The Telephone Booth Indian - Abbott Joseph Liebling [7]
By the time Dufour got back to Chicago with his company of hamburgereating cannibals, Rogers had built the village, a kind of stockade containing thatched huts and a bar. “We had a lot of genuine junk, spears and things like that, that an explorer had brought from the bacteria of Africa,” Joe Rogers says, “but this chump had gone back to Africa, so we did not know exactly which things belonged to which tribes—Dahomeys and Ashantis and Zulus and things like that. Somehow our natives didn't seem to know, either.” This failed to stump the partners. They divided the stuff among the representatives of the various tribal groups they had assembled and invited the anthropology departments of the Universities of Chicago and Illinois to see their show. Every time an anthropologist dropped in, the firm would get a beef. The scientist would complain that a Senegalese was carrying a Zulu shield, and Lew or Joe would thank him and pretend to be abashed. Then they would change the shield. “By August,” Joe says with simple pride, “everything in the joint was in perfect order.”
The partners bought some monkeys for their village from an importer named Warren Buck and added an outside sign which said, “Warren Buck's Animals.” By the merest chance, the branches and leaves of a large palm tree, part of the decorative scheme, blotted out the “Warren,” so the sign appeared to read “Buck's Animals.” Since Frank Buck was at the height of his popularity, the inadvertence did not cut into the gate receipts of Darkest Africa.
The concession proved so profitable that Lew and Joe decided to open a more ambitious kraal for the 1934 edition of the Fair. They chose a Hawaiian village this time. Customers expect things of a Hawaiian village which they would not demand in Darkest Africa. They expect an elaborate tropical decor, languorous dance music, and a type of entertainment that invites trouble with the police. The few Hawaiian entertainers on this continent will not even eat hamburger, a sure indication that theirs is a vitiated type of savagery. All such refinements increase the “nut,” or overhead. There was also a rather expensive restaurant. All told, Dufour and Rogers and their friends invested a hundred thousand dollars in the venture before it opened. The central feature of the Village was a volcano seventy feet high, built of painted concrete, near the restaurant. Joe Rogers in his youth had been much impressed by a play called The Bird of Paradise. In the big scene of the play the heroine jumped into the smoking crater of Mount Kilauea to appease the island gods. The Dufour & Rogers Chicago volcano was “gaffed” with steampipes. “Gaff,” a synonym for “gimmick,” means a concealed device. The verb “to gaff” means to equip with gaffs. Lew and Joe hired a Hawaiian dancer named Princess Ahi as the star of their Village. Twice nightly the Princess ascended the volcano, during the dinner and supper shows. As the Princess climbed along a winding path in the concrete, a spotlight followed her. The steampipes emitted convincing clouds; electrical gimmicks set around the crater gleamed menacingly, and the Princess, warming with her exertions, dropped portions of her tribal raiment as she gained altitude. The volcano was visible from all parts of the midway, a great ballyhoo for the Village and, incidentally, a free show for the smallmoney trade. When the Princess Ahi reached the top of the mountain, she whipped off the last concession to Island modesty and dived into the crater, which was only about four feet deep and was lined with mattresses to break her fall. “She would land right on her kisser on a mattress,” Joe Rogers says. The lights were dimmed; the steam subsided, and the Princess climbed out of Kilauea and came down again unobserved. Joe had to show the Princess how to dive into the crater, kisser first, instead of stepping gingerly into it. This astonished him. “She must have seen plenty other broads jump into them volcanoes at home,” he says.
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