Authors: John Beckman
Fun—once the province of discrete American groups—was touted in the 1920s as the great social mixer. In earlier eras it had strengthened social bonds to the exclusion of meddling outsiders: it had fortified Patriots against Royalists; it had fortified black communities against racist whites; it had fortified frontiersmen’s homosocial bonds against the interference of feminine domesticity. In the 1920s, it still served such identity formation—as in helping young women break Victorian chains or galvanizing a growing black urban population. But in the social upheaval following
World War I—America’s sudden economic prosperity, African Americans’
Great Migration, women’s suffrage and growing economic freedom—new and more sophisticated kinds of earlier fun became instrumental in breaking boundaries down. Playful behavior and acts of rebellion carved inroads among long-divided races, classes, and genders who recognized at least one common opponent: Bradford’s legacy, the American killjoy.
GILDED AGE–STYLE
“family fun” flourished during the prosperous 1920s. Thanks to sophisticated new communications technology, it had grown sleeker and stronger since Barnum’s newspapers announced the
circus was coming to town. Silver screens dominated moviegoers’ senses.
Radio signals entered consumers’ homes. But the pleasure being sold was basically the same: the passive reception of a performer’s talent. The popularity of
amusement parks dropped off during this decade, beginning “a steady decline” as early as 1921, but Americans tripled their consumption of entertainment in general, largely in the form of sports and movie tickets—but also of records, books, sheet music, and sporting goods, products that required some level of consumer engagement. The
U.S. population grew by 16 percent, from 105 million to 122 million, but annual spending on spectator
sports more than doubled from $30 million to $65 million and on cinema from $301 million to $732 million.
Sports
stars became the new folk heroes. Among those who dominated the public imagination—boxer Jack Dempsey; tennis star Big Bill Tilden; running back Red Grange, the Galloping Ghost—none of them matched the bleachers-packing celebrity of the Sultan of Swat,
Babe Ruth, the rags-to-riches slugger whose fame was gaudily constructed by the press agent
Christy Walsh. Adored for his athletic prowess as much as for his gustatory and erotic appetites, the barrel-bellied Babe—far more than his surly rival
Ty Cobb—was the cheerful and beer-swilling epitome of fun, and his fans (who wasn’t one?) loaded themselves down with his trademarked merchandise and spin-off items, the cars, dress shoes, fishing poles, and other products (most with no connection to baseball) buoyed up by his famous name. Baby Ruth candy bars appeared in 1921 and cashed in on the Bambino’s fame for free—by claiming to have been named after Grover Cleveland’s daughter.
“
Each week about 100 million Americans went to the
movies,” writes 1920s historian
Geoffrey Perrett, “a number equal to nearly the entire population.… By 1926 there were more than 20,000 dream palaces offering celluloid refuge.” It would be difficult to overstate the impact Hollywood had on America’s national consciousness—and self-consciousness—during the 1920s. The movies’ “celluloid refuge” was even darker and more impersonal than B. F. Keith’s
vaudeville theaters, but thanks to their absolute passivity and total immersion the reclining spectators were consumed by pleasure. No longer victims of the worn-out material and lackluster performances of circulating road-show talent, Americans paid a quarter to be plunged into fantasy—titillated by
Cecil B. DeMille’s racy comedies, surrounded by
D. W. Griffith’s (racist) and
Erich von Stroheim’s sprawling histories, and—most important—indulged by the graceful, witty, glamorous, gorgeous, carefree, death-defying, and scandalous ectoplasms of
Mary Pickford,
Douglas Fairbanks, Theda Bara, Gloria Swanson,
Rudolph Valentino, Charlie Chaplin, and all the royalty whose faces and antics towered thirty feet above the raked seating. Anyone with the price of a ticket claimed an evening’s rights to the
purity and danger of the world’s biggest stars. The movies’ dazzling fun blended in just fine with what Duffus called the “age of play.” Nevertheless, for all of their vicarious excitement, they were also the era’s most efficient means of keeping citizens stock-still in their seats, “
gaping stupidly at idiotic pictures in monochrome,” Mencken objected. “No light, no color, no sound!”
The new “Puritans” thought movies posed a moral threat. Movies set bad examples, gave bad ideas, and gloried in Jazz Age libertinism. In 1922, when critics raised a stink about his
flapper fantasy
Foolish Wives,
von Stroheim felt they were infantilizing society: “
My ears have run with their united cry: ‘It is not fit for children!’ Children! Children! God, I did not make that picture for children.” But the conservative majority was an indomitable force, and that same year, as
Hollywood sank into a scandalous mire—
Mary Pickford’s divorce;
Fatty Arbuckle’s (supposed) rape and murder of a young party guest; actor-director
William Desmond Taylor’s unsolved homicide—studio executives, in an act of contrition, founded the
Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), their own homespun censorship and moral-conduct squad. With this very public and showy gesture, the largely Jewish film establishment tried to appeal to America’s stern Christian establishment, in particular to the powerful
Federal Council of Churches, overseers of upright civic organizations like the YMCA and the
Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) and the
Boy Scouts of America. Lest the churches doubt Hollywood’s sincerity in making peace with Main Street, the MPPDA appointed as its “czar” the sober and evangelical
Will Hays, a former postmaster general who was winkingly known as the “
Billy Sunday of the Republican Party.”
Hays, their small-town-Indiana shill, enjoyed his warm California welcome. The Hollywood streets were “
decorated with bunting and flags” and “big signs reading
WELCOME WILL HAYS
” (one of which, FBI sources reported, ended up hung over the door to
Charlie Chaplin’s bathroom). But his appointment and purpose, bunting and all, were flagrant acts of
Barnumism. By assigning Hays as liaison to the churches, and by allowing him to loosely enforce his touted moral “Formula,” the studios could forestall the conservative lobbies from ramming a censorship
bill through Congress. Throughout the 1920s, even as Hays occasionally ceded ground by failing to grease the right clerical palms, the
humbug worked. Movies remained classified, begrudgingly, as speech, and Hollywood was trusted to regulate itself. Hays’s “Formula” was updated in 1927 to become the “
Eleven Don’ts and Twenty-Six Be Carefuls,” whose most egregious “Don’ts” would have been Middle American box-office poison anyway: anti-Christian profanity, “sexual
perversion,” “nudity,” “miscegenation,” “ridicule of the clergy,” and, tellingly, “
white
slavery.”
The Jazz Singer,
Al Jolson’s blockbuster talkie that same year, much of which was played in blackface, seems to transgress the radically democratic “Don’t” against “willful offense to any nation, race or creed,” but as with all of the Hays guidelines, the “race” this one protected (and flattered) was white.
Hollywood’s showy pact with the churches, like Barnum’s own pact some ninety years before, was strategically commercial. The industry required such mainstream access as only the clergy’s blessing could ensure; studios vied for block distribution, carte blanche contracts with the nation’s theaters to screen their movies, good, bad, or ugly. At the same time, the movies had to please cosmopolitan ticket buyers: they had to be modern, daring,
fun
. With feckless Hays they had found the perfect Formula. With the fox guarding the henhouse, the fun went on:
Flaming Youth, Free to Love, Smouldering Fires, Flesh and the Devil.
Industry heavies like von Stroheim and DeMille trod on the Don’ts and ignored the Be Carefuls, and their blockbusting profits gave them moral high ground. They were just giving the people what they wanted. What is more, while DeMille’s biblical pictures (
The Ten Commandments
[1923] and
The King of Kings
[1927]) may have been his raciest of all, in the end they were forgiven even for using illicit sex (Mary Magdalene’s burlesque dance for a stony-faced Christ was trimmed and tamed but ultimately ran) because they sparked interest in religious film.
F. Scott Fitzgerald, unimpressed by tame cinematic sex, refused to see any threat in it at all. “
Contrary to popular opinion,” he opined, “the movies of the Jazz Age had no effect upon its morals.”
Unlike the rebels in
Buddy Bolden’s line who dove into the fray of 1920s fun, simple moviegoers were a sleepy majority. Their role was vicarious, identificatory at best; their pleasure was scopophilic, voyeuristic.
To this extent, they were less adventuresome than Buffalo Bill’s cheering crowds. As consumers of the tabloid boom and of salacious and canned new
fan
magazines, they were silent investors in the dazzling star system that empowered
Hollywood with a global reach. And yet by buying tickets,
moviegoers (who were often also churchgoers) gave assent to changing national attitudes toward fun. Thanks to the humbug surrounding Hays’s new Formula, even middling Babbitts were given mind-blowing lessons in risk, transgression, rebellion, and silliness, as well as in the defiant populism of the era’s infectious tramps and flappers.
The deadpan slapstick of
Charlie Chaplin and
Buster Keaton remain our crispest images of 1920s fun. In
The Gold Rush
(1925), a masterpiece of the silent era, Chaplin’s Tramp treks into the snowbound Klondike in search of turn-of-the-century riches but instead, like
Mark Twain’s self-satirizing argonaut, encounters adversaries societal and natural. In the end he gets both the girl and the gold, but not until he has known humiliation and near death by exposure, starvation, mauling, murder, and cannibalism at the hands of a fellow prospector who hallucinates that he is a chicken. Chaplin gleaned this latter setup, and another in which the Tramp eats his boot, from an account of the Donner party. “
Tragedy,” he later wrote of these scenes’ dark comedy, “stimulates the spirit of ridicule, because ridicule, I suppose, is an attitude of defiance: we must laugh in the face of our helplessness against the forces of nature—or go insane.” This statement may have been a coded reference to his personal misery that year. Having impregnated the film’s original dance-hall heroine—a sixteen-year-old named
Lillita MacMurray—he embarked on a two-year shotgun marriage that dragged his peccadilloes through the courts and tabloids, resulting in his nervous breakdown and the public’s disgust and a divorce settlement that cost him more than a million dollars. Even
H. L. Mencken, not much of a Chaplin fan, redirected blame (via Puritan metaphor) at the fickle Babbittry: “
The very morons who worshipped Charlie Chaplin six weeks ago now prepare to dance around the stake while he is burned.” True to form, Chaplin took refuge in “an attitude of defiance”: throughout this crisis, his Tramp clowned around making his 1928 name-saving feature,
The Circus.
For all of their seeming weakness, Chaplin’s and Keaton’s shambling
protagonists were monsters of such defiance—Keaton’s, in particular. Hapless, fumbling, ingenuous, and daring, Buster Keaton’s assortment of long-faced straight men turn the roughest scenes into jungle gyms—from grapples with Virginia bootleggers in his 1918 short,
Moonshine,
to his astonishing array of silent features: the luckless Friendless roping (and befriending) cattle in
Go West
(1925); the weakling Alfred pretending to be a prizefighter in
Battling Butler
(1926); the dandy turned soldier wrestling a locomotive in
The General
(1926); the egghead turned acrobatic jock in
College
(1927); and, in
Steamboat Bill, Jr.
(1928), the delicate flower forced to hold his own against a roughneck riverboat crew and—in the finale, one of the most impressive sequences in all of cinema—a town-flattening tornado. Chaplin’s and Keaton’s sight gags in the face of misery encapsulate the
Jazz Age spirit: humor, agility, audacity, and style were the best defenses against nature’s foes, and on these strange terms such underdog clowns became the modern American heroes. Heightening their fun, their risky pleasure, was the fact that their lethal stunts were real—as were
Harold Lloyd’s and many of
Douglas Fairbanks’s. (
Gary Cooper also got his start in stunts.) They tripped along cliffs, slid from great heights, jumped from trains, fell from buildings, forever holding their gullible mugs intact. But Keaton’s antics set the standard. Trained as an acrobat in
vaudeville, limberly drunk much of his time on set, he put his body in constant peril (discovering only decades later that he had once broken his neck) and trained newcomers to do the same. “
I developed more stunt men than any studio in Los Angeles,” he said. “I’ve taken the goddamnedest people and made stunt men out of them.” But Hollywood’s stuntmen, the stars and stand-ins, were only glamorous examples of a greater thrill-seeking culture that took the goddamnedest people (on airplanes, skyscrapers, flagpoles, dance floors) and made daredevils out of them. Stuntmen only made this fad more visible.
Hollywood’s
“It girls,” for their part, took sassier, sexier,
steelier
risks. They dangled from the cliff of a steadfast social code that expected them to be either virgins or whores.
Clara Bow, the “Brooklyn Bonfire,” made it look like child’s play. Born into abject poverty in a Sands Street tenement—some of the most violent and tubercular living conditions
in turn-of-the-century America—as a girl she suffered constant hunger and frequent beatings by her severely epileptic mother and her vicious alcoholic father, a career busboy who dreamed of being a singing waiter. Shunned by other girls for being ugly and dirty, she excelled as a tomboy in her local street gang: “
I could lick any boy my size,” she boasted. “My right was famous.” She and the boys got into “all sorts of crazy stunts.… Once,” she recalled, “I hopped a ride on behind a big fire engine. I got a lot of credit from the gang for that.” At the age of nine, she rescued her best friend from an apartment fire by rolling him in carpet, only to have him die in her arms. She quit seventh grade to cut hot-dog buns at Nathan’s on Coney Island, then briefly answered phones for a Manhattan abortionist. In her teens she defied her mother and escaped her constant loneliness as most Americans did: she lived at the movies and devoured
fan
magazines, dreaming of one day becoming a star; she vanished into the movies’ “distant lands, serene, lovely homes, romance, nobility, glamour,” as she put it—into “everything that magic silversheet could represent to a lonely, starved, unhappy child.” Then at age sixteen, in 1921, she got her one-in-a-million break. Armed with two “terrible” boardwalk portraits, dressed in her goofy tam and single shabby outfit, she beat out streams of other hopefuls to win Brewster Publications’ Fame and Fortune Contest—for which distinction (in addition to winning a minor movie role) her mother tried to kill her with a butcher knife,
twice
. But her publicity shot was a revelation: auburn-haired, moony-eyed Clara was gorgeous.