The guys and dolls of old Broadway

“Broadway lived within an exuberant whirl of energy,” writes Jerome Charyn, chronicling the real-life figures of Manhattan’s Jazz Age myth, “a signage that lit the night, and a social order that included apartment hotels and rooming houses, delicatessens and vaudeville palaces, nightclubs and cabarets, where one might meet struggling chorines, retired actresses coughing their lungs out in a room that faced a wall, Jack Johnson shadowboxing in some basement, Babe Ruth riding along in his bearskin coat, Billy Rose looking like a gangster, gangsters looking like the president of Paramount Pictures, shopgirls in their little cloche hats, veterans of the Great War still wrapped in their puttees, detectives like Johnny Broderick who once stuffed Legs Diamond into a garbage can -- they were all a part of a melody that thrived in the dark, that would be imitated everywhere, until no one could tell the real from the unreal.”

In his nonfiction narrative “Gangsters & Gold Diggers,” Charyn tap dances through the “Guys and Dolls” version of Broadway, teasing fact from fiction while celebrating both. He introduces readers to the personalities made famous by such works as “The Great Gatsby,” “Gangs of New York,” “The Cotton Club” and “Chicago” and unveils the true stories and real people behind those tales.

Without the benefit of an introduction to indicate what he’s trying to achieve or to point us toward the big picture -- the mosaic he’ll assemble with his bits and pieces -- Charyn leaps right in with Damon Runyon, “the Grey Ghost of Broadway.” Runyon, a journalist whose stories of the Big Street were the inspiration for the musical production of “Guys and Dolls,” created characters who were bigger than life: Dave the Dude, “a benevolent bootlegger”; Miss Missouri Martin, “hard-boiled” nightclub owner; and the rest -- all of whom talk in Runyon’s “slanguage,” an idiom in which a gangster might be described as “a tough gorill” with “moxie” and a “chorus Judy” as looking “wiser than a treeful of owls.” In Runyon’s world, Charyn tells us, “[a] woman is either a ‘beauty’ or a ‘red-headed raggedy doll’ ” and “even a guy like Dave the Dude may go daffy over a doll.” This opening chapter sets the book’s tone, immersing readers in a mythically proportioned world and its oddball inhabitants -- but it may leave us wishing for a few opening remarks. Reading “Gangsters & Gold Diggers” is a bit like wandering into a vaudeville production in which magnificently costumed performers deliver great lines but there’s no program available to tell you just what’s what.

Ziegfeld Follies suddenly takes the stage, with tall, blond chorus girls adorned in plumed headdresses 6 feet high, prancing down staircase sets designed by Joseph Urban. Cornetist Bix Beiderbecke makes a cameo appearance, as does nightclub owner Texas Guinan, who soon gets cut down in the crossfire of Prohibition and the market crash of 1929. Before we know it, we’ve met a vast cast of characters, each with a unique role in the creation of Broadway: Mae West, Irving Berlin, Al Jolson, Babe Ruth, Fanny Brice, Joe DiMaggio, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Walter Winchell, Monk Eastman, Owen Madden, Arnold Rothstein, William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies. We learn the finer points of Broadway lore -- that Al “Scarface” Capone idolized George Gershwin and could “whistle every note of ‘Rhapsody in Blue,’ ” for instance, and that Jimmy Walker, known as Beau James, was the “Jazz Mayor” of New York. Charyn also gives long overdue attention to the black performers of vaudeville, who stood by and watched while whites in blackface gave lesser performances and reaped greater rewards.

Throughout, his high-spirited writing echoes the syncopations of jazz and the hyperbolic atmosphere of Broadway during that era. Describing Winchell (who was a media gangster of sorts; it was said that he didn’t need a gun to kill, and Capone used to beg him for lessons in proper diction and dancing the rumba), Charyn writes that he “would become a citizen of this new country-within-a-country that had emerged after the Great War: a 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).”

Each of Charyn’s fascinating characters dances with the author for a spell, perhaps offering a few comments on the shadowy side of Broadway, and then the curtain comes down and the next act is up. There is little structure here beyond the (loosely) chronological, but these set pieces are eminently entertaining. And maybe that’s the book’s point. As with Broadway itself, we’re meant to sit back and enjoy the show.

*

Gangsters & Gold Diggers

Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway

Jerome Charyn

Four Walls Eight Windows: 278 pp., $24