Now pay strict attention.
Look around you very, very, very, carefully and tell me: what is in roxy’s powder room?—I am.—Why are you in roxy’s powder room?—Because I am hiding from the miraculous and fabulous and bigger-than biggest Art of all roxy time.—And are you also hiding from roxy?—O yes.—Why?—Because I am roxy.—Who am I, then?—I guess you must be roxy, too.—You mean that we are both of us roxy?—We.
Here is something else.
What about the bigger-than-biggest Artists of all roxy time who make the bigger-than-biggest Art of all roxy time which is now going on in both fabulous parts of roxy’s fabulous egg?—O, they are all roxy.—What about the fabulous gadgets for making mountains out of molehills and what about the fabulous murals and urals and what about the goosegirl and the loose-girl and what about whathaveyou and what about everything?—O, that’s all roxy.—What about the roxyfeller?—O, the roxyfeller’s all roxy.—What about God?—O, He’s all roxy.—God?—Didn’t you know? He’s the roxy of ages.
Amen.
Hark! did you hear a simply frightful noise?—O yes.—Do you think the simply frightful noise may have been a social revolution?—I do not think.—Do you think the simply frightful noise might have been a pin dropping?—I do not think.—Do you think the simply frightful noise can have been a bigger-than-biggest variety star whispering to its bigger-than-biggest variety self a hundred thousand million billion variety light-years away?—I do not think.—Do you think the simply frightful noise could have been an intimate talking moving picture hero brushing his intimate moving talking picture teeth?—I do not think.—Speak, speak, thou fearful guest! what do you think the bigger-than-biggest, the intimater than intimatest, the absolutely fabulous and perfectly miraculous and most irrevocably immeasurable and inimitably illimitable and altogether quite inconceivably so to speak roxiest noise of all noises was?—I do not think.—Why do you not think?—Because I know.—What do you know?—I know it was Those Roxy-Bottom Blues.
From Americana, March 1933. Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel’s Radio City Music Hall opened on December 27, 1932, as a two-a-day vaudeville house; and closed one week later. When it reopened, movies and a stage show were featured in place of vaudeville.
EXIT THE BOOB
This guy says just kick the dictators in the patoot, boys, and live, live, live your life
More than a great many simple folks, for some none-too-obscure unreason, know that they know what’s good for you and me. Royally basking in his painfully acquired ignorance of whatever makes life livable, this “share the wealth” prophet butters platitudes for an invisible and immeasurable audience endowed with a simplicity so perfectly prehistoric as to be positively mythical. Quote every man a king unquote. Meanwhile a visible number of merely simplest folks surround that anonymous hater of human values who, busily raving under the peaceful stars, tells mankind just why it must come unto Doctor Marx to be goosed with a “class struggle.” Pantspressers of the world unite! you have nothing to lose but your pants, Etcetera, ad infinitum: yet (oddly enough) humanity survives. Individualism flourishes. Millions upon millions of men and women have toothaches. Thousands upon thousands of authentic sadists hope that (as one of them tactlessly assured myself) “someday I’ll be in the mouths of the best people.”
What ample zest! What copious verve! What abundant enthusiasm! What boundless bonhommerie! It’s actually hard to imagine that there really was a time when everything wasn’t known to be known and everybody didn’t know that they knew it. But science says that a time there was; and science is an honourable man. A time there was when even the most omnipotent emperor didn’t know that he knew and he never could know that he had B.O.—and can’t you imagine his ill-starred consort, mounting her dazzling throne with a hideous case of Morning Mouth? Sure an’ ’tis a merciful miracle our mysterious mothers and fabulous fathers got themselves born at all at all. Hail, hail, the Civilization’s all here . . . although one rather suspects that something must be not far from wrong when every punk can’t automatically become Albert Lincoln or Abraham Einstein, merely by letting a button press itself or (if there must be such a thing as imperfection) by throwing a switch: am I right? Wouldn’t a ducky invention like that simplify the whole horrid complicated unemployment problem rather nicely? Answer me, you twenty-five-hundred-dollar-a-week apotheosis of cinematographic idiocy. Or (if you prefer) just try to lift those already lifted eyebrows. Hoot, lass, ’tis not a Nude Eel in my sporran either way.
Note that the stalwart champion of Civilization, the dulcet handmaid of Progress, the omnipotent Genie of the uncorked Unknown—science—has succeeded in shrinking our socalled world until it doesn’t fit anybody. But there’s something stranger still: the fact that any number of simple folks, no matter how mutually antagonistic they may seem to you and me, can (and do) inhabit one and the same microscopic blunder—the blunder of “thinking” that “people” can be “improved.” Believe it or not, each of these cranks knows that each of them knows that he, she or it has the absolutely only authentic dope on how to better its, her or his socalled neighbour. Well and bad: but as long as that neighbour equals X, Y probably doesn’t mind; and as long as it doesn’t equal X, X possibly doesn’t mind. Nobody really minds perhaps, until that neighbour becomes XY—
Did you ever share an otherwise palatial dungheap with much too many other vividly stinking human beings? Did you ever (attired in all the majesty of a wilted monkey, with sixty-odd pounds of erroneously distributed junk banging your coccyx) go foolishly limping and funnily hobbling up and down a river of feebly melting tar entitled “company street?” Did you, accidentally, ever exchange your hard-earned right to visit freedom for the doubtful privilege of policing latrines; just because you’d failed—as a warrior can’t and mayn’t—to grunt loudly at the exact moment when those red hands of yours stuck that real bayonet of Uncle Sam’s into an imaginary fellowman? Ah, the ecstasy of it all! And the rapturous ritual of standing in line (here, by the by, we can use what writers, who know that they know, call “a blazing sun”) waiting and waiting and waiting and waiting to partially submerge one slipperiest plate in one stickiest kettle of lukewarm once-upon-a-time water, through which meander lazily something like two hundred remains of something which somebody said was supposed to have once upon a time been tapioca pudding . . .
Well, anyhow—the socalled fascist styles for a not too distant future look simply fascinating. Off with your earmuffs, ladies fair, and hear what your well-dressed man will wear. And you, upstanding nonpareil of American masculinity, lend me your auditory appendages. You will wear (sic) mud and you will wear gas and at least three kinds of lice and you will wear terror and agony and hatred and disgust and shrapnel and (without knowing it) a funny little foolish little feeble little fairylike grinless grin. Yes indeedy. Big though you be, big boy, you’ll carry that tiny faggoty feeble foolish funny thingless thing wherever you go—all the while never so much as suspecting you’ve quietly turned into somebody else.
“Who in hell is this s. o. b. to tell me what I’ll do?” an outraged sample of the more widely circulated brand of intellectual snob cordially inquires.
Now let said outraged sample keep his shirt on; if he thinks we despise fighting, he’s agreebly mistaken. We don’t. But neither do we ignore the obvious and incredible fact that, if individuals are organisms, multitudes are mechanisms. Courage we consider whatever is most important on earth; and multitudes do not have courage. A “soldier” who prefers going over the top to being shot in the back by his superior officer is not a man. A man is an entirety, not a fraction of something. A man has courage.
As for who ourselves are: we honestly feel that they couldn’t be trusted to furnish the outraged sample with a correct answer—not that he wants a correct answer; far from it. What he wants is a simple answer, which happens to be completely different. The business of a correct answer is to ask a question. The business of a simple answer is the business of a machine gun bullet: to know th
at it knows.
I do not know that I know—I merely feel deeply—that your correspondent is no mechanism. He is not a “nasty” and he is not a “red” and he is not a “jingo” and he is not a “pacifist” and he is not a “solar engine” and he is not any other form of simple answer. He is alive. What is more, he enjoys nothing so much as being alive. What is most, he would not (so far as an ignorant bloke like him can guess) willingly exchange the worst spontaneous complexity of life for the best premeditated simplicity of something else. Artists are odd, that way. In the immortal words of no less modest a specimen of complexity than the Polish artist Marcoussis “we are living in an Apocalypse. It is necessary to be very intelligent.” Certainly not quite oddly enough, a very great many prophets, cranks, busybodies, snobs, opportunists, simple folks (and other nonartists) do not know that they do not know precisely what the word Apocalypse means.
By God, a good dictionary ought to get up on its hind legs and tell them, sometime.
Just a moment (interrupts somebody whom, for the sake of brevity, we’ll call Z). I heartily disapprove of cranks (Z comfortingly continues) but there’s something of which I disapprove even more heartily; and that’s a supercrank. What do I mean by a supercrank? I mean the world’s only extant Total Loss: The Art For Art’s Sake guy. At least cranks care enough about their fellow men to try to influence them. Not so your Artist With A Capital A. O no: He lives in an Ivory Tower; and He sings hymns to Abstract Beauty; and He doesn’t give a hoot in Hell if the whole human race goes to the dogs. He expects mere human beings to appreciate His “genius.” Absolutely: and He wonders why out-and-out honest-to-God flesh-and-blood men and women, who don’t shirk their responsibilities to the community and who’d rather drop dead than lead the parasitic existence which He idolizes, somehow can’t afford to waste their meagre leisure pulling three or four stale ideas out of several tons of affected gibberish which He, forsooth, calls His “work!” See what I’m driving at? Huh? Get the illusion? Speak up!
I think you mean “allusion,” my friend; but let that pass. You apparently dislike snobs; so do I. And of snobs there are many varieties.
Only the other day, for instance, I was talking to a variety of snob which might fairly be called the supersnob. Listen (I said to this supersnob) here’s a coin, called a “nickel”; it has two sides, “heads” and “tails.” Now if I should feel a supreme urge to gamble—as I very well might, particularly if the drinks were on myself—I’d flip this “nickel.” And if I did flip it, the question would be: “heads” or “tails”? If, on the other hand, I felt like taking the El to 125th Street, the question would be, not “heads” or “tails,” but is it a “nickel” or isn’t it? Very well. Now for a metaphor: there is a coin called “dictatorship”; it has two sides, “fascism” and “communism.” If you’re a guy who thinks he’s lucky, you get all excited over the question: which side up will “dictatorship” land—shall we have “communism” or “fascism”? If, however, you’re a man who wants to get somewhere—and if “dictatorship” is your last coin—and if you find that “dictatorship” fails to produce the desired result, that it hasn’t the value it claims to have, that it simply doesn’t turn the trick, that (in short) it’s a dud—then what do you do? You grin, baby, and you walk. That’s what I said to the supersnob. And he answered: but it might rain.
Fortunately, there still exist persons for whom living means something more complex than keeping out of the rain. Some of these backward, unscientific, possibly even idiotic, persons are artists; the vast majority are not. None of these insufficiently mechanized monsters can possibly be called snobs or supersnobs or Ivory Tower lads. Maybe these pitifully outmoded reactionaries, who haven’t forgotten what feet are for, constitute “forgotten men”; I wouldn’t know that I knew. One of them, in Biblical parlance, is my neighbour. He resides near me, in a town called Silver Lake, in the state of New Hampshire; and his incomparable name is actually Mike Frost.
Now, ladies and gents, having handed the socalled institution of modern warfare some dirty cracks, I shall (with your permission) allow Mike Frost to lay a sweet bouquet upon the socalled altar of freedom. Listen—
Mike Frost is no slouch. By which I mean that, if he fought the recent war (alias the great war, alias the war to end wars) on his socalled native hearth, it was Uncle Sam’s fault for not getting Mike Frost any farther away from Silver Lake, New Hampshire, than Portsmouth, New Hampshire—which was nevertheless a Big Change. Mike Frost, alias my neighbour, was grateful to Uncle Sam for the Big Change. What is more, Mike Frost enjoyed every inch of the War With a Capital W. What is most, that well nigh fatal crusade to end all attempts to make this socalled world safe for anything whatever—by furnishing my neighbour, Mike Frost, with such otherwise unattainable complexities as Travel and Irresponsibility—equals until this very hour the biggest, if not the only, socalled thing in the socalled life of a socalled human being.
Verbum sap.
From Esquire, June 1935.
BURLESQUE, I LOVE IT!
Enlightened scholars have doubtless written learned treatises on the relation of burlesque to the satyr choruses, to The Frogs and The Birds, to Roman comedy, to Punchinello and Brighella, to the “afterpieces” of the minstrel show, to the whole fundamental structure of uncivilized and civilized theatre from prehistoric Then to scientific Now; if they haven’t, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. As for your shameless correspondent, he’s never even looked up “burlesque” in an encyclopedia and he never intends to. I’ve seen, in the past thirty years of my proletarian life, a lot of burlesque shows (and I hope to see a lot more) but for no other reason than that burlesque appeals to me. If it doesn’t appeal to you, by all means don’t read any farther.
Boston’s Howard Athenaeum emanated, about 1912, a filth which may never again be equalled—a filth which bore somewhat the same relationship to mere “dirt” that a sunset does to a lighted match. The unparalleled intensity of this filth was due, I imagine, to suppression: that quaintly exaggerated sense of civic virtue which produced a certain Mr. Sumner and a certain Watch and Ward Society, and, in particular, a day when Gertrude Hoffman and her young dancers were ordered to disport themselves in nothing less than wrist-and-ankle-length underwear. Even so, she was called Dirty Gertie.
Less extraordinary than the Howard’s filth was the ugliness of its girls—but not much less. Your correspondent used to sit up in the Non Si Fuma and even there they’d make your eyes wince. Yet so differently were these harpies deformed, I swear that in all my experience with the Old Howard (as it was affectionately called) I never saw one member of a chorus who in any way, shape, or manner resembled another member. The era of interchangeable parts had not put in its standardizing appearance. Those were indeed Ye Goode Olde Days.
Most significantly, the filth and ugliness of the Howard performed a very definite function. This function consisted in the framing of a mammoth collective picture of Mother with a capital M. Never have I seen and heard the maternal instinct glorified with such boundless, not to say delirious, enthusiasm, as in that unholy of unholies. The very bozo who had just distorted a harmless popular ditty to include all known forms of human perversion would, without any warning whatever—that, of course, was the whole trick—plunge himself and us into a monologue whose reeking sentimentality made the Christmas Carol seem positively cynical. Immediately and to a man, those selfsame muckers who had roared themselves hoarse over sin, shame and sorrow would swell and bloat, and then snivel and finally even sob with unfeigned adoration of maternity. A better instance of the emotional versatility of the proletariat would be difficult to conceive.
Burlesque-lovers are faithful; and it took a world-war-to-end-world-wars to blast me out of the Howard and into the National Winter Garden. This gaudy and tawdry institution was located at the very end of Second Avenue, New York City. Having reached the very end, you rose heavenward in something never quite approximating a freight elevator. Alighting in heaven, you passed
through a mistranslation of Dante—or did that come later?—and you found Jack Shargel. Shargel was a Jew comedian, sandwiched between oversize derby and oversize shoes, who combined unlimited lasciviousness with a velocity so inscrutable as to suggest only the incomparable Con Colleano of Ringling’s. To say that Shargel was a great artist is to put it mildly.
Around Aristophanes Jack (and later, his myth) there hung very loosely some authentic commedia dell’arte, ranging from subtle sketches of the Face on the Bar Room Floor type, to mammillary and abdominal calisthenics by a Juno called Cleo. When I say commedia I mean commedia. Ray, the straight, used to boast to his devoted and enraptured proletariat that the whole show was “hokum by which I mean that we make it up as we go along.” And what a proletariat that proletariat was!
Burlesque audiences are more demanding than most people can realize. Unlike your average theatregoer, your proletarian knows what he wants and won’t be happy till he gets it. What he wants (and what he gets) is a show. To give him that show has been, at one time or another, the aim of David Warfield, Lillian Russell, Marie Dressler, Fanny Brice, Willie and Eugene Howard, Bert Lahr, Jack Pearl, Jim Barton, Eddie Cantor, Joe Cook, Mae West and W. C. Fields. But I wouldn’t swop any of them for Shargel, whom I never saw except on a burlesque stage. And as for Shargel’s audience—it was not only peculiarly demanding, it was extraordinarily well mannered. I have not sat, and I never hope to sit, with tougher or more courteous people.
After being pinched over and over again, the National Winter Garden folded. Its devotees were, very naturally, disconsolate. But every cloud has a silver lining to those who love burlesque. One fine day, John Dos Passos advised me to doff my mourning and pay a visit to the Irving Place Theatre. And lo! here, in its full flower, was strip-teasing.
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