Hello, Sucker
When twenty-three-year-old Mary Louise Cecilia Guinan came to Manhattan from Waco, Texas in 1907, she headed straight for Greenwich Village, where self-created larger-than-life characters like her belonged in those days. Her first residence was a two-dollar-a-week room at 72 Washington Square South. The Village remained her home base for the rest of her life, though for the first decade she didn’t exactly settle down there. She toured with vaudeville troupes as a singer and dancer, and made her first silent film, The Wildcat, in 1917. She specialized in playing cowgirls in Westerns, doing her own stunts, appearing in some three dozen silent films. She’d later tell the press it had been three hundred, having learned early that when dealing with the gossip writers an entertaining fib always trumps a mundane truth. After she came back to the Village for good in 1920 and became rich and successful, she moved to a duplex at 17 West Eighth Street, filling it with antiques and bric-a-brac and bringing her parents to come live with her there. Decades later it would house the famous Eighth Street Bookshop. She installed the chorus girls from her club nearby, and parked her limos in a Village garage.
The decade-long party called Prohibition was on, and Texas was more than ready to play the hostess. Brassy, ballsy, wise-cracking and fun-loving, a kind of smaller-scale Mae West, with whom she was friends, from 1922 on she was the mistress of ceremonies at several Times Square speakeasies, including the high-toned Beaux Arts Cafe and the King Cole room at the Knickerbocker Hotel, where the party-goers included Rudy Valentino, John Barrymore, Vanderbilts and Whitneys. She then hooked up with Larry Fay, a gangster from Hell’s Kitchen who, like many hoodlums in New York, saw acres of diamonds in the city’s exploding speakeasy and nightclub scene. As the emcee at his speakeasy the El Fay Club on West Forty-Fifth Street, Guinan was as much a draw as the chorus girls who kick-lined behind her. Wall Streeters, Ivy Leaguers, movie stars current (Tom Nix) and future (George Raft, still a Times Square taxi dancer), Mayor Jimmy Walker, gangsters, judges, visiting senators and tourists filled the joint with whoopee. Columnists Walter Winchell and Ed Sullivan mined the place for its rich mother lode of gossip. Ring Lardner and Damon Runyon stole snappy lines from Guinan’s patter. Her “Hello, sucker!” greeting and “Give the little girls a big hand” became catch-phrases of the dry decade. George S. Kaufman used her nickname for visiting businessmen from the heartland, “butter-and-egg men,” as the title of his 1925 Broadway hit.
The authorities couldn’t leave a speakeasy as universally famous as El Fay alone, and it was often raided, landing Guinan and the “little girls” in jail. But Fay, who was raking in around seven hundred thousand dollars a year – more than eight million in today’s dollars – knew all the palms to grease, and Texas and her gals always walked the next morning. When El Fay was finally padlocked for good, Fay and Guinan immediately opened the Texas Guinan Club nearby. It was periodically raided as well. The newshounds hanging around the grand Police Headquarters building downtown elbowed and shoved to get shots of Guinan, who by now was a very rich woman, stepping out of a paddy wagon in furs and diamonds, followed by her girls in their skimpy stage outfits.
Guinan branched out on her own with her 300 Club on West Fifty-Fourth Street, instantly the hottest spot in town. Everybody went there – Mae West, Clara Bow, Gloria Swanson, Al Jolson, socialites, politicians, visiting princes. George Gershwin would drop by and play the piano. Even the crusading radio evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson made a visit. McPherson was to the 1920s evangelical movement what Guinan was to speakeasies, and like Texas she never passed on an opportunity for press. They understood each other. The Guinan-McPherson match was almost as celebrated as Tunney-Dempsey. “After a quick warm-up at a dark Greenwich Village dive,” Leo Trachtenberg wrote in City Journal (Spring 1998), “where the natives taught her the unholy Black Bottom dance, McPherson swept into Texas’s establishment at 3 am, followed by reporters feverishly writing down her warnings about a city spiraling its way downward to fiery damnation.” Patrons cheered as she joined Guinan on the stage. The next day, Guinan and her girls marched into the Glad Tidings Tabernacle on West Thirty-Third Street to catch McPherson’s sermon – then headed to the club. Guinan v. McPherson ended in a draw, both of them winning a bounty of publicity.
The crash of ‘29 and ensuing Depression brought Guinan low, as it did so many other high-rollers. She and her little girls hit the road. When they tried to tour Europe, the French authorities, in an oddly prudish move considering the nightlife in Paris at the time, refused them entry. The always resourceful Texas turned the experience into a satirical revue, Too Hot For Paris.
She also made two more films, her only talkies. In the 1929 Queen of the Night Clubs she basically plays herself in a cast that included Raft and Eddie Foy, Jr. She did the same, as Tex Kaley, in her last picture, the 1933 Broadway Through a Keyhole, a low-grade musical. The story, by Winchell, was a barely fictionalized version of Al Jolson’s complicated courtship of and troubled marriage to Ruby Keeler, a dancer in Guinan’s troupe and dating Guinan’s partner Fay when Jolson met her. When the movie came out Jolson was so enraged he punched Winchell and knocked him out. UPI reported, “Mammy-Singing Al Jolson Punches Walter Winchell, The 'Keyhole Peeper,’ and Appreciative Crowd Cheers.”
That year, touring Too Hot For Paris in Vancouver, Guinan died of intestinal problems, probably ulcerated colitis exacerbated by a lifetime of drink. She was 49. Her body was brought back to New York, the city she loved, where thousands lined up for the viewing at the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel, Manhattan’s funeral home to the stars. (Others laid out there have included Valentino, Cagney, Irving Berlin, Garbo, Lennon, Stravinsky, Lord Buckley, Norman Mailer, Judy Garland, Candy Darling, Nicola Tesla and Heath Ledger.) She was buried in Queens. Prohibition died a month later.
Guinan’s legacy lived on. Her pal Mae West played a character based on her in her movie debut, the 1932 Night After Night, opposite Raft. Phyllis Diller played her in Splendor in the Grass in 1961. Madonna once planned a musical based on her called Hello Suckers!. And yes, the Whoopi Goldberg character on Star Trek: The Next Generation was named for her.
by John Strausbaugh