American Fun Read online

  Responding to public outcry, fearing reprisals, but still determined to cash in on West, Paramount severely vetted Mae West’s sexuality—making her next heroine, in I’m No Angel (1933), a gold digger instead of a nymphomaniac. The Hays officials were delighted by the results, and fan magazines joined the general humbug, touting West herself as a humble church lady, but her mounting success was her greatest threat—to men in particular, as Hamilton argues. It was her brazen attitude, not her canned characters, that was causing all the damage. Girls filled the theaters at women-only viewings and took to imitating her walk and talk. A new generation of self-sufficient flappers, less dependent than ever on (often financially strapped) men, took notice that pleasure, pluck, and slang could be slung and shot like John Wayne’s pistols. This threat wasn’t lost on the Hays Office, who well knew their public’s double standard: “The very man who will guffaw at Mae West’s performance as a reminder of the ribald days of his past will resent her effect upon the young, when his daughter imitates the Mae West wiggle before her boyfriends and mouths ‘Come up and see me sometime.’ ” Hence, though she stayed onscreen throughout the decade, West became the Hays Office’s pet project. When they responded to Catholic pressure in 1934 and began to apply the Code in earnest, her trademark ruffian was reformed as the heroine of schlock morality tales.

  The Great Depression shared a calendar with the golden age of Hollywood, an era of glitzily luxuriant escapism when Fred Astaire glided with Ginger Rogers, the Three Stooges and Marx Brothers redefined silly, and Busby Berkeley mastered the mass human ornament. This decade of the Dust Bowl, soup lines, and Hoovervilles deserved to be soothed by such crowd-pleasing frivolity. Yet its best filmic statement on Jazz Age fun looked economic misery full in the face. Modern Times, Chaplin’s 1936 masterpiece, and his extravagant farewell to the silent era, butts the same Tramp who braved the Yukon up against the worst the thirties could dish out: factory drudgery, workers’ revolt, unemployment, abject poverty. First called Commonwealth, then The Masses, it reflected the auteur’s growing anti-capitalist stance. Defiant as ever—in a movie whose tagline is “humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness”—his Tramp takes refuge in ridiculous play and lives on the constant lam from the cops. A portrait of Marx’s original reified laborer, the Tramp develops a manic repetitive-stress injury from tightening bolts on Electro Steel Corp.’s assembly line. After bodily rotating through the machinery’s cogs, he emerges a pranking and sex-crazed imp who cranks random levers until the turbines blow and squirts oil from a can into the factory president’s face.

  In and out of asylums and jail, in and out of work, he falls in love with a fellow rebel, “a gamin child of the waterfront” played by the flashing-eyed Paulette Goddard. They escape together from a police wagon, knocking a cop unconscious along the way. A Bonnie and Clyde of puckish fun, the Tramp and the Gamin pursue their happiness on the fringes of law and civil society. Exploiting his temporary job as a department store night watchman, they freeload at the lunch counter and cut loose in the fourth-floor toy department, where, blindfolded and roller-skating backward, the Tramp cuts breathtaking capers along an unguarded ledge. Compromising their dream of a middle-class home, they call her shanty along the docks “paradise” despite its tin-can tableware and collapsing walls, floors, and furniture. When at last they get their break as performers in a dinner theater—the Gamin as a dancer, the Tramp as an outlandish singing waiter (Chaplin’s mockery of his first speaking role)—cops apprehend the Gamin for vagrancy and send them packing once again. In earlier versions, to placate the Hays Office, Chaplin sent his Gamin to the convent. In the final version, they march off into the sunset—poor and pursued but defiantly smiling.

  ONE LEADING LIGHT of the Harlem Renaissance wouldn’t publish her first book until long after Harlem had fallen out of vogue. Zora Neale Hurston, by many accounts, lived in constant pursuit of “fun”—or what she herself called “the terrific kick that comes from taking a chance.” This self-proclaimed “Queen of the Niggerati” contributed to The New Negro and was a founder of Fire!!. She cut a spirited image on the 1920s scene—whether crashing swanky hotels dressed as an “Asian Princess” or speaking out against Marcus Garvey’s anti-Americanism. But she didn’t make her name as a folklorist and novelist until deep into the Great Depression. What she uncovered then was a cultural revelation. In contrast to Dorothea Lange’s dismal photographs and Steinbeck’s downtrodden Joad family, Hurston’s treasure trove of jokes, tales, songs, and novels showcased, among many other features, the fun of rural southern blacks—a population too low on the national class ladder to have been helped by the boom or even hurt by the crash.

  Though Hurston frequently lied about the year of her birth (somewhere between 1891 and 1903), it is known that she grew up in all-black Eatonville, Florida, “a city,” as she characterized it, “of five lakes, three croquet courts, three hundred brown skins, three hundred good swimmers, plenty guavas, two schools, and no jail house.” Her father was the town’s sometime mayor who thought blacks shouldn’t have “too much spirit,” but her mother told her to “jump at de sun,” advice driven home by the many dancers, drinkers, fighters, partiers, and athletes she so admired around town. Among this fun-loving population, she held the cutthroat storytellers on Joe Clark’s porch in highest regard. Only the threat of a hickory switch could get her to leave before a story’s climax. For young Hurston their stories shone like fact. In addition to the rattlesnakes, gators, and bears that added thrills to Eatonville’s daily life, “God, Devil, Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, Sis Cat, Brer Bear, Lion, Buzzard, and all the wood folk walked and talked like natural men.” Even decades later, when she studied at Barnard under the famed anthropologist Franz Boas, her childhood enthrallment with jokes and folktales shaped the way she thought, worked, and played. Langston Hughes himself (swallowing his lingering bitterness over a plagiarism dispute) remembered her as the “most amusing” of the “niggerati” and cited her “side-splitting anecdotes, humorous tales, and tragicomic stories” as proof. In her pursuit of such folklore in the 1930s, she got down to the root-ball of Jazz Age fun.

  It was while working for Boas—and later for the Guggenheims, the Works Progress Administration (WPA), and her rich white “godmother,” Charlotte Osgood Mason (whose primitivist demands didn’t irk her as much as they did Hughes)—that Hurston kept returning to the Deep South, and later the Caribbean, and sharpening her techniques for collecting materials. After her initial failure in 1927, when Boas scolded her for gathering old news, she learned to exploit her southern charm and, most important, her secret weapon: being black, she could penetrate the “feather-bed of resistance” that kept out white colleagues like Boas and John Lomax.

  Learning to suppress her “carefully accented Barnardese,” Hurston went native in Polk County, Florida. She packed a revolver, frequented job sites and jook joints, nearly got herself killed by a bluesman’s ex-lover, and spent years getting acquainted with the humor and hoodoo that inform her (uneven) first novel Jonah’s Gourd Vine (1934), her folklore collection Mules and Men (1935), and most of her writing to follow. The fun she saw there eased even the hardest of lives. Lumberjacks were “poets of the swinging blade” and phosphate miners “Black men laughing and singing.” Railroad workers, swinging hammers, sang a steady chant:

  Oh, let’s shake it! Hank!

  Oh, let’s break it! Hank!

  Oh, let’s shake it, Hank!

  Oh, just a hair! Hank!

  Orange pickers manned their ladders, “singing, laughing, cursing, boasting of last night’s love” and didn’t “say embrace when they [meant] they slept with a woman.” And at night in the “jooks” the rhythm kept rolling and the people kept “balling,” the sexually inflected black slang term that Hurston translated as “having fun”: “Dancing the square dance. Dancing the scrunch. Dancing the belly-rub. Knocking the right hat off the wrong head, and backing it up with a switch-blade.” The dancing and joking, often tinged with violence, someti
mes erupted into the dozens—that “risky pleasure,” Hurston calls it, of trading verbal blows about an enemy’s family members until the weakest and least witty eventually lose their cool. Clarence Major calls the dozens a “test” of “emotional strength.” Dozens were likewise the forte of Lorenzo Staulz, Buddy Bolden’s profane vocalist who could challenge his whole audience to verbal jousts. This cousin to cutting contests, this ancestor to rap music’s chest-bumping rivalry, becomes in Hurston’s writing the razor’s edge of fun. Its graceful slices, dodges, and parries sharpen the wits, strengthen the self, and delight any onlookers—right up to the brink of violent collapse. “If you have no faith in your personal courage and confidence in your arsenal, don’t try it.”

  In Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), widely regarded as one of the most important twentieth-century American novels, it’s the dozens that sets Janie, the protagonist, free. Confined in her marriage to Joe Starks, Eatonville’s big-talking mayor (a combination of Hurston’s father and what she called “Negrotarian” race leaders like DuBois), Janie is “classed-off” from all of Eatonville’s fun—its storytelling sessions, its “contest[s] in hyperbole,” its hilarious funeral for Matt Bonner’s mule. Only when she hears Joe mocking her aging body does she sling the razor tongue of a Ma Rainey or Bessie Smith. Verbally, she does “the thing that Saul’s daughter had done to David.” She castrates him in front of the other men:

  “Talkin’ ’bout me lookin’ old! When you pull down yo’ britches, you look lak de change uh life.”

  “Great God from Zion!” Sam Watson gasped. “Y’ll really playin’ de dozens tuhnight.”

  “Wha—whut’s dat you said?” Joe challenged, hoping his ears had fooled him.

  “You heard her, you ain’t blind,” Walter taunted.

  “Ah ruther be shot with tacks than tuh hear dat ’bout mahself,” Lige Moss commiserated.

  Joe Starks, never recovering his pride, ultimately withers and dies. After a brief mourning period, Janie lets down her hair and meets a fun young drifter who goes by Tea Cake—based on a twenty-three-year-old undergraduate with whom Hurston had an affair. Eatonville scorns him for being beneath Janie’s station, but she loves him for asking her to play checkers—or go fishing, attend barbecues, or just fool around. Uninterested in Janie’s class or money, he takes her into his world of migrant workers in the Everglades, or what they call “the Muck.” Down off her pedestal and among the vibrant crowd—America’s least-valued crowd of “permanent transients with no attachments”—Janie discovers an unlikely paradise of “pianos living three lifetimes in one” and “Blues made and used right on the spot.” Free to be herself within this civil society of “dancing, fighting, singing, crying, laughing, winning, and losing,” she finally gets to join the fun.

  IN MODERNIZING FOLK CULTURE, Buddy Bolden & Company had gotten it ready for war. They had weaponized it. For the “age of play” wasn’t an easygoing time. It staged some of America’s great social struggles—between drinkers and drys, blacks and whites, women and men—and often these struggles came to blows. But even in this age of outsize personalities who spoke their minds and strutted their stuff, the technologies of fun, born of slave society, taught everyday Americans to spin their conflicts into pleasurable collisions. The stock market crashed, and the flood of rich slummers soon dried up in Harlem, but jazz, and its joyous revolt, just kept growing.

  Throughout the 1930s, swing dancers goaded jazz bands to grow bigger, blow louder, and new copycat Savoys sparked urban dance scenes all across the country. But Cat’s Corner, in Harlem, was still the engine room. In the late 1930s it was ruled by King Leon James, a tall, lanky member of the Jolly Fellows street gang and winner of the Harvest Moon jitterbug contest. Even on the jumpingest Saturday nights, the corner stayed empty until the King strolled in with his chain-swinging, coin-flipping entourage. The scuffle started at the base of the pecking order (the “scrubs”) and always ended with the King himself, after which followed a respectful intermission.

  One night, when the King had finished his set, a seventeen-year-old scrub named Albert Minns swept his partner into Cat’s Corner. He imitated the King’s new moves like a pro (plagiarism that was punishable by broken bones), but then he added trickier moves of his own, flying acrobatics like the “back flip,” “over the head,” and “snatch”—moves that eventually got “the Lindy off the ground” and anticipated the marvels of 1980s break dancing. The stunt was certain to earn a drubbing by the other Jolly Fellows—had the King not been so duly impressed. The prank’s success, if nothing else, showed the power of audacity within the Savoy hierarchy. It helped, of course, that Minns could dance. The two were combining efforts within a year, and Al Minns himself went on to rule Cat’s Corner. The fame Shorty Snowden originally brought to the Savoy had hardened into landmark, legend, so much so that a mock-up of the ballroom was erected at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, where the Lindy Hop was canonized.

  The Lindy or the “jitterbug” wouldn’t take hold until 1936, the year it was associated with the white clarinetist and bandleader Benny Goodman—the year, that is, that jazz became “swing.” The word spread fast: suddenly the jitterbug whipped and flipped on screens, stages, and dance floors nationwide. Around this same time, the flamboyant street culture that had gotten its start at Harlem’s Savoy was changing the dancing and dressing styles of America’s inner-city youth—in particular, young African-American “hepcats” and Latin American pachucos and pachucas. Loyal to their idol Cab Calloway, the men in these subcultures wore sleek, wide fedoras and flashy two-tone round-toe shoes. The men crafted loose and flowing suits, the women long skirts and flapping cardigans, all of which dramatized the Lindy’s power and grace. The dance and its styles were a proud performance—of strength, invention, high spirits, talent—and it coursed from the Savoy and L.A.’s Diana Ballroom to the high streets and sidewalks of America’s cities. Possibly as a nod to Cab Calloway’s scat singing, they self-identified as “zoot suiters.” But they were no stooges, no Bowery b’hoys—though black ones “conked” their long hair with slickening products in a style reminiscent of the old soap locks. Perfecting Buddy Bolden’s dance-music tradition, they gave to jazz as much as they took: moves, style, attitude, jive. No “movie-made children,” these kids were the authors of popular culture.

  In an age when Hollywood was marshalling its forces to wipe “miscegenation” off the silver screen, swing dance was proving more effective than ever at bringing races and ethnicities together—close together. Malcolm X, who had been a zoot suiter at the Savoy in the early 1940s, looked back on its electric, multiracial fun: “I just about went wild! Hamp’s band wailing, I was whirling girls so fast their skirts were snapping. Black girls, brownskins, high yellows, even a couple of the white girls there. Boosting them over my hips, my shoulders, into the air.… Circling, tap-dancing, I was underneath them when they landed—doing the ‘flapping eagle,’ ‘the kangaroo,’ and the ‘split.’ ” The historian Luis Alvarez explores the pleasure and tension generated by swing dancers’ racial mixing. In Los Angeles, major dance halls represented a full sample of the region’s complex demographics: blacks, whites, Mexicans, Filipinos, Chinese, and Japanese. “Many zoot suiters,” he writes, “broke public taboos against integration and racial mixing by socializing together and participating in [overtly diverse] public events”; the results themselves were often mixed—dancing, competing, sometimes rumbling—but the building up and breaking of tension was engineered into this subculture’s fun, its “sheer enjoyment,” eros dancing and tangling with thanatos.

  Sandra Gibson throws the legendary Al Minns in the Savoy Ballroom’s Cat’s Corner, 1939. (Courtesy of Cornell Capa, Magnum Images.)

  Throughout New York City, not just in Harlem, swing bands drew radically diverse crowds: “every couple, almost,” Dizzy Gillespie (who zooted, too) said, “was a mixed couple one way or the other. That was the age of unity.” Swing was especially popular, he observed, among black and white Communist
Party members. But larger society didn’t share that love. In the early 1940s, when their subculture gained force and their styles and attitudes became more visible, zoot suiters and pachuco/as took it from all sides. Zoot suits themselves, constructed of ample fabric, were declared illegal in 1942—for hoarding textiles during wartime. Disliked by whites, disowned by adults who hated their flash, zoot suiters inhabited, as Shane White and Graham White have shown, the abject new category of “juvenile delinquency.” Even J. A. Rogers, the journalist who touted jazz’s “joyous revolt” in Alain Locke’s New Negro anthology, decried zoot suiters in 1943 as the “revolt of callow youth against convention and authority.” Zoot suiters strutted the worst of jazz’s “morally anarchic spirit.”

  Their racial mixing was also seen as a threat, as unpatriotic, disgusting, enraging, especially by white U.S. soldiers and sailors, who were often forbidden to attend jazz clubs. Indeed, in May 1943, when city health authorities ordered the Savoy shut down, claiming its “role in facilitating the spread of venereal disease among servicemen,” investigative reporting by the local black press unearthed a different motive: “Mixed Dancing Closed Savoy Ballroom.” Their case was sound. In comparison with the downtown sex clubs and brothels that somehow eluded the authorities’ notice, the Savoy, as they put it, looked like a “Christian youth center.”

  Later that same month, a long-running tension between zoot suiters and service members (often with the assistance of cops) erupted into the so-called Zoot Suit Riots—just the latest wave of race riots to spread throughout Los Angeles County. Having long been ridiculed by soldiers and sailors as femmes, cowards, and national enemies, a group of Mexican-American zoot suiters clashed with eleven service members in L.A.’s Alpine neighborhood, breaking the jaw of one of the sailors. On June 4, following a few similar clashes, two hundred or more sailors entered East L.A. in a fleet of taxicabs, armed with bludgeons and patrolling for zoot suits. They attacked the first boy they saw and unleashed four days of unchecked violence against randomly identified Mexican Americans and blacks, many of whom were beaten and stripped naked—whether they wore zoot suits or not.