Washington Confidential 3 – Mortimer · Verses Across
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 3Part 1 · NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE
18
Literature · Crime, Thrillers & Mystery
Washington Confidential 3
Part 1 · NW COULD MEAN NOWHERE
MortimerEnglish
The first question asked by members of the new Seventh Congress, after taking the oath in the draughty and unfinished Capitol in 1801, was “where is a saloon with dames?” or the early 19th century equivalent thereof.
The chief usher escorted them to the steps on the Hill, which overlooked what there then was of the young city, a collection of boxes resembling nothing so much as a rude Oklahoma oil-boom town on a rainy day, and pointed northwest. “There,” he replied. Ever since that historic moment, anything that matters and much that doesn’t is in that part of the city known by its postal address as “NW.”
“North West” is the only section of Washington which counts. It is the capital of the capital. NW is the works.
When Major Pierre L’Enfant accepted the commission to plan the capital, he went Caesar’s Gaul one better and divided it into four parts. These he laid out like spokes around a wheel, with the hub “The Hill,” on which he built the Capitol. He named each section after compounded cardinal points of the compass, NW, SW, NE and SE. The others you can throw into the garbage-can--NW is the city.
Other municipalities have distinctive sectors. In Washington everything, the rialto, marts of commerce, homes of the wealthy, are piled into this one corner, where they rub shoulders with the lowly, the dirty and the wicked, not to overlook Washington’s No. 1 problem, the colored.
Washington’s Main Drag is F St. if you could call it such. The crossing at 14th Street is its Times Square, its State and Madison--an insult to both. Most of the 1,500,000 who live in the District and environs, plus a half-million tourists, pass it daily.
Here are the movie palaces, but its sole legit theatre is almost a mile away. Its best-known restaurants are around the corner. Any night, Saturday included, the heart of America’s heart is dark and quiet.
Washington’s Main Stem is somewhat more somnolent than those of most villages. Don’t get us wrong--things do happen after dark. But--those who do them don’t want them seen.
When one seeks the reason for the empty dreariness of Washington at night, where trees swaying in the wind often are the only living things, he is told what seems the obvious--Washington is a town of early-to-bedders who do not go in for night life. That is not true. Washington has hundreds of sneak-ins that remain open all night. Your hardy reporters almost collapsed before they could complete this assignment--to visit every place openly or surreptitiously breaking the law. Almost all are in NW, which should have made it easier.
After-dark Washington is the way it is because it has the smalltown mentality. People do their sinning in homes and hotels or in pseudo-private “clubs.”
Now let’s get on with NW.
Most Congressmen live there. That’s a break for all except cab-drivers. Hack rates are regulated by zones. Passengers pay the same fee regardless of where they ride to in a zone, with a surcharge for each extra zone the cab enters. The Congressmen, who make all the District’s laws, talked the Public Utilities Commission into gerrymandering the zone map in such a way it ended up allowing them and you and us to go almost anywhere from the Capitol into NW for a minimum fee. No one wants to go elsewhere, so it’s a fine deal for all but the cab-jockies.
All the big hotels are in NW. That includes everything from popular-priced tourist fall-ins near the station to the luxury hostelries like the Mayflower, Statler, Carlton and the residential ones in the outskirts, such as the Shoreham and Wardman Park. And the assignation hotels are downtown, smack in the middle of everything, very snug.
Perhaps the most famous hotel is the Willard, at F and 14th Streets. They call it the New Willard now, though the new section was built during Teddy Roosevelt’s first administration. For almost a century, VIP’s from all over the world stayed here. Julia Ward Howe wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” in one of its rooms. Now its cocktail bar is a hangout for lonesome government girls and other fancy-free women, best time after 5 P.M.
The new and modern Ambassador Hotel is at 14th and K, one of the many holdings of Morris Cafritz, husband of Washington’s “first” hostess since the elevation to the Diplomatic Corps of Mme. Mesta. The High Hat Cocktail Lounge in the Ambassador is a gay drinking spot, much patronized by the lonesome of either sex because of its informality. When we asked a cab-driver where we could meet a “friend” he directed us to the Ambassador. We sat there five minutes, not long enough to attract a waiter’s eye. But the eyes of two blonde things, young and not bad-looking, were quicker. One asked us to buy her a drink. We did.
Before long we were old friends. They told us they’d spend the evening with us for $20 each. We said we had to catch a train. They thought we meant the price was too high and reduced it to $10--“if we had a place to take them.”
We returned to the Ambassador half a dozen times, and all except once we were approached. That time it was too late, about 1 A.M., and all the volunteers had already booked themselves. We also saw other stags talk to girls with whom they hadn’t come in, but with whom they left.
Another cash-and-carry supermarket is the gracious old Peacock Alley of the Willard Hotel, a broad indoor parade where once world statesmen sat and sized up famed society beauties.
These hotels are not unique. All of Washington’s respectable inns and cocktail bars are plagued with loose ladies; there’s nothing much can be done about it, because the muddled situation of District law and law enforcement makes it impossible for the managements to bounce that sort of undesirables--if they are so regarded. The cops would refuse to eject them for fear of suits; the hotels and saloon-keepers are subject to the same liability. We saw hookers, or busy beavers that looked remarkably like them, speak to strangers in the cocktail lounges of the Statler and Carlton, and we were approached by one in the former place.
The hotel situation is never static. Comes war or emergency and the town is always short on rooms. In times of depression or recession there are too many rooms. When your authors began their regular trips to the city in search of material for this book, Washington had not started to take on its Sino-Korean war dress. We and our money were welcomed with open arms. We spent lavishly throughout the summer at the Carlton, a haunt of New Deal and Labor aristocracy, where John L. Lewis and White House assistant David K. Niles maintain luxurious suites.
As the summer wore on, Washington filled up with hoards of businessmen, manufacturers’ agents, lawyers, fixers and other finaglers. They had unlimited expense accounts. Remembering what happened in Washington during the years of World War II, some leased permanent suites. Others slipped large and welcome tips to room clerks and executives. Then reservations at the Carlton for mere confidential reporters were bitched up. They were unceremoniously moved from room to room, given second-class accommodations, notified they must get out; so better spenders could get in--and our bills had been running to $100 a day.
The Shoreham asked permanent guests to leave. Included were many Congressmen who had been living there for years. Some had voted against rent control in the District. But now they were Displaced Persons.
It was no secret that among the permanents who were in danger of being forced to go house-hunting were several statuesque blondes whose rents were being paid by high officials, diplomats and senators. The swank Shoreham, one of the most beautiful hotels anywhere, has figured prominently in police court and divorce court news more than once.
Washingtonians smile when they wonder if the Shoreham’s managing director, Harry Bralove, asked his pretty ex-wife to find other lodgings, too. There was a lot of gossip when she and Bralove were divorced. Once, when unable to meet an overdue $900 alimony bill, he convinced the court he no longer had an interest in the hotel, merely worked for it. Meanwhile he and his former spouse renewed their sentiments, but figured they’d be happier as friends than as man and wife. So the former Mrs. Bralove moved into the Shoreham.
A very pleasant exception to the general rule about kicking the guests around is the Mayflower Hotel, after three decades, still the choice of Washington’s smart set. In the wing devoted to private apartments are housed some of the most prominent people in the nation and they haven’t been moved to enable the management to snag profiteer revenue.
What there is of show business is in NW. That is little. Yet it was not always so. In the early days Washington was a hell of a show town. There was gaiety then. Long before the streets were paved, dignitaries attended the theatres and dined sumptuously at famed eating spots.
The theatre figures prominently in Washington’s history. The martyred Lincoln was slain in Ford’s Theatre, now a museum. President Wilson was an incurable vaudeville fan with the real habit, attending the same theatre every week on the same night. He used to slip out of the White House to Keith’s, a block away, where the management held a seat in the back row, where he tried to be unobserved. Washington had top vaudeville before the demise of that medium. Today Keith’s is a grind movie house. The only thing resembling variety is at Loew’s Capitol, where four or five modest acts are sandwiched in between runs of a picture.
Washington’s sole remaining legit theatre was the National. Once Washington was a hot road show town. Many New York hits-to-be had their tryouts there. Successes played week stands after leaving Broadway. Washington had minor population but supported many houses. Its residents were avid show-goers. The National gave up the ghost and turned into a movie house because of the race problem. Few Washington theatres permit colored patronage, though Negro theatres allow whites.
The National was restricted against colored attendance in its lease. A couple of years ago, a race-conscious Actor’s Equity Association, steamed up by Eleanor Roosevelt and her “we’re-all-brothers” group resolved not to permit its members to appear in any theatre in Washington while racial discrimination was enforced. Equity did not issue the same edict against theatres in the rest of the South, all of which are so restricted. The operators of the National were bound by the terms of their lease and could not change their policy. Rather than risk a long, costly fight, they converted the house into a cinema. Meanwhile, for two years, the capital of the world’s most literate nation was barren of all living drama.
Within the last few months, the owners of the Gayety Burlesque, on 9th Street, which is Washington’s Skid Row, converted it into a legit house. The Gayety had offered pretty low entertainment, because practically anything is permitted. But trade wasn’t too good. The cagey operators, not hampered by contractual restrictions, switched. To accent the fact that they were going all out on this new line of race tolerance, they booked as their first attraction a show with a mixed cast, “The Barrier” starring Lawrence Tibbett and Muriel Rahn, who is a Negro. Its theme was miscegenation in the Deep South.
The opening in the old home of burlesque, surrounded by shooting galleries, tattoo artists and cheap sex movies for “adults only,” was attended by the top layer of Washington New Deal and left-wing weepers and critics for the Negro press and the Daily Worker. The show was panned by the other reviewers. It closed prematurely, after five days. Producer Michael Meyerberg said, “We shouldn’t have opened in Washington.”
After that, the theatre limped along, sometimes lighted, sometimes dark. The Negroes showed no zeal to patronize it. The whites passed it up. Now the Theatre Guild is sending shows there, subsidized by highbrow subscribers.
Many who want to see good drama go to New York. There’s usually a Broadway hit playing in Baltimore.
During the summer, attempts are made to present road shows of New York companies on The Water Barge, in the Potomac, and in some neighborhood playhouses. Regardless of the success of some individual play, Washington can be written off as a theatre town.
Despite all the hardships, there are always optimists, especially when they can get their names in the papers. One of these is Congressman Klein, of New York, a screaming New Dealer, who represents one of Gotham’s most poverty-stricken neighborhoods. Klein is trying to get the government to spend $5,000,000 for a national theatre. Naturally it is to be named the Franklin D. Roosevelt Memorial Theatre. Some of his constituents need shoes, but F.D.R. needs another monument. His bill forbids barring any person from appearing in it or attending it because of race, creed, color, religion or national origin. It would be conducted by the Secretary of the Interior, who at this writing is that well-known showman, Oscar L. Chapman, of Denver, Colorado, who is a co-founder of the Spanish-American League to Combat Exploitation of Mexican Workers in the United States, an arty cause, no doubt.
For most of the area’s 1,500,000 permanents and 500,000 transients, movies offer the big night out. How much longer, in the face of TV competition, remains to be seen. At the present time, attendance runs 100,000 a day. Most film houses in white neighborhoods are restricted to whites. Negroes have their own. One of the most famous is the Howard, in the NW colored section, which often augments its shows with top-flight Negro stage shows. At such times the place is apt to draw more white customers than black. Washington has its hep-cats. Many of the younger social and diplomatic sets get a bang out of hot licks. These people who willingly sit next to dark folks in the Howard refuse to permit them in their own theatres or restaurants. That’s typical Washington thinking.
The high-class shopping street--the Fifth Avenue--is Connecticut Avenue, running from La Fayette Square, past the Mayflower Hotel, and out into Cleveland Parkway, past residential hotels and swank apartments.
There are plenty of first-grade shops here, with chic imports, expensive antiques and other gewgaws to lure the feminine dollar. Despite the great wealth of the District and the presence of an international set, all is not pheasant for these merchants. New York and the magnet of its style-conscious stores is too near. Even Baltimore gets some of the trade which can’t find enough smart things at home. But a curious reverse process has been taking place in recent years. Whereas many Washingtonians travel to New York to shop and to dine, a couple of Washington’s best-known institutions have been reaching out and taking over some of the same places in New York which Washingtonians travel 225 miles to patronize.
Garfinckel’s is Washington’s high-fashion department store. A couple of years ago, its proprietors bought out the ancient and aristocratic New York men’s furnishing house, Brooks Brothers. Within a few months, the Garfinckel octopus reached out and gobbled up one of New York’s oldest and best-known Fifth Avenue stores, de Pinna.
While this was going on, a couple of smart Swedes, who had made a tremendous success at Olmsted’s Restaurant, a popular eatery with fine food in the NW business section, bought New York’s oldest and most famous restaurant, Luchow’s, on 14th Street, one of the last places left in the country where dining is still a fine art.
Reference to the appendix will show many other Washington eating places, some good, some bad and not all recommended, but most of them are in NW.
One of the best-known and best is Harvey’s, on Connecticut Avenue, near the Mayflower. This is J. Edgar Hoover’s nightly eating place when he is in Washington. Like most Washington restaurants, Harvey’s has been in business long. It specializes in sea food. The room does a sell-out business and it’s almost impossible to get a table at the height of the dining hour. Service by ancient Negro waiters is slow. Best time to eat is after 9, because most Washingtonians dine early; 6 o’clock is the standard time. Many start at 5. Those are the homely habits. Some restaurants close at 8, and a few at 7.
Julius Lully, who owns Harvey’s, is the butt of J. Edgar’s robust sense of humor. Once Hoover had a batch of wanted-fugitive-identification “fliers” made up showing Lully in his World War I private’s uniform. He had them nailed up on posts for miles around Lully’s country place. When the hick sheriff locked up the restaurateur, who sputtered and gave Hoover as a reference, J. Edgar said he had never heard of him.
On another occasion Hoover sent a letter, purporting to be from Oscar of the Waldorf, threatening to sue Harvey’s for appropriating his salad dressing. Lully hired a lawyer and told him to offer the Waldorf $2,500, but J. Edgar advised him it wouldn’t be enough.
The Occidental is hoary with age and legend. Pictures of presidents, cabinet officers and generals cover the walls. This was our favorite, but the Occidental has succumbed to the new boom. An officious head waiter, with a typical Prussian attitude toward customers, lined us up like prisoners of war, then heaped contemptuous abuse when we dared question his excellency about the possible chances of being seated and served. Washingtonians take it. They are used to being kicked around. Senators or cabinet officers they may be, but at heart most are grass-rooters overawed by the big city. We didn’t take it. We walked out. We are used to consideration and hospitality, spoiled by the good manners of heartless Manhattan.
When Major L’Enfant plotted the city, he provided that the streets should run in three directions, north and south, east and west, and diagonal. Where the diagonal avenues, which are named after states, cross the rectangular streets, generally numbered or alphabetically lettered, there are wide circles or broad squares. One of those is Lafayette Park, known to all Americans because it is the square in front of the White House. Here, less than a hundred yards from the President’s front door, is one of the most sordid spots in the world. At night, under the heroic equestrian statue of Andrew Jackson and in the shadow of the foliage of overhanging trees, there is a constant and continuous soprano symphony of homosexual twittering.
The President knows about it; he reads the papers. The police superintendent knows about it. Congress, which governs the District, knows about it. Recently, the secretary of a Senator was arrested there, charged with indescribable misbehavior. He was acquitted by a jury. There are few convictions.
Lafayette Park is one of the showplaces of NW. Another is Thomas Circle. Years ago, the circle and all the streets leading into it were lined with mansions. Now you can pull up in your car in front of a newsdealer there, at any hour, day or night, and place a bet on a horse, buy a deck of junk or get a girl--$10 asking price, $5 if you put up a struggle.
Another NW cynosure was Dupont Circle. It was social. There were the homes of such as Princess Eleanor Patterson. Now they’ve been razed or cut up because of taxes, death benefits, estate distributions and the high cost of maintenance. Those that still stand have been turned into embassies, headquarters of national organizations, and rooming-houses in between. One triangular corner was torn down to make way for the Dupont Plaza, a glassy and glossy apartment hotel, swell for lobbyists, flashy girls and 5-percenters. What happened to Dupont Circle hit all the way out the length of 16th Street, which runs off from the White House, and Massachusetts Avenue. These two long, broad avenues run through all NW. They are the “Ambassadors’ Rows.”
Of the sixty embassies, legations and chancelleries, almost all are on one or the other. Both have a liberal sprinkling of organization headquarters, such as unions, trade associations and eleemosynary institutions, with the ever-present furnished-room coops and apartment hotels.
The complexion of NW is changing, growing darker. The area always had a large Negro section. There are no racial zoning laws. Restrictive covenants cannot be enforced. There are no longer any racial boundary lines and some people think that is dandy. They have been in the driver’s seat since 1933.
You will find colored people living within a half a block of an embassy or around the corner from a new luxury apartment house. There is no reason why this should not be so, but the property-owners and the white residents do not agree. As the process continues, NW grows less swank and less desirable, while many of its rich residents move into Maryland suburbs such as Chevy Chase and across the river into Virginia.
The Negroes and other specific phenomena of NW will be considered in specialized chapters.
