[Gutenberg 61645] • New York · Confidential!

"What this book is about--

This is the New York that's not in the guide books--the lowdown on the Big Town as only Jack Lait and Lee Mortimer can give it. They take you behind the scenes to explore and expose the denizens adn the operations of the raffish half-world of crime, politics, intrigue, and passion. They lead you into swank night clubs and into squalid nests of vice and perversion. They take the lid off Broadway and Swing Lane. They tell the truth about glamour girls, show girls, party girls, models, and the White Way wolves. They sketch many after-dark characters who have made the city famous, or infamous.

Here is New York from the inside. This book ignores Grant's Tomb, the Statue of Liberty, and Radio City. Instead it gives you an intimate revelation of what really makes the town tick. The authors have crammed an enormous amount of off-the-record information into its pages. Much of it is on the seamy side, but all of it is real, and it is undeniably fascinating. It preaches no moral; it simply points out how to get into or stay out of trouble. From that point on you're on your own. There is a wealth of advice on how to avoid New York's many booby traps. There are many tips for the person who wants to see something besides the tall buildings. And there is choice data on the leading restaurants and night clubs, as well as a list of backstage (confidential) telephone numbers.

Lait and Mortimer are both well known New York newspapermen and between them they miss little that goes on in Gotham-on-the-Hudson. They have produced a compendium of facts and observations about the Big Burg that will amaze, amuse, and steer not only the stranger but even that supposedly non-existent species, the native New Yorker. This is not the New York of the travel forlders. It is an index of the city as it really is: hard, frequently hostile, a place where cash is king--but a city throbbing with life and opportunity both good and bad. Probably the most fabulous, fascinating city on earth."