A chance encounter, as it so happened, only a few hours before his death, with Ernest Boyd in the premises of Pete's Tavern, a resort deriving a certain tony clientele from the adjacent Players and National Arts Club, set this department to speculating, as it does more or less annually, on the estate of the boulevardier, the man-about-town, and the gay dog in the expansive manner of yesterday. It was only a few years ago that Mr. Boyd himself was an arresting type of man-about-town of letters, and his red beard, wing collars, and elegant Homburg hats were ubiquitous oriflammes of masculine fashion. Time had not dealt too kindly with Mr. Boyd, as his hearing was impaired and he himself said that he was out of circulation, but he was once very much a part of what may be termed the Age of the Back Room at the Plaza, when such mighty names supplied copy for the town's paragraphers as Condé Nast, Karl K. Kitchen, Caruso, Colonel Creighton Webb, Bob Davis, Frank Case, and Charles Dana Gibson.
Even while these names of weight and wit were illustrating the maître d'hôtels' reservation lists in the lobster palaces, it was, of course fashionable to mourn the vanishment of the true boule-vardier of the generation previous and the top hats and horse carriage grandeurs of such epic fellows as Stanford White and Richard Harding Davis, George Kessler and Mannay Chappelle, Center Hitchcock and Harry Lehr. The Oscar of the Waldorf Era supplied bar-room gab about Colonel William d'Alton Mann's latest blackmail through the agency of his “Town Topics,” about Evander Berry Wall's stock collars and velvet evening jackets, about Wilton Lackaye's most recent and outrageous gesture of glass-smashing which had got him barred from the Lambs for a year.
With the passing of time, the Oscar of the Waldorf Era and the Age of the Back Room at the Plaza merged in the mists of unreality and became only fragrant memories of yesterday, along with the little supper parties that were always being arranged for Lily Langtry and the time back in 1911 that Albert Keller first allowed ladies to smoke in public apartments in the Ritz. And by the time what may be described as the Jack and Charlie Cycle had rolled around, everyone seemed agreed that the boulevardier and man-about-town, the first-nighter of lobster-supper proportions and the stage-door Johnny, were one with the fauna of the Early Ordovician stage of geology—gone with the frock coat and the 1900 vintage champagnes.
But, like the champagnes themselves, a new vintage of fashionable masculine New Yorkers inevitably came into being, and although, in keeping with the custom of the times, almost all of them depended on their own professions and pursuits rather than on inherited chips for a living, all the hall marks of the public figure of style and elegant accomplishments were there minus only the Inverness cloak and the toasts drunk from a lady's slipper. Into the Jack and Charlie Cycle there survived such authentic old-timers as Frank Crowninshield, dean of all charming and affable Manhattanites, Charles Hanson Towne, whose name is so happily suited to his ways of life, and Colonel Creighton Webb himself. George Jean Nathan, Marc Connelly, and Harold Ross were part of a historic posse of eminentos who foregathered in Frank Case's Algonquin Hotel to practice poker and games with bottles; Clifton Webb became celebrated as the greatest dandy since the great Wall; and Mike Arlen took to carrying a gold-headed walking stick to his table in public restaurants, a custom not observed hereabout since Boni de Castellane was in full cry after Anna Gould. The boulevards teem with exquisites ranging in all degrees of fashion and age, style and occupation from Serge Obolensky, Alfred de Liagre, and Crosby Gaige to Jack Kriendler himself, who lends his name to an era, Jackson Hines, the monocled sourdough of San Francisco, Frank Chapman, Frederick Blake Payne, Paul Draper, and W. Averill Harriman.
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