American Fun (36 page)

She cast herself as a “jazz baby” in her first play,
The Ruby Ring
(1921), and in the title role of her co-written second,
The Hussy
(1922), but by the mid-1920s, when she had entered her thirties, she dropped the flapper dress for a whore’s lingerie. Piqued by young
Clara Bow’s
The Fleet’s In
, she adapted a low sex comedy called
Following the Fleet
(in which Montreal prostitutes do just that) into a morally shocking play called
Sex
(1926).
Sex
featured West as her heroine, Margy, a slang-slinging prostitute who proves, in the end, to be more upstanding than Clara, a Connecticut socialite who slums at Margy’s brothel. What made
Sex
unforgivable was that, of all the sex comedies playing off-Broadway, this one gave moral high ground to the whore, even stating Margy would “
make a better wife and mother than” Clara. The production featured sailors dancing an all-male jig. West herself did a “
shimmy shawabble” that she claimed to have learned on Chicago’s South Side. The critics, siding with high society, greeted
Sex
with a collective Bronx cheer: “
vulgar,” “nasty,” “infantile,” and “as bad a play as these inquiring eyes have gazed upon in three seasons.” But the
theatergoing public held a different opinion, making it off-Broadway’s most successful play of the season.

Her next year’s production joined the recent gay-comedy vogue and cashed in on a new, leering interest in
drag balls. The play,
The Drag
(1927), drew in part upon West’s circle of gay men and went beyond its potentially salacious subject matter to give a sympathetic and jubilant look at gay culture. Her great risk, once again, lay in her sympathy,
this time with a
sexual orientation that, as her play acknowledges, was scorned as “
degenerate” and “criminal.” Much as
Sex
ennobles prostitutes by society’s highest standards,
The Drag
describes a gay couple as being “
happier” than any “normally married couple.” The story hinges on two contentious old friends, a doctor who speaks generously of the “
born homosexual” and a judge who believes “
people like that should be herded together on some desert island.” The doctor’s daughter is unhappily married to the judge’s elusive son, Rolly, who, predictably, is secretively gay. Mae West’s own melodramatic typecasting suggests that, against the play’s defense of homosexuals, Rolly and other gays have questionable morals (he freely deceives his wife, he is killed by his rejected ex-lover), but
The Drag
’s dominant picture presents the gay community as close-knit, witty, and defiantly fun. A drag queen, Duchess, defending herself for powdering up in front of the cops, says that “
they like me,” and then with innuendo: “They all know me from Central Park.”

West’s cops are stand-ins for the 1920s vice squads that came down hard on sexual deviance and put special heat on West herself. In
The Drag
they’re also the peak of excitement. In the culminating drag party—the dance spectacle that made the play’s money—cross-dressers boast about previous jail time and burst into excitement when the joint is raided: “
It must be the wagon, let me in first!” “I had to stand the last time!” “I don’t care, I had a gay time!” “I had a grand time!” “I had a gorgeous time!”

On February 9, 1927, trying to forestall
The Drag
from ever opening in New York City, the
Society for the Prevention of Vice raided
Sex
and two other racy plays. (The lenient “jazz mayor,”
Jimmy Walker, was on vacation.) West and her cast were hauled away in a van and released on $14,000 bail. She and her two producers, refusing a plea bargain, reopened the show with “
a restraining order against police interference” and enjoyed several months of lavish profits while awaiting their
obscenity trial. Each of the three was found guilty, fined $1,500, and sentenced to ten days behind bars—a high-profile incarceration with which Mae West, like P. T. Barnum some seventy years earlier, had a lot of fun. She reported in a limo, dined with the warden, and bragged of having done her time in a silk negligee.

She rewrote
The Drag
as
The Pleasure Man,
making changes to evade
the censors but keeping its big draw, the drag ball, intact.
The Pleasure Man
was raided right away, and West and her producers were forced to bail out a cast of fifty-nine. The obscenity trial lasted fourteen days, but after the media had had their fill, the case was thrown out. In the end the trial was just another wild party. Having scored this major free-speech victory, though to the tune of $60,000, West summed it up: “
Let’s see some other son of a bitch do that.”

Mae West came from tough American stock. She didn’t shrink from the fight—she courted it. In the heat of battle—onstage, in court—West was at the top of her game, dropping her foes with delicious rejoinders, losing herself in a shimmy shawabble. Not just a writer, actor, or producer, West was an impresaria, a
force.
And she wasn’t just in it for herself. Unlike Zelda, she was no
elitist. Like
Bessie Smith and
Clara Bow, she was loyal to her people and eager to spread their fun around. She harnessed the power of despised Americans and made it desirable even to the middle class. Critics scoffed and censors pounced, but the people kept coming back for more. For her fun wasn’t meant to please the elite. Her fun was at home down among the crowd. It was the fun of outcasts, rebels, and commoners, and it was open country for any citizen who was unafraid, unashamed, unflappable.

9

F
.
SCOTT FITZGERALD
’
S STUNNING ESSAY
“Echoes of the
Jazz Age” (1931) looks back on the early 1920s as years when “
a whole race”—first the young, then everyone else—fell under the erotic spell of jazz and went “hedonistic, deciding on pleasure.” Soon “people all the way up to fifty, had joined the dance.” Eventually, and Fitzgerald implies
inevitably,
fun lovers started vanishing “into the dark maw of violence”—insanity, murder, suicide. Fitzgerald’s perspective is typical of his elite white peers, who often presented fun as a prelude to catastrophe. It also makes for a tidy, boom-and-bust story. If the twenties were (in his words) “the most expensive orgy in history,” a party fueled “by great filling stations full of money” that roamed from Palm Beach to the French Riviera, then it follows from this ruling-class reasoning that the end was near when the rich turned neurotic (somewhere around 1927); nearer still when they had to travel with “citizens” who had the “human value of Pekinese, bivalves, cretins, goats” (around 1928); and that the whole kaleidoscopic soap bubble had to pop with the great crash of 1929. Jazz may have turned the ignition, but money, by this argument, filled the tank.

And there’s truth to it. America’s excesses during the “age of play”
fattened the movie, music, games, sports, tobacco, and travel industries.
Bootlegging gave the crime syndicate unprecedented new power. Already-rich rentiers like
Harry Crosby reached scary heights of extravagance and danger. And during its meteoric rise in 1929, the stock market itself became a source of excitement that attracted many first-time lower-to-middle-class gamblers. Hence, in the story of 1920s prosperity, the great crash was a cultural climax—what Crosby recorded in his diary as “
exciting story millions lost in an hour suicides disorder panic.” The big losers were bankers and celebrities, and as usual their failures filled the tabloids. But as
John Kenneth Galbraith cautioned, “
only one and a half million people, out of a population of approximately 120 million and of between 29 and 30 million families, had an active association of any sort with the stock market. And not all of these were speculators.” At least in the short term, John Q. Public was largely untouched.

By the same token, then, the mass of Americans who embraced the twenties’ vogue for witty, acrobatic, joyous revolt didn’t need buckets of cash to do so. They didn’t require biplanes and Stutz Bearcats. Like Pinkster revelers and argonauts before them, they fashioned their fun from what they had at hand—they bobbed their own hair, staged their own stunts, bubbled their own bathtub gin. It was the fun of improvised participation, and superstar tramps like
Charlie Chaplin and
Clara Bow inspired even the lowliest of citizens to join in. This latest iteration of American fun wasn’t born of
Gilded Age luxury. It was born of
Buddy Bolden’s reckless innovations, it was an all-hands showdown with
Plymouth Plantation, and it emboldened crowds for any eventuality. This will to party was the twenties’ cultural legacy, the playful one, that handily survived the crash of ’29. Speculators jumped hand in hand from skyscrapers, and broken-down celebrities slipped away into asylums (Chaplin and Bow included), but once it had been released onto an eager mainstream, the risky, rebellious fun of the people stumbled its way through the economy’s rubble. When speculators went bust, big-time bootleggers, whose business kept bubbling, snatched up their half-million-dollar yachts for a song (for as little as $5,000 apiece) and “
decorated them with pretty girls in bathing suits.”
Prohibition was repealed in 1933, but the struggle for a pious America raged on. Dance
marathons—which had only grown longer, wilder, and more dangerous since their inception in the early twenties—were widely banned in 1934. And that year the
Hays Office finally got serious.

IN THE EARLY
1930s, with the advent of sound, movies were more salaciously fun than ever, assisted in large part by a
pair
of Brooklyn bonfires—
Clara Bow (returning from her breakdown as a hot-tempered, whip-cracking, half–Native American gambling addict in the border-crossing talkie
Call Her Savage
), and the censors’ bête noire herself,
Mae West, whose 1933 film debut,
She Done Him Wrong,
based on her Gay Nineties comedy
Diamond Lil,
did to Hollywood what she had done to Broadway: dragged it through the seamy underworld, once again bedeviling viewers with a gleefully unrepentant Bowery madame, this time Lady Lou. Kindled by West’s sulfurous legal history, bellowed by gusts of rave reviews, and promoted with an actual stunt still shot in which the famed evangelist
Billy Sunday gamely threatens her with a barroom chair,
She Done Him Wrong
’s brushfire swept the nation, engulfing even southern and remote midwestern markets. It was also nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.

Variety
called West “
as hot an issue as Hitler.” For now she had a formidable opponent. There was a new pastor in the parish, Catholics, who had stopped playing along with the studios’ ruse. Following the Catholic Church’s uproar against
MGM’s 1927 picture
The Callahans and the Murphys,
which comprised a shameless stream of Irish-American slurs, Hays had deputized U.S. Catholics to form the
Legion of Decency, tasking them with writing the 1930 Production Code. Later known as the Hays Code, these new rules held films to high moral standards: criminals had to be detestable, crimes had to be punished, and only intimations of
marital
sex were permitted, and never between members of different races or (it didn’t even need to be stated) same-sex partners. Until 1933 and Mae West’s unprecedented onscreen eroticism, the Code—like the 1920s
Formula—was distorted and ignored by its enforcers. But as Marybeth Hamilton puts it, despite the Hays Office’s attempts to make Lady Lou into a contemptible cartoon,
“West’s acting
style had subverted all [their] efforts to veil Lou and her surroundings in comedy.” Her character was real, born of the streets, and her effect was terrifically seductive—especially to young women, which of course was the Legion’s greatest fear.

That same year,
Henry James Forman’s hand-wringing book,
Our Movie-Made Children,
tried to arm priests, parents, and reformers with evidence that impressionable girls—especially reform-school girls—had been aroused and damaged by Hollywood eros. Forman opens fire on the youth who provide him testimonials. He smirks at the “
young Negro high-school girl” for wanting to “possess”
Clara Bow’s “It.” He makes examples of “tots” who identified with “robbers” over “coppers” and eventually went on to join “the racket.” American kids were blazing out, having fun, and Forman blamed Hollywood: “When a girl tells of learning to handle a cigarette like Nazimova, to smile like
Norma Shearer, to use her eyes like
Joan Crawford, she is not necessarily an immigrant’s daughter. She is merely a daughter of Eve.” But the apparent foreigners and de facto whores were, to judge from these testimonials, mostly self-confident adolescents who, like Clara Bow herself, were finding their comfortable place in the crowd: “ ‘I have learned from the movies,’ a high school girl boldly announces, ‘how to be a flirt, and I found out at parties and elsewhere the coquette is the one who enjoys herself the most.’ ” They have learned from motion pictures how to banter, talk back, and “hug,” and as one boy reports, “how to kiss a girl on her ears, neck and cheeks, as well as on her mouth.” Kids were getting a sexual education and, yes, they were
using
it—as were at least 33 percent of the five hundred students who took Forman’s survey. (He suspected the actual percentage was higher.) He scorns the “sixteen-year-old girl” who “so pertinently, so pathetically” calls such acquisitions “talents,” but fairly clearly she is no Mae West. She is just reporting what her peer group values. Unlike Bowery b’hoys who did their demagogues’ bidding, many of Forman’s “movie-made children” come across as lively, thoughtful citizens: some speak critically of the movies’ strong influence, others see movies as helpful primers for fine-tuning what they would probably do anyway—which is to say, have the kinds of taboo fun that had been defining American youth for over a decade. Forman sniffed
that some parents even “may desire this species of schooling for their daughters.” But parents who took Forman’s anxious position went on the rampage.