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F. Scott Fitzgerald Country

With Gold Coast parties and bathtub gin, Long Island epitomizes the Roaring '20s

By David Behrens | Staff Writer

It was the beginning of a decade of Prohibition and apparent prosperity: a time of jazz bands and petting parties, high-stepping flappers and college boys with hip flasks.

On Long Island, there were rumrunners and dealers in bathtub gin, gaudy parties on the grounds of fabulous Gold Coast estates, rowdy gatherings in neighborhood speakeasies and big-name entertainers in flashy nightclubs, where ordinary men and women brushed shoulders and clinked glasses with the famous and the notorious. There were also thousands of work-a-day people who went to work-a-day jobs, worried about their children's future and hoped to save up for the latest Ford.

It was the Roaring '20s on Long Island, which became a microcosm of the nation's revolution in manners and morals. F. Scott Fitzgerald had memorialized the era with his 1922 best-seller, ``Tales of the Jazz Age,'' the year before he rented a house in Great Neck and began work on his best-known novel, ``The Great Gatsby.''

In the wooded villages of the North Shore, the affluent life was celebrated in the mansions of more than 500 estates. Some played host to grandiose dinner-dances where hundreds of guests transformed brightly lighted landscapes into a weekend playland. These scenes of newly won opulence and excess later found their way onto the pages of ``Gatsby,'' a story of the American Dream gone awry.

At the same time, off the shores of Long Island, fleets of rumrunners fought a deadly battle with the Coast Guard and with each other, smuggling ashore the most precious cargo of the decade: illegal alcohol.

And along the byways of the South Shore was a string of roadhouses, nightclubs and speakeasies that turned Merrick Road and Sunrise Highway into what columnists called Glitter Alley and The Great Light Way, a scene to rival Broadway's Great White Way.

Here, shop girls on dates and college boys on vacation danced the Charleston, sharing the scene with an odd mixture of businessmen, show business figures, politicans such as New York City Mayor Jimmy Walker and gangsters such as Jack (Legs) Diamond. All came to imbibe illicit drink, to dance, and to listen to the latest sounds in blues and jazz.

Clubs along Merrick Road, such as the famed Pavillon Royal, which opened in 1924, featured the nation's best-known bands. Legendary entertainers such as Texas (``Hello, suckers'') Guinan, Guy Lombardo, Eddie Duchin and Rudy Vallee drew customers from Long Island, New York City and across the nation.

At some clubs, champagne sold for $100 a bottle. On the strip, bandleader Paul Whiteman introduced a singing group called The Rhythm Boys featuring then-unknown Bing Crosby. Other show business favorites included comics Ken Murray and Victor Moore and singer Sophie Tucker, billed as the ``Last of the Red Hot Mamas.''

``Everyone in show business flocked there,'' Tucker, who lived in Freeport for a time, had told a local reporter. The small village boasted a famous private club, The Lights Club on Fairview Avenue, organized by George M. Cohan. Entertainment started at midnight and ran until dawn, with Al Jolson, W.C. Fields and Eddie Cantor among the regulars.

Great Neck also boasted its share of celebrities. In 1926, the local weekly engaged in some unabashed name-dropping with a letter from author Gene Buck. The village, he wrote, ``has more truly noted people within its domain than any other community of its size in the world.'' He cited such residents as New York World editor Herbert Bayward Swope, composer Oscar Hammerstein, and actors Ed Wynn, Frank Craven and Ernest Truex.

In another issue, the Great Neck News noted with pride: ``Our Ring Lardner of East Shore Road wrote the scenario for `The New Klondike' at the Rivoli next week.'' Film director Henry King of Elm Point had just made ``Stella Dallas,'' starring Douglas Fairbanks, the paper reported.

Along Suffolk's North Shore, other well-known residents were spotted. Marion Davies had a hideaway in Halesite, courtesy of her patron, publisher William Randolph Hearst, and actresses Lillian and Dorothy Gish could be spotted cycling about town. And gambler Nicky Arnstein, Fanny Brice's husband, allegedly ran a dice game at the Halesite firehouse's annual fund-raiser.

For the ordinary wage-earner, there was the local speakeasy. A large pitcher of beer cost $1.50 at Fred's Roadhouse in Wantagh or Otto's Silver Wave in Freeport, and bathtub rye, a homemade blend of rotgut alcohol, water and flavorings, was on sale at Old John's Shack in the Bellmore woods. On Sunrise Highway, speakeasies served shots of gin for 50 cents, while a motherly looking woman on Old Country Road sold ``guaranteed Scotch'' from her Garden City home.

A social revolution challenging accepted American traditions was certainly under way, historian Frederick Lewis Allen observed in his account, ``Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s.''

In the forefront of this rebellion were the children of ordinary American families. In communities across the country, young women bobbed their hair, painted their faces with rouge, slipped on short sleeveless dresses, rolled down silk stockings below the knee and kicked up their heels on countless dance floors. By 1920, The New York Times reported that ``the American woman . . . has lifted her skirts far beyond any modest limitation.'' Hemlines nine inches above the ground!

The more racy flappers stashed their girdles in the cloakrooms of popular dance places, complaining that men wouldn't dance with corseted women. Even ``nice'' girls used swear words and slang, smoked in public and, somewhat less openly, kept up with the menfolk drink for drink. And everyone seemed to be dancing: fox-trots at afternoon tea dances, high-kicking Charlestons into the early morning hours.

So it seemed.

But there was also an ambivalence about the changing times and a good deal of moderation. In the villages of Long Island, old values seemed to persist, regardless of pressure from the trendy culture. As recorded in local newspapers in the mid-'20s, day-to-day social life did not seem so different from the prewar era:

Mrs. Dudley B. Fuller Jr. of Franklin Court, for instance, entertained at dinner on Saturday night and took her guests to a theater party at the Community Club, the Hempstead Sentinel reported.