The Sunday Gentleman (4 page)

I was in France when I received a copy of the magazine that contained the article about me. My friends regarded the article as generally favorable, even affectionate in tone. Despite this, the hard angle was obvious: A group of authors existed, of which I was one, who had found the means of making a fortune from novels by writing them after a commercial formula. While this made an eye-catching angle for the story, it was (and the magazine knew it was from what I had told them) the sheerest nonsense.

If successful novelists had a formula, they would not have failures, and I know of no novelist who has not had a failure at one time or another. If successful novelists had only the acquisition of money for their goal, if they were motivated by royalties instead of a need for honest self-expression, they would find it expedient to give less time, less care, less inner agony to a single work, and in that way be able to produce three novels in the period that it ordinarily takes them to suffer over one. Thus, if lucky, they would enjoy two or three times the amount of income they obtained from a single carefully created book. Yet I know of no instance where an author has been influenced by this economic theorem.

In short, the angle, based on preconceived opinion, manufactured to titillate its readers, was fanciful, with absolutely no basis in fact. As a result, when my next novel appeared, about one-third of the critics, influenced by the angle in the magazine biography of me, incorporated discussions of a so-called best-seller “formula” in their reviews. While not all of this minority of critics were gullible enough to be taken in by the angle, the fact that they had even repeated it in print did have the effect of putting off some serious readers.

Neither a largely favorable press, nor the enormous circulation that this novel of mine finally achieved in the United States and abroad, could fully undo the temporary harm committed by a popular periodical’s angle. As a magazine writer, I had always been uncomfortable with the demands of my employers for an angle. As a novelist, my resentment of it has been acutely intensified.

This persistent necessity for using an angle, then, as well as the lack of respect for and censorship of a writer’s words that came from both magazine publishers and story subjects, and above all, the almost constant lack of freedom to write as one wished, were reasons why I left the magazine field, and I have never regretted my decision, even for a day.

Still, it would be unfair, even dishonest, of me to say that I did not derive considerable pleasure and excitement from my two decades in the magazine field. Between 1931 and 1953, I published around five hundred articles and short stories, perhaps one piece of fiction for every nine pieces of nonfiction. I suppose I also wrote an equal number of articles and short stories that remained unpublished, although some of them represented my better Sunday writing. As a youngster, before 1940, I would write for whoever would publish me:
Horse and Jockey Magazine, American Farm Youth Magazine, Catholic Digest, Current Psychology and Psychoanalysis, For Men Only, Ken, Modern Mechanics, Thrilling Sports, Modern Screen
. Later, my markets, while still as diverse, improved in prestige and circulation:
The Saturday Evening Post, American Mercury, Esquire, Liberty Magazine, Collier’s, Coronet, The Rotarian, Saturday Review of Literature, American Legion Magazine, Cosmopolitan, Literary Cavalcade, Pageant, Reader’s Digest, This Week, True
.

In quest of stories for those publications and others, I traveled widely, collected adventures, knowledge, renowned and bizarre personalities, knew hours and days of thrills and experiences that would probably have been impossible to acquire in other fields of endeavor. I remember interviewing Huey Long while he, clad in silk pajamas in a New Orleans hotel suite, told me that his forebears had been blessed with great longevity, and that he expected to live until ninety-nine (this, a year before his assassination). I remember spending two grueling days climbing 17,000-foot Mount Ix-taccihuatl, outside Mexico City. I remember accompanying an expedition into the heat of the Honduran jungles to discover a freak of nature called the Fountain of Blood, and being received by the President of El Salvador for performing this feat.

I remember, the year before Pearl Harbor, secretly interviewing an American in Nanking, China, an authority on Japan’s vicious policy of drugging the population of occupied China with heroin and opium, and being interrogated by the Japanese Dangerous Thought police for my curiosity, I remember, also months before Pearl Harbor, a long meeting with Yosuke Matsuoka, the Foreign Minister of Japan who had signed the Axis Pact with Hitler, and his outburst which warned me that Japan was prepared to go to war with the United States—and the reactions of President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox, and United States Army G-2 (waiting for me when I returned to San Francisco).

I remember Alexander Kerensky, and our conversation in a Los Angeles hotel room, and his bitterness about his failure to thwart Lenin and Bolshevism in revolutionary Russia. I remember Leni Reifenstahl, who was amiable enough to lift her skirt to her navel to display a surgical scar, and who became angry only when I suggested that she had been Hitler’s mistress. I remember an afternoon with W. C. Fields at his home, and his showing me framed caricatures of celebrities he hated, several of them pornographic, each covered with chaste little curtains, and one being of Eleanor Roosevelt, and the comedian then passing out in mid-sentence from excessive drinking.

I remember the pugilist. Kid McCoy, a few weeks before he killed himself, telling me how he had put the term “the real McCoy” into the language. I remember Diego Rivera, resentful and brusque because I had interrupted his painting of a nude in his studio, later coming in the rain, sweet and cooperative, to submit to an interview in Mexico City’s Ritz Hotel. I remember a hushed conference with three members of the anti-Franco underground in a shaded restaurant in a suburb of Madrid, and the Resistance lookouts on the watch for headlights of the Falangist police cars. I remember Pablo Picasso’s guided tour through his attic studio at 7 Rue des Grands-Augustins in Paris, as he (“looking like a prosperous Italian shoemaker wearing a beret,” my notes remind me) explained his work in progress in an undertone, his eyes brimming because of the death of the wife of a friend in Switzerland that morning. I remember a Nobel judge in Stockholm, a special room inside Buckingham Palace in London, a croupier in the basement of the Casino in Monte Carlo, a monsignor in the editorial offices of
L’Osservatore Romano
in the Vatican, a legendary madam in a Montmartre bistro in Paris.

All of this is but a small portion of what I remember as the best of my two decades of magazine writing. And many of the other persons, and places, and institutions that I have not mentioned, but were a part of my magazine years, I have included in full detail in the pages of this book.

In this collection are those factual stories which I decided were the most interesting and durable of my Sunday Gentleman narratives. There are twenty of these stories in all. Of these, nine were previously published, but in abridged form. Here, they appear re-edited and in their full original length. The remaining eleven stories, which I have also re-edited, have not previously appeared in print. Of these, three were sold to magazines, but for one reason or another were never published in America.

To each of these chapters I have added an afterword or postscript which I call
What Has Happened Since
, and these vary in length from 750 words to 7,500 words. For when I began to reread these magazine articles, I became intensely curious to know what had happened to my subjects with the passage of years since I first wrote about them a decade or two ago. What had happened to the two old ladies who, in their youth, had managed the most spectacular house of ill fame in American history? What had happened to the young man who had undergone a prefrontal lobotomy? What had happened to the great sleuth who lived in Lyons? What had happened to the Nobel judge who worshiped Hitler? What had happened to the head of the geisha union? What had happened to the greatest art forger in modern times? to my favorite train, the Orient Express? to my favorite advertising column in
The Times
of London? And so from 1963 to 1965, I traced and tracked down the subjects of my articles, to find out how they had fared from the time I had originally written about them until today. This proved to be a fascinating detective job in itself. My findings, described in twenty postscripts, add up to approximately 40,000 words written to complete this book.

For the most, these stories are a miscellany of my personal adventures with, and topical soundings of, unusual people and places that aroused my curiosity in recent years. Since subjective writing is little desired in the articles that popular magazines publish, many of the short pieces in this book are factual and objective in style. These stories are interviews, reports, impressions, made at home and abroad, on subjects that intrigued me at the time and interest me still. Why did I select these subjects at the time I did? I do not know, exactly. Perhaps my choices were always based on instinct. Or perhaps I never quite forgot what the editor of a great weekly magazine once told me. I had asked him, in the office of my literary agent in New York, to tell me what measuring stick might be used to determine whether a subject might qualify for his august periodical. He replied: “We are interested in anything that is the biggest, the best, or the first.” I inquired, “Or the most unusual?” To which he replied, “Yes, or the most unusual.”

While I did apply these criteria to most of my workaday articles, I did not apply them strictly to the Sunday ones in this book, unless I did so unconsciously. I wrote these stories because the subjects fascinated me and because it was fun to write about them, and now it is my hope that they will give the reader equal pleasure.

Here, then, two decades of Sundays, when one uncertain man walked “accoutred in the fashion of the times, with a flowing wig, lace ruffles, and a sword by his side,” from daybreak to dusk, so briefly his own man, so briefly speaking of what he pleased and what pleased him.

PART TWO

THE

SUNDAY GENTLEMAN

AT HOME

2

Two Nice Old Ladies

In late February of 1902, when Prince Henry of Prussia arrived in New York City to accept the yacht built for his brother, Kaiser Wilhelm II, then ruler of Germany, he was asked by members of the press what sight in America he would most like to visit. Bored reporters waited for the expected official reply: the White House, Niagara Falls, or the Grand Canyon. Instead, Prince Henry answered. “The sight in America I would most like to visit? I would like to visit the Everleigh Club in Chicago.”

The members of the press were stunned with disbelief, and then alive with delight. And thereafter, they took the prince to their bosoms. For as they knew, and the more sophisticated male population of the United States (and apparently Europe) knew, the Everleigh Club was neither an attraction ordinarily discussed openly nor was it a men’s club in the ordinary sense. It was, as one periodical kindly pointed out, a club that “no one ever joined…or resigned from” but it was “a Chicago ‘mustn’t’: a house of ill—but very great—fame.”

After presenting the United States government with a statue of Frederick the Great, Prince Henry of Prussia received his gift from the United States government in return. He was escorted to Chicago, and there, after depositing a wreath on the Lincoln monument, taking a guided tour of the Loop, and suffering a reception at the Germania Club, he was granted his one wish. At midnight, March 3, 1902, Prince Henry of Prussia was the guest of honor at a great party—the local newspapers called it an “orgy”—given by two Southern sisters, who were the madams of the Everleigh Club, and their retinue of thirty beautiful and uninhibited hostesses.

It was a long and raucous night. Ten dancing girls, attired in fawn skins, wildly striking cymbals, amused the Prince while he solemnly discussed Schiller with Aida and Minna Everleigh, the proprietors of the internationally renowned resort. Later in the proceedings, during a moment of high hilarity, the Prince toasted the Kaiser (and the Everleighs) by drinking champagne from a girl’s silver slipper, thereby popularizing a custom that would know its full flowering in the 1920’s. For the Prince, the occasion had been extraordinary and memorable. For the Everleigh sisters, the royal visit had been enjoyable—and routine.

During the nearly dozen years in which it flourished, the Everleigh Club rarely went a week without the appearance of some celebrity, either American or international. In the two years before Prince Henry’s visit, and for almost a decade after, famous foreigners from every nation, after making their official rounds of the stockyards, lakefront, and municipal monuments, climaxed their sightseeing with an evening in the Everleigh Club.

The club’s popularity was well deserved, because few bordellos had ever existed, or existed then, that could compete with its opulence and lavish hospitality. In the time of its greatness, the Everleigh Club enjoyed constant comparison with other competing
maisons de foie
in America and abroad, but almost always to its own advantage. Typical among domestic competitors was The Castle in St. Louis, a three-story brick house managed by the plump and affable Negress, Babe Connors, whose teeth were inlaid with diamonds. In this sporting house, Paderewski once accompanied the entertainers’ bawdy songs on the piano, and in its rooms a Republican national platform was once written, and from within its walls “Ta-Ra-Ra-Boom-Der-PS” swept on to plebeian acceptance. Here, the young girls, octoroons, “girls in long skirts, but without underclothing, would dance on a huge mirror.” Typical among the Everleighs’ foreign competitors was the House of All Nations in Budapest, a $100,000 house of ill fame on Andrassy Street, where a reception parlor featured “portraits of the women, nude, from which you made your choice. You then touched an electric bell-push under the photograph and it was covered, so that the next visitor would know the lady was engaged.”