Free Rothstein by David Pietrusza Page A

your happiness, but you cannot have my approval. How could I approve losing my son?”
    “But you would not be losing him.”
    “If he marries outside his faith, he will be lost to me. That is The Law.”
    That was that. Carolyn and Arnold left his parents’ home with Carolyn particularly discouraged. “Someday you’ll hate me for coming between you and your family,” she told her fiance. “I don’t want that to happen. Maybe we ought to stop seeing each other.”
    “It was just the way I knew it would be,” said A. R. “Maybe I just wanted to hurt myself. But I won’t let it change anything about us. I love you. I want to marry you. My father said I lived my own life. Well, it wouldn’t be much of a life without you.”
    “You’re always talking about percentage. This time it’s against you. Have you thought of that?”
    “Sometimes I buck the percentage. There are ways to even things up. I love you. Will you marry me?”
    Carolyn Green said yes.
    Their courtship continued, both maintaining their professional lives. A. R. gambled. Carolyn acted. In February 1909, producer and theater owner J. J. Shubert helped her secure a role in Leslie Stuart’s Havana. Carolyn described it as “the sensation of the theatrical year.” She was one of eight “Hello” girls, chorines often compared to the old Floradora Sextette, a natural comparison since Stuart had written both Floradora and Havana, but Carolyn had another comparison in mind. As in the case of the Floradora Sextette, she noted, most “Hello” girls made “successful marriages.”
    She soon made a successful marriage herself, at least financially. One night after Carolyn was through with Havana, she and Arnold dined at Rector’s. A. R. proposed formally, presenting her with a ring featuring a “cluster of white diamonds around a brown four-carat diamond which gave the effect of a daisy.” Carolyn accepted again.
    Carolyn met many of A. R.‘s friends, or at least the more respectable among them like Wilson Mizner, Hype Igoe, Tad Dorgan, John McGraw, Ben de Cassares, and Frank Ward O’Malley. But she found reporter Herbert Bayard Swope to be the most interesting. Swope was just plain brilliant. Born in St. Louis to immigrant German-Jewish parents (Schwab was the actual family name), young Herbert considered Harvard, briefly attended the University of Berlin, and returned home to cashier at a local racetrack. Swope enjoyed the company, the atmosphere-and the gambling-but his chosen occupation disconcerted his bourgeois family, who wanted him in more respectable pursuits, their best suggestion being an $8-a-week reporting job with Joseph Pulitzer’s St. Louis PostDispatch. The PostDispatch soon noticed that Swope spent more time at the track than in the newsroom and fired him, but not before the newspaper business had entered his blood. He moved to Chicago, working for the Tribune and the Inter-Ocean. Hunting for young talent, the New York Herald lured Swope east. He moved to Manhattan, shared a flat with actor John Barrymore, continued gambling, and soon was fired again. He became a theatrical press agent, spent even more time gambling, met all the best-and worst-people, and returned to the press room, first to the Morning Telegraph, a racing paper, and again to the Herald.
    Swope and Rothstein had much in common. Born just twelve days apart, both came from middle-class, German-Jewish Orthodox families. Both loved gambling and being just a little smarter than the next person. Both would become the biggest men in their fields.
    Arnold and Carolyn often double-dated with Swope and his girlfriend, Margaret Honeyman “Pearl” Powell. Pearl would eventually reach the highest levels of society, while Carolyn remained a gambler’s woman, albeit a phenomenally rich gambler’s woman. Still Pearl never lost respect for her friend. “She was,” Pearl would say of Carolyn, “more of a lady than most ladies I know.”
    Carolyn Rothstein recounted that in