May to December

Will you love me in December as you do in May

Will you love me in the good old-fashioned way?

When my hair has all turned gray,

Will you kiss me then, and say,

That you love me in December as you do in May?

When James John Walker wrote these lyrics, some 30 years ago, he was a Greenwich Village song writer, law student and semi-pro baseball player. His sweetheart sang them in vaudeville, later heard them played at her wedding, when she married the author. When a Miami cabaret orchestra inappropriately struck up the song, at the time of their divorce in 1933, she wept over them.

By that time Jimmy Walker was loafing in Cannes with his favorite girl friend, curvaceous Betty Compton, dancer (Oh, Kay!, Fifty Million Frenchmen). They had become friends five years before, when wisecracking, dandified, vote-getting Mayor Walker was giving New York City the kind of musical-comedy administration it could then afford. They danced to Leo Reisman's orchestra at the Central Park Casino, munched hot dogs to the smack of Babe Ruth's home runs at Yankee Stadium, first-nighted the boom-time musicals, which often ran the Mayor's plug in their theatre ads. Those were brave days.

In 1935, after the investigation that drove Jimmy Walker from office had cooled, Jimmy and Betty came home from Europe as man & wife. Still the popular idol of many a New York City voter, Jimmy half-heartedly practiced law while his wife ran a flower shop. He conducted a short-lived radio program, looked around for a steady job. And a job to Jimmy meant a political job. Last fall Mayor LaGuardia gave, him one: as $20,000-a-year tsar of industrial and labor relations for Manhattan's giant cloak-&-suit industry (see p. 84).

Thrice-married Betty Compton, 36, announced that she had had enough. This week she filed suit for a Florida divorce. "Being a woman of acute sensibility," said plaintiff, "the demand made upon her as the wife of a prominent public figure was such . . . that she became ill. . . ." She wanted her freedom, $5,000 a year as long as she remains unmarried, and equal custody of their two adopted children. For once Jimmy Walker, 59, seemed quite chapfallen, had nothing to say.

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