was the straight man. One night they raided 48 saloons. Izzy could play anyone - traveling salesman, street cleaner, banker, Texas cattleman, and he always carried his “evidence collector”, a small funnel in his vest pocket attached to a small bottle inside his pants. That way he wouldn’t drink all the evidence.

Speakeasy owners were an eccentric bunch. Perhaps the most famous was Texas Guinan, a curious mixture of P.T Barnum, Machiavelli and Mae West, whose tag line was, “Hello suckers! Come on in and leave your wallet on the bar.” After she was arrested, and acquitted, she opened a revue called “The Padlocks of 1927”. When that show closed she opened a new place, complete with calliope, dartboard, shooting gallery, and fishpond. Her one-time partner, Larry Fay, was a hustler and small time hood who made his first bundle betting on a 100 to 1 shot that came in. Fay used to walk around holding a roll of nickels which he used like brass knuckles on employees, customers, or both. Fay struggled through the Depression at his last club, the Casa Blanca. Late in 1933 he was forced to give his staff pay cuts, and one of his doormen shot him.

The performers of the time were legendary, perhaps none more so than Florence Mills. She was “The Little Blackbird” with the “voice of a hummingbird” – when she danced they said it was like “Dresden china that turned into a stick of dynamite". She’d been a hit in Paris, and was then booked into New York’s Plantation Club. For two weeks customers waited ten deep on the sidewalk, unable to get reservations for her sold out shows. Through the door they could hear her music and the audiences going wild. By the time they could get in she was a sensation. Nobody knew that that for those first weeks as the frenzy built she’d been singing to an empty house, and to recorded applause. The scam worked. Four years later she was dead at the age of 31. 40,000 came to Harlem to see her lie in state, and 150,000 attended her funeral. The Prince of Wales sent a blanket of flowers for her coffin.

If there was a symbol of the Fabulous Twenties in New York it was the dapper, silk-hatted mayor of the city (and speakeasy owner), “Gentleman Jimmy” Walker - an extraordinarily popular politician, but not much of a public servant. He was an hour and a half late to his own inauguration, a pattern he maintained at almost every public ceremony he attended thereafter. He filled city offices with sluggish political cronies, changed clothes three times a day, and drove around the city in a $17,000 limousine. His administration thrived on the same system of payoffs and kickbacks that undermined Prohibition, and was noted for an absence of serious initiatives, though one interesting one did stand out. At a time when wristwatches came into fashion, Walker campaigned to have a large illuminated one placed upon the forearm of the Statue of Liberty.

Prohibition in New York was also the time of the “Harlem Renaissance” when the nightclubs in Harlem made that neighborhood the hottest and most exciting in town. The shows in Harlem were fantastic. Connie’s Inn brought in Louis Armstrong from Chicago, and its floorshow of Andy Razaf & Fats Waller's Hot Chocolates would later be a hit on Broadway with songs like "Ain't Misbehavin'. Late at night at Small’s Paradise, the waiters would do the Charleston while carrying fully loaded trays. And then there was the one and only Cotton Club, which nightly presented one and a half hours of some of the greatest entertainment imaginable - the Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway Orchestras, singers like Ethel Waters and Lena Horne, dancers like Bill Robinson and Pegleg Bates (13 peglegs, one to match each suit), and a chorus of stunningly beautiful women.

It was an extraordinary, raucous, dangerous and incredibly vital time, but it all came crashing down with the Depression. As Wall Street tumbled and the economy deteriorated, the number of big-spenders who fueled the speakeasies dwindled. The impact was swift – the shows became less glamorous, the menus less pricey – profits disappeared and scores of speakeasies and nightclubs closed their doors. Some survived, and even went legitimate once Prohibition was repealed, giving birth to the legendary New York nightclub scene of the 1940s and ‘50s. But nothing that followed could quite compare to the fantastic, bizarre and red-hot speakeasy scene that was New York City in the Roaring Twenties.

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