American Fun (60 page)

1.
According to legend
: Ted Gioia,
The History of Jazz
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 29–34.

2.
“
jes’ grew
”: James Weldon Johnson,
The Book of American Negro Poetry
(New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1922), xi. To be precise, Johnson writes that “ragtime jes’ grew.”

3.
“
kindly, rather simple, hard-luck personage
”: Jessie Fauset, “The Gift of Laughter,” in
The New Negro,
ed. Alain Locke (1925; New York: Touchstone, 1997), 162.

4.
“
decide which of us
”: James Weldon Johnson,
Black Manhattan
(New York: Da Capo, 1930), 105.

5.
“
sex dance
”:
Musical Courier
quoted in Stearns and Stearns,
Jazz Dance,
122–23.

6.
“
hummed, whistled, and played
”:
San Francisco Call
and French newspapers quoted in Davinia Cady, “Parisian Cake Walks,”
19th-Century Music
30, no. 3 (Spring 2007): 288–317.

7.
Born Charles Joseph Bolden
: Donald M. Marquis,
In Search of Buddy Bolden, First Man of Jazz
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1978), 36–37.

8.
“
harem
”: Ibid., 45.

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 mixing 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):

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.