The Fast Women of New York (Vintage 1869)

by Stephen J. Gertz

Society to-day in New York means everything and anything...The members of it are chiefly concerned in the important item of living, although some of them live at a fast dying rate. The rage of the hour with the masses is display, ostentation, dress and the gratification of all the animal desires. Toes are educated more than hands, and the tongue talks vastly more than the brain thinks. Polish, etiquette and accomplishment are of more value than honesty of purpose and a good common sense education. There are exceptions to this rule, as there are to all rules, but this is the way we look at the masses.

Society of to-day represents the highest perfection of our Anglo-Saxon civilization as developed under a republican form of government in the New World. While there is much in it which is worthy of all admiration, there is much which is crude, false, foolish, wicked and deserving of our censure. It is now content with nothing short of what money can purchase....As the love of money is the root of all evil, so society which is built on money has much in it which is evil...

Thus begins The Women of New York: Or the Under-World of the Great City. Illustrating the Life of Women of Fashion, Women of Pleasure, Actresses and Ballet Girls, Saloon Girls, Pickpockets and Shoplifters, Artists' Female Models, Women-of-the-Town, Etc., Etc., Etc., a grand tome from 1869, a significant time in American culture when, weary of war, seeking pleasure, and greater personal freedoms, the average American city dweller's manners. mores, and values began to dramatically shift. The emergence of the working woman, freed from domestic chains, created great anxiety amongst religious leaders, moralists, and culturally conservative citizens. 

The Women of New York is just one of the many books that were published in the late 1860's-early 1870s that warned of a cultural Armageddon in the making. It, amongst these other volumes, constitutes nothing less than the origin of  the culture wars in the United States, now in their 151st year.

The Belle of Fashionable Society.

After a discussion of the good old days and an enumeration of the various types of society, the pseudonymous George Ellington gets down to business: the ladies of New York who exemplify the New Woman, to wit: whores and, due to their modern behavior, the nearly so if they're not careful. The shop girl - a new phenomenon - is just one step up from the streets.

At the Races - "Liquoring Up."

The book is divided into  eight sections: Women of Fashion; Women of Pleasure; Married Women; Wicked Women; Female Artistes (Ballet-Girls; Female Models; Actresses); Life in a Female Seminary; Other Women (i.e. physicians; "strong-willed women"); Female Institutions.  Married women do not escape Ellington's  indictment; the chapter titles to that part of the book tell the tale: Matrimonial Infelicities; Marriage à la  Mode; Married Intrigues in Middle Life; Married Liaisons; Separation and Divorce in New York; "Fast Women." There's no escaping the author's scorn; these women are wicked.

Fast Women at the Races.

But not as wicked as "Wicked Women," which include Female Astrologists; Female Clairvoyants; Female Adventurers; Female Pickpockets and Shoplifters.

A Stylish Mamma.

Beware the "fast woman."

"They indulge in all the 'manly sports' which it is possible for women to indulge in, and their philosophy or belief, if they have one, is to eat, drink, and be merry. They are of the world, worldly, and prefer to live and enjoy the present...

"The number of these fast women in New York is perfectly astounding to persons who really have a chance to know. There are, of course, a great many good women in New York who are not fast [slow women: "not so fast, buddy!"]...Fast women are not necessarily bad - they may be virtuous, they may scorn or pity the cyprian - but whatever they may be in that respect they are 'fast,' and lead an exceedingly rapid though short life."

One of the Few Good Mammas.

The above may be one of the few good mammas but I suspect Sylish Mamma is having a better time; "one of the few good mammas" could use a stiff drink to loosen-up; any stiffer in appearance and she might be confused with a caryatid.

The Queen of the "Underworld."

"Out of doors, on the streets of New York, under the light of the gas-lamps, the denizens of the under-world may be seen in even greater numbers than in the fine houses..." And so we are introduced to "Nymphs du Pave,"  a delightful euphemism for streetwalkers; the pavement-pro has never sounded so exotic.

A Female Gambling House on Broadway.

"Women of all classes of society in New York use stimulants and narcotics to a greater or lesser extent but the demi-monde in particular, above and beyond all others, are addicted to these unwholesome and life-destroying habits. If the women of fashion are compelled to use various kinds of opiates to induce sleep, how much more are the women of pleasure, whose life is one continued round of dissipation all the year through, and who never know what rest is...This practice is about as common as eating among them, and is indulged in by all classes of women-on-the-town, whether they be high or low.

"Hasheesh was the favorite drug with these women some years ago but it is no longer thought much of...Laudanum is a favorite drug with the demi-monde, and some of them carry its use to a fearful extent."

Female Models and the Artist at Work.

"To be a model female requires considerable good sense and qualities of the head and heart. To be a female model one can get along without any of these qualifications, so long as she possesses a fine, voluptuous form."

It should be clear by now that this book could have been written yesterday. The Culture Wars, modern greed, and the place of women in today's America can be traced in a very straight line back to this, and other, similar books of the era, a time when the new was outpacing the old at breakneck speed and the old had a bad case of the willies. Women were beginning to think and do for themselves.  Next thing you know they'll want to vote. Call the Riot Squad.

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ELLINGTON, George (pseud.). The Women of New York: Or the Under-World of the Great City. Illustrating the Life of Women of Fashion, Women of Pleasure, Actresses and Ballet Girls, Saloon Girls, Pickpockets and Shoplifters, Artists' Female Models, Women-of-the-Town, Etc., Etc., Etc. With Numerous Engravings. New York: The New York Book Company, 1869. First edition. Tall octavo. 650 pp. Frontispiece, 43 full page engraved plates.

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The inside Story of Jim Vaus and the Unholy Alliance of Politics, Crime and the LAPD

In 1953, a paperback book, The Inside Story of Narcotics, was issued by religious publishing house, Zondervan. Released at the height of hysteria about a national epidemic of teen-aged junkies that did not exist, it was written by one Jim Vaus.

"Every trade has a technical language. Even Christians have a language of their own. They speak of being 'saved,' of a 'Christian worker,' or of 'putting out fleece.' The person not used to their jargon doesn't understand what the Christians are talking about. Addicts, too, have a language of their own, language which must be understood if this book is to be understood. Some of the words most used are: bad go - too small an amount for the money paid; bang - an injection of heroin' blast party - a get together to smoke marijuana."

Vaus, it turns out, was one of the most interesting characters to have ever put pen to pulp. He was, until recently, a lost footnote in Los Angeles history, a man who stood at the shadowy nexus of Los Angeles politics, the underworld, and the LAPD. He then took a sharp turn and wound up connecting evangelist Billy Graham to that dark triad.

"Wiretapper Jimmy Vaus couldn't decide whether he wanted to be a cop or a crook - so he tried to be both. In doing so, he set off on a path that led directly to Mickey Cohen," the L.A.-born gangster who tried to make it in Chicago and Cleveland before returning to the City of Angels to eventually become Southern California's foremost fallen one.

A sound engineer and electronics specialist during Army service, in 1946 Vaus was managing an apartment building in Hollywood while pursuing his passion for electronic wizardry. A working girl living in the building was upsetting the other tenants. Vaus called the vice squad. The vice squad officer who responded had no way to catch her in the act; he could hear voices behind the girl's door but could not make out what was being said. Incredulous that the LAPD did not have electronic surveillance equipment to listen in on her conversations, Vaus volunteered his services. Vaus provided the LAPD with its first wiretapping equipment and operated it. The prostitute was busted. The wiretap was illegal but no matter - this was the LAPD at its darkest noir.

Vaus's success with the case prompted the LAPD to avail themselves of his ongoing services in their quest to prevent L.A. from becoming an "open" city for organized crime; in 1937, Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, the matinee-idol handsome mobster, had come to town at the behest of his associates in New York and Chicago to organize illegal activity. He brought in Mickey Cohen, a former street thug and featherweight boxer with hair-trigger temper and spastic trigger-finger, a wildly impulsive, near-illiterate punk with a rep for possessing the biggest pair of cajones for a little runt that ever wielded a .38, a shotgun, or whatever necessary to conduct business. He was sorcerer's apprentice to Siegel, who cleaned, polished (as much as Cohen could be), and wised him up. By the time Siegel was murdered in 1947, Mickey had risen to become L.A.'s top mobster.

This upset the LAPD no end. Soon, Vaus was tapping - illegally, 'natch - Cohen's phones and bugging his house.

Not long afterward, Vaus was involuntarily summoned to meet the Jewish Napoleon in sharkskin, who had learned of the taps and of the whiz behind them. Jim assumed the meeting would be his last on earth. To the contrary, Cohen asked him to tap and bug on his behalf.

"Confronted with such opulence [Cohen's home], Vaus's moral faculties, which were clearly weak to begin with, failed him entirely. 'It would have been very hard to persuade a man that it was wrong to have the money sufficient to buy these creature comforts,' Vaus concluded."

The beginning of the Mickey/Vaus relationship (gangsters elsewhere in the U.S. considered Cohen's operation "the Mickey Mouse Mafia") was celebrated by Cohen backing Jim in an electronics shop, conveniently located in the same building on Sunset Boulevard as Michael's Haberdashery, Cohen's ersatz-class men's shop. Cohen's given name was Meyer. He'd come a long way since Boyle Heights, he fantasized.

Cohen employed Vaus to collect evidence of police corruption, specifically blackmail attempts against him by LAPD officers. There was a lot of evidence. He also had Vaus de-bug his home. This presented a problem.

Vaus was now working both sides of the street. But "even the covetous wiretapper understood that working for both the LAPD and the city's top organized crime boss would be a dicey proposition."


In Time magazine's review of Wiretapper (1955) - "The true-life drama of the man who kept the Gangsters, the Gamblers and the Bookies always one step ahead of the law - until the moment when he tapped in on a direct line to God" - a movie adapted from Vaus's autobiography, Why I Quit Syndicated Crime (Wheaton, Illinois: Van Kampen Press, 1954), it is noted that "the highlight of Jim's criminal career was a slick trick for improving his judgment of race horses. He would cut into the direct Teletype wire between a bookie and the race track, take the race results on his own Teletype, and signal a confederate to place last-minute bets with the unsuspecting bookie before feeding the delayed tape back into the bookie's wire again. He was about to leave for St. Louis to make a new installation of this type when he stepped into a Billy Graham rally."

Vaus, whose father, James Vaus, was a Bible-thumping preacher, was ripe for conversion; the needle of his moral compass was spinning out of control and the omens for a long life ending by natural causes were not auspicious.

"The year 1949 had been a disastrous one for Jimmy Vaus. [The scandalous trial of a LAPD officer caught on one of Vaus's wiretaps] and the revelations that followed had exposed him as a double agent and placed him in considerable peril."

Billy Graham came to town in October of 1949 to begin a series of old-fashioned tent-meetings. Graham was a nobody until William Randolph Hearst took a shine to the charismatic religious figure and made sure his Los Angeles newspapers, the Examiner and Herald-Express, provided extensive and effusive coverage of the minister and his "Crusade for Christ." This campaign by Graham would be his first. It made him a star, and launched his career as America's Minister.

Vaus attended one of Graham's meetings. Graham made a call for sinners, his famous "This is your moment of decision!"

"Suddenly, Vaus found himself gliding up the isle toward the platform at the front of the ten where Graham was standing. Then he was down on his knees. He left in a daze. As he was exiting the tent, a photographer's lightbulb flashed. The next day, newspaper readers awakened to the headline WIRE-TAPPER VAUS HITS SAWDUST TRAIL.

"Jimmy Vaus had been born again."

Through Vaus, Graham met Mickey Cohen, who the evangelist had set his sights on as a flashy potential convert; Cohen was going through one of his periodic and disingenuous "I'm goin' straight" phases - a recent incarceration was so frightful that he never wanted to see the inside of a prison again. He played Graham as earnestly as Graham worked him. In the end, Cohen, despite his "sincere" desire, used Graham for cover, gave Graham the air, and left his salvation to the dice tables. But not before both had reaped the P.R. benefits.

Vaus, in the interim, wrote The Inside Story of Narcotics. Though he had virtually no experience with the drug trade in Los Angeles or anywhere else, his contacts in the LAPD's vice squad provided him with all he needed to know. As Billy Graham's star convert, the book was an exercise in redemption and sold well, going through at least four printings that I am aware of.

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The unattributed quotes above are from a book released earlier this year that I've just now gotten around to reading, the exhaustively and painstakingly researched L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City by John Buntin. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

Within, Buntin follows the trail of politics, the underworld and the LAPD from the turn of the 20th century through the mid-1960s, using the ascents of legendary LAPD Chief William H. Parker and gangster Mickey Cohen as opposites in parallel to relate this fascinating aspect of Los Angeles history.

"These two men — one morally unflinching, the other unflinchingly immoral — would soon come head to head in a struggle to control the city — a struggle that echoes unforgettably through the fiction of Raymond Chandler and movies like The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential. For more than three decades, from Prohibition through the Watts riots, their struggle convulsed the city, intersecting in the process with the agendas and ambitions of J. Edgar Hoover and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Mike Wallace and Billy Graham, Lana Turner and Malcolm X and inspiring writers from Raymond Chandler to James Ellroy. Its outcome shaped American policing — for better and for worse — and helped to create the Los Angeles we know today" (From Buntin's website).

“Packed with Hollywood personalities, Beltway types and felons, Buntin’s riveting tale of two ambitious souls on hell-bent opposing missions in the land of sun and make-believe is an entertaining and surprising diversion” (Publishers Weekly).

“LA Noir is a fascinating look at the likes of Mickey Cohen and Bill Parker, the two kingpins of Los Angeles crime and police lore. John Buntin's work here is detailed and intuitive. Most of all, it's flat out entertaining” (Michael Connelly).

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I briefly discuss The Inside Story of Narcotics in my book, Dope Menace. Consider this post an extended end note to that volume.