American Fun Read online

  In his youth, when the iconic Old Iron Pier split the sweeping beach between the tony east, with its white and sprawling Manhattan Hotel, and the demotic west, where the Tilyous lived, a notorious sub-industry preyed on the crowds—swindling them with cons and three-card monte, picking their pockets while they ogled “panel girls.” The Tilyous ran a respectable business, catering to well-connected families who took in the sea baths, clambakes, and beer gardens. George’s later life as a titanic showman, however, suggests he took cues from both of these worlds, from the sharpers on the beach and his good, godly family.

  As a boy he was as enterprising as young P. T. Barnum. He started small, at fourteen, selling vials of saltwater and cigar boxes of sand for midwesterners to keep as souvenirs. The next year he got serious and bought a pair of horses, built a rickety driftwood coach, and spent the summer hauling tourists back and forth between the boat landing and the center of Coney Island’s amusements; his endeavor was so successful that he was quickly muscled out by the town’s political heavy, John Y. McKane. In the early 1880s, when Coney Island hosted Buffalo Bill’s first season and basked in the fame of its first roller coaster, George and his father opened a popular vaudeville theater and assembled a small real-estate empire. McKane, who by then was the corrupt police chief and notorious “King of Coney Island,” had become the family’s bête noire. His loose stance on prostitution and gambling, and his promotion of prizefighting and drinking on the Sabbath, helped West Brighton to become “Sodom by the Sea,” a fact that the God-fearing Tilyous loathed. It was bad for the soul and bad for business. They were the only local businessmen to speak out against him, arguing in 1887 for middle-class reforms to make West Brighton a respectable resort. This stunt cost the elder Tilyou his lease, which officially belonged to the police department.

  But George kept socking away his profits, and in 1893, full of big ideas from his Chicago honeymoon, on which he had failed to buy the Ferris wheel (it was relocating to the St. Louis fair), he took out a loan, ordered a smaller one built to scale, and posted some humbug along Surf Avenue: “On This Site Will Be Erected the World’s Largest Ferris Wheel.” When it arrived, Tilyou’s wheel wasn’t half the size of the original, but it was higher and brighter than anything around. Soon there were knockoffs of the Midway Plaisance and Streets of Cairo, complete with camel rides and a fake Little Egypt. Following McKane’s conviction in 1894 for rigging Benjamin Harrison’s election, Tilyou’s vision for Coney Island blossomed. His sights were set on “clean fun.” More exhilarating than the roller coasters and the toboggan slides that had cropped up over the previous decade were his high-wire Aerial Slide and his Aqua Aerial Shuttle. The latter carried passengers on an 825-foot loop over the ocean’s crashing waves. And more spectacular even than Paul Boyton’s Sea Lion Park—which opened in 1895, featuring his world-famous Shoot the Chutes—was Tilyou’s response to it two years later, the twenty-two-acre Steeplechase Park, a midway boasting fifty mechanical amusements and encircled by a gravity-powered wooden racetrack: “A ride on the horses,” Tilyou’s promo claimed, “is a healthful stimulant that stirs the heart and clears the brain. It straightens out wrinkles and irons out puckers.… The old folks like it because it makes them young again. Everybody likes it because it’s cheap fun, real fun, lively fun.”

  As a Coney Island native, Tilyou knew that Americans liked to participate, even to put themselves at risk—bodily risk, social risk. Americans were drawn to anything daring, whatever raised eyebrows or got a laugh. “We Americans want either to be thrilled or amused,” he said, “and we are ready to pay for either sensation.” (This last bit, payment, was key.) So to jangle their nerves and make them look silly—to give them their nickel’s worth—he sent them walking on the Earthquake Floor, zapped them in the Electric Seat, knocked them around on the Human Pool Table, splashed them through the Electric Fountain, rolled them around in the Barrel of Love, and sent them down the Funny Stairway, which, he attested, “caused laughter enough to cure all the dyspepsia in the world.” Tilyou knew from a life on the beach that people loved to get lost in the crowd, so he threw in New York’s largest ballroom and kept four bands in constant rotation. Perhaps his more genuinely fun-making machine—for riders and amused observers alike—was a contraption called the Human Roulette, or the Human Whirlpool, a ride later depicted in an esteemed Reginald Marsh painting and featured in Clara Bow’s blockbuster It, where it was rechristened again as the Social Mixer. The ride was simply a wide spinning cone, surrounded by a dish. Its riders gamely clung to the center until—when the thing really got going—its centrifugal force scattered them around the margins in a tangled, woozy, democratized mass of heads, legs, arms, and torsos.

  By the turn of the century Tilyou had Steeplechase Parks in Atlantic City, St. Louis, and San Francisco. One was even featured in the 1900 Paris Exposition.

  Eventually he housed all of his head-spinning rides in the five-acre so-called Pavilion of Fun, a family-oriented steel-and-glass enclosure where drinking, swearing, even slang were forbidden. (B. F. Keith’s standards for “polite vaudeville” were judiciously enforced.) Just as Cody sold his show as education, Tilyou promoted his rides’ health benefits and ballyhooed their high moral standards. Bucking the island’s lingering reputation as a “Sodom by the Sea,” he enlisted local churches as evangelizing “sales people” and offered special deals to Catholics and Lutherans and eventually to troops of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Apparently even his Blowhole Theater—which blew fast air up women’s skirts and shocked men’s privates for the hilarity of the audience—was winkingly excused under Tilyou’s good name. As the historian Kathy Peiss explains it, by risking a bit of “flirtation, permissiveness, and sexual humor,” while never slipping into outright obscenity, Tilyou discovered a winning “formula” and exercised a “sexual ideology that would become increasingly accepted by the middle class.”

  Patrons of George C. Tilyou’s famous Human Whirlpool enjoy the gut-wrenching fun of centrifugal force. (Courtesy of the Brooklyn Public Library—Brooklyn Collection.)

  Tilyou knew fun’s power to fling people together, and like an electrician he harnessed that power. Turning people loose on his maniacal machines, he zapped their restless American spirits in harmless, painless, ninety-watt jolts. And he probably provided some of the vigor he advertised: he pumped his patrons with perpetual shots of adrenaline, endorphins, and dopamine. By many accounts, Tilyou was a man who wanted to do some social good. He stood down scoundrels like John Y. McKane. He believed in his inventions and the virtue of commerce. He wanted to bring joy to modern society. At the same time, he followed all the Gilded Age guidelines: Barnum’s self-promotion and “politeness,” B. F. Keith’s “continuous performance,” the jostle and pitch of Cody’s stagecoach, and the celestial scale of the Ferris wheel. And he upheld his era’s standards of decency. He believed in his outfit, and it made him a mint. “Laughter,” he said, “made me a million dollars.”

  But P. T. Barnum would have caught the humbug. Tilyou was such a subtle trickster that apparently he had tricked himself. The “fun” he hawked in his Pavilion of Fun wasn’t the real American deal—hardly the antics, pranks, and parties he witnessed as a boy growing up on the beach. Maybe he didn’t want it to be. Tilyou was selling a modern experience: cleaner, easier, with a quicker payoff. But unlike the old-style pranks and parties, this new stuff lacked fun’s social function—or, worse, it warped it. Tilyou may not have seen it that way. He saw his park as unadulterated fun. So would his son Edward, who would call it a “gigantic laboratory of human nature” that allowed customers to “cut loose from repressions and restrictions, and act pretty much as they feel like acting—since everyone else is doing the same.” A feeling of liberty may have prevailed at Coney Island, but the fun in this laboratory was a whole new species. Unlike the free-lance human pyramids that feature in countless Coney Island photographs, in which men and women in striped bathing costumes laugh and struggle to keep their balance, Tilyou’s
machines got in between the people and forced them to take passive, defensive roles: trapped them in the Soup Bowl, whisked them along cables and groaning tracks, rolled them up high on the Ferris wheel.

  With fewer chances in the vertical city for wild, expansive, liberating fun, crowds flocked to the beach to frolic in the waves, as they had done in decades past. But now they were halted several meters short by Tilyou’s acres of indoor distractions. (He was still selling sand by the seashore.) Tilyou’s machines looked friendly and familiar—they were cousins to appliances, elevators, and subways. But their threat was insidious. They hit the citizens at the level of their pleasures and created new tastes, desires, needs. It was that old West Brighton trick of picking men’s pockets while they gaped at “panel girls.”

  FUN WAS INSTRUMENTAL in forming the best of the early American character. Playful risk and playful rebellion helped to loosen Puritanical authority. They motivated peaceful crowd action in the revolutionary era. They liberated African Americans in the face of tyranny. They helped to civilize the violent frontier. Fun, in these cases, lubricated the conflicts natural to a budding democracy. It rewarded citizens for acting boldly, for breaking barriers and speaking out. It brought them into amicable collisions with people they may have considered enemies.

  But the “fun” engineered during the Gilded Age rewarded distinctly different behavior. It rewarded waiting, watching, and buying. Early photographs of the Pavilion of Fun show neck-craning crowds standing placidly by while the daring few are jerked in circles. Tilyou’s pleasures demanded submission, a submission even more extreme than at Barnum’s circuses or in Keith’s muffled theaters. His patrons were fixed, immobilized, trapped. But the mass of Americans were used to submission: no longer rebels, they were the stage rebel’s cheerleaders; they weren’t the cowboy, but his screaming fans; they weren’t the prankster, but the prankster’s dupes. As Americans became customers, consumers, and fans, the citizenry became ever more susceptible to the ingenious humbugs of bigger and bigger business. Not that many cared, however, not while they were having such fun.

  Visiting Europeans sensed something was amiss. Maxim Gorky, having seen Coney Island in 1906, allegedly exclaimed, “What a sad people you must be!” Freud went there in 1909, the same year he concluded that America was “a gigantic mistake.”

  Whether mechanical amusements were healthy, as Tilyou contended, or insidiously damaging, their legacy was mighty in the century to come. Progressives pushed back in the name of hands-on playtime: starting in 1906, the newly founded National Recreation Association oversaw the widespread construction of free urban playgrounds—promoting kid-powered fun on swings, seesaws, and merry-go-rounds and, by their mission, “encourag[ing] positive citizenship through supervised playground and leisure time activities.”

  But the mechanical amusement industry, now a multibillion-dollar international juggernaut of interactive museums and theme parks, was only in its infancy, and already it was a formidable opponent.

  There was more to turn-of-the-century fun, however, than what was found on Coney Island, and the best of it wasn’t supervised. During these same decades, in Missouri and Louisiana, a volcanic new variety of fun was erupting. Pulling “walk-arounds” down from the minstrel stage, freeing tricksters from the storybooks, early jazz was black folk fun destined to shatter America’s barriers—and to set people twirling all on their own.

  7

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  Merry Mount Goes Mainstream

  ACCORDING TO LEGEND, jazz was born in the brothels of Storyville. There’s some truth to this. The early practitioners of rhythmic, brass-based, syncopated music tended to frequent the twenty-five barbershops—and countless bars, dance halls, and parks—in and around the twenty-block New Orleans neighborhood winkingly named after Sidney Story, the alderman who made prostitution legal there in 1897. And jazz has traditionally been connected with sex—and vice, disruption, dissolution, and crime. The word “jazz,” which gained currency during World War I, may possibly derive from the cant word “jasm”—a mid-nineteenth-century version of “jism,” which meant “pep” and “vigor” in addition to semen. So Storyville’s brothels make for an attractive birthplace. But few musicians ever played the red-light district proper, where live music was shunned as a costly distraction from the brothels’ more lucrative services. They were just as likely to play in churches.

  The music is actually of uncertain parentage. Most likely, in the words of James Weldon Johnson, jazz—“like Topsy,” the ragamuffin slave girl from Uncle Tom’s Cabin—“jes’ grew”: just grew from early black spirituals, field hollers, work songs; grew from the bamboulas on Congo Square; grew (ironically) from blackface minstrelsy; grew from the herky-jerky ragtime piano playing that had traveled from the gut-bucket bars of Missouri to the World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893; grew from the street-corner spasm bands that bashed out songs on washtubs, lead pipes, cigar boxes, and hair combs; grew from the bighearted call-and-responses in black Baptist churches throughout the South; and grew, most directly, from hip-swaying marching bands that drove miles-long parades throughout the Crescent City—wedding parades, holiday parades, funeral parades to raise the dead.

  It also grew from turn-of-the-century black theater. Black-owned, -directed, and -performed minstrelsy had risen to prominence in the 1880s and 1890s, and even when it upheld the blackface cartoon of heedless African-American life, it slipped in innovative new dances and humor and served as a training ground for serious black performers. While some African-American productions of the 1890s shed the minstrel tradition altogether (1898’s A Trip to Coontown and Clorindy—the Origin of the Cake-Walk, for example), others, like the comedy act of Williams and Walker, turned it inside out.

  Looking back on this duo in 1925, the author Jessie Fauset contrasted Bert Williams’s “kindly, rather simple, hard-luck personage” with George Walker’s “dishonest, overbearing, flashily dressed character” and concluded: “The interest of the piece hinged on the juxtaposition of these two men.” They hammed up this juxtaposition in a dance. In 1896, during their record-breaking forty-week run at Koster and Bial’s Hall in New York, Williams and Walker ignited the cakewalk into the first international dance craze. The dance was a play on the Virginia Minstrels’ walk-around, which was a play on the slaves’ play on Southern white marches—as well as eel dances at New York’s Catharine Slip. The way Williams and Walker did it, the dance split ragtime music down the middle: flashy Walker pranced out its marchlike rhythm, and shy Williams improvised the syncopated accompaniment. Something about the way they rounded the stage, leading their lively female partners; something about the mix of Walker’s tidy strut (a variation on the stately, original cakewalk) with Williams’s slinky, sliding “smooch” (a less polite move, with ring shout origins) made audiences scramble to try it themselves.

  Suddenly walk-arounds stepped off the stage and reclaimed their place down in the crowd. That year the nation was overtaken by cakewalk sheet music, cakewalk piano rolls, cakewalk contests. Williams and Walker appeared in cigarette ads, and when they learned that their chief competitor, the performer Tom Fletcher, was giving dance lessons to the Vanderbilts, they delivered a challenge to the Fifth Avenue mansion: $50 would “decide which of us all shall deserve the title of champion cake-walker of the world.” (The Vanderbilts never responded.) In 1899, the Musical Courier scorned this unruly “sex dance” as “a milder edition of African orgies,” but the people were having too much fun to care. In 1900, when John Philip Sousa brought the cakewalk to the Paris Exposition, the song “Bunch o’ Blackberries” was, according to the San Francisco Call, “hummed, whistled, and played in almost every nook and corner of the French capital,” and the dance itself—the “peregrination for the pastry”—was widely celebrated as “gay,” “boisterous,” and “la plus illustre des fanfares américaines,” even more illustrious, presumably, than George C. Tilyou’s mechanical amusements.

  Minstrelsy and the Jazz Age overlap. On this 1
896 sheet-music cover, Bert Williams and George W. Walker, originators of the global cakewalk craze, are racially exoticized for their “eccentric” fun. (Courtesy of African American Sheet Music, 1850–1920, Sheet Music Collection, John Hay Library, Brown University.)

  Jazz was reaching its preadolescence when it sprang from the cornet of Buddy Bolden, the light-skinned, muscular, five-foot-eleven sport who is usually credited with being its first “king.”

  Born Charles Joseph Bolden in 1877, Buddy was raised in a mixed New Orleans neighborhood where working-class blacks, Irish, and Germans mostly got along. These groups divided along religious lines, but they mobbed the same street corners, and in the city’s ongoing culture of celebration nearly everybody came together for barbecues, parades, and plein-air parties. Marches and dance music were the main attractions, and they provided Buddy’s elementary training. Little is known about his early years. He may have attended Fisk School for Boys, with its vibrant choral and band programs, but most of his training would have happened by osmosis—from the ever-present fiddle bands, brass bands, and orchestras that were known to share a single stage in a night. Not long after he turned seventeen and had learned the cornet (from a kindly cook in the French Quarter), Bolden was incorporating all of these musical styles into his magpie horn-playing technique, a musical ventriloquism that incorporated anything from the junk collectors’ calls to the fruit peddlers’ chants.