THE WOMAN WITH AUBURN HAIR was dressed in dusty pink heels with her dress blowing up over her head, her hands pushing down at the billowing gold and scarlet fabric. She was smiling and was only half-heartedly pushing back against the wind, her frilled white panties showing, her bare back bent over, her left breast peeking out from her halter top dress. The woman was not real, but a version of her lived in the memories of New Yorkers from Harry’s generation, who as teenagers had spent their afternoons loitering outside the Flatiron Building on Twenty-Third and Fifth, waiting for the ladies’ dresses to blow up. Because of the wind at that unusual corner, women’s ankles and legs, sometimes even a thigh, could be seen. That is until the police shooed the gawkers away. The old 23 skidoo.
Now, with the help of an illustrator, the woman was living and breathing on the March 1933 cover of Spicy Stories. Harry could make any dress blow up at will. And share it with his reading public, whose appetite was insatiable. There seemed to be no end to the girlie pulps on the newsstands. As a result, they were becoming more and more of a target.
J. Edgar Hoover tried to nab Harry again and again for interstate transportation of his obscene materials, but with Harry’s legal connections and his shell games—switching business addresses and company names—Hoover could barely pin him down. When he did, the US Attorney and courts repeatedly ruled that the material in Harry’s magazines was not even obscene. Though she no longer worked for Harry, his former sex pulp editor/lover Merle Williams Hersey was kept on his payroll so she wouldn’t spill any secrets to Hoover.
With the election of reformer Fiorello LaGuardia to mayor in 1933, the New York City landscape started to change. LaGuardia cracked down on Costello’s slot machines, arrested Lucky Luciano, and instructed the newly christened sanitation department to take the smooshes from the newsstands and throw them directly in the trash.
Most garbagemen probably weren’t so conscientious. LaGuardia would have to take matters into his own hands. And so, the second week of March 1934, his commissioner of licenses made a sweep of one hundred newsstands, removing fifty-nine different publications and arresting shopkeepers and dealers. Featured inside Harry’s January issue of Pep Stories on page 21 was a black-and-white photo of a willowy beauty holding a vase and wearing a pair of high-heeled pumps—and nothing else. It was an artsy shot, the naked woman standing in an arched doorway, glancing down at a checkered floor, a dark triangle of pubic hair showing just below the vase’s base. Something Vermeer might have painted had he been a smoosh artist. Harry was promptly arrested. The magistrate claimed to be so horrified by the publications that he came in on his day off to handle the case. “The stories not only tend to arouse lecherous desires,” said the magistrate, Alfred Lindau, “but are intended to do so.”
The magazines were banned from newsstands in New York City, and though Harry and his competitors fought the order on First Amendment rights, they lost. The smooshes were still permitted in cigar stores, since they were less visible there, just not out on the street for young, impressionable eyes to see. But Harry changed gears and moved to mostly express-mail subscriptions.
After losing his fight against the city, Harry pleaded guilty and was sentenced to sixty days in jail. Luckily Harry still had some pull left over from his bootlegging days dealing with Tammany Hall, so he paid a hefty $950 fine—the equivalent of $18,000 today—and was given a suspended sentence. But that April, Harry was also brought up on state obscenity charges. Thankfully, his pull extended all the way to Albany. He was hit with a $250 fine and a six-month suspended sentence in exchange for his promise to tone down the content of his magazines. A third strike, the judge told him, would land him behind bars. So Harry took his name off all of the unsavory magazines in his stable and formed Culture Publications, incorporating in Wilmington, Delaware, far from the prying eyes of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice—even though his offices would remain in NYC in the Grand Central Palace. Harry placed one of his financial department employees, Herbert Myron Siegel, a fellow Romanian Jew, in charge of the sex pulps. But in name only.
To stay alive in the past, Harry had incorporated under Gussie’s name, friends’ names, Merle’s name, and other people’s wives’ and mothers’ names. Now, under the watchful eyes of the censors, Harry began removing bared breasts from the covers of the pulps and toning down the already tame sex stories. But Harry instinctively knew how to survive. That April, he combined the typical pulp detective magazine with the girlie magazine, launching Spicy Detective Stories. The new magazine paid a penny a word to its writers, who were encouraged to create “rapid fire, two-fisted detective stories with a strong sex angle.”
For example, from “Brunette Bump-Off”:
From an open window beyond the bed, a roscoe coughed, “Kachow!”… I said, “What the hell—!” and hit the floor with my smeller.… A brunette jane was lying there, half out of the mussed covers.… She was dead as vaudeville.
Harry’s new hybrid—sex paired with badly written detective tales—took Dashiell Hammett’s hard-boiled literary concept and tossed it, fresh and bloody and three-quarters naked, to the masses. The illustrated covers usually featured a barely dressed woman being attacked by a man with a gun—or in Harry’s parlance, a roscoe. Kachow!
Still shell-shocked from the violence of the Great War, and now reeling from the trauma of the Depression, Americans in the early 1930s found a strange comfort in detective stories. Crime was exploding on city streets, with the national homicide rate hitting an all-time high for the century in 1933. But the chaos in a detective story was controlled, with a guaranteed tidy resolution. With the added value of nearly naked women, Spicy Detective provided the perfect escape.
Spicy Detective was also the first of Harry’s publications to feature an actual comic strip, Sally the Sleuth. Sally was a sexy blond dish who becomes a crime fighter; with her appearance, sales skyrocketed. After that, every one of Harry’s pulps would carry a comic strip inside.
The new magazine was so successful it spawned a series of other Spicy fusions, including Spicy Western, Spicy Adventure, and Spicy Mystery. To keep ahead of the vice team, Harry would run two versions of each issue, a relatively “clean” version, which included nearly naked women, marked on the cover and the spine by a star; and the dirtier version, which was always kept below the counter at cigar stores and other fine establishments. These included racier stories and more nudity as well as exciting details like whispers of pubic hair and whip marks on the bodies of the S&M characters.
If you wanted it extra spicy, you had to ask for it.
Thanks to the spicy pulps, Harry was wealthy enough to move out of the Bronx and into a townhouse on Riverside Drive at Eighty-Second Street. Gussie readily agreed, thinking that maybe she would see more of Harry if his home was closer to his office. Their new neighborhood was still rough around the edges, but was being transformed under the West Side Improvement project by Robert Moses, the city’s parks commissioner and master planner. For now, the waterfront was marred by rusted wire fences and tracks, whose smelly cattle and pig trains ran along the New York Central line. Riverside “Park” was just a big mudflat and ash heap where the city’s sanitation department dumped garbage, hungry New Yorkers swarming around each new load to search for food for their families. Shantytowns—Hoovervilles—had sprung up all along the river’s edge. There were river rats and still the occasional streetwalker. The car traffic on the West Side was also becoming a problem.
But Harry loved being back in Manhattan full-time, without that long commute to the Bronx. He also loved the fancy brick and limestone French Baroque and English Gothic houses that faced the river, some topped in copper, others edged like castles. Their views of rotting timber and tar-paper shacks would soon be replaced with a beautiful park and state-of-the-art highway, once Moses’s $200 million construction was done in 1937. The neighborhood, like Harry, was on the rise.
Harry played the aristocrat, hiring a cook named Ethel, a young Bavarian housekeeper named Betty, a Polish nanny named Anna, and an Italian chauffer, Frank, who drove Gussie, their seven-year-old son, Irwin, and five-year-old daughter, Sonia—whom they called Peachy—wherever they wanted. Frank chauffeured young Irwin every morning to the exclusive Columbia Grammar & Preparatory School near Central Park West and went to all of his ball games. Harry only went to one of Irwin’s baseball games and didn’t even stay for the whole thing. He was always too busy traveling for business or out carousing. Now Harry was just a short stumble away from the Midtown bars he loved, which were now legal.
Occasionally he would sing his children to sleep, because, well, Harry loved to sing, especially when he’d been drinking. But he also made sure the kids got the music lessons his parents could never afford. Peachy played piano, Irwin the ear-piercing trumpet, which blended in with all that horn honking on Riverside Drive. Harry had only his voice. When the children were very young, he sang them Yiddish lullabies. But he preferred the completely inappropriate “Mama Don’t Want No Peas an’ Rice”:
Mama don’t want no peas an’ rice
Mama don’t want no coconut oil
Just a bottle of brandy handy all the day!…
Mama don’t want no glass o’gin
Because it’s bound to make her sin
Says it keeps her hot and bothered all the day!
The kids loved it, though it annoyed their mama, who was not a heavy drinker like Harry. By this time, Gussie had lost any sense of humor she had had when Harry first met her. Her children would remember her as grumpy and disagreeable. She didn’t get along with Harry or anyone, really. But Harry had only himself—and his many infidelities—to blame.
Gussie no longer spoke of divorce, exchanging her anger for a role as a major stockholder of Trojan Publishing in 1934—and a juicy cut of Harry’s business dealings. But she knew he was cheating. Everyone knew. The sales ladies at all the department store perfume counters in town knew because Harry was always buying a new girlfriend a new bottle. Even his own son, years later, said that Harry had a wife, a lover, and a mistress and cheated on all three of them.
But his favorite of all his lovers was Sunny.
Sunny Paley had been born Sonya Paley in the spring of 1911. She was also born in the autumn of 1909, depending on what story you believed. Or maybe 1907. Whatever the year, Sonya was born in Minsk to a barber, coincidentally or not, named Harry and his wife, Gussie. (The fact that Sunny’s name was Sonya may have been the reason Harry renamed his daughter Peachy. It was all a big fat Freudian knot no one wanted to untie.)
Sunny and her three siblings grew up on Cherry Street on the Lower East Side in the shadow of the anchorage of the newly built Manhattan Bridge. All of Cherry Street was awful, but the area where the Paleys set up house—across from a horse stable, near a lumberyard and scrap metal dump—was particularly grim. Cherry Street had once been one of the premier addresses in New York City, with curved cobblestone paths, a view of the East River, and, of course, a grove of cherry trees. It got its name from the seven-acre orchard that stood there until houses were built, including the presidential mansion of George Washington.
By the time Sunny arrived, Cherry Street was full of dark, dirty alleys and the worst tenements in the city. To get out of the neighborhood, nineteen-year-old Sunny married a thirty-six-year-old raincoat manufacturer, sailing off to Cuba for a two-day honeymoon. The marriage was over nearly as quickly as the honeymoon. When Harry met Sunny, she was living a few buildings away from him, divorced and sharing an apartment with her brother Charlie, a musician.
Maybe Sunny bumped into Harry on Riverside Drive, the sad New Jersey skyline wincing in the distance, the baby black cherry trees and American elms newly planted in Riverside Park. However they met, Sunny soon became a fixture on Harry’s arm. She had a tiny waist, unlike Gussie, and tiny feet—she wore a size 5 shoe. Sunny always smelled of Bal à Versailles perfume and she smoked, but only socially, and kept her cigarette in a cigarette holder. She drank scotch and quite a bit of it, maybe to forget, sometimes, that dirty street where she came from. It was one of the things Harry loved about her. But not the only one.
Sunny was stylish, swathed in fur wraps, with expensive alligator handbags draped on her slender arm even before she met Harry, gifts from her many admirers. Harry loved to give her presents, minks from the Upper West Side furriers and expensive jewelry dripping with diamonds. Her favorite possession was a ring with her full name—SUNNY PALEY—written in chunky diamonds all the way around the gold band in big block letters like a name flashing in bulbs on a Hollywood movie marquee.
She and Harry traveled to Hawaii and Florida regularly, though their favorite spot was Cuba, where they would stay at the National Hotel in Havana. Set on a rocky hill, the sand-colored National looked out onto the impossibly blue sea, its two red-tiled towers climbing higher than the palm trees leading to its balconied, Corinthian-columned portico. Financed by the National City Bank of New York and built for the gringo tourists who flocked there, the hotel was a monument to capitalism on an island fighting for its political soul. In 1933, student activists teamed up with enlisted soldiers to overthrow the government. After a coup d’état by Sergeant Fulgencio Batista, a bloody battle even unfolded in the hotel, leaving bullet holes in the walls and forty rebels dead. Of course, the trouble was just beginning for Cuba, its government precarious and its political divisions deep. But Harry and his Mob friends—like Lucky Luciano—considered it a second home. Occasional gunfire was a small price to pay for gambling in paradise.
With his love of the National, Harry had officially left his Socialist past behind. He would spend his days laying bets in the Mob-run casino there, and Sunny would, well, sun herself by the pool and on the beach. The two of them would stay together for more than twenty-five years.
Gussie no longer seemed to mind. She had the money, the Riverside apartment, the chauffer and cook. The mistress came along with the deal. She and Harry—and Sunny—were living the dream.