Jay is Fay (The Broadway Gangster)

 

           Larry Fay               Live fast and die young

There was, very likely, a real-life model for Jay Gatsby (The Great Gatsby, 1925), forgotten today, whose life was as colorful as they come.  Larry Fay, like the fictional Jay, made his money the old fashioned way -- from bootlegging, bringing liquor in from Canada and from the rumrunner boats.  He sold it at his nightclubs in New York, the Casa Blanca and the El Fey, playing the part of the fashionable bon vivant dressed in custom Bond Street clothes.  Like Gatsby, he had a mansion on Long Island where he threw lavish parties.

And he had a Daisy of sorts, former showgirl Evelyn Crowell, who quickly became a mistress of Joseph P. Kennedy and then married another rich man after Fay's dramatic death.  He was shot four times by his club doorman, Edward Maloney, on New Year's Eve 1932, because he had reduced employee hours and pay.

Fay had hardly made a mistake before in the dangerous life he lived.  In the early twenties he made so much from a winning 100 to 1 odds bet at Belmont Race Track he bought a taxi fleet.  Then came his scheme to corner the New York milk market and fix prices, for which he was indicted but skated away free.  

Mary Louise "Texas" Guinan, former stage and film star, headlined at Fay's establishments -- so successfully that she took half the profits.  "The Queen of the Nightclubs" was the epitome of the Jazz Age,  still remembered for her catchphrase greeting, "Hello, suckers!"  Barred from bringing her road show to France because of her reputation, Texas opened a new one back home called "Too Hot for Paris."  The 300 Club, often raided, was all hers, but there was little time left to enjoy it as she died shortly after Fay, in 1933.  

Since Prohibition was over, maybe their time was up, too.