The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [62]
In 1935, the Paramount began to regularly book the big bands, who had taken the nation by storm. Jitterbugging was said to have been invented when kids at a 1937 Benny Goodman concert began dancing up and down the aisles. There was no bigger gig than the Paramount; Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Paul Whiteman, Duke Ellington, and Goodman all played frequent engagements there. On December 30, 1942, Goodman featured an “Extra Added Attraction,” a skinny kid who sang with Dorsey; he was, of course, Frank Sinatra. Sinatra stayed at the Paramount for eight weeks, and during that time he became an object of adolescent devotion such as no singer ever had before, nor would again until Elvis Presley, if then. He drove fifteen-year-old girls insane. The “bobby-soxers” would scream and faint and weep and hurl themselves at the stage; they came first thing in the morning, and left late at night.
At first, the Sinatra phenomenon was dismissed, at least by highbrow critics, as a momentary craze. But when Sinatra played a return engagement in October 1944, he sparked what became known as the Columbus Day Riot at the Paramount. Despite a curfew, kids began gathering at the box office the night before the first show. A line ten thousand teenagers long snaked down 43rd Street, up Eighth Avenue, and back down 44th. Twenty thousand more kids clogged Times Square. Hundreds of policemen were called away from the Columbus Day Parade to keep order. But to no avail: according to Arnold Shaw, one of Sinatra’s biographers, “The ticket booth was destroyed in the crush. Shop windows were smashed. Passersby were trampled and girls fainted. When the first show finished, only 250 came out of the thirty-six-hundred-seat house. . . . A woman on line with her daughter told a reporter that the girl had threatened to kill herself unless she saw the show.” It was an echt Times Square moment: mammoth crowds, unrestrained glee, more than a hint of danger, and, above all, the instant, irrefutable proof of public adoration.
In a world conquered by the motion pictures, Times Square still provided an indispensable stage for “legitimate” performance. But in a world conquered by television, performance itself became irrelevant. Why pay for the stage show at the Paramount when Ed Sullivan was dishing out the same fare for free? In 1950, 4.4 million American households owned a television set; by 1960, the figure had reached 60 million. And the great stages of Broadway went dark. The Paramount put an end to the shows in 1952 (though Sinatra played yet another sold-out engagement in 1956). The Capitol, at 51st Street, had long since shifted to an all-movies schedule. The Roxy, which had showcased Milton Berle and Jack Benny and Cab Calloway, gave up the stage show in 1948; in 1960, the theater, on the northeast corner of 50th and Seventh, was demolished to make way for an office building. The Capitol went soon thereafter.
Times Square had one last ratifying role to play for Hollywood. The blockbuster movies that Hollywood began to turn out in the forties and fifties—gorgeous Technicolor fantasies set in ancient Rome or Egypt or Hawaii or never-never land—may have been made in a studio backlot, but they almost all opened on Broadway. Movies like Quo Vadis? and White Christmas and Around the World in Eighty Days had spectacular openings in one of the great movie palaces, with red carpets, mega- and mini-stars, klieg lights, madly shoving photographers, and gawking fans. These events were minutely orchestrated by the studios, who knew that nothing generated better publicity than a boffo opening in Times Square. Cleopatra, which, thanks to the affair between the stars,