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Gangsters and Gold Diggers: Old New York, the Jazz Age, and the Birth of Broadway
In this rousing tribute to an unforgettable time and place, Jerome Charyn picks up where Gangs of New York left off and transports readers back to a swaggering, golden era in American life—the Roaring Twenties—when Broadway the street exploded into Broadway the legend. Charyn looks at the men and women who helped make the Big Street the most glamorous place on the planet, from Mae West to Fanny Brice, Legs Diamond to Irving Berlin, Scott Fitzgerald to Arnold Rothstein, and many more. In cinematic prose and numerous photographs, Charyn captures Broadway's vagabondage, outlaw culture, and self-mythologizing. He brings a rollicking, rough-and-tumble period in New York history to life—conjuring an intoxicating portrait of Jazz Age excess by examining the denizens of that greatest of all "staggering machine[s] of desire," the street known as Broadway.
278 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2003
4 people are currently reading
164 people want to read
About the author
Jerome Charyn
224 books230 followersJerome Charyn is an award-winning American author. With more than 50 published works, Charyn has earned a long-standing reputation as an inventive and prolific chronicler of real and imagined American life.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."
Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year.
Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.
In addition to writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top ten percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."
Charyn's most recent novel, Jerzy, was described by The New Yorker as a "fictional fantasia" about the life of Jerzy Kosinski, the controversial author of The Painted Bird. In 2010, Charyn wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an imagined autobiography of the renowned poet, a book characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as a "fever-dream picaresque."
Charyn lives in New York City. He's currently working with artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka on an animated television series based on his Isaac Sidel crime novels.
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon calls him "one of the most important writers in American literature." New York Newsday hailed Charyn as "a contemporary American Balzac," and the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers."
Since the 1964 release of Charyn's first novel, Once Upon a Droshky, he has published thirty novels, three memoirs, eight graphic novels, two books about film, short stories, plays, and works of non-fiction. Two of his memoirs were named New York Times Book of the Year.
Charyn has been a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. He received the Rosenthal Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and was named Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture. Charyn is Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the American University of Paris.
In addition to writing and teaching, Charyn is a tournament table tennis player, once ranked in the top ten percent of players in France. Noted novelist Don DeLillo called Charyn's book on table tennis, Sizzling Chops & Devilish Spins, "The Sun Also Rises of ping-pong."
Charyn's most recent novel, Jerzy, was described by The New Yorker as a "fictional fantasia" about the life of Jerzy Kosinski, the controversial author of The Painted Bird. In 2010, Charyn wrote The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson, an imagined autobiography of the renowned poet, a book characterized by Joyce Carol Oates as a "fever-dream picaresque."
Charyn lives in New York City. He's currently working with artists Asaf and Tomer Hanuka on an animated television series based on his Isaac Sidel crime novels.
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
October 10, 2025
This book, ostensibly about old New York and the birth of Broadway, jumps around quite a bit and veers off in many directions, including into a synopsis of the film musical "Chicago." For the most part, it's an enjoyable read but at times I found myself getting lost in the chapters dealing with the gangsters who roamed through early Broadway. The problem is that many of them had more than one name - first, their birth names (which often were changed), then their nicknames, and sometimes there were even more than one of those. Sometimes the author refers to a particular gangster by his birth name and then in the next paragraph he is referring to the same person but this time with his nickname. I sometimes found myself having to back track to figure out who was being talked about. The parts I enjoyed the most were those sections dealing with Florenz Ziegfeld and some of the stars who became famous in his follies - Fanny Brice, Bert Williams, etc. Numerous celebrities of the period make appearances - Al Jolson, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Irving Berlin, Bessie Smith, the Marx Brothers and more. All of them deserving of more than the few paragraphs they are given. My problem with the book is that I began to doubt some of the author's research when I came across two mistakes. On one page, while talking about Ruby Keeler, he mentions that she was born in 1904. On the very next page he says she got married in 1928 when she was 19. If someone was born in 1904 and got married in 1928, they would be 24 at their wedding, not 19. It made me wonder if the author was poor at math or just being sloppy? I found another mistake in his section on Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. The author, talking about Goddard, says she "was Chaplin's 'muse' and co-star in 'City Lights' (1936)." This is completely wrong. First of all, "City Lights" was released in 1931, not '36 and Paulette Goddard was not in that film. The film that the author must be thinking of is Chaplin's "Modern Times," which was released in 1936 and did co-star Paulette Goddard. These sorts of mistakes, which could have been easily found if the book had had a fact-checker, made me doubt some of the other purported facts in the book.
March 16, 2023
This book is less of a curated narrative documentary and more of a collection of essays and vignettes of events and figures central to the history of 1920s New York City and Broadway. Despite its title, I find that the parts about gangsters are much less interesting than the deep dives into the entertainment of the era (and it’s complex artistic threads and racial politics).
I think this book fails as a historical narrative about the Broadway era. I think it succeeds in reinforcing some of the classic images and ideas about the era through its exploration of key figures, though.
This is a decent read, but it’s dry at times. I recommend it to people who maybe have a greater ongoing interest in this era of NYC’s history. As something if an outsider to this topic, the book can be a little hard to get into.
I think this book fails as a historical narrative about the Broadway era. I think it succeeds in reinforcing some of the classic images and ideas about the era through its exploration of key figures, though.
This is a decent read, but it’s dry at times. I recommend it to people who maybe have a greater ongoing interest in this era of NYC’s history. As something if an outsider to this topic, the book can be a little hard to get into.
July 4, 2025
A good companion piece to the classic Only Yesterday by F.L. Allen, though this one is specifically focused on the decadent New York scene of the 1910's thru 30's. It introduces the reader to characters such as Damon Runyan and Walter Winchell, as well as many of the gangsters working in the Prohibition-era alcohol trade and entertainment business (i.e. speakeasies, booze, and the precursors to the mainstream Broadway theater business). Written in much the same spirit as Allen's work (though it does unfortunately get preachy and self-righteous at times).
February 22, 2015
A Jazzy Book about the Jazz Age, Ward reviews Jerome Charyn’s Gangsters and Gold Diggers
Between World War One and The Great Depression, two eras of disillusionment, America had its Roaring Twenties. It was a to-hell-with-it-all decade of flapper girls, gangsters, illegal booze and speakeasies. The girls were a shocking departure from the previous decade’s demure Gibson Girls. The flappers’ shock was mostly intentional. They smoked and danced, petted and voted and drove cars. They swigged illegal booze out of flasks and flaunted their knees and bobbed their hair and became the symbol for an era brilliantly distilled (ha ha) in Jerome Charyn’s lively, entertaining, and oh-so readable gem, Gangsters and Gold Diggers, The Birth of Broadway.
The book is primarily, although not exclusively, the decade of the twenties. It’s the first third of the twentieth century. It’s the people who worked and played, mostly played, along Broadway, and with so many colorful characters available, the author builds his book around the personalities, creating insightful biographical sketches of the rogues who made the Broadway legend.
So many delicious characters!
Like Al Jolsen, best known today, if he’s known at all, as the star of the first talkie. Technically, it wasn’t the first talkie, there’d been sound in movies for thirty years. Call it the first full-length feature with synchronized dialogue, the film that drove a dagger into the heart of the silent film era. The Jolsen presented in this book is much more than an actor in blackface, speaking. He had a long career as a singer, film actor, and comedian, and at the peak of his fame, he was big, really big. Dubbed "The World's Greatest Entertainer,” you might think Jolsen was the most famous person to have emerged from St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, in Baltimore, Md. And maybe he was, or would have been, if not for the later emergence of another boy from the school ─ George Herman “Babe” Ruth Jr.
Junior? Really? Who knew?
The book doesn’t spend a lot of time with the Babe, maybe the author figures we know him well enough already, and with all those other juicy personalities to explore. Still, we see the Babe, striding like a colossus over Broadway, hell, over all of New York and America.
Babe Ruth isn’t the only sports personality present. There’s Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world from 1908 to 1915 and a tragic figure for years afterward. White America didn’t appreciate a black champion in those days, especially a champ who refused to scrape and bow and who had an affinity for white women. America destroyed Johnson. It took a while, Johnson was a tough cookie, and not just inside the ring. The author draws an apt analogy between Johnson and a later heavyweight champ, Muhammad Ali. Another analogy would be with Vic Power, the black, Puerto Rican-born baseball player who might have become the first black Yankee, ahead of Elston Howard, except Power was no more accepting of second-class status than was Johnson, and like Johnson, Power had an affinity for white women.
Then there’s John McGraw, legendary manager of the New York Giants. In the years before Babe Ruth, McGraw’s Giants were the kings of New York baseball. Muggsy (McGraw) was a part of the Broadway crowd, expounding the intricacies of baseball even as he indulged in marathon card games with shysters and bootleggers. (Take that, Pete Rose.)
New York, Broadway, in the twenties, was made for the garrulous Babe, but as the decade closes with the onset of the Great Depression, the exuberance fades. The Babe fades too (on the ball diamond, not in life, never in life) and the flapper girls go away. (The gangsters manage to hang around.) The new decade, with its legal booze is, in some ways, more sober than the previous decade. There’s a new king of the Yankees, the magisterial, introverted Joe DiMaggio. Joe was a fabulous ballplayer but he was no Babe Ruth off the field. And another black heavyweight champion steps onto the stage, the more compliant (outside of the ring) Joe Louis.
The book isn't really about sports. It’s about everything Broadway.
There’s a cogent assessment of The Great Gatsby and of the Fitzgeralds, F. Scott and Zelda, and there’s the colorful Damon Runyon, a sportswriter who transcended sports, but the most fun of all are the gangsters, the bootleggers. Thank you, America, for having had the audacity to outlaw booze. There’s Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein, a legend in his own time, even surrounded by legends. What about Capone, you ask? Sorry. Scarface was Chicago (although Brooklyn-born) and this is a book about Manhattan.
Back to Rothstein. He didn’t smoke and he only drank milk and he maybe fixed the 1919 World Series. Fitzgerald used him as Meyer Wolfsheim in the Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s mentor in the shady side of life.
What sparkles most throughout the book are those Ziegfeld girls. Call them the sun around which the rest of Broadway revolved. All the male characters, ballplayers, writers, hooligans, even the cops, drooled over the chorus line. Onstage every night, the girls were tall, leggy beauties, dancing, sometimes wearing six-foot headdresses, often scantily dressed, sometimes nude. They were a shocking sensation. The kick line was one route to marriage with a wealthy man, and sometimes it was the route to money and fame without the man. Joan Blondell and Barbara Stanwyck kicked; others ─ Joan Crawford, Hedda Hopper, Lucy, failed to make the cut.
In the final chapter of the book, the author takes us on a twenty-first century spin around the old haunts. The street and most of the buildings remain, but the exuberance, the pizazz, the audacity, the violence and the raw sexuality, are gone. Broadway meets Disney, Disney wins, and having spent a few hours with the characters of old Broadway, we ache for the loss. On May 11, 2010, the last surviving Ziegfeld girl, Dorothy Eaton Travis, who was also the youngest Ziegfeld Girl, strutting and kicking at fourteen, dies at the age of one hundred and six, and the book is closed, reluctantly, on an era.
Between World War One and The Great Depression, two eras of disillusionment, America had its Roaring Twenties. It was a to-hell-with-it-all decade of flapper girls, gangsters, illegal booze and speakeasies. The girls were a shocking departure from the previous decade’s demure Gibson Girls. The flappers’ shock was mostly intentional. They smoked and danced, petted and voted and drove cars. They swigged illegal booze out of flasks and flaunted their knees and bobbed their hair and became the symbol for an era brilliantly distilled (ha ha) in Jerome Charyn’s lively, entertaining, and oh-so readable gem, Gangsters and Gold Diggers, The Birth of Broadway.
The book is primarily, although not exclusively, the decade of the twenties. It’s the first third of the twentieth century. It’s the people who worked and played, mostly played, along Broadway, and with so many colorful characters available, the author builds his book around the personalities, creating insightful biographical sketches of the rogues who made the Broadway legend.
So many delicious characters!
Like Al Jolsen, best known today, if he’s known at all, as the star of the first talkie. Technically, it wasn’t the first talkie, there’d been sound in movies for thirty years. Call it the first full-length feature with synchronized dialogue, the film that drove a dagger into the heart of the silent film era. The Jolsen presented in this book is much more than an actor in blackface, speaking. He had a long career as a singer, film actor, and comedian, and at the peak of his fame, he was big, really big. Dubbed "The World's Greatest Entertainer,” you might think Jolsen was the most famous person to have emerged from St. Mary’s Industrial School for Boys, in Baltimore, Md. And maybe he was, or would have been, if not for the later emergence of another boy from the school ─ George Herman “Babe” Ruth Jr.
Junior? Really? Who knew?
The book doesn’t spend a lot of time with the Babe, maybe the author figures we know him well enough already, and with all those other juicy personalities to explore. Still, we see the Babe, striding like a colossus over Broadway, hell, over all of New York and America.
Babe Ruth isn’t the only sports personality present. There’s Jack Johnson, the heavyweight champion of the world from 1908 to 1915 and a tragic figure for years afterward. White America didn’t appreciate a black champion in those days, especially a champ who refused to scrape and bow and who had an affinity for white women. America destroyed Johnson. It took a while, Johnson was a tough cookie, and not just inside the ring. The author draws an apt analogy between Johnson and a later heavyweight champ, Muhammad Ali. Another analogy would be with Vic Power, the black, Puerto Rican-born baseball player who might have become the first black Yankee, ahead of Elston Howard, except Power was no more accepting of second-class status than was Johnson, and like Johnson, Power had an affinity for white women.
Then there’s John McGraw, legendary manager of the New York Giants. In the years before Babe Ruth, McGraw’s Giants were the kings of New York baseball. Muggsy (McGraw) was a part of the Broadway crowd, expounding the intricacies of baseball even as he indulged in marathon card games with shysters and bootleggers. (Take that, Pete Rose.)
New York, Broadway, in the twenties, was made for the garrulous Babe, but as the decade closes with the onset of the Great Depression, the exuberance fades. The Babe fades too (on the ball diamond, not in life, never in life) and the flapper girls go away. (The gangsters manage to hang around.) The new decade, with its legal booze is, in some ways, more sober than the previous decade. There’s a new king of the Yankees, the magisterial, introverted Joe DiMaggio. Joe was a fabulous ballplayer but he was no Babe Ruth off the field. And another black heavyweight champion steps onto the stage, the more compliant (outside of the ring) Joe Louis.
The book isn't really about sports. It’s about everything Broadway.
There’s a cogent assessment of The Great Gatsby and of the Fitzgeralds, F. Scott and Zelda, and there’s the colorful Damon Runyon, a sportswriter who transcended sports, but the most fun of all are the gangsters, the bootleggers. Thank you, America, for having had the audacity to outlaw booze. There’s Legs Diamond, Dutch Schultz and Lucky Luciano, and Arnold Rothstein, a legend in his own time, even surrounded by legends. What about Capone, you ask? Sorry. Scarface was Chicago (although Brooklyn-born) and this is a book about Manhattan.
Back to Rothstein. He didn’t smoke and he only drank milk and he maybe fixed the 1919 World Series. Fitzgerald used him as Meyer Wolfsheim in the Great Gatsby, Gatsby’s mentor in the shady side of life.
What sparkles most throughout the book are those Ziegfeld girls. Call them the sun around which the rest of Broadway revolved. All the male characters, ballplayers, writers, hooligans, even the cops, drooled over the chorus line. Onstage every night, the girls were tall, leggy beauties, dancing, sometimes wearing six-foot headdresses, often scantily dressed, sometimes nude. They were a shocking sensation. The kick line was one route to marriage with a wealthy man, and sometimes it was the route to money and fame without the man. Joan Blondell and Barbara Stanwyck kicked; others ─ Joan Crawford, Hedda Hopper, Lucy, failed to make the cut.
In the final chapter of the book, the author takes us on a twenty-first century spin around the old haunts. The street and most of the buildings remain, but the exuberance, the pizazz, the audacity, the violence and the raw sexuality, are gone. Broadway meets Disney, Disney wins, and having spent a few hours with the characters of old Broadway, we ache for the loss. On May 11, 2010, the last surviving Ziegfeld girl, Dorothy Eaton Travis, who was also the youngest Ziegfeld Girl, strutting and kicking at fourteen, dies at the age of one hundred and six, and the book is closed, reluctantly, on an era.
May 30, 2020
I wanted to like it, I really did. The topic was what initially drew me in Charyn's style is disjointed and scattered, making it extremely difficult to pinpoint a common thread throughout the book. It was interesting how he grounded seemingly larger than life figures like Babe Ruth, F Scott Fitzgerald and Jack Johnson. It was a struggle to get through the book. I did alot of outside research while reading to understand about who and what Charyn was talking about. I will say that due to the confusing nature of this text, I was left wanting more; my curiosity in 1910s-1930s entertainment is piqued. 2/4. Interesting but not enough substance and too scattered.
March 16, 2018
It’s a really fun series of what amount to connected essays on various Broadway characters.
April 10, 2020
Colpa mia perché mi aspettavo un altro tipo di libro, però va detto che è scritto molto bene, con molti riferimenti e molte informazioni interessanti.
July 7, 2023
Some really interesting nuggets about the 20s buried within the purple prose. Fans of the era will love it.
Read
February 9, 2016Having finished this book, I hardly know how to summarize it. There are so many images of so many famous (and not-quite-so-famous) people that it's less like a history, which proceeds more or less chronologically, and more like a music video, cutting from scene to scene, or a Howl-like poem. I saw the greatest minds of my generation (or at least some of the more colorful minds) holding court at a table at Lindy's, having no inner resources, bored by his own company, roaming from the Follies to the speakeasies, seduced by the girls' long legs, doing time at Sing Sing, ending last in a puddle of blood in the alley. The gangsters, the gold-diggers, the musicians, the writers, the sports stars, the politicians, they all blend together in a picture of something greater than their individual selves, this thing we are calling Jazz Age Broadway.
And Jerome Charyn not just describes the things that happened, he muses upon what they mean, and he muses upon the books and the movies that were based on the things that happened (Gatsby, Citizen Kane, Guys and Dolls) and what they mean. One part history, one part literary criticism, one part sociology, one part tabloid muckraking, and one part lyrical poetry. I found the whole of it hard to follow at times, as we cut from one story to another, but certainly entertaining.
And Jerome Charyn not just describes the things that happened, he muses upon what they mean, and he muses upon the books and the movies that were based on the things that happened (Gatsby, Citizen Kane, Guys and Dolls) and what they mean. One part history, one part literary criticism, one part sociology, one part tabloid muckraking, and one part lyrical poetry. I found the whole of it hard to follow at times, as we cut from one story to another, but certainly entertaining.
December 30, 2019
Packed with trivia (including entire plotlines, spoilers, and revues of films) I found this difficult to read. Charyn writes with breathless enthusiasm about the MOST famous, the MOST beautiful, and the MOST blah blah blah while he alternates between using the true name of historical figures and their nicknames. Many times I had to go back 4 or 5 paragraphs to be certain who Charyn was referring to.
It's possible the intent of the busy and frenetic style of writing is to mimic the chaos of these early years ala John O'Hara's stylistic treatment in "Butterfield 8" but that is more effective (and appreciated) in a novel than in a work of non-fiction. When I finally finished "Gangsters and Gold Diggers" I felt like I'd run a race, dodging potholes every step of the way.
It's possible the intent of the busy and frenetic style of writing is to mimic the chaos of these early years ala John O'Hara's stylistic treatment in "Butterfield 8" but that is more effective (and appreciated) in a novel than in a work of non-fiction. When I finally finished "Gangsters and Gold Diggers" I felt like I'd run a race, dodging potholes every step of the way.
October 24, 2008
Time travel back to the Jazz Age and get "lit-up" in speakeasies w/ gangsters and their molls, writers and their flapper girlfriends-for-the-night; Duke and Count and Bunny Berigan might be on stage, someone might get shot and killed just outside; half of Manahttan may burn down; but as long as the bootleg and smuggled-in-from Canada ("good stuff"), no one gives a hoot.
Wish I'd been there, my kinda world.
Wish I'd been there, my kinda world.
May 25, 2011
Full of interesting stories but scattered and disorganized.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews