American Fun Read online

  The new “Puritans” thought movies posed a moral threat. Movies set bad examples, gave bad ideas, and gloried in Jazz Age libertinism. In 1922, when critics raised a stink about his flapper fantasy Foolish Wives, von Stroheim felt they were infantilizing society: “My ears have run with their united cry: ‘It is not fit for children!’ Children! Children! God, I did not make that picture for children.” But the conservative majority was an indomitable force, and that same year, as Hollywood sank into a scandalous mire—Mary Pickford’s divorce; Fatty Arbuckle’s (supposed) rape and murder of a young party guest; actor-director William Desmond Taylor’s unsolved homicide—studio executives, in an act of contrition, founded the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), their own homespun censorship and moral-conduct squad. With this very public and showy gesture, the largely Jewish film establishment tried to appeal to America’s stern Christian establishment, in particular to the powerful Federal Council of Churches, overseers of upright civic organizations like the YMCA and the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the Boy Scouts of America. Lest the churches doubt Hollywood’s sincerity in making peace with Main Street, the MPPDA appointed as its “czar” the sober and evangelical Will Hays, a former postmaster general who was winkingly known as the “Billy Sunday of the Republican Party.”

  Hays, their small-town-Indiana shill, enjoyed his warm California welcome. The Hollywood streets were “decorated with bunting and flags” and “big signs reading WELCOME WILL HAYS” (one of which, FBI sources reported, ended up hung over the door to Charlie Chaplin’s bathroom). But his appointment and purpose, bunting and all, were flagrant acts of Barnumism. By assigning Hays as liaison to the churches, and by allowing him to loosely enforce his touted moral “Formula,” the studios could forestall the conservative lobbies from ramming a censorship bill through Congress. Throughout the 1920s, even as Hays occasionally ceded ground by failing to grease the right clerical palms, the humbug worked. Movies remained classified, begrudgingly, as speech, and Hollywood was trusted to regulate itself. Hays’s “Formula” was updated in 1927 to become the “Eleven Don’ts and Twenty-Six Be Carefuls,” whose most egregious “Don’ts” would have been Middle American box-office poison anyway: anti-Christian profanity, “sexual perversion,” “nudity,” “miscegenation,” “ridicule of the clergy,” and, tellingly, “white slavery.” The Jazz Singer, Al Jolson’s blockbuster talkie that same year, much of which was played in blackface, seems to transgress the radically democratic “Don’t” against “willful offense to any nation, race or creed,” but as with all of the Hays guidelines, the “race” this one protected (and flattered) was white.

  Hollywood’s showy pact with the churches, like Barnum’s own pact some ninety years before, was strategically commercial. The industry required such mainstream access as only the clergy’s blessing could ensure; studios vied for block distribution, carte blanche contracts with the nation’s theaters to screen their movies, good, bad, or ugly. At the same time, the movies had to please cosmopolitan ticket buyers: they had to be modern, daring, fun. With feckless Hays they had found the perfect Formula. With the fox guarding the henhouse, the fun went on: Flaming Youth, Free to Love, Smouldering Fires, Flesh and the Devil. Industry heavies like von Stroheim and DeMille trod on the Don’ts and ignored the Be Carefuls, and their blockbusting profits gave them moral high ground. They were just giving the people what they wanted. What is more, while DeMille’s biblical pictures (The Ten Commandments [1923] and The King of Kings [1927]) may have been his raciest of all, in the end they were forgiven even for using illicit sex (Mary Magdalene’s burlesque dance for a stony-faced Christ was trimmed and tamed but ultimately ran) because they sparked interest in religious film. F. Scott Fitzgerald, unimpressed by tame cinematic sex, refused to see any threat in it at all. “Contrary to popular opinion,” he opined, “the movies of the Jazz Age had no effect upon its morals.”

  Unlike the rebels in Buddy Bolden’s line who dove into the fray of 1920s fun, simple moviegoers were a sleepy majority. Their role was vicarious, identificatory at best; their pleasure was scopophilic, voyeuristic. To this extent, they were less adventuresome than Buffalo Bill’s cheering crowds. As consumers of the tabloid boom and of salacious and canned new fan magazines, they were silent investors in the dazzling star system that empowered Hollywood with a global reach. And yet by buying tickets, moviegoers (who were often also churchgoers) gave assent to changing national attitudes toward fun. Thanks to the humbug surrounding Hays’s new Formula, even middling Babbitts were given mind-blowing lessons in risk, transgression, rebellion, and silliness, as well as in the defiant populism of the era’s infectious tramps and flappers.

  The deadpan slapstick of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton remain our crispest images of 1920s fun. In The Gold Rush (1925), a masterpiece of the silent era, Chaplin’s Tramp treks into the snowbound Klondike in search of turn-of-the-century riches but instead, like Mark Twain’s self-satirizing argonaut, encounters adversaries societal and natural. In the end he gets both the girl and the gold, but not until he has known humiliation and near death by exposure, starvation, mauling, murder, and cannibalism at the hands of a fellow prospector who hallucinates that he is a chicken. Chaplin gleaned this latter setup, and another in which the Tramp eats his boot, from an account of the Donner party. “Tragedy,” he later wrote of these scenes’ dark comedy, “stimulates the spirit of ridicule, because ridicule, I suppose, is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature—or go insane.” This statement may have been a coded reference to his personal misery that year. Having impregnated the film’s original dance-hall heroine—a sixteen-year-old named Lillita MacMurray—he embarked on a two-year shotgun marriage that dragged his peccadilloes through the courts and tabloids, resulting in his nervous breakdown and the public’s disgust and a divorce settlement that cost him more than a million dollars. Even H. L. Mencken, not much of a Chaplin fan, redirected blame (via Puritan metaphor) at the fickle Babbittry: “The very morons who worshipped Charlie Chaplin six weeks ago now prepare to dance around the stake while he is burned.” True to form, Chaplin took refuge in “an attitude of defiance”: throughout this crisis, his Tramp clowned around making his 1928 name-saving feature, The Circus.

  For all of their seeming weakness, Chaplin’s and Keaton’s shambling protagonists were monsters of such defiance—Keaton’s, in particular. Hapless, fumbling, ingenuous, and daring, Buster Keaton’s assortment of long-faced straight men turn the roughest scenes into jungle gyms—from grapples with Virginia bootleggers in his 1918 short, Moonshine, to his astonishing array of silent features: the luckless Friendless roping (and befriending) cattle in Go West (1925); the weakling Alfred pretending to be a prizefighter in Battling Butler (1926); the dandy turned soldier wrestling a locomotive in The General (1926); the egghead turned acrobatic jock in College (1927); and, in Steamboat Bill, Jr. (1928), the delicate flower forced to hold his own against a roughneck riverboat crew and—in the finale, one of the most impressive sequences in all of cinema—a town-flattening tornado. Chaplin’s and Keaton’s sight gags in the face of misery encapsulate the Jazz Age spirit: humor, agility, audacity, and style were the best defenses against nature’s foes, and on these strange terms such underdog clowns became the modern American heroes. Heightening their fun, their risky pleasure, was the fact that their lethal stunts were real—as were Harold Lloyd’s and many of Douglas Fairbanks’s. (Gary Cooper also got his start in stunts.) They tripped along cliffs, slid from great heights, jumped from trains, fell from buildings, forever holding their gullible mugs intact. But Keaton’s antics set the standard. Trained as an acrobat in vaudeville, limberly drunk much of his time on set, he put his body in constant peril (discovering only decades later that he had once broken his neck) and trained newcomers to do the same. “I developed more stunt men than any studio in Los Angeles,” he said. “I’ve taken the goddamnedest people and made stunt men out of them.�
�� But Hollywood’s stuntmen, the stars and stand-ins, were only glamorous examples of a greater thrill-seeking culture that took the goddamnedest people (on airplanes, skyscrapers, flagpoles, dance floors) and made daredevils out of them. Stuntmen only made this fad more visible.

  Hollywood’s “It girls,” for their part, took sassier, sexier, steelier risks. They dangled from the cliff of a steadfast social code that expected them to be either virgins or whores. Clara Bow, the “Brooklyn Bonfire,” made it look like child’s play. Born into abject poverty in a Sands Street tenement—some of the most violent and tubercular living conditions in turn-of-the-century America—as a girl she suffered constant hunger and frequent beatings by her severely epileptic mother and her vicious alcoholic father, a career busboy who dreamed of being a singing waiter. Shunned by other girls for being ugly and dirty, she excelled as a tomboy in her local street gang: “I could lick any boy my size,” she boasted. “My right was famous.” She and the boys got into “all sorts of crazy stunts.… Once,” she recalled, “I hopped a ride on behind a big fire engine. I got a lot of credit from the gang for that.” At the age of nine, she rescued her best friend from an apartment fire by rolling him in carpet, only to have him die in her arms. She quit seventh grade to cut hot-dog buns at Nathan’s on Coney Island, then briefly answered phones for a Manhattan abortionist. In her teens she defied her mother and escaped her constant loneliness as most Americans did: she lived at the movies and devoured fan magazines, dreaming of one day becoming a star; she vanished into the movies’ “distant lands, serene, lovely homes, romance, nobility, glamour,” as she put it—into “everything that magic silversheet could represent to a lonely, starved, unhappy child.” Then at age sixteen, in 1921, she got her one-in-a-million break. Armed with two “terrible” boardwalk portraits, dressed in her goofy tam and single shabby outfit, she beat out streams of other hopefuls to win Brewster Publications’ Fame and Fortune Contest—for which distinction (in addition to winning a minor movie role) her mother tried to kill her with a butcher knife, twice. But her publicity shot was a revelation: auburn-haired, moony-eyed Clara was gorgeous.

  More to the point, as was clear from her first screen tests, this lonely teenager was wild good fun. Despite her uncanny talent for crying on cue (“All I hadda do was think of home”), this strange new girl galloped like a mustang: “She is plastic, quick, alert, young, and lovely,” wrote the contest judges. Throughout her intensely prolific career (fifty-four feature films by 1933), cameramen struggled to keep her in the frame as she romped and cavorted about the set—often making editors fill in with close-ups when they lost her altogether. Her unbound, vivacious, improvisational style reflected her genuine effervescence: playing the flapper daughter Kittens in Dancing Mothers (1925), she overrode the script’s Hays-placating disapproval and “played her,” in Bow’s words, “as a girl out for havin’ fun”—out, that is, for writhing on furniture, relishing liquor, gulping cigarettes, and flirting with men young and old at a pirate-themed speakeasy. In this otherwise dour cautionary tale about the modern family’s disintegration, she’s a spark plug, a sparkler, exquisitely out of place. But she also frolicked out of Chaplinesque “defiance,” as she did during the filming of Enemies of Women (1923), when her mother was on her deathbed in an asylum: “In the picture I danced on a table. All the time I had to be laughing, romping wildly, displaying nothing for the camera but pleasure and the joy of life.… I’d cry my eyes out when I left my mama in the morning—and then go dance on a table.” By all appearances, however, she did it wholeheartedly, and the critics adored her in the worst of movies.

  She was right at home in tomboy roles—as a roustabout stowaway in Down to the Sea in Ships (1922), as frontier girls and gutter urchins, and like the male comic stars she did her own stunts. But her stock-in-trade was to play the “jazz baby”—the neighbor girl, newlywed, or college coed whose lip-biting desire and smoldering appeal threaten to torch the whole neighborhood. She perfected this role in Victor Fleming’s 1926 funny adaptation of Sinclair Lewis’s Mantrap; her lead character, Alverna, the Emma Bovaryescent wife of a clueless country bumpkin, cracks the ice under their cold Canadian town when she is tempted by a New York divorce lawyer. A serious social novel played for laughs (the joke is on frigidity), Mantrap showcased Bow’s ultramodern talent for making sex fun: frolicsome, not fearsome; liberating, not damnable. “Alverna channels all her vitality in flirtation,” Michael Sragow observes. “She stands for life amid a mob of pious zombies.” For Bow eroticism wasn’t an act; it was her most authentic mode. It gave her power and put her at ease. Fleming was ensnared by it on the set of Mantrap, at the same time Gary Cooper was, and the Hollywood gossip mill went berserk—because, true to character, she refused to be discreet. She liked them both. Where was the shame? In Hollywood, as she put it, she was “running wild”—“in the sense of trying to have a good time”—and moviegoers were the beneficiaries: “I suppose a lot of that excitement, that joy of life, got onto the screen, and was the sort of flame of youth that made people enjoy seeing me.” All her bad name lacked was a brand. So in 1927 her relentless producer, B. P. Schulberg, the same spin doctor who had trademarked Mary Pickford as “America’s Sweetheart,” enlisted the aging Elinor Glyn, a British romance writer who had become the decade’s authority (after Freud) on sexual prowess, to ordain Clara Bow as America’s “It girl”—It being the title of Glyn’s recent novel. “It”—a winking play on id—referred to a sort of erotic chutzpah. Did Clara Bow have it? For a $50,000 promotional fee, Glyn allowed she did and fawned over the object of her endorsement. The honeymoon ended when Glyn’s (unsolicited) etiquette lessons prompted Bow to call her “that shithead.”

  It (1927) is the film for which Clara Bow is legend and one of the decade’s biggest box-office hits. In it, she plays downtown Betty Lou who works the fabric counter of a midtown department store. By dint of her pluck and flirty wit, she catches the eye of the dashing store president (Antonio Moreno), who eagerly tries to win her for himself. His uptown idea of having fun is to treat her to a night at the Ritz (where Glyn makes a stiff and stagy cameo)—though, predictably, their evening falls flat. She agrees to give him a second chance. Her idea of a “real good time” is to take him out to Coney Island. Among the rubbed-up Steeplechase throngs, he takes some encouraging but gradually loosens up. At a climactic moment in a romantic sequence that entails the usual carnival fun, she drags him into the Fun House, where they mount George C. Tilyou’s Human Roulette. In It it’s called the Social Mixer, and risk and democracy are part of its structure. The ride, as we have seen, is a broad, gently sloping cone, surrounded by a wide and generous dish. Patrons pile up onto the cone, and as it spins they cling tightly to each other, lest they be thrown off in all directions and ultimately be “mixed up” in the dish. In the film, the It girl and the president are the last two revelers left clinging to the center, gleefully resisting centrifugal force. She flies off first into the writhing rabble. Though he holds on with all his might, he accepts natural law that the center cannot hold and is flung into the spinning crowd (and our heroine’s arms). But the whirling motor under the movie’s hood isn’t Tilyou’s outmoded toy, it’s Clara Bow’s up-to-the-minute id.

  Clara Bow: The Brooklyn Bonfire. (Courtesy of the Library of Congress.)

  And like her libido, her folksiness was real. She was more at home with working-class film crews than with her fellow superstars—who widely shunned her for her bad table manners, her coarse Brooklyn accent, and her refusal to put on the high-class airs that Hollywood’s lowborn society affected. At the height of her fame and fortune, instead of buying the expected sprawling mansion, she moved with her infamously drunken father into a modest bungalow, best known for its lurid Orientalist boudoir, and she roller-skated up and down the driveway. When the rest of the “colony” wouldn’t keep her company, she cold-called the Sigma Chi house of Morley Drury, the captain of the University of Southern California’s famous “Thundering Herd,” and spent
the late fall of 1927 entertaining the entire football team (including the undergraduate who would become John Wayne)—whether in loud dance parties at her bungalow or in the Garden of Allah’s jazz club and swimming pool. When she managed to break the thumb of an All-American tackle in a late-night game of touch football, the Herd’s coach publicly rounded them up. The bad-news It girl was officially off-limits. But the twentieth-century g’hal from Brooklyn’s mean streets kept thriving in her milieu of fun. “I like young people and gaiety,” she said in 1928, “and have a lot of both around me whenever I have time.”

  Bow and her generation of so-called flappers—brash “New Women” like Bessie Smith, Louise Brooks, Zelda Fitzgerald, and Dorothy Parker—headed up a fun-loving jazz revolution that electrified the middling masses. For the real social mixer, of course, was sex, and the capacity to admit it if you liked it. But it was still risky business: the Victorian Age wasn’t that long ago. All it took was the scorching Mae West, another frank rebel from Brooklyn’s mean streets, to blow the lid off Will Hays’s cooked Formula.

  THE JAZZ AGE CAUSE CÉLÈBRE was booze. After the Volstead Act of 1920, the opposing sides of Main Street became radicalized into the temperate “drys” and the wild-living “wets.” The drys, as ever, had the moral high ground, and now the law was on their side. The historian Paul A. Carter makes a reasonable case for Prohibition’s “democratic faith,” explaining how the Eighteenth Amendment “met all the tests of proper democratic action: the test of time, the test of full discussion, the test of decisive majority expression (forty-six of the forty-eight states had, after all, ratified the constitutional change).” When the law passed in 1919, the winning majority was mostly rural Protestants fulfilling the wishes of their temperance forebears, but they were met with such resistance from the growing minorities—most notably from blacks and Catholic and Jewish immigrants—that the law also signaled the decline, as Carter argues, of Protestant ideological power.