The door was at the top of a narrow staircase on West Forty-Fifth Street, just east of Sixth Avenue, and it had a peephole in it. Behind the door: silk on the walls, eighty chairs pushed close enough that strangers touched elbows, a stage barely wide enough for a chorus line, and a woman at a ringside table holding a clapper in one hand and a police whistle in the other. The room did not open until midnight. It did not close until five.
Everyone who climbed those stairs got the same welcome, delivered at volume, in a voice trained on Broadway and roughened somewhere well west of it.
Hello, sucker. Come on in and leave your wallet on the bar.
They paid a cover charge for that. Bankers paid it. Ballplayers paid it. A future king of England paid it. For most of a decade in New York, one of the surest ways to prove you were somebody was to be publicly insulted by a woman from Waco, Texas — and to laugh while it happened.
Her name was Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan. By the middle of the decade there was no need to say all of it. Texas Guinan, speakeasy queen, covered the ground.
She was born in Waco in 1884, and she went west before she went east. Hollywood found a use for her early: she was billed as the screen’s first cowgirl, and she made something on the order of three dozen silent pictures, shot fast and shot cheap, in which she rode bareback, handled a gun, and generally did on horseback what women were not supposed to be able to do. Two-Gun Girl came out in 1918. The Lady of the Law followed in 1919.
Texas Guinan in her Western picture years, c. 1919–1921. Photographer unidentified.
That second one is the tell. She made it for Bull’s Eye Productions, and she was not only in front of the camera — she was running a unit department, learning the machinery from the inside. Years before she stood in the middle of a room taking a cut of the door, she had already worked out where the money and the control actually sit, which is behind the performance rather than in it.
Then New York, and several starring roles on Broadway, and a discovery that would shape everything after it: what audiences responded to most reliably was not her singing. It was her mouth.
She was in her mid-thirties by then, in an industry that had already decided what that meant for a woman. In the ordinary version of this story, the next chapter is a slow fade — smaller parts, longer gaps, a return home.
Then, on January 17, 1920, the country went dry, and the ordinary version of the story stopped applying to anyone.
Prohibition did not end New York nightlife. It reorganized it, and it moved the profit.
The great restaurants — Delmonico’s, Sherry’s, Jack’s — had built their reputations partly on their cellars, and their cellars were now a liability. What rose in their place were small dives and gaudy nightclubs where the illegality was not an inconvenience but the entire appeal. People did not go out simply to drink. They went out to be seen not caring about a federal law.
Texas understood what that room needed. She dyed her brunette hair a hard blonde, put her figure in glitter, and cultivated exactly the connections the business required. In 1923, Emil Gervasini and John Levi hired her to sing at their Beaux Arts speakeasy. A Brooklyn Daily Eagle piece four years later, by the reporter Marjorie Corcoran, put her pay at fifty thousand dollars — a figure worth treating as the number the newspapers printed rather than a number from anyone’s ledger.
The producer Nils Granlund saw her at the Beaux Arts and introduced her to Larry Fay, a rumrunner with a club and no clear idea yet of what he had. The building on Forty-Fifth Street had served for a while as the temporary quarters of the Friars Club; Fay took the lease and put a peephole in the door. She became his hostess and mistress of ceremonies at the El Fey, and the arrangement they arrived at is the thing worth pausing on: a cut of the profits, a chorus line at her back, and free rein. She was not decoration. She was the product.
Texas Guinan in Queen of the Night Clubs. Warner Bros. advertisement, Variety, February 6, 1929, pp. 32–33. Public domain. Source: Internet Archive / Wikimedia Commons.
The act ran all night. She sat or stood at the center of the room and worked it — leading the crowd in a song, promising them a fight a night or their money back, telling a big spender he might be all the world to his mother but he was just a cover charge to her. Rich men in from out of town were butter-and-egg men, and they came back for more of it.
The guest list is a snapshot of the decade: Babe Ruth, Charles Lindbergh, Charlie Chaplin, Rudolph Valentino, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Lord Mountbatten, Edward, Prince of Wales. And gangsters, in quantity. During one raid, the story goes, she put the Prince in an apron and set him to cooking eggs so the agents would take him for kitchen staff. Whether it happened exactly that way is the kind of question the twenties rarely answer cleanly. It circulated because it was the sort of thing everyone believed she would do.
She knew what Fay was. She knew whose money was underneath the club and who was sitting at the tables. None of it appears to have troubled her for a moment. She had spent the better part of two decades in middling show business, and she had arrived at the far edge of what that business considered a woman’s useful life, and here at last was the celebrity she had been reaching for.
The writers who came to look at her came away impressed and a little unnerved. Edmund Wilson found her formidable and catalogued her like a monument — the pearls, the yellow hair, the teeth. Lois Long, who covered New York nightlife for The New Yorker under the byline Lipstick and was no small figure herself, granted Guinan something she granted almost no one: permission to be vulgar. The club, Long allowed, was rowdy and maudlin and thoroughly alive, and everyone ought to see it once.
And through all of it, every night, she drank coffee. She built her whole living on a room full of liquor and never touched it.
By the middle of the decade she had a professional antagonist. Emory Buckner, the United States attorney in New York, had turned the padlock into a strategy — close the club, chain the door, move on to the next one. The clubs closed. Texas opened more of them. Texas Guinan’s Club on West Forty-Eighth. Then back to the old El Fey address. Then Club Intime, the Salon Royale, the Argonaut, each one padlocked in its turn.
She left Fay eventually, with the help of Owney Madden, who persuaded him to let her go, and opened the 300 Club on West Fifty-Fourth under her own name. In 1927 she took a revue to Broadway called Padlocks of 1927. The critics were unkind. Her company performed a number called “Oh, Mr. Buckner!” — a song about the man prosecuting her, sung publicly, while he was prosecuting her.
That same year she was arrested at the 300 Club on suspicion of a Volstead violation, released on a thousand dollars’ bail along with nine of her employees. As the police walked her to the wagon she turned to her orchestra and told them to play “The Prisoner’s Song.” A detective, keeping up, offered the line that became the caption on the whole affair: give the little girl a big handcuff.
At the Forty-Seventh Street station she performed. For nine hours, off and on, she entertained the arrested guests, the reporters, the photographers, the police and the federal agents, all of whom seem to have enjoyed the evening considerably more than their usual work. Afterward she told the papers she liked their cute little jail, and that she had never felt her jewels were safer.
It reads as pure nerve, and it was. But it is worth noticing what the nerve was made of. She was a woman past forty running an illegal business in an industry owned by men, in a city where the law could take her livelihood on any given Tuesday, and the only leverage she had was that she was more entertaining than the raid. Every arrest was a performance because performance was the asset. This is what it looks like when a woman has exactly one thing to bargain with and bargains with it relentlessly — the same pressure, in a louder room, that runs through everything I write about women remaking their lives in early twentieth-century America.
Belle Livingstone was in one of these rooms in 1927 — fifty-two years old, newly broke, watching how it was done. She went away and built her own version of it, and she outlived Guinan by twenty-four years.
The following summer the government stopped raiding clubs one at a time.
On the night of the twenty-eighth of June, 1928, on orders from Assistant Attorney General Mabel Walker Willebrandt, agents went into speakeasies across the city in a single coordinated sweep and arrested more than a hundred people. Guinan was not on the premises. Neither was Helen Morgan, who was singing at the Ziegfeld Theatre that season and fronting rooms of her own on the side. When word went out that both women would be collected unless they presented themselves, they presented themselves — together, at police headquarters, in front of every photographer in New York.
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. Both women won on the same argument, and it is the argument worth sitting with: that they were only entertainers. Hostesses. Employees of rooms they did not control. For Helen Morgan that was very nearly the plain truth, and it had cost her for years — her name went over doors that belonged to other people. For Guinan it was something else. A woman who had spent five years making certain that everyone in New York knew exactly whose room they were standing in stood up in court and said the room was not hers, and the jury believed her in a little over an hour.
There is one detail from those years I have never been able to put down. Sometimes, when the club had finally quieted and the sky was going grey, she would have herself driven out to a beach on Long Island with her manager and a few of the girls. She would sit there in the cold air for a few hours. Then she went home to Greenwich Village, to her mother and father and her rooms crowded with trinkets, and slept until it was time to start again.
She was the loudest woman in New York, and she needed somewhere with no one in it.
The market crashed on October 24, 1929, and the wallets that had made the El Fey possible thinned out fast. Texas kept swinging — an indiscretion a day, she said, keeps the Depression away. She played a version of herself, a club owner called Texas Malone, in an early talkie called Queen of the Night Clubs; the film itself is lost now, though some of the sound survives. In 1933 she turned up in Broadway Through a Keyhole, delivering the old greeting to a camera. She took a show called Too Hot for Paris out on the road and drew record crowds in cities that had never seen the inside of a speakeasy.
The Detroit News, Monday, November 6, 1933. United Press.
She fell ill backstage in Vancouver on November 4, 1933, and died the following day during surgery, of ulcerative colitis. Prohibition ended one month later, almost to the day. She missed the repeal of the law that made her.
Something on the order of twelve thousand people came to her funeral in New York. The casket was open, at her request, so the suckers could get a good look at her without a cover charge.
She was still working the room. T for Texas, G for Good Times.
Texas belongs to the Hooch ‘n Hellraisers posts, where I’ve been collecting the women who made a living out of Prohibition rather than merely surviving it. If she interests you, so will the women running the rooms in other cities and the women who made the whiskey before anyone else could sell it.
The woman who runs the room — who reads every face at the door, who knows exactly whose money is under the floorboards and serves them anyway — is a figure I keep circling back to in the fiction. She’s all through the Rum Runners’ Chronicles, where the women aren’t standing at the edge of the business but running it: buying, moving, selling, deciding who gets served and who gets shown the stairs. Texas Guinan, speakeasy queen of New York, is the version history bothered to write down, because she was far too loud to leave out. Most of them were quieter than that, and the record barely holds them at all. The series begins with Red Sky at Night, which is yours for free.
There’s a smaller echo of Texas in Chicago, seven years on. Della sings at the Velvet Hour on a stage the size of a card table, in a room that officially does not exist. She is not Guinan — nobody was — but she knows exactly what it costs to be the reason a room fills up. Her winter is The Velvet Hour.