One Summer: America, 1927

humble entrance at the rear. Others simply moved to new premises with different names, so that the El Fay Club became successively the Del Fay Club, Fay’s Follies, Club Intime, Club Abbey, the Salon Royal and the Three Hundred Club – though generally they were all known as Texas Guinan’s after their celebrated proprietress. Guinan was a slightly larger-than-life character. Originally fromWaco, she was forty-three years old in 1927 and of a fair size, with platinum hair and a great toothy smile. It was her habit to insult her customers, especially if they weren’t spending freely, and she was much loved for it. Her catchphrase was ‘Hello, sucker.’ Most of her clubs were small and packed. The girl dancers were frequently all but naked and often appallingly youthful. Ruby Keeler started at Tex Guinan’s when she was just fourteen and left three years later to marry Al Jolson – who was, like many another, smitten with her trim figure and slight but fetching lisp. Another Guinan dancer, Ruby Stevens, became better known later as Barbara Stanwyck.
    Guinan acted as master of ceremonies. She loved her girls, but didn’t take their talents too seriously. ‘Now this little gal isn’t much of a singer,’ she would say. ‘She learned singing by a correspondence course, and she missed a coupla lessons, but she’s the nicest little gal in the whole show, so I want ya to give her a big hand.’ (‘Giving a big hand’ was said to be another Guinan coinage.) So celebrated did Guinan become for being padlocked that the Shubert brothers starred her in a Broadway revue called Padlocks of 1927 .
    Since clubs might be shut down at any moment, the minimum amount of money was spent on comforts and decor. Customers didn’t seem to mind as long as they could get a decent drink. For more public and rooted places like hotels, the options were far fewer. The bar in the Knickerbocker Hotel (reputed birthplace of the dry martini) took in $4,000 a day before Prohibition, a sum not easily replaced. Without its bar takings, the Knickerbocker went under. So, too, did the Manhattan Hotel, where the manhattan cocktail was first created. Some hotels tried to survive by offering what were known as ‘set-ups’ – ice, seltzer, Angostura bitters and so on – to which the customer could add his own alcohol, but that hardly compensated for all the lost liquor business. Others continued selling alcohol discreetly in the hope that it would somehow escape official notice. Sooner or later they were nearly always disappointed.
    In March 1926, Buckner padlocked the dining room of the Brevoort Hotel for six months. That meant that it lost not only allits liquor revenue, but also its luncheon and dinner business. It couldn’t even serve its guests breakfast, so many clients abandoned it altogether. Eventually, Raymond Orteig succumbed and closed the Brevoort.
    Buckner’s padlocking policy caught on and was employed all over the country, including on a redwood tree in California in which was found an illegal still (though this sounds suspiciously like a publicity stunt). Altogether, in 1925, the peak year, authorities padlocked some 4,700 premises across America.
    Interestingly, Buckner didn’t actually believe in Prohibition, and admitted that he enforced it because it was the law and not out of any moral conviction. ‘I am not very much interested in it, except as a legal problem,’ he explained. He made no secret of the fact that he had often imbibed drink himself (though not since being appointed district attorney). The whole thing was a terrible mistake, in his view. ‘It has brought about a vicious criminal situation, with its offshoots of perjury, murders, the moral poisoning of public officials, assaults, thefts and all manner of interrelated lawbreaking. All the good which the law may produce is worthless compared to the chain of serious crimes which it is producing every day.’
    Nearly everyone recognized Prohibition as a colossal failure, and yet the nation persevered with it for thirteen years. A poem in Franklin Pierce Adams’s popular newspaper column ‘The Conning Tower’ in the New York World perfectly caught the official attitude:
     
    Prohibition is an awful flop.
    We like it.
    It can’t stop what it’s meant to stop.
    We like it.
    It’s left a trail of graft and slime,
    It’s filled our land with vice and crime,
    It don’t prohibit worth a dime,
    Nevertheless, we’re for it.
     
    It was in fact because