By the time this appears, it is entirely probable that a large portion of the dust and fury aroused by Stanley Walker's renunciation of New York in the form of a Saturday Evening Post article will have abated. As city editor of the Herald Tribune and the most distinguished practicing newspaperman of an entire generation, Mr. Walker knew New York from the Battery to the Bronx and from TwentyOne to the Tombs as probably no one else did in his time or professional office. He collected about him a legendary and fabulous staff of newswriters which included such top-drawer byliners as Alva Johnston, Beverly Smith, Ishbel Ross, Edward Dean Sullivan, Denis Tilden Lynch, the late Ben Robertson, Joe Alsop, Joseph Mitchell, and Edward Angly, and staff members in allied departments of the Tribune and Bleeck's Saloon, Henry Cabot Lodge, Walter Millis, Don Skene, William O. McGeehan, and Percy Hammond were influenced by his stylisms and conditioned to his views on editing and reporting.
When, therefore, he gave New York a chilly brush-off and did a double scurry for his native Lampasas, Texas, folk generally adjusted their ear trumpets and gave heed. New York, said Mr. Walker, was brash, rude, crowded, unmannerly, and in a hurry. The food was in decline; the company in its bars and restaurants was lamentable; its wit was bankrupted, and its graciousness a myth; and he, Walker, was going home to Lampasas. Only people who have ever been to Lampasas can estimate just how much of Mr. Walker's tongue was in his cheek. But this department has been to Lampasas and knows. Boy!
Nobody is more open to persuasion on the subject of Manhattan's deficits and demerits than this department. But then, no city anywhere, unless possibly it is the incomparable town of San Francisco, achieves complete perfection, and there are a good many qualities about Baghdad-on-the-Make which still serve to recommend it above most comparable American communities. Let us list just a few of them.
In no other city in America, again with the exception of San Francisco, is it impossible to observe in the principal boulevards and public places so few women in trousers and so few hatless men, both of them manifestations of obscenity which in any right-minded community would be banned by legal fiat. In Hollywood, the outhouse civilization of the universe, not one man in fifty owns a hat, and the number of wretched female rumps wallowing along the sidewalks in men's garments is beyond all counting.
Not even in the least pretentious of the town's restaurants in New York is all the food without exception nauseatingly fried in deep pools of rancid valve oil or hair grease as is the universal custom in all but the most enlightened and expensive restaurants anywhere south of Princeton, New Jersey, nor is a revolting sort of crank-case lubricant served with the breakfast hot cakes on the strength of the completely spurious complaint that maple syrup is too expensive.
There are scores and scores of places in New York where it is possible for a reasonable charge, the times being considered, to obtain the two-ounce cocktail that is ordained by God and civilized usage—the Plaza, the St. Regis, Bleeck's Artists and Writers, Whyte's, and Billy the Oysterman's, to name a few. Elsewhere in the land cocktails are commonly and unblushingly served in glasses which were intended to hold a half portion of liqueur, and it is frequently necessary to command eight or ten of the nasty things to be poured together in a water tumbler before a perceptible quantity can be accumulated for swallowing purposes.
There are more waiters per public diner in New York than anywhere else in the United States and fewer waitresses, and while, heaven knows, there are some very wonderful waitresses in the world, as can be attested by any regular patron of Durgin Park's Market Restaurant in Boston or Thompson's Spa, formal and proper service of food requires a waiter who is as much of a professional expert as a surgeon, a copy reader, or a locomotive engineer, and nobody else can take his place.
It is an absolute impossibility to discover in New York a police officer who smokes on duty, wears his cap on the back of his head, or appears improperly attired in uniform. The average smalltown cop throughout the land is often personally and sartorially indistinguish able from the village bum or truckdriver.
Only in the provincial outlands of the United States is it common currency to attempt to disguise saloons under the revolting euphemism of “cocktail lounges.” In Manhattan at least a saloon is a saloon, and there are a number of bars restricted to masculine patronage alone, without juke boxes, without loudspeaker public address systems, and without women.
There are, as Mr. Walker suggests, a great many things lacking in New York. The town would be the better for the planting of as many trees, proportionately, as, say, Cleveland or Rutland, Vermont. It could stand between five and ten thousand additional taxicabs, and its troublesome traffic problem could be solved within an hour by the flat abolition of all and any parking anywhere between the Battery and the Harlem River at any time. The all-night, mechanical ice delivery stations which are universal elsewhere would be a great help. The restoration of night steamboat service to Boston, Albany, Providence, the Virginia Capes, and elsewhere would be welcomed with dancing in the streets. The ridiculous business of the “Avenue of the Americas” might as well be liquidated now as later, and while they are about it they might restore so-called Times Square, which is actually and technically only the name of a subway station, to the pleasant name of Longacre Square.
There are these and many more minor improvements on the life scheme of Gothamtown, but hardly any of them are to be found as local institutions in Lampasas, Texas.
Running to form and character as the opening manifestations of a theater season almost universally admitted to be one in which revivals will dominate, the only two productions to have made their Broadway bows as this dispatch goes to the composing room have been, in fact, revivals. One of them, The Front Page, was frankly and in toto a revival of the text, at least, of the hilarious Chicago drama which delighted audiences in the twenties, while the other, Gypsy Lady, was a generally acceptable synthesis of two other Victor Herbert operettas whose structural economies made them in themselves impracticable of production and improbable of acceptance by contemporary audiences.
The third opening with pretensions to the attention of the public, Yours Is My Heart, was of such a melancholy character and so meanly endowed of recommendations at once by its production, its participants, and its entire atmosphere, that chivalry would suggest the omission of its mention and expediency would do the same on the basis of its improbable longevity.
The Front Page, while its production was nourished by the youthful enthusiasm of its producer, Hunt Stromberg, Jr., proved singularly lacking in the vitality and excitements which had made its original production two decades ago a near classic of the American stage. It suffered in the inevitable comparison to its great original and the film version which enhanced its primal luster, and it suffered by any more immediate and objective standards from a sort of anemia and malnutrition which made its every stance and gesture pallid and faltering. In a word, Mr. Stromberg, whom everyone along Broadway wishes well for a variety of personal and professional reasons, lacked inspiration in his casting and in the very considerable gusto of production which are both essential to this particular play. It is not enough that the players in the Hecht-MacArthur nonesuch should adhere faithfully to its raffish, uncouth, and hilarious text; they must lend it a verisimilitude of authenticity which transcends the mere speaking of sides. Perhaps a cast of genuine roughnecks rather than gentle and mannered mumpers recruited from the membership of the Players and the Lambs would be the solution. Certainly Lew Parker and Arnold Moss in the roles originally created by Lee Tracy and Osgood Perkins were a very gentle brace of newspapermen indeed, when both the script and tradition called for a determined hooliganism of approach and conduct. The best of the evening was unquestionably William Lynn's impersonation of Sheriff Hartman which was a lewdly hilarious combination of sniveler, rascal, and marplot. The Front Page rates about a C minus for its good intentions.
Brighter than the foregoing may be the report on Gypsy Lady, if only for the reason that the cast includes the incomparable Melville Cooper, a sly and malicious fellow whose accomplished drolleries have enlivened any number of musicals from Jubilee down to the present moment, and who has never yet failed any producer who employed him. As a sort of gypsy Mike Romanoff, his clowning is of a pattern with his wonderful Popoff in The Merry Widow and his Italian duke “with a legal, regal duchess” in a later musical version of The Firebrand.
The Romany shindig at the Century stands on Mr. Cooper and the Victor Herbert score, both of which do very well indeed as supports for a book that is no great shakes but is at least tastefully ornamented by a pleasing cast and furnished forth with modest opulence.
The New York theater season cannot, in all conscience, be reported to have opened with any resounding bang, but it may be forecast with some assurance that the next report in this department will be of a livelier nature. It should cover the openings of the American Repertory Theater's Henry VIII, the Guild's newest Eugene O'Neill threedecker, The Iceman Cometh, and Cecil Beaton's costumes for Lady Windermere's Fan, and the reporter is of good cheer about all of these.