Hella Nation - Evan Wright [31]
It is believed that a Chicago-based Greek immigrant started the first taxi-dance hall after a trip to San Francisco, where he had been impressed by the success of closed dance halls. Returning to Chicago, he and his brothers borrowed the ticket-a-dance system as well as the girls-on-a-couch setup from the dance academies and opened the first hall dedicated exclusively to renting women as dance partners. (Thus the “taxi” in “taxi dancer.”)
The idea spread to Los Angeles, and by the early 1930s there were at least four halls operating downtown. The dancers became known as “dime-a-dance girls” or “nickel hoppers.” The halls continued to flourish after Prohibition ended in 1933, and ten years later, at the height of World War II, two Los Angeles brothers, Ed and Ben Fenton, took over a club called Roseland Roof, at 833 South Spring Street. They soon eliminated the ticket-a-dance system and replaced it with the punch clock.
Roseland Roof never really shut its doors. Although taxi dancing died out in most American cities by the 1960s (when it became quaintly obsolete against the onslaught of the sexual revolution), the Fentons continued to run their hall until 1981. By this time, the swing bands they had employed were long since gone, and the dancers no longer wore formal gowns on Friday nights. Despite changing mores, the Fentons found a buyer for Roseland Roof when they retired, and it continues to operate today, as Dreamland, occupying the same ballroom that had served Roseland Roof since it opened in 1933.
Edward Fenton, ninety-one, stands at the window in his second-floor office in the Fenton Building. He shows me the corner on Spring Street where he sold newspapers in the early twenties, and then recalls the night his brother phoned to ask if he wanted to go in with him in purchasing Roseland Roof. Ben was an attorney who had been representing the club’s owner since 1938, and in “nineteen hundred and forty-three” the owner wanted to sell.
“I’d never heard of a place like this,” Fenton says. “I didn’t have any idea how it was operated. I came here on a Thursday night to check the place out. I see a bunch of women and a bunch of customers, and I say, ‘What’s this business all about?’ So my brother explained it to me, and I said, ‘Not a bad idea. How’s the supply of girls?’ And he said, ‘We don’t have any problem with that.’ ”
I ask Fenton to describe the old days, the color, the spirit.
“Well . . .” He pauses, thinking a long time. “The customers wore neck-ties. They were well-dressed.”
“Is there anything else you can think of?”
“The customer was lonely, that’s the word. The club brought in lonesome people. They came here to meet with girls and carry on a secret romance.”
“You mean they had affairs with the girls?”
“No. I didn’t say that.” Fenton appears momentarily annoyed with my complete ignorance. “The customer lived in a fantasy.”
THE SMELL OF LYSOL mingles with perfume in Club Fantasy, located in a basement on Third Street. It is smaller and cleaner than the other establishments. The walls are freshly painted. It has the feel of a community-center rec room in which most of the lights have blown out. Drinks (soft) are served in styrofoam cups.
“There is a spiritualness about this place,” says Ted, the manager, a third-generation Asian-American and former used-car dealer. He stands by the viewing gallery, surveying his club. “There is a whole conglomerate of emotion in here. It is more than it looks like.
“On the surface, behavior is based on a code of law. If the customer makes certain demands on the girl, he will go to jail. But there is also a psychological code. The customer is lonely for a woman. On a date, a girl might make him feel inadequate, like he isn