GENTLEMEN FOR RENT

Cities like New York have a way of coming up with solutions—skyscrapers, doormen, take-out coffee, laundry delivery, human rickshaws—to problems that they create themselves. In the late nineteen-thirties, as the city was gearing up to show off its forward-looking technological ingenuity at the World’s Fair, a problem that it hadn’t solved was what to do about unaccompanied women—both those who lived and worked in the city and those who would be visiting to stroll through the “World of Tomorrow.” At the time, single women enjoyed an unprecedented level of freedom and autonomy to go to work, live alone, and even—in the words of their soi-disant guru, a self-help writer named Marjorie Hillis—to like it. But, to really enjoy the city’s post-Prohibition night life, a see-and-be-seen matter, women needed men. Single female non-celebrities were turned away from the lounge of the New Yorker hotel, even if they were paying guests, and “hen parties” attracted horrified disdain from the guardians of glamour. Women could meet their female friends in dull, obscure restaurants, but they couldn’t hunt in “Sex and the City”-style packs. So what was a single girl to do when the best tables were behind closed doors? Nobody who visited the city in 1939 was really there just for the museums, the Trylon, and the Perisphere. They were there for the Stork Club and the Mirador, the Cotton Club and the Savoy, for midtown café society and uptown jazz adventures. They had money to spend, and yet an absurd combination of convention, prejudice, faux concern, and fear kept them from where they most wanted to be. And, of course, it would take an entrepreneur to solve the problem.

Ted Peckham, a foppish Midwestern arriviste in his early twenties, spotted this opening in the market soon after he arrived in New York. In 1935, he founded the Guide Escort Service—essentially, a way for women to rent out men. He approached the managers of upscale midtown hotels and persuaded them that here was an above-board, safe, and reliable way for their out-of-town guests to enjoy the city after dark. Having realized that social snobbery was the key to getting his rent-a-gent service accepted, Peckham insisted that all his men were graduates of Yale, Harvard, and Princeton, with exceptions made only for down-on-their-luck European royals. Publicity did the rest. Peckham told his story to everyone, from the Times to Le Figaro, and, in 1937, he tried to stage a Broadway musical based on his business. He wrote twice about his exploits: in 1940, in a collection of letters received, and, more fully, in 1955, in a memoir called “Gentlemen for Rent.” Both books begin with his move from Depression-crippled Cleveland to New York, equipped only with “the naïve gullibility of youth, a fairly well-cut set of tails, and five five-dollar bills.” In the first version of his story, the author, who never married, hints at the particular form of restlessness driving him away from Ohio, where he was known as “that strange little Peckham boy” because of his flamboyant style: “I affected elaborate habits of dress, and strolled about in a miniature derby hat and dark blue coat with an astrakhan collar, in contrast to my playmates clad in plainly cut overcoats and conventional caps.” Perhaps because of his outsider status, the strange boy grew up to be an excellent salesman, much like his contemporary Dale Carnegie, whose “How to Win Friends and Influence People” was the self-help bestseller of 1936.

When Peckham arrived in New York, he was struck by its glitter and privilege, apparently “untouched by depression.” Hoping to soak up a little reflected glamour, he went to the Plaza one afternoon for tea, and in the Palm Court he overheard two dowagers complaining that they had been refused entry to the most stylish spots in town. The eavesdropping entrepreneur began plotting how to redirect some of their abundant funds into the pockets of struggling young men like himself. For, despite the city’s superficial swank, the Depression was still biting. When Peckham visited the Yale Club to recruit for his new service, the registrar confided that only seventy out of the club’s five thousand members had jobs. Peckham nonetheless insisted that his men hold some kind of day job, no matter how poorly paid, in order to prove that they were more than “lounge lizards or gigolos.”

He laid down strict rules of conduct to keep the encounters businesslike: “We did not permit hanky-panky, and our boys could hold coats but never hands.” But Peckham knew quite well what really drove his success. “I am not so foolish, however, as to exclude sex completely, for I know it registers itself in everything we do. As Mr. Freud said, ‘It is very basic.’ ” But, after this airy admission in his first book, the spectre of sex is dismissed. Instead, Peckham emphasized that this was work. The escort “would have to remain the perfect cavalier, attractive, entertaining, and ingratiating throughout an entire evening, even if he didn’t like the woman who had hired him.” In other words, his men would have to practice the same tiring arts of flattery and fakery that women had perfected over centuries of boring dates on the arms of wealthy men.

The illusion of male dominance, however, needed to be maintained. If women were to pay the men directly—and, worse, pay their own checks—the role reversal would turn off both the clients and the escorts. So women would fill two envelopes with cash, one the escort’s fee and the other her budget for the evening, and her date then used her money to pay waiters and bartenders, reasserting his superficial control of the evening. In January, 1938, an anonymous “girl reporter” for the Hartford Courant sampled the service, reporting that her rather gloomy escort, “Mr. Smith,” was in it for the money, and considered it unglamorous hard work. By handling the money on dates, he kept some control, although only over how much his date drank. The women held the real power, and had to be kept happy. “After three complaints an escort is dropped,” he explains. “Women complain because they don’t draw a Clark Gable for $10.”

But men still controlled the city’s night life and its social codes—men like the columnist Lucius Beebe, the “orchidaceous oracle of café society,” and, less subtly, the bouncers and gangsters guarding the doors at the Stork Club and the Rainbow Room. Single women, especially in multiples, especially of uncertain age, were unwelcome. Even when they were guests at an upscale hotel, women alone could not freely visit all the public rooms. Peckham saw college graduates with no cash to take women out and women with cash but no men to take them, and the solution was simple: he would “bring these two desolate and palpitating groups together.”

Peckham was palpitating with status anxiety. He would employ only graduates of élite universities, and recorded in his memoir the sting when someone assumed that his own alma mater, Western Reserve, was a college on a reservation. His social graces were hurriedly acquired: when he got his first encouraging nod from the manager of the Waldorf-Astoria to promote his business to hotel guests, he rushed out to buy a “wine and society food book” in order to teach his men how to order from an upscale menu. At first, he spoke a little too freely to reporters, confiding to the Times that “I tell my boys not to put up with [the women] a minute if they’re drunk. They take ’em right home.” Peckham always insisted that his motives were altruistic, yet he was torn between pride and shame in his business. His books are full of letters like one from a pair of Denver teachers who want absolute anonymity for fear of local scandal. Clients’ names were “locked away in a safe-deposit vault” and, when he was brought to trial by the city’s licensing commission, in the summer of 1939, none of his former clients or escorts came forward to defend him. The commission did not care about what Peckham had actually done but, rather, what his service might allow men and women to do. Vague fears of “indecencies and immorality” were raised in court, although no such accusations had actually been made against Peckham. In the end, the chastened entrepreneur was fined two hundred and fifty dollars, given a three-month suspended sentence, and forbidden from operating any similar business in the future. He immediately appealed the decision, but his conviction was upheld in January, 1940, reasserting official opposition to any such service operating in the city.

“The suppression of Ted Peckham,” as The New Yorker put it, coincided with what should have been his greatest triumph. The World’s Fair, which opened, in Flushing, in April, 1939, was meant to be a wholesome symbol of the city’s emergence from the murk of Prohibition and the gloom of the Depression. But not even its organizers believed that they could keep tourists out of Manhattan’s night clubs. Ted Peckham ramped up his business to cater to lone female visitors, and by the time the Fair opened “the Service was beginning to brighten life at a conveyor-belt rate of production.” It earned a glowing mention in “New York—Fair or No Fair,” a guide to the city for single female travellers written by Hillis, who had been famous for about as long as Peckham, since the publication of her bestselling advice book, “Live Alone and Like It,” in 1936. Hillis promised that the service could provide “a Kentucky Colonel, a French Marquis, or a Hungarian Count” on request, and reassured readers that their escort would “behave perfectly and probably be every bit as good-looking and well turned out as your best beau at home (or even your husband or son).” Peckham was already in court when he saw her endorsement, and could only wonder bitterly why his lawyer hadn’t quoted it during the trial.

Peckham saw both the rise and fall of his service as a product of its time. “The picture of a lucky youngster who parlayed a hare-brained idea into a good livelihood belongs within the framework of the nineteen-thirties.” Success had come too easily, and, in a challenge to the self-help cults of the time that elevated it to a moral virtue, turned out to be a shallow comfort that did nothing to help him develop any powers of resilience. Failure made the city look different, tawdry in the light of the morning, its language and pretenses worn out: “I was fed up with superlatives—‘darling,’ ‘marvelous,’ ‘gorgeous,’ and ‘divine’—and every other cliché of café society life.” But Peckham’s disillusionment with superficialities was itself a cliché, and it didn’t last much longer than the next sundown. The Associated Press reported, in January, 1940, that he was hard at work in sales again, this time “promoting a business of cultured pearl cuff links and studs in department stores.”