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Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway Paperback – Illustrated, December 21, 2004

by Jerome Charyn (Author)
4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 17 ratings
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In this rousing tribute to an unforgettable time and place, Jerome Charyn picks up where Gangs of New York left off and transports readers back to a swaggering, golden era in American life—the Roaring Twenties—when Broadway the street exploded into Broadway the legend. Charyn looks at the men and women who helped make the Big Street the most glamorous place on the planet, from Mae West to Fanny Brice, Legs Diamond to Irving Berlin, Scott Fitzgerald to Arnold Rothstein, and many more. In cinematic prose and numerous photographs, Charyn captures Broadway's vagabondage, outlaw culture, and self-mythologizing. He brings a rollicking, rough-and-tumble period in New York history to life—conjuring an intoxicating portrait of Jazz Age excess by examining the denizens of that greatest of all "staggering machine[s] of desire," the street known as Broadway.
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  1. Print length
    296 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publication date
    December 21, 2004
  4. Dimensions
    5.5 x 0.75 x 8.5 inches
  5. ISBN-10
    1560256435
  6. ISBN-13
    978-1560256434
  7. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

Review

"Exciting...vivid...anyone who's nostalgic about Manhattans history will cherish [it]."

About the Author

Jerome Charyn was born in the Bronx in 1937. His novel The Green Lantern was one of the five finalists for the 2005 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and he is the author of more than thirty books. A film professor as well as a novelist and essayist, he is currently Distinguished Professor of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Da Capo Press; First Edition (December 21, 2004)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Paperback ‏ : ‎ 296 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1560256435
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1560256434
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 12.2 ounces
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 0.75 x 8.5 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars 17 ratings

About the author

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Jerome Charyn

Jerome Charyn

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"Charyn, like Nabokov, is that most fiendish sort of writer―so seductive as to beg imitation, so singular as to make imitation impossible." ―Tom Bissell

Customer reviews

4.3 out of 5 stars
4.3 out of 5
17 global ratings

Top reviews from the United States

Frank J. Konopka
5.0 out of 5 stars Lullabye of Broadway
Reviewed in the United States on May 6, 2004
Verified Purchase
This book is simply awash in great little anecdotes about the folks who spent their days in and around the Broadway of the early part of the 20th century. We get tales of the famous and the infamous, the good and the bad, the rich and the not so rich, and a myriad of supporting characters so colorful they could fill a Damon Runyan book of stories. It's not meant to be a book of mini biographies, but there are some interesting lives explored. The book also contains one of the most incisive analyses of "The Great Gatsby" I've ever read. If the author leaves you wishing for more information about some of the people you meet, that may be the book's only failing: it's too short. I could really have enjoyed reading another few hundred pages about the people and places he describes!
6 people found this helpful
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Robert Barker
5.0 out of 5 stars A Fun Read
Reviewed in the United States on May 31, 2016
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Nice book. Concise, and covers a wide range of 1920s New York characters from Musical Theater artists to boot leggers. It's a nice primer on that particular time and place.
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Happy Gal
2.0 out of 5 stars Not a keeper
Reviewed in the United States on November 20, 2014
Verified Purchase
I'm an avid reader and had a terrible time following this book. It got bogged down in so many characters, 99% of whom I've never heard of, that it was hard to keep them all straight. But then, I was born in 1958 and this was way before my time. I guess I just figured it would be more about the "famous" gangsters and Broadway types.
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The 3 Centervilles
5.0 out of 5 stars A Jazzy Book about the Jazz Age, Ward reviews Jerome Charyn’s Gangsters and Gold Diggers
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2015
Between World War One and The Great Depression, two eras of disillusionment, America had its Roaring Twenties. It was a to-hell-with-it-all decade of flapper girls, gangsters, illegal booze and speakeasies. The girls were a shocking departure from the previous decade’s demure Gibson Girls. The flappers’ shock was mostly intentional. They smoked and danced, petted and voted and drove cars. They swigged illegal booze out of flasks and flaunted their knees and bobbed their hair and became the symbol for an era brilliantly distilled (ha ha) in Jerome Charyn’s lively, entertaining, and oh-so readable gem, Gangsters and Gold Diggers, The Birth of Broadway.

The book is primarily, although not exclusively, the decade of the twenties. It’s the first third of the twentieth century. It’s the people who worked and played, mostly played, along Broadway, and with so many colorful characters available, the author builds his book around the personalities, creating insightful biographical sketches of the rogues who built the Broadway legend.

So many delicious characters!

Like Al Jolsen, best known today, if he’s known at all, as the star of the first talkie. Technically, it wasn’t the first talkie, there’d been sound in movies for thirty years. Call it the first full-length feature with synchronized dialogue, the film that drove a dagger into the heart of the silent film era. The Jolsen presented in this book is much more than an actor in blackface, speaking. He had a long career as a singer, film actor, and comedian, and at the peak of his fame, he was big, really big. Dubbed "The World's Greatest Entertainer,” you might think Jolsen was the most famous person to have emerged from St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, in Baltimore, Md. And maybe he was, or would have been, if not for the later emergence of another boy from the school ─ George Herman “Babe” Ruth Jr.

Junior? Really? Who knew?

The book doesn’t spend a lot of time with the Babe, maybe the author figures we know him well enough already, and with all those other juicy personalities to explore. Still, we see the Babe, striding like a colossus over Broadway, hell, over all of New York and America.

Babe Ruth isn’t the only sports personality present. There’s Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world from 1908 to 1915 and a tragic figure for years afterward. White America didn’t appreciate a black champion in those days, especially a champ who refused to scrape and bow and who had an affinity for white women. America destroyed Johnson. It took a while, Johnson was a tough cookie, and not just inside the ring. The author draws an apt analogy between Johnson and a later heavyweight champ, Muhammad Ali. Another analogy would be with Vic Power, the black, Puerto Rican-born baseball player who might have become the first black Yankee, ahead of Elston Howard, except Power was no more accepting of second-class status than was Johnson, and like Johnson, Power had an affinity for white women.

Then there’s John McGraw, legendary manager of the New York Giants. In the years before Babe Ruth, McGraw’s Giants were the kings of New York baseball. Muggsy (McGraw) was a part of the Broadway crowd, expounding the intricacies of baseball even as he indulged in marathon card games with shysters and bootleggers. (Take that, Pete Rose.)

New York, Broadway, in the twenties, was made for the garrulous Babe, but as the decade closes with the onset of the Great Depression, the exuberance fades. The Babe fades too (on the ball diamond, not in life, never in life) and the flapper girls go away. (The gangsters manage to hang around.) The new decade, with its legal booze is, in some ways, more sober than the previous decade. There’s a new king of the Yankees, the magisterial, introverted Joe Dimaggio. Joe was a fabulous ballplayer but he was no Babe Ruth off the field. And another black heavyweight champion steps onto the stage, the more compliant (outside of the ring) Joe Louis.

The book really isn’t about sports. It’s about everything Broadway.

There’s a cogent assessment of The Great Gatsby and of the Fitzgeralds, F. Scott and Zelda, and there’s the colorful Damon Runyon, a sportswriter who transcended sports, but the most fun of all are the gangsters, the bootleggers. Thank you, America, for having had the audacity to outlaw booze. There’s Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein, a legend in his own time, even surrounded by legends. What about Capone, you ask? Sorry. Scarface was Chicago (although Brooklyn-born) and this is a book about Manhattan.

Back to Rothstein. He didn’t smoke and he only drank milk and he maybe fixed the 1919 World Series. Fitzgerald used him as Meyer Wolfsheim in the Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s mentor in the shady side of life.

What sparkles most throughout the book are those Ziegfeld girls. Call them the sun around which the rest of Broadway revolved. All the male characters, ballplayers, writers, hooligans, even the cops, drooled over the chorus line. Onstage every night, the girls were tall, leggy beauties, dancing, sometimes wearing six-foot headdresses, often scantily dressed, sometimes nude. They were a shocking sensation. The kick line was one route to marriage with a wealthy man, and sometimes it was the route to money and fame without the man. Joan Blondell and Barbara Stanwyck kicked; others ─ Joan Crawford, Hedda Hopper, Lucy, failed to make the cut.

In the final chapter of the book, the author takes us on a twenty-first century spin around the old haunts. The street and most of the buildings remain, but the exuberance, the pizazz, the audacity, the violence and the raw sexuality, are gone. Broadway meets Disney, Disney wins, and having spent a few hours with the characters of old Broadway, we ache for the loss. On May 11, 2010, the last surviving Ziegfeld girl, Dorothy Eaton Travis, who was also the youngest Ziegfeld Girl, strutting and kicking at fourteen, dies at the age of one hundred and six, and the book is closed, reluctantly, on an era.
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Rene A. Vallee
5.0 out of 5 stars AMERICA IN THE JAZZ AGE A THE UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT---I LOVED AND THE STUDENTS WERE CRAZY FOR IT
Reviewed in the United States on November 1, 2014
i READ AND RE-READ THIS BOOK AND THEN INCLUDED IT IN A CLASS ON THE ROARING TWENTIES;AMERICA IN THE JAZZ AGE A THE UNIVERSITY OF VERMONT---I LOVED AND THE STUDENTS WERE CRAZY FOR IT...ITS HARD TO BELIEVE IT ALL CAME IN SUCH A SMALL PACKAGE......GOD BLESS YOU JEROME CHARYN....MY AMEICAN MUSE
One person found this helpful
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B. M. Howard
5.0 out of 5 stars Underrated book on Broadway's colorful past
Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2003
Gangsters and Golddiggers is a fascinating book that introduces you to the unique characters that made up early broadway. From its early existence as an Indian trail to the rise of theater and organized crime, this book offers a glimpse into a world that vibrates with violence and lust. Gangsters and Golddiggers reads almost like an epic motion picture. Definately pick this one up.
9 people found this helpful
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Jacob G. Novak
2.0 out of 5 stars Who edited this book?
Reviewed in the United States on March 30, 2004
Well, this book is filled with lots of interesting stories, but it's so disorganized it seems like it was written by an Jazz age drunk! Better editing would have done wonders for this book which has great stories about some of the celebrities of the 1920's, but flows sloppily from one anecdote to another.
9 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

A. G. Dawkins
5.0 out of 5 stars Pleased with goods
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on January 23, 2018
Verified Purchase
Received quickly; Pleased with goods! Many thanks Al
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