Read Online The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub - Free Book Online Page B

West Twenties where he had worked as a young man. And so, he says, one evening he planted two male and two female performers, dressed in evening clothes, like the rest of the clientele, at a table near the Hungarian orchestra. “At a prearranged signal,” Keller writes, “they broke into song.” Keller knew that he was onto something when his customers burst into applause. From that moment, he says, “Maxim’s never suffered from ennui”—the one fatal ailment of all Broadway establishments. When the customers tired of popular tunes, Keller hired “dark-eyed señoritas with their castanets and Spanish dances,” Russians with “their quaint native costumes,” Hawaiians with ukuleles, and “beautiful girls who wove their way among the tables and with adoring eyes poured forth their ballads of love.”
    Thus was born—or by some other means was born—the cabaret. Soon almost all the great restaurants of Broadway had cleared out space for performances. The Folies Bergère opened its doors in 1911 as New York’s first full-time cabaret, a theater with strolling orchestra, circulating waiters, a balcony promenade, and a series of shows mounted on a stage. But the Folies didn’t last out the year, for the whole power of cabaret lay in its intimacy. Keller’s innovation, if it was his, of stationing the performer among the diners was essential, because in erasing the footlights that had traditionally separated entertainer from audience it engaged the fantasy that the diner was part of the intoxicating and risqué world of the entertainers. The most desirable tables were right on the edge of the cabaret floor, where you could see and touch and talk to the performers. The cultural historian Lewis A. Erenberg has described the sense of liberation brought on by the “action environment” of the cabaret and the café: “Seated among the fast crowd, women of the town, ethnic entertainers, and guests from out of town, respectable urbanites were open to the flux of public life that the city offered. . . . Instead of letting gentility define the limits of their public lives, respectable urbanites were realizing they could enter a wider world of spontaneous cosmopolitan gaiety and experience ‘the whirl of life’ itself.”
    A passage in Rupert Hughes’s 1914 novel
What Will People Say?
summarizes the astounding velocity with which the habits and mores of Broadway changed in the years after 1909 or so. A party has gone to the upstairs room of the fictitious Café de Ninive, and a middle-aged woman reminisce about very recent history:
    A few winters ago we thought it was amusing to go to supper at a good restaurant after the theater, have something nice to eat and drink, talk a while, and go home to bed. We thought we were very devilish, and the preachers railed at the wickedness of late-supper orgies. . . . Then somebody started the cabarets. And we flocked to that. We ate the filthiest stuff and drank the rottenest wine and didn’t care so long as they had some sensational singer or dancer cavorting in the aisle. . . . But it has become so tame and stupid that it is quite respectable. At present we are dancing in the aisles ourselves, crowding the professional entertainers off their own floors. And now the preachers and editors are attacking this. Whatever we do is wrong so, as my youngest boy says, “What’s the use, and what’s the diff?”
    The really shocking thing about this passage is that a woman of mature years is adopting both the slang and the morals of her youngest son; it indicates how drastically the revolution in entertainment upended settled forms of behavior. It all began with cabaret, which mixed respectable urbanites with the fast crowd of Broadway, leaving respectability much the worse for wear. Cabaret was still a passive experience, like theatergoing. But almost immediately, restaurants and what were known as cafécabarets began encouraging diners to get up off their seats and get onto the