Bandbox

A generous fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation helped me to write this novel.

I owe special thanks to the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen’s Library on West Forty-fourth Street in Manhattan—already long established in 1928, and still going strong. Among many dozens of books treating 1920s New York, I am particularly grateful to: Will Irwin,
Highlights of Manhattan
(1927); Joe Laurie, Jr.,
Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace
(1953); Caroline Seebohm,
The Man Who Was
Vogue:
The Life and Times of Condé Nast
(1982); and
The Encyclopedia of New York City
, ed. Kenneth T. Jackson (1995). As always, I hasten to note that I am writing fiction, not history, and that I’ve availed myself of many small liberties, from the architectural to the zoological.

I could not have done without the crazy rhythms of Roger Wolfe Kahn, whose incomparably evocative music has filled my study for the past three years.

Over the past decade it’s been my great good fortune to have Dan Frank as an editor. Andrea Barrett is a near-daily source of advice and inspiration in my life. Frances Kiernan, Richard Bausch, André Bernard, Michael Collier, and Sloan Harris are other indispensable presences.

But, above all, thanks to Bill Bodenschatz.

Westport, Connecticut
July 12, 2003

Cuddles Houlihan got clipped by the vodka bottle as it exited the pneumatic tube.

“Goddammit!”

The cry of pain that filled the office came not from Cuddles, whose head still lay asleep on his desk, but from the tube. Its ultimate source was the office of Joe Harris, the editor-in-chief. At this late, sozzled hour, Harris had mistakenly fed the interoffice mail chute not the translucent canister containing his angry communication to Cuddles, but the still-half-full, six-dollar quart of hooch he was regularly supplied with by the countess in the fact-checking department.

Harris glowered for several seconds at the undispatched canister, before giving in to the impulse to open it up and look once more at what had enraged him in the first place: a photograph of Leopold and Loeb, smiling, each with an arm around the other, perched on the edge of an upper bunk in the Joliet State Prison, both of them avidly regarding the latest issue of
Bandbox
. The thrill killers held it open with their free hands, like a box of candy they were sharing on a back-porch swing.

Would make a great ad
, said the inked message on the back of the photograph, whose bold penmanship Harris recognized as belonging to Jimmy Gordon, up until eight months ago his best senior editor here at
Bandbox
. “I think of you as a bastard son,” he’d once told
Jimmy in a burst of bibulous sentiment. Now, as editor-in-chief of
Cutaway
, the younger man was his head-to-head, hand-to-throat, competition. If Harris didn’t think of something, this picture of those two murderous fairies reading
Bandbox
—the magazine that had
made
goddamn Jimmy Gordon, and remade Jehoshaphat Harris—would be plastered to the side of every double-decker bus crawling up Fifth Avenue.

Rummaging his bottom drawer for another quart of vodka, Harris—a great curator of his own life story—managed to consider, yet again, with prideful amazement, how only five years had passed since Hiram Oldcastle, the publisher, had said, “You want it? It’s yours,” giving him the
Bandbox
job as if it were the keys to a jalopy. “An overpriced rag for overaged pansies,” Oldcastle had called the dying men’s fashion book, which had somehow never evolved out of the tintyped, stiff-collared days of McKinley. Harris would be the magazine’s last chance before Oldcastle killed the sclerotic monthly and concentrated on his more robust publications, like
Pinafore
, for the “young miss”—edited by Harris’s girlfriend, Betty Divine—and the shelter book,
Manse
.

“Give me six months,” Harris had said.

“Take a year,” Oldcastle had replied, sounding almost guilty about the eagerness with which the new editor wanted to take charge.

It took Harris one business quarter to bring
Bandbox
to life, to hit upon a formula that lured young men and advertisers back to a magazine no one had paid attention to for years. He kept the fashion—even made it fashionable—then butched up the rest of the production, adding a slew of stylish articles about all the sports, politics, crime, money, and movies that went into the current age’s cocktail. Newsstand buyers and subscribers were now deciding they craved the camel-hair coat on page 46 just as much as they needed to sleep with the screen siren or buy the radio stock described a few pages away. The table of contents might sometimes seem a tasteless whipsaw—

“New Hope for the Shell-Shocked” sitting right above “Look Terrific for Under Two Hundred”—but the magazine’s turnaround had been so successful that by the spring of last year, Condé Nast decided he could not leave a whole new field to his usually more downmarket competitor, Oldcastle. Last March he had announced the start-up of
Cutaway
, exactly the sort of clothes-and-journalism book Harris had concocted; and on April 30, he had named Jimmy Gordon its editor.

Jimmy Gordon: who had brought in most of Harris’s expensive new writers; who had three bad story ideas for every good one, but so many of each that, with Harris as a filter, every issue of
Bandbox
still abounded with first-rate stuff. Jimmy Gordon, who was now stealing not only Harris’s formula but every keister not nailed down to the swivel chairs here on the fourteenth floor of the Graybar Building. He’d pried away three of his old writers, a photographer, and two production assistants, and had even made a run at Mrs. Zimmerman, the receptionist. But the real prize for Jimmy was Harris’s readers and advertisers, whom he would surely keep wooing away if he managed, with stunts like this Leopold and Loeb picture, to undo the makeover of
Bandbox
. Things could turn around so quickly—hadn’t Harris himself proved it?—that the older editor would be left with a shrunken subscriber base consisting chiefly of the perfumed boys you saw gazing at each other across the tables of the Jewel cafeteria.

Hazel Snow buzzed Harris from the outer office.

“It’s a bad time!” he shouted.

Hazel ignored him. “Mr. Lord and Miss O’Grady here to see you,” she said, indifferent to anything but her desire to go home. Through the intercom Harris could hear the squeaky sound of Hazel putting on her galoshes.

“You picked the worst possible moment!” he shouted to Richard Lord and Nan O’Grady once Hazel had ushered them in.

The English art and fashion director looked at his expensive
shoes, still unscuffed at this late hour, and whispered, “It’s about Lindstrom, I’m afraid.”

“What about him?” Harris asked, in a voice that made plain, for all its volume, that he would rather know nothing new concerning Waldo Lindstrom, the handsomest young man in New York, and
Bandbox
’s most frequent cover model now that photographs were replacing illustrations. Harris would be more receptive to tidings of this Adonis were Lindstrom not also an omnisexual cocaine addict who had escaped from the Kansas State Penitentiary a few years ago at the age of twenty, and whose work for Oldcastle Publications depended on frequent payments from Harris to the NYPD’s vice squad.

“He never showed up,” murmured Lord, while he adjusted the two points of his breast-pocket handkerchief.

“Find his pusher!” bellowed Harris. “Call the morgue! Why are you bothering
me
? And why are
you
bothering me?” he continued, turning his eyes and anger to Nan O’Grady, the copy chief, whose lower lip had begun to tremble. A tear wobbled in the lower reaches of her left eye, ready to drip down her powdered cheek and cut a line that would run parallel to her straight red hair.

“It’s Mr. Stanwick’s piece on Arnold Rothstein.”

Max Stanwick, a successful writer of hard-boiled mystery novels, now also wrote features for
Bandbox
on the nation’s ever-burgeoning crime wave. The fact-checkers sometimes muttered that he had made no discernible shift from the methods of his old genre to those of nonfiction, but Stanwick’s pieces were immensely popular and the occasion for some of Harris’s more memorable cover lines:
LEND ME YOUR EARS
had announced Max’s recent report on a spate of loan-sharking mutilations in Detroit. Harris trembled at the thought of losing him to Jimmy Gordon, who had brought him to
Bandbox
in the first place.