“The crowd was in the Long Island Bowl for the second Sharkey-Stribling fight and the preliminaries were stumbling to a close and there came the rising whine of sirens from outside. A stir and a babble ran through the crowd and heads turned away from the ring and it seemed everyone was standing and craning. Down an aisle swept Jimmy (Walker) with his retinue, with a hand uplifted in jaunty response to the shouts that greeted him. And that entrance was more exciting than any of the fifteen rounds of brawling that followed.”—Red Smith, “As He Seemed to a Hick,” in The New York Herald Tribune, 1946, reprinted in To Absent Friends From Red Smith (1982)
This quote shows, as if you needed a reason, why Red Smith was more than just a great sportswriter, but also a Pulitzer Prize-winning one, with prose as elegant as his subject here, James J. Walker. The magical qualities it ascribes to New York’s mayor in the Roaring Twenties struck me full force as I wrote my prior post on the present occupant of Gracie Mansion, Mike Bloomberg.
Over the last couple of generations, a vogue has emerged for running government as a business. So many people have subscribed to this notion that it has helped elect charm-challenged functionaries like Bloomberg, Jon Corzine and Mitt Romney.
But when you’re talking about business in this context, which company head do you have in mind, a builder or a destroyer—Steve Jobs or “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap? It’s an important question, because the businessman-politician depends crucially for his authority on prosperity, and once that’s gone, so is nearly every shred of the electorate’s interest in his well-being.
But people make an awful lot of allowances for charm, don’t they? You can hardly find a more classic example than Walker, described flatly by Smith as “the most charming man you ever met.”
You can understand what Smith was talking about by checking out the accompanying photo. It’s easy to imagine Walker being born fully formed, with a boutonniere in his lapel, a melody in his heart and a quip on his lips.
The 20th century provided unparalleled opportunities for entertainers to enter politics: Texas radio entertainer-entrepreneur Pappy O’Daniel, Sonny Bono, “The Love Boat’s” Fred Grandy, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and, also in California, George Murphy (as Senator) and Ronald Reagan (as governor). (After the latter’s midnight swearing-in, he turned to Murphy, an old film song-and-dance-man, and cracked: “Well, George, here we are on the late show again!”)
If “Gentleman Jimmy” Walker wasn’t the first of the entertainer-turned-politicians, he was awfully close. The son of an Irish-born alderman, he made his living for a while as a young man on Tin Pan Alley, cranking out such tunes as this one, with a title he would certainly take to heart in years to come: “There’s Beauty in the Rustle of a Skirt.”
To be sure, President Kennedy’s grandfather, John “Honey Fitzgerald” Fitzgerald, didn’t require much coaxing to break into “Sweet Adeline,” and if you want to understand how Alfred E. Smith bonded with voters, then look for the short clip of him belting out his campaign theme song, “The Sidewalks of New York,” that was included several years ago in the TV documentary series The Irish in America: The Long Journey Home.
Maybe it was that shared love of song that led Smith to notice the young Walker and help propel him up the ranks of Tammany Hall, where he would eventually successfully challenge John Hylan for Mayor.
It was Walker’s great good fortune to become Hizzoner when Gotham assumed its status as the leading financial, media, and industrial city of the world. It was his misfortune still to be around when the music ceased after Black Tuesday in 1929.
It’s somehow appropriate that “Beau James,” as he came to be called, was mayor during the Jazz Age. In fact, if you could have equipped him with a Southern accent, he could just as easily have fit in down in jazz capital New Orleans, where “Let the Good Times Roll” could have served as a campaign slogan.
It was under Walker that New York staked its claim as the nerve center of what might later be viewed as the blue state sensibility. At the height of a censorship debate in Albany he cracked, “I have never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book” (shortened, not long thereafter, to “No girl was ever ruined by a book”).
If anyone knew anything about girls, it was he. Cocktail waitresses added spice to the illegal speakeasies he frequented, and seven decades before Donna Hanover Giuliani announced on the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral that “America’s Mayor” had broken their marriage irretrievably, New Yorkers reacted with much greater equanimity when the Catholic Walker left his wife for showgirl Betty Compton.
Residents didn’t seem to mind that, nor a penchant for traveling outside the continental U.S. that exceeded Mayor Bloomberg’s. But after the stock market crashed, Tammany corruption became harder to ignore and Walker was enmeshed in a corruption probe.
Still, it was risky for Franklin Roosevelt to involve himself in the Seabury investigation into these matters, not least of all with the Irish-Americans who were part of Walker’s (and his own) base. Years ago, my godfather, my Uncle Johnny, could still flash with anger in asking how FDR could destroy a mayor who made sure that my uncle’s down-on-their-luck family had a turkey delivered to their apartment on Thanksgiving.
In September 1932, Walker abruptly resigned, then sailed off to Europe soon thereafter. He endured several years of lonely exile (Smith indelibly describes the former mayor calling up reporters while abroad just to shoot the breeze) before returning home. For awhile, it seemed that the answer to a tune he penned in his younger days--"Will You Love Me in December As You Do in May?"--was going to be a firm "no."
Whatever his faults—and they were many—Walker at least did not spend his time out of power in endless bitterness, and perhaps for that reason even a number of his former opponents found it difficult to carry a grudge against him. In fact, Fiorello LaGuardia—the anti-corruption candidate who Walker beat for reelection in 1929—even appointed his old rival to be municipal arbiter to the garment industry, eight years after Walker’s fall from power.
Walker’s last years were spent doing what his background eminently fitted him for: head of a record label. He died in 1946 and was buried in Gate of Heaven Cemetery in Westchester County. (My uncle would, I strongly suspect, be tickled pink at the prospect that the mayor he loved is buried on the same grounds that he is.)
The entertainment world was not through with New York’s “Night Mayor.” In 1957, Bob Hope starred, uncharacteristically, in a film based on Gene Fowler’s affectionate biography, Beau James.
Over a decade later, Frank Gorshin—just a couple of years removed from his turn as The Riddler on TV’s Batman—headlined a Broadway musical about Hizzoner, Jimmy, with Anita Gillette as Betty Compton. Unlike another musical about a New York mayor, Fiorello, this musical lasted only 84 performances. Undoubtedly, “Beau James” would have shrugged the whole thing off with a wisecrack, then have a few laughs at the nearest bar when it was all over.
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