Mr. New York

BEAU JAMES (389 pp.)--Gene Fowler --Viking ($4).

A woman in the audience fainted. Without a second thought, New York's Mayor James J. (for John) Walker darted from the radio microphone into which he was delivering his inaugural address, and knelt at her side. In the brief radio silence that day in 1926, thousands of New Yorkers stared at their sets and wondered: What was Jimmy up to now?

They would often ask that question during the next half dozen years. Gentleman Jimmy was forever darting away from his post in the peak-of-prosperity days--to Florida or Europe or simply to the fights. New York didn't seem to mind. Jimmy was the cock o' the walk, a witty, debonair, fashion-plate Irishman who could charm a bird down out of a tree. "Mr. New York," they called him, and the Big Town "wore [him] in its lapel" like a carnation (as one wit cracked), and threw him away when the Big Party of the '20s was over.

Love In May. Beau James is the Walker story as told by Gene Fowler, whose biographies of other gifted scapegraces (John Barrymore in Good Night, Sweet Prince; Manhattan Lawyer William Fallon in The Great Mouthpiece; Denver Publishers Bonfils and Tammen in Timber Line) were bestsellers. Fowler writes of "the good old days" (a phrase that seems to mean the '205 now) sometimes as if he had a fistful of firecrackers, sometimes as if his pen had a tear duct. But the material (much of it new) lends itself perfectly to the Fowler flair for the sympathetically lusty tale.

After a stint at business school and two years of law school, gregarious, piano-playing Jimmy Walker set out to write songs for a living. He had only one big hit, Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?, but he made a million friends in Manhattan. In 1912, Jimmy married his sweetheart, Janet ("Allie") Allen, to a medley of "Here Comes the Bride" and Witt You Love Me in December? All his life a 10 o'clock scholar, Jimmy was more than two hours late for the wedding. Two years later, after having served as an assemblyman, Walker was elected to the state senate, and later became the senate's Democratic leader.

Tempest in a Pot. As mayor, Walker soon reduced his onerous new job to an easygoing system. "Walker would rise about 10 o'clock and glance at the headlines," writes Fowler. "After three or four minutes with the big type, Walker . . . would . . . retire again . . . With pillows propped behind his back, he would make telephone calls, and . . . re-examine the newspaper headlines." Around noon he would dress and go out. He got a lot of mail, but, says Fowler, ,he "seldom read any of the thousands of letters sent to him over the years . . . seldom replied to those he did chance to read ..." Most of the essential work got done. Said New York's present mayor, William O'Dwyer, "Jim Walker as mayor got more things done in two hours than any of the rest of us could do in ten."

After working hours, Jimmy was off to parties with old Broadway friends. Soon he had a new one: Actress Betty Compton. Their relationship became a Page One scandal. "If you have to be a sneak to get votes," snapped Jimmy, "then count me out right now." All went as gaily as a magic-carpet ride--until the Crash. In 1931, the New York state legis- lature voted an investigation of charges of corruption in the Walker administration. "A tempest in a pot," said Jimmy.

It was tempest enough. Jimmy admitted that as mayor he had accepted a quarter of a million dollars in gifts from a friend. Chief Investigator Judge Samuel Seabury charged that Jimmy had let corruption rot his administration. (At the start of the investigations, Jimmy was caught in a police raid on a gambling casino, escaped arrest by pulling on a waiter's apron and sitting down to a plate of beans in the kitchen.) In September 1932, with Walker's sudden resignation, hearings on the charges came to an end.

Characteristic in December. The trouble, as he later explained it, was that he had trusted people too much. "I knew how to say 'no,' but could seldom bring myself to say it. A woman and a politician must say that word often, and mean it--or else." But if he had any regrets Jimmy kept them to himself. Said he: "I have carried youth right up to the fifty-yard mark. I had mine and made the most of it."

Jimmy got a divorce and married Betty Compton. He tried this & that to keep up his standard of living--a newspaper column, a chicken farm, assistant counsel for the State Transit Commission, a job at $25,000 yearly as czar of labor relations in Manhattan's garment industry. He was still faultlessly tailored, urbane and worldly. In 1942, after his marriage to Betty had also ended in divorce, Jimmy, 60, went back to the Roman Catholic Church. "The glamor of other days I have found to be tinsel," he later said.

In November 1946, he died. Traffic delayed the hearse on its way to St. Patrick's Cathedral. The crowds shuffled and the choir boys waited. A policeman put the thought in words: "Our little Jimmy is late again."

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