The walls of City Hall are lined with formal portraits of former Mayors. But the magnificent official portrait of the 20th Century’s handsomest Mayor hangs where none save the Fine Art Commission’s staff can admire it, up beyond a chained doorway in the rotunda. Trim, slender, broad-shouldered—with not a hair out of place and just a hint of a smile—he stands, papers in hand, wearing a beautifully-cut bespoke suit of his own design. Even now, more than sixty years dead, James J. Walker still outclasses any guy in the joint.
Yet all he had wanted to be was a songwriter. After composing some songs for high school plays, he began turning them out for Tin Pan Alley: “Kiss All The Girls For Me,” “There’s Music in the Rustle of a Skirt,” “After They Gather the Hay,” and many more. None really took off. Only after he had finally promised his father to attend New York Law School was he inspired to compose the smash hit of 1908, “Will You Love Me in December as You Do in May?”:
Now in the summer of life, sweetheart,
You say you love but me,
Gladly I’ll give my heart to you,
Throbbing with ecstasy.
But last night I saw, while a-dreaming,
The future, old and gray,
And I wondered if you’ll love me then, dear,
Just as you do today.
Will you love me in December as you do in May?
Will you love me in the same old-fashioned way?
When my hair has turned to gray
Will you kiss me then and say
That you love me in December as you did in May?
It was schmaltzy. It was blatantly sentimental. It sold over 300,000 copies and put $10,000 in his pocket. In 1908, this was real money, comparable to over a quarter of a million dollars today. For the rest of his life, bandleaders could extract $100 tips from him by striking up the song as he entered the room. In the meantime, he went to law school and, in 1909, to the State Assembly.
Walker was a dandy. When he first visited Paris, he immediately went to Charvet’s, the foremost haberdasher of the time, for silk ties and scarves. Later in the same trip, while visiting London, he introduced himself to several Bond Street tailors. One refused to build a suit for him to Walker’s specifications: broad shoulders, narrow waist, and one button rather than three on the jacket. The tailor referred Walker, by then Majority Leader of the New York State Senate, to a theatrical costumer, and then asked whether he was an actor. Walker smilingly replied, “Most of the time.” To the astonishment of his companion, Walker then soft-shoed to the door, saying, “This is called, ‘Off to Buffalo,'” spun, twirled his cane, bowed, and left.
All his suits were tailor-made, usually closely cut, with broad shoulders and exaggeratedly narrow waists. His trousers never had cuffs: he believed them dust-catchers. He disliked belts and suspenders, believing that they constricted the body. Instead, he always wore vests. Inside the lower edge of his waistcoats were sewn two tabs with buttonholes in them, corresponding to buttons on his trousers’ waistbands. He wore thin ties without linings, arguing that thick knots became soiled after contact with one’s chin.
Charles F. Murphy, the boss of Tammany Hall, saw talent in the young clotheshorse and sent him to the State Senate in 1914. Even as Democratic leader he usually walked into the chamber unprepared, glanced at the agenda and at the bills, and rose to his feet with a fine speech. He proved a spectacular debater, conciliator, strategist, and showman. He seemed to thrive on late hours. Al Smith repeatedly tried to reform him, saying, “Why can’t you be like Jim Foley? His light is burning late, but he is studying.”
“At that hour, I’m lit up too,” Walker replied. Some weeks later, while Smith and Walker were meeting in the Executive Chamber, there was a total eclipse of the sun. Walker said, “No matter what they tell you, Al, I had nothing to do with this.”
With a quick wit and ready smile, Walker was much pursued by women; and such was his temperament that they never had to pursue him very far or very fast. His first wife, Janet Allen, found him generous, affectionate, and chronically unfaithful. He had a particular weakness for actresses. Once, during Walker’s long affair with Yvonne Shelton, a comedienne and dancer, she was fired for lateness from a show at the Century Theatre. She told the manager as she walked out, “Laddie, the license for the show walks out with me.” Once she called Walker, it had. She was hired back the next day for double the salary, with a chauffeured limousine to get her to the show on time. Mysteriously, the license was immediately restored.
He was the city’s symbol of the Jazz Age, the perfect master of ceremonies, the man to keep the tempo sweet and hot, relying on his eloquence, emotions, and improvisation to keep him aloft.
Probably his sensuality, reflected in his emotional life and even his love of clothing, affected his politics. Walker’s passion for his personal liberty made him an instinctive friend of individual freedom. He intensely disliked censorship and legislated morality. And, unlike many politicians who only passively support liberty, Walker put the full power of his skills in its service. Thus, Walker the statesman put through Governor Smith’s progressive legislation: workers’ compensation, unemployment insurance, and rudimentary social services. Walker the libertarian legalized prizefighting and Sunday professional baseball games, repealed the State prohibition laws and allowed motion picture houses to open on Sunday.
Among his finest moments was his defeat of the so-called Clean Books bill. Its sponsors read passages from D. H. Lawrence into the record, declaiming about protecting womanhood and the home from pornography. Walker’s speech, uttered without flourish or oratory, as a reasonable man speaking to other reasonable men, did what few speeches do. It changed men’s minds: “I have never yet heard of a girl being ruined by a book.”
In 1925, Walker entered the Democratic primaries against incumbent Mayor John F. “Red Mike” Hylan, not among the brightest bulbs in the municipal chandelier. Hylan published a pamphlet, “The ABCs of Hylanism.” Walker said, “What does it mean? At the Bottom of the Class.” Walker trounced Red Mike, 248,338 to 154,204. In November, he swept the general election to become the city’s 96th Mayor.
Thirty years or so ago, there were still a few old-timers around City Hall who had begun their careers in Walker’s time. One told me of how Walker, having spent a night shooting craps in some dive below Canal Street, strolled over to a greasy spoon on Broadway, near Chambers Street, around 7:00 a.m. (When I first hung out around City Hall, Ellen’s Restaurant was there; it’s now been replaced by a branch of Washington Mutual Bank.) The place had just opened for the day. The mayor walked in. He was the only customer in the place. The cook grumbled, “Whaddaya want?” Walker turned on the charm and said, “How about coffee, some scrambled eggs, and a few kind words?” The cook poured him some coffee, went to the stove, made the eggs, and silently put the plate before the mayor. “How about the kind words,” Walker said.
“Don’t eat the eggs,” the cook replied.
The greatest pageantry of the Walker years were the official welcomes, produced by Grover A. Whalen, described by journalist M. A. Werner as “one of the most entertaining personages of the period…whose waxed and polished exterior concealed a considerable amount of real ability.” Perhaps Whalen’s masterpiece was the welcome given to Marie, Queen of Romania. Strikingly attractive, stylishly dressed, Her Majesty had America swooning at her feet. On a raw October morning, she disembarked at the Battery. From there, the parade marched up Broadway, with soldiers, sailors, buglers, cops, and the Department of Sanitation band.
As the open car bearing the Mayor and the Queen passed a construction site, the Queen’s lap robe slipped from her knees. Walker leaned over to adjust it. Some riveter, perched on a girder of the partly finished skyscraper, cupped his hands about his mouth, and boomed an inquiry that has been most politely translated as, “Hey! Jimmy! You make her yet?”
The Queen, smiling, said, “Everyone seems to know you in this great city.”
“Yes, Ma’am,” Walker replied, “and some of them know me very well indeed.”
In 1927, he fell in love with Betty Compton. She was a musical comedy actress: a short, slender brunette with a great figure, good legs, and considerable temperament. He was forty-six, she was twenty-three. When they met, he offered her a ride in the limousine to get her through traffic. Although Walker hated fast driving and never used the siren, he told the chauffeur to do both. After a time, Compton turned her large brown eyes on Walker. “I’m impressed. Now you may stop the siren.”
Even with her, the charm worked its way. In 1928, Walker took his valet and wardrobe and left his wife. Not a whisper appeared in the press, which then felt that a public person’s private life was his own business.
In 1929, he defeated Congressman Fiorello LaGuardia, his Republican opponent by nearly 2 ½ to 1. But the stock market had crashed the month before. Things soon fell apart. Patrick Cardinal Hayes, during a private meeting with Walker at the Residence, rebuked him for his personal life. Although Walker did not end his relationship with Compton, the reprimand weighed heavily on his mind. Judicial scandals led to a full scale investigation of city government by former judge Samuel Seabury, a cold, austere man of rigid integrity, aloof as Mount Everest, relentless as Javert, and completely unable to understand or forgive Walker’s political, financial, or moral lapses.
Walker had always lived beyond his means. There had always been some wealthy friend to help pick up the checks. Paul Block, a newspaper publisher, apparently gave Walker nearly a quarter of a million dollars in one year, paid his personal expenses, and even lent him a private railway car. Not even Seabury could prove that Block did this for any reason other than friendship. But Walker had also accepted money from persons with an interest in obtaining municipal contracts or franchises. He denied that any of these had been bribes. With the exception of Seabury, his political opponents privately believed him. Even Fiorello LaGuardia believed Walker at worst guilty of bad judgment.
Seabury examined the mayor in May 1932. Admission to the court room at 60 Centre Street was by special pass only. As Walker trotted up the stairs, one man got close enough to ask for his help in getting a seat. Walker replied, “I’ll gladly give you mine.” Seabury pounded away at the “benefices” given to Walker by his wealthy admirers and, on June 8, referred eighteen charges to Governor Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Governor then grilled Walker over twelve sessions between August 11 and 27, 1932.
Roosevelt never had to decide whether to remove him. Walker resigned on September 1, 1932. A few days later he left for Europe where he remained for three years.
He married Compton, and eventually the two returned to the city. In 1940, LaGuardia appointed him an impartial arbitrator for industrial and labor relations in the garment industry. In 1945, the Daily News took a poll of potential mayoral candidates. LaGuardia, craving a fourth term, was a poor third. Walker, who was not even a candidate, had been included in the poll at the last moment. He had come in first.
A year later, the man they once called Beau James died after a short illness. He will be remembered for his amiable vices long after we are forgotten for our admirable virtues.
New York Press, December 8, 1998