The room sat over a garage on West Fifty-Sixth Street and had almost nothing to recommend it. Low ceiling. No view. Tables pushed close enough that a waiter had to turn sideways to get between them. On a full night in the winter of 1924 there was no floor left to stand on, which is how a twenty-four-year-old singer came to be lifted up onto the lid of the piano.
She spent the rest of her career there.
That is one version of the story. There is another, set a dozen years earlier in a cabaret in Montreal, where a girl of twelve was hoisted onto an upright because she was too small to be seen over the heads of the crowd. Both are printed as fact in perfectly respectable places. I have not found the document that settles which came first, and I have stopped minding, because the two versions agree on the thing that matters. She got up on the piano because the room would not make space for her otherwise. Then she took the room’s problem and turned it into the only thing anyone would remember about her for the next hundred years.
The record disagrees about a great deal else, too. It disagrees about where she was born. Most of the reference works put it in Danville, Illinois, on the second of August, 1900, and that is where the paper trail leads. Her biographer had it from the family that she was born in Toronto that October, to a mother who had been left behind and was waiting tables in a railroad yard. It disagrees about her name — Riggin, or Riggins, with Morgan arriving later from one of her mother’s marriages. It disagrees about her father, who by one account died and by another simply walked out, twice.
This is not unusual for a woman who made her living in rooms that were themselves illegal. What is unusual is how little of it she bothered to correct. Publicity in the 1920s was something you assembled rather than something that happened to you, and Helen Morgan seems to have decided early that a life with a few soft edges was a better instrument than a life with hard ones.
What is not in dispute is the childhood. There was no money. She left school young. She packed biscuits in a factory, worked as a shop girl, did nails. In 1912 a Chicago newspaperwoman came to Danville to write about railroad families and found a child singing where a child should not have been able to sing that well, and the child was booked into a club in Montreal — where Canadian law on child performers ended the engagement and sent her home. In 1918 she was crowned Miss Illinois. She took a second title across the border, and a cash prize; the number that follows her through the retellings is fifteen hundred dollars. It was enough to get to New York.
She went there to study voice properly. What she got instead was the speakeasy circuit.
By November of 1924 she was the first headliner at Billy Rose’s newly opened Backstage Club, and the piano trick was already doing its work. New York had never heard a woman sing that way — small, close, unhurried, more like something overheard than something performed. The songs were about men who had gone, or would go, or should have gone and hadn’t. The trade called them torch songs. The woman singing them from the top of a piano became the definition of a torch singer, and the definition has not really been revised since.
Helen Morgan- 1927- Photograph by Edward Steichen.
National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; acquired in memory of Agnes and Eugene Meyer through the generosity of Katharine Graham and the New York Community Trust, The Island Fund
Rose’s club took on partners who could arrange for it to be left alone. That is the sentence, and it is worth sitting with, because it is not a colourful aside — it is the operating condition of the entire business. Every room she sang in for the next decade was a room that had made an arrangement. She did not make those arrangements. She sang in the rooms that did.
Then her name started appearing on the doors. The Fifty-Fourth Street Club at 231 West Fifty-Fourth. Chez Morgan. Helen Morgan’s Summer Home. Three clubs in quick succession, all trading on a name that meant something to the kind of customer who could pay a cover charge, and all of them running on money that was not hers. This is the part of the story that gets flattened into “she opened her own speakeasy,” and the flattening loses the argument. What she owned was her name. She rented it out. When the federal agents came, the name was on the door and the money was somewhere else.
And on Broadway, at the same time, everything was going right. George White’s Scandals in 1925. Americana in 1926, where a song called “Nobody Wants Me” was added after opening night so she could sing it from a piano in the orchestra pit. And on the twenty-seventh of December, 1927, the Ziegfeld Theatre opened Show Boat, and Helen Morgan walked out as Julie LaVerne and sang “Bill” and “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and was, from that night forward, a serious actress.
Three days later, federal agents raided Chez Morgan and arrested her.
That first case fell apart by February. The club reopened under a different name, which was the standard arithmetic of the era — the padlock closed a door, not a business.
Then came the summer. On the night of the twenty-eighth of June, 1928, on orders that came down from Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt, agents went into eleven clubs across the city in a single sweep. More than a hundred people were arrested. Helen Morgan’s room was among them, and the agents did not simply seize the liquor and go; they took axes to the fittings. A contemporary account put the wreckage at fifty thousand dollars’ worth of furniture, which in 1928 was not a raid. It was a demonstration.
Morgan was not there. Neither was Texas Guinan. When word went out that both women would be picked up unless they presented themselves, they walked into police headquarters together, in front of every photographer in New York, and were charged and released. They were two of a hundred and eight people named in a federal indictment for conspiracy to violate the Prohibition laws.
The trials came the following April. Guinan went first and the jury turned her loose. Morgan’s case was heard days later, and her defense was the plain truth of her situation: she was an employee. She sang. She did not own the liquor, did not sell it, did not control what happened in the room after the song ended. The jury acquitted her.
It was a successful argument, and it should have been a bitter one. The same fact that kept her out of prison — that the business used her name and gave her no part of the business — was the fact that had kept her working other people’s rooms for six years. She won by proving she had never been in charge of anything.
She did not go back to nightclub work until Prohibition was over.
The career held for a while. Kern and Hammerstein wrote Sweet Adeline for her in 1929. She made Applause for Rouben Mamoulian that same year and Roadhouse Nights the year after. “Why Was I Born?” and “Body and Soul” sold. There was network radio in the thirties, more pictures, and in 1936 the full sound version of Show Boat — Julie again, ten years older, and better.
The drinking had started somewhere in the middle of all that and did not stop. The people who worked with her described a woman who needed brandy before she could get herself out from the wings, and who was, without exception, kind to everyone she worked with. Both of those things were true at once for a long time.
In October of 1941 she was in Chicago with a touring edition of George White’s Scandals — the same revue that had given her a Broadway stage sixteen years earlier — when she became too ill to go on. She died at Henrotin Hospital of cirrhosis of the liver. She was forty-one. Her husband had to apply to an actors’ charity for the hospital bill, and her mother asked relatives to cover the funeral. She had earned something close to a million dollars in her working life.
Asked once what had made her successful, she is supposed to have given a one-word answer.
Hunger.
I keep coming back to women like her when I write. Not for the glamour, which was mostly lighting, but for the arrangement underneath it — a woman whose name was worth money to men who would not give her a share, singing in a room she could be arrested in, holding the whole thing together with a voice. Della, who sings at the Velvet Hour, is not Helen Morgan. But she knows what it is to be the reason a room is full and still not be the person the room belongs to.
That tension — between what a woman is worth to a business and what the business is willing to let her own — runs through everything I write about women remaking their lives in early 20th-century America. If you want the rest of it, the Rum Runners’ Chronicles follow women working the same trade from the water end of it, and The Velvet Hour is Della’s book. There is also a free story to start with, if you would rather be introduced before you commit.
If you have been down here in the Hooch ‘n Hellraisers rooms before, you already know Texas Guinan who walked into headquarters beside her; Belle Livingstone, who figured out that it wasn’t the illegal liquor that brought in the customers, the women who ran the whiskey when the men were gone or dead; and the wider company of the queens of the speakeasies, of whom Morgan was the one who could actually sing.