North Beach, September 1928. There’s a walk-up playhouse on Green Street with a stage the size of a dining table and fourteen actors crammed onto it. The show is a French farce called “Easy for Zee Zee.” Opening week, it’s bombing.
Beautiful Elaine Worth, a Russian emigre, replaces the leading lady in the role of Zee Zee. Elaine is the kind of dame who brings trouble with her the way some dames bring perfume.
Frisco can’t get enough of her and leading man Robert Chapman. The show takes off and soon sets attendance records for Frisco.
November 24, 1928, half past midnight. Somebody puts six bullets into Jerry Ferri at his apartment on Lombard Street. The cops find letters addressed to Elaine on a dresser there. She had just moved out a week before the murder.
January 29, 1929, the cops bust the manager and the cast on an obscenity charge. The judge goes to see the show to see for himself. He dismisses the charges, but the story boosts ticket sales even more.
For nearly a year, “Zee Zee” is the hottest ticket in town.
In August 1929 the show’s Robert Chapman goes out a sixth-floor window at a friend’s place after a cast party. The Chronicle wants the show shut down, and the District Attorney is looking for a way to do it. Producer Sid Goldtree is sitting in Los Angeles and pulls the plug himself before they can.
The Coroner’s Jury determines Chapman’s death an accident, which makes no sense, but that is Frisco. He is the fourth bee buzzing around Elaine Worth’s hive to turn up dead in a span of nine months.
Part One of the Elaine Worth story. Part Two, “Where There Is Honey, There Are Bees,” picks up the bodies.
#SanFranciscoHistory #NorthBeach #TrueCrime #Prohibition #Frisco
Hi, welcome to Frisco: The Secret History. I’m your host, Knox Bronson. I have a great episode for you today, Part One of the Elaine Worth story, the gorgeous Russian actress whose presence turned the failing production of the “Easy For Zee Zee,” show at the Green Street Theater in North Beach into a smash hit in 1928. The show would set a record for box office revenue and attendance in Frisco, just as Elaine would set a still-unbeaten record with the mysterious and violent deaths of several boyfriends and admirers. Today, I’m talking about the Green Street Theater and the show. In Part Two, I will dive into the story of Elaine and the gangsters who loved her.
Before we get going, I want say thank you to Walter Haas at Graffeo Coffee Roasters at 735 Columbus Avenue in San Francisco.
Graffeo was founded in 1935 and has been selling coffee beans to the public and the best restaurants near and far ever since. I have been drinking Graffeo Coffee since I lived around the corner on Mason Street back in the Seventies. Graffeo offers a dark roast, light roast, and a Swiss-water decaf bean. If you can’t get to North Beach, you can go to Graffeo.com, that is g r a f f e o dot com and order there. They sell whole beans, or will grind to your request. I love starting my day with a huge mug of dark roast. I am really happy to say that Graffeo Coffee is a founding sponsor for the Frisco: The Secret History podcast. I am thrilled to be associated with such an historic and iconic San Francisco brand. Graffeo beans are, as it says on the package, “Simply the finest coffee in the world.” It’s true. Give Graffeo a try. You will thank me.
[intermezzo]
Producer Sid Goldtree had a huge problem. His production of the French stage play, “Easy For Zee Zee,” was bombing. It had opened on September 6, 1928. The next day, the Examiner published this review by Gobind Behari Lal, who, just nine years later would share the awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for Distinguished Reporting.
The headline read:
[typewriter]
IT’S WORSE THAN JUST NAUGHTY
By GOBIND BEHARI LAL.
“Farce in three acts, adapted from the French of Pierre Dijon, produced by Sid Goldtree, who also wrote the lyrics for the show’s theme song, and directed by Hugh Metcalfe, who also played the part of Monsieur Dupont.”
“She is the measles!”
“The measles?”
“Yes. Every man gets her—”
Zee Zee is her name, to her catalogue of lovers. But she owns a clubman of a husband, and is a high-toned society lady. Also she is the star character in the naughty French farce, “Easy for Zee Zee.”
Of course, it is the sort of play written on asbestos. All this caloric comedy was staged at the Green Street Theater last night.
“Better than ‘The Married Virgin,'” the management had boosted throughout the Latin quarter’s speakeasies and cafes. Better? Or worse? Let the moralist puzzle. Suffice it to say that “The Married Virgin” type was preserved, and several of the titillating tricks of that play were embodied, with slight changes, in “Easy for Zee Zee.”
Again there was a married virgin — Paulette. But this time the fault was not hers. Her husband, although married five weeks, had not enlightened her. The young scapegrace had had “measles” — i.e., Zee Zee.
What amused and tickled the audience was that their rawest expectations were fulfilled, and the historic background of the before-the-1913 Barbary Coast dance hall shows was conjured up once more — only under French farcical guise.
Except that Zee Zee might have been Shakespeare’s Mrs. Overdone, and M. Dupont a sort of Falstaff, the acting was poor, and in part, rotten.
But the dirt, meaning the measly, hot dirt, carried it — in a fashion.
[end typewriter]
Mr. Lal’s erudite panning of the play, with its allusions to Shakespeare’s characters, Falstaff, the fat, vain, boastful, witty, and charismatic knight who loves drinking, telling tall tales, and living off stolen or borrowed money, often from married women, and Mistress Overdone, the the brothel-keeper in Measure for Measure, a flamboyant, shrewd fixture of Vienna’s underworld, who helps save a nun’s brother’s life who has been sentenced to death for impregnating his fiancée before marriage, was matched by most of the other papers in the city.
Alice Worthington, who had the lead role as Zee Zee, was not even mentioned by name in one review. The Bulletin published her picture with the caption, “Alice Worthington is an important member of the cast that carried “Easy for Zee Zee” to success at the Green Street Theater.” This was six days after the show opened. She would be gone in a day or two.
George C. Warren, in the Chronicle, gave the play a mixed review. He calls Hugh Metcalfe’s direction “very good,” praises the first act as “brisk, comic and sufficiently broad to get guffaws,” but finds the second act and ending a let-down, and sums it up as heavy on undress and light on characterization.
And this is the crux. Well, one of the cruxes.
Note the phrase “heavy on undress” in the Chronicle review and “But the dirt, meaning the measly, hot dirt, carried it — in a fashion,” from the Examiner’s.
It seems the men, not the women, ended up in their skivvies in the second act.
This wasn’t enough to bring in the crowds. After a mediocre run of a perhaps a week, it looked like Sid Goldtree would have to close the show.
And then a miracle happened.
Somehow, somewhere, Elaine Worth, an ethereal beauty of Russian heritage, an actress with a lust for excitement she easily broadcast from the stage, moved into Sid Goldtree’s line of vision. He was transfixed, like all men in her presence,
I can find no record of how they actually met. Traditionally, the theater world in Frisco has always been a relatively small club. Among working actors, producers, directors and crew, everybody pretty much knows everybody, or at least knows of everybody, so I can’t imagine he wasn’t aware of her when originally casting the show, but that seems to be the case.
Alice was out and Elaine was in.
Like an enchantress, Zee Zee immediately cast an electrifying spell over the audiences every night. Within days, attendance at the show gained momentum at an astonishing speed.
Zee Zee herself, the radiant Elaine Worth, was at the center of a vortex, onstage and off, that would build in intensity over the next year and a half.
I have to believe she loved it.
[intermezzo]
What was North Beach like in the late 1920s? Frank Lanza had been sent out by the Mob back east during World War I to set things in order there. This was an ongoing process and things were heating up in late Twenties. By this time he and Giuseppe Alioto, father of future mayor Joe Alioto, controlled Fisherman’s Wharf and the docks.
The McDonough Brothers ran Frisco’s justice system, the cops, the courts, and the jails, from their bar and bail bonds company at the corner of Kearny and Clay, collecting and distributing payoffs, granting entrepreneurs permission to open gambling joints, whorehouses, and operations of every other form of vice.
Prohibition was still the law of the land and there were dozens, if not hundreds of speakeasies in North Beach, the Tenderloin and everywhere in between.
Despite the liquor laws, North Beach had a vibrant nightlife: clubs, restaurants, theaters, and cafes were abundant. If Frisco as a whole still basked in its reputation as the Paris of the Pacific, dating back to the late 1800s, then North Beach would have been its Left Bank.
On October 14, 1927, the Green Street Theatre reopened, billing itself as “San Francisco’s Most Daring Playhouse in the Heart of Bohemia.” The little theater was up two flights of stairs where the public would dine with the cast. It sat between 300 and 400 people, depending on the size of the production. The opening attraction was a scandalous play called “The Married Virgin,” starring former silent film actress Marion Aye. The play itself was based on a 1918 silent movie of the same name, which starred a pre-fame Rudolph Valentino.
The lobby was decorated with wonderfully racy pen-and-ink illustrations. Check Frisco: The Secret History on Instagram or Facebook to see them.
A few weeks into the run, Aye was arrested along with the other actors on grounds of indecency. It was first time Aye had ever been arrested; for the others, it was old hat. Needless to say, ticket sales exploded. The play had a sixteen-week run.
The theater repeated the pattern almost a year later with its next hit “Easy For Zee Zee,” which opened on September 6, 1928.
The play was an odd production, performed on a tiny stage. The Chronicle reported that there were, in keeping with the theater’s avant garden affectations,, a “master of ceremonies’ offering syncopated improvisations between acts.” I have no idea what these improvisations entailed and whether or not there was musical accompaniment.
Alice Worthington initially played Zee Zee, Hugh Metcalfe played Monsieur Dupont, the philandering husband and father of the bride. He also directed and quite ably design the production to fit on the theater’s postage-stamp sized stage. Florence Bell played Madame Dupont, the sleuthing mother-in-law. Robert Chapman, who had less than a year to live, played the young husband and son-in-law to the Duponts. His innocent and unsuspecting bride, Paulette, was played by Elaine DeVore. There were a few more supporting characters.
Pierre Dijon wrote the original French script and Samuel B. Dickson adapted it into English.
Paulette, a bride of five weeks, is still a virgin because her young husband, Robert, has been distracted by Zee Zee.
Zee Zee is both a charming socialite in the city’s upper-crust and a seductress well-known to the denizens of the Paris demi-monde. The Chronicle said: Zee Zee is a siren who sets her net for every kind of fish. Elaine Worth shared these qualities with her dramatic counterpart in real life. Paulette’s parents, the Duponts, are counting on grandchildren, and are not happy when they learn of the fractured state of their daughter’s marriage.
Things get complicated, to put it mildly, when it is revealed that Zee Zee has been carrying on with Monsieur Dupont for quite some time.
A young bride whose husband can’t release the delights of his past, a philandering father-in-law, a house full of secrets, and there we have the perfect formula for a smash hit.
[intermezzo]
As we know, it didn’t become a hit until Elaine Worth stepped into the lead role as Zee Zee. The timing is hard to ignore. Word of mouth brought in the throngs and the excitement multiplied.
The role as a Parisian demi-mondaine came naturally to her. She exuded mirth, mystery, and sexuality. The papers raved about the exotic young Russian actress and her, as the Bulletin put it, her “Slavic sensuousness and pulchritudinous appeal.” By the fourth week of the play’s run, Easy For Zee Zee’s box office receipts were breaking records, exceeding those of the Green Street Theater’s last big hit a year before, “The Married Virgin.”
The papers ran features on the players, like what books they read. The Bulletin ran this story on November 9:
[typewriter]
When the actor wants a book to read, what does he choose? Is he as a rule a “lowbrow” or a “highbrow” or neither? A census taken among Green Street Theater actors in “Easy for Zee Zee” reveals a catholicity of taste. The star of the show, Elaine Worth, she who plays Zee Zee herself in Sid Goldtree’s Parisian farce, admits a fondness for Maxim Gorky.
Hugh Metcalfe, on the other hand, seen as the unctuous philanderer Dupont,, likes Dickens “because he is so near to nature and the Bible.”
Elaine de Vore prefers Edgar Alan Poe and explains her choice by saying he has “a certain weirdness, chilliness and thrill.”
Jack Phipps, the plighted lover, delights in red-blooded fiction and hankers, it is said, for wild and woolly yarns of the plains and the cowpunchers.
[end typewriter]
Is it my imagination, or were newspapers of the day back then of a more literary bent than media today?
As the city rolled into winter, demand for Easy For Zee Zee remained and was nothing short of a phenomenon.
On November 14, the show had its one-hundredth performance to a packed and enthusiastic house.
On November 24, Gennaro Ferri, also known as Handsome Jerry, was found shot to death in his apartment at 490 Lombard Street, four blocks from the theater. He was a local gangster and bootlegger.
Elaine Worth had moved out of that apartment just a week before. She later said that they had had a fight about the nature of his acquaintances, comprised of hoodlums and criminals, of whom she thoroughly disapproved, and had moved back home to her mother’s in the East Bay .
This may be so, but of one thing I’m absolutely certain: Elaine had a thing for bad boys.
[intermezzo]
Easy For Zee Zee continued its successful run through the holidays without a break. On January 30th, 1929, The Examiner carried this story:
[typewriter]
GENDARMES PAY ZEE ZEE A VISIT
It wasn’t so “Easy for Zee Zee” last night, at least not as easy as it had been for the past twenty-one weeks or more.
Because the play called “Easy for Zee Zee” that has been running at the Green Street Theater was suddenly and mysteriously “pinched” last night, after the curtain had gone down on the last act. A full house is expected tonight as a result.
It was Corporal Peter Peshon, official police censor, and a posse who made the arrests. They waited until the cash customers had received their money’s worth, in other words, until the play had ended, and then they decided that after more than twenty weeks something ought to be done about it.
So they arrested the cast. Violation of an ordinance prohibiting obscene plays was charged. Sidney Goldtree, the manager, was released on $25 bail. The others were released on bail of $10 each.
[end typewriter]
Corporal Peshon and his morality crew had raided “The Married Virgin” at the Green Street Theater twice, the year before and would raid “The Flat Tire,” a merry mix-up of wives and husbands, a year later.
In the case of “The Married Virgin,” Sid Goldtree had gotten wind of Peshon’s plans to make a raid and arrests and obtained an an order from the court restraining Peshon from stopping the play. They were all ultimately arrested, but nothing came of it.
Nothing ever did.
I assume Corporal Peter Peshon raided other theaters as well. I must they weren’t on the same protection pay-off scheme like all the bordellos and gambling joints in town.
Or maybe it was just their turn in rotation to get raided, just as the police did with the whorehouses. The house would get a warning, giving them time to get the men out of there. The cops would take the madam and a few of the girls in. A reporter and a photographer would be there. At the station house, the photographer would ask one of the girls to hike up her skirt so he could get a good leg-shot. A print of this would be buried in the pile of the next morning’s collection of photos for that day’s paper. Examiner editor Bill Wren would very much enjoy the morning’s eye-candy snapshot. The madam and the girls would post their bail and get back to work. The story of the raid would be published and the public would be assured that Frisco’s politicians and police were doing something about vice.
Peshon was one of those rat finks everybody hates in any organization. As a sergeant, he turned in one of his own men in 1911 for grabbing a cup of coffee without first getting permission to do so while on duty. Peshon tracked him down personally to a coffee shop on Van Ness Avenue. This was against regulations. It cost the beat cop a $25 fine, almost $900 today. Penson later was promoted to the rank of Corporal, as the SFPD’s Censor of Stage and Screen.That was his official title.
Peshon raided the Green Street Theater every year like clockwork. You could set your clock to it.
Producer Sidney Goldtree’s bail was set at $25 for his Zee Zee arrest, about $200 today. The cast were all released on $10 bail each.
Clearly, nobody was taking the charges seriously, but the charade had to be played all the way out.
[intermezzo]
Having heard the arguments of the defense, Police Judge Sylvain Lazarus resolved to see the offending spectacle with his own eyes. On the evening of Monday, February 4th, by his order, he would take his seat in the Green Street Theater beside Assistant District Attorney George Schoenfeld and Corporal Peter Peshon, the Police Department’s censor of stage and screen. There the three of them would judge, finally and in person, just how gravely “Easy for Zee Zee” had offended the city’s virtue.
So there they sat on that brisk Winter night in the cramped Green Street Theater, judge, prosecutor, and arresting officer all dourly taking notes in a sea of laughing patrons.
The following day, Judge Lazarus dismissed charges against the cast and producers of the play, not for morality’s sake, but for that of mediocrity.
He proclaimed:
“I never spent a more profitless or more unsatisfactory evening than that I wasted as a sacrifice to official duty.
“If stupidity is a crime, then those responsible for this dull and insane performance, which I do not dignify by the name of drama, are entitled to punishment.
“The play is a bore to intelligence. It is vapid. It is amazing that an affair so flat, so stale and so unprofitable could draw audiences in the city where Warfield and Belasco once trod the boards.”
And so the drama of that year’s raid on the Green Street Theater was over.
[intermezzo]
The short trial and the sensational visitation of the officers of the court to the show made the front pages, adding to the show’s luster and demand for tickets continued to climb. Producer Sid Goldtree proudly, and loudly I might add, proclaimed to the press that the show had survived “a passage at arms with the forces of censorship.”
Judge Sylvain’s dismissal of the show’s worth had had no impact at all.
H.L. Mencken had, a few years earlier, in the Chicago Daily Tribune, written, “”No one in this world, so far as I know—and I have searched the records for years, and employed agents to help me—has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.” It’s usually misquoted as underestimating the taste of the American people. In any case, perhaps Easy For Zee Zee proved Mencken’s point. I don’t know. I’ve looked for a copy of the script, but cannot find one.
By March, 78,000 people had seen Zee Zee, setting a Frisco record for a theatrical run.
At the end of that month, the papers reported that Sid Goldtree was cabling Europe in search of new properties and scripts with which to follow Zee Zee. I find it odd, since the show was still selling out every night.
In early April, they celebrated the three-hundredth performance of Easy For Zee Zee, with an outdoor party including free food and dancing on Green Street and, as one paper reported, “bells ringing.” I have no idea which bells. Local church bells? I will leave it to your imagination.
There had been some turnover in the cast, but Elaine Worth continued to shine in her starring role. Robert Chapman was still there every night. He and Zee Zee had a wonderful chemistry onstage that audience found enchanting.
In May, one paper reported that it looked like Easy For Zee Zee promised to run forever and so the show rolled through the summer and on into the fall.
[intermezzo]
Leading man Robert Chapman — whom one newspaper feature later claimed Elaine Worth was to marry the next morning — did not survive the fall from a sixth-floor window into the building’s light well.
He and his friend, playwright Allen Hoffman, had been at an after-show gathering in the apartment of Florence Bell, who played Madame Dupont in the show, at 344 Ellis Street — six or eight rounds of moonshine with an assorted group that included two out-of-work actors, a sailor off the USS New Mexico, and a woman nobody named.
At 3 a.m., Chapman and Hoffman headed over to Hoffman’s apartment at 245 Leavenworth.
What happened next comes from Hoffman. At 4:30, he said, as they were getting ready for bed, the doorbell rang — two men who had come by twice before looking for someone called “Red” and demanding liquor. There was a scuffle, and one of them knocked Hoffman out with brass knuckles. When he came to, bloody and bruised, the door was open, the men were gone, and so was Chapman. The building’s janitor found him at the bottom of the light well, dead. The two men were never identified. A week later, a coroner’s jury called it an accidental death.
[intermezzo]
Three days after Chapman’s death, the Chronicle ran a front-page story headlined “‘Zee Zee’ Ends Tragedy Run as Brady Acts to Stop Show.” That would be San Francisco District Attorney Matthew Brady, who told the paper, “This play should not be allowed to go on. I am studying some method by which I can put a stop to it.”
The Chronicle, in an editorial, demanded the show be closed “in the interests of decency,” denouncing “the long series of murders and underworld disturbances that have followed in the wake of the play.”
The show’s producer, Sid Goldtree, was in Los Angeles. When he learned of the Chronicle’s position, he ordered the production shut down, beating the District Attorney to it. That same week, federal Prohibition agents raided the Gigolette Cafe, directly beneath the theater, and arrested its proprietor, Frank Martini, with a flask of liquor.
In the nine months before Robert Chapman’s mysterious death, three other men romantically linked to the beautiful star of “Easy for Zee Zee” had died violently. It’s a fascinating and convoluted tale of many intertwining strands, which we’ll attempt to unravel in Part Two of the Elaine Worth story: “Where There Is Honey, There Are Bees.”
[intermezzo]
Oscar Wilde wrote, in “The Picture of Dorian Gray, “It’s an odd thing, but anyone who disappears is said to be seen in San Francisco.
It must be a delightful city and possess all the attractions of the next world.”
The picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1890. Oscar loved the American West and San Francisco in particular, which he claimed to be the second-most beautiful city after Naples, Italy, and certainly the most free. He had visited in the early 1880s. He planned to return to live here but never made it back.
My focus here are primarily the last two decades of the San Francisco that Oscar and the rest of the world loved.
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If you enjoy the podcast, please tell your friends about it, especially those who enjoy San Francisco or true crime history. Word of mouth is the absolute best means of promotion for any creative endeavor in this world of algorithms and the ceaseless barrage of ads, notifications, and appeals on every digital platform. If you are aware of some particular aspect of San Francisco history in the thirties and forties you would like me to research, or a story to tell, please let me know. Once again, I’m your host, Knox Bronson. Thank you for listening. Until next time, get a little crazy and call it Frisco.