In a community whose foundations rest on nutbergers, drive-in cat's-meat shops, women in trousers, men without neckties, and crowds of foetid urchins caterwauling and swooning in the streets, and paid instead of publicly flogged for doing it, the simian manners of film stars aren't so noticeable. Public tumults engendered by the bodyguards of psychopathic night-club singers and the ad-mixture of slugging, bleating, and hysterics that pass for social intercourse are regarded as good promotion and stylish publicity, but New York hasn't yet become entirely reconciled to this sort of caper. The crowds attracted by the first nights of legitimate theaters are already quite offensive enough without having film press agents cruising the reformatories and urging delinquent and idiot juveniles to run amuck in the streets to honor their employers when they venture east to see themselves drooling, mugging, and clowning on the screen in first nights of films that were better never fabricated or uttered.
The comedy and nuisance of what pass for movie celebrities away from their native zoo have assumed such proportions that the Waldorf, whenever one of these pests puts up there, has to recruit a special regiment of house police simply to cope with the creeps and cretins whom press agents hire to follow their principals and make street scenes. Sherman Billingsley and other night-club proprietors, at their wit's end to protect their regular and more mannered customers from the pushing and pretentious entrances of boors from Bel Air, have to reorganize the entire conduct of their premises and make arrangements tactfully to segregate the actors from the legitimate patrons. Anything that can be done to enforce an immigration quota on film personalities seeking admission to Manhattan on a group basis is no more than is demanded by the communal peace.
For all that Manhattan may be guilty of a thousand and one evidences of ava-rice and chiseling, greed, graft, gyp, rookery, and blackjacking, travel in the nation convinces the voyager in suburban parts that there is one form of small-time cheating which isn't practiced so much in New York as it is west of the Hudson where it is universal, and that is in the field of bar drinks. The greatest licking the American sucker public is taking today isn't in the field of side money for rents or under-the-counter prices for cars or any of the other swindles to which, being a member of the most gullible citizenry of all time, he submits with no visible sign of outrage. It is in the payment of fantastic prices for drinks in the provinces which no New York barkeeper in a responsible resort would dare set before a customer.
Cocktails, for example, in honest New York bars frequented by people of reasonable discrimination—the Plaza, the St. Regis, Bleeck's, Whyte's, and a number of others—are served in three- or three-and-a-half-ounce glasses, and are filled with two and a half ounces of liquor, often enough three. In tearooms and standup bars alike in Chicago, Los Angeles, even, may heaven forgive its mention, in San Francisco, saloon proprietors barefacedly serve their so-called cocktails in ounce-and-a-half glasses in which there is often less than an ounce of watered liquor. This, mark you, is in large cities accustomed to the uses of urbanity. In small towns and country resorts this department has seen Martinis served over a large olive in a liqueur glass, so that there was by no conceivable possibility more than a tablespoon of diluted liquor in the glass, and the suckers pay sixty and seventy-five cents for this portion of nothing. The humorous aspect of this deal, in which the bar profit may conceivably run as high as 1,000 per cent on a two-dollar bottle of gin, is that the belles poires who put up with such nonsense are the very people who, in the hospitality of their own homes, excuse themselves if they pour less than six ounces of bourbon in a highball, and strain to make a fifth of gin provide a round of Martinis for four people!
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