The Late Mayor

Manhattan was richer, gayer, noisier than it had been since the days of Texas Guinan, the "Black Bottom" and the speakeasy peephole. The big spender was back, nightclubs were jammed and Broadway had never blazed so brightly. But the slim, jaunty little man who had been given star billing at the last big performance was no longer part of the show.

Fortnight ago at the Army-Notre Dame football game, when he climbed to his mediocre seat (20-yd. line, high up under the eaves), hardly a head was turned. His clothes were still natty and at 65 he looked amazingly young. But he was not as young as he looked; he was not well. One night last week the tabloids gave him his first big headlines in more than a decade--he had suffered a cerebral thrombosis. Thirty-four hours later, Death, as it must to all men, came to James John Walker, ex-mayor of New York, the dapper, silk-hatted symbol of the Fabulous Twenties.

Broadway Baby. The U.S. had never seen anything quite like Jimmy Walker. He grew up in Manhattan's Greenwich Village with the cigar smoke of Tammany Hall in his nostrils. His father was a Democratic alderman. But Jimmy's heart always belonged to Broadway.

After school and college (St. Francis Xavier's, New York Law School) he began haunting Tin Pan Alley. He scribbled song lyrics for years. He was 28 years old before his Uncle James Roon marched him down to a Tammany boss, Charles W. ("Cash & Carry") Culkin, and got him elected to the State Assembly.

But Jimmy never left Times Square--even when he went to Albany. By the time he was State Senator he was as famous as any matinee idol for his flashy clothes, his theatrical trick of cocking his head and firing wisecracks. He killed a Pure Book Bill with a line: "No woman was ever ruined by a book." Once, after listening to an interminable political speech about subways, he rose and cried: "For digging subways, sir, you need a pickax, not a thorax."

Lavender & Jazz. In 1925, when the aroma of moonshine hung like lavender over the big Bull Market, Tammany ran him for mayor. He was the people's choice. He was an hour and a half late to his own inauguration and late to almost every public ceremony thereafter. He called himself "The Late Mayor." He filled city offices with sluggish Tammany favorites. He kept a wardrobe of 70 $165 suits, drove about the city in a $17,000 Duesenberg. He lolled happily at the fabulous Central Park Casino with his mistress, musical comedy star Betty Compton (whom he afterwards married). Jazz-happy New York loved him for it.

But New York was sobered by the depression. In 1932, during the famed Seabury investigation, Jimmy Walker heard himself charged with responsibility for civic corruption and maladministration of city affairs. He never denied it, he never admitted it. But a few months later he abruptly resigned as mayor.

In the years that followed, years in which his personal popularity was still high, he seemed haunted by the words of a song he had written as a youth. Its title: Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May? New York did, and showed it in the endless, anxious ringing of telephones as he lay dying at Manhattan's Doctors' Hospital.

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