The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  All right! Cuba, de Gaulle, unilateral disarmament, Lyndon B. Johnson, South Viet Nam, it wasn’t the sweep of history, but in the league of disc jockeys covering the first moments the Beatles set foot on the earth of America, it was a historic scoop. The whole press conference went that way. Even after the questions started from everybody, Murray the K kept copping exclusive interviews. Some reporter would yell out a question like, “What do you think of Beethoven?” John Lennon, the Beatle, would answer most of these random questions, saying things like, “Beethoven? He’s crazy, especially the poems,” and all the while Murray the K would be sticking the stick microphone up and asking, say, Ringo Starr, something like, “Ringo, what’s the first thing you want to see in New York?” and Ringo would look down and see this odd little character balled up at his feet and say, “Oh, I dunno, some of the historic buildings, like the Peppermint Lounge.” Finally somebody in the back, some reporter, yelled out, “Hey, somebody tell Murray the K to cut out the crap!” So Paul McCartney, the Beatle, stepped forward and looked down at Murray the K and said, “Murray the K, cut out the crap!” Paradise! “Crazy, Paul, baby,” Murray the K said into the microphone, “You’re what’s happening, Paul, baby, and remember, you heard it first on 1010 WINS!” Cut out the crap! From Paul himself! This was the perfect note, for by now it seemed like this was Murray the K’s press conference and the rest of these hundred or so guys around here were just some kind of a chorus. Murray the K’s fortunes started skyrocketing from that very moment.

  Somehow, the next night, it was Murray the K who was taking the Beatles twisting at the Peppermint Lounge and from then on he was the Beatles’ guide, Boswell, buffer, playmate throughout their American tour, and he even went to England with them. Maybe it was his magic hat, he doesn’t know, he had never had any communication with the Beatles at all before the moment he turned up stationed at their feet at Kennedy. “It was involuntary,” says Murray, not necessarily choosing the precise word. By the end of a week there were reporters who were getting mad because to get anything out of the Beatles they had to go through Murray the K, and who the hell was he anyway. In Miami, Murray the K roomed with one of the Beatles, George Harrison, and there and everywhere else Murray the K was making tape recordings a mile a minute. He had all the Beatles, one by one, saying anything he wanted into the tape recorder—plugs for WINS, plugs for Murray the K, plugs for the “Swinging Soiree,” which is the name of his nightly show from 6:30 to 10.

  The impact of all this was great for Murray the K. Every station, practically every disc jockey in town, was trying to capitalize on the Beatles, who were probably the biggest single popular music phenomenon ever. WABC, for example, was calling itself WABeatleC, and so forth, but nobody could match Murray the K. He was the Fifth Beatle!

  Susan Tyrer, a seventeen-year-old girl, is now sitting in Murray the K’s studio. She is up there for something called the “Miss Swinging Soiree” contest, and there are 25 finalists, none of whom seems to have the faintest notion of what happens if she wins. Susan tells how it was with her: “I started listening to Murray the K when he started getting popular, you know, with the Beatles and the English groups.” Murray the K also plays a lot of the other English groups, such as the Dave Clark Five and The Animals, groups like that. “Murray the K—well, you know,” says Susan, “like, he’s what’s happening!”

  So Murray the K’s rating shot back up, and now his program is almost entirely Murray the K and the Beatles. He not only plays Beatle records all the time, the whole show sort of moves in the medium of the Beatles.

  One evening there is a story in the newspapers that Ringo Starr, the Beatle, is going to get married.

  “I’m here to deny, baby,” Murray the K says into the microphone, “I mean I’m here to deny that Ringo’s marrying anyone. You know if he was you’d hear it first on the boss show, 1010 WINS, New York. And now, baby, listen, baby, it’s the Beyezeatlesingbooees!”

  Murray the K even has tapes denying Beatle marriages. He’ll say something like, “Paul, baby, we’re glad you called us about that marriage bit, baby.” And Paul says, “Well, Murray, I was glad to get it cleared up sort-of-thing.”

  He runs in Beatle dialogues all night long. Sometimes they have a wacky jumpy quality about them, something on the order of Murray the K saying, “Hey, Paul, baby, what’s happening, baby?”

  “I dunno, Murray, everything’s happening sort-of-thing.” “Paul, somebody asked me to ask you—I mean, they asked me, some of your fans, they asked me to ask you, so I’m going to go ahead and ask you, What is your favorite color?”

  “Well, uh, it’s kind of, you know, black.”

  “Black.”

  “Yeah, you know, black. John is going to jump off the ladder now.”

  There is a sound of applause.

  “They applaud,” says Paul. “Sounds like a cricket match.” “You’re what’s happening, Paul, baby!”

  Symbolic logic, baby! Who cares what’s happening? The Beatles are there, and Murray the K is in there with them, tight.

  One minute he feels like he is a showman who is playing the role of “Murray the K” at this particular stage in his career, which is a way of saying that Murray the K is not the real him. Then the next minute he has a very jealous regard for his Murray the K role and all the unique skills that have gone into it. The symbol of his pride about this is his hat. He keeps his straw hat on all the time when he is being Murray the K and he is ready to fight over it. One time he was MC’ing a show at the Fox Theater in Brooklyn and some singer, one of the parade of them that come and go, got playful and grabbed Murray the K’s hat off his head and threw it out into the audience. Murray the K blew up. He made the fellow stop everything, right in the middle of the show, and go out in the audience, out among a lot of screaming kids, and retrieve the hat. There was something about the look in his eyes, and the fellow didn’t have to think twice about whether he was going to obey or not. He just went after the hat.

  The same goes for the music he plays, which is generally called rock and roll, a term that Murray the K considers out of date. He argues that it is the popular music now, not just a teen-age deviation, just as swing was the popular music of the 1930’s. He really blows up when someone like William B. Williams starts panning rock and roll as infra dig, such as the way Williams used to introduce the Beatles’ first hit record, “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” as “I Want to Hold My Nose” and just play 12 seconds of it. The same people, says Murray the K, will then start going on and on about Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey, Artie Shaw and all that bunch as if they were classics, all those mushy woodwinds, mushy ballads, all that stupid roadhouse glamor of the “Big Band” and some aging smoothie leading the band with a moon face and his hair combed straight back. The Glenn Miller business really gets him. Pop music today has a vitality and an intricacy that Glenn Miller couldn’t have come up with in a hundred years.

  “When I hear people start going about Glenn Miller,” says Murray the K, “well, that’s too much.”

  Ironically, rock and roll, or whatever you want to call what the hysterical disc jockeys play, is very much in vogue now among intellectuals in New York and Paris and London. They revere it like primitive art. They play the Shirelles, the Jelly Beans, the Beach Boys, Shirley Ellis, Dionne Warwick, Johnny Rivers, musicians like that, on the record player at parties. Jazz, especially jazz as played by people like Miles Davis and Thelonious Monk, is considered a hopelessly bourgeois taste, the kind you might expect from a Williams College boy with a lie-down crewcut on a big weekend in New York.

  Yet the vogue has never included the disc jockeys themselves, although you hear some of them, Murray the K and Cousin Brucie, particularly, mentioned as sort of pop art phenomena. So the disc jockeys themselves remain about the only people who appreciate the art. Does anybody truly realize what it amounted to when Murray the K took over the Beatles?

  “When the Beatles came here,” he says, “I believed that this was the test. This was t
he biggest thing in the history of popular music. Presley was never this big, neither was Sinatra. The fact that I was able to be associated with the Beatles the way I was, living with them, having George as my roommate—well, it caused such jealousy as I have never seen in my life.”

  Murray the K stands up and paces around in his gusseted boots. When he says something with conviction, his southern accent breaks through. He was born in Virginia.

  “But I’m not riding on the Beatles’ coat tails,” he says. “Actually, I think the Beatles are going to last a lot longer than everybody believes. I think they are natural wits and comedians, they’re the coolest, they’re too much, they’re the greatest. But I’m not riding the Beatles’ coat tails, and if they go, I’m going to be ready for the next person who comes along.

  “I’ve done everything you have to do in this business, I’ve made every move you have to make, I’ve put cash on the line, and I came out a winner, and now I want everything that goes with it, all the goodies and all the respect, because I earned it.”

  Murray the K winds up his show a couple of minutes before 10 o’clock, and as soon as he leaves his glass cubicle, in walks a young man wearing a crease-top hat, of the genre known as the Madison Avenue crash helmet, and carrying an attaché case. He looks like an account executive on the 5:25. He sits at a table studying a script. His name is Pete Myers. Suddenly he leans into the microphone and says, “It’s 10 P.M. and now, from Sponge Rubber Hall—it’s Mad Daddy.”

  Down on the street, on Central Park West, three girls are waiting to get Murray the K’s autograph as he comes out the door. One of them is squeezed into a pair of short shorts that come up to about her ilial crest. Coming down over her left breast she has a row of buttons. The top one says, “We Love the Beatles.” The next one says, “We Love Ringo,” the next one, “We Love Paul,” the next, “We Love John,” the next, “We Love George,” and the next—well, the next one, the bottom one, is kind of rough in execution. It is made of paper wrapped around an old button with the letters penciled on, saying, “We Love Murray the K.” But so what? The letters are big, and her little mary poppins tremble honestly.

  Chapter 4

  The Peppermint Lounge Revisited

  ALL RIGHT, GIRLS, into your stretch nylon denims! You know the ones—the ones that look like they were designed by some leering, knuckle-rubbing old tailor with a case of workbench back who spent five years, like Da Vinci, studying nothing but the ischia, the gemelli and the glutei maximi. Next, hoist up those bras, up to the angle of a Nike missile launcher. Then get into the cable-knit mohair sweaters, the ones that fluff out like a cat by a project heating duct. And then unroll the rollers and explode the hair a couple of feet up in the air into bouffants, beehives and Passaic pompadours. Stroke in the black makeup all around the eyelids, so that the eyes look as though Chester Gould, who does Dick Tracy, drew them on. And then put those patient curls in your lips and tell Mother—you have to spell it out for her like a kid—that yes, you’re going out with some of your girlfriends, and no, you don’t know where you’re going, and yes, you won’t be out late, and for God’s sake, like don’t panic all the time, and then, with an I-give-up groan, tell her that “for God’s sake” is not cursing.

  At least that is the way it always seemed, as if some invisible force were out there. It was as though all these girls, all these flaming little Jersey Teen-agers, had their transistors plugged into their skulls and were taking orders, simultaneously, from somebody like the Ringleader Deejay.

  Simultaneously, all over Plainfield, Scotch Plains, Ridgefield, Union City, Weehawken, Elizabeth, Hoboken and all the stretches of the Jersey asphalt, there they went, the Jersey Teen-agers, out of the house, off to New York, every week, for the ongoing Jersey Teen-agers’ weekend rebellion.

  They headed off up Front Street if it was, say, Plainfield, and caught the Somerset Line bus at the stop across the street from the Public Service building around 7:30 P.M. Their bouffant heads would be bouncing up and down like dandelions until the bus hit the Turnpike and those crazy blue lights out there on the toothpaste factories started streaming by. They went through the Lincoln Tunnel, up the spiral ramps into the Port Authority Terminal and disembarked at some platform with an incredible number like 155. One hundred and fifty-five bus platforms; this was New York.

  The first time people in Manhattan noticed the Jersey Teen-agers was when they would come bobbing out of the Port Authority and move into Times Square. No one ever really figured out what they were up to. They were generally written off as Times Square punks. Besides the bouffant babies in their stretch pants, furry sweaters and Dick Tracy eyes, there would be the boys in Presley, Big Bopper, Tony Curtis and Chicago boxcar hairdos. They would be steadying their hairdos in the reflections in the plate glass of clothing stores on 42nd Street that featured Nehru coats, Stingy-Brim hats, tab-collar shirts and winkle-picker elf boots. No one ever seemed to notice how maniacally serious they were about their hairdos, their flesh-tight pants, puffy sweaters, about the way they walked, idled, ogled or acted cool; in short, how serious they were about anything that had to do with form and each other. They had a Jersey Teen-age netherworld going in the middle of Manhattan. Their presence may not have been understood, but it was not ignored. There were nightspots that catered to them with rock and roll music. And when the Jersey Teen-agers started dancing in Times Square nightspots, they were serious about that, too. The Lindy, which was the name the kids had for what an older generation called jitterbugging, was already out. The kids were doing a dance called the Mashed Potatoes and another called the Puppet. Curiously, they were like the dances at a Lebanese maharajan. There was a lot of hip movement, but the boy and girl never touched. Then a new variation caught on, the Twist. There would be the Jersey Teen-agers, every weekend, doing the Mashed Potatoes, the Puppet and the Twist, studying each other’s legs and feet through the entire number, never smiling, serious as always about form. One of these places was the Wagon Wheel. Another one was the Peppermint Lounge, 128 West 45th Street, half a block east of Times Square.

  THE PEPPERMINT LOUNGE! You know about the Peppermint Lounge. One week in October, 1961, a few socialites, riding hard under the crop of a couple of New York columnists, discovered the Peppermint Lounge and by the next week all of Jet Set New York was discovering the Twist, after the manner of the first 900 decorators who ever laid hands on an African mask. Greta Garbo, Elsa Maxwell, Countess Bernadotte, Noël Coward, Tennessee Williams and the Duke of Bedford—everybody was there, and the hindmost were laying fives, tens and twenty-dollar bills on cops, doormen and a couple of sets of maître d’s to get within sight of the bandstand and a dance floor the size of somebody’s kitchen. By November, Joey Dee, twenty-two, the band-leader at the Peppermint Lounge, was playing the Twist at the $100-a-plate Party of the Year at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

  That, of course, was two years ago. Everybody knows what has happened to the Jet Set in that time, for the Jet Set is always with us. But whatever became of the Jersey Teen-agers and the Peppermint Lounge?

  Marlene Klaire, leader of the club’s Twist chorus line, is standing in the hall off the dressing rooms in back, talking about the kind of fall it has been for her. Marlene is a short, lithe, gorgeous brunette. It is right after the second show, and she has on her Twist chorus satin, a pair of net stockings, Cleopatra eye makeup and a Passaic pompadour that brings her up to about six feet four. Yes, there is an institution now called the Twist chorus line, tended by a couple of choreographers named Wakefield Poole and Tom Roba. Marlene arrived at the Peppermint Lounge two years ago via the Jersey Teen-age route, but now her life is full of institutions.

  “The Waddle,” Marlene is saying, “is one of the dances we were demonstrating the other night over at Sacred Heart. You get in two straight lines sort of like, you know, the Hully Gully.”

  “Sacred Heart?”

  “The Catholic Church. We. weren’t in the church, really, it was the auditorium. They let us wear
our costumes. They were all adults there. We were teaching them the Waddle, the Dog, the Monkey—the Monkey is probably the most popular right now.”

  Well, all that was with the young adults at Sacred Heart. And then there was the night the educational program took her and the girls over to the Plaza Hotel for the Bourbon Ball, where they showed the Society people the Waddle, the Dog, the Monkey, the Mashed Potatoes and the Slop.

  “The Society people loved it,” Marlene is saying, “but the Mashed Potatoes is hard for some of them, and—”

  Marlene came to New York over the Jersey Teen-age route way back in 1961 when the Peppermint Lounge was first getting hot. She was from Trenton, and then she had a job as a secretary in Newark, but then one night she came rolling into the Port Authority like everybody else and headed for the Peppermint Lounge. She worked her way up fast. First she got a job as a waitress, then she got one of the jobs dancing between shows, in street clothes, which is to say, something like stretch pants and a mohair sweater, to encourage customers to come up and dance. Marlene could really dance, and she got a job in the first Twist chorus line.