The remaining few aristocrats bide their time, believing and hoping for a revival which will never come. But they are curious. Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt visited the Stork Club once. Mrs. Hamilton McK. Twombly went to dinner at the Monte Carlo ONCE. And that vital nonagenarian, Colonel Creighton Webb, has been to a night club _twice_.
Society departments still appear in the newspapers, a habit the editors fear to shake off. But their content is mostly betrothals and weddings of people few know--no charity balls, no formal functions, no musical soirées, no tally-ho outings, polo or fox hunts in season.
In another year or two, a new superior set may arise--composed of union labor leaders, rising reds and affluent Africans.
Until then, Society will go like the gallant G.A.R.--doomed by the toll of time.
_When this chapter first appeared in print in 1948, they said we were nuts. The following year, when we wrote_ Chicago Confidential, _we expanded on the subject of the organized underworld. That made our critics hysterical._
_But the findings of the Kefauver Committee, which got its original inspiration from these books, proved how right we were. In fact, the Senate Crime Committee's final report was practically a plagiarism of_ Chicago Confidential, _and_ Washington Confidential.
The rattle of the sawed-off tommy-gun, the whining whistle of the leaden slug and the thud of its impact against flesh and bone no longer are the sound effects in the orchestration of the gangsters' theme song.
In the last decade an extraordinary metamorphosis has come over the characters who saw their big years of glamor and of terror during Prohibition and for a spell after repeal.
In truth, there are no gangsters, and there are no mobs. Yet, today's underworld figures cast a far wider shadow and wield an incalculably greater influence on the life of the nation and its principal city.
Except for a few shabby neighborhood ruffians in squabbles about penny-ante rackets, such as fish-peddling, shakedowns of storekeepers, enforcing collections for double sawbuck loan sharks and similar bagatelles, the old and happy habits of killing each other have evaporated.
Everything is now organized into an institution a hundred times the proportion of any outfit dramatized by Raft and Robinson, including the empire of Al Capone, which is represented as a minor element in the set-up that grew out of it all.