Guys and Dolls, the musical loosely based on the Broadway stories of Damon Runyon, premiered on Broadway on November 24th 1950. It ran for 1,200 performances and has been frequently revived ever since. The film version, starring Frank Sinatra as Nathan Detroit and Marlon Brando as Sky Masterson, appeared in 1955.
Even on the page, never mind in 1950s Technicolor, Runyon’s characters can sometimes seem larger than life. But many of them are, in fact, based on real people that Runyon knew on the Broadway of the 1920s and 1930s. His first biographer, writing in 1948, two years after Runyon’s death, said that any competent New York detective would recognised most of the gamblers and gunmen. But if many of them have faded from both memory and myth these days – itt’s hard to find out much about the gambler Nicely Hogan, the basis for Nicely-Nicely Johnson, for instance – it’s still possible to connect some of them to their reputed fictional counterparts.
Nathan Detroit
Nathan Detroit isn’t a big figure in Runyon’s stories, but the man on whom he is modelled was big enough for Runyon to trace not one, but two characters from him. That man was Arnold Rothstein, a still-legendary underworld figure, responsible more than anyone putting the organised into organised crime: under his guidance, the families and syndicates of criminal America were moulded into professional, quasi-corporate enterprises. “He don’t want to be known as a tough guy,” a fellow gangster said. “Rothstein wants to rob people sitting down.”
Above all, Rothstein was a financier – people called him The Big Bankroll – backing everything from Prohibition-era bootleggers and the nascent drugs trade to small-time debts and loans. The biggest bookmaker in the country, Rothstein thought he could fix anything, from the 1919 World Series baseball tournament to the city’s politicians and police. The floating crap game, Nathan Detroit’s signature enterprise, which involves moving the game’s location every night to make it hard for the police to shut down, was a Rothstein idea; every kind of floating game was. He had been running such things since 1911.
In a couple of stories, Runyon gave Rothstein the name Armand Rostenthal, and another nickname too: The Brain. Like The Brain, Rothstein conducted much of his business from a table at Lindy’s 24-hour restaurant at 1626 Broadway, between 49th and 50th Street – thinly disguised as Mindy’s by Runyon – where he reportedly drank nothing stronger than milk.
That was how Runyon knew him, because Runyon, who was a journalist by trade, spent hours there himself, listening out for stories in the chatter of the Broadway folk who drifted in and out. “I am the sedentary champion of the city,” Runyon once said. “In order to learn anything of importance, I must remain seated. Why I am the best is that I can last an entire day without causing the chair to squeak.”
Rothstein died of gunshot wounds in November 1928 after a dispute about a large gambling debt. Runyon was one of the last people to speak to him alive before he left Lindy’s that night; he made the evening the subject of one of his first stories, ‘The Brain Goes Home’.
Mathew Lyons 