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Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway

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Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway

Paperback(First Trade Paper Edition)

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Paperback(First Trade Paper Edition)
$21.99

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Overview

In this rousing tribute to an unforgettable time and place, Jerome Charyn picks up where Gangs of New York left off and transports readers back to a swaggering, golden era in American life—the Roaring Twenties—when Broadway the street exploded into Broadway the legend. Charyn looks at the men and women who helped make the Big Street the most glamorous place on the planet, from Mae West to Fanny Brice, Legs Diamond to Irving Berlin, Scott Fitzgerald to Arnold Rothstein, and many more. In cinematic prose and numerous photographs, Charyn captures Broadway's vagabondage, outlaw culture, and self-mythologizing. He brings a rollicking, rough-and-tumble period in New York history to life—conjuring an intoxicating portrait of Jazz Age excess by examining the denizens of that greatest of all "staggering machine[s] of desire," the street known as Broadway.

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About the Author

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560256434
Publisher:	Hachette Books
Publication date:	12/21/2004
Edition description:	First Trade Paper Edition
Pages:	296
Sales rank:	934,426
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x (d)

About the Author

Jerome Charyn was born in the Bronx in 1937. His novel The Green Lantern was one of the five finalists for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and he is the author of more than thirty books. A film professor as well as a novelist and essayist, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.

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Editorial Reviews

Scott and Zelda are here, and the movie star Louise Brooks, and Gilbert Seldes, the critic who stooped from the empyrean heights where most cultural interpreters dwelt to notice that George Herriman's comic strip "Krazy Kat" was one of the wittiest fables being spun in America. It was the heyday of Gloria Swanson and Bessie Smith and Ruby Keeler, of Al Jolson and Bert Williams and Jack Johnson. If you have only a nodding acquaintance with most of these luminaries, Charyn's book is a kind of primer on them, not to mention jazz babies, red hot mamas, gold diggers, "Hello, suckers!" and why Al Jolson deserves our attention even though he often performed in blackface. — Dennis Drabelle

The Washington Post

Charyn's paean to Jazz Age New York stars the multifarious characters who graced the stages, speakeasies and diners around Broadway in the 1920s and '30s. Never, he says, was New York "New Yorkier" than in this "lawless, unbridled mecca where everybody could meet-hoodlums, heiresses, jazz singers, funny girls, dentists from Des Moines (so long as they had a little money)...." Around Broadway, Al Jolson rubbed shoulders with Ellin Mackay, "the richest girl in America," and George Gershwin would run into Mae West. In the words of nightclub owner Texas Guinan, "Better a square foot of New York than all the rest of the world in a lump." High spirits, though, don't prevent deep flaws in Charyn's book. The author, who has written more than 30 books of fiction, memoir and cultural studies, presents a huge array of characters, few of whom are explored deeply or coherently. Many of the myriad players are cursorily glossed over and then dropped from the narrative. The result is like walking into a glittering party where you don't know a soul and nobody bothers to make introductions. Those who already know the major and minor stars of this era will glean some colorful anecdotes, taken from disparate sources. Al Capone, for example, "liked to drink whisky out of a teacup" and Zelda Fitzgerald, before her breakdowns, was prone to dive into the fountain at Union Square. The force of the running prose, reminiscent of the high-kicking Follies girls, might carry interested readers through the disorganized narrative. Illus. not seen by PW. (Dec. 1) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

What do Babe Ruth, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Al Jolson, Damon Runyon, Louise Brooks, and William Randolph Hearst have in common? They are all major characters in Charyn's (Bronx Boy) expos of the New York theater, literary, and underworld scenes in the early 20th century. The author combines some chronological history of Broadway with lengthy discourses on all-but-forgotten denizens of the shady side of Prohibition such as Arnold Rothstein and Owen Madden, as well as seedy entertainment figures on the order of Texas Guinan. Charyn certainly has a stylish way with the English language and uses quotations from contemporary sources to good effect, but it is hard to tell at what audience the book is directed-is he trying to document a time period or merely add another to his series of crime novels and fictionalized treatments of famous personages? Readers will be put off by the unnecessary vulgarisms, diffuse shifting of voices and settings, and strong opinions (sometimes with little to back them up), and an epilog dealing with New York after 9/11 and the movie Chicago shows promise but is rather self-serving. Libraries should consider this distinctly marginal purchase only if Charyn fans clamor for it.-Barry Zaslow, Miami Univ. Libs., Oxford, OH Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

A skillful novelist fashions an ordinary paean to the Broadway That Was, followed by an unsurprising rebuke of what we’re left with. New Yorker Charyn (Bronx Boy, 2002, etc.) declares that 9/11 occasioned this Gotham scrapbook. He wished, he says, to honor all of Manhattan by celebrating one particular place, a certain street, a certain time. The author begins with Damon Runyon (whose Broadway stories he greatly admires) and moves more or less chronologically by creating patchy portraits of those who form the popular pantheon of characters who once ruled the street or flashed across the horizon of celebrity or acted or sang or danced or joked in vaudeville. His sketches of Arnold Rothstein, Flo Ziegfeld, Al Jolson, Irving Berlin, Fanny Brice, Jack Johnson, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, and George Gershwin will enlighten no one who reads widely or watches A&E’s Biography. Okay, readers may not know that "rosebud," the last word to escape the lips of Charles Foster Kane, was the private name that William Randolph Hearst gave to the private parts of Marion Davies. Similar shocked delight may accompany the discovery that Jolson called exceptionally sexually adept women "chandeliers" (because they would do it even while hanging from a chandelier). Charyn does give overdue credit to the black performers of the era (e.g., Bert Williams, Florence Mills), all of whom endured crushing indignities, not the least of which was watching lesser (white) talents apply blackface and win popular acclaim. And he retains, even in the most unremarkable passages, the ability to craft a remarkable line (Broadway was "that nighttime capital of chaos"), although he is also quite capable of writing a sentence soordinary that it seems to have come from the pen of an evil twin ("Both Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald were the center of everything, with an aura all their own"). There simply aren’t enough new insights or revelations to justify this parade of well-known stories and personalities. Entertaining, affectionate—but not a hit.

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