The Friars Club, about to open its own building, was moving out of its temporary quarters on 45th Street, near Sixth Avenue. Fay leased the building for five years. His plan was to set up a magnificent club which he thought would lure back to New York the gal he was nuts about, if he offered her star billing and a big salary. He hired Tex as emcee, with a heavy guarantee. He called it the El Fey Club so it could be identified with him and still not carry his name, which was on record where it wouldn't help. He began frantically telephoning the girl in Florida. She turned him down and after the first call refused to answer. So here he was, stuck with a five-year lease on a five-story building and a contract with Guinan.
Here comes the most interesting incident, which has never been truly told and which has been untruly told for years everywhere.
As each show went on, Larry would stand in the extreme rear, where it was dark and where he—always in plain blue serge suit, white silk shirt and black windsor tie—was inconspicuous. As Texas would mount her chair (that was how she worked) she would look across the long room at him. And, thinking of the lease, her pay, the flop of his romantic objective, she would cast a glance right over the heads of the audience and call out—to him—"Hello, sucker!"
Through some phenomenal human quirk, every other sucker in between thought it was addressed to him. And, as strangely, every man liked it. It became her trademark. Long after Larry passed out of her picture and was killed on a New Year's morning, she still featured it—his only monument.
Texas played to a strange conglomeration—Wall Street, the world of art and letters, the Blue Book lorgnette set, New York's usual concentration of out-of-town buyers, plus never-failing underworlders. These were all paying guests. There was very little passed out on the cuff in any of her deadfalls. There were very few beefs about atrociously phony "champagne" at $35 a bottle, and some of the bootleggers who made her Scotch and gin at perhaps $1 a quart came to her dives and paid $15 a quart for their own hogwash.
There was something in that "Hello, sucker!" which softened up a man and made him what she called him. She always had a flock of lovely young girls, but no customer ever got closer to them than seeing them on the floor. It was no place to pick up one on short notice. Texas watched over her kids like Diana guarded the doves on Olympus. Many a contented matron, perhaps now turning 40, may remember what a demon chaperon she was.
"Give the little girl a great big hand!" But that was all. Not a great big car; not even a sandwich.
She never got rich. She lived in a little flat on Eighth Street, which looked like a Chinese second-hand furniture store, where she had one servant. She certainly left no great sum. She dropped a wad in the stock market crash and had to hock her "ice," in which she had sunk a bucket of bucks. She had thieves and thugs for partners and, though regarded as a shrewd operator, she was taken like Armour takes a sheep. From the moment she came to work at night, until daylight, she was on her job and had no time even to look at accounts. She could well have said "Hello, sucker!" talking to herself.
But she was dynamite as a drawing card. The sappos began laughing before they came in. They greased headwaiters heavily for ringside seats in front, and a few minutes later saw tables moved in front of them. The best act she ever put on was George Raft, doing a Charleston, which lasted a minute. Ruby Keeler broke through the barrier with her beauty and tap-dancing. Beyond this, there were practically no principals, except Guinan.