Authors: Joseph Mitchell
The newspaper for which I work sent me up to interview Miss Cubitt the day after she arrived in New York. A photographer went along with me. I saved all my notes, and I want to tell you about Miss Cubitt because I think she will be one of the sensations of the Midway at Mr. Whalen’s Fair.
We were met at the door of Miss Cubitt’s room by one of the Exposition’s press agents, a brisk young man named Jack Adams. We went in and sat down, and he said the Queen—he called her the Queen
every time he referred to her—would be out in a minute. I had a bad cold that day and did not particularly like the assignment. I liked it even less when Mr. Adams began telling me about the Queen. He said she did not approve of the girls in the New York night-club shows because she felt they besmirched the cause of nudism. He said she ate uncooked carrots, took an orange-juice bath about once a week and lived almost entirely off raw herbs.
He was telling about the Queen’s dietary habits when she came in. She was naked. It was the first time a woman I had been sent to interview ever came into the room naked, and I was shocked. I say she was naked. Actually, she had a blue G-string on, but I have never seen anything look so naked in my life as she did when she walked into that room. She didn’t even have any shoes on. She was a tall girl with a cheerful baby face. She had long golden hair and hazel eyes. The photographer was bending over his camera case, screwing a bulb into his flashpan, when she came in. As soon as he saw her, he abruptly stood erect.
“My God!” he said.
Mr. Adams introduced the Queen, and she shook hands with me and smiled. Then she shook hands with the photographer.
“Pleased to meet you,” said the photographer.
“Likewise,” said Miss Cubitt, smiling.
She went over and sat down in one of the hotel’s overstuffed chairs and said she hoped we wouldn’t mind if she didn’t put anything on, and we shook our heads in unison. The telephone rang and Mr. Adams answered it. When he got through with the telephone, he said he would have to beat it, that he had an appointment with an advertising agency, and he said goodbye. The rain was beating against the windows, and when Mr. Adams got to the door, Miss Cubitt yelled, “You better wear your rubbers.” The photographer was still standing in the middle of the floor with his flashpan in his hand, staring open-mouthed at the young woman. I didn’t know how to begin the interview.
“Well, Miss Cubitt,” I said, tentatively, “Mr. Adams just told me you eat a lot of raw carrots.”
“Why,” she said, sitting upright in the overstuffed chair, “I never ate a raw carrot in my life. I eat like anybody else. My mother cooks me great big old steaks and French-fried potatoes. That’s what I eat. In the nudist colony, the men nudists eat a lot of that stuff. The men nudists are a bunch of nuts. Why, they eat peas right out of the pod. They squeeze the juice out of vegetables and drink it, and they don’t eat salt. Also, they have long beards. They don’t have any ambition. They just want to be nudists all their lives.
I want to be a dancer, myself. I’m going to come to the New York World’s Fair with my dance, and I bet it will make me a reputation.”
I saw that the young woman was articulate, and that I wouldn’t have to ask a lot of questions. When I said I had a bad cold, she said, “You poor man,” and telephoned room service to send up whiskey. At the same time she ordered some sandwiches, some corned-beef sandwiches, saying, “I’m so hungry I could eat the flowers off the plate.” While she was holding the telephone in her hand, waiting for room service to answer, she said she was only nineteen years old and that she had eight sisters, four of whom had been working with her in the nudist colony. Their names, she told me, were Ruthie, Bobbie, Lucille and Diane. She said her mother was glad they were working in the colony.
“It keeps us out in the open,” said Miss Cubitt. “It doesn’t keep us out late at night, and we have a healthy atmosphere to work in. My girl friends think we have orgies and all, but I never had an orgy yet. Sometimes when the sun is hot, nudism is hard work.”
She was a pretty girl. Her skin was ivory-colored and she had freckles on her cheeks, like Myrna Loy. In fact, she looked a little like Myrna Loy. She was obviously healthy, and she said she played a lot of tennis and handball. She said she sometimes posed
for artists. “Once one of them told me I looked like a Madonna,” she said, “and I said, ‘O.K.’” I think she was the least inhibited person I ever saw. She reminded me of Reri, the Polynesian girl Florenz Ziegfeld brought to New York in 1931. Reri’s feet were always dirty, because she insisted on walking about the theater barefooted, and she used to sit in her dressing room at the “Follies” reading a movie magazine and wearing nothing but a pair of men’s trunks.
“Mr. Adams told me you don’t approve of the dancers in night clubs here,” I said when she sat down again, “because you feel they besmirch the cause of nudism.”
Miss Cubitt giggled.
“Well,” she said, “you can put that in the paper if you want to, but I went to a night club last night and I thought the girls were real sweet. I would like to get a job in one. I sure do like New York. I’ve had lobsters every meal since I got here, and last night I had some real French champagne.”
After the photographer had been introduced to the Queen, he had slumped into a chair and had remained there, staring. Now he roused himself and said he wanted to make some shots in a hurry, because he had to leave and cover the St. Patrick’s Day parade. The young woman enjoyed posing and seemed to be sorry when the photographer finished, although
he made about five times as many pictures as we needed. A few minutes after he left, a waiter, bringing the whiskey and the corned-beef sandwiches, knocked on the door. The waiter was either extremely sophisticated or had waited on the Queen before, because he did not seem to notice that she was not wearing anything. His eyes were respectfully averted, but he acted as if all the young women he waited on were nudists. When he had arranged his plates and glasses on a table, he handed Miss Cubitt the check. She signed it, and he bowed and left.
While we were eating the sandwiches, she told me of the dance she was working on, saying she called it the Tiger Lily dance. Why she called it that was a secret, she said.
“A World’s Fair,” the Queen remarked, “is a good place for a girl to make a reputation. When you get a reputation, you are fixed. Look at Sally Rand. What’s she got I haven’t got? I’ve seen her, and she’s no world-beater. Look at Rosita Royce and her butterfly dance. Look at Toto La Verne and her swan dance. They’re all World’s Fair girls. If I can put my Tiger Lily over at the World’s Fair, I’ll be fixed.”
I warned her that she might live to regret a World’s Fair reputation, and mentioned the career of Mrs. Frieda Spyropolous, the Syrian girl whose dance as Little Egypt at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893 attracted more attention than the
seventy-ton telescope or any of the other educational exhibits. I told her how this Little Egypt had married the respectable Mr. Andrew Spyropolous, a Greek restaurant proprietor, not long after the Columbian Exposition closed, expecting to settle down to a peaceful way of life, and how the scandalous behavior of the hundreds of other Little Egypts who began doing her dance in low places all over the country had caused her acute anguish the rest of her life.
“Oh, I won’t regret it,” said the Queen, chewing on her sandwich. “I won’t do anything unless it’s artistic. Why, out at San Diego they even wanted me to do a Lady Godiva on a big white horse. I didn’t do it because my boy friend made me mad. He said to go ahead and be Lady Godiva. He said he would sure pay forty cents to see me do it, because it had been years and years since he’d seen a horse.”
Miss Cubitt giggled.
After we finished the sandwiches, we sat at a window and looked at the drizzle. I pointed out a few skyscrapers, but they didn’t interest her. She wanted to talk about her career.
“It’s swell being a nudist,” she said, “but I wouldn’t want to make it my life’s work. I think the whole world should go nudist in the summer. You save so much on clothes. But then I don’t know. I was in a real nudist colony once, and there were a lot of big, fat men there, and some women that must have
weighed a ton. No kidding, you sure do see some terrible shapes in a nudist colony. Out at San Diego, we go on duty in the colony at noon and work until nine. It’s like going back to your childhood—all you do is lie in the sun and play games. It’s kind of silly, too. Sometimes me and my sisters get to laughing when we figure that already more than two million people have paid forty cents to see us girls running around naked. At the colony, we are a good distance from the customers, and they stand up there at the fence and strain their eyes. Sometimes I say to Ruthie, ‘Ruthie, one of those psychologists would have a picnic down here.’”
By the time I got ready to go, my cold had vanished. Miss Cubitt went to the door with me. We were standing in the hall, shaking hands, when an elderly couple, a man and a woman, came out of a nearby room and started down the hall to the elevator. When they saw Miss Cubitt, their chins dropped. When they walked past us, they turned and stared. They did not appear to disapprove. They just seemed to be startled. Miss Cubitt giggled. She backed into her room.
“I guess I better say goodbye now,” she said. “See you at the World’s Fair.”
I hope I do see her at the World’s Fair, and I hope her Tiger Lily dance is successful and that she gets the reputation she wants, and I hope she makes the chin
of Mr. Grover A. Whalen, president of the New York World’s Fair Corporation, drop.
Rosita Royce, 20, is a shy Methodist girl from Kansas City, Missouri, who believes so utterly in the purity of the dance she performs in night clubs behind an amazingly transparent balloon that she does not even wear the gauze-and-tape fashionable among the strip girls in burlesque houses. I talked with her in a dressing room at the Congress Restaurant.
“It takes a lot of work to fill the balloon,” she said, wrapping a silk kimono tightly around her lithe figure.
Then, grunting, the dancer bent over and picked up a long rubber tube which was attached to the mouth of a treadle bellows, operated by foot-power. She fitted the end of the tube into the nozzle of the six-foot balloon behind which, ostensibly, she hides during her dance. Then she placed her bare left foot on the treadle and began to pump air into the only property, except high-heeled slippers, that she uses during her dance.
“I guess,” she said, as she pumped away, “that I am the only fan or balloon dancer who really is a nudist. I mean an official nudist. Last December I organized a nudist club, the Rocky Mountain Cult, out in Denver, and we had fifty members when an
engagement took me away. I believe it is healthy for the mind and the body. I think the human body is beautiful and I am not ashamed by nakedness.
“Of course, a lot of people believe that nudism, or even the balloon dance that I do, is indecent exposure. I followed Sally Rand in the Streets of Paris at A Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago and I was using my butterfly dance. The butterfly costume is made out of black lace——”
“Why, it is so beautiful it is almost sacred,” said Samuel J. Burger, her manager.
“Yes,” said the young dancer, “it is beautiful. And so I was dancing my butterfly dance and it was a windy night. I was out in the open air and the winds from the lake were blowing hard and they blew off the silver fig-leaf I had on. Well, the Fair police took me in and scolded me, but the real Chicago police arrested me for indecent exposure and I would have been in a terrible fix if the judge hadn’t acquitted me.”
Preparing for her dance, Miss Royce said that she is forced to dance behind curtains because customers would doubtless stick pins or cigarettes into the balloon if they could reach it.
“They often burst on me,” she said. “In a lot of cabarets they use these steel-wool brushes on the floor and sometimes a tiny piece of wire gets caught in a crack and when my balloon hits it there is an
explosion. Also the spangles from the chorus girls’ dresses get caught in the cracks and break my balloon. They cost $12.50 apiece and I have to get a new one every three days.”
Miss Royce travels with her mother, Mrs. Bertha Royce, a business-like middle-aged woman. Her father runs a chain of dentist offices in Kansas City. She said her real name is Marjorie Rose Lee. Royce is her mother’s maiden name. She went to Wesleyan College in Lincoln, Nebraska, and studied dramatics but did not finish the course. She started dancing professionally at seven with the Portia Mansfield Dancers and traveled all over the country. She believes she invented the balloon dance at the age of ten.
“I had it copyrighted,” she said. “I had a description of my dance and a photograph sent to the Library of Congress and they copyrighted it. It is No. 157,757. Of course, the balloon dance was being performed with little balloons before I was born, but not with great big six-and ten-foot balloons. Scores of girls all over the country are imitating it with what they call bubble dances.”
“A balloon is not a bubble,” said Mr. Burger. “It is just a piece of rubber. Our lawyer is going to try to get an injunction restraining Sally Rand from dancing with big balloons, which is our idea, but I don’t know if it’ll do any good.”
“I don’t want to fight Sally Rand,” said Miss Royce.
“You are too shy,” said Mr. Burger.
“I guess I am too shy,” said Miss Royce, as she threw off her kimono, got behind the balloon and walked out on the restaurant’s stage.
Sally Rand, the lithe, hearty siren from a Missouri corn farm, who has faced prison sentences, horse-whippings, and a fate worse than death in her tumultuous career as the nation’s original fan dancer, sat on a divan in her black and silver dressing room at Brooklyn’s Paramount Theatre and slowly rolled the flesh-colored stockings off her celebrated legs.