NOT BAD FOR DELANCEY STREET
The organizational chart for the War Industries Board resembles a large family tree that in place of descendants offers more than twenty divisions, commissions, committees, bureaus, and sections that all flowed from and answered to their one patriarch and leader, Bernard Baruch. All the resources of American industry crucial to fighting Germany and its allies in World War I were overseen by the WIB, which President Woodrow Wilson created in May 1917, one month after the country entered the war. But the WIB was unable to coordinate or settle the demands and conflicts between the needs of the government’s War Department and private industry’s profit motive until Wilson, on March 4, 1918, named Baruch the WIB chairman. During his tenure Baruch “came closer to achieving an absolute dictatorship of US industry than any man has ever done before or since.”1
Baruch’s august position seemed natural justice itself. He was a compendium of gifts, inherited and acquired. Bernard Mannes Baruch, at six feet four inches tall, possessed a “well-honed charm” and good looks too striking for him to pretend to ignore, and was slim and athletic and good enough with his fists in his youth to win a compliment from prizefighter Bob Fitzsimmons. He was a self-made multimillionaire and, emphasizes a biographer, his generation’s example of “the American dream come true. He was the American success story, the aspiration fulfilled of every young man off the farms, or out of the little towns and villages, who dreamed of conquering the city and of amassing wealth and fame and power.”2 Born in South Carolina on August 19, 1870, to Simon Baruch, a Jewish immigrant from Germany who became a respected physician, and his wife, Isabelle Wolfe, who traced her Jewish roots to colonial America, Baruch attended high school and college in New York, found work in the city as a stockbroker, and by 1900 was a legend for his ability to prosper on Wall Street in good times and bad, betting long that stocks would rise and betting short that the value of an investment would tumble.3 He became known as the Wizard, and Doctor Facts, but Baruch was no bloodless monument to Commerce High’s Success Formula and its ideal of self-denial. He loved the theater, actresses, and publicity and sought coverage in newspapers and newsreels. He was also a ladies’ man with a healthy libido.4 At age sixty-eight, Baruch vigorously pursued the singer Kitty Carlisle Hart, then the twenty-eight-year-old Kitty Carlisle. He “chased me considerably around the bedroom in his long winter underwear,” Hart recalled. This was in the summer of 1938, when she accepted his invitation to shoot game at the apparently chilly ten-thousand-acre hunting estate and lodge Baruch rented in Scotland during grouse season. Because of their forty-year age difference, Hart said, “I thought he was so old that I kept saying to him, ‘Bernie, get into bed.’”5
Any young man working in proximity to such a successful and robust figure might understandably come to admire and even idolize him, but to Billy Rose, Baruch’s gifts seemed the antidote to his—and his father’s—every deficiency. Where Rose was short, just five feet two inches, and an athlete manqué, Baruch was tall and strong, features that always impressed Rose. In 1940, he wrote to the columnist Walter Winchell that his new press agent was “six foot, all man.”6 That ideal intensified Rose’s appreciation of Baruch: “He was the best looking man in North America, as far as I was concerned. He wore the quietest and best fitting clothes, he was pink skinned, premature[ly] gray.”7 Baruch’s sartorial example informed Rose that his own style was off base. “My shoes, ties, were wrong. I was talking too loud. I lowered my face. I knew the legend, he was a living legend.”8
Just as crucial as Baruch’s success was his identity as an American Jew, born not in Russia but in the American South. Rose’s father was saddled with the immigrant Jewish speech that was viewed as comical. He “talked with a terrible Jewish accent,” said Rose’s secretary. “He was unwittingly funny.” Baruch, by contrast, apparently recognizing the value of his South Carolina speech as an authentic American credential, retained “a trace of a southern accent” even after seventy years in New York.9 When Rose in the mid-1920s found himself among New York’s Jewish songwriters he mocked the pretensions of their “back-to-Dixie” tunes and shrewdly demanded, “What Tennessee? More likely it’s Odessa or Riga.”10 Baruch, on the other hand, was a real Southerner and also a prominent Jew, one who intermarried but at crucial moments aided Jewish causes, an approach Rose would follow as closely as he did the older man’s financial advice.11 Baruch inspired Rose but also humbled him. “I would like to think I was a pale carbon copy of Bernard Baruch. I don’t think it would be correct to say that I was even a pale carbon copy.”12
That note of modesty was not, however, Rose’s characteristic key, and it is not how people remembered him at the WIB. “In the office was an undersized stenographer, who distinguished himself by taking dictation at an infernally rapid rate and who, in leisure moments, amused himself and the rest of us by his uncanny skill in drawing fascinating pictures of strange beasts and birds on his typewriter,” said the three-time Pulitzer Prize–winning reporter and Algonquin Round Table wit Herbert Bayard Swope, who worked with Baruch at the WIB and who, in his mention of Rose’s sketches of “strange beasts,” left a clue to Rose’s later interest in the art of Salvador Dalí. “Rose, I am willing to wager, secretly believes that he won the World War.”13 Baruch was more restrained but affectionate when he wrote in his autobiography, “We had one particularly bright young lad—a crackerjack stenographer—named Billy Rose, who has since earned fame and fortune.”14 Neither man verified a story that Rose organized and headed a team of shorthand reporters and typists that delivered to Baruch daily verbatim reports of WIB activities. Rose succeeded in getting the tale accepted as fact elsewhere, but he did not share it with a Baruch biographer whose book appeared while her subject was alive. Here Rose was careful to claim only that part of his “job was to carry chocolate sodas to Baruch at three in the afternoon.”15 This circumspection supports the truth of a story he did share with Baruch’s biographer: while at the WIB, Rose met the president of the United States. In November 1918, with the war at an end, President Wilson relaxed for a few minutes with the young office worker to talk shorthand. “I understand you’re quite a shorthand writer,” Wilson said, and then a low-key shorthand showdown took place between the young man and the president, who practiced the Pitman method. “I walked out of the White House and floated back to my office via the rooftops,” Rose said, as he thought to himself, “Not bad for Delancey Street.”16
The six months Rose worked in Washington began on July 24, 1918, and ended on January 8, 1919. That was not what he had hoped for. On his “Application For Employment” Rose sought a permanent job, not a temporary one. It was a curious request. Though it was impossible to predict the war’s duration, it was unlikely to last forever, and unsurprisingly Rose’s job and the WIB itself disappeared soon after the war ended on November 11, 1918. Baruch and Swope returned to New York, and it was not until the 1930s that Rose achieved the success that enabled him to transform his youthful acquaintance with Baruch into a friendship. What’s more, at the WIB Rose’s salary of $1,800 a year was just a little more than half the $3,000 he made in New York at Thompson-Starrett. John Robert Gregg, Rose’s primary professional reference—and the one that allowed Rose to get the WIB job without taking the civil service exam—was also in New York. So the goal of permanent employment in the nation’s capital is confounding, except that a return to New York meant a return to his unreliable father and relentless mother.17
THE GETAWAY
In early 1919, the National Shorthand Reporters’ Association was preparing its first convention since 1917 and its first shorthand speedwriting contest since 1916. The 1918 convention was called off because of the war, and the 1917 speed contest was canceled because so many prospective contestants had enlisted in the army. In 1919, with the war at an end, the NSRA brought back the convention, revived the speed competition, and rekindled Rose’s quest for a national victory his mother could relish.18 “He desperately wanted to be champion. He wanted to be the world champion,” Louis Leslie said. “He used to bring the medals home to his mother. . . . He had this medal complex for Mama.” The Gregg company shared Rose’s dream of glory and upon his return to New York put him on the payroll so he could afford to prepare for the August convention in Detroit. “Training in any physical or neuro-muscular skill is the same. You have to have a sparring partner. We took Albert Schneider. . . . He was miles below [Rose] but at least he was close enough. . . . We simply paid two salaries in order to have the pacer for [Rose],” Leslie said. He tested Rose every week, while Gregg himself “was upstairs chewing his finger nails.”19
Two days of convention proceedings took place before the speed contest was held at ten o’clock on Thursday morning, August 21. According to the NSRA Bulletin, “The great event, which has its attraction for the oldest as well as the youngest reporter,” confirmed that “the Speed Contest has come to stay, and it is now an admitted fact that the shelving of this important feature of our annual gathering was a mistake.”20 Then comes silence. Rose apparently fainted during the contest, but the Gregg organization declined to discuss it. Its official reports offer no explanation of what happened to its star, though Leslie said Gregg believed Rose and Schneider got drunk the night before in nearby Windsor, Ontario, where the liquor that was recently outlawed in America was available. But that does not explain Schneider’s adequate performance. Rose claimed he did poorly owing to “fatigue, exhaustion, brain-fever.”21
A more suggestive explanation is that Rose buckled under the stress of winning the contest to please his mother. He experienced another disabling moment years later when courting his first wife, vaudeville star Fanny Brice, whose resemblance to Rose’s mother included not just her Jewishness and first name but also her superior position over him, signified by her fame, her height advantage, and her being eight years his senior. As the junior partner in the future marital union sat down to dinner at Brice’s home, he was struck by “a terrific and sudden nosebleed.” Brice responded with calm competence and tact and took care of him in “her big happy-looking kitchen.”22 She was a benevolent Fanny, not an overbearing one, but it seems that eagerness to please his mother, or a symbol of her, made Rose vulnerable to collapse. Her expectations were enormous. “She was a doer,” said a niece. “Did things on a very large scale. Thought big.” Brice agreed that Rose’s mother demanded “big, big everything big.”23 She set a high bar for her short son.
In August 1919, Rose had good reason to feel anxiety over what he might have to render to Fannie Rosenberg. Big changes in the works surfaced on December 4 when Fannie spent $15,000 on a four-story Manhattan row house at 767 St. Nicholas Avenue, in the so-called Sugar Hill neighborhood, where residents lived the sweet life.24 The home had the commanding presence that suited Fannie’s yearnings for splendor, and in later years Rose referred to anything great, rich, and fine as a “real Fannie Rosenberg.”25 The home was one of ten Italian Renaissance–style townhouses on the west side of St. Nicholas Avenue between 148th and 149th streets, a row that is “one of the most impressive” in the now-historic district. Designed by the prominent architect Frederick P. Dinkelberg, the lavish single-family houses completed in 1895 offered master bedroom suites outfitted with “octagonal dressing room[s] . . . with full-height plate-glass mirrors” and adjoining bathrooms with fireplaces.26 When the Rosenbergs arrived the neighborhood still hosted remnants of an earlier elite. Though many homes had been remodeled to accommodate multiple families, one block south at 747, 749, and 751 St. Nicholas the homes still each served one family and a live-in servant. The Rosenbergs’ building could accommodate several families, and the idea was to rent out the extra space to pay the monthly expenses.27
There was, however, a catch. Rose was supposed to be Fannie’s silent partner in the deal. Five weeks after Fannie bought the house she began to mortgage it, probably to repay whoever loaned her the $15,000 purchase price (likely her brothers Abraham and Maurice). So on January 16, 1920, she committed herself to an $11,000 mortgage from Emigrant Industrial Savings Bank and another for $3,700 from one Abram Libman. She closed both transactions without her husband. Though husband and wife still lived together, Fannie had clearly decided to make her way without his help. When she signed her name, in Hebrew characters, to the mortgage agreement with Libman, the only witness was her son, William Rosenberg. On March 8, 1920, Fannie further mortgaged the property to a Sadie Wolper for $1,200, bringing the total obligation to $15,900, more than she had paid for the house three months before. Rose did not witness this third mortgage.28 He had likely already left town. In the winter of 1920, Rose made his getaway.
Since January 1919, Rose had weathered a series of setbacks. He lost his job at the WIB and the company of outstanding men such as Baruch. That was nobody’s fault, and there was nothing to be done about it. Then he returned to New York and the practice of shorthand, drilled regularly to win the national speed contest, and failed spectacularly, spoiling his deserved reputation for excellence. “Don’t let anybody derogate Billy . . . about being a reporter,” Charles Swem told an interviewer. “He was never world champion, but he was a grand reporter.”29 But Fannie’s decision to make her son her business partner may have signaled to Rose that he might now suffer a much greater failure. He could become another emasculated David Rosenberg. Rose witnessed the dynamics of his parents’ marriage. Fannie “overpowered papa. She dominated him,” said his sister Polly.30 Probably to escape that fate, and also to see the country beyond New York—accounts of American journeys were featured in the Commerce High Caravel when he attended school there—Rose for the first time in his young life made a move without regard for professional fame or monetary gain.31 He set out on a four-month travel excursion to Ohio, Kentucky, Tennessee, Texas, and New Orleans.32 His apparent goal was freedom, independence, and a chance to test his resilience.
Rose bought his first gun, a .32 Smith & Wesson pistol, in an assertion of manliness that emphasized independence from his mother and also reflected his realist view of the world and its dangers, and lit out alone, starting in Ohio. There, the Caravel reports, he worked as a stenographer for the state’s governor, James Cox, who was seeking the Democratic Party’s nomination for president.33 According to Rose’s account of his wanderings, he next found a shorthand job in Memphis, Tennessee, working for Clarence Saunders, founder of the Piggly Wiggly grocery store chain, and visited Bowling Green, Kentucky, to see the Mammoth Caves, which in 1917 had installed electric lights to facilitate tourism. The trip also gave him his first look at Texas. Rose worked in the oil boomtown of Wichita Falls as a stenographer for attorney Fred Weeks.34
His next stop was San Antonio, where election-year politics created demand for his shorthand skills. The Texas state Republican convention there soon turned into two conventions as three hundred African American delegates boycotted it and staged their own convention. Rose said he covered the breakaway group, transcribed the delegates’ speeches, and had typists create copies he sold to the protesting delegates, a tale supported by a newspaper report that the African American delegates had “stenographic reports” of their convention. “I was a specialist and I quickly learned that my specialty was a marketable commodity wherever I went,” Rose said.35
Another specialty came in handy when Rose needed money between shorthand gigs: he hustled pool. The game was at the height of its popularity, with forty-two thousand pool halls across America, so there was no shortage of opportunities.36 “He was a great pool player,” said the art dealer Gilbert Lloyd, who in the 1940s helped Rose amass his collection of paintings and sculptures. “He was superb.” With less admiration a press agent confirmed his skill. “He was a shark. Would take every penny from you.”37 In the early 1920s, future movie actor George Raft tried to hustle Rose but got taken by him at Crenshaw’s, a well-known New York hangout at Broadway and 166th Street.38
Crenshaw’s and places like it formed a lasting part of Rose’s education; they were where the proper English taught in school was undermined by the slang of those whom linguist James Sledd terms “gentlemen who are not gentlemen and dislike gentility.”39 That was the place for Rose, and when his travels up the social ladder delivered him into environments that lacked the desired conversational color he supplied it himself. “He didn’t talk like someone who had gone to a good school. . . . He talked like an East Side Jewish kid,” said a longtime acquaintance.40 Examples abound. In a letter to Winchell, Rose wondered of their fanatical devotion to work, “Can it be we’re both nuts?”41 When he was rich enough to live in a home with a private elevator that sometimes stalled between floors he complained to his butler, “See who the hell is caught in the gimmick.”42 And when it was time for dinner he commanded the help, “Give me the works.”43 He liked to use Jewish locutions, too, and said of avoiding sunshine, “I should get wrinkled. What am I, a prune?”44 The style charmed Alistair Cooke, the British-born journalist and America enthusiast who saw how much Rose loved the underdog persona this language signaled, that of “a little, cocky, bright boy from the east side.”45 The approach paid off when he became a songwriter. As lyricist Chester Conn explained—an explanation that itself required slang—the title of Rose’s “I Found a Million Dollar Baby (In a Five and Ten Cent Store)” leveraged Rose’s “lingo. He used that same language.”46
Rose’s 1920 excursion ended with a conveniently dramatic return to New York. Though he never let the truth interfere with a good story, it seems he really was a passenger on the steamship Comus that sailed from New Orleans to New York, which, on July 12 in a fog off New Jersey, rammed into and sank another ship, the Lake Frampton. In the panic, Comus passengers clutched their belongings, which “if our boat was going to sink was of no use,” Rose said.47 This derision of others’ character and incompetence was fundamental with Rose, and decades later he would remind the director of Jerusalem’s Israel Museum to inspect the lamps that illuminated the sculptures he donated. “The screw which keeps the [lamp] hood firm sometimes gets loose and the hood falls. In that event, the light, instead of focusing on the sculpture, merely spills on the ground.”48 Rose’s kingdom would not be lost for want of a nail, or screw, while he was on the job.
Rose was back in New York when Fannie’s dream of home ownership ended on August 10, 1920. She had been a homeowner only eight months when she signed over to one Will N. Clurman all three mortgages to 767 St. Nicholas Avenue.49 Rose was an official signatory to this failure, which he later hid with a lighthearted story that his mother grew tired of the property and sold it for a $7,000 profit, a sum she spent on “bringing over greenhorns.”50 This white lie protected his mother’s reputation as a businesswoman. A $7,000 profit represented a gain of nearly 50 percent in eight months. This was impossible, especially because Fannie had the bad luck to buy her home on the eve of the 1920 recession. After her purchase, real estate prices fell.51 The true story of his headstrong mother’s fiasco was too humiliating. He had already aligned himself with her against his father the failure. She had to be, if not a success, at least bold and indefatigable, not overbearing and foolhardy. Before the end of the decade, in addition to a substitute father Rose found a replacement mother.
On January 15, 1920, just before Rose began his American excursion, a New York census taker found him living in a rooming house on West Fifty-Fifth Street. It was the last time Rose identified himself as William Rosenberg and the first time he announced his new vocation as an “artist” in the “theatrical” industry.52 He was determined to be a songwriter, and upon his return to New York in July he picked up where he had left off, which was at the bottom. The songwriting idea was not completely out of left field. Rose had played piano in his high school orchestra, where he shared musical duties with fellow student Harold Warren. “I was designated the piano player for the classical pieces and Rosenberg the piano player for the popular music,” Warren said.53 Rose’s interest in popular music was revived when he and Albert Schneider prepared for the 1919 shorthand contest. “He told me himself how he got into the song business,” Louis Leslie said. “The two boys went to all those shows, took down the lyrics of all the songs in shorthand. Just to be writing.”54 Acquaintanceships with songwriters followed and familiarity bred contempt. “I wasn’t at all impressed by these characters. . . . [They were] shoddy and second rate compared to the industrial giants I met in Washington. . . . All they talked about was how stupid the music publishers were and how they wouldn’t recognize a hit song if you shoved it down their throats.” But he could not dismiss the money the songwriters made: “It just struck me that here was a two-penny world where people were earning $50,000 a year.” Rose decided that if “these men who write infantile mush can make six times as much as a man who writes shorthand at the rate of 280 words a minute this is the life for me.”55
He was hardly the only one with this notion. “It gets into the newspapers that a chauffeur has written a tune which has made thousands of dollars,” and this attracts “gullible hopefuls and ignoramuses,” wrote Isaac Goldberg in his 1930 book Tin Pan Alley: A Chronicle of the American Popular Music Racket, a title appropriate to its jaded participants. But Rose was neither innocent nor dumb, and few were better suited to a business where inspiration, wrote Goldberg, “punches a time clock.”56 First, songwriting was a largely Jewish pursuit, and this allowed Rose to join the general trend of greatly diminished, if not wholly abandoned, Jewish practice, while remaining within the Jewish community. Sales of kosher meat in New York, for example, dropped 30 percent between 1914 and 1924, and “Jewish identity began to be defined partly as . . . association with other Jews.”57 Such association was unavoidable on Tin Pan Alley. As Goldberg noted, from the onset of the twentieth century, “Of a sudden, it seemed, the business took on a Jewish complexion.”58 This was widely understood, and when in the 1920s Rose pestered a press agent to win him a New Yorker profile, the magazine’s editor Harold Ross replied, “One more profile about a Jewish songwriter and we will go out of business.”59 Some of the greatest entertainers of the time, including Al Jolson, Sophie Tucker, Fanny Brice, Eddie Cantor, and George Jessel, were Jews who won over audiences with Jewish songs and comedy, such as Brice’s “Second Hand Rose,” Tucker’s “My Yiddishe Mama,” Cantor’s parody version, “My Yiddisha Mammy,” and Jessel’s comedy routine about taking his mother to a Broadway play, where she behaves as she would in the Yiddish theater, eating fruit and yelling at the actors. Rose soon wrote a similar sketch for Brice called “Mrs. Cohen at the Beach.” Unlike in the nation’s capital, where Rose’s clothes and speech were all wrong, in the New York songwriting game he needed no alterations.
Songwriting also took advantage of what a fellow writer called Rose’s “perfect ear for speech.”60 A love for the everyday language of American life was key, because slang had a “revivifying influence” on popular song, Goldberg said.61 But his greatest advantage was not being a typical songwriting type. “The personality of songwriters is emotional and sentimental,” said Rose’s writing partner Edward Eliscu. “They don’t think much about the future. They act much more impulsively.”62 That was not Billy Rose. “He was very methodical and conscientious,” said Ray Henderson. “All I can say is by sheer determination and studying he learned the modus operandi of songwriting.”63 That drive to succeed was so seldom seen among songwriters that a biographer of Irving Berlin wrote that it was Berlin’s emphasis on “work and work, and then WORK . . . that set Berlin apart.”64 With far less talent than the master, Rose nevertheless had an edge over the songwriters he disparaged as “spontaneous grasshopper types.”65 Rose was the hardworking ant.
NASTY, JEWISH, AND SHORT
During the summer of 1920, Rose lived on money borrowed from songwriter Walter Hirsch and others, survived on Automat doughnuts, and lingered at restaurants “until he was sure somebody would pay the check.”66 To make money he hustled, and a sign of his desperation is an August 18, 1920, review of a dismal act at the Harlem Opera House by “Billy Rose, blackface comedian,” which is notable for his rare work as a performer and for the first report of his new name.67 That same summer Rose visited Camp Lake Brant in New York’s Adirondack Mountains, four hours’ distance from the city, to buy lyrics from then virtually unknown songwriter Lorenz Hart. “Their system was to go out in a boat at ten or eleven o’clock in the morning” and write there all day. Rose paid Hart one hundred dollars for each day’s work and then sold the songs for a profit back in New York.68
By the fall Rose’s efforts to write and sell songs made him a regular visitor to the offices of song publishers Leo Feist; Shapiro, Bernstein; and Irving Berlin, Inc., where Saul Bornstein was the business partner who went on to cheat Berlin and the kind of guy who liked to tell people, “My first name is Saul. . . . My last name is Bornstein, and my middle name is Oscar. You know what my initials spell.”69 His true middle initial was H., but it was part of the 1920s code of big-city Jewish masculinity to boast of bad qualities. It warded off potential enemies. Rose was cut from the same rawhide, and years later in a letter to acting coach Lee Strasberg he referred to “what I laughingly call my heart.”70 Insiders understood that this kind of talk was (partly) ironic. When actress Mercedes McCambridge told Rose she “thought Jewish guys insulted each other too much,” he explained that it was “how they showed their love for one another.”71 Rose understood the community. It was often, like him, nasty, Jewish, and short.
In 1921, Rose had his first successful song. When the Ziegfeld Follies opened in New York in June of that year, one of the acts in the variety show famous for its beautiful girls in extravagant costumes was the male singing duo of Van and Schenck performing “I Hold Her Hand and She Holds Mine: Ain’t Nature Grand?” The lyric was credited to the newly minted Billy Rose, and it reports on a boy’s nights in the park with his girlfriend. She is “not too bad and not too good,” a perfect mixture for the amorous male, who cheerfully admits he is one of nature’s more uncouth creations: “With me it did the best it could.” The song also touts a streetwise contempt for education. The boy did not go to college and does not care for “the knowledge found in books.” Rose’s first notable song reveals that its creator was made of coarse material. How much sanding down and smoothing over he would stand for was a battle he waged with himself, his friends, and his several wives for the rest of his life.
“Most of my songs were written without distinction or merit,” Rose admitted. But he would not take a put-down from those who claimed they adhered to higher standards. “Guys who never saw their mothers were writing about mother,” he said. “Their songs had nothing to do with their actual experiences,” including their Jewish immigrant experience, which as he observed was often obscured with songs of longing for the Old South. Rose played the same game with “That Old Gang of Mine,” a 1923 hit he wrote with Henderson. It expresses a yearning “for that old gang that has drifted apart,” which was nonsense, Rose said. “I did not in the least want to get back to my old East Side gang of chiselers and muzzlers.”72
Another Rose hit from 1923, written with Con Conrad, was based on experience. “You’ve Got to See Mamma Ev’ry Night (Or You Can’t See Mamma at All)” was perfect for Sophie Tucker, the powerhouse Jewish vaudeville singer who made it a hit. The so-called “last of the red-hot mamas,” Tucker was always happy to toss over respectability in favor of the less refined facts of life, and in “Mamma” she found a song about an earthy and love-hungry woman that suited both her sexually frank persona and also the new woman of the 1920s, who engaged in premarital sex at “astounding” rates. In the twenties, half of all “young white women of courting age” engaged in premarital sexual intercourse.73 This female sexual liberty, however, was mainly restricted to their fiancés, and the complaint of the aggrieved woman in the song reflects this reality. A sexual relationship required commitment and allegiance. Tucker sings to her part-time lover, “Now I’m not showing you the door / I’m just laying down the law,” which is spelled out in the song’s title. “Laying down the law” signals an improvement in Rose’s lyric ability. The colloquialism connects the song to the actual spoken language of the audience and the reality of their lives. The song also may have reflected the reality of Rose’s life. In January 1923, he apparently folded in the face of a similar ultimatum when he married an actress named Betty Weston in Tijuana. There is no evidence the relationship lasted long or ended with a stateside divorce, but Rose seems to have paid off his sexual debt to Weston the following year by helping her land a part in The Melody Man, the first Broadway play he backed.74
“That Old Gang of Mine,” “You’ve Got to See Mamma,” and a song called “You Tell Her—I Stutter” made 1923 the year Rose emerged as an important player on Tin Pan Alley, but all those numbers were eclipsed by “Barney Google,” a novelty song based on a popular comic strip character of the same name. “That song wasn’t a hit, it was a disease,” Rose said.75 It certainly spread like one. The character was a lovable loser overpowered by his wife who found solace in “the male fantasies of his loyal readers,” including the alluring Ziegfeld girls, wrote the biographer of Billy DeBeck, Barney’s creator. Barney Google was a “reflection of their hopes, dreams and failures.”76 That was one interpretation. The cultural critic Gilbert Seldes, in his 1924 book The 7 Lively Arts, took popular culture more seriously and saw Barney Google as part of a lively insurgency that desecrated what society venerated. Barney had “so little respect for law, order, the rights of property, the sanctity of money, the romance of marriage, and all the other foundations of American life” that if he had appeared as a character in a more respectable art form, such as a novel, “the Society for the Suppression of Everything” would drag him into court.77 Rose’s song anticipated Seldes’s view. It comically celebrates the loser as a great man, a hero. “Who’s the most important man this country ever knew?” asks the song’s opening line. It is Barney Google, who is never respectable but always finds a way to survive. “Women take him out to dine, then he steals the waiter’s dime.” The song sold a million copies of sheet music and three million records. DeBeck received one-third of the royalties, but Rose’s take was still an impressive $25,000, and his 1923 income was $60,000, a figure that surpassed the amount he dreamed of making three years before.78 Rose was a success.
His growing prominence owed as much to his guts as to his hits. Rose was fearless toward song publishers. His “Gang” was a big hit for Irving Berlin’s publishing company at a moment when Berlin himself suffered a creative drought, so when Berlin one day ignored Rose’s greeting of “Good morning,” Rose set him straight. “When I say good morning, answer me, because my tune is paying for your flops.” Rose later reflected, “I was a pretty fresh punk.”79 Such bravado made him a songwriter’s hero. “He upset all the traditions, as almost all the other writers came into the publishers and kowtowed,” said Walter Hirsch. “He used to fight them.”80 “We were all anxious to write with Billy because he was a pugnacious guy,” Dave Dreyer said. “He was the first song writer to stand up to the publishers and tell them off. He made beautiful deals, pulled advances. Therefore we wanted to work with him. . . . He was ruthless.”81 Exactly what he did and how he did it Rose kept to himself. “He’d go in and make a deal, come out, hand you some money, that was it!” remembered Harry Warren. “You never found out what he sold it for till the statement came. Then you’d find you’d been rigged, he’d taken the biggest bite. And on the one hand you hated him, and on the other hand you knew you wouldn’t have gotten any deal without him.”82
The same calculus applied among publishers. “Publishers told me later on [that] in spite of all the antagonism he showed . . . they liked him,” Hirsch said.83 Rose got deals done, and that was the name of the game. Publishers also appreciated that Rose made sure his partners actually delivered product. “He kept you on the thing,” Henderson said. “If you started to talk about the World Series he would listen for a half second and say, ‘Let’s get back to the songs.’”84 The approach was a relief to many. “He was 100 percent business,” Eliscu recalled, “and I enjoyed that after [Eliscu’s regular partner Vincent] Youmans’ chaotic work habits.”85 “He was a great feeder,” Warren said. “He’d sit with the boys, and he’d say something like, ‘Come on, gimme another line, nah, nah, you can do better than that, come on, gimme something like . . . ’ then he’d come up with a phrase or a line, something. Somehow, a song would come out of all this, somehow. And nobody knew what Billy had done, but he’d done something.”86 Rose’s magic touch later led to accusations that he did not write his song repertoire but was instead “cut in,” given credit he did not deserve. According to popular song authority Michael Feinstein, the assertion is almost wholly untrue. Ira Gershwin and Harry Warren “told me personally that Billy did in fact write many lyrics,” Feinstein wrote.87 It was a case of Rose’s self-created reputation for larceny shaping his story more powerfully than the facts. He did not let it bother him. Rose could not be insulted, said one. He “had a skin like a crocodile.”88
IMPORTED BRIDEGROOM
That skin was, however, sensitive to his mother’s touch, and in the year of his great success she put the touch on him. Now that Rose had money he could solve some family problems, one of which was his sister Miriam, who in 1923 was twenty-two years old and single. “Miriam was plain and frumpy. Polly was the golden girl,” said Vicki Walton, daughter of Rose’s third wife, Joyce Mathews.89 To fix the Miriam situation, Fannie visited her son at his room in the Princeton Hotel, a residence on West Forty-Fifth Street popular among entertainers such as the Marx Brothers, and made a pitch that could have been booked as a vaudeville sketch about Jewish mothers.90 Miriam is not married, began Fannie. “It’s a catastrophe! The shame is on the whole family already.” Rose was not ashamed, he told his mother, who replied, “You should feel ashamed if you got a spark of feeling in your blood, for your own flesh and blood, your own poor sister, what is crying day and night because her heart is breaking she is not living a normal life.” Rose admitted defeat and mother and son became coconspirators. According to Rose, the scene went like this:
“She leaned forward confidentially. ‘I have arranged a husband for her!’
“‘Fine! I’m glad to hear. I’d like to meet him.’
“‘That’s a little difficult,’ she says. ‘He’s in Russia.’”91
Fannie had discovered a Jewish doctor in Russia she decided would make a good husband for her daughter. A fictional story about a similar Jewish parental plot, Abraham Cahan’s “The Imported Bridegroom,” was published a quarter century before, in 1898, and even at that time the American-born daughter in the tale objects to the arrangement. In fact, in 1898 a Jewish matchmaker in New York complained that young people today “believe in love and all that rot. They are making their own marriages.”92 By 1923, Fannie’s plan was truly archaic. But Rose became his mother’s partner in the plan, and he spent $500 to bring over from Russia one Joseph Berenstein, who arrived in Boston on November 1, 1923. The ship arrival passenger list shows his age as thirty-three and confirms Fannie’s story that he was a doctor.93
Berenstein’s arrival overlapped with another of Fannie’s Jewish projects. At the same time that she arranged a husband for Miriam she planned with her brothers Maurice and Abraham to found a synagogue in the small town of Park Ridge, New Jersey, where the two men lived with their wives and children. Maurice was the first to leave New York and by 1923 had a successful dentistry practice in Park Ridge.94 Abraham was in the dry goods business and arrived in the northern New Jersey town between 1920 and 1923. Rose’s parents joined the Wernick brothers there in 1923, and on October 10 of that year, the three Wernick siblings and their spouses joined fifteen other Jews to found the Park Ridge Hebrew Community Center. The congregation’s English name, as opposed to a Hebrew one, and its designation as a community center instead of a synagogue, is evidence that the project had to serve a variety of needs and, as the town’s only Jewish community, be comprehensible to its non-Jewish neighbors. Fannie and her brothers were prime movers of the project. Of the twenty-one founders only eleven sat on the board of trustees, and more than one-quarter of this small group consisted of the Wernick clan, including Abraham Wernick, Maurice Wernick, and Fannie Rosenberg.95 Rose’s mother had found another opportunity to rule.
Fannie’s parallel ventures of importing a bridegroom and founding a synagogue converged after Miriam married Joseph Berenstein in New York on September 21, 1924.96 The union was followed by a celebration at the Park Ridge synagogue on a field that “was turned into a carnival playground, with Japanese lanterns, tables, a band playing freilichs, Jewish wedding music, a nervous gyrating string music with a single clarinet, single trumpet and some fiddles and a piano,” Rose said. The uproarious scene got a little out of hand. “It was a completely unreal wedding—nearly a thousand guests, children roaming around, chasing chickens, men getting drunk and falling into a lake. The crowd and the noise so loud you couldn’t hear the rabbi.”97
It was the Jewish source of the mad entertainments Rose later produced in his nightclubs and theatrical shows, as well as an example of the Jewish gift for enjoyment that some felt did not get enough publicity. “It pleased me enormously to find that back where I came from there were hundreds of thousands of Jews who stuffed themselves with highly flavored food, got pie-eyed, sang dirty songs and occasionally punched each other on the nose,” wrote A. J. Liebling in his 1938 book Back Where I Came From. “A saloon-keeper I know on Delancey Street once made me a proposition that would have delighted [the ribald French poet François] Villon. ‘We’ll eat good,’ he said, ‘then we’ll get shikker, go upstairs and see the girls, and then we’ll go to a Turkish bath and have a good sweat.’”98 Other visitors were also struck by Jewish spiritedness. Despite the poverty of the Lower East Side, “the impression given by the inhabitants is one of intense vitality,” noted the fashion photographer Cecil Beaton.99 Rose translated this into the American vernacular but kept his distance from the original. Despite his later embrace of Jewish causes, he could not integrate Jewish customs into his personal life. Regardless of the kick he got out of recalling his sister’s wedding, Rose would never have one remotely like it.