F. Gwynplaine MacIntyre’s
Alleged New York Daily News Articles:

“WIDE OPEN: Getting a Little Tenderloin”

(originally published in the New York Daily News, 15 December 2004)

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SOME BACKGROUND: I’m strangely fascinated by stage musicals that should have worked but somehow failed. Tenderloin is widely regarded by Broadwayites as a high-quality musical that deserved to succeed, yet it ran barely six months and has never been revived.

One problem with Tenderloin is that the main character (Reverend Brock) is a do-gooder, and such characters do not easily earn an audience’s sympathy. A secondary character in this same show was more accessible — Tommy, the cynical reporter — but he remained firmly a secondary character.

There was another problem as well. Have you ever noticed how many Broadway musicals deal with prostitution? I can name at least fifty that do so, through varying degrees of euphemism. But none of them have ever depicted prostitution as the truly dehumanising industry that it really is. Typically, a whore in a Broadway musical is an attractive young lady who gets plenty of sunshine and fresh air, and meets lots of nice friendly men. The prostitution and other vices depicted in Tenderloin were portrayed with much distancing and very little reality. As such, audiences resented Reverend Brock for attempting to clean up a profession which (as portrayed onstage) didn’t seem to be so dirty in the first place.

I became aware of Tenderloin in unusual circumstances. The first time I visited the London production office of legendary producer Alexander Cohen, I was intrigued to notice on his wall what looked like an authentic theatrical poster for a 19th-century play, in perfect condition. This turned out to be an original poster for Tenderloin, printed in 1960: but the poster almost perfectly replicated the design and typography of the late Victorian era in which this musical takes place.

I was working on other projects while I wrote the articles I contributed to the Daily News’s BIG TOWN series, and I had an appointment to meet an important out-of-town client when he visited Manhattan in December 2004. I was hoping to impress him with my credentials as a free-lance journalist and copywriter. By chance, the News ran my latest article — this one, about Tenderloin — on the same day as my business appointment with this gentleman, so I made sure to bring along a copy of that day’s New York Daily News, and I counted myself lucky for the happenstance. In the event, I turned out to be even luckier: my client had brought his girlfriend along to our appointment, and it chanced that she had starred in her high school’s production of Tenderloin! Naturally, she was delighted to read my article, and enchanted to meet me. And that’s how, through pure dumb luck, I landed a lucrative free-lance assignment.

Nineteenth-century New York City’s police force was full of goons and grifters whose chief activity was extorting protection money from local merchants. Naturally, some precincts offered more gravy than others, and every crooked cop’s ambition was to get assigned to a precinct with lots of lucrative crime . . . such as the 29th, the fashionable red-light district on the West Side below 42nd Street, where the flesh-peddlers were protected by cops who in turn were protected by powerful Tammany Hall [New York City’s all-powerful and famously corrupt Democratic Club.]. In 1876, when Captain Alexander “Clubber” Williams was transferred to the 29th precinct, he famously announced: “I’ve had nothing but chuck steak for a long time, and now I’m going to get a little of the tenderloin.” And “the Tenderloin” is what that part of town soon became known as.

One man who disapproved was Dr. Charles Henry Parkhurst, pastor of Madison Square Presbyterian Church. “While we fight iniquity,” he said of Tammany in a thundering sermon in February 1892, “they shield and patronize it; while we try to convert criminals, they manufacture them.” A grand jury challenged the reverend to prove his charges. He had no specifics, he admitted, but he vowed to get them.

And so Parkhurst disguised himself as a country bumpkin, and toured the Tenderloin’s sleaziest dives. Armed now with facts, he made the grand jury take notice. In 1895, a newly-appointed police commissioner named Theodore Roosevelt started cleaning up the corruption. The Metropolitan Force was on its way to becoming New York’s Finest.

In 1960, Broadway’s biggest hit was Fiorello!. With script by George Abbott and Jerome Weidman, and songs by Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick, this show celebrated the career of colorful Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia. Now the same creative team decided to create another musical about an earlier colorful period in the city’s history. The result was Tenderloin.

Set at the close of the 19th century, Tenderloin told a fictionalized version of the Reverend Parkhurst’s undercover exploits. English actor Maurice Evans played the Reverend Andrew Brock, pastor of the Old Stone Church, who is dismayed to discover a “monument to harlotry” on his parish’s doorstep. Here’s how brazen were the trollops and floozies in the show’s opening number:

Little old New York is plenty good enough for me.
Right now she’s wide open; here’s hopin’
She’ll always be this way.
Anyone doesn’t like it here, he don’t have to stay.

Smelling a story in the Reverend Brock’s crusade, brash young newspaper reporter Tommy Howatt infiltrates the Old Stone Church’s choir. Though at one point he sings a treacly ballad about “poor little Anne”, an orphan girl who freezes to death while making artificial flowers, he is otherwise a cynical sort, suspicious of the pastor’s purity campaign:

I never met no one yet who wasn’t lookin’ for his cut.
You gotta be after somethin’,
But I can’t imagine what.

The scene shifts to Spanish Anna’s bordello on West 23rd Street, where the cops are collecting their weekly $5 tribute from each working girl. The Reverend Brock seeks to persuade the precinct commander, Lieutenant Schmidt, to raid the joint . . . unaware that the lieutenant — who, after all, paid $15,000 to get assigned to the Tenderloin — is getting the biggest slice of the graft. Schmidt finally sets the reverend straight:

“Shutting down the Tenderloin won’t change a thing. If the houses close in my precinct, they’ll only open again somewheres else. What do you think makes this the biggest city in the country? Why do out-of-towners come here? Not [for] your sermons, Your Reverence. It’s sin. Sin is what makes this town go round. People want it. It’s what keeps both you and me in business.”

The hookers and harlots are even blunter:

Everybody’s happy,
That’s the way it stands
Just as long as the money changes hands.

Reporter Tommy, meanwhile, has been playing both sides against the middle, tipping off Schmidt to the plans of Brock’s do-gooders . . . and collecting a piece of the payoffs. Finally he runs a phony story, luridly linking the reverend to one of the floozies, and scandal follows. Moral of story, as one song has it:

Denounce the sins of Babylon,
But skip the sins next door.

Unable to clear his name, the disgraced Reverend Brock leaves town and takes his anti-sin campaign out west. Which — in the New York of 1960, still conspicuously displaying its vices six decades after the Reverend Charles Parkhurst’s heyday — was perhaps the only plausible ending for a dark-hearted musical like Tenderloin.

Because 1960 Broadway audiences didn’t much like the good Reverend Brock anyway, Tenderloin limped through 216 performances, losing the show’s entire investment. The one saving grace was Tommy Howatt’s song about poor little Anne the orphan girl: “Artificial Flowers” became a hit for Bobby Darin.

The real Reverend Parkhurst continued his pious reform efforts for years, denouncing jazz and flappers and automobiles and so on, until one night in 1936 when, at age 91, he went sleepwalking and fell off the porch roof of his house. [His bedroom was on an upper storey; he had the misfortune to somnambulate out his bedroom window and onto the porch roof.]

 

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