BROADWAY BOOGIE WOOGIE: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture

BROADWAY BOOGIE WOOGIE: Damon Runyon and the Making of New York City Culture. By Daniel R. Schwarz. Palgrave Macmillan. 346 pp. $35

An apocryphal conversation from 1930s Hollywood: A mogul dissatisfied with a script says to the writer, "Put some Demon Rayon stuff in to give it some life." The writer instantly understands. The script needs the sort of characters Damon Runyon (1884–1946) created for his popular short stories.

These days, Runyon’s name appears in the news only when Guys and Dolls, the musical based on his stories, gets revived. In his time, the 1930s, he was the highestpaid newspaper journalist, good on all subjects—sports, headline trials, famous people, and everything about Broadway. His shortstory collections sold in the millions, and 16 of the stories became popular movies. Every few years, someone discovers Runyon’s stories and finds in them the work of a gifted and unique writer. This triggers an analysis of the clever plots, the use of the present tense, and the fictitious gentility of conversation among bookmakers, heart-of-gold hookers, horse players, and cops and robbers. Daniel R. Schwarz, an English professor at Cornell University, is the latest to make the discovery. His Broadway Boogie Woogie puts Runyon right up there with the great Seabiscuit, a horse Runyon admired, bet on, and wrote about.

Schwarz says that Runyon, in his fiction, could transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. "But most important, his stories give us a complex reading of the diverse contexts that defined the image of New York City culture for Americans and Europeans—and indeed for New Yorkers themselves. Moreover, he was not merely a mirror of the world he observed but a creative force in shaping that world. When we look back at the major cultural forces shaping the history of the first half of the 20th century, and in particular our image of New York City, Damon Runyon looms large."

Schwarz does not mention Thorstein Veblen, who used a puffed-up vocabulary to make straight-faced fun of the upper leisure class. Runyon, who did not finish grammar school and doubtless never read any Veblen, made fun of the lower leisure class that lived within the loopholes of Title 18 of the U.S. Criminal Code. His straight-faced act consisted of never referring to a mobster as anything but a gentleman.

I would like to set forth a Runyonesque incident that happened to Damon Runyon himself. The facts have been verified by two sources.

About noon one spring day, Runyon kisses his showgirl sweetheart goodbye and leaves his West 57th Street apartment. He strolls toward Lindy’s Broadway Deli for his breakfast-luncheon and six cups of coffee. On the way, he meets a guy who tells him he has never seen Damon Runyon without a hat. Runyon decides to return to the apartment and get one of his 50 hats. (He bought more clothes than he could ever wear.) There he finds his girlfriend playing house with a gentleman named Primo Carnera, the heavyweight champ.

When Runyon, years later, tells the story to a friend, the friend asks what a gentleman does when he finds his beloved in the arms of the champ. Runyon says: "It’s all in the hat—you put it on and leave in a hurry."

—Jacob A. Stein