Prohibition Gangsters: The Rise and Fall of a Bad Generation

Chapter 5. The Conference as Comedy

97 $ No matter how it has been interpreted the May 1929 Atlantic City Conference was serious business. But it has spilled over into two comedic classics, one a short story by a noted American writer and the other a celebrated Hollywood movie. “Dark Dolores” The unique writing style of Damon Runyon has lead to the adjective “runyonesque,” generally describing the kind of characters to which he was drawn—gamblers, dancing girls, hobos, outlaws, boxers, and other dubious people on the sketchy fringe of society. It has often been pointed out that Runyon’s own life was runyonesque. Born in 1880, he was the offspring of a family whose American origins went back to the colonial era. His mother died when Runyon was a child, and parental oversight was provided by a remote, uncaring, hard-drinking father—a newspaperman whose career sank from publisher to typesetter and who drifted from Manhattan, Kansas, to Pueblo, Colorado.Young Damon was something of a wild child in Pueblo, kicked out of school after the sixth grade, living on the streets, and following in the footsteps of his dad by drinking, smoking , and whoring. While still in his teens he became a reporter for local newspapers. He enlisted in the army during the Spanish American War, c h a p t e r 5 The Conference as Comedy 98 Atlantic City Interlude though his only combat was with sobriety. After the service he kept on writing, lying prodigiously about his military service, and binge drinking. But his life changed as he matured and developed his writing skills. He got to work at better quality newspapers, got his stories and poems published in quality magazines, fell in love, and stopped drinking. He was hired by William Randolph Hearst’s New York American as a reporter and columnist and eventually became the highest paid newsman in the nation. But he still had about him the gaunt look of a three-pack-a-day smoker and reformed alcoholic. Runyon is best known today for his connection to the great New York thoroughfare of Broadway, where he spent his evenings immersed in low culture, eating at Lindy’s Restaurant, smoking cigarettes, drinking coffee, and hobnobbing with celebrities and nobodies. He used the people he met on those late-night expeditions to create the characters in his newspaper columns, magazine stories, and books. The musical Guys and Dolls, based on his Broadway writing, is today his best-known legacy. A significant part of his writing concerned gangsters, and Damon Runyon knew lots of them, including Frank Costello, Owney Madden, Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky, and Al Capone. Runyon actually had dinner at Capone’s mansion in Florida a short time before the Atlantic City conference. He knew enough about the Atlantic City event to write a short story about it,“Dark Dolores,” that was published in Cosmopolitan magazine in November 1929.1 Cosmopolitan in those days was a literary magazine (unlike its present incarnation as a publication devoted to advising young women about how to attract young men by practicing sensual techniques). “Dark Dolores” has all the aspects of Runyon’s prose style. It is written entirely in the present tense, with a degree of affection for its dimwit characters and laugh-out-loud humor. The story begins with an unnamed narrator , who describes a chat he had with Waldo Winchester, Runyon’s name for his friend and rival columnist Walter Winchell. Winchester bemoans the dearth of female murderers for him to write about, and he reflects The Conference as Comedy 99 on femme fatales from the past, including Cleopatra, Helen of Troy, the mermaid Lorelei, and the Greek goddess Circe. This brings the narrator to relate the story of Dolores, “a doll I met when I am in Atlantic City with Dave the Dude at the time of the big peace conference.” Some crime writers use this line to claim that Runyon actually attended the conference, but this is improbable. The narrator relates how he is strolling down Broadway one day, when a cab pulls up at the curb. Riding in the taxi is Dave the Dude, a character who appeared in many of Runyon’s short stories. This time Dave is on his way to Penn Station to catch the train to Atlantic City. Dave pulls the narrator into the taxi and asks him to accompany him on this trip. Dave the Dude has been...