By the Waters of Razz-­Ma-­Tazz

Toward the end of 1920, or just about the time the fencing foils on my bedroom wall were yielding to sepia portraits of Blanche Sweet and Carol Dempster, I became briefly enamored of a Rhode Island schoolmate named, if memory serves, Celia Cahoon. Together with a dozen other unemployables that semester, Miss Cahoon and I were retracing Xenophon’s footsteps to the sea, and as we toiled our daily twenty parasangs over the stony Mesopotamian plain, leaving a wake of dead and dying gerunds, I felt myself involuntarily succumbing to her spell. Though hardly the comeliest girl in the class, Celia possessed a figure so voluptuous that it addled every male within a radius of fifty feet. Whenever she was called on to recite, chairs began to scrape, pencils rolled off the desks, people upset ink on their pants, and the quickened exhalations formed a steam that fogged the windows. In her senior year at Classical High, Celia undoubtedly came in for more accidental jostling in corridor and lunchroom than anyone prior to Sophia Loren.

It was, therefore, with as much exultation as though I had been singled out of the ranks by Catherine of Russia that I mounted the stoop of the Cahoon residence one December evening, painstakingly groomed for the soirée Celia had bidden me to. In both dress and deportment, I was patterning myself after Wallace Reid, the brightest star in my movie galaxy; I wore a yellow butterfly bow and a wasp-­waisted tweed suit with globular leather buttons, my hair (modishly parted in the middle) exuded a paralyzing scent of bay rum, and my swagger was debonair to the point where I was having trouble retaining my balance. Whom Celia was impersonating at the moment I have no idea, but I remember bee-­stung lips pouting out of a heavy mask of rice powder, and a hairdress of those unlovely puffs we used to call “cootie garages,” accentuated by a wicked spit curl. The lights in the parlor were low, and another couple, also from our class, was executing a vertiginous tango to “La Veeda.” While Celia hastened to fetch me a glass of some ghastly punch made of muscatel and sliced oranges, I adopted a dégagé pose on the arm of a Morris chair and, stifling a well-­bred yawn, covertly studied my surroundings. The family’s taste in art was plainly cultivated; in addition to the standard chromo of Landseer’s “Dignity and Impudence,” there was a side elevation of a pearly nude with red hair by Henner and half a dozen etchings by Anders Zorn. Their library also hinted at a wide intellectual horizon, ranging from fluff by Peter B. Kyne and James Oliver Curwood to substantial works by John Spargo and Brand Whitlock.

“Now, don’t be an old bookworm,” said Celia effervescently, seizing my wrist. “Come on, slowpoke, let’s shake a tibia!” To be in close proximity to the figure I had so long admired was an exhilarating experience, and when my hostess coyly disclosed that her folks would not be home until midmorning, I figured I had hit the mother lode. As the punch took effect, the pace grew markedly giddier; there was a rare amount of tickling and squealing, and the ladies had frequent recourse to the lipstick that dangled from the chain of the floor lamp—a fribble that I pretended to sneer at but that actually impressed me as the acme of sophistication. But whatever the romp I contemplated in the Elysian fields, the gods had ordained otherwise. Made overconfident by wine, I decided to re-­enact an adagio Wallace Reid had performed in his latest vehicle, The Dancin’ Fool. I clasped Celia in a cheek-­to-­cheek embrace and, to the cadences of Coon-­Sanders and their Blackhawk orchestra, began a series of improvised pirouettes in the style known as the balconade. Just as we were completing a dizzying backward dip, my partner’s heel caught in the green plush portieres suspended from an archway, and we fell heavily, demolishing a rubber plant and the lower panel of a Globe-­Wernicke bookcase. At that instant, the door opened and two old crabs by the name of Cahoon entered. They had unexpectedly altered their plans, and, it shortly transpired, my own.

Normally, nothing could have persuaded me to revive such painful memories, but they crowded in pell-­mell to a screening I was granted recently, by the Museum of Modern Art, of this very Wallace Reid classic. Like The Roaring Road and Excuse My Dust, his automotive sagas of the same epoch, The Dancin’ Fool was a breezy success story, altogether synthetic and as devoid of motivation as Happy Hooligan. Its leading man, for all his dazzle, was probably the least gifted actor of the century—a sizable achievement in a medium that begot Nelson Eddy, Henry Wilcoxon, and Mario Lanza. At the risk of alienating readers wholesale, I submit a précis of the plot, but it must be understood that I act merely as an intermediary, or vector. The management will not be responsible for any lost illusions, heartbreak, or ennui poisoning.

The Jones Jug Company, the setting of Wally’s initial exploits, is an old-­fashioned pottery concern headed by his Uncle Enoch (Raymond Hatton), a stereotyped curmudgeon who bitterly resents progress. Into this milieu bounces Reid, cast as a fresh young hayseed named Sylvester Tibble (or Ves Tibble, naturally), seeking a business career. Given the post of office boy, he at once pantomimes cyclonic energy, raising clouds of dust with his broom, ruffling the bookkeeper’s wig, scoffing at the filing system, and generally roiling his elders. After dusk, his uncontrollable zest for dancing leads him into a basement cabaret whose songstress, Junie Budd (Bebe Daniels), seeks his protection from a masher. Wally flattens the offender, and Junie, captivated by his dimples, invites him to her mother’s boarding house and offers to coach him in ballroom technique. “You’ve got regular rattleboxes in your feet,” she declares, obviously unaware of a pair that were making every cake-­eater in Rhode Island drool with envy. In no time at all—one lap dissolve, in fact—the couple have blossomed out as a dance team in the cabaret, doing a Dutch specialty at their première that establishes new frontiers in bathos. Among the patrons, it just so happens, is a wealthy pottery tycoon named Harkins (Tully Marshall), who is established as avid to gain control of the Jones Jug Company’s clay pit, a circumstance without burning relevance to the floor show but that provides a yeast for future villainy. Wally and Junie now reappear in an apache number so sensational, presumably, that a rival café owner signs them up at two hundred a week, whereupon they run home to apprise Junie’s mother of their success and Wally proposes to her. To Junie, that is, not her mother, although actually it wouldn’t have made much difference. By this point in the proceedings, it was crystal-­clear to me that the engineer was drunk in the cab, the locomotive out of control, and the switches wide-­open.

At the Jones Jug Company, where our hero continues as office boy while dancing professionally at night—a movie premise as plausible as most of them—the firm’s drummer, a blowhard and wineskin, returns from a sales trip and angrily resigns when Wally questions his expense account. Thereupon, in a comic routine that has begun to lose some of its sizzle with repetition, Uncle Enoch upbraids his nephew for exceeding authority, fires him summarily, and hires him back at once. Disclosed next are Junie and Wally at their cabaret that evening, clad in leopard skins and presenting a divertissement billed as “Antediluvian Antics,” which it would be flattery to describe as the nadir of choreography in our time. Nonetheless, Harkins (who apparently uses the crib as his headquarters) applauds it vociferously from ringside and invites Wally to his table. There the latter overhears him confide to a subordinate, “The way to get old Jones’s business is to buy up his pottery, and I believe he’d sell out for a dollar.” Sensing the machinations that threaten his uncle, Wally racks his brain for some novelty that might stimulate sales, and evolves a repulsive line of containers with human faces he calls B-­Jones B-­Jugs. Uncle Enoch, betraying the one flicker of taste visible anywhere in the picture, quite properly refuses to countenance them, but, to rid himself of Wally’s paranoid schemes, permits him to take over as traveling salesman. When Junie discovers her partner has doffed his leotards for commerce, she breaks their engagement in the best musical-­comedy tradition, and Wally, approximately as grief-­stricken as if a caraway seed had lodged in his teeth, exits nonchalantly to pursue his destiny. The temptation to emulate him pierced me like a knife. I half rose from my chair; then, detecting the projectionist’s baleful eye fixed on me through the peephole of his booth, I twisted my features into a sickly placatory grin and sank back, resigned to perishing like a rat in a trap.

In the ensuing reel, Harkins, repeatedly bilked in his attempts to flimflam Uncle Enoch out of his pit, cunningly decides to show the old gentleman the fleshpots, and inveigles him to dinner at the cabaret. Junie has meanwhile found herself another dancing partner, though still torchy for the Ragtime Kid. The evening the new team is unveiled, Wally bursts in unexpectedly—unexpected by the washroom boy, it would seem, for nobody else exhibits surprise—and, shouldering aside the interloper, struts a duet with Junie to universal acclaim. Uncle Enoch fumbles on his glasses, recognizes his scapegrace nephew, and once again thunders, “You’re fired!” By some process of reasoning I was too dense to comprehend, the revelation that he had been nurturing a gigolo determines Uncle Enoch to sell out to Harkins. The two retire to a banquet room to sign the necessary papers; there is the usual zabaione of misgivings, phony legalities, and the fountain pen that runs dry, and inevitably Wally comes bounding in with the cornucopia of orders he has garnered for B-­Jones B-­Jugs. Uncle Enoch, exuberant, makes him a full partner on the spot, and his competitor, after a token display of pique, proves that he has a heart of gold under his knavish exterior. “We’re beaten. It serves us right,” he says sheepishly. “All along we’ve been calling him a dancin’ fool and really he’s a commercial whiz.” The butchery terminates with Wally imprinting a peck on his sweetheart’s cheek and declaring, with a brisk insincerity guaranteed to reassure his female fans, “B’gosh, you’re going to be my little B’Junie, and b’join the B’Jug family.”

You might suppose that a victim of such cinematic mayhem would excite some measure of pity, and that when I reeled out into Fifty-­third Street and collided with a pair of elderly dragons laden with Christmas shopping, I would have been accorded a helping hand. On the contrary, both ladies recoiled and gaped at me as though I were aswarm with caterpillars. “Well!” snapped one of them, pursing her lips. “Pickled in the middle of the afternoon, and in a museum, too. I always wondered what went on in there.”

I removed my Borsalino and gave her as courteous a bow as I could muster. “If I told you what went on in there, Medusa,” I said, “those dentures would drop out of your head. Did you ever hear of a dancing salesman named Ves Tibble—I mean an office boy called Wallace Reid?” Before I could adumbrate the plot, the two of them turned tail and streaked for Fifth Avenue. I worked over toward Sixth, found myself a cool, dark clinic with a sympathetic interne, and eventually managed to justify their diagnosis. What the hell, you might as well be hung for a sheep as for a lamb.