Damon Runyon | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Born | Alfred Damon Runyan (1880-10-04)October 4, 1880 Manhattan, Kansas, U.S. |
| Died | December 10, 1946(1946-12-10) (aged 66) New York City, U.S. |
| Occupation(s) | Writer, journalist |
| Years active | 1900–1946 |
Alfred Damon Runyon (October 4, 1880[1] – December 10, 1946) was an American journalist and short-story writer.[2]
He was best known for his short stories celebrating the world ofBroadway in New York City that grew out of theProhibition era. To New Yorkers of his generation, a "Damon Runyon character" evoked a distinctive social type from Brooklyn or Midtown Manhattan. The adjectiveRunyonesque refers to this type of character and the type of situations and dialog that Runyon depicts.[3] He spun humorous and sentimental tales ofgamblers, hustlers, actors, and gangsters, few of whom go by"square" names, preferring instead colorful monikers such as "Nathan Detroit", "Benny Southstreet", "Big Jule", "Harry the Horse", "Good Time Charley", "Dave the Dude", or "The Seldom Seen Kid".
His distinctive vernacular style is known asRunyonese: a mixture of formal speech and colorful slang, almost always in the present tense, and always devoid ofcontractions. He is credited with coining the phrase "Hooray Henry", a term now used in British English to describe the upper-class version of a loud-mouthed, arrogant twit.
Runyon's fictional world is also known to the general public through the musicalGuys and Dolls based on two of his stories, "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure".[4] The musical additionally borrows characters and story elements from a few other Runyon stories, most notably "Pick The Winner". The filmLittle Miss Marker (and its three remakes,Sorrowful Jones,40 Pounds of Trouble and the 1980Little Miss Marker) grew from his short story of the same name.
Runyon was also a newspaper reporter, covering sports and general news for decades for various publications and syndicates owned byWilliam Randolph Hearst. Already known for his fiction, he wrote a noted "present tense" article onFranklin Delano Roosevelt's Presidential inauguration in 1933 for the Universal Service, aHearst syndicate, which was merged with the co-ownedInternational News Service in 1937.
Damon Runyon was born Alfred Damon Runyan to Alfred Lee and Elizabeth (Damon) Runyan.[5] His relatives in his birthplace ofManhattan, Kansas, included several newspapermen.[6] His grandfather was a newspaper printer from New Jersey who had relocated to Manhattan, Kansas, in 1855, and his father was the editor of his newspaper in the town. In 1882 Runyon's father was forced to sell his newspaper, and the family moved westward. The family eventually settled inPueblo, Colorado, in 1887, where Runyon spent the rest of his youth as portrayed in the film "Damon Runyon's Pueblo." By most accounts, he attended school only through the fourth grade.[7] He began to work in the newspaper trade under his father in Pueblo. In present-day Pueblo, Runyon Field, the Damon Runyon Repertory Theater Company, andRunyon Lake are named in his honor.
In 1898, when still in his teens, Runyon enlisted in the US Army to fight in theSpanish–American War. While in the service, he was assigned to write for theManila Freedom andSoldier's Letter.
After military service, he worked for Colorado newspapers, beginning in Pueblo. His first job as a reporter was in September 1900, when he was hired by thePueblo Star;[8] he then worked in the Rocky Mountain area during the first decade of the 1900s: at theDenver Daily News, he served as "sporting editor" (today a "sports editor") and then as a staff writer. His expertise was in covering the semi-professional teams in Colorado. He briefly managed a semi-pro team in Trinidad, Colorado.[9] At one of the newspapers where he worked, the spelling of his last name was changed from "Runyan" to "Runyon", a change he let stand.
After failing in an attempt to organize a Coloradominor baseball league, which lasted less than a week,[10] Runyon moved to New York City in 1910. In his first New York byline, theAmerican editor dropped the "Alfred" and the name "Damon Runyon" appeared for the first time. For the next ten years, he covered theNew York Giants and professional boxing for theNew York American.
He was theHearst newspapers' baseball columnist for many years, beginning in 1911, and his knack for spotting the eccentric and the unusual, on the field or in the stands, is credited with revolutionizing the way baseball was covered. Perhaps as confirmation, Runyon was voted 1967J. G. Taylor Spink Award by theBaseball Writers' Association of America (BBWAA),[11] for which he was honored at ceremonies at theNational Baseball Hall of Fame in July 1968.[12] He is also a member of theInternational Boxing Hall Of Fame and is known for dubbing heavyweight championJames J. Braddock the "Cinderella Man". Runyon frequently contributed sports poems to theAmerican on boxing and baseball themes and wrote numerous short stories and essays.
If I have all the tears that are shed on Broadway by guys in love, I will have enough salt water to start an opposition ocean to the Atlantic and Pacific, with enough left over to run the Great Salt Lake out of business. But I wish to say I never shed any of these tears personally, because I am never in love, and furthermore, barring a bad break, I never expect to be in love, for the way I look at it love is strictly the old phedinkus, and I tell the little guy as much.
Gambling, particularly oncraps or horse races, was a common theme of Runyon's works, and he was a notorious gambler. One of his paraphrases from a line inEcclesiastes ran: "The race is not always to the swift, nor the battle to the strong, but that's how the smart money bets."
A heavy drinker as a young man, he seems to have quit drinking soon after arriving in New York, after his drinking nearly cost him the courtship of the woman who became his first wife, Ellen Egan. He remained a heavy smoker.
His best friend was mobster accountantOtto Berman, and he incorporated Berman into several of his stories under the alias "Regret, the horse player". When Berman was killed in a hit on Berman's boss,Dutch Schultz, Runyon quickly assumed the role of damage control for his deceased friend, mostly by correcting erroneous press releases, including one that stated Berman was one of Schultz's gunmen, to which Runyon replied, "Otto would have been as effective a bodyguard as a two-year-old."
While in New York City, Runyon courted and eventually married Ellen Egan. Their marriage produced two children, Mary and Damon Jr. A modern writer remarks that "by contemporary standards, Runyon was a marginal husband and father."[13] In 1928, Egan separated from Runyon permanently and moved toBronxville with their children after hearing persistent rumors about her husband's infidelities. As it became subsequently known, Runyon, in 1916, was covering the border raids of Mexican banditPancho Villa as a reporter for theAmerican newspaper owned byWilliam Randolph Hearst. He had first met Villa in Texas while coveringspring training of the state's teams.
While in Mexico, Runyon visited one afternoon theCiudad Juárezracetrack where Villa was present and placed a bet through a young messenger girl in Villa's entourage. The 14-year-old girl, whose name was Patrice Amati del Grande, erroneously placed Runyon's bet on a different horse that nonetheless won the race.[14]: 131–34 She confided to the lucky bettor that she wanted to be a dancer when she grew up and Runyon told her that if, instead, she would attend school, for which he would pay, she could come after her graduation to see him in New York and he would get her a dancing job in the city; Runyon did indeed pay for her enrollment in the localconvent school.[14]: 135–36
In 1925, 19-year-old Grande came to New York City looking for Runyon and found him through theAmerican's receptionist. The two became lovers and he found her work at localspeakeasies. In 1928, after the separation between Runyon and Ellen Egan turned into a divorce, Runyon and Grande were married by his friend, city mayorJimmy Walker.[15] His former wife became analcoholic and died in 1931 from aheart attack.[16] In 1946, some time after Grande began an affair with a younger man, the couple got divorced.[13]
In late 1946, the same year he and his second wife were divorced, Runyon died, at age 66, in New York City from thethroat cancer that had been diagnosed two years earlier, in 1944, when he underwent an unsuccessful operation that left him practically unable to speak.[13]
His body was cremated, and his ashes were scattered from aDC-3 airplane over Broadway in Manhattan byEddie Rickenbacker on December 18, 1946. This was an infringement of the law but widely approved.[17] The family plot of Damon Runyon is located atWoodlawn Cemetery in The Bronx, New York.
Runyon, in hiswill, left to his former second wife his house inFlorida, his racing stables, and the money from his insurance. He split in half the royalties from his works to his children and Grande.[18]: 301 His daughter Mary was eventually institutionalized foralcoholism while his son Damon Jr., after working as a journalist inWashington, D.C., died by suicide in 1968.[14]: 393–94
The English comedy writerFrank Muir comments[26] that Runyon's plots were, in the manner ofO. Henry, neatly constructed with professionally wrought endings, but their distinction lay in the manner of their telling, as the author invented a peculiarargot for his characters to speak. Runyon almost totally avoids the past tense (English humoristE. C. Bentley thought there was only one instance and was willing to "lay plenty of 6 to 5 that it is nothing but a misprint"[27]), and makes little use of the future tense, using the present for both. He also avoided the conditional, using instead the future indicative in situations that would normally require conditional. An example: "Now most any doll on Broadway will be very glad indeed to have Handsome Jack Madigan give her a tumble" (Guys and Dolls, "Social Error"). Bentley[28] comments that "there is a sort of ungrammatical purity about it [Runyon's resolute avoidance of the past tense], an almost religious exactitude." There is an homage to Runyon that makes use of this peculiarity ("Chronic Offender" bySpider Robinson), which involves a time machine and a man going by the name "Harry the Horse".
He uses many slang terms (which go unexplained in his stories), such as:
There are many recurring composite phrases such as:
Bentley notes[29] that Runyon's "telling use of the recurrent phrase and fixed epithet" demonstrates a debt toHomer.
Runyon's stories also employ occasional rhyming slang, similar to thecockney variety but native to New York (e.g.: "Miss Missouri Martin makes the following crack one night to her: 'Well, I do not see any Simple Simon on your lean and linger.' This is Miss Missouri Martin's way of saying she sees no diamond on Miss Billy Perry's finger." (from "Romance in the Roaring Forties")).
The comic effect of his style results partly from the juxtaposition of broad slang with mock pomposity. Women, when not "dolls", "Judies", "pancakes", "tomatoes", or "broads", may be "characters of a female nature", for example. He typically avoided contractions such as "don't" in the example above, which also contributes significantly to the humorously pompous effect. In one sequence, a gangster tells another character to do as he is told, or else "find another world in which to live".
In a contemporary introduction toThe Damon Runyon Omnibus, the journalistHeywood Broun says that Runyon's prose style is based on a real dialect spoken in 1930s New York City: "He has caught with a high degree of insight the actual tone and phrase of the gangsters and racketeers of the town. Their talk is put down almost literally... Runyon has exercised the privilege of selectivity. But he has not heightened or burlesqued the speech of the people who come alive in his short stories."[30]
Runyon's short stories are told in the first person by a protagonist who is never named and whose role is unclear; he knows many gangsters and does not appear to have a job, but he does not admit to any criminal involvement, and seems to be largely a bystander. He describes himself as "being known to one and all as a guy who is just around".[31] The radio programThe Damon Runyon Theatre dramatized 52 of Runyon's works in 1949, and for these the protagonist was given the name "Broadway", although it was admitted that this was not his real name, much in the way "Harry the Horse" and "Sorrowful Jones" are aliases.[32]
There are many collections of Runyon's stories, in particularRunyon on Broadway andRunyon from First to Last. A publisher's note in the latter claims that collection contains all of Runyon's short stories not included inRunyon on Broadway,[33] but two Broadway stories originally published inCollier's Weekly are not in either collection: "Maybe a Queen"[34] and "Leopard's Spots",[35] both collected inMore Guys And Dolls (1950). The radio showThe Damon Runyon Theater, in addition, has a story, "Joe Terrace", that appears inMore Guys and Dolls and the August 29, 1936, issue ofColliers. It is one of his "Our Town" stories that does not appear in the "In Our Town" book, and the only episode of the show which is not a Broadway' story; however, the action is changed in the show from Our Town to Broadway.
The "Our Town" stories are short vignettes of life in a small town, largely based on Runyon's experiences. They are written in a simple, descriptive style and contain twists and odd endings based on the personalities of the people involved. Each story's title is the name of the principal character. Twenty-seven of them were published in the 1946 bookIn Our Town.
Runyon on Broadway contains the following stories:
More Than Somewhat
| Furthermore
| Take It Easy
|
Runyon from First to Last includes the following stories and sketches:
The First Stories (early non-Broadway stories):
Stories à la Carte (Broadway stories written in Runyonese):
|
| The Last Stories (Broadway stories written in Runyonese):
Written in Sickness (sketches):
|
In Our Town contains the following stories:
|
|
|
The following "Our Town" stories were not included inIn Our Town:
|
Twenty of his stories became motion pictures.[36]
In 1938, his unproduced playSaratoga Chips became the basis ofThe Ritz Brothers filmStraight, Place and Show.
The Damon Runyon Theater radio series dramatized 52 of Runyon's short stories in weekly broadcasts running from October 1948 to September 1949 (with reruns until 1951).[38][39] The series was produced byAlan Ladd's Mayfair Transcription Company for syndication to local radio stations.John Brown played the character "Broadway", who doubled as host and narrator. The cast also comprisedAlan Reed,Luis Van Rooten, Joseph Du Val,Gerald Mohr,Frank Lovejoy,Herb Vigran,Sheldon Leonard,William Conrad,Jeff Chandler,Lionel Stander,Sidney Miller,Olive Deering andJoe De Santis.Pat O'Brien was initially engaged for the role of "Broadway". The original stories were adapted for the radio byRussell Hughes.
"Broadway's New York had a crisis each week, though the streets had a rose-tinged aura", wrote radio historianJohn Dunning. "The sad shows then were all the sadder; plays likeFor a Pal had a special poignance. The bulk of Runyon's work had been untapped by radio, and the well was deep."[40]: 189
Damon Runyon Theatre aired on CBS-TV from 1955 to 1956.
Mike McShane told Runyon stories as monologues on British TV in 1994, and an accompanying book was released, both titledBroadway Stories.
Three Wise Guys was a 2005 TV movie.
| External videos | |
|---|---|
 Booknotes interview (December 29, 1991) with Jimmy Breslin on his book,Damon Runyon: A Life,C-SPAN |
