The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [25]
Persis and her crowd were nice people, but nice people wanted to be naughty. The dance craze always involved a balance, which teetered first one way and then the other, between the idea of erotic abandon and the idea of aristocratic restraint. The first dance celebrities were Vernon and Irene Castle, who had made a career teaching social dancing to the children of Fifth Avenue until the all-important year of 1913, when they opened up Sans Souci at 42nd and Broadway. The Castles were impeccable in matters of dress and deportment, and their aristocratic style had the effect of shielding dance from its lower-class associations and its black and Latin origins. Indeed, Irene’s way of talking about freshly arrived dances gave the impression that she and her husband operated a laboratory for the neutralization of virulent dance germs. “We get our dances from the Barbary Coast,” Irene once explained, using a euphemism for the black world. “Of course, they reach New York in a very primitive condition, and have to be considerably toned down before they can be used in the drawing room.” A particularly low item called “Shaking the Shimmy” had “just arrived,” and Irene said that “the teachers may try and make something of it.”
The social hierarchy remained perfectly undisturbed in the mansions and the clubrooms of Fifth Avenue, but the Corybantes scrambled whatever was left of the old order in Broadway. As Julian Street wrote, “Practically any well-dressed person who is reasonably sober and will purchase supper and champagne for two may enter” a restaurant that offered dancing. “This creates a social mixture such as was never dreamed-of in this country—a hodge-podge of people in which respectable young married and unmarried women, and even debutantes, dance, not only under the same roof, but in the same room with women of the town.” They might, in fact, dance with each other. Restaurants and cabarets provided men, typically of dubious background, as partners and dance instructors for the unescorted women who appeared at the afternoon thés dansants. This practice provoked scandalous rumors and much public debate; even Variety, the unofficial trade publication of Times Square, warned about the dangers of “tango pirates.”
And no amount of Castling could disguise the erotic abandon encouraged—almost compelled—by dance. Even the names of the dances implied a new openness toward the body and toward touch: the turkey trot, the black bottom, the bunny hug, the tango. These steps typically required the partners to lock in a tight embrace and to fling themselves around the floor in wild gyrations. In “Everybody’s Doin’ It,” a “ragtime couple” “throw their shoulders in the air,” “snap their fingers,” and shout, “It’s a bear, it’s a bear, it’s a bear.” Julian Street described a performance by Maurice (“the French pronunciation, please!”), the dance master at the rooftop cabaret of Louis Martin’s, a traditional lobster palace: “Suddenly, the man flings the girl away from him violently, as a boy throws a top. Holding to his hand, she spins until their arms are outstretched. Then with a jerk, he draws her back again, revolving, to his arms.” Faster and faster they go, until the climax: “With a leap, she alights astride her partner’s hips and, fastened to his waist with the hooks of her bent knees, swings outward and away from his whirling body like a floating sash.”
One can judge the impact these dances had on received moral principles from the reaction of the courtly Lieutenant Forbes in What Will People Say? Early