endroits pour boire where you could ply a likely lass with a cocktail or two. That meant you were obliged to rub shoulders with denizens of the underworld—the plight of Orpheus. It didn’t mean you had to shoot craps with these people, but that helped.
“I knew a gangster called Vido Arracci who would blow away a rival without so much as a ‘ scusi ,’ but who loved opera, loved to quote Dante and Petrarch, and loved Old Master paintings. I used to drink with friends at a little speak that he owned called the Trolley Lounge, and I would make sketches of some of the gals who entertained there. Vido saw them and bought a couple, then one day he said, ‘Hey, bub, you paint too?’ He asked me to paint his girlfriend, a lusty-looking contralto named Mae Monte. He told me he wanted the picture to be ‘kinda intimate, you know whad I mean? Like Titian did ’em, an’ Rubens. An’ you can look all you like, so long as you don’t get too pally—get my drift?’ Mae was a girl who loved to take her clothes off. I painted her twice—once for Vido and once for myself. It also turned out that Vido had quite a few girlfriends, and he wanted me to paint them all.
“By then I knew a lot of Vido’s—let’s call them his ‘associates.’ One of them was a tough little character called Tony Peanuts—at least that’s what people called him behind his back—and he controlled a couple of burlesque houses. I had free run of those places. I could sketch in the wings, paint the girls in their dressing rooms. It was a swell time. The girls would ask me to make drawings in return for favors. The kids these days think they invented sex, but you don’t know what sex is till you’ve enjoyed a roundelaywith a couple of exotic dancers.”
This was all very interesting, but I wasn’t there to do archival research into the priapic habits of modern American masters, and I was getting more and more curious about the chairs we were sitting on and the walls of books.
“So, if we wanted to bring this story up to date,” I asked, “what would that tell us about Aladdin’s Alibi, and what would it tell us about Sandy Smollett?”
“Well,” said Langham, who was on a roll and wasn’t about to apply the brakes without a fight, “I made the mistake of marrying this woman named Cynthia Cutteridge—a ball bearing heiress from Cincinnati who turned out to be a hardcore ball breaker. She didn’t approve of me spending time with strippers and chorus girls . . .”
I saw that I would have to bide my time, and eventually we got round to Aladdin’s Alibi, by way of Palm Beach and other landscaped parking lots for the mink bikini set. At last he arrived at the point.
“From Cynthia’s funeral I went directly to the airport. From La Guardia I took a cab directly to 42nd Street and the first place I saw was the Alibi. I was immediately at home. The place is vulgar, if you like, but I’ve always liked vulgar.”
Looking around at the tasteful furnishings of the atelier, and photographs of tennis parties and tango teas, presumably taken during his society period, I thought that they didn’t quite add up with his last statement. But lately nothing did. He took me over to a big studio easel that held a large canvas. It had been facing away from me till then. The painting was almost finished. It showed a predominantly male audience seated at tables around an apron stage, scantily dressed cocktail waitresses moving among the tables, and caricatured faces of customers leering toward the performer on stage. She was the one part of the painting that was unfinished—no more than a ghostly presence suggested by a few quick brushstrokes. Her almost insolent pose was already discernible, and I could imagine the woman looking down at the gawking faces below with a disdainful expression that I had become familiar with.
“What do you think, dear boy?” Langham asked.
It was an over-elaborate, overworked parody of his early paintings, but I
“I knew a gangster called Vido Arracci who would blow away a rival without so much as a ‘ scusi ,’ but who loved opera, loved to quote Dante and Petrarch, and loved Old Master paintings. I used to drink with friends at a little speak that he owned called the Trolley Lounge, and I would make sketches of some of the gals who entertained there. Vido saw them and bought a couple, then one day he said, ‘Hey, bub, you paint too?’ He asked me to paint his girlfriend, a lusty-looking contralto named Mae Monte. He told me he wanted the picture to be ‘kinda intimate, you know whad I mean? Like Titian did ’em, an’ Rubens. An’ you can look all you like, so long as you don’t get too pally—get my drift?’ Mae was a girl who loved to take her clothes off. I painted her twice—once for Vido and once for myself. It also turned out that Vido had quite a few girlfriends, and he wanted me to paint them all.
“By then I knew a lot of Vido’s—let’s call them his ‘associates.’ One of them was a tough little character called Tony Peanuts—at least that’s what people called him behind his back—and he controlled a couple of burlesque houses. I had free run of those places. I could sketch in the wings, paint the girls in their dressing rooms. It was a swell time. The girls would ask me to make drawings in return for favors. The kids these days think they invented sex, but you don’t know what sex is till you’ve enjoyed a roundelaywith a couple of exotic dancers.”
This was all very interesting, but I wasn’t there to do archival research into the priapic habits of modern American masters, and I was getting more and more curious about the chairs we were sitting on and the walls of books.
“So, if we wanted to bring this story up to date,” I asked, “what would that tell us about Aladdin’s Alibi, and what would it tell us about Sandy Smollett?”
“Well,” said Langham, who was on a roll and wasn’t about to apply the brakes without a fight, “I made the mistake of marrying this woman named Cynthia Cutteridge—a ball bearing heiress from Cincinnati who turned out to be a hardcore ball breaker. She didn’t approve of me spending time with strippers and chorus girls . . .”
I saw that I would have to bide my time, and eventually we got round to Aladdin’s Alibi, by way of Palm Beach and other landscaped parking lots for the mink bikini set. At last he arrived at the point.
“From Cynthia’s funeral I went directly to the airport. From La Guardia I took a cab directly to 42nd Street and the first place I saw was the Alibi. I was immediately at home. The place is vulgar, if you like, but I’ve always liked vulgar.”
Looking around at the tasteful furnishings of the atelier, and photographs of tennis parties and tango teas, presumably taken during his society period, I thought that they didn’t quite add up with his last statement. But lately nothing did. He took me over to a big studio easel that held a large canvas. It had been facing away from me till then. The painting was almost finished. It showed a predominantly male audience seated at tables around an apron stage, scantily dressed cocktail waitresses moving among the tables, and caricatured faces of customers leering toward the performer on stage. She was the one part of the painting that was unfinished—no more than a ghostly presence suggested by a few quick brushstrokes. Her almost insolent pose was already discernible, and I could imagine the woman looking down at the gawking faces below with a disdainful expression that I had become familiar with.
“What do you think, dear boy?” Langham asked.
It was an over-elaborate, overworked parody of his early paintings, but I
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