Guys and Dolls and Other Writings Read online

  PENGUIN CLASSICS

  GUYS AND DOLLS AND OTHER WRITINGS

  DAMON RUNYON was born in Kansas in 1884 and grew up in Pueblo, Colorado. As a teenager he wrote articles for the local newspapers, and in 1898, at the age of fourteen, he enlisted in the Spanish-American War. He returned to work on various newspapers and became a sportswriter for the New York American in 1911. During the First World War he was a war correspondent for the Hearst newspaper chain and after the war continued to work as a Hearst columnist. He died in 1946.

  PETE HAMILL is a veteran journalist and novelist. He has written many best-selling books, including A Drinking Life, Snow in August, and Forever. His most recent book is Downtown: My Manhattan. He is a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. He is a past winner of the Damon Runyon Award from the Denver Press Club.

  DANIEL R. SCHWARZ is the Frederic J. Whiton Professor of English and the Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow at Cornell University. He is the author of numerous poems, articles, and books, including Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture, Imagining the Holocaust, Reading Joyce’s Ulysses, Reconfiguring Modernism: Explorations in the Relationship Between Modern Art and Modern Literature, Rereading Conrad, and Disraeli’s Fiction.

  DAMON RUNYON

  Guys and Dolls

  and Other Writings

  Introduction by PETE HAMILL

  Essay and Annotations by DANIEL R. SCHWARZ

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  This edition first published in Penguin Books 2008

  Copyright © American Rights Management Co., LLC, 2008

  Introduction copyright © Pete Hamill, 2008

  Essay and annotations copyright © Daniel R. Schwarz, 2008

  All rights reserved

  Special acknowledgment is made to Matteo Molinari for his assistance with this book.

  The original sources of the selections in this book are cited in

  “A Note on the Text” and the annotations section.

  Excerpts from Broadway Boogie Woogie: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture

  by Daniel R. Schwarz in Mr. Schwarz’s essay are reprinted by permission of Palgrave Macmillan.

  Copyright © Daniel R. Schwarz, 2003.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Runyon, Damon, 1880–1946.

  Guys and dolls and other writings / Damon Runyon; introduction by Pete Hamill;

  essay and annotations by Daniel R. Schwarz.

  p. cm.

  Includes bibliographical references.

  ISBN: 978-1-101-66485-8

  I. Schwarz, Daniel R. II. Title.

  PS3535.U52A6 2008

  813’.52—dc22 2007017004

  Except in the United States of America, this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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  Cover art: © Al Hirschfeld. Reproduced by arrangement with Hirschfeld’s exclusive representative, the Margo Feiden Galleries Ltd., New York.

  Version_1

  Contents

  Introduction by PETE HAMILL

  Suggestions for Further Reading by DANIEL R. SCHWARZ

  A Note on the Text

  GUYS AND DOLLS AND OTHER WRITINGS

  THE BROADWAY STORIES

  Romance in the Roaring Forties

  A Very Honorable Guy

  Madame La Gimp

  Dark Dolores

  Lillian

  Social Error

  Blood Pressure

  Butch Minds the Baby

  The Hottest Guy in the World

  The Lily of St. Pierre

  The Bloodhounds of Broadway

  “Gentlemen, the King!”

  The Brain Goes Home

  The Snatching of Bookie Bob

  Hold ’em, Yale!

  For a Pal

  Broadway Financier

  Little Miss Marker

  Dream Street Rose

  Tobias the Terrible

  Dancing Dan’s Christmas

  Earthquake

  The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown

  The Old Doll’s House

  It Comes Up Mud

  The Brakeman’s Daughter

  What, No Butler?

  Broadway Complex

  The Three Wise Guys

  The Lemon Drop Kid

  Princess O’Hara

  A Nice Price

  Sense of Humor

  Undertaker Song

  Breach of Promise

  A Light in France

  THE TURPS

  A Call on the President

  EARLY FICTION

  The Defense of Strikerville

  Two Men Named Collins

  OTHER FICTION

  Lou Louder

  On the Dear Departed

  Doc Brackett

  Jeremiah Zore

  POEMS

  A Handy Guy Like Sande

  A Jew

  TRIAL REPORTING

  Arnold Rothstein’s Final Payoff

  Al Capone

  Morgan the Mighty

  OCCASIONAL PROSE

  Why Me?

  Sweet Dreams

  Passing the Word Along

  Your Neighbor—The Gambler

  Mr. “B” and His Stork Club

  Essay and Annotations by DANIEL R. SCHWARZ

  Introduction

  The beautiful thing about Damon Runyon is that he still speaks to us across the decades. He was born in the nineteenth century—fittingly in Manhattan, Kansas—and died in 1946 after a long struggle with cancer. In between, he wrote millions of words of journalism, some poetry, and the wonderful Broadway stories that make up part of this book.

  Almost all of them are tales related by an unnamed narrator (who is surely a stand-in for Runyon), and they describe a world that vanished long ago, if indeed it ever existed at all. The world was located in about ten square blocks of midtown Manhattan during the second and third decades of the twentieth century. Usually the area is called Times Square, although Runyon, who worke
d for Hearst and never The New York Times, seldom uses that name. It is a world primarily inhabited by the New York children of Irish, Jewish, and Italian immigrants, although Runyon enjoys describing the collisions of his Broadway people with various outlanders: slumming members of the upper class, greenhorns from way out in America, ambitious grifters in town to make big scores. There are almost no African-Americans (and in the racist argot of the era, Runyon refers to various black porters and waiters as “stove lids”). Harlem in that era was vivid with life and ambition. Runyon, the story writer, never bothered going there, except for glancing visits on the way to and from the Polo Grounds, where a team called the Giants once played baseball, long ago.

  The Runyon world appears in these stories to be a male club (one critic describes it as “homoerotic”). His gangsters, gamblers, old bootleggers, prizefighters, waiters, musicians, and newspapermen are triumphantly male. Their language has a male rhythm. So do their lives, where the macho codes often lead them to mayhem. But many of the stories feature women, and the effect they have on men. The women are often tougher than men, and certainly more realistic. Most of them accept the notion of love, but they almost never separate that dangerous and delightful emotion from the hard realities of economics. Runyon’s showgirls all seem to understand that their beauty is a transient thing, an accident of genes and luck, but that with clarity and a certain amount of guile, a doll can build a secure future upon that splendid accident. Most of Runyon’s females would have agreed with Runyon’s advice to young writers: “Get the money.”

  One result: the men are terminally wary of women and live with them in a state of comical alert. Here is the narrator in the story “Tobias the Terrible” (1937):

  If I have all the tears that are shed on Broadway by guys in love, I will have enough salt water to start an opposition ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific, with enough left over to run the Great Salt Lake out of business. But I wish to say I never shed any of these tears personally, because I am never in love, and furthermore, barring a bad break, I never expect to be in love, for the way I look at it love is strictly the old phedinkus.

  Nobody alive knows what a “phedinkus” is, and Runyon’s stories are sprinkled with other words whose meanings have vanished into air. But their meanings can almost always be deciphered from context. A phedinkus must be a swindle, a fraud, a sweet lie created to tear down personal defenses. Runyon, of course, was not immune to the old phedinkus. All accounts of his life tell the story of his two failed marriages, his estrangement from his children, his erratic romances, his abiding solitude and loneliness. In the Runyon story, there was another object of his enduring capacity for love: the city of New York.

  He started life as Alfred Damon Runyan (with an “a”). The date of birth was October 4, 1880, a year before Doc Holiday and the Earps fought in the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, while Henry James, in a very different America, published The Portrait of a Lady. His father, Alfred Lee Runyan, was a second-generation newspaperman, an itinerant who could set type and write stories and who settled for a long while in Pueblo, Colorado. There the boy was raised and began to learn his trade. The boy’s mother died when he was either seven or eleven (the biographical confusion came from Runyon himself, who at the height of his fame shaved four years off his age for an entry in Who’s Who in America). The best bet is eleven. His widowed father was part of the hard-drinking newspaper tradition, while Damon roamed Pueblo with his schoolmates. He went only as far as the sixth grade but would get his most valuable education (about craft and life) from working at newspapers, following the unwritten syllabus of a classical apprenticeship. At fifteen he was being paid to write for the Pueblo Evening Press. In one of his early bylined stories, a typo changed the “a” to an “o,” and the young man let it stand, perhaps as a small declaration of independence from his father.

  In 1898 he enlisted in the army for the Spanish-American War (with the Thirteenth Minnesota volunteers) and was sent to the Philippines. He saw no action but did write stories for papers called Manila Freedom and Soldier’s Letter. When he returned to Colorado, he moved from paper to paper, constantly developing his craft, before landing at the Denver Post, a big-time newspaper. There he became a star sportswriter who could also report features, politics, and an occasional murder. He began writing short fiction for national magazines, much of it set in the West. At the same time he ached for the East, specifically that other, larger, more glittering Manhattan. In 1910 he got his chance.

  He went to work for William Randolph Hearst, another westerner who had gone east. He started covering baseball and boxing for Hearst’s New York American (where an editor cut the “Alfred” out of his byline). He gave up drinking for life (but kept smoking heavily), married a newspaperwoman named Ellen Egan, and fathered two children. By 1914 he was a star reporter, traveling to the Mexican border to observe Pershing’s futile pursuit of Pancho Villa and covering murder trials, eventually the war in France, the first exploits of pilots in the heroic early days of flight, and then the multiple imbecilities of Prohibition. He was earning about $500 a week.

  By all accounts, he was a small, quiet man, given to expensive clothes and good food, with a fine eye for detail and an ear for the nuances of human speech. As a newspaperman, in that era before television, he could put the reader in the courtroom or the ballpark or the scene of a murder. His silence was not surly. He was listening. Reporters learn quickly that if they are doing the talking, they can’t hear a word from anyone else. The same accounts tell us that Runyon, in the years of his growing fame, was a dreadful husband. (His wife would die in 1931 from the effects of alcoholism while Runyon lived in solitude at the Hotel Forrest.) He was, like many of his characters, a heavy gambler, always in need of money.

  In 1929, that year when all the certainties of the Roaring Twenties began to shudder and then disappear into the Great Depression, Runyon found a way to get more money.

  The first of Runyon’s Broadway stories appeared in Hearst’s Cosmopolitan two months before the Wall Street crash and was called “Romance in the Roaring Forties.” It was about a rough customer called Dave the Dude, his doll, Miss Billy Perry, and a gossip columnist called Waldo Winchester. Like most of the Broadway stories, it’s about love and money. Dave the Dude was probably based on real-life gangster Frank Costello (who by mob standards was a pacifist, preferring brains to muscle). The gossip columnist was an obvious version of Walter Winchell, who would soon be the most powerful journalist in America and much later, in the last years of Runyon’s life, a close friend. That first Broadway story was something new in American fiction, with its own rhythms and language and a view of human beings that was at once cynical and embracing.

  The audience must have loved it, and certainly magazine editors did, in that era when the short story was a major form of American fiction. More than eighty stories would follow, featuring Nathan Detroit, Feet Samuels, Sky Masterson, Big Jule, Nicely-Nicely Jones, Madame La Gimp, Good Time Charley Bernstein, Miss Missouri Martin (based on Texas Guinan), Benny South Street, and scores of others. Many would later appear in the Frank Loesser musical Guys and Dolls, which opened on Broadway in 1950. Runyon wouldn’t live to see this wonderful show, but I suspect he would have loved it. The lyrics, music, and spoken word were absolutely true to Runyon’s stories and his vision of Broadway.

  The voice of those stories is usually the “historical present,” as in “Butch Minds the Baby”:

  One evening along about seven o’clock I am sitting in Mindy’s restaurant putting on the gefilte fish, when in comes three parties from Brooklyn wearing caps as follows: Harry the Horse, Little Isadore and Spanish John.

  The narrator is not sitting in Mindy’s while he is telling the story; this unfolding story happened in the past, even though Runyon uses the present tense. But the simple device gives the stories a kind of energy that would be absent in most uses of the past tense. It looks easy, until you try to do it. The voice was above all urban, drawing on Yiddish, which in
the 1920s was New York’s second language, as Spanish is today. Thus, a five-dollar bill is a “finiff” and various people are “starkers” (tough guys) or “gonophs” (thieves, cheats, pickpockets). Sometimes we can hear Runyon’s people talking above their station, playing social roles that are lies, but we certainly don’t mistake them for characters out of Edith Wharton, who do the same thing.

  This is, of course, a fictional world. The gangsters don’t speak the way real gangsters spoke in that era, or in ours. There is no obscenity, for example, no compounding of vile words to express contempt. And in the tales of romance there are subtle implications of sexual activity but no clinical details and no eroticism. Runyon is often accused of sentimentalizing his gangsters, and is sometimes guilty as charged. But a close reading of most of these stories shows us a clear darker side. His people often do terrible things to each other, and out of base motives.

  He actually knew many of the people he describes in his fictions. One such character he called Nathan Detroit in some stories and in others, Armand Rosenthal, The Brain. The character was loosely based on the notorious gambler Arnold Rothstein, who was said to have fixed the 1919 World Series. In his 1925 masterwork, The Great Gatsby, F. Scott Fitzgerald presented a minor character named Meyer Wolfsheim, also based on Rothstein, but alas, he is a clumsy anti-Semitic caricature. Runyon’s version was free of this virus, for good reason. He knew Rothstein well and often sat with him for coffee at the Rothstein table near the cashier at Lindy’s restaurant on Broadway (as Mindy’s, the location of many of his stories). Rothstein was no common thug. He was, by most accounts, articulate, subtle, intelligent. Presumably their conversations were about gambling, women, and food, and not the meaning of life, but Runyon never told us. On November 4, 1928, Runyon had one final whispery conversation with Rothstein at Lindy’s before the gambler went off to be shot dead at the Park Central Hotel for welshing on a gigantic gambling debt. He lives on in Runyon’s stories.

  So does the New York that almost certainly existed only in the imagination of the man who wrote about it. Perhaps it was New York as he wanted it to be, the place he had yearned for when he was young in the West. Perhaps it was a city that was both magical and real. Certainly Runyon loved New York as William Faulkner later said he loved Mississippi: in spite of, not because. These stories were almost all written during the Great Depression, but hard times never overwhelm the players, even the two-dollar horse players. They know that their fate is to die broke. Runyon was free of ideology, generally embracing the principles of the New Deal (although he grew more conservative as he grew older). There are a few ideologues in the stories, usually figures of fun, and at least one story deals with the civil war in Spain, which consumed so much energy among many New Yorkers. But Runyon did not write fiction to change his readers’ minds. He wanted them to laugh. And they did, and still do.