No Room for Vice

"I Would Like a Prostitute," I said to Mr. McNamara, who is a Chicago prosecuting attorney. We were sitting in a chewed-up office adjoining one of the municipal courtrooms. Court was in session.

"I'll try to dig one up," said Mr. McNamara and went out.

I had agreed to write a column for my old paper, the Daily News, such as I used to write 30 years ago under the head A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago. Prominent in my cast of characters had been the prostitute. She was always good for a bit of profundity and some sardonic phrases, and she couldn't sue for libel. I had my lead in mind -- the wanderer returned to his native town found everything changed -- except the lady of vice. In the midst of the atomic-age world there she stood, hangdog and unaltered before the same addled bar of justice.

Mr. McNamara came back in half an hour, winded.

"I've looked high and low," he said. "There is no prostitute on any of the dockets!"

"Maybe they're under some other title," I suggested.

"No, the title hasn't changed," said Mr. McNamara, "it's just that we haven't got one coming up for trial."

"Do you mean to say," I said, "that the police haven't arrested a single prostitute all week?"

"As far as I can make out from a quick survey," said Mr. McNamara, "there hasn't been a prostitute arrested this whole year. We have a Japanese shoplifter coming up before Judge Hoheimer. Will she do?"

I said she wouldn't do and picked up the phone. I called the district police captain. It was a Near South Side district, once the center of the red-light traffic.

"This is the Daily News," I said, controlling a nostalgic sigh. "We're doing a feature story on vice conditions. When is the last time you remember a prostitute being arrested and held for trial, Captain?"

"You mean a white or colored one?" the captain asked.

"Either will do."

"There's been no arrest of a white prostie since I'm in this district, seven years," said the captain. "Last November we picked up a colored girl in front of a tattoo parlor. But, as I recall it, the charge was inciting to riot."

I went into the courtroom and listened to some testimony.

"That's a rather interesting case," Mr. McNamara whispered beside me. "The girl set fire to her father's bed and then tried to commit suicide by swallowing a box of carpet tacks. I'm recommending that she be psychoanalyzed."

But there were no overtones to the proceedings. This was not the kind of thing you can get sardonic or profound about. The sins of society are not involved in a carpet tack swallower. Without Society as a co-villain, a story has only two dimensions. At least, so I had taught myself on the Daily News. I stayed through the case of the Japanese shoplifter, and then left.

That evening I rode through the city as guest of Captain John Golden, Homicide chief. His side-kick, Detective Sweitzer, was driving. Golden showed me the new "black belts" of Chicago in which the million Negro arrivals of the past decade have taken up sardine-like residence. The colored situation in Chicago, said the captain, was worse than the situation between Russia and the U.S.A.

"That is correct," said Detective Sweitzer. "We have a 20 percent colored population now in Chicago. In 10 years it will be 51 percent."

My mind was on an older problem.

"Why don't the police arrest prostitutes anymore?" I asked my hosts.

"There aren't any," said the head hunter-killer of Chicago.

"That is correct," said Detective Sweitzer. "There aren't any prostitutes in Chicago for the same reason that there aren't any straw hats at the North Pole."

"They're not needed?" I asked, to make sure.

"They would starve to death," said Detective Sweitzer. "Every fourth female over 18 in the city of Chicago is very active sexually, either on a romantic basis, or a financial one. Usually on both." Warming to the topic he continued, "In addition there must be at least 100 thousand girls living in bachelor quarters where they are able to entertain their bosses and business associates. I have not, since I was a patrolman, heard of any male Chicagoan complaining about sex frustration. To the contrary."

"How about brothels?" I asked. "Are there a lot of them still around?"

"Brothels, shmothels," said Detective Sweitzer. "What kind of a mind you got?"

Ignoring this space-age detective, Homicide and I reminisced about the places my editor used to call "Houses of Ill-Shape."

"I can remember innumerable such centers," said Captain Golden. "They were very expensively furnished and the ladies wore ball gowns."

"That must have been around the time of the Fort Dearborn massacre," said Detective Sweitzer.

"No," said the captain, "it was after that."

Not too long. It was before my time but its saga was still brightly alive when I became a boy-reporter in 1910. Not only the saga but the events they told of were still aroar in the town.

Beginning in 1890, Chicago experienced a brothel boom unique in the Republic. Hundreds of madams from all over came sashaying into the great cow-killing metropolis, bringing their full staffs with them, including pimps and piano professors.

Thousands of venturesome young farmers' daughters and prairie village maidens came pouring out of the Santa Fe and the La Salle Street stations on their own. A few weeks later found them scented and silken-gowned in the Tenderloin havens. Around 1900 Chicago was the Republic's unchallenged center of bawdry. New Orleans, New York and San Francisco were unhappy runnersup. Vice in those communities was a glittering side-line activity. In Chicago it was half the town. Crystal chandeliers blazed in every third parlor on the Near North and Near South Sides. Pimps canvassed the city's office buildings like crack salesmen. Most of the city's cafés, theatres and rallying places were barred to respectable females. Only bawds enjoyed the town. On a Saturday night the tune-filled bordellos were as jampacked as are the city's beaches today (concluded overleaf)No Room for Vice(continued from page 52) on a summer weekend.

"Do you remember Lil Hamilton?" I asked.

The captain said he did. We talked about her.

She was called Queen Lil. She had a glistening snow-white pompadour of several levels. She weighed 200 pounds, dressed in cascades of black lace and carried a shepherd's crook.

On the opening of the racing season, she used to take her 14 girls to the Washington Park track in an old-fashioned tallyho. The girls, in lavender evening dresses, sat on the top deck, hanging onto their ostrich-plume hats. Two footmen in lavender knee breeches stood in the rear of the equipage and tooted long herald horns. Queen Lil, looking like the Victorian era in person, sat beside the driver who wore a lavender stovepipe hat and guided his six horses with iron wrist. Michigan Avenue's male pedestrians proudly returned Queen Lil's salutes as she passed.

Around 1908 another madam named Birdie leaned out of her South Side window on a summer morning and watched a street cleaner brushing away at the horse-favored highway. He was six feet two, broad shouldered, with a mop of black hair and big white teeth. Birdie called him to her side from his lowly chore.

"I need somebody to help me run this house," she said, "and I got nine other houses that need a steady hand. You can start with keepin' the books and seeing I don't get lonely."

Jim Colisimo grinned and took the job. Five years later he was vice lord of the town. He divorced his wife, the same Madam Birdie, and retired her from his enterprises. Potentate of a hundred bordellos, all booming like bargain counters, Big Jim endeared himself to the moral and legal guardians of the city with unprecedented gifts of cash. A patrolman could get rich just saying "hello" to Big Jim. His 22nd Street café was the toniest night spot in town, and packed till dawn with celebrities.

In Big Jim's café all was decorum. A pretty girl, with an innocent face and a high-necked dress to accent her modest airs, sang semiclassical ballads. She was beloved by Colisimo. Guests were permitted to applaud her artistry, but not to talk to her.

Colisimo's activities became so extensive that he imported a half-dozen bodyguards to watch over him. Among these was Al Capone of Brooklyn. Capone had recently been honorably discharged from the U.S. Army. His Army discharge card read "Capone, Alphonse. Character, Excellent."

Shortly after insuring his safety this way, Colisimo was shot to death one dawn while making a romantic call in the telephone booth of his café. A thousand city and state officials including high police officers, judges, aldermen, senators, prosecuting attorneys, lodge chieftains and the Mayor's staff attended, many of them in silk hats, the ex-street-cleaner's funeral. Bodyguard Capone took over the Colisimo empire of bawdy houses that reached as far as Rogers Park and Cicero -- and added other enterprises to it.

When we finished remembering Big Jim, I asked Detective Sweitzer, "Aren't there any arrests at all anymore for violations of sex morality?"

"You are talking about a world that has gone," he answered patiently. "The only trouble you can get into in that department is if your wife catches you and she is not broad-minded."

"There are a lot of degenerates getting arrested," said Captain Golden.

"They don't count," Detective Sweitzer said, firmly. "Besides, degeneracy is one thing Chicago has never been famed for. So why open up the subject?"

We rode on. I mentioned London, Paris and Rome where I had recently worked, making movies. Those three cities, I offered, are full of prostitutes. They crowd the London night, and parade the Parisian and Roman pavements in platoons.

"Regular prostitutes?" Detective Sweitzer asked. "Or just amateurs taking the air?"

"I don't know," I said. "They hail you, smile at you, walk beside you and discuss their accomplishments and their modest cost."

"Sounds like regulars," said Captain Golden. "It's surprising they should still be going big in Europe."

"Hard to figure," said Detective Sweitzer.

It is. One has to imagine that sexual freedom is not so advanced among English, French and Italian women as among their Chicago sisters, and that the prostitute becomes, therefore, a demand commodity. But this is hard to believe. My observation in those countries is of no help. As far as I could make out, the women of their upper, middle and lower classes had much the same unfrowning attitude toward amour as is to be found in northern Illinois.

The persistence of prostitution in those lands may be due to a paucity of women. Or it may be due, more likely, to the fact that traditions die out more slowly in Europe than in the U.S.A. Prostitution, like the Lord Mayor's Hat and the Changing of the Guards, just hangs on, out of a historical sense sturdier than ours.

"I wouldn't say that prostitution is through in this country," said Captain Golden. "Everyone knows there's a lot of vice traffic still going on all around. The underworld still rings up big grosses selling women."

"Where?" demanded Detective Sweitzer. "Name me one place where there are white slaves at work."

"It's not in our field," Captain Golden said. "We're homicide men. All we know about is murders."

"That's right," Detective Sweitzer stood corrected. "We've been trying to solve one for two years -- me and the chief, here. A popular radio announcer gets himself killed by gunshot, and we can't even collar a suspect. Police work must have been easier and more fun when you could roll up a record pulling in prosties."

We rode in silence through the onetime saturnalian precincts of Chicago, the 20s and 30s along Cottage Grove Avenue. They had a garbagey look. I try not to be too sentimental about the past, but I could not help comparing these once gaudy stamping grounds to the prissy locales in which modern vice operates. The swanky cafés, full of ritzy-looking callgirls, the hotel suites reserved for out-of-town buyer amour; the back seats of automobiles, the untidied bachelor girl apartments, the dimly lit booths in cheap eateries, the friend's apartment borrowed for the evening with the phone ringing an unnerving obligato -- such and countless other improvised rendezvous have displaced the old plush and crystal brothels. And the new servitors of Venus pretending to be actresses, artists, book readers, models and honest working girls seem more designed for troublemaking than pleasure.

I have a memory of vice, with its devil's fire flaming in forbidden streets, as having been more diverting than the casual sinfulness of today. Obviously vice will never return in its old theatric guises. To have vice, and the hideaway world that goes with it, you have to have masses of people denouncing sex as the world's darkest evil; you have to have press and pulpit roaring that unmarried dalliance and extramarital adventuring will send their participants straight to hell. It is unlikely any such fine thoughts will ever sound in the Republic again.

• • •

In the local room of the Daily News the next day I wrote the story of the Japanese girl shoplifter. I put a lot of psychology in it. But it lacked bite. There were no overtones.