The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub
Authors: James Traub
Tags: History
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hostess, Dulcy, is modeled on a preposterous character invented by Franklin P. Adams; her speech consists entirely of the clichés that pass for conversation among the stupid rich. If someone praises a book, Dulcy is sure to say, “My books are my best friends.” Dulcy is, at bottom, a thoroughly lovable meddler, in the spirit of Austen’s Emma, and she reduces the play’s genteel suburban setting to a shambles before she and her husband are implausibly rescued by the gods of comedy.
Dulcy
is a largely—and not unfairly—forgotten play, but in its breezy irreverence and its witty contempt for mediocrity it broke through a cultural crust and left Broadway a slightly different place. James Thurber later said that it was
Dulcy
that showed him how to wield his own satirical weapons.
Dulcy
reproduced in narrative form the urbanity, the irony, and the wit of the best of the revues; in retrospect, it turns out to have been the first ripple from the mighty torrent of witty and urbane plays and movie scripts and radio programs and magazine articles that was to come roaring out of Broadway in the burst of creativity that began in the years after World War I, and that ushered American culture out of the Victorian hinterlands and into the modern age. The 1920s on Broadway was, above all, the era of wit, and of the wits. If there was a wit-in-chief, it was George S. Kaufman, a beanpole who scrutinized the world from beneath a great, shocked thicket of hair, an ironist with an allergy to sentimentality, a neurotic perfectionist driven by a dread of failure. One of Kaufman’s biographers writes that when
Dulcy
opened in Chicago, Marc Connelly discovered Kaufman, between acts, “huddled against a rusty pipe in the dusty, deserted scene deck . . . staring blankly at the floor and running his fingers through his thick hair.” He could only mumble abject apologies while Connelly assured him that the play was, in fact, a hit.
IN “MY LOST CITY,” an elegiac account of the accumulating wreckage of his own life, F. Scott Fitzgerald recalled Manhattan in 1920. Already, he wrote, “the feverish activity of the boom” had fired the city with life, but the “general inarticulateness” of the moment, its raw novelty, denied it any larger sense of meaning. Here was energy without voice.
Then, for just a moment, the “younger generation” idea became a fusion of many elements of New York life. . . . The blending of the bright, gay, vigorous elements began then, and for the first time there appeared a society a little livelier than the solid mahogany dinner parties of Emily Price Post. If this society produced the cocktail party, it also evolved Park Avenue wit, and for the first time an educated European could envision a trip to New York as something more amusing than a gold-trek into a formalized Australian Bush.
In those years immediately after World War I, the country appeared to be shedding its old, familiar ways like a dried-up skin. Indeed, the very fact of drastic change, the widespread consciousness of it, was a central aspect of the new. American culture was rapidly taking on the jazzed-up, fragmentary rhythms of urban life. The census of 1920 showed that for the first time more Americans lived in cities than in the country. New York was the nation’s colossus, and the world’s. The city’s population swelled almost to eight million. Economic growth was stupendous. Between 1918 and 1931, the number of cars registered in New York leaped from 125,101 to 790,123—more cars than in all of Europe combined. New York was the factory of the new at the moment when novelty itself had become a craze. The emerging cultures of fashion, design, advertising, and magazine publishing were all centered in Manhattan. It was as if the city were inventing the idea of urbanism, and then retailing it to the rest of the country. As the urban historian Ann Douglas writes, “Trendsetter to the nation and the world, New York finds its job in the
Dulcy
is a largely—and not unfairly—forgotten play, but in its breezy irreverence and its witty contempt for mediocrity it broke through a cultural crust and left Broadway a slightly different place. James Thurber later said that it was
Dulcy
that showed him how to wield his own satirical weapons.
Dulcy
reproduced in narrative form the urbanity, the irony, and the wit of the best of the revues; in retrospect, it turns out to have been the first ripple from the mighty torrent of witty and urbane plays and movie scripts and radio programs and magazine articles that was to come roaring out of Broadway in the burst of creativity that began in the years after World War I, and that ushered American culture out of the Victorian hinterlands and into the modern age. The 1920s on Broadway was, above all, the era of wit, and of the wits. If there was a wit-in-chief, it was George S. Kaufman, a beanpole who scrutinized the world from beneath a great, shocked thicket of hair, an ironist with an allergy to sentimentality, a neurotic perfectionist driven by a dread of failure. One of Kaufman’s biographers writes that when
Dulcy
opened in Chicago, Marc Connelly discovered Kaufman, between acts, “huddled against a rusty pipe in the dusty, deserted scene deck . . . staring blankly at the floor and running his fingers through his thick hair.” He could only mumble abject apologies while Connelly assured him that the play was, in fact, a hit.
IN “MY LOST CITY,” an elegiac account of the accumulating wreckage of his own life, F. Scott Fitzgerald recalled Manhattan in 1920. Already, he wrote, “the feverish activity of the boom” had fired the city with life, but the “general inarticulateness” of the moment, its raw novelty, denied it any larger sense of meaning. Here was energy without voice.
Then, for just a moment, the “younger generation” idea became a fusion of many elements of New York life. . . . The blending of the bright, gay, vigorous elements began then, and for the first time there appeared a society a little livelier than the solid mahogany dinner parties of Emily Price Post. If this society produced the cocktail party, it also evolved Park Avenue wit, and for the first time an educated European could envision a trip to New York as something more amusing than a gold-trek into a formalized Australian Bush.
In those years immediately after World War I, the country appeared to be shedding its old, familiar ways like a dried-up skin. Indeed, the very fact of drastic change, the widespread consciousness of it, was a central aspect of the new. American culture was rapidly taking on the jazzed-up, fragmentary rhythms of urban life. The census of 1920 showed that for the first time more Americans lived in cities than in the country. New York was the nation’s colossus, and the world’s. The city’s population swelled almost to eight million. Economic growth was stupendous. Between 1918 and 1931, the number of cars registered in New York leaped from 125,101 to 790,123—more cars than in all of Europe combined. New York was the factory of the new at the moment when novelty itself had become a craze. The emerging cultures of fashion, design, advertising, and magazine publishing were all centered in Manhattan. It was as if the city were inventing the idea of urbanism, and then retailing it to the rest of the country. As the urban historian Ann Douglas writes, “Trendsetter to the nation and the world, New York finds its job in the
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