Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  Mouvet and his drinking buddy, the Parisian actor Max Dearly, were flabbergasted. The commercial instincts of the two young entertainers quickly switched on, however, and they asked the tough to teach them the dance, which he did for the price of another round. Soon both Dearly and Mouvet were dancing a modified apache with their partners in Paris cafés. Mouvet then brought it to New York, where it became a sensation. “It is the dance of realism, of primitive passion,” wrote Mouvet. “As a picture of life in the raw, it has beauty and artistic strength.32

  Mouvet’s account of its discovery may be bunk. Joseph C. Smith performed an apache dance in the Broadway show The Queen of the Moulin Rouge in 1908, and offered an almost identical origin story to a reporter in a 1912 article. His telling stressed the woman’s passivity and the extreme brutality of the dance. After witnessing a man break a glass over his lover’s head—“I thought she was dead,” Smith said—he observed the dance: “He only cavorted; she really danced, danced with an expressiveness that I had never seen before. Not a word did she speak, but her every movement, all her grace and life, implored him to be merciful to her, to take her back and fold her in his arms.”33

  Here, in movement, was the very same impudently masochistic desire expressed in a new kind of music emerging around the same time that ragtime did—the blues. By 1920, when Mamie Smith had the first hit in the genre with “Crazy Blues,” one preoccupation stood out among its many subjects: troubled love. Blues favorites like Smith’s song, Ma Rainey’s “Sweet Rough Man,” and Bessie Smith’s “Tain’t Nobody’s Business If I Do” took on touchy subjects with an unapologetic clarity, transmuting the spirit of tough dancing into song.

  Like the blues, the apache gave women power through its physicality but also portrayed their victimization. Some women dancers would refuse to perform the apache; others would add steps in which the woman fights back. While it definitely did glamourize men’s abuse of women, the apache also appealed to female observers because it so graphically depicted the frightening loss of control that might result from more expressive sexuality. The apache was like a hidden chapter in the living marriage manual of social dancing; dwelling on the extremes of violence and abuse, it also gave form to more common fears about jealousy, sexual craving, and emotional dependence.

  From its inception onward, the apache remained strictly an exhibition routine, never embraced by nonprofessional dancers. Its key moves—especially that strangulating lift—were just too difficult to be executed by amateurs, and a crowded dance floor wouldn’t accommodate the throws that sent female apache dancers across the room. Yet we still see traces of this dance everywhere. Dozens of films, from the musical comedy classic Singin’ in the Rain to director Baz Luhrmann’s postmodern Moulin Rouge!, rely on versions of it to heighten the drama. Its greatest presence remains in the ballroom. Those dangerous lifts and dazzling throws that win competitions like Dancing with the Stars? They’re apache in origin.

  Partner dancing is now a specialty only some amateurs pursue, but in the first half of the twentieth century it was arguably the central American leisure activity. It told stories, the way songs did—the most evocative dances were love songs without words. Jazz Age Americans eager to become more sexually sophisticated learned how to ride the current of their own desires by watching savants like Mouvet and his partners and, after a few champagne cocktails, tentatively trying out their own dramatic routines. They longed to discover how to integrate publicly expressed passion into their daily lives and relationships. Sure, you could shimmy like your sister Kate, as the song said, but could you do it out in the open, with your wife, or husband, or the cutie who’d just caught your eye? These questions both inspired and vexed nightlife explorers as they took to the wide-open interior spaces proliferating across the country and reveled in what Mouvet called “the shining-floored life.”

  Dance instructors of the Jazz Age took it upon themselves to help the descendants of the Puritans relax and enjoy themselves on the dance floor, if not in the more secluded spaces to which such choreographed flirtations often led. These entrepreneurial artistes cashed in on a surge of interest in partner dancing that began around 1912, when urban cabarets and hotels began installing floors polished with oil sealer and equipped with springs beneath for extra floatiness. “Suddenly in the midst of this money-getting machine-made age,” one journalist wrote, “we throw all our caution to the wind; we give up some of our business hours, and we do not only dance in the evening, but in the afternoon and the morning.”34 It was as if every city in the nation suddenly wanted to be New Orleans—as if the purpose of urban life were not commerce, but leisure, and everyone, poor or rich, needed to learn how to have visible fun.

  THE COMPLEXITIES OF COUPLING

  The dance mania served a serious purpose, providing couples a way to explore each other in a safe, shared zone, as they pantomimed desire, conquest, happiness, and even sometimes sorrow and violence to the sound of a hoppin’ band. Coupledom was already a major theme in vaudeville and other traveling entertainments, as well as on Broadway. Mixed double acts—a man and woman working together, as opposed to two Laurel and Hardy–style men—became common in the first years of the twentieth century, with a focus on the ups and downs of matrimony. The most famous of these teams in black vaudeville, Butterbeans and Susie (aka Jodie Edwards and Susie Hawthorne), actually wed onstage in Philadelphia in 1917. Bickering, ribald jokes, and heavy innuendo were the specialties of such acts, foreshadowing the subject matter of the classic blues. Their songs sometimes included the sounds of sex, masked by jaunty melodies.35

  Dance also created opportunities for displays of sexualized vigor. Individual performers employed the shimmy-shake; stock routines like the famous carnival show-closer “Eph and Dinah” did something similar for couples. In that skit, an elderly plantation couple is celebrating a wedding anniversary, and everyone at their party dances to the syncopated sounds of a string band, except the honored guests themselves. After some goading, Uncle Eph creakily gets up—and eventually proves himself stellar at getting down. Dinah, pulled to the dance floor, starts out hobbling but ends up executing a powerful hootchie-kootch. Soon they’re doing a slow grind, to the amused shock of their youngers. Dance brings Eph and Dinah back to life; it’s Viagra in motion, resurrecting desires and abilities that by all known logic should be dead.

  The boom in urban entertainment gave residents of America’s biggest cities ample places to witness and experience the revitalizing power of dance. Most theaters featured a dance contest, open to the public, on Friday nights, enticing participants with the promise of a prize, possible romance, and even a new career—since many vaudeville stars got their start winning such battles.36 In the more intimate spaces of the cabaret and the rooftop garden, this mingling of the professional and the amateur took a different form. The historian Lewis Erenberg called this world of leisure “a realm of public privacy.”37 Relatively diverse crowds—sometimes even racially mixed ones—could mingle in a fairly exclusive environment. Professional dancers and singers would often hide in plain sight, sitting at a table along with the evening’s other guests, until the time came for them to stand up and perform, within touching distance of the crowd.

  The most famous of the dancers were Vernon and Irene Castle, the lithe young pair who became the official embodiment of America’s dance craze. Though the Castles vehemently rejected “crude” dance elements like the shimmy-shake, their easy way of being in tune with each other still produced an erotic buzz. The Castles symbolized the sexual compatibility of complementary equals and that made them the envy of many middle-class couples. An early Castles film clip shows the duo waltzing through their act; it cuts to an older husband and wife watching. The husband quickly grows excited, grinning and nudging his wife. At first, she resists, but under the Castles’ spell she soon softens, throwing googly-eyed glances at her spouse.38

  The Castles sold themselves as purveyors of clean choreography, which they associated with whiteness. Tho
ugh Vernon loved ragtime and sought out African American musical collaborators, and Irene took at least one lesson from Ethel Waters’s companion (and likely lover) Ethel Williams, the pair claimed to have never performed black dances in their “primitive” state—Irene denounced the shimmy, for example, calling it “very, very crude.”39 Their dance floor chemistry was more cool than hot, their choreography communicating an ideal of intimacy grounded in propriety and mutual respect.

  Yet partner dancing, like the blues, could also dwell on the downside of eroticism. The apache, with its seedy pimp-and-whore narrative, is just one example. The most popular “dangerous” dance of the time was the tango, which felt risky because of the clutching grasp it demanded and the narrative of frank passion it embodied. The tango was promoted in New York in the early 1910s by Mouvet, who, in a story that echoed his apache brag, claimed to have learned it from a group of Argentinian youths he befriended while living in Paris. In New York, he opened a studio where he and his wife, Florence Walton, taught all comers who could afford the twenty-five-dollar fee.40 The tango brought to prominence the Latin elements that ran through all the music of the Afro-Caribbean diaspora. It was foreign-flavored, yet as a hidden but ever-present part of the nation’s heritage, it instantly made sense in an American context. The Latin Lover, a character developed by Mouvet and later perfected by the Italian-born Rudolph Valentino, romanticized a familiar presence in every urbanite’s life: the immigrant, changing the face of a nation that had never been ethnically stable in the first place.

  OF MISERY AND MEN

  The advent of recordings coincided with a general shift toward more openly sexual subject matter in virtually all styles of music. By 1920, the top songs included the harem-themed “Dardanella” and sexy dance tunes like Art Hickman’s teasing, squeezing “Hold Me.” Also at this time, the growing assertiveness of the African American creative class was complemented by the rise of immigrant performers who, burdened with similar stereotypes casting them as primitively passionate, sometimes found in them a way to be more freely emotional. The transition to something closer to naturalness affected all performers. One compelling case is that of Fanny Brice, the Jewish comedienne whose song “My Man” became the massively popular musical equivalent to the apache dance.

  Brice, born in 1891, was a child of New York’s Jewish merchant class; her parents owned a chain of saloons in New Jersey. As a teenager, she dropped out of school to pursue work as a chorus girl in Florenz Ziegfeld’s staged extravaganzas, finding her niche performing comic numbers based on Yiddish stereotypes. She danced in the style of Little Egypt and attempted the apache (for the latter, Eddie Cantor played her paramour), but she did so for laughs. Her first big splash came when she did a silly Dance of the Seven Veils to the tune of Irving Berlin’s song “Sadie Salome (Go Home).”

  Brice longed to transcend comedy, or at least step outside of it for one memorable number. “People like to feel miserable,” she said in a New Yorker interview in 1929. “You make them laugh, they will forget you, but if you make them cry, they will never forget you.”41 But she couldn’t find the right material until 1919, when Ziegfeld, her mentor, suggested a song he’d discovered on a recording by the French musical hall queen Mistinguett, who, as it happened, was Max Dearly’s partner when he brought the apache dance to the cabaret of Paris.

  The song was “My Man,” a mesmerizing chanson with a circular melody and a modal undercurrent. Its original lyric came straight out of the apache legend. The wronged woman who sings it is a prostitute, left alone by her pimp, whom she viscerally misses: “I’m going crazy, because he’s under my skin.” Brice transformed it into what she called “every woman’s song,” though she held on to its frisson of violence. She often performed it in what one critic identified as “the apachian black and red, leaning against a lamppost, with great pathos,” as “a portrayal of the abused companion of some slum brute singing of her love.”42

  The English lyrics Ziegfeld commissioned from the playwright Channing Pollock soften up that criminal scenario just enough so that the average wife unhappy with the state of her own less-than-ideal marriage could identify with it. The “My Man” we know is a prototypical tale of miscommunication and dependency: “Oh my man, I love him so, he’ll never know . . . all my life is just despair, but I don’t care . . . what’s the difference if I say I’ll go away, when I know I’ll come back on my knees someday.” This was also the story of Brice herself in 1921, when she first performed it. The element of confession cemented the song’s place in the history of women speaking their sexual realities in song, alongside the best work of blueswomen like Bessie Smith and Ma Rainey, who were Brice’s historical peers.

  Brice’s man was Jules “Nicky” Arnstein, and though he wasn’t a street tough, he was definitely a gangster. She met the handsome racketeer in 1912, when she was twenty-one and he was thirty-three. He quickly abandoned the wife he had in Baltimore and set up house with Brice in New York; six years later they married, and she bore him a daughter and a son. Initially entranced by what she perceived as Arnstein’s high-class grace—the press painted Arnstein as a peacock, who didn’t like to be interrogated because “it had a way of disturbing the set of his collar and the groom of his hair”—Brice spent much of their marriage trying to keep him out of prison.

  She invested heavily in legal battles that ultimately failed, and he did time for criminal acts including bank fraud and wire-tapping. Though they divorced in 1927 and Brice went on to marry (and divorce) the songwriter and producer Billy Rose, Arnstein remained the legendary love of her life. Omar Sharif transformed him into a real matinee idol in Funny Girl, the 1968 film starring Barbra Streisand, and Arnstein still hovers in the background, a bad boy, every time another singer, from Barbra Streisand to Lea Michele, approaches “My Man.”43

  It’s the actual performance, not the costume or even the context, that marks “My Man” as a benchmark in both Brice’s career and in the history of the erotic lament. “My Man” created a space in Brice’s otherwise frantic routine, allowing her to subdue the freneticism of her shtick and truly connect. Singing slowly, often lapsing into plain speech, Brice acted as both confessor and confidante, offering up a sorrow her fans perceived as real and asking them to feel it as a way of better understanding their own burdens.

  “My Man” earned Brice respect as an artist who could truly reveal herself instead of simply relying on jokes and sugary sentimentality. “Hear her, with her castles of romance tumbling about her ears, bravely sing ‘My Man,’” read an advertisement for Brice’s Victor recording of the song. “[It is] the kind of heart song you want to hear again and again.”44 This copywriter’s spiel indicates what was changing in popular song as the 1920s began. The record, a relatively new medium that was also responsible for the rise of the blues, demanded a shift in priorities. No longer did artists have to dance to point to their embodied realities. The disembodied nature of the record allowed for a kind of intimacy that demanded stillness as the listener absorbed a song’s emotional impact in relative privacy. Dance would still play a central role in popular music for decades to come, but now it had a competitor: the natural-sounding voice, whispering sweet nothings that meant everything in a listener’s ear.

  As part of this transition, “My Man” is truly a blues song, admired for its honest depiction of emotions so intense they erase propriety. It also resembles the single biggest hit of the 1910s—a song that would never be called a blues. “You Made Me Love You” is remembered as perhaps the last high point (if you can call it that) of blackface minstrelsy, performed by Al Jolson, whose legacy will forever be tainted by its burnt-cork mark. To modern ears, it doesn’t match the pathos of “My Man”—it’s an embarrassing relic of a less aware time. Brice herself made Jolson’s song into a joke in her routines, showing her undies to the crowd as she winked and grinned.

  Yet as Jolson played it, the famous desperate, funny, slightly scary hook of “You Made Me Love You”—“gimme gimme gimme
gimme what I cry for”—does tap into the anxieties of the time about love and loss of control. He’d fall to one knee when he sang it during a Winter Garden theater run in 1913. The gesture, first necessitated by an injury, read as human, as did his outstretched arms. Once again, a lyric about the failure to keep sexual feeling in its proper place fascinated listeners and made the singer who conveyed it something more than just another clever mugger.

  It’s telling that both “My Man” and “You Made Me Love You” later became signature songs for artists associated with bringing older musical styles into the modern age. In 1937, an adolescent Judy Garland sweetly murmured Jolson’s plea to a photograph of her heartthrob, Clark Gable; her understated rendition signaled her own move from the broad theatrical tradition toward the more intimate palette of the movie star. The same year, Billie Holiday would record “My Man” as a jazzy blues, applying her intelligence and cool to its overheated lyric and taking the classic blues into the jazz age. Just as the key moves of the era’s favorite partner dances would be used in love rituals for decades to come, these songs served as vehicles for popular music to progress, and along with it, for America’s expressions of erotic longing and fulfillment to become more subtly shaded and refined.