Tag Archives: reviews

Répétition Générale

H.L. Mencken

The Smart Set/January, 1921

§ 1

On Criticism.— (1) The notion that a critic, to be competent, must be a practitioner of the art he criticizes; (2) the notion that a doctor, to cure a bellyache, must have a belly-ache.

§ 2

In Extenuation and Apology.— There are two kinds of dramatic critics: destructive and constructive. I am a destructive. There are two kinds of guns: Krupp and pop.

§ 3

The Journalist.—The fiction of such romantic fellows as Jesse Lynch Williams and the late Richard Harding Davis is probably responsible for the widespread notion that newspaper work makes for a high degree of sophistication, and that old newspaper men are all very sharp and skeptical fellows, with keen eyes for quackery and very hard to fool. This is actually true of only a small minority of them. The average newspaper man, young or old, is quite as credulous and sentimental as the average stock-broker or delicatessen-dealer. It was an appetite for romance that took him into the profession in the first place, and that appetite is constantly fed and fostered by the somewhat childish excitement of his daily life. The events that chiefly concern and arouse him are not genuinely important events, but merely melodramatic events. In other words, the typical newspaper man is one who reacts to terrestrial phenomena like the typical reader of his paper, i.e., like the typical idiot. His so-called nose for news, so much praised by persons who confuse it with the colour sense of a Velasquez or the delicate ear of a Brahms, is simply a capacity for determining instinctively what a car-conductor or a Baptist clergyman will regard as interesting. This, nine times out of ten, is something that is utterly uninteresting to a civilized man. It takes a naive and hollow fellow to develop any such talent. He must start off with a profound ignorance of all genuine human values, and he must reinforce that ignorance with a vast knowledge of bogus values, painfully acquired and taken quite seriously by himself. To say that the possession of this blowsy and imbecile knowledge is sophistication is to say nonsense. If it is, then so is the knowledge of a Swedenborgian theologian or a negro witch-doctor. The burden of it eventually destroys all that remains of the logical sense of its possessor. No man is easier to fool than an old journalist. The politicians, in fact, make a regular trade of fooling him; he must be fooled before the rank and file of the boobery may be fooled. Press agents find him an easy mark. He is constantly victimized by the hocus-pocus of such mountebanks as the Hon. A. Mitchell Palmer. He believes childishly in all the heroes of the proletariat, from the Hon. Babe Ruth to the Hon. Herbert Hoover. He is so far out of contact with the intellectual life of his race and time that he is quite unable to comprehend it. He sees the world essentially as a police sergeant or a ward heeler sees it. His instinctive antipathy to all civilized culture and aspiration is the instinctive antipathy of obtuseness. He hates intelligence because intelligence is the enemy of his habitual sentimentality.

Journalism, of course, also has room for a quite different sort of man, to wit, the cynic. This cynic is attracted to it by its very imbecility; he delights in belabouring the boobs with their own bosh, and even more in having fun with other journalists. Often a streak of boyishness is in him; he likes the uproar, the mountebankery, the combat. Such a cynic was the late Charles A. Dana. He believed in nothing. To him the battle of ideas was a mere spectacle. His intelligence revolted against the assumptions made by both sides. Another journalistic cynic of high talents is Hearst, a man much hated by his inferiors. Yet another is Watterson. But such superior intelligences are rare in journalism. Few journalists have their sharp sense of reality, their serene immunity to emotion, their capacity for intellectual detachment. The average is a fellow who believes in his own balderdash. In brief, a fellow indistinguishable from a Congressman, a clergyman or the owner of a prosperous sash-weight factory.

§4

The Galatea Complex.—A man, when taken with a woman, seeks to make her over in accordance with his own standards and ideals. The more she responds to his sculptor’s chisel, the more his admiration for her is augmented. But, presently, when the statue is completed and perfect, the man turns to another slab of uncut marble by way of fresh experiment for his unsatisfied vanity.

§5

Patriis Virtutibus.—That Prohibition has taken from the American one of his most amusing pastimes, the Prohibitionists loudly challenge. They assert that if drinking and becoming pleasantly alcoholed is an amusing pastime, then the American is better off, and eventually happier, without that pastime. Speaking for one American, I deny it. I do not care for golf; it doesn’t amuse me; and it makes me lame. Cocktails do amuse me, and they do not make me lame. Furthermore, if I drink cocktails with a man, I enjoy his conversation. It is livelier, gayer, more interesting than the idiotic conversation about strokes, putts and holes that I have to listen to if I play golf with him. Nor do I care for the other so-called sports; I can see neither profit nor pleasure in running across a lot after a leather ball that some other bonehead has hit with a round piece of wood, or in sitting up half the night waiting to be given a playing card that will make my hand worth $1.50 in I. O. U.’s, or in walking three miles through the Park inhaling the smell of monkeys and Italians. Reading is part of my profession; I like to get away from it when I have play-time. What is there left? I live in New York. I am a bachelor. I have no lawn to mow, no wife to fight, no children to put didies on. What is left, obviously, is a cocktail or two. When the five o’clock whistle blows and I roll down my sleeves and throw my lead pencil into the spittoon, I want to sit down with a friend and spill two-thirds of gin and one-third of vermouth into me. I have been doing it for the last twenty-two years; my father did it before me; my grandfather— God rest his old red nose!—did it before him. I am happy, healthy, prosperous. My father was happy, healthy, prosperous. My grandfather was happy, healthy, prosperous. I want to keep on being as I have been, and as they were. If the Prohibitionists insist upon my going out and getting lumbago on a sport moor instead of staying comfortably indoors and getting mildly and healthfully snooted, then I say the devil take ’em. I had my first drink, at the table of my parents, at the age of nine: a bit of claret. I shall have my last drink at my own table—God willing, with my mother—if I have to put on a pair of greasy whiskers, turn my collar hind-end foremost and, thus disguised as a Methodist clergyman, sneak it across the Canadian border myself.

§6

Query.—If, born over again, you had the choice of being any other man living in the world today, which man would you select? I ask the question purely out of idle curiosity. As for me, I’m darned if I can pick one.

§7

On Patriotism.—Patriotism is conceivable to a civilized man in times of stress and storm, when his country is wobbling and sore beset. It then appeals to him as any victim of misfortune appeals to him. But when it is safe, happy and prosperous it can only excite his loathing. The things that make countries safe, happy and prosperous—a secure peace, an active trade, political serenity at home—are all intrinsically disgusting. It is as impossible for a civilized man to love his country in good times as it would be for him to respect a cheese-monger.

§8

The Eternal Proletarian.—It is curious that no one has ever thought to test the practical efficacy of popular education by subjecting a few thousand normal individuals of the lower classes to a rigid intellectual test. The current school statistics reveal nothing. They show that the average plowhand, say in Qhio, can read and write after a fashion and is able to multiply 8 by 17 after four trials, but they tell us nothing about his stock of fundamental ideas or about his capacity for elementary logic. Is such a fellow appreciably superior to the villein of the Middle Ages? Sometimes I am inclined to doubt it. I suspect, for example, that the belief in witchcraft is still almost as widespread among the boobery, even of such advanced states as Iowa, as it was in the year 1500. Surely the negroes of the hinterland all believe in witches, and no doubt most of the whites are with them, though not disposed to talk about it. The belief in ghosts penetrates to very much higher levels. I know very few Americans, indeed, who are wholly innocent of it. One constantly comes upon grave defenses of the imbecility by college professors. I venture the guess that an honest and secret poll of the Harvard faculty would show a large majority on the spooky side. In the two Houses of Congress it would be difficult to find a dozen men willing to denounce such nonsense publicly. It would not only be politically dangerous for them to do so; it would also go against their consciences.

When one comes to the more attenuated varieties of supernaturalism one may almost say that the American people, despite a century of education, are still unanimously believers. There are whole states in the Republic in which it remains social suicide for a man to let it be known that he does not believe that he will turn into a gaseous vertebrate when he dies and sit upon the right hand of God. All the current religions of the land hang upon the theory that there is an immortal soul in every one of us, proof against both the embalmer’s formaldehyde and the crematory’s fire. To question this theory is still a form of social indecorum ; no newspaper ever does it, even by inference; even such godless sheets as the Nation, the Freeman and the New Republic never do it. For simply mentioning the matter in this place, I will be denounced by 100% Americans in all parts of the country, and no doubt this issue of The Smart Set will be barred from the Long Island roadhouses, the Lambs Club and the Albany night-boat.

§9

Spiritual Values.—One sniffing at such puerile tosh as the Woodrows, Billy Sundays and Bryans of the world unload is always accused of being anaesthetic to spiritual values. The charge is more tosh. I do not despise spiritual values, messieurs; I simple despise the ignoble spiritual values of ignoble men. My plea is for honesty, justice, self-respect, dignity, decency, honour. In other words, the things I ask for are precisely the things that none of the professional mongers of spiritual values can comprehend.

§10

Munsey.—Biographical crescendo of the publishing genius of Frank A. Munsey: The Golden Argosy, The New York Star, The New York Continent, The Live Wire, The Ocean, The New York Daily News, The Boston Journal, The Scrap Book, The Cavalier, The New York Press, The Philadelphia Times, The Railroad Man’s Magazine, The All-Story Magazine, The New York Sun. . . .

§11

Safeguarding the Young.—During the past three or four years the Comstocks have managed to suppress two American books of high and dignified quality and to prevent the publication of perhaps three or four more. Meanwhile the leading advertisement in the leading American literary journal is that of a dealer who offers a long list of frankly pornographic works. Such, in brief, are the fruits of the regulation of the arts by pigs.

§12

The Cinema as an Instrument of War.—That the movies were the one great factor in assisting the government of the United States to prosecute successfully the late war against Germany and make the world unsafe for Pschorrbrau must be apparent to any professor who studied the situation with an open mind. For example, that the sinister workings of the Wilhelmstrasse would have remained a cryptic menace to the United States had it not been for the complete exposé of those deviltries by the sagacious films, few can longer doubt. While the American Secret Service was still baffled by the uncanny activities of the German spy bureau, while it was still utterly in the dark as to the precise mysterious manner in which this spy system was subtly accomplishing its nefarious ends, the movies came to the rescue of the nation, showed up the entire business and put a spike into the whole doggone shebang.

Take, for instance, the amazing movie entitled “Behind Hunnish False Whiskers,” produced for the information and enlightenment of the baffled United States Secret Service by the Super-Excelsior Film Company. Until this picture was flashed upon the screen, the United States Secret Service had laboured under the false impression that what the agents of the Wilhelmstrasse were most eager to accomplish was the general weakening, in one way or another, of America’s military and naval efficiency. On this indefinite theory the American Secret Service was expending all its effort and wasting precious money and invaluable time while the German spies were left free to the consummation of the dirty work they were, unperceived by our Secret Service, actually up to. Imagine the surprise of our Secret Service agents and the officials of the United States government, therefore, when they drifted casually into “Behind Hunnish False Whiskers” (scenario by the eminent military expert, Miss Mae Alys Winckmann, of Los Angeles) and learned to their intense consternation that what the German spy system was really centering all its energies on was not the debilitating of the mass of American fighting forces on land and sea, nor the blowing up of warehouses and ammunition works, nor yet the plotting against railroad shipments, nor the sowing of discord among labourers in the shipyards, nor the buying up of senators from the Middle West, nor the arming of a vast horde of aliens along the Canadian border, nor anything like this, but the blowing up of what was apparently the most important strategic bridge in all America, the blowing up of a bridge that, once destroyed, would completely disrupt the military plans of the United States and render those plans practically useless, the blowing up of a bridge whose enormous importance had not even occurred to the American officials—the bridge, to wit, that spans the small creek back of the Bull Durham billboard in the vacant lot two blocks to the left of the Super-Excelsior Film Company’s studio over in Fort Lee, New Jersey!

I betray no secret when I tell you that it was directly as a result of this startling exposé that the United States Secret Service agents arrested Herman Schmierkàse’s son-in-law, August Rinderbrust, and found, in the back room of his delicatessen store—and not three hundred yards from the bridge—a Brownie kodak and several undeveloped snapshots of the Fort Lee ferry, Grant’s tomb and Olga Petrova.

Consider, too, the now famous case of the manner in which the eyes of the officials at Washington were opened by the movie entitled “Inside Secrets of the Kaiser’s Wiener Schnitzel, or, How the Berlin Spy System Has Enveloped America in a Net of Marinierte Rostbraten,” written by the celebrated military strategist, Miss Minnie P. Dingle, of Goshen, N. Y. (winner of the Grandioso Film Company’s prize of ten dollars in gold for the best 25,000 word motion picture scenario dealing with the war), and produced by the Grandioso Film Company, J. Pierce Stonehead directing, in its California studios at an expense of no less than $80,000, of borrowed money. (It will be remembered that, up to the time this masterly movie was presented, the authorities were resting complacent under the delusion that the Kaiser’s agents in this country were directing their chief intrigue toward such ends as disabling American ships and German ships that had been taken over upon the declaration of war, spreading insidious propaganda, making blue-prints of coast fortifications and harbour works, and the like.) It was “Inside Secrets of the Kaiser’s Wiener Schnitzel, or, How the Berlin Spy System Has Enveloped America in a Net of Marinierte Rostbraten” that disclosed the true intent of the enemy and permitted the authorities to take action and save the country before it was too late. This movie—and here I but repeat what is now history—gave the first inkling that what the Huns were up to in America was by no means what the United States authorities ignorantly and foolishly supposed but, quite to the contrary, that what they were up to and what they were bending all their energies to accomplish was nothing less than the chloroforming of William A. Brady’s daughter Alice, and the snitching from her of a blue-print which, so I have been informed, contained the valuable secret of the exact amount of open floor space available in the Famous Players’ studio in West 56th Street for Elsie Ferguson’s next picture.

The part that the movies played in stirring up the patriotism of the nation and keeping that patriotism at white heat—an essential thing in the successful prosecution of the war—cannot be overestimated. Who so callous that he could resist the appeal, for example, of the movie showing the ruins of the Bon Ton Shirt and Collar Factory at Thirty-second Street and Tenth Avenue after its recent fire and labelled “What Was Left of the Village of Fromage de Brie after the German Hordes Had Passed Through It”? And who so without soul that he could remain passive before the display of a few hundred feet clipped out of an old movie of “The Two Orphans” and set forth as “View of Two Little Belgian Kiddies Whose Father Was Shot by the Huns?” But the value of the movie as an adjunct of war by no means rests here.

That the movie may serve as a record of the war, as a history of the war, one can doubt no more than one can doubt what I have already proved in these other important directions. For instance, let me recall to your mind the famous movie entitled “With the German Armies on the Eastern Front,” displayed promiscuously in this country before we entered the war and announced as “official” and as having been taken by a staff of German government photographers directly on the firing line. Can one forget the vividness of this remarkable record? Can one be oblivious to its value to the school-children of the future in learning the methods of warfare, the manner in which the enemy carried on its Russian campaign, etc., etc. Who, for instance, can fail to appreciate the value as a strategic military document of the well-remembered scene in this movie showing German soldiers drinking beer out of tin cans, of the equally unforgettable scene showing the Kaiser attending a garden party at Stuttgart in 1905 and labelled “Ovation to the Emperor in Warsaw After the Recent Taking of that City by His Troops,” of the remarkable scene showing two young German soldiers washing their socks, and of that never-to-be-forgotten picture of German efficiency showing a Prussian lieutenant successfully shaving himself in front of a broken mirror? That the movies assisted, more than any other thing, in making America realize, while we were still a neutral nation, the imperative necessity for preparedness, is now fully obvious. The manner in which these movies brought home to us the horrors consequent upon an invasion of the United States by an armed and relentless foe and so awakened us to an immediate need for a sufficiently big and powerful army and navy, is readily recalled.

Chief among the movies which eloquently proved this to us was the one called “The Fall of a Nation.” As I remember this stirring screen document, it brought home to us the terrifying realization that down on Long Island there lived a blonde against whom the whole German army had evil designs. That the United States was as a nation asleep and that it was all-vital that it wake up instanter and put a couple of million trained men in the field and build a fleet of a thousand new battleships to keep the Boches from imprinting unwelcome kisses on the mouth of this Long Island blonde, the movie demonstrated so clearly that the government at Washington got busy at once. And I violate no confidence when I tell you that the sinking of the Lusitania, supposed by many misinformed persons to have been responsible for the waking up of the country to German frightfulness, had very much less to do with it than the scene in “The Fall of a Nation” which showed the Freeport virgin being chased around the room by a bibulous Hun file-closer.

Then, too, there was the similar movie put out by Mr. J. Stuart Blackton and called, if I am not mistaken, “Defenseless America” or something of the sort. This movie, a powerful plea for Preparedness, brought to the attention of our government the error in “The Fall of a Nation” and explained that it was not a Freeport blonde that the German army had its eyes on, but a New York brunette. The moment the enemy landed in America, this movie showed us, it was due to make a bee-line for the home of this dark metropolitan chicken and surround the house while its Commander-in-Chief went up to the library on the second floor and made a lascivious eye at the houri.

Plainly enough, such things were enough to make any nation, however backward, sense at once the need for a strong fighting force. And so I confidently repeat that movies like this and the many allied movies were the one great and incontrovertible aid to our government in its prosecution of the war. Without these movies, I shudder to think what might have happened.

§13

Two Definitions.—Democracy, on the one hand, is the desire to be impertinent to one’s superiors. On the other hand, it is the yearning to be respected by one’s inferiors.

§14

A Simple Complex.—Imagine a respectable and (intellectually) well-ironed young man grown stage-struck. Imagine him a bit conscience-smitten, and eager to purge his soul. Imagine him setting about it by seeking for virtuous elements in the thing he admires. Imagine him finding them—for example, intellectual purpose. Imagine him now seized by a pedagogical passion to impart his discovery to other respectable folks. Imagine them grateful to him for relieving their minds. Imagine—but you have already imagined a worthy man, Prof. Brander Matthews de l’Académie Américaine, A.B., LL.B., D.C.L., Litt. D , LL.D.

§15

The Red Gospel.—It is commonly urged against the so-called scientific Socialists, with their materialistic conception of history, that they overlook certain spiritual qualities that are independent of wage-scales and metabolism. These qualities, it is urged, colour the aspirations and activities of civilized man quite as much as his material condition, and so make it impossible to consider him simply as an economic machine. As examples, the anti-Marxians cite patriotism, pity, the aesthetic sense, and the yearning to know God. Unluckily, the examples are ill-chosen. Millions of men are quite devoid of patriotism, pity and the aesthetic sense, and have no desire to know God. Why don’t the anti-Marxians cite a spiritual quality that is genuinely universal? There is one readily to hand. I allude to cowardice. It is, in one form or other, visible in every human being. It almost serves to mark off the human race from all the other higher animals. Cowardice, I believe, is at the bottom of the whole caste system. In order to escape going to war himself, the peasant was willing to give the warrior certain privileges—and out of those privileges has grown the whole structure of modern society. Go back still further. Property arose out of the fact that a few relatively courageous men were able to accumulate more possessions than whole hordes of thoroughly cowardly men and, what is more, to retain them after accumulating them. Socialism would go aground on this rock, as communism has gone aground upon it in Russia.

§16

Genealogical.—Paul, geb. Saul: the primordial Stammvater of Bloomingdale geb. Blumenthal, Noblestone geb. Edelstein, Belmont geb. Schoenberg, and Robinson geb. Rabinovitz.

§17

Philosophy I .—If I had my life to live over again, I would live it precisely as I have lived it. Well, precisely is probably going a bit too far. One thing, at least, I would have done differently. I would have laid in a bigger stock.

§18

The One-Legged Art.—To me, at all events, painting seems to be half an alien among the fine arts. Its credentials, of course, are sounder than those of acting, but they are surely not as sound as those of music, poetry, drama, sculpture and architecture. The trouble with painting is that it lacks movement, which is to say, the chief function of life. The best the painter can hope to accomplish is to fix the mood of an instant, the momentary aspect of something. If he suggests actual movement he must do it by palpable tricks, all of which belong to craftsmanship rather than to art. The work that he produces is comparable to a single chord in music, without preparation or resolution. It may be beautiful, but its beauty plainly does not belong to the highest order. The senses soon tire of such beauty. If a man stands before a given painting for more than five or ten minutes, it is usually a sign of affectation: he is trying to convince himself that he has more delicate perceptions than the general. Or he is a painter himself and thus engrossed by the technical aspects of it, as a plumber might be engrossed by the technical aspects of a fine bathroom. Or he is enchanted by the story that the picture tells, which is to say, by the literature that it illustrates. True enough, he may go back to a painting over and over again, just as a music-lover may strike, and restrike a chord that pleases him, but it can’t hold him for long at one session—it can’t move his feelings so powerfully that he forgets the real world he lives in.

Sculpture is in measurably better case. The spectator, viewing a fine statue, does not see something dead, embalmed and fixed into a frame; he sees something that moves as he moves. A fine statue, in other words, is not one statue, but hundreds, perhaps even thousands. The transformation from one to another is infinitely pleasing; one gets out of it the same satisfying stimulation that one gets out of the unrolling of a string quartet or of such a poem as “Atalanta in Calydon,” “Heart of Darkness” or “Faust.” So with architecture. It not only revolves; it also moves vertically, as the spectator approaches it. When one walks up Fifth Avenue past St. Thomas’s Church one certainly gets an effect beyond that of a beautiful chord; it is the effect of a whole procession of beautiful chords, like that at the beginning of the slow movement of the “New World” symphony or that in the well-known and much-battered Chopin prélude, opus 28, No. 20. If it were a painting it would soon grow tedious. No one, after a few days, would give it a glance, save perhaps strangers in the city.

This intrinsic hollowness of painting has its effects even upon those who most vigorously defend painting as the queen of all the fine arts. One hears of such persons “haunting the galleries,” but one always discovers, on inquiry, that it is the showrooms that they actually haunt. In other words, they get their chief pleasure by looking at an endless succession of new paintings: the multitude of chords produces, in the end, a sort of confused satisfaction. One never hears of them going to a public gallery regularly to look at this or that masterpiece. Even the Louvre seldom attracts them more than a dozen or so times ina lifetime. The other arts make a far more powerful and permanent appeal. I have read “Huckleberry Finn” at least forty times and “Typhoon” probably twenty times, and yet both pleased me as much (nay, more) the last time as they did the first time. I have heard each of the first eight symphonies of Beethoven more than a hundred times, and some of Haydn’s quite as often. Yet if Beethoven’s C Minor were announced for performance tonight, I’d surely go to hear it. More, I’d enjoy every instant of it. Even second-rate music has this lasting quality. Some time ago I heard Johann Strauss’s waltz, “Geschichten aus dem Wiener Wald,” for the first time in a long while. I knew it well in my goatish days; every note of it was still familiar. Nevertheless, it gave me exquisite delight. Imagine a man getting exquisite delight out of a painting of corresponding calibre— a painting already so familiar to him that he could reproduce it from memory!

§19

The Celluloid Artist.—Much of the prevailing sniffing at moving-picture actors, in this place and elsewhere, is plainly based upon a bilious and impotent jealousy. The movie mime is simply one who approaches more closely than any other familiar man to the ideal life of the standard American vision. That is to say, he does little work for a great deal of money, achieves heroic acts without running any risk, and is constantly pursued by women of an oriental and sinister voluptuousness. This is precisely what every normal American young man, graduated from a reputable American college, hopes to come to himself: the dream well mirrors the high aesthetic and ethical flight of the American people.

§20

Finis.—A charming woman is any woman who believes that you are not a fool.

Standard

Unattended Husbands

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/July 28, 1909

A THRIVING Western man, who lives in a thriving Western town, says he is going to get rid of his little Western wife because she is too clubbable.

“When I go home at night,” says the thriving Western man, in the papers which he has prepared in his divorce suit, “I never know who is going to meet me: the cook, the housemaid or my wife.

“Generally it is not my wife. She’s always at the club, “reading papers on Browning or Tolstoi.

“I’m sick of it. I want a home, so I have told her she can go and live with her club if she wants to, and I’ll hunt for some woman who will think more of me than she does of Dante or Ibsen.”

Why, the idea! Did you ever hear of such a thing, girls? Who could think more of a man like that than she could of Dante or Ibsen? I suppose we women ought all to be very indignant at the story of this thriving Western man, especially we women who believe in the “Broader Selfhood” and the “Higher Life,” but I am afraid I have a good deal of sympathy for it.

He’s all wrong about the club, though. It isn’t the club that’s to blame, or Dante or Ibsen, either. It’s the woman. If she wasn’t reading Dante, she’d be reading “The Duchess,” or embroidering doilies, or doing anything else that happened to please her, without any regard to what she ought to be doing at all.

Seven out of ten married women in America pay just about as much attention to what their husbands want as they do to the mewing of a stray cat under the window.

So long as they themselves are housed and fed and dressed—that’s the most important part, the dress—they don’t seem to care what becomes of poor, patient pa, who works all day at things he hates, just to give them the things they like.

Every married man has a right to a home and a home that is a home when he provides the money to sustain it.

When his wife refuses to make a home for him, I don’t blame him for leaving her with plenty of time for her own particular fads.

A woman can leave a man for failure to provide. Why isn’t it just as bad a crime for a woman to fall to make use of what the man does provide, because she is too selfish to bother her head about the kind of home he wants?

Greetings to you, brother of the West; heartfelt, hearty greetings. I sympathize with you. 

Standard

Bebe Daniels, Child Star, Would Like to be a Fairy

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/February 11, 1909

Miss Bebe Daniels, the largest salaried child actress in America, is in our midst.

She is making a big hit in the Prince Chap this week. She gets more curtain calls than the leading man; and as to the leading woman, no one seems to know she’s alive, when little Bebe Daniels appears on the scene.

She is 8 years old, is Miss Daniels, and just a bit rangey for her years. With a face that’s going to be a model for a Madonna when she gets a little older and a pair of big, soft, dark eyes that will deal death and destruction to more than one hapless mortal man when she gets to the death and destruction age.

Just at present she’s as beautiful as an old picture, as sweet and wholesome as a bunch of buttercups that grow in a clean, breezy, upland meadow, and as fresh and unspoiled as a glass of pure spring water.

She doesn’t make you think of bread and milk and honey and clover, though, as so many American or English children do. She reminds you of pomegranates and tube rosea and magnolias and pistache ice cream, and everything else that is sweet and rich and tropical and foreign.

Yet, she’s an American girl, born somewhere south of the Mason and Dixon line.

BEBE DANIELS believes in fairies. She told me so, when I asked her about it yesterday.

She was rather busy when I ran in to see her for a minute.

You see, she has six fox terrier pups, a large black cat and an Amiable Bulldog, and when she isn’t taking care of the armfuls of flowers that are sent to her every night at the theatre she has to be teaching Modoc to speak or brushing Pansy’s hair, or making Zaza—that’s the naughtiest of all the fox terrier pups—behave herself. So she hasn’t much time for being interviewed.

“Believe In fairies?” she said, tying a large knot of violets into Zaza’s left ear, “why, of course, I do. I have lived on a ranch down in Southern California for years, and lots of times I have seen the fairy rings where they dance in the night. You know how they look like toadstools in a circle with a big one in the middle where the grasshopper fiddler sits, and the grass all trodden down where they’ve been dancing, only I never could creep up quite close enough to catch them at it.

“I WISH I could be a fairy for a few minutes myself. I’d be pretty busy. I’d change all the people who are cruel to animals. Oh, I’ve seen them kick cats and throw things at dogs, and how would they like that, I should like to know—into toads or frogs or something ugly that nobody loved, and I’d turn all the queer old women and mean old men who want to make the stage children stay at home and be lonesome instead of playing grown-up at the theatre and being happy and getting flowers and having people like them—well, I’d change them all into nasty, fat, yellow, creepy, crawly caterpillars that everybody runs away from. Caterpillars are the awfullest of all, don’t you think so?

“It would be awful to be one, wouldn’t it?” The big eyes softened a little. “Well. If they’d be real good and promise to let us go on acting and being happy, I might let them change into butterflies by and by.

“THEY stopped me down In Los Angeles, you know, and Oh, we had an awful time. They said I shouldn’t act, and I said I would and my! It was pretty bad.

“Why do you suppose they didn’t want me to act? They said it was for my sake.

“I wonder If they never dressed up and played ‘Go to vistin’ when they were little? Well, that’s what acting is to us stage children. I love it lots better than dolls or playhouse keeping or anything. This part I am playing is lots of fun.

“I’m poor in the first act and wear rags and look as sad as I can, and then I get rich and laugh. I just love it when I’m poor and sad. It’s fun to make people cry and see ’em try not to look as if they cared. Did you hear me play my little piece on the piano? I did it in Zaza. I learned it in two days. No, I’ve never taken any lessons on the piano, but I think it’s awfully easy.

“YES, of course I’m going to stay on the stage.

“I’m going to be a star some day and have my name on all the billboards and ride to the theatre in a carriage and have a maid to dress and undress the dogs for me. But she’ll have to be a kind maid, and not a cross one, and mamma und auntie will have diamonds braided all in their hair, just as many as they want, and every time I see any poor little girl I’ll take them home with me and give them a nice dinner and some pretty dresses and have somebody write a part for them to play in a nice play.

“No, it doesn’t make me nervous to play a new part. The newer it is the better I like it.

“Yes, I’m glad the papers said nice things about me, and I love it when I get the curtain calls but oh, the darling flowers, they are the best of all!

“Monday night I brought my arms full of them home and mamma cried and all the time she was crying she kept saying how happy she was. Mammas are funny people, sometimes, don’t you think so?”

AND I kept wondering what sort of a woman little Bebe Daniels will be and whether she’ll be half as happy when she’s a great star with diamonds braided in her own hair and a French maid to take care of the French dog and an English maid to look after the English terrier, and a press agent to tell amazing stories about her in the papers, and a secretary to write her letters, and a manager to exploit her as she is now when she’s just a little big-eyed girl who looks at the crowded theatre as just a big playhouse and who doesn’t see why mammas cry sometimes just because they are so very happy.

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Ah Sam Doesn’t Know a Thing

Annie Laurie

San Francisco Examiner/February 12, 1909

AH SAM doesn’t know a thing.

Not a thing.

He can’t imagine why the president of the Sorosis Club was cross when she had to leave the comfortable seclusion of her rubber tired auto for the dingy courtroom to be held as a witness in the case of the State of California against Ah Sam.

He doesn’t see what the president of the Pacific Union sees in a harmless subpoena to fill him with amazed wrath.

He’s meek and mild and deprecating, a little bit surprised, but perfectly calm, is Ah Sam—but he has not as yet instructed his lawyer to withdraw the subpoenas and let his smart witnesses off from coming to the courtroom next Tuesday morning, just as If they were plain little brown persons, with a shuffle and a cue.

AH SAM sat in the office of his attorney, Mr. Countryman, yesterday, and looked exactly like a funny little toy Buddha carved out of a nut to make a moment’s laughter for a group of slant-eyed children.

He is little and wizened and dried up, and wrinkled, and as yellowish brown as an old-fashioned gourd which stood too long in the sun before it was rightly seasoned.

His interpreter sat beside him, a large, moon-faced rather impressive person, with a smile that meant everything—and nothing.

Ah Sam didn’t care to talk about his case, the interpreter said, but If I insisted, of course, he—and then I began trying to find out something about Ah Sam, and Ah Sam’s reasons for his weird and peculiar performances in dragging innocent and perfectly harmless bridge-players end high-minded and absolutely innocuous poker players into this vulgar discussion concerning Chinese gambling.

“HE belongs,” said the interpreter, waving his large yet well-kept yellow hand deprecatingly in the direction of little unwinking Ah Sam, “to a gentleman’s club, a Chinese gentleman’s club. It Is $10 for entrance and a month for the dues.

“He was sitting,” he said, “watching some friends of his in the club play dominoes, and a white policeman knocked on the door.”

Ah Sam raised his small and neatly booted foot and gave a firm kick at the ambient air. His face didn’t change by the moving of a wrinkle, but the Interpreter hastily corrected his statement about the policeman.

“He says the policeman kicked on the door, he did not knock,” said the interpreter, “and then the door was broken in, and all the men who were playing and those who were watching were taken to prison.”

Ah Sam, who did not understand one word of English, so the interpreter and the lawyer both declared, leaned forward and plucked the interpreter by his broadcloth sleeve. Then he put his thin hand in the air and clutched with it as if he were taking some one by the collar.

“He says,” said the interpreter, “they were dragged to prison, not taken.”

“That’s all.”

“He wasn’t playing fan tan?” I Inquired. Ah Sam’s eyes were shocked, but the interpreter remained calm.

“No,” said the interpreter, “dominoes, or looking on at dominoes. He wasn’t playing himself.”

“He plays poker?”

“Yes,” said the interpreter, when he had inquired, “he plays poker. He learned, he says, in San Francisco. It is not, he says, a Chinese game.”

“Why does he drag all these white people into this case?”

At the repetition of the question Ah Sam’s small eyes sparkled with virtuous amazement. He meowed something volubly, bethought himself and crossed his hands placidly again.

“He has not called them,” said the interpreter, “they were subpoenaed by the white man’s laws, and by the white man’s law they must answer.”

“Does he resent the white man’s habit of breaking in on his quiet club, and is he trying to habit of breaking in on his quiet club, and is he trying to teach us a nice little lesson to illustrate the old saying that what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander?”

THE interpreter questioned and Ah Sam patiently shook his wizened little head, and meowed again.

“No,” said the Interpreter, “he is not teaching anything, he but follows the law, the white man’s law. He is a good citizen and wishes to obey the law in all things.”

And Ah Sam nodded as the toy Buddhas nod when you shake the shelf they stand upon, and the interview, if you can call it an interview, was over.

What was it in the old verse about the game Ah Sam did not understand? I wonder what Ah Sam really does understand in this particular game he seems to be trying to play, or whether—but what’s the use of wondering? Ah Sam will never tell.

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Damon Runyon Pays Tribute to Reilly as Man and Lawyer

Damon Runyon

The Buffalo News/February 3, 1937

Handling of Hauptmann Case, Blamed Partly for His Misfortune, Called Brilliant, Despite Odds.

Poor old Ed Reilly has been put away as a mental case. We are sorry to hear it. Not a bad fellow, Reilly.

He was chief counsel for Bruno Richard Hauptmann in the famous trial at Flemington, and for a time, his name appeared in the papers in big headlines almost every day.

Reilly rather enjoyed headlines. As a matter of fact, he was one of those fellows who think in headlines. That is, he would say and do things calculated to produce headlines over his quotations and actions.

This is nothing to criticize. It is the natural instinct of the born showman. Reilly, in his heyday, was all that. At the time of the trial he was big and bluff, and ruddy, and flamboyant, and fairly glowed in the publicity spotlights. He always gave us fellows covering the Hauptmann trial something to write about.

Thought Himself at Fault

His physician is quoted as saying that Reilly thought Hauptmann innocent of the Lindbergh crime, and felt that he might have been at fault somewhere in his handling of the case.

We wouldn’t know about the domestic trouble. But we wouldn’t think he had any reason to worry about his handling of the Hauptmann matter.

We thought he made the best of a bad case.

We don’t know what he secretly thought of Hauptmann. We never asked him. We assume, however, that a lawyer who undertakes the defense of a man accused of a crime as dreadful as the Lindbergh kidnapping must believe there is reasonable doubt of his client’s guilt, or he wouldn’t lift a finger to help him.

Got Case Through Paper

So we must assume that what the physician says of Reilly’s belief is true. Still, as a lawyer, he could scarcely blame himself for the verdict of the Flemington jury, which was based on evidence so circumstantial that it must have caused Reilly, regardless of his belief, to wonder a little about Hauptmann.

Reilly was a Brooklyn lawyer of something more than local fame. He got into the Hauptmann case through a New York newspaper, as we remember the paper putting Mrs. Hauptmann in touch with him.

In Brooklyn, Reilly was sometimes mentioned as “Death House” Reilly, because of the number of his clients who found themselves eventually sitting in the electric chair, with old Bob Elliott peering over their shoulder.

Two Strikes on Clients

This title wouldn’t seem to be any recommendation for a lawyer, but a fellow once explained it to us this way:

“Reilly practices criminal law as a relief from the boredom of civil practice. When a Brooklyn court has a tough case to assign to a lawyer, Reilly always gets it. He seldom draws a client who hasn’t two strikes on him to start with.”

Well, Hauptmann had a couple of strikes on him to start with too, as Reilly soon discovered. It was a mighty tough case for any lawyer.

Reilly was associated in the defense with three steady-going country lawyers from New Jersey, who seemed somewhat bewildered by the ornate manner and method of the Brooklyn barrister.

Said to Have Blundered

He appeared before the jury of small town men and women arrayed even as Solomon in all his glory—striped pants, spats, morning coat and waistcoat, and his boutonniere. A huge fur-lined, fur-collared overcoat concealed his sartorial effulgence outside the courtroom.

But however the jury may have regarded his display, we think it was testimony to Reilly’s honesty. He appeared that way in other courts, and he saw no reason to change his make-up for Flemington.

Some say Reilly made terrible blunders in legal tactics, as for instance, his conceding of the corpus delicti at an unexpected moment.

At least one of his associates was inclined to make something of the possibility of raising a doubt in the minds of the jurors that the baby skeleton was that of the Lindbergh child, thus perhaps clouding the very facts of the crime.

Chance to Confuse Jury

A medical man was being examined at this point, when Reilly abruptly announced that the defense conceded it.

He hadn’t consulted his associates, and some observers said Reilly missed a chance to confuse the jury, but here again, we believe it was testimony to his intellectual honesty.

He told us that he felt that contesting the corpus delicti in this case would have been a gross piece of legal chicanery.

He withdrew from the case after Hauptmann’s conviction. We used to see him occasionally around the night clubs in New York, and for a time he had to get up and take bows under the spots when the masters of ceremony introduced him.

New York Forgot Him

By and by, he didn’t get introduced anymore.

The last time we saw him, we thought the glitter of his ornate exterior was fading somewhat, and certainly the sparkle of his personality was dimmed.

Reilly was a fellow who liked to get around, and if you keep getting around Broadway long enough, the nap gradually wears off.

His physician says that rest and treatment may bring him around again, and we hope that’s true. 

We would hate to think of a picturesque fellow like “the bull of Brooklyn” mumbling his life away in a nuttery.

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All That Yankees Needed Was Adequate Traffic Regulations

Ring Lardner

Pensacola News Journal/October 9, 1922

Ring Lardner Says Detroit Writers Watched World Series and Then Went to the Zoo to See More Animals—Asks Friends to Donate Plush to Make Costly Fur Coat

Well boys, it looks like it was all over and the only complaint I have got to make is that the traffic regulations was not handled right. The next time the Yankees takes part in a world series they should ought to have a traffic policeman stationed between first and second base and another traffic policeman stationed between home and 1st. The former should tell the boys when it is ok to run to second and the latter must inform them that when a ground ball is hit to the infield in a World series the general theory which has never been disproved is to run on high speed to first base which is the base towards right field from the home plate. The lack of adequate stop and go system is what lost this serious on the part of the Yanks. The final game of the series was marked by the only inceedence of brains exhibited by the Yanks during the whole serious.

In the second innings with two boys on the base and one out Joe Bush passed Arthur Nehf to first base so as to get the head of the batting order up and not confuse the official scores. This bit of thinking probably was responsible for nothing. I will not try and dilate on the rest of the serious only to say that Charles A. Hughes and Eddie Batchelor of Detroit spent this a.m. at the Bronx Zoo to try and see more animals. It is hard to satisfy the boys from Detroit.

All I know what to write about on an occasion like this kind is little incidence that come off, the first incidence that calls to mind is in regards to Tommy Rice of the Brooklyn Eagle. Tommy wrote seven thousand words in regards to the first game of the serious and page by page it blew out of the window in the costly apartment building in which the Brooklyn expert lives. There is no telling what the loss to the world is on account of not being able to read Tommy’s story to say nothing about the readers of the Eagle. 

Now, boys, I suppose they is a few interested in whether the little woman is going to get a costly fur coat. The other day I wrote a story to the general effects that we was going to kill our cats and use their fur to make the costly garment. This story was not appreciated in the heavily mortgaged home. After a long argument the master of the house compromised and decided to not doom the little members of the finny tribe to death. Instead of that we are going to use an idear furnished by the same Eddie Batchelor of Detroit mentioned a few thousands words ago. Eddie’s idear is to start a chain letter to all our friends and readers asking them to look around the old homestead and find their family albums and take the plush off of the covers and send it to the undersigned and make a plush coat which everybody tells me is the most fashionable fur on the green footstool. The little woman can wear plush and a specially the red pigment, but black and tan plush covers will be welcome and this man tells me theys nothing more attractive than a black and red and tan blocked coat made out of plush albums. 

I was going to say further in regards to the plush albums but Harry Frazee has just butted in with the story of his life. It seems like when Harry was a young man in Peoria his father said to him if you don’t be wild and go into the theatrical business and stay around Peoria you will be as big a man as your uncle. So Harry looked at his uncle who was getting $125 per month staring at books. “Well” says Harry, “I can get more than that catching runaway horses.” So he is now catching runaway horses and selling them ‘to the New York baseball club.

 As I now sit here and write. I am surrounded by a corpse of experts just as ignorant as me and they don’t seem to be none of them able to tell who is going to pitch tomorrow. Personally, I think it with be Col. Rappert and Huston.

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Schmeling Confident He Can Beat Sharkey

Damon Runyon

Knoxville Journal/May 6, 1930

Arrival of German Carries Damon Runyon Back to Days When Jack Dempsey Was in His Heyday; Maxie Shows Signs of Being a Thinker

NEW YORK, May 5.—The suite in the hotel Commodore occupied by Max Schmeling was a striking reminder Sunday of the quarters of Jack Dempsey when the Manassa man mauler was in the heyday of his championship career.

The same magnificence with which the ubiquitous Doctor Kearns used to pitch the temporary camps of Dempsey was there—a big parlor and a string of connecting rooms, very costly to inhabit. Waiters constantly moving in and out with pitchers of ice water, and trays of edibles. A dozen wardrobe trunks scattered around. The telephone ringing in all the different rooms at once.

And in the rooms the corresponding characters that used to infest the premises wherever and whenever the one-time heavyweight champion of the world set up his tepee. Some of these characters were indeed the very same. There was Professor William McCarney, the ol’ clo’ man of fistiana, for example, all dressed up in his Sunday best, and suave and smiling, and gloriously reminiscent, as he lolled in the depths of a big settee.

Even Joe Benjamin, the sheik of the San Joaquin, was there. He had called with his friend Mendel, the golf pants maker, to pay his respects. The California lightweight was a fixture of the Dempsey entourage in the old days. Of course, the ubiquitous Doctor Kearns was not on hand, but taking his place in the cast was Joe Jacobs, with a huge cigar in his kisser, volubly greeting all comers, and retiring at intervals to the bathroom for important conference with some.

No Privacy Here

The last was a peculiarly Dempseyesque touch. No one was ever able to find privacy in any of the many rooms that Kearns always had at Dempsey’s disposal in a hotel. Only the sanctity of the bathroom afforded freedom from eavesdroppers. Many an important deal in Dempsey’s behalf was consummated in the bathroom by Doctor Kearns. ‘Twas in the bathroom of your operative’s apartment in the Great Falls Hotel, in fact, that the conference was held which decided the fate of the Dempsey-Gibbons battle at Shelby.

A little Dachsund was rolling around the floor of the Schmeling suite Sunday. He had brought it over from Germany for a newspaper friend. You could kick up a purp somewhere around Dempsey’s rooms. A score of newspaper men were talking to the Black Uhlan of the Rhine—or at least they talked to him when he held still for a minute. He was up and down, and back and forth, shaking hands with newcomers, and answering the telephone, or just pacing the carpet with all the restlessness of the Dempsey of a few years ago.

Reminds One of Jack

“My, my,” remarked Joe Benjamin, glancing around at the mob. “It’s just like the old days. And how that guy resembles Dempsey before Jack got his beezer lifted! I never saw anything like it. He moves around a room like Dempsey. Well, if he can only fight as good as Dempsey when Dempsey was his age, I feel sorry for Sharkey.”

Tom McArdle, the pudgy matchmaker of Madison Square Garden, leaned against a table listening to the chatter. Frank Bruen, general manager of the Garden, called early to say hello, and incidentally to ask the Black Uhlan about fighting for the Garden corporation next year if Max win the heavyweight tlte, a point on which Frank got no satisfaction.

Mike Jacobs peered in for a moment. Herman Black, the baron of Atlantic Highlands, sat with a pitcher of water at his elbow, from which he imbibed heavily. Mushky Johnson, the young trainer of gladiators, was acting as a sort of major domo, assisting the callers out of their coats, and into them. Schmeling’s own trainer, Max Mahon, listened eagerly to the chatter, and said nothing. All day long a string of visitors passed through the rooms. It must have been something of a strain on the Black Uhlan, but he kept smiling cheerfully, and talking volubly in his broken English.

Has Rhineland Accent

Max has an accent that reeks of the Rhineland, but it is easily understood after you get the hang of it. Moreover, he quickly assimilates conversation addressed to him in English. In fact he talks more English now than he does German, even to his German callers. When a business proposition is put to him in English he has to revolve it around in his mind awhile, possibly to translate it into German for his own reflection, but for ordinary conversational purposes his English suffices.

He has a world of personality, which is perhaps another way of saying charm. His cordiality is natural. He loves the crowd as Dempsey loves it. He likes the bustle and stir in his hotel camp. Around Tunney’s diggings there was always an atmosphere of restraint. Around Sharkey there is a peculiar air of surliness, and even hostility. The Black Uhlan has that thing which is so rare in human beings, popular appeal.

He seems very confident he will beat Sharkey, and after Sharkey he would like to fight Dempsey. The vague possibility of Tunney returning to the ring was suggested to him, and Schmeling’s eyes brightened. Would he like to fight Tunney? Ach, yes! That would draw a lot of money. The Black Uhlan has an eye to business, you can see that.

Max is Ready to Go

He asked many questions about Sharkey’s battles with Loughran and Scott. Did he box them, or did he fight them? Obviously Schmeling wants to find out as much as possible about his opponent. He is a bit of a thinker, is the Black Uhlan. He expressed himself as anxious to get started to work for his battle under the auspices of the milk fund on the night of June 12 as quickly as possible. His appearance indicates that he has done some little training already, but he said the most important thing is to become acclimated.

“I never saw the guy fight,” commented Joseph Benjamin after he had gotten a good load of the German, “but he acts like a fighter who looks like a fighter. I’ve seen mighty few champions that didn’t look like champions. And this fellow’s got it. My my, how he reminds me of Dempsey!”

And the sheik of the San Joaquin fell into deep reflection. Possibly he was meditating on the last time he saw Dempsey, which was when the Manassa Mauler pegged a big right hand at him, severing a large, and large, and beautiful friendship.

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