Sitting majestically in her cage like a raffish queen, Mazie is one of the few pleasant sights of the Bowery. She is a short, bosomy woman in her middle forties. Some people believe she has a blurry resemblance to Mae West. Her hair is the color of sulphur. Her face is dead white, and she wears a smudge of rouge the size of a silver dollar on each cheek. Her eyes are sleepy and droopy-lidded. On duty, she often wears a green celluloid eyeshade. She almost always has a cigarette hanging from a corner of her mouth, and this makes her look haughty. Like a movie croupier, she can smoke a cigarette down to the end and not take it from her mouth once, even while talking. She has a deep cigarette cough; she smokes three and a half packs a day and says tobacco is murdering her. On her right hand she wears four diamond rings. She likes vigorous colors, and her dresses are spectacular; they come from shops on Division Street. The glass-topped Bowery and Chinatown rubberneck wagons often park in front of the Venice, and now and then a band of sightseers stand on the sidewalk and stare at Mazie. She despises sightseers and says they give the Bowery a black eye. Sometimes she thumbs her nose at them. Actually, however, she does not mind being stared at. ‘People walk past here just to give me the eye,’ she once said. ‘I got a public of my own, just like a god-damn movie-pitcher star.’
Mazie is a talkative woman, and on most subjects she is remarkably frank, but she rarely says anything about her private life, and some people on the Bowery consider her a mystery woman. A man who had been stopping by to chat with her several times a week for years suddenly realized recently that he did not know whether she was Miss or Mrs Gordon. ‘You ever been married, Mazie?’ he asked. ‘That’s for me to know, you to find out,’ she said sharply. A moment later she added, ‘I’ll ask you this. Do I look and act like a girl that never had a date?’ People around Chatham Square believe, among other things, that she was a belly dancer in the Hurtig & Seamon burlesque houses when she was a young woman, which isn’t true. They claim, with not much relevance, that she gives her spare money to bums because she was once disappointed in a love affair. Furthermore, they believe she was born in Chinatown. Actually, she is a native of Boston, a fact which gives her a lot of satisfaction. Every winter she takes a week off and spends it in Boston, just walking around. She believes the people of Boston are superior to the people elsewhere. One night a blind-drunk bum stumbled into an ‘L’ pillar in front of the Venice, skinning his nose, and she rushed out and dragged him into her lobby. Then she went into a nearby saloon and yelled, ‘Gimme some hot water and a clean rag!’ ‘You want to take a bath, Mazie?’ asked the bartender. This remark enraged her. ‘Don’t you talk like that to me, you yellow-bellied jerk,’ she said. ‘I come from Boston, and I’m a lady.’
Mazie says her real name is Mazie Phillips, but she will not tell anything about her parents. Her intimates say that around 1903, when she was a schoolgirl in Boston, her older sister, Rosie, came to New York and married Louis Gordon, an East Side gambler and promoter. They established a home on Grand Street, and a few years later Mazie and her younger sister, Jeanie, came to live with them. The family of Belle Baker, the vaudeville singer, lived nearby on Chrystie Street. Irving Becker, Belle’s brother, now the manager of a road company of ‘Tobacco Road,’ once had a job loading rifles in a shooting gallery Gordon operated at Grand Street and the Bowery. ‘We and the Gordons were great friends,’ Becker said recently. ‘Louie Gordon was as fine a gambler as the East Side ever produced. He was a big, stately gentleman and he gave to the poor, and the bankroll he carried a billy goat couldn’t swallow it. He hung around race tracks, but he would gamble on anything. He made a lot of money on horses and invested it in Coney Island. He and his brother, Leo, helped back the original Luna Park, which opened in 1903. He was one of those silent gamblers. He never said nothing about himself. He gave everybody a fair shake, and he didn’t have a thing to hide, but he just never said nothing about himself. All the Gordons were that way.’
In 1914, Gordon opened a moving-picture theatre in a building he owned on Park Row, naming it the Venice, after an Italian restaurant in Coney Island whose spaghetti he liked. After operating it four years, he found that it kept him away from the tracks and he gave it to Rosie, who had been working in the ticket cage. The next year he sold his Bowery shooting gallery, in which, for several months, Mazie had been running a candy-and-root-beer concession. Rosie did not like selling tickets, so Mazie took her job. Around this time, Mazie began calling herself Mazie Gordon. She will not explain why she took her brother-in-law’s name. ‘That’s my business,’ she says. The Gordons left Grand Street in the early twenties, moving to a house on Surf Avenue in Coney. Mazie continued to live with them. Louis was away much of the time, following the horses. Mazie says that once, after a good season in Saratoga, he gave her a Stutz which, with accessories, cost $5,000. She used to ride down to Coney in the Stutz every night after work; one of the ushers at the Venice was her chauffeur. In October, 1932, Louis fell dead of a heart attack at the Empire City race track. Mazie and her sisters left Coney Island a few years later and returned to the East Side, eventually taking an apartment together in Knickerbocker Village, four blocks from the Venice. They live quietly. Rosie, a taciturn, sad-eyed woman, looks after property left by her husband. Besides her interest in the Venice, this property includes a number of lots along the boardwalk in Coney and an ancient red-brick tenement at 9 James Street, a block from the Venice. This tenement has sixteen cold-water flats, all occupied by unmarried Chinese men. Jeanie, a handsome young woman, boasts that she has gone to the West Coast and back ten times while working in vaudeville as an acrobatic dancer. Now and then she spells Mazie in the cage at the Venice.
Mazie’s hours would kill most women. She works seven days a week, seldom taking a day off, and is usually on duty from 9:30 A.M. until 11 P.M. Her cage is not much more spacious than a telephone booth, but she long ago learned how to make herself comfortable in it. She sits on two thick pillows in a swivel chair and wears bedroom slippers. In summer she keeps an electric fan, aimed upward, on the floor, replacing it in winter with an electric heater. When the weather is especially cold she brings her dog, Fluffy, an old, wheezy Pomeranian bitch, to the theatre. She lets Fluffy sleep in her lap, and this keeps both of them warm. Mazie makes change as automatically as she breathes, and she finds time for many domestic chores while on duty. She mends clothes, puts red polish on her fingernails, reads a little, and occasionally spends half an hour or so cleaning her diamonds with a scrap of chamois skin. On rainy days she sends out for her meals, eating them right in the cage. She uses the marble change counter for a table. Once, hunched over a plate of roast-beef hash, she looked up and said to a visitor, ‘I do light housekeeping in here.’ When she gets thirsty she sends an usher across the street to the King Kong Bar & Grill for a cardboard container of beer. She used to keep a bottle of Canadian whiskey, which she calls ‘smoke,’ hidden in her cash drawer, but since an appendix operation in 1939 she has limited herself to celery tonic and beer.
There are two cluttered shelves on one wall of her cage. On the bottom shelf are a glass jar of ‘jawbreakers,’ a kind of hard candy which she passes out to children, a clamshell that serves as an ashtray, a hind leg of a rabbit, a stack of paper towels, and a box of soap. When a bum with an exceptionally grimy face steps up to buy a ticket, Mazie places a couple of paper towels and a cake of soap before him and says, ‘Look, buddy, I’ll make a bargain with you. If you’ll take this and go in the gents’ room and wash your face, I’ll let you in free.’ Few bums are offended by this offer; most of them accept willingly. Occasionally she gives one fifteen cents and sends him to a barber college on Chatham Square for a shave and a haircut. If she is in a good humor, Mazie will admit a bum free without much argument. However, she says she can tell a bum by the look in his eyes, and ordinary citizens who have heard of her generosity and try to get passed in outrage her. ‘If you haven’t got any money,’ she tells such people, ‘go steal a watch.’
On Mazie’s top
shelf is a pile of paper-backed books, which includes ‘Old Gipsy Nan’s Fortune Teller and Dream Book,’ ‘Prince Ali Five Star Dream Book,’ and ‘Madame Fu Futtam’s Spiritual Magical Dream Book.’ Mazie is deeply interested in dreams, although at times she seems a little ashamed of it. ‘A dream just means you et something that didn’t agree with you,’ she sometimes says, rather defiantly. Nevertheless, she makes a practice of remembering them and spends hours hunting through her books for satisfactory interpretations. Also on her top shelf are a rosary, some back numbers of a religious periodical called the Messenger of the Sacred Heart, and a worn copy of ‘Spiritual Reflections for Sisters,’ by the Reverend Charles J. Mullaly, S. J., which she borrowed from an Italian nun, one of the Daughters of Mary Help of Christians, who conduct a school in Chinatown. Lately Mazie has been reading a page of this book every day. She says that she understands hardly any of it but that reading it makes her feel good. Mazie is not a Catholic; she is Jewish, but she has been entranced by Roman Catholicism for many years. One of her oldest friends in the neighborhood is Monsignor William E. Cashin, rector of St Andrew’s, the little church back of the Municipal Building. She frequently shows up for the Night Workers’ Mass, which is said every Sunday at 2:30 A.M. in St Andrew’s by Monsignor Cashin. She sits in a middle pew with her head bowed. Surrounded by policemen, firemen, scrubwomen, telephone girls, nurses, printers, and similar night workers who regularly attend the mass, she feels at home. On the way out she always slips a dollar bill into the poor box. Now and then she calls on the Monsignor and has a long talk with him, and whenever he takes a walk on the Bowery he pauses at her cage and passes the time of day.
Mazie also knows two mothers superior quite well. The rosary she keeps in her cage is a present from the Sisters of Our Lady of Christian Doctrine, who run Madonna House, a settlement on Cherry Street. Sister Margaret, the superior there, has known Mazie for years and has made an attempt to understand her. ‘On the Bowery it’s probably an asset to have a reputation for toughness,’ Sister Margaret once told a friend, ‘and I’m afraid Mazie tries to give people the worst possible impression of herself, just for self-protection. She isn’t really tough. At heart, she’s good and kind. We can always count on her for help. A few weeks ago there was a fire in an Italian tenement near here. One of the families in it had a new baby. It was late at night and we didn’t know exactly how to help them. Two of the sisters went to Mazie, and she came right down and found the family a new flat and gave the mother some money.’ Mazie’s favorite saint is St John Bosco. There is a statue of him in a niche in the steeple of the weatherbeaten Church of the Transfiguration in Chinatown. At night the saint can be clearly seen by the light of the galaxy of neon signs on the chop-suey joints which surround the church. When she passes through Mott Street, Mazie looks up at the saint and crosses herself. ‘I asked a sister once if it was O.K. for me to give myself a cross, and she told me it was,’ Mazie says.
Mazie became interested in Catholicism in the winter of 1920. A drug addict on Mulberry Street, a prostitute with two small daughters, came to her cage one night and asked for help. The woman said her children were starving. ‘I knew this babe was a junky,’ Mazie says, ‘and I followed her home just to see was she lying about her kids. She had two kids all right, and they were starving in this crummy little room. I tried to get everybody to do something – the cops, the Welfare, the so-called missions on the Bowery that the Methodists run or whatever to hell they are. But all these people said the girl was a junky. That excused them from lifting a hand. So I seen two nuns on the street, and they went up there with me. Between us, we got the woman straightened out. I liked the nuns. They seemed real human. Ever since then I been interested in the Cat’lic Church.’
Mazie does not spend much time at home, so she encourages people to visit her while she is working. Her visitors stand around in the lobby at the rear door of her cage. She frequently gets so interested in a caller that she swings completely around in her swivel chair and presents her back to customers, who have to shout and rap on the window before she will turn and sell them tickets. In the morning, practically all of her visitors are bums with hangovers who come to her, scratching themselves and twitching, and ask for money with which to get their first drinks of the day. She passes out dimes regularly to about twenty-five of these men. Because of this, she is disliked by many of the hard-shell evangelists who hold hymn-singings in the gutters of the Bowery every evening. One of them, a grim, elderly woman, came to the cage not long ago and shook a finger at Mazie. ‘We sacrifice our nights to come down here and encourage these unfortunates to turn over a new leaf,’ she said. ‘Then you give them money and they begin using intoxicants all over again.’ When Mazie is faced with such a situation, she makes irrelevant or vulgar remarks until the complainant leaves. On this occasion she leaned forward and said, ‘Par’n me, Madam, but it sounds like your guts are growling. What you need is a beer.’
Few of the men to whom Mazie gives money for eye-openers are companionable. They take her dimes with quivering fingers, mutter a word of thanks, and hurry off. Two of them, however, invariably linger a while. They have become close friends of Mazie’s. One is a courtly old Irishman named Pop, and the other is an addled, sardonic little man who says he is a poet and whom Mazie calls Eddie Guest. She says she likes Pop because he is so cheerful and Eddie Guest because he is so sad. ‘I come from a devout family of teetotallers,’ Pop once said. ‘They was thirteen in the family, and they called me the weakling because I got drunk on Saturday nights. Well, they’re all under the sod. Woodrow Wilson was President when the last one died, and I’m still here drinking good liquor and winking at the pretty girls.’ ‘That’s right, Pop,’ Mazie said. Pop works bus stops. He approaches people waiting on corners for a bus and asks for a nickel with which to get uptown or downtown, as the case may be. When he gets a nickel, he touches his hat and hurries off to the next bus stop. At night he sings ballads in Irish gin mills on Third Avenue. Mazie thinks he has a beautiful baritone, and every morning, in return for her dime, he favors her with two or three ballads. Her favorites – she hums them – are ‘Whiskey, You’re the Divil,’ ‘The Garden Where the Praties Grow,’ ‘Tiddly-Aye-Aye for the One-Eyed Reilly,’ and ‘The Widow McGinnis’s Pig.’ Sometimes Pop dances a jig on the tiled floor of the lobby. ‘Pop’s a better show than I got inside,’ Mazie says on these occasions.
Eddie Guest is a gloomy, defeated, ex-Greenwich Village poet who has been around the Bowery off and on for eight or nine years. He mutters poetry to himself constantly and is taken to Bellevue for observation about once a year. He carries all his possessions in a greasy beach bag and sleeps in flophouses, never staying in one two nights in succession, because, he says, he doesn’t want his enemies to know where he is. During the day he wanders in and out of various downtown branches of the Public Library. At the Venice one night he saw ‘The River,’ the moving picture in which the names of the tributaries of the Mississippi were made into a poem. When he came out, he stopped at Mazie’s cage, spread his arms, and recited the names of many of the walk-up hotels on the Bowery. ‘The Alabama Hotel, the Comet, and the Uncle Sam House,’ he said, in a declamatory voice, ‘the Dandy, the Defender, the Niagara, the Owl, the Victoria House and the Grand Windsor Hotel, the Houston, the Mascot, the Palace, the Progress, the Palma House and the White House Hotel, the Newport, the Crystal, the Lion and the Marathon. All flophouses. All on the Bowery. Each and all my home, sweet home.’ For some reason, Mazie thought this was extraordinarily funny. Now, each morning, in order to get a dime, Eddie Guest is obliged to recite this chant for her. It always causes her to slap her right thigh, throw her head back, and guffaw. Both Eddie Guest and Mazie can be grimly and rather pointlessly amused by the signs over flophouse entrances and by the bills of fare lettered in white on the windows of pig-snout restaurants. When Mazie passes the Victoria House and sees its sign, ‘ROOMS WITH ELECTRIC LIGHTS, 30C,’ or when she looks at the window of the Greek’s on Chatha
m Square, ‘SNOUTS WITH FRENCH FRY POTS & COFFEE, T, OR BUTTERMILK, 10C,’ she always snickers. Mazie has considerable respect for Eddie Guest but thinks he is kidding when he calls himself a poet. Once he read to her part of a completely unintelligible poem about civilization in the United States, on which he says he has been working for twenty years and which he calls ‘No Rags, No Bones, No Bottles Today.’ ‘If that’s a poem,’ Mazie said when he had finished, ‘I’m the Queen of Sweden.’
Mazie’s afternoon visitors are far more respectable than the morning ones. The people who stopped by to talk with her between noon and 6 P.M. one Saturday included Monsignor Cashin, Fannie Hurst, two detectives from the Oak Street station, a flashily dressed young Chinese gambler whom Mazie calls Fu Manchu and who is a power in Tze Far, the Chinatown version of the numbers lottery; two nuns from Madonna House, who wanted to thank her for buying a phonograph for the girls’ club at their settlement; a talkative girl from Atlanta, Georgia, called Bingo, once a hostess in a Broadway taxi-dance hall and now the common-law wife of the chef of a chop-suey restaurant on Mott Street; the bartender of a Chatham Square saloon, who asked her to interpret a dream for him; and the clerk of a flophouse, who came to tell her that a bum named Tex had hanged himself in the washroom the night before. When she was told about Tex, Mazie nodded sagely and said, as she always does when she hears about the death of someone she has known, ‘Well, we all got to go sooner or later. You can’t live forever. When your number’s up, rich or poor, you got to go.’ Most of the visitors on that afternoon happened to be old friends of Mazie’s. Miss Hurst, for example, she has known for eleven years. She calls her Fannie and likes to tell about their first meeting.
‘One night,’ she says, ‘a swell-looking dame came to my cage and said she often took walks on the Bowery and would like to meet me. She said her name was Fannie Hurst. “Pleased to meet you, Fannie,” I said. “My name is Mary Pickford.” It turned out she really was Fannie Hurst. At first I thought she was going to put me in a book, and I didn’t go for her. Since she promised not to write no books about me, we been pals.’ Miss Hurst visits Mazie frequently. Each time she comes, Mazie looks at her dress, fingers the material, asks how much it cost, tells her she got gypped, and advises her to try one of the shops on Division Street. Miss Hurst does not mind this. ‘I admire Mazie,’ she said. ‘She is the most compassionate person I’ve ever known. No matter how filthy or drunk or evil-smelling a bum may be, she treats him as an equal.’ Until recently, Miss Hurst occasionally took friends down to meet Mazie. ‘I’m afraid they looked on her as just another Bowery curiosity,’ she says. ‘So I don’t take people down any more. I used to invite Mazie to parties at my house. She always accepted but never came. I think she’s still a little suspicious of me, although I’ve never written a line about her and never intend to. I simply look upon her as a friend.’