Jazz Age Editor

THE NIGHT CLUB ERA--Stanley Walker--Stokes ($3).

City editors of big metropolitan dailies have to be well informed. Few have their finger tips on a wider variety of facts about contemporary people and events than Stanley Walker, brisk little city editor of New York's potent Herald Tribune. Not content with doing a first-rate job at a desk that many a colleague has found exhausting, he somehow finds time to turn out book reviews, magazine articles, has now written a book, a timely newspaper-man's-eye-view of Manhattan under Prohibition. Says Star Reporter Alva Johnston, who writes the introduction: "Mr. Walker seeks by a wealth of anecdote and a cheerful ironic style to disguise the fact that he has written an authoritative work on metropolitan anthropology."

Starting with the night the Volstead Act shut down on the U. S. (Jan. 16, 1920), omnireminiscent Observer Walker takes a quick stroll through the 13 ensuing years, cocking a never-reverent eye at Manhattan's speakeasies, Prohibition agents, cops, racketeers, hostesses, parsons, suckers, "clip-joint" proprietors, colyumists. Some of his headliners: "Owney" Madden, Walter Winchell, Jimmy Walker, Barney Gallant, the late John Roach Straton, "Legs" Diamond, "Texas" Guinan, Larry Fay, Florence Mills. Some of the things he recalls: That the Prohibition raids instigated by Mabel Walker Willebrandt in New York cost the Government "at least $75,000," brought in $8,400 in cash and fines. That "the agents kept up the price of liquor. Their extortions, their free drinks and free meals forced the ordinary customer to pay twice what he should have paid for liquor." That salvation in Manhattan is expensive: "The cost of making converts in the foreign mission field . . . comes to about $260 a head. . . . In wicked New York the average cost of making a convert is placed by the most optimistic statistician at $660, and other experts who have tried to figure it out say that $1,500 would be more nearly the correct figure." That Broadway, "once a street of comparatively modest tastes, of some show of decorum . . . has degenerated into something resembling the main drag of a frontier town. . . . Broadway has become a basement bargain counter."

Author Walker devotes a chapter to Manhattan's No. 1 Racketeer, Owen Victor ("Owney") Madden, who under Prohibition "became, in many respects, the most important man in New York. . . . In many ways he had more sense than Capone. He was a better business man. He saw what too much publicity was doing for Capone." (Released from his latest term at Sing Sing last July, Owney Madden is now at large.) Of another Walker, Manhattan's ex-Mayor James John, he says: "If he had wanted to study, he could have led the class"; quotes Jimmy's definition of a reformer: "A guy who rides through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat." He retails the philosophy of Barney Gallant, Latvian Jew who once shared an apartment with Eugene O'Neill, later became Greenwich Village's night-club tycoon: "No isms or cults are any good. Every man should be his own Jesus."

The Author, says his introducer, "is that rare article, a newspaper executive who gets around a little and has first-hand knowledge of his town. He is a connoisseur of people, especially fantastic ones, and seeks them out as the late J. P. Morgan sought rare old snuff-boxes." He has journalistic premonitions which stand him in good stead. "He is practically a whippoorwill in his ability to forecast death, especially the death of an eminent citizen." Generally considered Manhattan's most colorful as well as ablest city editor. Stanley Walker fulfills the first requisite of a Manhattanite by having been born elsewhere (on a Texas ranch), its second by living outside Manhattan (at Great Neck, L.I., where he keeps his wife, two children). Short, wiry, cigar-smoking, a demon for work and night life, Editor Walker knows a good deal for one so young (33) about his adopted city. Though he sees through its mundane glory, smiles at its sophisticated wickedness and remains unbewildered by its multifarious complexity, he is still fascinated by "that fabulous city."

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