Authors: Joseph Mitchell
She rubbed her drowsy blue eyes. Then she scratched her back, grunted with satisfaction, and remarked that the make-up she applies to various sections of her body sometimes makes her itch. She said, “Doesn’t it feel good to scratch?” It was very warm in the dressing room, and so she pulled the legs of her filmy pajamas up to her pink, dimpled knees, wriggled her painted toes and said, “I like to be as naked as possible.”
“Only,” she said, “I’m against organized nudism. I think those nudist people are selling the public a bill of goods that they are foolish to pay for. It shouldn’t cost anybody anything to go naked. There was a nudist
cult out on the West Coast, and their lawyer came around and offered me a big sum to go out there and endorse it. Did I give him a tongue-lashing? I ask you.”
“Are you afraid of competition from the nudists?” she was asked.
“Oh, no,” she said. “It’s nothing commercial. The offer shocked me. I knew that if I endorsed it a lot of fat old men would join the cult just to see me without fans. It made me sick, to think that my lovely dance should be confused with such things! Those nudists told me that your moral fiber is made stronger if you go naked, but all the nudists I saw had scratches all over their rear ends where they had been sitting down on thorns.”
She pushed her hands through her blond curls. Her Japanese maid, Stella Sato, a jovial, bespectacled Oriental, pattered in and began to shake out Miss Rand’s ostrich fans.
“How do you feel, Stella?” asked Miss Rand.
“O.K.,” said Miss Sato.
“The reason I asked her that,” said Miss Rand, “is because we just made the longest overnight theatrical jump on record. Last night at 9:30 I ran off the stage of the Paramount Theatre in Omaha, Nebraska, and jumped into a pair of woolen pajamas. Then we drove to the airport, got into a United Airline plane, and rode all night. I was in time for the first show here in Brooklyn.
“I complicated things at Omaha because one of my admirers gave me a fat little suckling pig with a red ribbon around his neck. I put it in a shoe-box and punched some holes in it so he could breathe. The airline won’t let you take pets. When I got in the plane the pig squealed on me, and I had to leave it behind. You never heard such squealing. Such a pretty little pig!”
Miss Rand has a new explanation for her dance, a dance in which she strides across the stage weaving a pair of fans in front of her.
“It is just my interpretation of a white bird flying in the moonlight at dusk,” said the dancer, speaking huskily as if reciting a love poem. “A white bird, flying. It flies up into the moonlight. It is dusk. It flies low. It flutters. Then it begins to climb into the moonlight. Finally, it rests.”
Miss Rand, who looks as if she could take the prize as the Healthiest Girl in America, breathed ecstatically. She said that the music for her dance is called “The Birth of Passion.” She left her fans at the hotel this morning, but Lawrence Sittenberg, a fan manufacturer, arrived with a new pair just in time for the show.
She picked up one of the fans, laid it on her lap and caressed it. She did not get much sleep on the airplane, and her eyes were drowsy.
“I could just stretch out and sleep forever,” she
said, ruffling the fan. “I have been having such a good time. I bought my mother an orange grove near Los Angeles, and I gave her a tractor for a birthday present. Her name is Annette Kisling. My real name is Helen Beck, and I was born in Hickory County, Missouri. My mother has been married twice. We grow the best apples in the world in Hickory County.
“I understand they have a new license commissioner here in town, and I hope he keeps his pants on. The other one said I was obscene. Personally, I think my dance is as lovely as anything in the world, and I would run from anybody low enough to see anything obscene in it.”
The Japanese girl came into the dressing room; she was smiling, but her eyes were sleepy and bloodshot. “Time to go on, Miss,” she said. The girl from Hickory County stood up and began to pull off her pajamas.
“O.K.,” she said, flexing her right leg until the muscle in it bulged.
At least 90 percent of the fan dancers in this country—there are approximately 1,000 industrious professionals—are indebted to Lawrence Sittenberg.
Tacked on the walls of his crowded loft factory on the second floor of 107 West Forty-eighth Street are
effusively autographed photographs of the leaders in the now-I’m-naked-now-I’m-not line. There is, for example, a photograph of Miss Thais Giroux on which she has scribbled:—“To Larry, to one who helped put me on the road to success. Sincerely, Thais.” There are many frank photographs of Sally Rand, of course. She and Mr. Sittenberg are close friends. There is also, framed, a New Year’s greeting card on which the demure Miss Rand pasted a tiny pair of panties embroidered with her name. On the card she wrote:—“I’m saving my money, so I’m sending you something I don’t need. Sally.”
“Get it?” said Mr. Sittenberg, giggling. “She don’t need her panties any more. Sally is very artistic. Only an artistic girl would think up a card like that. She only sent out three of them, to her three best friends, of which I am one.”
Mr. Sittenberg is engaged in an unusually specialized enterprise. He manufactures fans for fan dancers. Each year he imports approximately 650 pounds of feathers jerked from the tails of ostriches in Capetown, South Africa. A lot of these soft, slinky feathers are used in orthodox theatrical costumes, but a good percentage of them are bought by fan dancers after they have been properly cleaned, tinted, tied and attached to celluloid handles.
He made the pair of fans with which tall, pouting Faith Bacon technically shielded her body on
the night in 1930 when Earl Carroll’s “Vanities” was raided by a squad of modest cops, a raid which marked the beginning of the fan dance as an American institution. He made the pair, priced at $80, with which Miss Rand shocked the farmers at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago.
Mr. Sittenberg’s business is listed in the telephone book as “Sittenberg, Henry & Son, ostrich feathers, 107 W. 48th, BRyant 9-3960.” Mr. Sittenberg is the son. His father has been ill for many years. The firm is thirty-seven years old and young Mr. Sittenberg, who is forty, has been junior partner since he was fourteen. Mr. Sittenberg’s grandfather was Louis Sittenberg, the famous New York detective who was killed during a trip to Italy to bring back a Black Hand agent. His father, a millinery salesman, established the firm when ostrich feathers were used widely by fashionable women. He had no idea he would eventually become a theatrical costumer.
For many years the Sittenbergs sold their ostrich feathers chiefly to millinery firms, also making fans with fragile mother-of-pearl handles for society women. They also did special ostrich-feather jobs, making the fans used by the bridesmaids at President Woodrow Wilson’s wedding, for example. The elaborate musical comedy costumes originated by Ziegfeld helped their business.
Any producer using tricky head-dresses is almost
certain to telephone Sittenberg. At one time or another the firm has turned out costumes made of feathers from practically every bird that flies, from pigeons to peahens.
Society women quit using ostrich fans a good while back, and since that custom languished nothing helped the Sittenberg firm or the ostrich-feather industry so much as the arrests of Miss Bacon and Miss Rand. The popularity of their dance caused hundreds of producers to hire young women willing to prance about a stage with nothing to hide their pristine nakedness but a half a gross of ostrich tail feathers. Soon after Miss Rand was arrested in Chicago, Mr. Sittenberg got a bale of orders for fans. Since that time he has made up almost 1,000 pairs. He has turned out eight pairs for Miss Rand. She sends them back periodically for reconditioning. He has two pairs of Rand fans in the shop now.
Mr. Sittenberg said he would rather deal with fan dancers than millinery firms.
“They are an honest bunch of people,” he said. “Of course, I send them everything C.O.D., so they can’t gyp me.”
The ostrich-feather czar said the fan dance is nothing new, that dancers have used fans since the infancy of musical comedies.
“The only thing is they didn’t do it nude, and they
used only one fan,” he said. “A real fan dance like Sally does is complicated. I have figured out that there are exactly forty-eight different positions in which the fans may be held gracefully by a naked woman. I can do them all myself. I originated many of the positions myself.
“Only an artist can use these big fans. Most fan dancers, of course, just run out on the stage waving their fans and jump around like a goat. Sally is a showman. She would make Barnum look like the barker in a medicine show. She was the first of the fan women who believed enough in herself to spend money, hire a press agent and get herself known.”
Lately Mr. Sittenberg has branched out. He has invented several fan dances—“Leda and the Swan is one and the Cascade, a knockout if the right girl does it, is another”—and is managing the girls who perform them. Under contract with him are Austa Sven (her real name is Myrtle Miller), who does the Swan number; Thais Giroux, hitherto an orthodox fan dancer, and Rio Grande, whose real name is Betty Adler, a Spanish fan dancer.
“She is only a few inches over four feet,” he said, “and I am working out a Spanish routine for her to do with fans. The Cascade is going to be a big sensation. A nude comes out with showers of feathers around her, and she can drape these feathers into a fountain
by movements of her hands. Then she can transform it into a train of feathers, or a cape. I am getting patents for these dances, so a flock of thieves will not steal them like they did the fan dance.
“All I need is a hint to originate a dance that will pull a girl out of the fan-dancing class into a big novelty or specialty number. Of course, the right kind of fan is the important thing. When I am originating a new dance there are days and days when every person in this plant is working on one fan. You can understand why one pair of Sally’s fans, the pair she used in her moving picture, set her back $300. Whenever anything drastic goes wrong with Sally’s fans she wires me to get an airplane at once. A few weeks ago I flew out to Milwaukee to do a job for her.”
Like a matador working out a new pass with the cape, Mr. Sittenberg is concerned in a bleakly academic manner about the positions in which dancers hold his fans. He is capable of taking sides in fights between groups of fan dancers over the theory of their art, such as the war between the Western Federation of Fan Dancers, which insisted on 35-inch fans, and the United Fan, Bubble and Specialty Dancers of America, which maintained that 25-inch fans were long enough “for all dancers except those ashamed of their bodies.” For amusement he goes
deep-sea fishing in the boats that tie up at Sheepshead Bay.
Sally Rand is not his most famous customer. He once turned out a nice job for Mrs. Franklin D. Roosevelt.
“It was an old-fashioned cape of ostrich feathers,” he said.
I admit I did not spend much time looking for one, but during eight long, sorrowful years as a reporter in New York City, years in which I covered scores of sermons and church affairs, I did not meet a minister, priest or rabbi for whom I could sincerely have any great respect. The ones who appealed to me most, however, were Father Divine, the Reverend G. Spund, and Elder Lightfoot Solomon Michaux, a gold-toothed, deep-voiced Negro, who gave up his shad and oyster peddling business in a Virginia city in 1917 to become one of the republic’s most influential hell-and-damnation evangelists. I got acquainted with the Elder in Rockland Palace, an old hall under the elevated tracks at 155th Street and Eighth Avenue in which prizefights, wrestling matches and dances are sometimes held. He was holding a terrific revival in
the Palace. A raucous, happy congregation of 2,500 shouted “Amen!” and “Yeah, man!” while the Elder stomped about the stage and fought sin at the top of his voice. I sat in the first row.
“I’m going to drive the devil out of Harlem and I might just as well give you people hell to start with,” said the Elder.
“I bet we catch hell now,” shouted a small, uninhibited worshiper in the second row.
“You done said something, brother,” replied Elder Michaux. “Everywhere I turn I see people gobbling up whiskey and beer, and the men they leave their wives, and the streets are thick with gamblers. They got slot machines in all the hangouts.”
Behind the evangelist sat sixty members of the “Happy Am I” choir. The self-conscious women members in the front row were dressed in olive-green uniforms with starched caps. The Elder’s wife, Mrs. Mary E. Michaux, known as “the silver-tongued soloist,” was also on the stage. She helped the choir sing “The Devil’s on the Run” and other Michaux spirituals.
Immediately before beginning his sermon the forthright churchman instructed his ushers to go through the crowd and sell copies of the songs at 30 cents apiece. They sold hundreds of them. All the benches in the Palace were occupied.
In the rear of the hall there is a barroom, but it was boarded up when the Negro preacher leased the Palace for a week. When he was younger, Elder Michaux was a bartender in his father’s saloon, but now he looks on alcohol in all its forms as a snare and a delusion.
“I see I got work to do up here,” said Elder Michaux, who delivered his sermon beneath a great electric sign in which his name was spelled out in red, white and blue letters. “I got to find out where you people expect to go for the duration of eternity. I mean, heaven or hell, what’s it going to be?