{"id":36617,"date":"2012-08-03T13:52:20","date_gmt":"2012-08-03T17:52:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=36617"},"modified":"2012-08-06T17:40:32","modified_gmt":"2012-08-06T21:40:32","slug":"sisters-of-the-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2012\/08\/03\/sisters-of-the-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Sisters of the Night"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

The bookstore, and especially the used bookstore, is vanishing from New York City. Today there are a few, but there used to be a multitude of them, crammed between kitchen appliance shops and Laundromats and thrift stores. They all had temperamental cats prowling their aisles and they all smelled wonderfully of what a team of chemists in London has called<\/a> \u201ca combination of grassy notes with a tang of acids and a hint of vanilla over an underlying mustiness.\u201d I will miss terribly this stimulating fragrance, and the books that produce it, when it\u2019s washed from the city for good. Luckily, there are towns that still accommodate used bookshops. Lambertville, New Jersey, is one of them. On North Union Street, there are two used bookstores, Panoply<\/a> and Phoenix Books<\/a>, one right across from the other. You can spend hours here, and it\u2019s guaranteed that you\u2019ll return with some grassy, musty artifact of the past. On my last visit to Panoply, I came home with a copy of Sisters of the Night: The Startling Story of Prostitution in New York Today<\/em> by \u201cveteran newspaperman\u201d Jess Stearn.<\/p>\n

Published in 1956, the book began as an assignment for the Daily News<\/em> when Stearn\u2019s editor told him to find out what makes prostitutes \u201ctick.\u201d He was told, \u201cGet out and talk to the girls, see the judges, the social workers, the cops, the headshrinkers\u2014you won\u2019t win a Pulitzer Prize but it should be worth reading.\u201d Dragging his feet, the reluctant Stearn complied, going out in search of what one of the book\u2019s reviewers called the \u201corchidaceous girls\u201d of the city.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

A faded black-and-white photo. Suited and tied, he looks tired as hell, resting his arms atop his clunky manual typewriter at a desk covered in a snowdrift of papers. He has deep, dark circles under his eyes. I wonder if the photo was taken during the writing of Sisters of the Night<\/em>, when Stearn was up all hours prowling the city\u2019s backwater joints, pretending to be a john so he could talk one-on-one with hard-edged young women in crummy rooms and dingy restaurants, where they dragged at cigarettes and told their stories of abuse, drugs, and fun. He worked hard to depict them just as they were. As the girls speak, leaning close, you can almost smell the spearmint chewing gum snapping in their mouths, mixed with nicotine and a cloud of Tabu, \u201cthe forbidden perfume.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Tabu: The Forbidden Scent, 1950s<\/p><\/div>\n

In a bar near Madison Square Garden, a blonde B-girl (the B stands for \u201cbar\u201d) explains to the author why she prefers sailors to other men: \u201cWith sailors there\u2019s not much chance of getting hurt. They\u2019re on the go and so are we . . . I\u2019ve taken many a sailor who was down and out to my room. I might have spent the night with a boy from Princeton and done myself some good, but I didn\u2019t.\u201d The B-girl likes getting letters from the sailors, envelopes with exotic stamps that she collects and trades with other B-girls. But she\u2019s no stamp-collecting whore. \u201cI want you to know one thing, Mr. Reporter,\u201d she tells Stearn. \u201cI\u2019m not a tramp. I work hard during the day. I\u2019m a clerk in a factory. It\u2019s damn dull, and the nights are the only thing that keep me alive.\u201d<\/p>\n

The B-girls hope to find romance, maybe even marriage. Some are attractive, others not so much. Most started hustling in their teens. Peggy is one of them. In her diary\u2014stuffed with paper Valentines, restaurant menus, and ticket stubs\u2014she writes about nights smoking \u201creefers\u201d and juggling a stable of brutal men who offer small gifts in exchange for favors\u2014\u201cHe bought us a gang of drinks, plus cigarettes and nickels for the jukebox and when we were going home he gave me $1 for cab fare.\u201d But Peggy is still in pain. \u201cI went to the candy store to listen to records. I had Steve\u2019s picture with me. And, diary, while listening to the records, I felt so lonely and empty inside.\u201d Peggy got busted as a first offender, then vanished from the NYPD\u2019s records.<\/p>\n

After the B-girls, Stearn learns about \u201cpony girls.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n

A cross between a B-girl and a call girl . . . a pony\u2019s big-time stuff, but she picks her own men. They generally work out of some East Side bar where the Johns know where to find them. The bartenders freeze out servicemen and other stiffs because they aren\u2019t well heeled. The ponies are after big money.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Cool in their metallic gowns, slinking through bars on shabby streets near Rockefeller Center, the pony girls cost $50 an hour, far more than the lowly streetwalker who offers herself to men at a hamburger counter for 75 cents a pop.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

52nd Street, 1950s<\/p><\/div>\n

Stearn teams up with a friend for courage and tracks the pony girls to 52nd Street. Also known as Stripty-Second, this part of the street has been taken over by burlesque. Time<\/em> magazine said of the scene: \u201cnightclubs in sorry brownstones crowd each other like bums on a breadline,\u201d each one featuring dancers peeling it off to three-piece bands. In one shabby club, Stearn and his friend talk with a buxom blonde chanteuse from Buffalo who loves the poetry of Dylan Thomas. She laughs when Stearn propositions her, saying, \u201cThe only thing we hustle here is drinks\u2014I\u2019d get canned if I took a live one out of here.\u201d But the dancer on stage is rumored to be \u201ca call girl in flimsy disguise,\u201d a star who charges $100 for her phone number, $200 for lunch, and $1,500 for weekend cruises. \u201cWhy does she bother with a night-club act?\u201d Stearn\u2019s friend asks him over watered-down whiskies. \u201cThat\u2019s easy,\u201d Stearn jokes, \u201ceven Macy\u2019s has to advertise.\u201d But he and his friend can\u2019t afford her and they move back out into the night. The author still hasn\u2019t answered the question \u201cWhat makes these girls tick?\u201d and he\u2019s getting tired.<\/p>\n

In a downtown restaurant he talks to Willie the Weasel, an emaciated pimp who watches his girls through a peephole while they work.<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cI used to have to hold on to my sides,\u201d he says, \u201cor I might have split a gut from laughing. They were a howl. Some of these old guys with the big bellies would stand there and say to the girl, \u2018Whip me.\u2019 So she\u2019d whip until they were screaming. And they\u2019d scream, \u2018Harder, harder!\u2019 And you should have seen the looks on their faces\u2014like baboons.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Next, Stearn visits an apartment on Central Park, in a \u201cvery respectable building\u201d where the management thinks the girls are models in the Garment District. Here, high-end call girl Jane sits chain-smoking and stroking a Pekingese in her lap, telling of her days making $1,000 a week. She fell in love with one of her Johns, a boy who \u201csent me so many flowers the place smelled like a funeral parlor.\u201d But that didn\u2019t last. \u201cLove, schmove,\u201d she says, \u201cwho knows about love?\u201d Jane hopes for a career in show business. \u201cThey tell me that I have more versatility than a lot of those dames on TV.\u201d<\/p>\n

In an East Side bar, Georgia sips a Martini and talks of working stag parties where she takes on gangs of Johns. She gets beaten up by bachelors, clean-cut young men who leave her blacked out, surrounded by empty bottles and cigarette butts. It\u2019s nothing a bowl of hot broth and some sleeping pills can\u2019t fix. She keeps going back for more. In an untidy tenement living room, a \u201cvivacious redhead\u201d shares the poetry she writes about suicide, about jumping into the East River. She was once the wife of an iceman, then she was a hat-check girl, and now she hustles, searching for the \u201cbig-timer\u201d who\u2019ll marry her and make her \u201cMrs. Rich Bitch.\u201d But it hasn\u2019t happened yet.<\/p>\n

And there\u2019s Eileen, a girl from a good family who came to New York to work a legitimate job, but the employment agency men \u201ckept asking me to lift my skirt, so they could see my legs. A couple of them suggested that I start as a cigarette girl or camera girl in night clubs.\u201d She fell into prostitution, and now she feels too dirty to live the straight life. \u201cI\u2019ve made my bed and I\u2019m going to lie in it,\u201d she says, resigned.<\/p>\n

After all his talking to prostitutes and pimps, Stearn still doesn\u2019t understand \u201cwhat makes them tick.\u201d So he seeks out a psychoanalyst, a \u201cheadshrinker\u201d who\u2019s an authority on the subject. Prostitutes hate men, the shrink explains, they all have a weak father figure and they seek revenge against him. \u201cThey are sick women bent on self-destruction,\u201d he says, \u201cand they first destroy what men prize above everything else in a woman\u2014female virtue.\u201d But prostitutes also have a paradoxical love for unfortunate men. Why are they so kind-hearted, Stearn wonders, with blind beggars, violin-playing cripples, hunchbacks, and legless mendicants perambulating on roller-skate platforms?<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t know if Jess Stearn ever satisfied his questions and I wondered what became of him, that tired, beleaguered fellow on the back of the book jacket. A quick Googling revealed that, after Sisters of the Night<\/em>, he went on to write books with subtitles like Drug & Delinquent Stories<\/em>, A Startling Investigation of the Spread of Homosexuality in America<\/em>, and A Report on the Secret World of the Lesbian<\/em>. Then he left smutty New York City for the clean living of Malibu where he dedicated himself to psychic phenomena, yoga, reincarnation, and the life of New Age forefather Edgar Cayce. In later photos and videos, he is no longer the weary newspaperman, but a smiling, silver-haired Californian wearing cable-knit sweaters among the palm trees. He died in 2002 at age 87. His New York Times<\/em> obit read: \u201cNo funeral services are planned for the writer, who believed he had lived previously and would live again.\u201d<\/p>\n

As for all those B-girls and pony girls, did any of them get to live another life? I imagine that some went back to checking hats and selling cigarettes, some tried acting, some ended up dead too soon\u2014murdered, overdosed, jumped into the East River\u2014and some surely left the city\u2019s seamy joints and dives to shuffle back to Buffalo (or Kenosha, Cuyahoga, Lambertville), where they became mothers and grandmothers, members of the local Junior League, spending summer weekends weeding gardens and whipping up batches of Ambrosia. They\u2019d be into their seventies by now. I\u2019d like to think there\u2019s a woman somewhere who, wisely suspicious of e-readers, will wander into some moldy shop, hungry for the smell and the feel of old books. She\u2019ll happen upon Sisters of the Night<\/em> and recognize herself as Georgia, Jane, or Eileen\u2014no, this is Peggy, the girl who got away. (She goes by Margaret now.) Turning the yellowed pages, she\u2019ll read excerpts from her forgotten teenage diary, heart pounding to recall the wild, lost girl she was when she wrote long ago: \u201cI remember once wanting to be a nurse, or else going to teaching school. I knew all along they were only dreams. I guess the only way you get anyplace is by hustling for it. I wonder whether I\u2019ll make a good hustler.\u201d<\/p>\n

I just hope I didn\u2019t take the copy meant for her.<\/p>\n

Jeremiah Moss is the pseudonymous author of the blog Jeremiah\u2019s Vanishing New York<\/a>. He has also written about the city for <\/em>The New York Times.<\/p>\n

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