Swinging city

Montreal Confidential gives you the 1950
low down on the big town

by CHRIS BARRY

Montreal, as we all know, has a long, storied history as an open city, a town where one could reliably get good and drunk back when temperance ruled the roost in the rest of North America. A place where horny studs could bank on securing a gynaecologist’s perspective of the female anatomy whilst strippers elsewhere still wore g-strings, a city where, to this day, plenty of bad fun is easily accessible for those with an interest in such activities. It’s one of the reasons why so many of us love this place, even in cold, cold January, our long-held reputation as some sort of “Havana North” is a source of civic pride to more than just a few of us.

Back in Al Palmer’s day, Montreal was unquestionably the most “open” of North American cities. In Montreal Confidential, which originally hit the stands back in 1950 as something akin to a tourist guide for those seeking “the low down on the big town,” Palmer, in an almost comical vernacular straight out of a Raymond Chandler novel, goes on at length about the various shady characters, watering holes, bordellos, burlesque houses and general joie de vivre that characterized Duplessis-era Montreal, before keeners like Pax Plante and Jean Drapeau chased the underworld out of here, transforming the city into a cleaner, if somewhat less colourful place in the process.

Inside the series of short essays that comprise Confidential, Palmer offers tourists and locals alike important tips on key things like how to sneak leggy dames past hotel security and into your room, or where you’re most likely to score reefer in the downtown core (Clark and Ste-Catherine, btw), or where, if you’re comfortable laying down with bedbugs, to secure yourself a flophouse for all of 25 cents (Craig Street). It’s a fun read, and not just for those fascinated by Montreal’s cultural history. Palmer’s peculiar slang is worth the price of admission alone, even if at times it’s difficult to figure out what the hell he’s talking about. In Palmer’s world, Ste-Catherine is popularly referred to as Ste-Kit’s, Stanley is Swing Street, beer is “stupor suds,” hard liquor is “stagger syrup” and those possessing a lot of money have “heavy cabbage.”

Wacky lingo aside, Palmer was a pretty hip dude by the era’s standards. Dapper, as sharp-minded as he was sharp-looking, he once said that, forced to make the choice, he’d rather buy clothes than eat. Beginning life as an orphan yet growing up to hold the undisputed reputation as his era’s premier man about town, Palmer was as comfortable cavorting with mobsters and lower Main lowlife as he was with the police officials and politicians he regularly covered, first as a police reporter and later in his “Man About Town” column for the long-defunct Montreal Herald.

At the peak of Montreal’s celebrated burlesque era in the early ’50s, Palmer was dutifully covering all the action in his daily “Cabaret Circuit” column. He certainly was on top of all there was to know about the movers, shakers, jazz musicians and lowlifes who inhabited the town he loved so dearly, and he was forever being sought out by visiting celebrities who understood Palmer was a guy who could really show them a good time. Hell, the guy apparently even bedded Lili St-Cyr a few times, so you know he had to have had something going on.

At worst, Montreal Confidential can feel monotonous, especially after reading paragraph after paragraph about the various insignificant characters who do nothing more than, say, mix a great martini at the El Morocco club or who Palmer feels deserve mention because they can “open a bottle of champagne in half the time it takes to say the word.” But taken as a whole, these observations provide an important glimpse into a genuinely exciting period of Montreal’s recent social history, and it’s hard to imagine anyone other than Palmer, a bona fide legend in Montreal journalistic circles, being able to relate it all so well.

MONTREAL CONFIDENTIAL BY
AL PALMER, VEHICULE PRESS,
PB, 157 PP., $12