Tomorrow-Land

by Joseph Tirella

  The chaos engulfing New York City was the worst possible news for the World’s Fair: Race riots, civil rights protests, the public ridicule of the President of the United States by college students, charges of police brutality, and every day more horrific crime stories with headlines that dared you to look away. Just two days after the Fair opened, the papers had described another tragic murder involving two minors—Boy, 16, Throws Girl, 12, from Roof—and that was from the high-minded New York Times, hardly one of the city’s “if-it-bleeds-it-leads” tabloids. All of these events invited the question that Robert Moses once asked in a New York Times Magazine article back in 1943: What’s wrong with New York? Twenty-one years later, many Americans and would-be Fairgoers pondered the same question.

  In late July, Moses sent a sample of the letters he had been receiving for months to Mayor Robert F. Wagner Jr. The first was from a Marshall, Texas, man who feared for the safety of his daughter and three granddaughters, who were planning to visit the Fair. His letter quoted a magazine article about Genovese, recounting how thirty people “witnessed the rape of a defenseless woman by a sex maniac without rendering any assistance.” He went on to say: “This would not have happened in this part of the country.” He wanted Moses’ personal assurance that New York City was safe.

  Another man from St. Paul, Minnesota, expressed similar reservations. “The news stories concerning racial incidents, muggings, and actual killings have done much to cool our feelings for the Fair,” he told Moses. Another wrote the Master Builder asking if it were true that cars with Alabama plates were being targeted by vandals, ostensibly in retaliation for the sins of Bull Connor and Governor George C. Wallace, now a presidential candidate.

  “I’m sure you will be perfectly safe here,” Moses assured any out-of-towner who asked. And while he admitted that violent crimes occurred in New York and other big cities—“this is true of . . . rural districts as well”—the real problem, he claimed, lay with the New York media. “The metropolitan press unfortunately plays these incidents up,” he explained.

  Despite these concerns, just four months into the Fair’s first season, Moses had already turned his attention to improvements for Season Two, which would begin on April 21, 1965. There was no shortage of problematic pavilions to fix: There was the unofficial French Pavilion (shut down by Moses because the business group that organized it hadn’t made the exhibit suitably French enough); the struggling American Arts Pavilion (which managed to aggravate the critics who had lobbied for it and inspire only apathy from the public); the cash-strapped Louisiana Pavilion, with its old-time riverboat-style revue America Be Seated, which was too close to a minstrel show for the NAACP, whose complaints ended the show after two days; and the Texas Pavilion, which despite its acclaimed To Broadway With Love show—which won praise for its integrated cast from Fair director Dr. Ralph J. Bunche—had red-stained balance sheets and was losing a reported $130,000 a week by early summer.

  But by August, Moses’ biggest problem was the Lake Amusement Area—the square mile of Fairgrounds adjacent to Meadow Lake that was accessible by a footbridge. He had built a small amphitheater and a marina that would anchor the area, but the surrounding Fairgrounds were ultimately populated with a zoo and a circus, as well as various sideshows and rides. From the get-go, Moses had instituted a no “midway” policy—referring to the traditional seedy entertainment areas of World’s Fairs where one could find barkers luring customers into Coney Island–style funhouses, penny arcades, cheap games of chance, or circus freaks shows (like Olga the Bearded Lady, who was famous enough to earn a profile in The New Yorker in 1940). When the lights went down and the kids went home, these same venues would become more risqué and were strictly for “adults only.”

  Not at Moses’ Fair, though. The Master Builder flatly refused to allow anything ribald or what he judged “bad taste” anywhere near Flushing Meadow. As Judge Samuel Rosenman, one of Moses’ most trusted confidants, told The New Yorker months before the Fair opened, “You can have gaiety and amusement without any obscenity.” By the summer of 1964, many of the producers of the Lake Amusement Area blamed Moses and his “ban-the-bust, no girlie show” dictum for their failing shows. “Moses is running the Fair as if it were a state park,” complained a producer to the New York World-Telegram. Said another: “Moses isn’t a showman. He has created a public image of the Fair as a serious place and has taken the fun out of it.”

  For Moses, that was the final straw. “We can do nothing further for the noisy whiners, kickers and mud throwers in the so-called Amusement Area who have attacked the Fair because we won’t pay their advertising and other bills,” he complained in a letter to his friend Roy S. Howard, who owned the paper: “I see no reason for us to spend any more time and money on shills, barkers, and Coney Island promoters who guessed wrong and really mean nothing to the success of the Fair.”

  But tradition and history were on the promoters’ side. World’s Fairs had long incorporated less idealistic and baser entertainments to attract adult customers. The 1933 Chicago Century of Progress Exposition was best remembered by many for Sally Rand’s “Streets of Paris” routine where she wiggled and danced to Chopin’s “Waltz in C-Sharp Minor” and Debussy’s “Clair de Lune” until she was covered only by carefully placed ostrich feathers. The striptease was such a hit that she repeated it at the Fort Worth Frontier Centennial Exposition three years later, renaming it “Sally Rand’s Dude Ranch” (when she revised it yet again for the 1938 Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco, it was known as “Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch”). Not to be outdone, producers at the 1935 Pacific International Exposition in San Diego dreamed up Zoro’s Nudist Gardens, which featured a male actor dressed up as a robot who cavorting in a pastoral setting with a half-dozen fully nude female performers, in what could best be described as sci-fi soft porn.

  Inspired by the ever-mounting risqué acts in the American expos of the 1930s, set designer Norman Bel Geddes wanted to up the sex ante once again for 1939–40 New York World’s Fair. Having already masterminded GM’s Futurama exhibit—the Fair’s “World of Tomorrow” centerpiece—he now envisioned something less exemplary: a Crystal Gazing Palace (a playful riff on the legendary Crystal Palace after “Sexorama” was rejected). Bel Geddes’s “glorified peep show” featured a G-string-clad dancer on a stage in a room full of mirrors, thus allowing one seminude dancer to appear like a platoon of naked performers, while men sat in two rooms gazing on. Bel Geddes also created “The Living Magazine” show, in which seminude models posed as if they were part of a 3-D magazine cover. Customers were allowed to photograph the women as much as they liked. For all its utopian visions of the future, when it came to women, the World of Tomorrow was as sexist as the World of Yesterday.

  Moses wanted no such exhibits at his 1964–65 World’s Fair, his “endless parade of the wonders of mankind.” His Fair was “essentially educational” he said again and again, and had no room for the cheap, puerile, and déclassé. His conservative stance won him praise from like-minded citizens and clergy, like the Reverend John P. Cody, a high-ranking priest from the New Orleans Archdiocese, who within a few years would become Cardinal of the Chicago Archdiocese, one of the most important positions in the US Catholic Church. “Can we survive without vulgarity, just escaping censorship and police intervention?” Moses wrote to Cody. “We have chosen the side of the angels.”

  If you wanted to sell something, then keep it clean, Moses believed. And all World’s Fairs were selling something. Nowhere was this more evident than in the series of American World’s Fairs held throughout the 1930s. As the Great Depression devoured the nation’s self-respect and economic might, every year of that turbulent decade saw a Fair in a different corner of the country: North, South, East, and West. Those Fairs—including New York’s 1939–40 World’s Fair—were selling capitalism and the free market system, which, thanks to the economic misery of the Depression, had plenty of detractors at th
e time. After all, it was the unbridled free market fundamentalism of the 1920s that had laid waste to the American economy.

  Moses’ Fair was selling the notion of progress: the kind of progress that had created a National Highway System and enshrined skyscrapers as a new form of American art; the kind of progress that had successfully split the atom and was now close to putting a man on the moon; the kind of progress that unleashed the single-minded directives of a Master Builder who could—and did—mold and shape the largest and greatest metropolis on earth according to his whim, filling it with expressways and block towers, bridges and tunnels that led millions outside of its shadows and into vast pastoral settings of parks and beaches. This was the ethos of postwar America, and it was the personal philosophy—almost a religion, really—of Moses. “Big things happen to cities that make big plans,” Moses said. And when the Fair was over, he had very big plans for Flushing Meadow Park. Stripteases and peep shows didn’t figure into his calculations.

  But while Moses stuck to his strictly family entertainment policy, the Lake Amusement Area offered few, if any, amusements that could attract customers either young or old. “Why spend time at the circus when you were at the World’s Fair?” asked Bill Cotter, who attended the Fair dozens of times as a child. “You could go to the circus anytime.” The truth was, the Lake Amusement Area, with its county fair–style rides, had to compete against the Fair’s most popular attractions, such as Walt Disney’s “It’s a Small World,” the Vatican Pavilion’s La Pietà, the panoramic views offered by the observation towers at the New York State Pavilion, or the old-world charms of the Belgian Village. And when the Lake Amusement Area did garner media attention, it was for all the wrong reasons. On July 6 several Fairgoers, including a number of children (the youngest was just five years old), were stuck a hundred feet in the air in a gondola for three and a half hours when a ride malfunctioned. As emergency workers labored to fix the ride, a crowd of nearly seven hundred people gathered and watched in anticipation until the families were rescued. “This is the biggest crowd we’ve had in the Lake Amusement Area all year,” noted one worker.

  The area was also in a remote location, far from the Fair’s popular attractions and its main avenues that fanned out in every direction from its centerpiece, the Unisphere. A visit to the Lake Amusement Area required that Fairgoers walk over a footbridge. At night the poorly lit district was hardly inviting to already jittery tourists fearful of New York’s soaring crime rates. (By summer, Moses reluctantly approved $100,000 worth of new lighting for the area.) What’s more, throngs of teenagers congregated there, away from the Fair’s more populated areas; no doubt many of them were harmless, hormone-laden teenagers, but there were enough of them to garner a piece in the New York Times a week after opening day.

  The interests of the American teenager occupied a blind spot for the seventy-five-year-old Moses, a particular problem for the Lake Amusement Area, which regularly featured musical shows and concerts. Moses’ most daring tastes in music ran to the easy-listening styles of his close friend Guy Lombardo and His Royal Canadians, and Mitch Miller, whose sedate style and popular “Sing Along with Mitch” routines had made him a TV star. Moses was also a fan of swing-era bandleader Benny Goodman, still active in 1964 but synonymous with a style of jazz that was popular during the previous New York World’s Fair. Some of the biggest draws at the Fair in the summer of 1964 were shows by the timeless jazz maestro Duke Ellington and the Dave Brubeck Quartet. Brubeck, who was at the height of his popularity, had achieved a mass audience thanks to his crossover hit “Take Five,” had landed on the cover of Time, and had been savvy enough to name two tracks on his 1964 LP, Time Changes, “Unisphere” and “World’s Fair.”

  Though popular, these artists still didn’t appeal to teenagers. Moses, however, thought differently. He was sure his friend Guy Lombardo would reach the youthful crowds who had the potential to become repeat customers. “Guy Lombardo would appeal to the somewhat older and more conventional nostalgic group,” Moses wrote in a memo marked urgent to World’s Fair director Rosenman, “but I have noted that he is also a favorite with many of the kids, if not the wildest ones.”

  Even marketing experts trained in reaching young audiences couldn’t change Moses’ mind. “Our experience tells us, however, that Guy Lombardo’s music is not the dance music for Americans today, except for a relatively few people,” an executive with the Thom McAn shoe company (which was interested in sponsoring a musical dance) had written to Moses in March. Instead, the executive proposed three different bands to attract a wide variety of Fairgoers but cautioned “the distinct sound of Guy Lombardo is not one of them. We don’t think that his is the right music, the right image for a 1964 World’s Fair or for us.” Regardless, Moses rushed through a contract with his friend Lombardo in early April due to “extreme urgency” under the assumption “that it will have the endorsement of the committee.”

  But in between headliners like Goodman and Lombardo, who played six nights a week at the Taparillo band shell, plenty of other bands and performers had a chance to play the World’s Fair, including a number of rock ’n’ roll acts. One of the groups included two local musicians, guitarist-keyboardist Al Kooper, and bassist Harvey Brooks, who had grown up in the same Queens neighborhood just a few miles from the Fair. Their group played forty-five-minute sets, twice a day, seven days a week, performing covers of the Beatles’ “A Hard Day’s Night” or whatever songs were topping the charts. Kooper, who would soon kick-start his long rock music career by playing with Bob Dylan, loved the steady World’s Fair gig. “Until I played with Dylan, the Fair gig was the best-paying job I ever had,” he recalled.

  By early summer, as the Lake Amusement Area struggled to turn a profit, Moses insisted on seeing what kind of music was being played at his Fair. It didn’t take him long to decide he didn’t like what he saw. “I want the cheap Rock n’ Roll trash at the Amphitheatre out immediately,” he instructed. What he wanted in its place was crooner Harry Belafonte “and others appearing at Forest Hills Stadium.” Moses admitted that Belafonte was probably too busy—besides being at the height of his musical career, he was an activist and a confidant of Martin Luther King. But Moses’ point was that he wanted world-class talent at his Fair, not this amateur stuff.

  The Forest Hills Tennis Stadium had been the site of the US Open for more than thirty years, and by the summer of 1964, it had also become one of the most prestigious outdoor concert venues in New York. At fifteen thousand seats, it was also one of the largest. Besides Belafonte, acts like big-band jazz maestro Count Basie and crooner Johnny Mathis were playing Forest Hills, as well as younger, hipper acts like folk superstar Joan Baez (who would share her stage and spotlight with her boyfriend, Dylan) and, for two sold-out shows, the Beatles.

  After one of their shows, the Beatles themselves came face-to-face with one of Moses’ musical heroes, Goodman, who had agreed to interview the band for a local radio station in order to promote his upcoming World’s Fair concert. The meeting, however, went nowhere; it seems the generation gap between the lads and the King of Swing was far too wide to bridge. “The Beatles had no interest in meeting Benny Goodman, and Benny Goodman had no interest in the meeting the Beatles,” said Rachel Goodman, the jazzman’s daughter, who wrote a piece about their intergenerational summit for Esquire. “They literally had nothing to say to each other.”

  But while the dry British humor of the Beatles didn’t work on Goodman, it was starting to appeal to Anglophile Moses. As out of touch as he was with pop culture or the mood of teenagers, he came around to the band. Moses even wrote to a friend that he liked the scene in the band’s film A Hard Day’s Night, when a reporter asked, “How do you find America?” “Turn left at Greenland,” shot back John Lennon. (Moses mistakenly accredited the one-liner to Ringo, but then he was hardly the only American over the age of thirty who had trouble telling one Beatle from another.)

  Although six months ear
lier he had turned down a young fan’s suggestion for the Beatles to play at the World’s Fair, by mid-August Moses was open to the idea. “Would it be smart to invite the Beatles to the fountain fireworks and Tiparillo [band shell] or the Singer Stadium on some evening when they are around?” he asked a top aide. “They would probably turn up anyway with their own publicity and the crowd would be hard if not impossible to control unless the whole thing is programmed in advance.”

  What Moses didn’t realize was that by August 1964—just six months after their Sullivan debut—the Beatles had outgrown both the Fair and its Tiparillo Band Shell or its ten-thousand-seat Singer Bowl. For now the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium was the smallest arena that they could play. No rock band had ever been in such demand before. In August 1964 Dylan wasn’t headlining Forest Hills. He was just sharing the stage and basking in Baez’s stardom; she graciously invited him out to sing a few songs, helping him reach a wider audience.

  But while radio deejays and the performers’ fans thought the English mop-tops and the protest-song singer were worlds apart, each had a strong appreciation for the other. Ever since he first heard the Fab Four on his cross-country trip in February 1964, Dylan had fixed his imagination on the Beatles—not that he told anyone about his new obsession. “They were doing things nobody was doing,” he told a biographer in 1971. “Their chords were outrageous, just outrageous, and their harmonies made it all valid.”

  The Beatles’ arrangements—two guitars, bass, and drums, plus three-part harmonies—got Dylan thinking of his own music, but set in a band context, another thought he kept to himself. “I really dug them,” he said. “Everybody else thought they were for teenyboppers, that they were gonna pass right away. But it was obvious to me that they had staying power. I knew they were pointing the direction of where music had to go.”