"Fabulous Bawd: The Story Of Saratoga" 1952 HEIMER, Mel
$95
HEIMER, Mel
[244] pp.
Henry Holt and Company
1952
8 1/2" x 5 3/4"
Jacket design by John O'Hara Cosgrove, II
VG/ VG
On the dedication page of "Fabulous Bawd," the story of Saratoga Springs, is the line "This is dedicated to the horses who, alone in Saratoga over the years, have remained honest." This dedication IS in character with the book. "The Spa was lousy with Vanderbilts," the author says in one place. In another: "All the patrons weren't just rich slobs." Over some of the author's longer sentences the reader also travels at his own risk. Saratoga is "this strangest of all American towns, this most bizarre of watering holes, this caterwauling, restless, final frontier of that ridiculous and wonderful thing that was called society in these, our United States." If this kind of writing fits the Saratoga of Lucky Luciano, Arnold Rothstein and Joe Adonis, it is inadequate for the Saratoga of Commodore Vanderbilt, Madame Jumel and Victor Herbert, or for that matter, the Saratoga of Clarence Knapp. Monty Woolley and Frank Sullivan. Mel Heimer, author of "The World Ends at Hoboken" and "The Big Drag," is a New York columnist and he suffers from what is apparently an occupational disease of columnists —an extremely irritating condescension.
SARATOGA in its great days needs no apology. Down the long corridors of its fabulous hotels have paraded long lines of colorful characters. There was E. Berry Wall, who once changed his costume forty times in one day; John Morrissey and Richard Canfield, the country's most famous gamblers, and Diamond Jim Brady, who arrived on the scene with a gold-plated bicycle, twenty-seven Japanese houseboys and, of course, the one and only Lillian Russell.
But Saratoga is not only a resort of society, trunks and potato chips. It was also, and with its new Saratoga Spa Association is still, a resort of Health; finally, of course, it is a resort of Horses. Here, "Fabulous Bawd" is at its best. The oldest race track still operating and the so-called "Graveyard of Favorites," Saratoga has seen races which no other track can match. It was on the Saratoga Track that Man o' War was beaten for the first and only time in his career—by a horse, of course, named Upset —and it was also on Saratoga on Aug. 11, 1930, on a rain-drenched track, when the unknown Jim Dandy, at 100-1. won the Travers Stakes by six lengths over the two fastest horses in America, Gallant Fox and Whichone.