Designs in Scarlet
I have a growing library of books to help support my writing activity. These books range from desktop standards such as dictionaries, thesauri (I use three), slang thesaurus, etc. I have a few books on writing and revising. I have books that help provide background for stories that take place in the past. Most helpful here has been The People's Chronology by James Trager (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1992) but I use a number of other sources, especially when the piece is novel length.
A large part of my library includes books dealing with sexual subjects. I'll highlight one here.
I've been working on a novel that takes place in the late 1930s. I was researching the useful Time Magazine online archives (http://www.time.com/time/archive/) and came across a review for a book published in 1939 which dealt with prostitution, pornography and other subjects. I found a copy of Courtney Ryley Cooper's Designs in Scarlet (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1939) on Ebay shortly afterwards.
The book is a journalistic look (sometimes sensationalized but also including FBI reports and interesting interviews). There are seventeen chapters on prostitution, pornography, quack doctors (STD treatments and abortifacients), "spanking clubs" (bdsm), sex crimes and more. One of the author's persistent concerns is "wandering youth." (Wandering youth is also a theme in Faith Baldwin's The High Road [New York: P. F. Collier & Son Corp., 1939]).
The late 1930s were a period of social turmoil — about a third of the youth in high school and college were members of student left-of-center activist organizations (or participating in those organizations' activities — about half of all college students attended annual one-hour strikes against war). There was a huge spike in incidence of sexually transmitted diseases which only began to lessen with the start of World War II.
I've chosen two extracts which give a glimpse into the period. The first is part of a long interview with a hairdresser who specialized in working for prostitutes. The hairdresser traveled across the country following her customers as they moved from one WPA or CCC project to another.
Cooper's Designs in Scarlet, pp. 95-96:
"Well, we had money for our fare and all, but my friend thought she needed some new clothes and nothing to buy them with. Then she happened to ask a fellow she'd dated with where he was from and he got to telling her how he was from a little WPA job out around Gulfport and now, right where he was, there weren't any women. Well, I wish you could have seen my friend! She rushed around and rented an automobile and drove out there and did curb service all that night."
"Curb service?"
"You know, you drive up to a fellow on the street and ask him if he's got a match, and he lights your cigarette for you and then you get to talking and you ask him if he wouldn't like to take a little ride, and he says yes, and then when he gets in, and you've gone a little ways and you see he likes you why you ask him if he minds paying for the gas and he says how much is it and you say a dollar a gallon or two dollars or whatever you think you can get? You know. Well, you ought to have seen my friend after she got back from that job! She'd run curb service on forty-five men, in a single night, and all she had left after she'd paid her expenses was twenty-five dollars. I told her she was just a damn fool. I'd rather have less money and not work so hard!"
The second abstract introduces a chapter dealing with prostitution. The women in this extract are working in a house where of the $2 fee men paid they saw half before expenses. After expenses ("political donations", towel fees, etc.) the women made a good deal less than $1 for each man they had sex with.
Cooper's Designs in Scarlet, pp. 279-282:
Big Doc stood with me at the end of his cosmetic counter, watching the usual driftwood of an all-night drugstore as it ebbed and flowed; Big Doc's place is toward the north end of the Loop District, in Chicago.
The cop came in for his drink of coffee. Then with a wisecrack for Big Doc as he drank it he wiped his lips with his sleeve and returned to his rounds. Two taxi drivers argued at the end of the soda fountain over the relative merits of their cars. The usual stumble-bum fumbled through the door, mumbled his plea for enough money to "buy a flop for the night," shrugged at the implication that what he really wanted was whisky, and ambled on again. The taxi drivers raced outward at the sight of a fare. The place was still.
This lasted, however, only for a moment. Suddenly the door burst open to the energetic push of a laughing young girl, while six others crowded in behind her, dividing to various parts of the store. Big Doc waddled forward to wait on this giggling trade; one wanted a small bottle of perfume, another called for gum; she was dying for a piece of gum, she said. Three others crawled upon stools at the soda fountain and demanded cherry and lemon drinks. Two others merely indulged in look-wishing, like kids in a candy store.
I was left alone to watch them and wonder about them —seven unusually young, healthily beautiful kids, the oldest of whom could not have been more than nineteen. Where had they been, all seven of them, suddenly to troop in here at midnight? They all seemed to know Big Doc; therefore, they could not be transient show-ponies. Besides, they were too uniformly pretty and fresh-looking for chorus girls, and they had none of the hard delineation about their legs which bespeaks today's tap and precision dancers. Their conversation could not be heard at this distance; certainly, however, it was light, giggly and immature. At last, they all went out, and Big Doc slowly returned to his place beside me. He seemed a bit downcast. I said:
"That was the most uniformly pretty bunch of girls I've seen in a long time."
He looked up.
"Yeh," came noncomittally. "They're mostly all like that. Must order 'em to specifications. It gets under my hide."
"What gets under your hide?"
"Kids like that. What chance have they got? You couldn't prove it to them, though. Every one of 'em thinks she's due to be rich in a couple of years."
"What is it? Some kind of a contest?"
"Yeh, in a way," drawled Big Doc. "To see who's first to the gutter. That's a part of the early shift, out of Cicero Danny's two-dollar whorehouse, going off duty!"
So this was why every pimping nighthawk taxi driver in Chicago always ended his salestalk with mention of Danny:
"Of course, a gent like you wouldn't want to be seen going into a joint like that, but let me tell you, pal, if you really want good-looking kids, you ought to hit one of Danny's joints! He's got the real stuff. Young, you know; pretty as hell. But a guy like you wouldn't want to go into one of them dumps — no sittin' around, no buyin' a drink, no conversation, no nothin' except the two bucks in the old cash register, the maid with the towels and you in and out of the room with the dame in fifteen minutes. Of course, the gals don't last long, but what the hell's that to Danny? What the hell's it to the girls when they come there, for that matter? All they know is they got a chance to turn enough tricks to make a hundred bucks a week. That's dough when you've been working for pennies. Besides, by the time they wake up to the fact that their pimp's taking it all away from 'em, Danny's looking for a new crowd, and the pimp drags 'em to some other town where he tells 'em they can make twice as much — and give it all to him."
With that in mind, I asked Big Doc:
"You seem to know those girls: How long have they been in the racket?"
"Oh, some of them a couple of months. A few of 'em only showed up three weeks ago. None of them have got more than six months to go. Change the faces, you know."
"Do they ever tell you where they come from?"
Big Doc grinned.
"Listen, what are you trying to pull, social-worker stuff? You know where those kids come from — a part of 'em right from high school, here in Chicago. Or from South Bend, or Aurora, or Peoria, or Des Moines. Where do whores come from?" he asked derisively.
"But wonderful-looking kids like that?"
"Danny is syndicate," he answered. "Syndicate is politics. Where would swell-looking dames come from if you were high up in politics and able to take your choice of all the beautiful kids that pimps can produce these days? Where do whores come from?" he sneered again. "Go get yourself a cup of coffee!"
"Now, wait a minute Doc. You weren't so hard-boiled when you came back here a minute ago."
He hesitated.
"No I wasn't. It isn't any fun to see kids like that going to hell. I used to try to talk to 'em, get 'em to change their minds. Tried to tell 'em where they're headed; asked 'em why they didn't go out and get a job somewhere, marry a good guy, have a home, something to look forward to. You know what I got, don't you? One of those baby-faced stares and: 'Me work for pennies? Don't be s-i-l-l-y!' "
"Then you're not so hard-boiled!"
"Hard-boiled hell!" he exclaimed, the veneer gone now. "With the business I do in clap-and-syph medicine, and be hard-boiled? Me giving a handout to some kid less than thirty years old, when I remember what she looked like in 1927? And maybe you think it's fun to listen to a girl junky beg for a shot, to have to tell her no — no — no!, when she's dragging the very heart out of me! I wished the damned little devils wouldn't come in the store. Every time I see 'em, I want to give 'em a kick in the fanny and send 'em home. But hell, that's where most of 'em got started!"
There was no argument with which to deny Doc's philosophy; the story is told too often every night in the dance halls, the taverns, the Bar B-Q's, the Dine and Dance. Over and over it is repeated in the parked car, the dim booths of the Greasy Spoon, the dimmer ones of the chop-suey "parlor":
"Listen baby, why be a damn fool? You've got what it takes. You poor little sap, wasting your life, working for pennies!"
