It’s All a Little Runyonesque “A lot of the comedy in Runyon comes from having gangsters who kill their friends but don’t like to disappoint their wives.” It’s 1932 in New York and a newly married man – let’s call him Alfred – is calling in a favour. His new bride, a Spanish Countess 26 years his junior, has a 30-carat diamond – the Amati diamond, no less – which Alfred would like to have insured for a sum hefty enough to earn its title. The only hitch is, the diamond may or may not exist. What’s more, until recently, Alfred’s ‘Spanish countess’ was a dancer from Mexico by the name of Patrice Amati del Grande. No matter. Alfred knows the right people, and the ‘diamond’ belonging to the ‘countess’ is duly listed for a cool $100,000. While it could be an outline for one of his own short stories – just another tale about the wheelers and dealers of Broadway – Alfred Damon Runyan had no need to make this one up. It was his insurance deal, his Spanish countess, his diamond. If this tall tale tells us anything, it’s that Runyon did not live on the sidelines of the Broadway he captured on the page. Not content to imagine Broadway’s shady side, nor populate it with imaginary ‘guys and dolls’, he seated himself – literally – right in the middle of it, and then he listened, observed and absorbed, until he was able not to recreate Broadway, but to invent it. Like his Spanish countess and her 30-carat diamond, it didn’t exist until Runyon said it did. Alfred Damon Runyan was born in 1880 in Manhattan, Kansas, the latest in a long line of newspapermen. His grandfather was a newspaper printer, his father an editor, making Runyan a shoe-in for the newspaper business. It wasn’t until years later, while writing for the Pueblo Evening Press, that a typing error renamed him Runyon. He let it stick, and remained Runyon until his death in 1946. After a stint in the US Army, Runyon arrived in New York and, as the author Jimmy Breslin put it, “planted his size five-and-a-half-size feet on a street called Broadway – which didn’t really exist – and he decided to invent it”. It
was 1910. Runyon began writing for Hearst Press and wouldn’t stop for more than 30 years, rising to become a star sports writer for the American. When he wasn’t covering the New York Giants or the latest boxing match, he could be found at Lindy’s, an allhours Jewish deli on Broadway. In many of his stories, Runyon would find his characters at Mindy’s, suggesting just how closely the writer overlapped his worlds. It was at Lindy’s that he soaked up the world that he would later pour into his stories. But first, he sat. And sat. “I am the sedentary champion of the city,” he boasted. “I can last an entire day without causing a chair to squeak.” These long days of watching and listening constituted years (and years) of patient research. Little by little, Runyon became a part of the world he would eventually commit to the page, himself indistinguishable from the hustlers, gamblers, gangsters and old bootleggers that would become Benny Southstreet, Harry the Horse, Good Time Charley, the Seldom Seen Kid, Big Jule, and dozens of others. Broadway offered rich pickings for a voraciously curious writer and, as one journalist wrote, “Runyon pitched his tent on the shady side of the street, where the stories were”. Stories like that of Arnold Rothstein. An intelligent, articulate racketeer, gambler and kingpin of the Jewish mob, Rothstein was known to everyone as the Brain – because Runyon invented the nickname. After a brief conversation with Runyon over coffee at Lindy’s on 4 November 1928, Rothstein travelled to the Park Central Hotel, where he was shot over a gambling debt. It was this event that prompted Runyon to turn to fiction as a way of capturing the violence of Broadway in a way that could be dramatic – and ultimately even comic. “It was a way of putting funny hats on hit men,” writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker. To say that Runyon had found his niche would be an understatement. Stories poured out of him for the next decade, and the money poured in. Runyon was not above such things: “I took one little section of New York”, he said once, “and made half a million dollars writing about it.” His stories were soon being snapped up by Hollywood to fuel over 20 movies, from
Above: Writer Damon Runyon working at his desk, 1944 Photo by Gjon Mili/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
Left: Mug shot of Dutch Schultz, 1931 Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
LITTLE MISS MARKER – the film that launched Shirley Temple’s career – to A SLIGHT CASE OF MURDER, JOHNNY ONEEYEand, of course, GUYS AND DOLLS. ‘Runyonesque’ became an adjective, ‘Runyon-ese’ a noun, and nobody knew whether the writer’s famous slang – always in present tense, never with contractions – was real or just a colourful part of the fiction. Language is the lifeblood of Runyon’s tales. He understood that street speech is a complex, elaborate thing, but his genius came from imagining how a streetspeaker might write. The addition of clumsy, self-conscious flourishes to phrases peppered with slang creates a voice uncomfortably caught between ordinary speech and the formal act of writing. The resulting phrases are endless, capricious, even endearing. Runyonese. Runyon’s stories made him one of the most popular American humorist writers of the 1930s. Once the real-life figures of Runyon’s Broadway – Dutch Schultz, Owney Madden, Frank Costello, Bugsy Siegel and more – found themselves lightly disguised in ink, they began to emulate their fictional counterparts, embellishing the
vernacular and transforming ‘Broadway’ into a reality it had never truly been. Until it was. And what of Runyon’s other glittering invention? By 1947, the Amati diamond was known as ‘the 11th largest diamond in the world’, a fact which perhaps prompted the armed robbery that took place in Patrice’s Massachusetts home that year. The thieves made off with a haul of jewels and valuables, but when questioned in court, the thieves were baffled at the mention of the diamond. Brandishing the insurance papers as proof of the stone’s existence and disappearance, the men were charged and imprisoned. The diamond has never been found. Funnily enough. It is fitting that given Runyon’s flair for invention, it’s hard to separate fact from fiction, or at least myth from reality. But if Broadway really was invented by Runyon, it seems only right that following his death in 1946, the writer’s ashes were scattered from an aeroplane into the skies over Broadway by World War I ace Eddie Rickenbacker. And that it should have been entirely and completely illegal.