Always a favorite with New Yorkers for whom the rigorous conventions of “the big season” of the town hold few attractions, “the little season” of May and June this year gives promise of being more amply characterized by blue days and fair along the boulevards than any springtime in many years. The “big season,” with its implications of social glamour and overtones of super elegance, is the period, in happy times, of the Opera, the Horse Show, the big-time theater openings, public dinners, balls, debutante parties, and all the white-tie and imperial-sable routs and sarabands to which the town is given in its most opulent moments.
Reversing the London tradition, in which the most formal court functions, the most stylish horse races, cricket games, and public school ceremonials are mounted in early summer and in which champagne and asparagus for lunch at Claridge's are the hallmarks of polite well-being, New York has a “little season” at this time of year when the city's charm is most perceptible, even to outlanders who find it nice only to visit but wouldn't etc., in the accustomed manner of suburban snobisme.
April in Paris, certainly; but May in New York, unequivocally yes!
This is the time of year when Sunday lunch at the Plaza is absolute ritual and when the red rope is up from one in the afternoon on, both at the traditional Back Room where Jules, the maître d'hôtel, is absolute overlord, and in the wonderful Terrace Restaurant, New York's most beautiful dining premises, reopened this season for Sunday only after many, many years. Now the horsecabs on the Fifty-ninth Street cabrank, missing Pat Rafferty of the old days but spry enough just the same, have new coats of paint on their wheels and glitter in cream, crimson, and yellow splendor as they tool through the finest of all parks. Sunday, relieved of the chill austerity which winter brings to Fifth Avenue, is a pleasant thing again. The top hats dip and glisten in the Plaza section after church; the footmen of the Rollses and Lincolns are in their smartest liveries. Pulitzer Memorial crawls with out-of-towners, sailors, and polite moppets being photographed at the one spot which is indisputably the heart of New York's heart.
And there are all the other traditional indexes and portents, the messengers and signs of spring: the letters to the editor of the Herald Tribune proclaiming the first robin from Peapack, New Jersey; the overflowing window boxes on the Park Avenue façade of the Waldorf; the last of the early shad, “brown and bright to the heart's delight, the broiled and beautiful shad,” on all the menus from Jack and Charlie's to the Madison; the newest and most amazing Valentina gowns on Gloria Swanson at lunch at the Colony and the latest and most preposterous Daché bonnets being recorded for the public prints by Thyra Samter Winslow at the Drake; the intelligence in the mail that cabanas at the Atlantic Beach Club are selling like nylons and that you had better hurry if you want to hold onto your old one; the new taxis and the promise and rumor of new cars of all sorts to be.
There are, too, losses and abatements in New York this spring. No bock beer, although that had, in recent years, so rushed the season as to become virtually a mid-January institution. And this is probably the last year that surface trolley cars will be a commonplace on Manhattan Island. Gone with the vanished, clattering Madison Avenue cars and the seasonal open trolleys on Lexington, will soon be all the broomstick cars of Gotham, and the good bock succumbed, temporarily, to economics. But the flyspecks on the civic show window of Manhattan are few, and the show itself was never better!
Pausing fascinated, as birds are reported to do in the gaze of lethal reptiles, before the display window in Forty-sixth Street of Walter McCrory, the maddest shirt carpenter of them all, we beheld the other morning Walter, the head shirt-cutter, wrapping up a parcel of chemises that would have given pause to Tom Mix and made even the late, shirt-maddened O. O. McIntyre think twice about the propriety of their public wearing. The other Walter, Mad McCrory as he is known to the profession, was standing by assisting the packing job with little pats of affection and loving adjustments of the bundle, obviously giving his adoring all to a consignment of what could only have been a costume order for an actor engaged in portraying the life of the late Evander Berry Wall. Aha, this department remarked to itself: Roy Howard has been running amok among the shirt samples again, and we went in to investigate.
“Roy Howard, poh!” scoffed Mr. McCrory, holding an index finger on a knot in the string, “and Bill Leeds, poh, poh! And also an additional poh for Bill Corum! These masterpieces of the needleworker's art are not for such mousy-modest, retiring, timid, and inhibited Brooks Brothers patrons as they. These are for a man who knows a fine shirt when he sees one, a true connoisseur, a man who likes to play games on the pattern of a single cuff: Mr. Winston Churchill!”
And indeed they were, too. For Winston Churchill is as strong-minded about his attire as he is about his cigars and brandy and soda, and through the dark days of the war Mad McCrory contrived to keep his courage up with regular consignments, shipped to England through very official channels indeed, of shirtings which showed, quite literally, that the star of empire still blazed, and blindingly, over the destinies of England. Neither Prince Christopher of Greece nor John Drew Devereaux, who are among McCrory's less inhibited shirt customers, is possessed of such a taste in fine raiment as the former British Prime Minister, and no London gentleman's furnisher was ever able to satisfy his hanker for tumultuous cowboy patterns. In fact, the best shirtmaker in Burlington Arcade is reported to have refused flatly to cut the materials Mr. Churchill selected, on the grounds that the Commonwealth was already none too secure and it would be better for everybody if the Prime Minister stuck to plain white starched shirts. Mr. McCrory doesn't think of himself as a man of destiny, but he isn't above remarking that England pulled through with his shirts at No. 10 Downing Street, and that there's no telling what would have happened had Mr. Churchill been a more timid fellow.
A youth of this department's acquaintance, recently out of the Navy under what that august organization would like to consider something of a cloud, approached a prospective employer and laid before him unimpeachable qualifications for a tolerably well-compensated job. As a last afterthought of inquiry, his by then near-boss asked about his discharge from the armed forces: honorable, of course? The youth blushed and admitted that quite the reverse was the case, that his discharge was strictly dishonorable. In a moment of complete frustration and revolt he had thrown a Royal typewriter in the face of his immediate superior, a commander, ruining both classifications of government property: writing machine and officer.
The prospective employer required documentary evidence to this effect and upon its being produced, hired the young man instanter. “My office manager is a former commander,” he muttered in a bemused manner, and then added a last qualification: “I suppose you can work just as well with an Underwood?”
The annual and inevitable uproar in the theater, which usually takes the form of screams of outrage and protest on the part of play authors and/or play producers against the rascally critics of the daily press, this season proved as abundantly entertaining as ever, perhaps a little more so because the screeches of pain and indignation were emitted in particularly piercing tones by the producers of a play by Maxwell Anderson, a dramatic architect of considerable standing and with a vast capacity for violent and noisy protest about things. Almost everyone concerned with these regular outbursts of temper in which the critics are, somewhat repetitively, denounced as tools of the reactionary press, is aware of the preposterous aspects of a situation in which the competitor in a game will abide by the rules only if the judge's every decision is in his favor. Mr. Anderson and his backers would have been entirely content to accept the opinion of the Messrs. Barnes, Nichols, and Chapman, the town's ranking drama reporters, had their opinion been that Mr. Anderson was the greatest living playwright and that his nonesuch, called in this case, Truckline Café, was the hottest stuff since Sophocles tossed Antigone to the Athenian first-nighters.
When, by the unanimous consensus of all the town's reviewers, a manifestation in itself as rare as, say, modesty in an actor, Truckline Café was reported to be a little stinker of museum-piece proportions, the Playwrights Company, which had produced the wretched thing, pouted and dug its toe into the gravel and said everyone was a hateful old meanie and didn't play fair. Had the reviews hailed the play as even passably plausible, its producers would have taken the same newspaper space to quote the highlights from the notices, as in fact it did to whimper that nobody understood the drama.
For the rest of the dramatic record of the current installment, the most agreeable entertainment in recent weeks, even though it is by no means uniform in its humors, is Nancy Hamilton's revue, Three to Make Ready, which has come to the Adelphi Theater as the inevitable successor, over the years, of One For the Money and Two For the Show. Under the supervision of John Murray Anderson, a technician who has never yet mounted a mediocre show, Three to Make Ready is handsome and gay if something less than urbane. It may be age or it may be merely the long and distressing familiarity of the theme, but there is something about comedy scenes dealing with plumbing fixtures which begins to leave the New York theatergoer cold. There simply is nothing either sophisticated or charming about the conveniences of modern sanitation and there hasn't been since Frank Morgan tried to make them fascinating in The Band Wagon. Why do otherwise adult persons still insist on monkeying around with the flush toilet as the supposed source of inextinguishable laughter?
Three To Make Ready is really more Ray Bolger's show than anyone else's, although Brenda Forbes is just as hilarious in her “Walküre” scene of grand opera as she was the last time this identical sketch was produced in the identical manner in Two For the Show, and there will be rude folk who will suggest that, if Stanley Gilkey and Barbara Payne, its producers, are going to loot the antecedent productions of Three To Make Ready, they might well include “Teeter-Totter Tessie” and “I Only Know That I Must Find Him.”
The intimate revue as old codgers and chronic curmudgeons will recall it in The First Little Show isn't recreated in Three To Make Ready, not by a darn sight, but it is the sort of show in which audiences forgive minor defect in the pleasure of seeing something frivolous, unpretentious, and peopled with young, attractive persons of pleasant character and intention. Not a class angle or a significant implication in the evening, and that, on the Broadway of the moment, is practically perfect.