by John Beckman
9. “keen rivalry”: Danny Barker and Alyn Shipton, Buddy Bolden and the Last Days of Storyville (New York: Continuum, 2001), 11.
10. “best dancer”: Ibid., 18.
11. “bosom buddies”: Ibid., 19. See also Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, 60–61. As Marquis shows, police records are the best source for polling Bolden’s fan base of rounders, pimps, prostitutes, drinkers, disturbers of the peace, and the occasional murderer. Morton himself was there one June night when Edward Ory shot Charles Montrell right above the eye. Montrell had rudely stepped on his foot. Morton recalls: “This big guy laid there on the floor, dead, and, my goodness, Buddy Bolden—he was up on the balcony with the band—started blazing away with his trumpet, trying to keep the crowd together.” This night, however, even Bolden’s galvanizing riffs couldn’t prevent the mob from busting down the doors and fairly trampling the on-duty cop (Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, 71). Also see Jelly Roll Morton, “In New Orleans, The Bolden Legend,” in The Saga of Mr. Jelly Lord, vol. 11, pt. 1 and conclusion (Circle Records, Circle Sound).
12. “keep it clean”: Barker and Shipton, Buddy Bolden, 21.
13. “I thought I heard Buddy Bolden say,” “on the spot,” “You’re nasty, you’re dirty”: Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, 110–11.
14. “had the reputation”: Barker and Shipton, Buddy Bolden, 10.
15. “Dusen and Bolden used to get,” “I thought I heer’d Abe Lincoln shout”: Ibid., 23.
16. “The police put you in jail”: Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, 111.
17. “hesitated and then explained”: Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 24.
18. “dementia praecox, paranoid type”: Marquis, In Search of Buddy Bolden, 129.
19. “leisure class”: Thorstein Veblen and Stuart Chase, The Theory of the Leisure Class: An Economic Study of Institutions (New York: Modern Library, 1934).
20. “recreation centers,” “nearer a frank and full enjoyment,” “I do not maintain”: Robert L. Duffus, “The Age of Play,” The Independent, December 20, 1924, 539.
21. “the Golden Age of the roller coasters”: Todd H. Throgmorton, Roller Coasters of America (Osceola, WI: Motorbooks International, 1994), 25–26.
22. “the spirit of play”: Duffus, “Age of Play,” 539.
23. the “Puritan,” who was widely viewed: Frederick J. Hoffman, The Twenties: American Writing in the Postwar Decade (New York: Viking Press, 1955), 314–15.
24. “Victorian character”: See Stanley Coben, Rebellion Against Victorianism: The Impetus for Cultural Change in 1920s America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 3–35, 136–56.
25. “stiffening, almost a deadening”: H. L. Mencken, “Maryland, Apex of Normalcy, May 3, 1922,” in These United States: Portraits of America from the 1920s, ed. Daniel H. Borus (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992), 165. For a classic discussion of the twenties’ cultural schizophrenia (“Of Bohemians and Consumers,” “Of Coolidge and Hemingway,” “Of Town and Country”), see Paul Carter, The Twenties in America, 2nd ed. (1968; Arlington Heights, IL: Harlan Davidson, 1975). For a marvelously schizoid account of the decade, see Frederick Lewis Allen’s classic Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the Nineteen-Twenties (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1951).
26. The U.S. population grew by 16 percent: U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States: Colonial Times to 1957 (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 12, 401.
27. “Each week about 100 million Americans”: Geoffrey Perrett, America in the Twenties: A History (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1982), 224.
28. “gaping stupidly”: Mencken, “Maryland, Apex of Normalcy,” 165.
29. “My ears have run”: Stroheim quoted in The Cinema Book, ed. Pam Cook (London: British Film Institute, 1985), 7.
30. “Billy Sunday of the Republican Party”: Francis J. Couvares, “Hollywood, Main Street, and the Church: Trying to Censor Movies Before the Production Code,” in Movie Censorship and American Culture, 2nd ed., ed. Francis J. Couvares (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996), 133.
31. “decorated with bunting and flags”: Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons, The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code from the 1920s to the 1960s (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1990), 5–6.
32. “Eleven Don’ts”: Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America, “The Don’ts and Be Carefuls,” in The Movies in Our Midst: Documents in the Cultural History of Film in America, ed. Gerald Mast (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 213–14; emphasis added. For an excellent (and fun) treatment of Hollywood’s censorship history, see also Jon Lewis, Hollywood vs. Hard Core: How the Struggle over Censorship Created the Modern Film Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2002).
33. “Contrary to popular opinion”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, “Echoes of the Jazz Age,” in The Crack Up, ed. Edmund Wilson (1931; New York: New Directions, 1945), 17.
34. “Tragedy,” he later wrote: Charles Chaplin, My Autobiography (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964), 303–4.
35. “The very morons who worshipped”: Mencken’s Baltimore Sun article cited in David Robinson, Chaplin, the Mirror of Opinion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1983), 71. Also see Kenneth Anger’s notorious Hollywood Babylon (San Francisco: Straight Arrow Books, 1975), 87–94.
36. “I developed more stunt men”: Kevin Brownlow, The Parade’s Gone By (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), 314.
37. “I could lick any boy my size”: Clara Bow, “My Life Story, as Told to Adela Rogers St. Johns,” Photoplay, part 1, February 1928. Transcribed by Jeffrey Ford. Http://theclarabowpage.tripod.com/clarabowlifestory/clarabowlifestory.html. Accessed August 1, 2012.
38. “All I hadda do”: Clara Bow, “My Life Story, As Told to Adela Rogers St. Johns,” Photoplay, part 2, March 1928. Transcribed by Jeffrey Ford. Http://theclarabowpage.tripod.com/clarabowlifestory/clarabowlifestory.html. Accessed August 1, 2012.
39. “She is plastic, quick, alert”: David Stenn, Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild (1988; New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000), 27.
40. “In the picture I danced”: Bow, “My Life Story,” part 2, March 1928.
41. “Alverna channels all her vitality”: Michael Sragow, Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master (New York: Pantheon, 2008), 115.
42. “running wild”: Clara Bow, “My Life Story, as Told to Adela Rogers St. Johns,” Photoplay, part 3, April 1928. Transcribed by Jeffrey Ford. Http://theclarabowpage.tripod.com/clarabowlifestory/clarabowlifestory.html. Accessed August 1, 2012.
43. “that shithead”: Stenn, Clara Bow: Runnin’ Wild, 79–86.
44. “I like young people and gaiety”: Bow, “My Life Story,” part 3, April 1928.
45. “democratic faith,”: Paul A. Carter, Another Part of the Twenties (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977).
46. “Our national heritage of freedom”: Quoted in Bruce Kellner, Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1968), 56–57. Whether indulging in it, reflecting on it, criticizing or regretting it, high-modernist writers were the first generation to take a long look at American fun. Their literary records of its delights and dangers are among their era’s most vivid products. White male writers of this period showed an often-leering avidity for it: John Dos Passos, Warner Fabian, Ernest Hemingway, Joseph Hergesheimer, Thorne Smith, Carl Van Vechten, and Thomas Wolfe are just a short list of famous novelists who examined the 1920s wild party.
Joseph Moncure March’s long poem The Wild Party, written in the summer of 1926 after the author quit The New Yorker’s managing editorship, penetrated so deeply into fun’s dark maw that it was banned in Boston and decades later became the septic source for an orgiastic film, a fiendishly smart Broadway musical, and a lavishly illustrated edition by Art Spiegelman. The wild party’s hosts are Queenie and Burrs—a burlesque dancer and brutal vaudeville clown—and its sexually liberated guests pursue social mi
xing of an intimacy that is usually only hinted at in Jazz Age literature. Its lightly tapping verse makes all the danger fun. Even its peek into a multiracial orgy makes it sound like child’s play (69):
The bed was a slowly moving tangle
Of legs and bodies at every angle.
Knees rose:
Legs in sheer stockings crossed,
Clung: shimmered: uncrossed: were lost.
Skirts were awry.
Black arms embraced
White legs naked from knee to waist.
March’s rhymes spread The Wild Party’s gospel of heedless drinking, sex, and hilarity. It all seems worth the costs, even reckless murder, right up to the concluding lines, when “The door sprang open / And the cops rushed in” (111). Its winsome attitude toward the kinky taboos aside, it leaves the reader with the puritanical assumption that the fun-loving people should be separated. When the modern crowd gets too hot, we need the cops to douse the flames. Joseph Moncure March, The Wild Party (New York: Pantheon, 1994).
47. “If the American people had had respect”: William Randolph Hearst and Edmund D. Coblentz, William Randolph Hearst: A Portrait in His Own Words (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952), 92.
48. “no scientific value”: Daniel Okrent, Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition (New York: Scribner, 2010), 185–89.
49. “on the farm of Senator Morris Sheppard”: Charles Merz, “The Crusade Starts,” Outlook and Independent, October 15, 1930, 278.
50. “the liberation of the individual”: Harry S. Warner, Prohibition, an Adventure in Freedom (Westerhouse, OH: World League Against Alcoholism, 1928), reprinted in Carter, Another Part of the Twenties, 90.
51. “Stills were everywhere”: Herbert Asbury, “Where the Booze Came From,” reprinted in Ain’t We Got Fun? Essays, Lyrics, and Stories of the Twenties, ed. Barbara H. Solomon (New York: New American Library, 1980), 91.
52. “Homosexuality, transvestitism, and interracial relationships”: Michael A. Lerner, Dry Manhattan: Prohibition in New York City (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 178–79.
53. “To it come all classes”: George E. Worthington, “Night Clubs of New York,” reprinted in George Edwin Mowry, The Twenties: Fords, Flappers, and Fanatics (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1963), 112.
54. “Narcotics are said to be distributed”: Ernest W. Mandeville, “Detroit Sets a Bad Example,” reprinted in Mowry, The Twenties, 111. Singer Billy Daniels fondly recalled that “the Mob was always present” on the 1930s New York nightclub scene: “Some of Murder, Inc.… used to come in and have a good time, have a ball, a half-dozen of them that I got to know. They were always full of fun, usually on a kick or something.” W. Royal Stokes, The Jazz Scene: An Informal History from New Orleans to 1990 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 53. While midwestern drinking and crime did decrease in the early years of Prohibition, “especially in towns and cities inhabited by Protestants of northern European extraction” (118), as Daniel Okrent specifies in Last Call, trangressions against the Volstead Act were hardly limited to the coasts. Chicago became an organized crime capital, and Detroit was considered “the liquor capital of the United States.” Charles A. Selden calculated that “the manufacture and sale of automobiles in Detroit involves nearly $2,000,000,000 annually and the chemical industry about $90,000,000. Between the two stands Detroit’s illegal liquor traffic, estimated at $215,000,000” (“Rum Row in the Middle West,” New York Times, May 27, 1928, reprinted in Mowry, The Twenties, 105).
55. “the matter of cocktail parties”: Carl Van Vechten, Parties (1930; Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1993), 172.
56. “Of the 113 establishments”: Okrent, Last Call, 208.
57. “in a decade that saw a declining interest in politics”: David J. Goldberg, Discontented America: The United States in the 1920s (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 56.
58. “C’est lui Lindberg, LINDBERG!”: Harry Crosby, Shadows of the Sun, ed. Edward Germain (Santa Barbara, CA: Black Sparrow Press, 1977), 146.
59. “Only in America”: Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 456.
60. “like[d] looping the loop”: Crosby, Shadows of the Sun, 264.
61. “his ambulance was vaporized”: Geoffrey Wolff, Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse of Harry Crosby (New York: Random House, 1976), 54.
62. “Bodily he survived”: Malcolm Cowley, Exile’s Return (New York: Penguin, 1976), 250.
63. “aristocrat”: Crosby, Shadows of the Sun, 284.
64. “a glamorous and charismatic man”: Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 458. Full account of Julian from ibid., 457–61.
65. “participatory” qualities: Kathy J. Ogren, The Jazz Revolution: Twenties America and the Meaning of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 8. Jazz dancers were inspired by both musicians and spectators. Zora Neale Hurston called dancing a chief form of “Negro Expression” and described how the dancer’s “flex[ing]” knee, “thrust[ing]” chest, “clenched fists,” and “elbows taut as in hard running or grasping a thrusting blade” demand a response from the spectator, who “adds the picture of ferocious assault, hears the drums and finds himself keeping time with the music and tensing himself for the struggle.”
66. “dance-based music”: Roger Pryor Dodge, “The Dance-Basis of Jazz,” Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance: Collected Writings 1929–1964, ed. Roger Pryor Dodge (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 145. Article originally appeared in The Record Changer, March and April 1945.
67. “Saxophone Supper[s]”: Dicky Wells quoted in Ogren, Jazz Revolution, 82.
68. “in control”: Scott DeVeaux and Gary Giddins, Jazz (New York: W. W. Norton, 2009), 56.
69. “compet[ing]”: Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 89.
70. Let’s Do the Black Bottom: “Castle Novelty” instructional film, Let’s Do the Black Bottom, 1924.
71. “It was new to them”: Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 315–16.
72. “The Home of Happy Feet”: Ibid., 324.
73. Harlem’s Savoy held special nights: Ibid., 322.
74. “segregated”: Interview with Pearl and Ivy Fisher at 409 Edgecombe Ave., March 1975, p. 3. Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. David Levering Lewis, “Voices from the Renaissance Collection,” MG 335, Box 1, Folder 1.
75. “grab a cook or mechanic”: “Savoy,” Lucky Millinder, Warner Brothers Music Corp./ASCAP.
76. “Cat’s Corner”: Stearns and Stearns, Jazz Dance, 327.
8 “JOYOUS REVOLT”: THE “NEW NEGRO” AND THE “NEW WOMAN”
1. “the nobody’s child of the levee”: J. A. Rogers, “Jazz at Home,” in The New Negro, ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Touchstone, 1997), 217, 223.
2. “an average group of Negroes”: Johnson, Black Manhattan, 162.
3. “poison for the weak”: Rogers, “Jazz at Home,” 223. He writes:
Joy, after all, has a physical basis. Those who laugh and dance and sing are better off even in their vices than those who do not. Moreover, jazz with its mocking disregard for formality is a leveler and makes for democracy. The jazz spirit, being primitive, demands more frankness and sincerity. Just as it already has done in art and music, so eventually in human relations and social manners, it will no doubt have the effect of putting more reality in life by taking some of the needless artificiality out.
4. “This new spirit of joy and spontaneity”: Ibid., 223.
5. “the first influence of the Negro”: W. E. B. DuBois, The Gift of Black Folk (1924; Millwood, NY: Kraus-Thomson Organization Limited, 1975), 146, 61.
6. “gift of laughter”: Fauset, “The Gift of Laughter,” 165.
7. some 555,000 in the 1910s alone: Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration (New York: Random House, 2010), 161.
8. “Red Summer”: Cameron McWhirter, Red Summer: The Summer of 1919 and the Awake
ning of Black America (New York: Henry Holt, 2011), 13–17.
9. “Long before the stock market crash”: Jonathan Gill, Harlem: The Four Hundred Year History from Dutch Village to Capital of Black America (New York: Grove Press, 2011), 231, 227.
10. “white clients enthusiastically”: David Levering Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue (New York: Penguin, 1979), 209.
11. “the more of a quiet reserved type”: Alberta Hunter quoted in Ogren, Jazz Revolution, 77.
12. “The whole joint was rocking”: Eddie Condon quoted in Ogren, Jazz Revoution, 77–78.
13. “transvestite floor shows, sex circuses”: Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 209.
14. “catered to all varieties”: Eric Garber, “A Spectacle in Color: The Lesbian and Gay Subculture of Jazz Age Harlem,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay & Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman et al. (New York: Meridian, 1990), 323.
15. “ladies’ maids and truck drivers”: Langston Hughes, The Big Sea (1940; New York: Hill and Wang, 1964), 233.
16. “semi-illiterate night watchman”: Chris Albertson, Bessie, rev. and expanded ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 29.
17. “lighted cigarettes”: Elaine Feinstein, Bessie Smith: Empress of the Blues (New York: Penguin, 1985), 61.
18. “Gimme a Pigfoot”: Bessie Smith, “Gimme a Pigfoot,” recorded November 24, 1933. Okeh 8949.
19. “fun to be a Negro”: Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue, 103–4.
20. “violently interested in Negroes”: Nathan Irvin Huggins, Harlem Renaissance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 99–101.
21. “Coney Island”: Carl Van Vechten, Nigger Heaven (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926).
22. “the fat black bucks”: Vachel Lindsay, “The Congo,” in The Poetry of Vachel Lindsay: Complete and with Lindsay’s Drawings, ed. Dennis Camp (Peoria, IL: Spoon River Press, 1984), 174.
23. “glistening African god of pleasure”: Willa Cather, My Ántonia (New York: Virago, 1999), 191.
24. “a blow in the face”: W. E. B. DuBois, “Books,” The Crisis, December 1926, 81.