Chapter 40
To draw its goal of five million attendees—along with their tourist dollars—to the 1935–1936 California Pacific International Exposition in San Diego, the Depression-era show offered mechanical marvels and sensuous sirens. The fair included Alpha, a 1-ton automaton whose skill set included answering questions, smoking a cigarette, and firing a gun. Complementing the cold steel of Alpha was the warm flesh of Zorine, “Queen of the Nudists.” Pictured here in the metallic arms of a male performer dressed as Alpha, Zorine reigned over nearly 100 mostly-nude naturalists in their outdoor enclosure known as Zoro’s Garden Nudist Colony. There, in the pay-per-view Eden, visitors shelled out 25 cents apiece to watch topless women in G-strings and bearded men in loincloths read books and play handball.
Peep shows like Zoro’s Garden symbolized prurience to the police as well as the San Diego churches, women’s clubs, and even Braille-using groups that protested the disrobed display. But its popularity on a worldwide stage reflected and reinforced a more uninhibited nation, with one study suggesting women marrying in the 1930s were almost five times as likely to engage in premarital intercourse as those who married before 1912. It also represented double-D profits to show organizers who remembered that fan dancer Sally Rand’s appearance at Chicago’s 1933–1934 Century of Progress International Exposition resulted in a profit of at least $300,000 for her exhibition alone. Fairs and sex were as natural a pairing as incubus and succubus.
Rand (formerly Harriet Helen Gould Beck, she claimed Cecil B. DeMille gave her the stage name) boasted a knockabout resume that included the Adolph Bohm Chicago Ballet Company and the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus, more than 20 silent films (including a cameo in DeMille’s King of Kings), and a stint on stage starring opposite Humphrey Bogart in “Rain.” When the Depression rucked and seamed every aspect of money except the need to pay bills with it, she began working as an exotic dancer at Chicago’s Paramount Club. There, she first performed her notorious “fan dance,” coyly shielding her supple 35-22-35 figure behind a pair of bashful-pink seven-foot ostrich fans she stumbled on in a secondhand shop. Despite appreciative audiences that included Capone henchman Machine Gun McGurn, Rand’s seductive shimmying needed a bigger catalyst to burn itself into the public consciousness.
When the Century of Progress International Exposition kicked off, Rand, her eye as honed for opportunity as the hawk’s is for rabbits, saw her main chance. Incensed by a woman who, she said, had costumed herself in a dress made of $1,000 bills in a time President Roosevelt would later describe as “. . . one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished,” Rand connived to rebuke the offender’s callousness and advance her career.
Stymied by fair bureaucrats snubbing her overtures to display her talents at the expo, Rand crashed a private event in the expo’s Streets of Paris concession. Clad in a velvet cape the color of snow, a long sun-gold wig, and nothing much else to weigh her down, Rand rode a horse onto the stage at the event, much as the tax-protesting Lady Godiva lewdly if mythically trotted on one down the streets of Coventry almost 900 years before. Arrested and booked for obscenity, Rand turned her criminal apprehension into a prototype for thinking-outside-the-box job interviews forever: Within a day, the Streets of Paris officials hired the erotic danseuse to arouse those parts of attendees not stimulated by the House of Tomorrow or the Enchanted Isle for children.
San Diego Historical Society
Rand’s au naturel agitprop proved to be a stroke of money-making brilliance. The fair’s Streets of Paris concession hired her, a summit of cultural match and historical gasoline. Her fan dance quickly went from ignored to iconic: Inspired by the idea of a white bird fluttering under the moon’s glimmer, Rand swayed and spun to Debussy’s “Clair de Lune,” peek-a-booing spectators from behind her towering pink fans. At the end, she raised the fans high, revealing her entire body. (Or appearing to. She was rarely, as she once declared, “barefoot up to her neck.” Her nakedness was a veil of illusion abetted by body stockings or coats of white theatrical cream, thick as a pelt.) Despite her carnal camouflage, Rand was nonetheless arrested regularly, for an act that was far more suggestiveness than sleaze. Still, the fine for one arrest—$200—was insignificant next to the power of the fan dance, which she claimed was grossing as much as $56,000 a week. By the expo’s second year, Rand had evolved her act into a bubble dance backed up by twenty-four dancers and sixteen showgirls. Rand had sunk up to $6,000 of her own money in researching and developing a sixty-inch-diameter transparent balloon to replace the fans as her scant cloak.
Granger, Inc.
Following her success at the Chicago expo, Rand appeared in impresario Billy Rose’s Frontier Follies at the 1936 Frontier Exposition in Fort Worth, Texas. The titular Sally Rand’s Nude Ranch offered eighteen girls wearing hats with a green bandana, skirtlets, and boots. For an effect that was more “Justine” than cowgirl, each of the women was “branded” with the initials “SR” rubberstamped on her haunches. Rand reprised the nude ranch at the 1939–1940 Golden Gate Exposition in San Francisco. There, for a quarter, spectators could glance through glass panels as twenty cowgirls, clad in only G-strings and boots, tossed horseshoes, rode horses, swung lariats, and shot basketballs, all with the jiggle of a bouncy house. The show was a whale among fishes, hauling in 65,000 people during the expo’s initial week of operation. After the fair shut down, Rand took the Nude Ranch on the road, plying unclothed recreation to the masses. By 1941 her fame was so ubiquitous, she was immortalized in the Looney Tunes cartoon “Hollywood Steps Out,” where “Sally Strand’s” bubble dance is burst by a silent and slingshot-wielding Harpo Marx.
Between the unchaste fan and the libidinous bubble dances, Rand had successfully reduced thousands of male spectators to a state of chronic tumescence. Nearly twenty-five years before a federal judge would lift the embargo on “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” “Tropic of Cancer,” and “Fanny Hill,” fairs exposed countless crowds to Rand’s voluptuous glissade, mainstreaming sensual nudity the way the VCR and the World Wide Web would normalize a more gynecological bareness decades later.
Basking on the worldwide stage of Chicago’s expo, Sally Rand helped turn nudity as natural as sunlight. But fairs had a long pedigree of venereal exhibits long before her risqué cavorting: For example, “Stella,” a full-size nude painting, drew, sources said, more than seven million viewers—at a 10 cents a pop—with her eerily lifelike charms in the aptly named Joy Zone of the 1915–1916 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco. Painted in 1893 by Napoleon Nani of Verona, Italy, the nude’s appeal wasn’t just in her hothouse pulchritude but in the illusion that she was breathing.
Not every exhibit needed bawdy burlesque and naked nymphs to suggest the demi-monde. By the time of the Chicago exposition, the soda fountain was the coffee bar of its era and Coca-Cola was the Starbucks. Known for using provocative artists like N.C. Wyeth and Norman Rockwell, the Atlanta-based company built a soda fountain of raven-black marble over a tableau of Art Deco water nymphs, symbolizing the drink that slakes the most kinds of thirst.
The World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 in Chicago quenched another kind of need.
Celebrating the 400-year anniversary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the New World, the fair was the first to segregate a special area solely for amusement of the adult variety outside of the area of amusements set aside from exhibitions called the Midway Plaisance. Organized by Sol Bloom, a future congressman from New York, the mile-long strip included an ostrich farm, ice railway, and The Street in Cairo. (Bloom personally owned and operated the Midway’s Algerian and Tunisian Village.) The last attraction featured a recreation of the Temple of Luxor (with copies of the original’s’ twin obelisks, one of which was inscribed with President Grover Cleveland’s name in hieroglyphics), mummies (among them, allegedly, were the wrapped remains of Ramses II, and the father-in-law and sister-in-law of King Solomon), a turbaned greeter in balloon pants, snake charmers, camel rides, donkeys (with cheeky names like Christopher Columbus and Daniel Webster), a wedding procession with jugglers and swordsmen, and Arabian horses. So popular were the nearly forty steeds, famous for their chiseled visages, including Obeyran, a stallion, and Nejdme, a mare, that at the fair’s end the horses were auctioned off, and 15 years later in 1908, the Arabian Horse Club of America Inc. was founded.
None of these attractions, however splendid and sublime, could compete with the dirty dancer known as Little Egypt. According to orthodox wisdom, Little Egypt introduced the evocative hootchy-kootchy in the Midway’s Algerian and Tunisian Village’s 1,000-seat theatre. The dance itself had many noms de wiggle—coochie coochie, muscle dance, danse du ventre, oriental dance—but it’s best known simply as the belly dance. Whatever the dance’s true name, Little Egypt swung her hips like a hypnotist’s watch, leaving hapless men weak and gasping. Thomas Edison filmed her for posterity, and Mark Twain suffered a coronary from witnessing her obscene gyrations.
Or so the story went. It was a narrative created in hindsight, not unlike the millions who remember attending Woodstock, or witnessing Hank Aaron’s Babe-Ruth-beating 715th home run.
There was no single entertainer jiggling her flanks at the fair, but several entertainers, such as Ghawazi dancers from Egypt and the Ouled Naïl ethnic group from Algeria, performing their versions of dances that Westerners would simply lump together as the belly dance.
Edison did not record it, and Twain did not suffer a cardiac event, which would have been difficult since he wasn’t in attendance at the expo. The supposed obscenity lurked in the eyes—and loins—of Westerners whose idea of the mysterious Orient had been sieved through the harem-heavy strainer of Gustave Flaubert’s “Salammbo,” Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres’s “The Turkish Bath,” and Eugene Delacroix’s “Women of Algiers in Their Apartment.” Even the hokey melody universally synonymous with the mysterious East, the so-called snake-charmer song, is as authentic as chop suey. Though Bloom supposedly penned the ditty for the dances, James Thornton copyrighted a version with lyrics in 1895 called “The Streets of Cairo, or the Poor Little Country Maid.” Both versions may be connected to an older rhyme, one version of which goes “There’s a place in France/Where the naked ladies dance/There’s a hole in the wall/Where the men can see it all.”
Contemporary accounts sniffed at the dancers with comments such as a “perilous lack of corsetry” and “. . . the dance du ventre of the young women, wherein Western people might see how the head of St. John Baptist was lost to Herodias.” Complaints about the performers—perhaps a promotional gimmick to drum up interest—brought the wrath of censors, including Anthony Comstock, whose eponymic Comstock Act, defining contraceptives as obscene and illicit, made it a federal offense to circulate birth control information through the mail or across state lines.
The estimated 2.5 million visitors who toured The Street of Cairo formed a kind of cultural megaphone that broadcast belly dancing to the rest of the country. Dancers who appeared at the fair, such as Fahreda Mazar Spyropoulos, later assumed the name Little Egypt. Dancers who hadn’t appeared also helped themselves to the title. The many Little Egypts—the name probably originated to capitalize on the expanded interest the fair triggered in the things oriental—spread out to carnivals, amusement parks, circuses, and nightclubs. To establish their bona fides, the Little Egypts claimed they had whirled before the multitudes at the 1893 expo. Later on, scandals involving various of the Little Egypt menagerie spread their notoriety even further, and the myth of Little Egypt’s lascivious belly dance made the journey from myth to established fact.
Nearly seventy years after the 1893 fair, and forty-five years before “Team America: World Police” served up marionette intercourse, Seattle’s Century 21 Exposition offered the salacious Les Póupées de Paris. Produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, the Montreal-born brothers, renowned for their work on “H.R. Pufnstuf,” “The Banana Splits,” and “Land of the Lost,” among a slew of other children’s shows, aroused an ire usually associated with villagers holding torches and waving pitchforks.
Also known as The Dolls of Paris, Les Póupées de Paris included a monstrous bat ripping the costume off a stripteaser and a malevolent figure with Einstein hair, Groucho Marx eyebrows, and Emmett Kelly pants shackling a buxom nude with Venus-on-the-half-shell hair to a column and then working her over with a feather the color of a flamingo until she expires, presumably, from anticipation. The blunt-force suggestion of S/M in an era when the topic’s appearance in Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking (and libido-exposing) “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female” was just under a decade old, and in a year when Lenny Bruce would be arrested for using the word “schmuck,” suggests that when it came to sexual ignorance, no safe word had yet been invented.
The Reverend Billy Graham denounced it with an outraged “The women don’t wear bras!” Even with his moral veto, the show (with its $200,000 sets that included a revolving theater, elevators, an ice-skating rink, and a waterfall) toured and titillated the country. Its net effect, like Rand and “Stella” and Little Egypt, was one more hormonal booster shot to the American libido. Marty Krofft understood the allure of his lewd effigies, ending every interview by advising the questioner to “Be sure to mention it’s dirty.”