Better Late Than Ever

Night life in wartime Manhattan is terrific. War workers and service men want to hit the high spots. Men about to go into service want to drink farewell toasts. Buyers need a lift, burghers a change. Money is free, travel restricted, the present arduous, the future uncertain.

The stampede is worst in the Broadway spots, with their bargain prices, gaudy floor shows and influx of sidewalk trade; but the swish East Side clubs are going almost as strong. Variety reports that headwaiters, disguised in overcoats, stand outside two East Side clubs, being choosy about the guests. The Village is booming also. Only the smoke-filled, low-ceiled jazz spots that sprang up while Manhattan had swing fever are (save for one or two like Kelly's Stable) on the syncopated skids. People want soft tunes they can sway to and old favorites they can hum. Most ubiquitous new song: Cole Porter's torchy-chornya You'd Be So Nice To Come Home To (best sung by the Riobamba's fresh-voiced Frank Sinatra).

There is, however, little of wartime's traditional desperate gaiety. There is more drinking than formerly--men about to be inducted drink the most--but little drunkenness.-Almost nobody wears evening clothes. Uniforms run up to 50% (mostly enlisted men) in the Broadway area; average 25% (mostly officers) on the East Side, with here & there a WAVE or a WAAC. Service men seldom pay a cover charge, often get special rates. Prices everywhere have climbed.

Customers want lure, and the little boites are adding token chorus lines, the big spots sultrier ones. Even more, customers want laughs: the comics are the town's brightest notes and biggest draws. (Most ubiquitous gag: "My mother-in-law is the Gestapo in bloomers.")

Antics. The town's best act is Jimmy "Schnozzle" Durante, who, at the brightly Brazilian Copacabana with its gorgeous showgirls, is making his first real nose-to-nose appearance in twelve years. Schnozzle ("I know I'm not good-lookin', but wot's my opinion against tousands of odders?") has aged but fortunately not mellowed, is again in the vein of the late, great Clayton, Jackson & Durante act, able to concentrate on his own mad, multileveled comedy which Hollywood usually heavily diluted with other men's ideas. He brings on his old partner, Eddie Jackson, partly to strut, mostly to stooge; fetches his fans with old favorites like Inka-Dinka-Doo; he insults waiters, lambastes bus boys, beats up the band, heaves lamps, flings around telephones, rips apart pianos, surges to a high-slaughter mark of comic violence.

Other comics:

^ At the Wedgwood Room is Victor Borge (pronounced Borguh) as the "unmelancholy Dane," who arrived in the U.S. two years ago not knowing a word of English. Borge's droll, suave, teasing act, full of casually crazy asides ("T.ie tenor comes in in single file") culminates expertly at the piano.

^ At La Martinique, sometime Borsch-Circuiter Jackie Miles makes a lively pat-ter-and-gag man. Sample: He asks an Army doctor whether there is any chance of a deferment. Answers the sawbones: "Not unless your seeing-eye dog goes lame."

Atmosphere. Most r'-.tractive of Manhattan's new night spots is La Vie Parisienne, its gay, Gallic charm enhanced by the popping of champagne corks and Artist Bernard Lamotte's fresh, green-blue murals of Parisian scenes. The bar (see cut) looks out, nostalgically, through a bistro window with reverse lettering, on a Montparnasse-ish street. Opened last year by tall, trim Arthur Lesser, a repatriated U.S. Jew who once owned his own wine business in France, later escaped from France by bribing the Gestapo with half a million francs, La Vie Parisienne puts on a good show. Boyish John Sebastian doffi wonders with a harmonica, and long-faced, deadpan Comic Paula Laurence (Something for the Boys) scrambles Brooklyn, bedlam and Bea Lillle into something very much her own.

Still pitchforking them in after 14 years, the roomy, rustic Village Barn (all hung round with ox harness, milk cans, birdhouses and brooms) fetches typist groups out on a toot, family birthday parties whom it tenders a cake, gobs of gobs, Eleanor Roosevelt, worldlings so blase they can get a kick out of calico. Its corn-fed show is fairly good fun, but its real stock in trade is audience participation (conga lines, square dances, potato games), and its real charm such typical incidents as seeing a sore-toothed showgirl hugging an ice bag which a sympathetic soldier refills out of his wine bucket. Action. The big, never-a-dull-moment Broadway fairs keep blaring and blazing away. Smart Billy Rose's Diamond Horseshoe follows its lucrative formula of past-tense fun and imperative-mood sex. Leon & Eddie's wobbles through a hit-or-miss show, briefly enhanced by lovely-shaped, velvet-skinned Charlotte Vogue, who comes on with a wolfhound and goes off nearly bare. La Conga, all smoke and jungle beat, offers a sultry Latin American show, climaxed by Diosa Costello--contortionist, fishwife, whirling dervish and hot stove. But La Conga's best sight is the dancing of its indefatigable, sambadex-terous patrons.

-In TIME'S high-&-low tour of the town, the only drunk encountered who had to be bounced was a cut-up at the Waldorf-Astoria's superele-gant Wedgwood Room.

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