THE year is 1899, and a saucy con artist named Peaches O'Day is trying to sell the Brooklyn Bridge. She succeeds, too, passing it off to a gullible fellow who pays her $200 and receives a bill of sale reading, "One bridge in good condition." As punishment, she is run out of town, but she returns in triumph, disguised in a black wig as the French entertainer Mademoiselle Fifi, and goes on to be elected mayor of the city.
So it went in the 1937 comedy "Every Day's a Holiday," a Mae West film that made merry with one of the most cherished notions about New York and the gullibility to be found there: that someone would be foolish enough to buy one of the city's iconic landmarks.
Since the bridge was completed in 1883, the idea of illegally selling it has become the ultimate example of the power of persuasion. A good salesman could sell it, a great swindler would sell it, and the perfect sucker would fall for the scam.
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