Chapter VI: Part TWO: THE PEOPLE (Confidential!) (1)

11. THERE’S NOTHING LIKE A DAME

Women are the same everywhere, except in Washington, where they not only are different, but there are more of them.

Females generally fall into two categories, good and bad--the good being so because they can’t get the necessary masculine cooperation to be bad.

We have seen them all, all over the world, but nowhere else are they like they are in Washington. This town has 100,000 more nubile women than men. Forty-five percent of all its females earn their own livings. Most of them are government employes, and thus have better security than is provided by a husband. Many support husbands, or assist toward the expenses of the mutual establishment. Being self-supporting, they are, on the average, better dressed than you’ll find them anywhere else. That is on the “average.” There is little “high-fashion” except in diplomatic and social circles, because government salaries are average, not high.

Most Washington men are only fair wage earners, too, and that limits the loot. It is not so easy to promote a mink coat in Washington as it is in New York, though there are more minks per corpus in Washington than are won, wangled or plain bought in Philadelphia, Chicago or Boston.

Our capital is a femmocracy, a community in which the women not only outdo the men in numbers, but in importance. Males hold more exalted positions, but such work as is accomplished could not go on without the efficient, well-trained and permanent secretarial corps, almost all female.

Everything in Washington is slanted toward dames. The accent in the stores is on things women do or buy for themselves, instead of on home-furnishing and children’s clothes, which are the bedrocks of department store trade in other cities.

Elsewhere, femmes are divided into specific classes. They are wives, whores, glamor girls, home girls and office workers. Here none matches her opposite number as you know her. The females in the capital defy classification by other standards, and lap over into categories not laid out by economic divisions or natural vicissitudes of physical appeal. Prim, bespectacled bachelor-girl secretaries enlist as $10 call girls after hours or on Saturdays and Sundays--not for the money, but for adventure, substitution for romance. A friend of ours had to entertain visitors. He phoned for three call girls. When they arrived he saw to his horror one was his secretary.

Washington’s biggest she-group is made up of G-girls, government girls, who will be taken apart in later paragraphs. Running a close second are O-girls, those who work for organizations, such as unions, charity groups, scientific societies, trade and mercantile bodies, and those who do the paper work for lobbies which maintain permanent offices here.

Washington proves that the emancipation of women is baloney. See what happens here. They have jobs and make as much as most men. They have the freedom to live alone and like it, but they don’t. They have the opportunity to do vital work, to carve out careers in the civil service, as some do. But all, including most of the married ones, are desperately unhappy. They are caught in the unreality of this huge farce. It can’t be a home, it can’t be a place to live in and love, it’s just a rat race running the same course every day.

Tens of thousands of young and ambitious girls flock into Washington from every state, territory and dependency, and from foreign nations. There are even two from Samoa, pretty Laida and Marion Kreuz, whose brother, Peter Coleman, is a policeman in the House Office Bldg., and a night law student. The mass migration is similar in number, but not in purpose, to that which occurs in New York and Hollywood and to a lesser degree in Chicago and San Francisco.

The girls that come from the farms, the inland cities and the tributary towns to the other great metropolises come with stardust in their eyes. Having discovered that what they have is too good for the local cow-manicurists, soda jerks and grease station monkeys, they assume it can be used to start them on the road to fame and fortune in the big city. Most fail to find the golden pot at the end of the rainbow or even get anywhere near it in New York and Hollywood. The disappointed fall by the wayside or return home and marry the mailman.

The psychological urge which uproots girls from their native environments to come to Washington is the same, but its manifestations are different. The youngster who pulls strings to get a government job may be, and quite often is, prettier than her neighbor who hitch-hiked to Broadway. But apparently she hasn’t the same confidence in her charms as her brasher sister, so she goes to Washington instead.

The young ones who come to the capital to work for Uncle Sam are on the whole better educated than kids who want to make careers in show business. Most of them must have graduated from high school and business school to get a government job. There are some among the chorines who stuck a toe in a college, but all they need for success is to know the difference between the right and left leg, and remember when not to cross them.

Not all girls who come to Washington come to work for the government. Not all are high school graduates. Washington draws more street-walkers, who are strictly out for business, than any other town. They set out from the nearby hills of West Virginia, Maryland and the Carolinas, and they are purposeful as to their objectives. Many aren’t bad-looking. So the question again arises, why didn’t they go to New York or Hollywood and try for bigger stakes where flexible morals pay off better and the field for a killing is bigger?

The answer again is--no confidence. They don’t feel important enough to make good in the big league. They are afraid of the megapolis on the Hudson. Washington has small-town ways and the whores are small-town girls. Street-walking requires no influential connections, deals, financial backlogs, tests, skills. They step off a bus and can be in business before they pass a crossing.

The general belief is that when girls leave home they dream of going on the stage. Washington proves that many leave home just to get away from Home.

They have one commodity they can sell. And they don’t have to carry samples in a briefcase. And they must go on the road for customers--too many complications where they are well known, have families, church connections, lovers or husbands.

12. G-GIRLS

_A. Government Girls_

About 200,000 women work five days a week for Uncle Sam. They come from every corner of the nation. And no matter how long they remain here, few of them ever really live here. They sleep in various kinds of barracks, rooming-houses, rundown hotels, board with retired married ones, and in all constitute a class so large and so displaced that the city cannot absorb them as it does working-women in other communities.

They are not all physically repellant, nor do they behave generally like spinsters are supposed to. The deadly monotony of their routine tasks and their lonesome lives wears out their charm before it destroys their looks. They are a hard, efficient lot, doing men’s work, thinking like men and sometimes driven to take the place of men--in the proscribed zones of desperate flings at love and sex. Lesbianism is scandalously rampant, frequently an acquired dislocation rather than a pathological aberration.

The existence of the average G-girl revolves between routine grind and physical frustration. She leaves her job at five. If she goes home, it is to her tiny room or apartment to heat her dinner out of tin cans and ponder whether to wash her panties or write letters home, or get drunk.

It isn’t all wrapped up in the fact of the female overflow. Left-over women can learn to do with half their share of men. But strangely, where every guy ostensibly could take his pick and date alternately, it doesn’t work that way. The Washington male clerks and middle-class bureau employes largely avoid their opposite numbers. They, too, are hall-room habitués, and they fraternize by some unwritten rule with other men, usually normal men. Propinquity does not work its magic here as the dominant factor in the mingling of the sexes.

Thousands of visitors and thousands of servicemen from nearby installations, most of them dame-hungry, don’t have to hunt; they are hunted. Not only that, but often they are paid, and seldom are they allowed to pick up checks without a struggle.

One of the sights of Washington is the outpouring of the janes at five o’clock. Many of them dash for cocktail bars, where they compete with the harlots, who violently resent them and call them “scabs.”

A favorite after-work guzzle-and-grab spot is the Cafe of All Nations, in the Mayfair House, at 13th and F. Wise men in the mood are there awaiting the stampede--not only for pleasure, but for the gigolo’s mite. Men and women are paid the same for equal work. Therefore the income is high for females and low for males as such things are usually adjusted. We gave the place a play at the right time and sat at a table with a third man who had come with us. A waitress shuffled up to us, and in voice and manner characteristic of an old-timer doing a familiar task, said, “The young ladies at the next table would like to buy you a drink.” We nodded, the potables were delivered, our hosts raised their glasses, and soon they joined us. We had another round, and when we insisted on taking the tab, not only for our drinks but theirs, too, they left us; they knew we weren’t “regular.”

A T-man in the course of a check turned up one instance where 12 G-girls had banded together and were keeping one man, in an apartment on Q Street.

Of course, among hundreds of thousands there are thousands not so situated. Many are beautiful, their intelligence is beyond the average, and even humdrum government work cannot make eunuchs of all men. Desirable girls quickly find that they get preferential receptions and promotions even in civil service examinations. There is a middle-aged woman with a superior position in the General Accounting Office, who has risen because she functions as the procurement officer for members of Congress and other dignitaries. The G-gals hear about her specialty, get in touch with her, and if they have appeal they find fun and get ahead. Outstanding ones are sometimes invited to entertain legation attachés or visiting celebrities.

Second-class lobbyists, who cannot finance dazzlers in the top echelons, have lists of typists and file-clerks and secretaries who are happy to be taken out, or taken in, and are not prissy over how an evening winds up.

Beyond these escapes from a circumscribed daily existence, there is nothing else. A couple of gals will walk the Mall on Sunday, hoping to get picked up; or they join a church, or go to one of the countless dances held during the winter season by state societies, where they find everyone else as desolate as they are; or they scrimp and save all week for a thrilling breakfast-lunch on Sunday at the Statler, where they find to their dismay everyone else in the room is a government girl, too, and stranded for company.

Many secretaries of Senators, Congressmen and executives are their office wives. All Congressmen’s offices contain sofas paid for by the Treasury.

These females, when they arrive, usually have accents, idiosyncrasies and dress foibles peculiar to their regions of origin. They quickly fall into the common mold. This is not surprising to your authors, who for years have been writing about Broadway showgirls. Within six months after one leaves the farm to join the chorus, she has acquired a new veneer which covers all she brought with her. You can’t, in any one chorus-line, classify the girls, except by their current hair shades. They are as uniform as if they wore uniforms.

The government is like a chorus; instead of 20 girls there are 200,000, and they all talk the same--mainly about favoritism shown to another by the immediate superior whom they accuse of sleeping with her. They dress the same--usually in suits. They eat the same--salads and dainty desserts. They live the same--in spick and span tiny rooms, with intimate wash hung on the line in the bathroom, which does triple duty as a kitchenette. They drink the same--martinis.

Their sex-lives are remarkably alike, too. Some are afraid they will. Others are afraid they won’t. And it all boils down to the same sustained jitters, but in different wrappers.

The G-girl is in an unnatural vacuum. She has no time-limits; her sentence is for life, usually. She isn’t home and she isn’t away. Her marriage outlook is bleak. No family ties console her. She is more often wooed by women than by men.

She makes a mockery of the theory that a woman’s first instinct is for security.

_B. Girls with Glamor_

Let it not be surmised that government-girls are all the girls. There are wives and fiancées, college co-eds, a sprinkling of debutantes and other daughters of the rare society clans, smart saleswomen, even a few presentable sob-sisters.

But the true glamorette, as she is known on Broadway and Fifth Avenue, Vine Street and Sunset Boulevard, and even in such remote oases of joy as Galveston, Texas, is virtually non-existent.

Chorines are but a memory of leg and lavender for the old inhabitants. Except for a rare transitory line in a night club, there is no such thing. Occasionally an imported single or sister-act plays the vaudeville house. Some of the painted peelers who work in the suburban dives sleep in Washington hotels. A movie celeb popping in for publicity, to attend a birthday ball or be photographed smiling down on Truman from the top of a piano, is an event. If there are any gorgeous, dangerous, slinky spies, we didn’t find them. Judy Coplon, by the men who specialize in the field, was called exceptionally lush for that trade. So we stopped looking.

The indigenous flora shape up about as they do in Brooklyn, except that they are better dressed and have less sooty complexions. They do not come downtown in slacks. Sloppy galoshes are de trop. Most girls at 16 appear and behave grown up.

But few can enter the accepted avenues where beauty may command a respectable commercial return. In any ranking hierarchy of glamor the model comes first, having long since passed the chorus girl, because of the more stable rewards and higher standards brought about by the great advertising demands. Washington has little need for animated manikins. Some of the choicer shops employ them to demonstrate clothes. There is no extensive advertising field.

The most lucrative and the steadiest calls for models come from sources not seeking those who might be employed in industrial cities for modeling. They hook on as hostesses, guides, ushers, and to decorate the booths and exhibits at conventions and trade shows, which are numerous. Those who are engaged sporadically earn a minimum of five dollars an hour, plus indeterminate tips. Their morals vary with the personal equation. The models who are willing to pose in the nude at stag-parties get fifty dollars an evening. These register with surreptitious characters of the middle-world between flesh-market procurers and shady promoters.

Among the better-known models’ agencies are Models Bureau, in the Chastleton Hotel; Ralston, 711 14th Street, NW, and Phyllis Bell, 306 13th Street NW.

The girl who sets out to be a model in Washington is usually one of those rare creatures--the native. An out-of-towner with such ambitions would naturally head to New York.

(_Note_: Most model agencies are schools instead of employment agencies. They seek to sign job-seekers to contract to learn how to walk, instead of sending them out to work. Some, billing themselves as agencies, provide girls--but not for modeling.)

Another reason for the shortage of really high class cheesecake is that there is almost always a displacement movement in effect.

The trains and planes to Hollywood are loaded with lookers, sent there with entree obtained for them by such influential VIP’s as cabinet officers, four-star generals, bureau heads, etc. When a prominent daddy gets fed up with his dame, he can’t just brush her off; she might make trouble, and that might get into print.

So the procedure is to phone Hollywood, where a liaison contact is instructed to obtain a job at a studio for the chick. The big film companies employ scores of so-called “contract” gals at $150 a week or so, who do nothing but pose for publicity stills, date chosen visitors, like out-of-town exhibitors, and otherwise make themselves useful and amiable around the lots. One in a thousand rises and may become a star.

The movie industry is always skating on such thin ice, what with anti-trust laws, etc., that a request from Washington is a command. So it’s a happy out all around. Mr. Big gets rid of his discarded girl, she goes willingly because no girl can turn down a film contract, and Hollywood stores up a favor for the next time it needs one.

Many girls with talent originated here but they scrammed as soon as they were old enough to know better. Among them were Helen Hayes, Kate Smith and Mary Eaton, all members of the St. Patrick’s Players.

Washington has no clubs or theatres with lines of girls. The best a babe with light feet can do is get in as a teacher at a dance studio, quite a business in Washington. The local classified phone directory has four pages of listings of dance instructors. That’s because dancing schools are a swell way for lonesome people to meet each other, and that’s what Washington has plenty of. The local Arthur Murray licensee, across the street from the Mayflower Hotel, is the largest Arthur Murray studio in the world. At least 2,000 girls find full or part-time employment working as instructors in the dozens of studios. Many of these girls are little more than taxi-dancers.

Pretty, personable ones can make up to $100 a week with tips. Those who take dates after hours do even better.

The real Washington glamor girl is the kept woman. You’d be surprised how many there are. All the bigger hotels and the glossier apartment houses around Dupont Circle and out Connecticut Avenue are loaded with them. They are the ones you most often see in mink coats, in expensive beauty parlors and fine shops. They are maintained mainly by important government officials, Senators, sports and millionaires from all over the country who make their headquarters in Washington. Many an executive who commutes to the capital keeps a cutie there full time.

All Washington giggled when it heard the story of the tall, stately blonde whose bills were paid by a Cuban sugar millionaire, and who fell in love with an assistant manager of the Shoreham Hotel, where she was living in high style. Her Latin lover found her in flagrante delicto with the hotel employe. The men squared off for a fist fight, but first locked the babe in a clothes closet. They blacked each other’s eyes--but she fractured her ankle trying to kick the door down.

To add to the embarrassment of the unhappy Cuban, his wife had been spying on him and his love through high-powered binoculars from Rock Creek Park, across the street. She sued him for divorce in New York.

A genuine glamor-gal does pop up now and then. One was Evelyn Knight, the radio and record star, who warbled for $75 a week in Washington hotels until a couple of years ago, then clicked in Manhattan and is now dragging down thousands.

Bette Woodruff, another home-grown dish, seems to be on the upgrade. A dress model, Bette had a yen to sing. One day, on a dare, she phoned maestro Dick Williams to tell him she was available. He didn’t know her from Eve, took her name to shut her up. Next day his vocalist got sick. He phoned Bette in a hurry. That was less than a year ago. Now she’s thrushing regularly, and well.

But Jan Du Mond, a five-foot-three night club canary, pianist and composer, drives a cab by day.

“My little coupe broke down,” she told a reporter. “I couldn’t afford a new car. Becoming a taxi-driver provided me with transportation at night to get to my engagement--the company lets me take the car home.”

Besides, she meets the most interesting people!

Sometimes a government gal switches to a glamor gal. One was Sandra Stahl, “Miss Washington,” in last fall’s Atlantic City beauty contest. Sandra was a secretary for Air Force Intelligence, but she has a face, a figure, a noodle and a voice. She was the dark horse when she sang before 3,000 people in Rock Creek Park, but 14 judges, including the Treasurer of the United States, sent her to Atlantic City.

Sandra comes from Long Beach, California. In our “New York, Confidential,” we noted that many of Gotham’s orchids on display come from Southern California. Maybe Sandra got on the wrong train.

13. COMPANY GIRLS

This is a specialty known only to Washington.

With the procuring situation as it is, the business of getting girls for fun, friendship, or what have you in mind is so commercialized, it’s incredible.

In our excursions into life in New York and Chicago, we found that girls you pay for an evening can be divided into two classes: party-girls and call-girls.

You summon the former, but they are not necessarily whores. You whistle for the others only when there’s to be a party.

If this seems contradictory, it’s because the dividing line is so tenuous, it usually isn’t there. But for our purposes, we shall group them together and call both “C-girls,” which stands for company girls, which is just what the womanless men who call them want them to be.

There are as many kinds of C-girls as there are kinds of women. They range from the lowest, who will come to your room for $5 for a quickie, to the most ultra, who expects $100, plus expenses, as a fee for her company for an evening, and nothing guaranteed. If it happens, it must be romanced or financed with honorarium.

The C-girls include the cheapest cocottes and some of the smartest, prettiest New York models. The only thing they have in common is you can phone them or someone who acts as an agent to make a deal, sight unseen, for their presence. The more they get the less they give. The true party-pretty undertakes only to appear for the evening, maybe entertain an important customer or that Congressman who’s going to investigate you or that general who places the orders. The call-dames are cheaper and more reliable.

They are available from all hotel bell-boys. A friend who lives in Washington said they weren’t necessary, for you can find a street-walker on any avenue or a hustler at almost any bar. We asked how about the transient, who doesn’t know that, so doesn’t know where to look, or is afraid. The bell-captain, who can get anything, including booze after hours, is the functionary out-of-towners over the age of puberty call. Using his services also means no raid from the hotel dick, who is an ally.

Lobbyists have lists of company-girls whose services they utilize as required. They exchange names with each other, so most of them have a master-list. In addition, there are agents, quite often apparently respectable, middle-aged women, who run “secretarial bureaus” that supply company-girls, often do contract businesses with large users, whom they bill by the year.

The secretarial bureau is important in the blind date business in Washington. Without much trouble, you can get the kind of girl you want by calling almost any of them. The procedure is this: You phone for a stenographer to be sent to your hotel room. She, however, is never the “date.” After giving her a nominal amount of dictation, you remark you are alone and friendless. She tells you one of her girl friends is lonesome, too, and would consider a date. You wait in. She arrives.

A problem for those who must entertain men of class is the low quality of the female commodity obtainable except from specializing agencies. Government gals, many of whom are on call, are superior intellectually, have better manners, though the professional predators run prettier. With the short supply of charmers, those who maintain a superior standard import them. Many big lobbyists and others who entertain frequently have lists of New York models and showgirls who will come down to Washington for fun, expense money, and maybe a mink.

There is a middle-aged woman in New York, who gives her name as Mrs. Hansen, who makes regular monthly trips to such Eastern cities as Philadelphia, Baltimore and Washington, where she meets prominent businessmen and offers to introduce them, at a fee of $10 each, to any of a hundred Powers and Conover models whose photos she has in a scrapbook and whose names she has on a typewritten sheet. She guarantees to produce any girl thereon in Washington within 24 hours, the girls to receive $100 and expenses for each day’s company.

But that is still run-of-the-mill. A babe named Teddie, with an apartment in the building on the southwest corner of 16th Street, in the 1600 block, handles knockouts, some married, for as much as $250 a night.

Virginia Wall, who lives at 2500 Q Street (phone Hudson 8783) at this writing, was chosen by those who know her as--“the most promising younger company-girl in Washington.” She knows many other company girls.

Florence Bowers, a Southerner who lives at 1716 Newton St., phone Hobart 5634, is a well-known company girl who will get others when needed.

Elizabeth Morley, 2124 P St., phone Hobart 7421, will get company-girls.

Mary Lou Vane, 1205 Clifton St., NW, is a superior company girl.

Washington has its corned beef and cabbage, but don’t say we don’t bring out its caviar.

14. FOR IMMORAL PURPOSES

It may startle you, though not necessarily stop you, to know what very few know--it is a felony to transport a female one step up or down or sideways in the District of Columbia with what grandma used to call “dishonorable intentions.”

The Mann Act was invented by a Chicago blue-nosed representative named Mann, after a hophead parlor-whore in melodramatic mood threw a note out of the window of the late Harry Guzik’s cathouse on which she had written “I am a white slave.” A milkman found it and turned it in at the 22nd Street police station. A puritanical young prosecutor named Clifford Roe, instead of laughing, made it so scandalous that the term “white slave” became the common synonym for a prostitute. Mona Marshall, the girl, was no slave at all, and when she came out of her fog she proved it. Her case history showed that she had been seduced in Wisconsin and brought to Chicago and placed in the house, quite willingly, by a traveling man who thought it was wasteful to give it away.

That came out in testimony and Congressman Mann fathered the law making interstate transportation a penitentiary offense. Too many jokes about crossing state lines have gone into the legend since then for anyone not to understand the possible consequences of taking ’em in one state and making ’em in another. But what has been very sparsely advertised is a phrase in the Mann Act which states, “or on federal territory.” Washington is federal territory.

So, if you meet one in the lobby and take her up in the elevator, you’re a candidate for Atlanta.

This clause has been enforced with ultimate results. But for many years, by unwritten policy, the Department of Justice stopped paying attention to private, non-commercial infractions. But in no way has the letter been ameliorated, and at any time this statute could be applied, as the income tax evasion law was used to convict murderous gangsters, if an Attorney General so instructs. It can be used without even the technical provisions required to substantiate an attempted rape. The language states, “for immoral purposes.” Such purposes need not be successful. There is a mistaken notion that paying a female’s fare has something to do with it. It has not, except as evidence of the intent, which is the res gestae.

Let it not be assumed that this is a major deterrent for the Washington wolf, before whom is spread a field alabaster with white lambs generously interlarded with black sheep. Yet the fine art of subtle, sophisticated flirtation, with skill, poise and aplomb, which has illuminated the finest works of the masters through the ages in every form of expression, seems extinct here.

Those in residence are boors; the transients are in a hurry; and the distaff defense being negligible, no true swordsman deigns to fence when he can hit a broad on the head with the handle.

Chief among Washington ladies’ men is handsome Warren Magnuson, bachelor Senator from the state of Washington, where some of his I.W.W. constituents would probably kick over the traces if they saw the highfalutin’ fillies he runs with in Washington. The Senator is a man among men, with the reputation of seldom wooing one girl at a time. He often entertains several in one evening in his Shoreham apartment. We know. They talk.

Not all wolves are single. We will not divulge names, or tell how they cover up. Your imagination will picture how easy it is in a town where so many are seeking favors, to get a stooge to come along as the cutie’s alleged “date,” while the principal apparently came along only for the ride.

Not all wolves, of course, are Senators or such with official immunity.

A simple way to get acquainted is to watch the papers for announcements of State Society dances. Most lonesome G-gals belong to these societies, composed of expatriates from their home states. Once every week, throughout the year, one of these groups throws a party or a dance. Admission is open to all. The Officers’ Service Club dances are swell, too.

At this writing there are no public ballrooms of the type of Roseland in New York or the Aragon in Chicago, not because they’re illegal, but because they have been unprofitable. In the summer this lack is filled by moonlight cruises of the Wilson Steamship Line on the river. The boats leave from the 7th Street wharf nightly, at 8:30, and the charge, including dancing, is one buck. Plenty of unattached women go.

The Potomac is mighty important to wolves. Practically the last of the night-boats in the country plies from Washington to Old Point Comfort and Norfolk, Virginia, summer and winter.

In years gone by, the fabled Albany and Fall River boats to Boston could have told such stories.

Steamers of the Old Bay Line charge $4.67 each way, with staterooms at from $1.50 to $5.50.

Last fall, a couple of evangelists chartered a Wilson liner for an evening prayer service on the Potomac. Many pious people showed up, but so did a swarm of scarlet sisters.

With all the game flying low you’d scarcely think it worth while for entrepreneurs to promote stag-parties. Yet many hotel ballrooms are engaged for shows at which talent, imported from Baltimore, is seen and appropriately appreciated. These nude nymphs perform also at Waldrops on Rhode Island Avenue, across the Maryland line.

Lots of smooth, mysterious guys in Washington, not pimps, make livings introducing lonesome men to pretty babes. One, named Al Walters, ran a series of dances called the “UN Victory Girls.” He was investigated by the Washington vice-squad, which found nothing illegal, though it did determine that his net income from promoting these get-togethers was $325 a week. Walters is still around town, always surrounded by eight or ten pretty bimbos, usually blonde, and he can get to the right people because he is a great introducer.

Young love gets a break in Washington, too, because the burg with its environs is small-town in construction, with front and back porches, lawns and alleys, and plenty of dark streets and nearby country nooks to drive to. Chief among the lovers’ lanes are Hains Point and the Anacostia Flats, along the Anacostia River, where the Bonus Army of ’32 made camp. Not all who court Eros in these secluded spots are juveniles. Many adults take their occasionals there, especially white men afraid or ashamed to check into free-for-all assignation houses.

We got the following story from a cop who worked the case. A blonde waitress at the Copacabana restaurant, a rendezvous for Latin-Americans, went with a stranger in his car to the Anacostia Flats. A woman’s screams tore the night air. Startled householders in the vicinity, rape-conscious because of the front-page sex murder of a girl the day before, phoned police. The squad car cops sped to a surprised girl and an embarrassed gent. “I always scream at a time like that,” she elucidated, with indignation.

WISDOM OF A WASHINGTON WOLF

When you see someone waiting for a bus or streetcar, it’s considered polite to offer a lift in your car. Washington gallants are very polite, especially if the hitch-hiker is cute.

* * *

We noticed Washington wolves seldom ply their dates with flowers. This may be because the girls are so anxious they’d give the guy orchids. Or maybe because Washington is an Eastern city, and in the East--New York especially--few well-dressed women wear corsages.

* * *

Most G-gals start work early in the morning. The wise Washington lupo learns to date them for cocktails at five in the afternoon.

* * *

Some characters tap the female college alumnae lists for recent graduates resident in Washington, then pick names at random and phone with an invitation to a Yale or Princeton hop which never seems to come off.

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HOTELS FOR WOMEN ONLY: Hattie M. Strong Hall, (YWCA) phone ME 2100, Meridian Hill, CO 1000; All States (cooperatively owned) NA 2483. (If the gal you’re phoning isn’t home, ask the switchboard operator if anyone else wants a date. She could know one.)

* * *

The abortion racket is wide open in Washington, with illegal practitioners protected from high-up. Prices run from $35 to $500 a job, depending on your color and your bank-book. The lowest charge is for Negroes. Unmarried G-gals can get by for $75. Married women with husbands who work are charged $100. Single ones in a jam who have rich or important paramours are nailed for as much as $500. (In New York $1,000 isn’t unusual.)

15. GARDEN OF PANSIES

If you’re wondering where your wandering semi-boy is tonight, he’s probably in Washington.

The good people shook their heads in disbelief with the revelation that more than 90 twisted twerps in trousers had been swished out of the State Department. Fly commentators seized on it for gags about fags, whimsy with overtones of Kinsey and the odor of lavender. We pursued the subject and we found that there are at least 6,000 homosexuals on the government payroll, most of them known, and these comprise only a fraction of the total of their kind in the city.

The only way to get authoritative data on fairies is from other fairies. They recognize each other by a fifth sense immediately, and they are intensely gregarious. One cannot snoop at every desk and count people who appear queer. Some are deceptive to the uninitiated. But they all know one another and they have a grapevine of intercommunication as swift and sure as that in a girls’ boarding school. Since they have no use for women in the main, and are uneasy with masculine men, they have a fierce urge, even beyond the call of the physical, for each other’s society. They have their own hangouts, visit one another, and cling together in a tight union of interests and behavior.

Not all are ashamed of the trick that nature played on them. They have their leaders, unabashed, who are proud queens and who revel in their realm. Your reporters, after years around show business, are familiar with those of their breed, unembarrassed in their presence. But, with the exception of crude male prostitutes whom they have encountered in police courts and on the sidewalks of New York’s Lexington Avenue and in Harlem, they still had a whisper of an illusion left: they got the idea, because they had met so many with marked talent, that by a pathological compensation many of them possessed artistic traits.

In Washington they found this false. The exceptional ones do drift to Broadway and to Hollywood. But they are no more representative of their numbers than are the gifted men and women who find their places in the arts of the great mass of people from whom they become detached to follow the livelier professions.

Now we have found out where the dull, dumb deviates go. We had assumed that, as they grew up in small communities where they soon became obvious and odious, they took flight for the stage, the screen, interior decorating, exotic literature and other fields centered in the metropolitan market-places. That is not true. Only a few can and do enter the avenues where their talents make them equal, often superior.

So, what becomes of the marked twilight-sex, unwelcome at home, pariahs afar? We might ask what becomes of the club-footed or pock-marked girl similarly situated. She is in a panic about the present, still more so about the future, and she searches for security. Where can that be captured? Nowhere else as surely as in the civil service. There, in the mediocrity and virtual anonymity of commonplace tasks, the sexes--all four of them--are equal in the robot requirements and qualifications. There is no color line, no social selectivity; not even citizenship is always a prerequisite. Once the precious appointment is filed in a machine which knows no discrimination, there it stays for life.

Like immigrants from foreign lands, for these people are aliens in their own, they attract--more often send for and finance--those who speak their language and live their kind of lives. Congressman A. L. Miller, of Nebraska, a physician, author of the District’s new bill to regulate the homos, enunciated with an oratorical flourish the deathless statement that, “birds of a feather flock together.” William Jennings Bryan came from Nebraska, too.

The 6,000 who made the perennial payroll drew many more thousands who flunked it. Like pug-nosed, freckle-faced girls of no distinction, who become waitresses and car-hops, these inverts who are washed in with the tide and beached in the mud become clerks in shops, hairdressers, waiters, bartenders, most often in the places habitually patronized by those of their own stripe.

The Washington vice squad had listed 5,200 known deviates. Dr. Ben Karpen, psychiatrist at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital, believes they are in the tens of thousands.

Their chief meeting place is in leafy Lafayette Square, across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House. They make love under the equestrian statue of rugged Andrew Jackson, who must be whirling on his heavenly horse every time he sees what is going on around his monument. Lafayette Square is no bohemian section, like Washington Square in New York. The three sides not surrounded by the White House have such buildings as the Cosmos Club, formerly the home of Dolly Madison; the national headquarters of the League for Political Education of the American Federation of Labor; the Hay-Adams House, one of Washington’s finer hotels, and other dignified structures.

How the fairies happened to pick this place for their rendezvous, and how the cops let them get away with it, no one can trace.

The police keep making arrests, but it does not deter the homos from hanging out around the square. They make pick-ups there and quite often engage in immoral acts practically under the eyes of the sparrow cops.

They also foregather in Franklin Park, a few blocks away, in the center of the business district.

There is no geographic section where degenerates generally live. That is part of the general picture, everything, everywhere, in Washington.

Many rich fairies and lesbians live in expensive remodeled Georgetown homes, the nearest thing to a left-bank neighborhood. This is also a left-wing center.

Some parties which take place in Washington pervert sets are orgies beyond description and imagination. Every invention of Sacher-Masoch and the Marquis de Sade has been added to and improved upon, and is in daily use. Weekends find the pansies and lady-lovers on broad, baronial estates of wealthy perverts in nearby Virginia and Maryland. Many of the third sex journey regularly to New York, where they have friends in esoteric circles.

Washington has its transvestites, who get their thrills from appearing in the clothes of the opposite sex. Some of the ritzier dress shops on Connecticut Avenue couldn’t exist if it weren’t for the fairies who buy French imports. Many dress in drag on Thanksgiving Day and mingle in the holiday crowds with the costumed young folk.

While these lines were being typed, a member of the staff of Democratic Senator Edwin C. Johnson, of Colorado, who recently made front pages when he attacked the morals of the movie industry, was arrested by two vice squad officers in the men’s room in Lafayette Square and charged with committing indecent acts. Booked in $500 bail, he pleaded not guilty. He and Senator Johnson, who appeared with him in the preliminary hearing before the United States Attorney, made no statements. He was later acquitted by a jury.

The same day, Assistant U. S. Attorney Warren Wilson asked for the night closing of public comfort stations, calling them breeding places of perversion. Commenting on the increase of such cases, Wilson said, “90 percent of these offenses are committed in men’s rooms operated by the Federal government.”

Wilson mentioned Lafayette Square, Stanton Park, Dupont Circle and Franklin Park. He recommended that all these comfort stations be closed as soon after 4 P.M. as policemen on the 4–12 shift could do so, and be kept closed until 8 A.M.

“These stations were constructed when there were no other facilities in downtown Washington,” Wilson said. “Today, hundreds of restaurants are required to have toilet facilities by law. Many hotels have been constructed since the comfort stations.

“Public places are becoming cesspools of perversion.”

Many cocktail lounges and restaurants cater to irregulars. Most of them are near the Mayflower Hotel. The most popular resort is the Jewel Box, near 16th and L, NW, formerly known as the Maystat. It is a cocktail lounge with entertainment by a piano-player, who sings semi-risqué lyrics.

The waiters are obviously fairies. Most customers seem to fit into the pattern. The night we went there, a police car, with siren screaming, pulled up. We figured it was a pinch. After the cop threw out two customers, a waiter told us everything was o.k.

“Those boys got fresh,” he said. “They tried to flirt with those two women sitting there. We don’t tolerate flirting--anyway not with women.”

Then he minced off, hand on hip.

Fags also like a restaurant known as Mickey’s, behind the Mayflower. They patronize the second floor of a place in the 1700 block of H Street. One night two Congressmen, a couple of army officers, and two young servicemen were mixing beer and gin there, and kissing each other. They also swish around the Sand Bar in Thomas Circle.

A favorite meeting-place for keeping appointments is the lobby of the Franklin Park Hotel. The Riggs Turkish Bath, the only one in town, under Keith’s Theatre, was closed up because these undesirables took it over. Its license has since been restored.

Black Washington has its share of deviates, too.

There is free crossing of racial lines among fairies and lesbians. We have seen aristocratic Southerners, on the bias, hunt down Negro men for dalliance. We bumped into a gal in show business, who we know is queer, sitting with two mannish-looking women at the Jewel Box. She invited us to a party in Black Town, an inter-racial, inter-middle-sex mélange, with long-haired, made-up Negro and white boys simpering while females of both races mingled in unmistakable exaltation.

During the summer, groups of colored fairies make up “yachting” parties and cruise the Potomac on the steamer Robert E. Lee. One Saturday night, last summer, over 100 cops were dispatched to the docks when the “Society of Female Impersonators” was to have a midnight sail. They found 1,700 Negro men, all dressed as women, on the boat, and as many more trying to get on. A riot was in the making, but the cops busted it up and kept it quiet when they hauled away two wagon-loads. The ship finally got off at 2 A.M.

Two weeks later, in another melee on the same boat, a colored man was fatally shot by a police detective after he jumped into the water. Another Negro, who pleaded guilty to having started the riot, was fined $200 for having endangered the lives of 600 persons. Some months later, Washingtonians were mystified by an ad in a daily paper which read as follows: “S.S. Mt. Vernon--moonlight cruise--8:30 P.M.--beer--stag or drag.”

No one knows how many lesbians there are, because the female--or is it male--of the pervert species is seldom spoken about and is much less obvious. Psychiatrists and sociologists who have made a study of the problem in Washington think there are at least twice as many Sapphic lovers as fairies. A large incidence of lesbianism is concomitant with the shortage of men, where women work together, live together, play together, so love together.

Some display themselves, strut around in fairy joints; all queers are in rapport with all others. You will see them also in some of the late bottle-clubs, on the make for the same girls the he-wolves are chasing.

The mannish women used to hang out at the Show Boat Bar, H and 13th, until the management drove them out. Now in David’s Grill, formerly the Horseshoe, in back of the Mayflower Hotel, they outnumber the pansies who haunted the place. Many lesbians frequent Kavakos’ Grill, in the SE section, though this is not any joint so specializing. The club, owned by Bill Kavakos, a rich Greek who likes to gamble, is near the Navy Yard. It caters to sailors and slummers.

A breakdown of occupations in one group of 543 perverts who were arrested showed some interesting sidelights. Among them was only one actor, but 92 students. There were 58 army personnel and 28 from the navy. Even the rugged Marines appeared. Among the deviates were one bartender, one barber and one baker. There were four attorneys, only two doctors and only one embalmer. This is the record:

Accountant 7
Actor 1
Airport employee 3
Army:
Commissioned 9
Noncommissioned 49
Attorney 4
Baker 1
Barber 1
Bartender 1
Businessman 7
Butcher 1
Cab driver 2
Clerk 48
Diplomat 1
Doctor 2
Embalmer 1
Embassy personnel 1
Government employee 57
Guard 9
Historian 1
Horse breeder 1
Interior decorator 3
Jeweler 1
Laundryman 6
Librarian 3
Marines, U. S. 2
Minister 3
Musician 5
Navy:
Commissioned 1
Noncommissioned 27
Page boy 1
Pharmacist 4
Porter 6
Radio personnel 3
Realtor 2
Reporter 2
Restaurant personnel 27
Salesman 10
Sculptor 2
Servant 10
Service-station operator 2
Skilled laborer 17
Stenographer and secretary 4
Student 92
Teacher and Professor 12
Technician 3
Unemployed 50
Unskilled laborer 31
Writer 2
---
Total 543

With more than 6,000 fairies in government offices, you may be concerned about the security of the country. Fairies are no more disloyal than the normal. But homosexuals are vulnerable, they can be blackmailed or influenced by sex more deeply than conventional citizens; they are far more intense about their love-life.

Foreign chancelleries long ago learned that homos were of value in espionage work. The German Roehm, and later Goering, established divisions of such in the Foreign Office. That was aped by Soviet Russia, which has a flourishing desk now in Moscow. According to Congressman Miller, who made a comprehensive study of the subject, young students are indoctrinated and given a course in homosexuality, then taught to infiltrate in perverted circles in other countries. Congressman Miller said:

“These espionage agents have found it rather easy to send their homosexuals here and contact their kind in sensitive departments of our Government. Blackmail and many other schemes are used to gather secret information.

“The homosexual is often a man of considerable intellect and ability. It is found that the cycle of these individuals’ homosexual desires follows the cycle closely patterned to the menstrual period of women. There may be three or four days in each month that the homosexual’s instincts break down and drive the individual into abnormal fields of sexual practice. Under large doses of sedatives during this sensitive cycle, he may escape such acts.

“The problems of sexual maladjustments are urgent and still far from a solution. In the Army, several thousand were discharged. When caught in the act, they were generally discharged without honor, which means loss of citizenship. Many failed to survive rigors of warfare and intimate association with men. The majority were unable to conceal their tendencies and were eventually eliminated with disgrace.

“Never is the bond which unites two friends such that the acquisition of a new friend by one is regarded angrily by the other; but quite otherwise is the life among homosexuals. Here jealousy reigns supreme. Male homosexuals will not share their fairy with anybody.

“The sexual attraction exercised by a male on another may be apparent in many ways. The homosexual will become excited by the mere presence of some man in a public place. They often approach that man, though he is a stranger. A taxi-driver finds fares making indiscreet advances. The homosexual has no sensation in the presence of the most beautiful and seductive female. Her amorous advances may be repulsive.”

Until the recent purges in the State Department, there was a gag around Washington you had to speak with a British accent, wear a homburg hat, or have a queer quirk if you wanted to get by the guards at the door.

One high State Department official was a notorious homo who preferred young Negro boys. He was detected in a Pullman car of the Southern Railroad--on the funeral train to bury Speaker Bankhead, father of Tallulah--making immoral advances to a porter. The story reached newspaper offices, but before it could be printed the State Department sent out an urgent appeal to editors to “kill,” because it might imperil the war effort. When this official’s misdeeds were placed before President Roosevelt, it was said he refused to replace him because they both “wore the same school tie.” After resigning from the government, this official almost died of exposure when a Negro farm hand, jealous because of his attention to another, slugged him.

Aware of the seriousness of the problem, the State Department has a highly hush-hush Homosexual Bureau, manned by trained investigators and former counter-espionage agents, whose duties are to ferret out pansies in Foggy Bottom.

But the department cannot free itself of boondoggling tendencies, for at the same time it retains a personable and intelligent young lady to prepare a treatise on homosexualism, the purpose being to see if it’s possible to cure or contain the deviates who remain on the roles. Her assignment requires her to visit faggot dives, observe the queers in action and ask them how they got that way.

The following will be denied, but whenever possible the YMCA is vetoing the use of its facilities, especially the swimming pool, to all State Department employees, just to be on the safe side.

A man of almost cabinet rank in the Defense Department is also a pervert, with bivalent tendencies, a two-way performer.

These are no isolated incidents. The government is honeycombed in high places with people you wouldn’t let in your garbage-wagons.

David K. Eichler, a brilliant 37-year-old Harvard post-graduate who was a top policy-maker in the State Department as Deputy Secretary General of the Far Eastern Commission until a couple of months ago, was arrested by Park Police on the Ellipse, charged with committing an unspeakable act with a Negro man. He put up $25 “forfeit,” a Washington variation of bail cash, about which more in another chapter. The next day, at the hearing, the colored man pleaded guilty, but when Eichler didn’t appear the judge told the prisoner he might change his plea, inasmuch as his co-defendant wasn’t there.

The black fairy said, “Never mind, judge. I had a good time.”

Shortly after his arrest, Eichler went on a vacation trip to the South. After learning about the pinch, security officials instituted a search for him and summoned him back to Washington. Eichler admitted nothing, but resigned his $9,000-a-year job. He wasn’t asked to stay.

On the other hand, the Grand Jury voted a no-bill when Eugene Desvernine, 34, acting officer-in-charge of Caribbean affairs in the State Department, was arrested for an alleged sex offense against a 13-year-old boy. Desvernine, suspended from the department after his arrest in East Potomac Park, has been restored to duty.

The original charges against fairies in the State Department listed only 91, but considerably more than a hundred have been discharged from it since. More are asked to withdraw. And there are believed to be hundreds not yet shown up.