Benjamin Appel was a New York novelist whose novels are about people trying to succeed as
Hell’s Kitchen dock wallopers, waterfront teamsters turned strong arm men working with
corrupt union thugs, and gangsters working their way up in the extortion, smuggling, loan
sharking, gambling, and call girl rackets. His first and most popular work was Brain Guy (1932).

  Benjamin Appel in his prime. Source: NY Times, 1/1/06, p.4 (Metro section).

Sweet Money Girl (1954), set in the Times Square area, was a  Gold Medal paperback original
with a totally irrelevant cover depicting three, two of whom are in their underwear, peeking at
each other. This suggests it was a lesbian story (“She was one girl in a world of girls. . . .”). That
sold well, not only to lesbians but to men liked to read about women having oral sex, a taboo for
men to engage in at the time.

Hortense Walton (she changed her family name because it was long, hard to pronounce, and
Polish, thus without glamour) is the female protagonist. Hortense is a talented, sexy,
promiscuous dance hall teacher. She is the Sweet Money Girl, the Golden Girl, the Glamour
Girl; and reminds a reader of Jay Gatesby’s Daisy, whose voice sounded like money. Her
partying, sleeping around, dates with students at the school of the “dahnce,” and café society
hob-nobbing are to make contacts with agents. Near the end of the story, she agrees to become a
call girl for one of them. She would, however, and does, run away to Florida with a wealthy man
instead. She stays with him until the money runs out and then leaves him for a millionaire she
men at a casino. Hortense is not a ruthless gold digger. She is a woman reaching 30 (then
considered over the hill), and desiring security, ease, contentment, and power–like anyone else.
Her position in 1946 New York gives her little alternative other than marriage.

In fact, one alternative is possible, because she matches up well with Hugh Pierson. Hugh is
equally intelligent, resourceful, and ambitious. He is taking business courses on the GI Bill at
NYU, and taking advantage of the kindness of his war buddy Maxie Dehn, who offers him a
room in his own place, a 47th Street tenement owned by his mother. Hugh is fascinated by
Hortense and has an affair with her, which they keep secret from Maxie, who is much more
passionately in love with her. Despite the incipient mutuality, Hugh and Hortense exist on a
different level; their passion is tempered by the American Dream: success, power, big money,
big house, status.

As for love, Hugh says, “My brand of love was the 42nd Street brand, a perpetual lovers’
midnight of double features. I looked at the men on the crowded sidewalks, all the little
dreamers of the big city, dreaming of love . . .  And settling for a 69 cent seat in the darkness as I
had settled for Hortense. Love? It would come someday, but in the meanwhile there was the
neon and the darkness, where for 69 cents you could make love to a woman in Technicolor. At
least the Technicolor women let you go when the movie ended. They let you go and their
celluloid hands left no stain.”

Maxie is the guy Hortense ran away to Florida with. He did not go to college, but resumed his
pre-war job as a rent collector for a family friend. Maxie is a self-hating, mother-dominated ,
quietly desperate man who, in the army, chose fat, older women (“bags”) to run with instead of
the beautiful young Italians the rest of his unit took to bed. The reason was that he had a painful
experience of inadequacy with his first partner, and she ridiculed him for it. He can only get it up
with the “bags” (the surrogate-mother aspect is clear). Maxie says that “Hortense saved him.” He
was infatuated when they met at a party, and when, after a date, she took him back to her place,
she knew how gently to overcome his anxiety. She will marry him, if he can pull off the real
estate deal that will make them rich.

Until then, he relieves his frustrations as he always had. In Times Square novelty shops and
tourist book shops, he buys “French picture cards . . . and the dirt you buy to read when you look
at the pictures. I even bought some of the poems the hicks buy. . . . I kept the French pictures and
the rest of the dirt on the top shelf in my closet . . . . I disgusted myself. More than that, I hated
myself. If I were to tell you [he is confessing to his friend Hugh, not aware he is being betrayed]
the things that popped into my head about the girls, and what you could do to them . . . .”

Early in the novel, Maxie shows Hugh the sights, and they stop in front of the Bond sign, with
the giant near-nude male and female figures, on either side of a six-story high waterfall. “See the
strings around the middle of the dame up there on the sign? You find the third string, the third
wire. That’s the spirit of Broadway.”



“It was a crooked grin,” Hugh tells us, “and a little obscene, like that of an old man telling a
dirty story. It revealed something about Maxie I hadn’t suspected, and for some reason I thought
of his fat girl friends overseas.
 
“We walked on past the movies, and the pineapple drink places, and the restaurants.” The Times
Square carnival includes a “legless concertina player and “a sidewalk peddler of toy metal dogs .
. .  In the noisy and glittering night I had come closer than ever before to something dark and
secret in Maxie. I thought of what he said about Hortense being good for him, and . . . I had a
flash of the woman in the Bond sign, huge as a goddess above the midget humans on the
sidewalks, and among them men obsessed with the third wire.”

Finally, Hortense goes to Florida with him, with the afore-mentioned result. But he has had his
weeks of happiness, which he can remember after he gets his old job back and married a girl she
approves of. Hugh gets a corporate position on Mad Ave, and a home and wife in Rye. I can
imagine the nice car, tasteful furniture, good dry bar, TV, rec room in the waterproofed
basement. He is afraid to see Maxie again, for he may have found out the depth of his best
friend’s betrayal. Meanwhile, just miles away from each other, I imagine them celebrating their
anniversaries at restaurants catering to various class and ethnic groups, watching those titillating
Hollywood romances at either a new suburban movie house or at the Paramount, and catching
Ricky and Lucy on the tube. A Cuban stud and a red headed femme fatale, now domesticated
into a hard working bandleader and his perky wife, something they can both identify with.

And the Sweet Money Girl, who Maxie thought had saved him and Hugh thought of as a mate?
Who knows? Dream stuff.