PROHIBITION: Mecca of Merriment

Last week many a famed Manhattan nightclubber received an astounding form letter. Excerpts: “You are cordially invited to attend the gala opening of the Fifty-Eighth Street Country Club. . . . If you found a soupçon of enjoyment in my former place . . . in this Mecca of Merriment you will behold . . . the titillating tintinnabulating secret excitations of the Congo and flesh-shuddering, goose-creeping horrors of the Grand Guignol!” The letters—there were two editions—were signed: BELLE LIVINGSTONE.

Author of the letters is also an author of books (Letters of a Bohemian, Belle of Bohemia}. Her latest book professes to be the story of her life, begins with a newsgatherer of Emporia, Kan. named Graham discovering her, an infant, under a sunflower. He adopted her, lost her when, according to the book, she sought freedom for the stage by begging a passing stranger to marry her. He did. She left him, started on an international career which included four marriages and. according to the narrative, acquaintance with such statesmen as the late Theodore Roosevelt (who she says gave her “a magnificent set of Haviland china”), the late Lord Kitchener (who she says gave her “a cross between a yacht and a houseboat”), King Edward VII of Britain, Herbert Hoover, King Leopold of the Belgians, and such celebrities as Fanny Ward, Harry Kendall Thaw, Morris Gest. Once she started from London to go around the world “by picking up my traveling and hotel expenses as I went,” got as far as Japan, then lost the bet which started her journey by marrying. Sample of that trip: “I was wearing a solitaire diamond . . . slipping it off my finger I dropped it in my corsage . . . I announced : I have lost my ring.’ . . . The next morning, imagine my surprise to find he had sent me around one of the loveliest solitaires I possess today.” During the War, the book’s index relates: “My house [in Paris] was the social head quarters of the U. S. A. High Command.”

Last year Belle Livingstone, no longer young but still a shrewd businesswoman, conducted a “salon of culture, wit and bonhommie” on Manhattan’s Park Avenue — a lurid house of night where people sat on cushions on the floor and drank until daylight. Federal officers raided it, arrested the proprietress and three bartenders. Visitors to her Mecca of Merriment last week saw Miss Livingstone in a black dress dotted with symbolic sunflowers, saw also a large house, three of whose floors are occupied respectively by dancehall and stage, salon and bar, ping-pong and Tom Thumb golf rooms. Specially designed murals of toping fauns and bare-breasted ladies had been installed. Cabaret entertainment, dancing and games were provided without cover charge. Payment for refreshments were arranged, as in her “former place,” by selling books of $1 tickets, one (or more) to be torn off by the waiter or bartender each time he serves a customer.