The Girls in the High-Heeled Shoes Read Free

immortalized in the
Variety
headline, WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG , an employer still doesn’t have to advertise a job. He just has to go into a dark corner, make sure there is nobody in earshot, and whisper quietly up his sleeve: “I need someone to sweep the floor and lift heavy objects. I can pay ten dollars a week.” Before he can make it to the front door, four hundred people will be lined up outside, politely, quietly, hopefully.
    But I not only have a job, I have the job I wanted: amanuensis and legman for Alexander Brass. My name is Morgan DeWitt and I have worked for Brass since the week I arrived in New York four years ago with my suitcase in one hand and my diploma from Western Reserve College in the other, determined to write the Great American Novel before I was thirty. I am still working on the novel. I have five years to go. Wars have been fought and won, dynasties have fallen, obscure army corporals have risen to lead great countries in less than five years; so I still have a chance with the novel. Besides, would it be so bad if I didn’t finish it until I was thirty-five?
    Brass has warned me that working for him will ruin my writing style. He has also said that any writer who is conscious of his style as he writes is an inept farceur. I suppose both could be true. But I like my job. The hours are lousy, the working conditions vary from elegant to dangerous, the pay is barely adequate, even for a young single man with an English degree from a small college in Ohio as his only reference, but I have learned more about life—about people—each week I’ve worked for Brass than I would in ten years of doing anything else. I have dealt with gangsters and their molls, politicians and their molls, stars of stage and screen, con men, kept women, kept men, nightclub owners, nightclub singers, nightclub crawlers, doormen and princes, whores and princesses, and have discovered no universal truth, no rulebook for understanding humanity. But I have learned, faster and more directly than I could have elsewhere, that it is presumptuous for any man to assume that he understands any other man well enough to write about him; and ridiculous for any man to assume that he understands any woman.
    Brass and I separated at the door; he grabbed a cab to the Stork Club and a night of listening to stars and starlets and would-be stars and their press agents and sycophants whispering boozy secrets in his ear. I raised the collar of my raincoat and pulled my hat down against the cold drizzle and headed for the 57th Street subway entrance. One of the city’s saving graces is that the streetcars, buses, and subways run all night. The other is that, though New Yorkers know that their city is the center of the known universe, they are not at all stuck up about it.
    * * *
    Twenty minutes later I was home, which is a room in a brownstone rooming house on West 74th Street between Amsterdam and Columbus. I share the house with an ever-changing assortment of actors, actresses, dancers, singers, musicians, playwrights, waiters, waitresses, and other recent arrivals who are going to make it big in this city without a heart, or die trying. Sometimes reality is surprisingly trite. There is also a young lady who reads cards and tells fortunes at various restaurants around town, a retired New York cop who works as a guard at the Museum of Natural History, and a small-time bookie who works out of a cigar store on Broadway and 86th. My next-door neighbor is a retired circus clown named Pinky. An ever-changing slice of life, my rooming house.
    There is a shared living room where people of the opposite sex can entertain each other, since propriety and Mrs. Bianchi, the landlady, discourage the mixing of the sexes in any of the upstairs rooms; brief visits with the door open are barely permitted. The room has an upright piano (no playing after 10:00 P.M.), a couple of couches, a few overstuffed chairs, some beat-up wooden chairs, a writing desk, and, at