She has now won what the girls consider to be a tremendous victory for “The Cause.” Through the courts she has compelled a real estate owner to deed a certain piece of property to “Heywood Broun and Ruth Hale, his wife.” The Greenwich Village ladies straightaway celebrated the event by adopting a new constitution for the Lucy Stone League—which is one way of giving a cheer, not to say a yell of triumph.
If it’s all right with Ruth, it’s all right with me, but it is certainly going to make complications. You will have to keep dragging the host of the party off to one side and keep demanding in a hoarse whisper, “Say, before this goes any further, is this Jane somebody’s wife?”
There’s also another terrible affair in the Village. Every bobbed hair is on end with excitement over what happened to “Grace” of the famous “Grace’s Garret.” This is one of the places in the Village where they get together and tell each other how the jealous magazine editors have turned down their work through spite.
Grace Godwin—of course, she has a husband named Sperry, but that doesn’t count—runs the place, she says, more as a harbor for lonely souls than as a depot for eats. Well, the other day, five or six lonely souls happened in for a dish of tea; but all the said lonely souls were inhabiting black bodies. Grace called the lightest colored one aside and told him how it was. Of course, the Village is awfully democratic and all that but—well, he ought to be able to see for himself—with so many of the other lonely souls being hot-headed Southerners and all. How was she to know that the colored brother was a famous sociologist with a Yale degree and that the rest of the party were all university high brows. They brought law suits against her and got a verdict for $600, which is more money than the Village ever heard of at one time before. Grace of “Grace’s Garret” has given the Village solemn warning that if any more dark tinged lonely souls come along she is going to close “The Garret” and move out of the Village.
But if it comes to that, everybody else is moving out of the Village anyhow. So many purse-proud outsiders have invaded New York’s Latin Quarter that the rents are murder in the first degree. The real Villagers are moving out to Brooklyn—than which there could be no worse fate for a Villager.
Ziegfield Follies girls tell me that all the time the police were supposed to be searching for Nicky Arnstein, the alleged bond robber, Nicky was in his wife’s dressing room. He is married to Fannie Brice of the Follies and used to come to the show every night disguised as her colored maid.
Now that we are on the topic, a burning piece of information should be hurried out to the waiting world. Ziegfield says that hereafter he is going to have all the chorus men in the show sing from behind the scenes. Nobody wants to see them anyhow. Hereafter, they just represent noise—like a drum.
A little movie girl of my acquaintance has recently joined the Follies and what she sees behind the scenes at the Famous beauty show fills her with awe for the human appetite.
“To tell you the truth,” she says, “Those girls don’t care much about millionaires. They infinitely prefer to go around with chauffeurs because they don’t have to worry about which fork to eat with. They have to have millionaires around on account of their appetites. No ordinary fortune could keep those girls filled up. In a previous existence most of them must have been boa constrictors. They eat all the time. One girl, famous for her beauty, starts in with a good dinner before the show. All during the intervals when she is not on the stage, she has waiters bring her lunches in her dressing room. Her bill averages forty dollars a week for the little snacks she eats between her dinner before the show and the supper with a millionaire after the show. That girl ought to marry a Service of Supply Depot.”