The Telephone Booth Indian (3 page)

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.

When interest in the Princess began to flag, the partners added Faith Bacon to their show. Miss Bacon did a dance in the N. T. G. show out at Flushing earlier that summer. “She was not a Hawaiian,” Joe explains, “but she had once eaten some Hawaiian pineapple.” At the Hawaiian Village, Miss Bacon did a gardenia dance, wearing only a girdle of the blooms and discarding them as she went along. This disappointed the customers, who expected her to start with one gardenia and discard petals. The partners also engaged a girl named Fifi D'Arline, who did a muff dance, using a small muff in place of an ostrich fan. She did not draw the crowds consistently, either. It was midsummer before
the partners acknowledged to each other that the attendance at the 1934 renewal of the Fair consisted mainly of Chicagoans who came out to kill a day without spending any considerable sum. Lew and Joe ripped out the luxurious modernistic bar in the Village and installed a cafeteria that sold a cup of coffee for a nickel and a ham sandwich for ten cents. The cafeteria pulled the concession through. Lew and Joe made no money on the Hawaiian Village but at least were able to break even.

The Seminole Indians, Dufour & Rogers' contribution to the urban understanding of the savage, subsisted on buckets of hamburger exactly as the Kroomen and Dahomans did in Chicago. The Seminoles were not very cheerful, for long acquaintance with winter visitors to Florida had given them a peculiarly bilious view of the white man. The adult males wrestled with torpid alligators in the brackish water of a small swimming pool, and the women sold beads if visitors to the Seminole Village insisted upon it. When the Seminoles arrived at the Fair grounds, on a cold, rainy April day, they walked into a culinary crisis. The gas for their cookhouse range had not been turned on. The nonplussed Indians tried, rather ineptly, to build a campfire over which to fry their only known form of sustenance, but the World's Fair fire department raced to the midway and put out the fire. When the firemen went away the Seminoles built another fire. After several repetitions of the episode the firemen got tired and let them alone. By that time, Rogers had had the gas connected.

Another emergency arose when the World's Fair health officer insisted that the Seminole cookhouse be equipped with an electric dishwashing machine, required by Fair regulations wherever food was prepared and served. It was impossible to change regulations at the Fair, because they had all been printed in a booklet. The partners won an indefinite delay, however, by arguing that
the Seminoles might accidentally mangle one of their papooses in a dishwashing machine, and so feel impelled to scalp Grover Whalen.

Joe Rogers liked the Seminoles. He understood them as intuitively as he understood General Dawes. Laborunion regulations prevented the Indians from doing any serious construction work on their village, but they did cover the tarpaper roofs of their leantos with palm leaves brought from Florida. They tacked overlapping layers of palm leaves to the tar paper, and in their lavish aboriginal manner used an inordinate number of tacks, which cost Dufour & Rogers money. Three or four days after the Seminoles got there, Will Yolen, the publicity man, arranged for them to make a tour of a New York department store. Yolen and the publicity department of the store hoped that some photographs of the Indians in the white man's trading post might get into the newspapers. Before the Indians went into town, Rogers, who had studied the Seminoles' mores, told his press agent to be sure that the party visited the hardware department. When the Seminoles returned, they brought plenty of tacks and even a few hammers which they had snitched en route, fulfilling their boss's expectations.

“You should have sent them to a jewelry store,” said the admiring Mr. Dufour. “We could have cleared the nut before we opened.”

Long before Lew Dufour and Joe Rogers became partners in the firm that once ran a halfdozen shows on the World's Fair midway, they had pursued separate careers with traveling shows. The men have been aware of each other's existence for at least twentyfive years, but until they started working together, during the Century of Progress in Chicago, their paths crossed so casually
and so often that they can't remember where they first met or the occasion of the meeting.

Twenty years ago, Dufour was head of a carnival known as Lew Dufour's Exposition. The Exposition traveled in twentyfive railroad cars, and Lew's name was bravely emblazoned on each, although his equity was sometimes thinner than the paint. The carnival included a small menagerie, snakes, freaks, a girl show, several riding devices, and a goodly number of wheels on which the peasantry was privileged to play for canes or baby dolls. At the beginning of every season, the Exposition would leave winter quarters in debt to the butchers who had provided meat for the lions in the menagerie. If the weather was fair the first week out, the Exposition would make enough to go on to the second date on its always tentative route. On one occasion the organization was bogged down in mud and debt at a town in eastern Tennessee after two weeks of steady rain. The tents were pitched in a gully which had become flooded, but as in most outdoor shows, the personnel lived on the train. The sheriff came down to Dufour's gaudy private car to attach the Exposition's tangible assets. With the aid of a quart of corn liquor, Dufour talked the sheriff into lending him the money to pay off the local creditors. Then he got him to ask the creditors down to the car and talked them into lending him $1800 to haul the show as far as Lynchburg, Virginia. At Lynchburg he talked the agent of the Southern Railroad into sending the train through to Washington without advance payment. It was a mass migration of four hundred persons and six wild Nubian lions in twentyfive railroad cars, without other motive machinery than Dufour's tongue.

Shortly after that hegira, Dufour decided that while the show owners got the glory, it was the concessionaires traveling with the shows who got the money. So he became the proprietor of a “jam joint.” A jam joint is a traveling auction store in which, as
the climax of the “regularly scheduled sale,” the auctioneer says, “Now, my friends, who will bid one dollar for this empty, worthless box?” A man in the audience says, “I will,” and passes up a dollar. The auctioneer is touched. He says, “This gentleman has sufficient confidence in me that he offers one dollar for an empty box. I will not abuse his confidence. Here, mister, is the box. Open it in front of everybody” The box, it turns out, contains “a seventeenjewel Elgin watch.” “I don't want your dollar, mister,” the auctioneer says. “Take this beautiful fortyfivedollar watch as a present.” Then he asks how many people will give him five dollars for an empty box. A few fivedollar bills are passed up hopefully He asks the people if they are perfectly satisfied to give him five dollars for an empty box. Sensing that it is a game, they shout “Yes!” He hands back their money and presents each of them with a “handsome and valuable gift,” usually a wallet or vanity case worth about a dime, as a reward for their confidence in him. Next he calls for tendollar bids on an empty box. By this time the contagion of something for nothing has spread, and the countrymen eagerly pass up their bills. He asks them if they would have any kick if he kept their money and gave them nothing but an empty box. Remembering the previous routine, they shout “No!” “Nobody will have any complaint if I keep the money?” the jam guy asks. Nobody. The auditors expect him to return the money, with a present as a reward for their faith. The auctioneer assures them that he will
not
give them an empty box for their money. He will give to each and every one of them a special platinumrolled alarm clock “worth ten dollars in itself.” He makes a speech about the alarm clock. That is not all. He will give to each a beautiful Persian rug, worth twentyfive dollars, specially imported from Egypt. He makes a speech about the rug. That is not all. He adds a couple of patent picture frames “worth six dollars apiece.” In short, he loads each of his confiding
acquaintances with an assortment of bulky junk and then declares the sale at an end, retaining all the tendollar bills.

Jamming paid well and yielded a certain artistic satisfaction, but it did not content Dufour. He felt that it was not creative and that it had only an oblique educational value. It was at the Louisiana State Fair at Shreveport, in 1927, that Lew found his real vocation. He recognized it instantly; Keats felt the same way when he opened Chapman's Homer. There was a medicine pitchman at the Fair who carried with him a few bottles of formaldehyde containing human embryos. The pitchman used the embryos only as a decoy to collect a “tip,” which is what a pitchman calls an audience, but Dufour, who was at the Fair with his auction store, dropped in on the medicine show one evening and at once sensed there was money in the facts of life. He must have had an intimation of that vast, latent public interest in medicine which has since been capitalized upon by Dr. Heiser, Dr. Cronin, Dr. Hertzler, Dr. Menninger, and all the other authors of medical best sellers. “A scientist may know a lot about embryology and biology,” Lew has since said, “but it don't mean anything at the ticket window because it's not presented right. I felt the strength of the thing right away.” From the day when he decided to present biology effectively, Lew began to collect suitable exhibits.

The important thing in assembling a cast for a biology show is to get a graduated set of human embryos which may be used to illustrate the development of an unborn baby from the first month to the eighth. The series parallels, as the lecturers point out, the evolution of man through the fish, animal, and primate stages. As an extra bit of flash, a good show includes some life groups of prehistoric men and women huddled around a campfire. Sometimes it takes months to put together a complete set of specimens. While it is true, as Lew sometimes roguishly observes, that you cannot buy unborn babies in Macy's or Gimbel's, there
are
subrosa
clearing houses for them in most large cities. It is now a small industry, though seldom mentioned by chambers of commerce. The embryo business even has its tycoon, to borrow a word from graver publications, a man in Chicago who used to be chief laboratory technician at a medical school. The specimens are smuggled out of hospitals by technicians or impecunious internes. Hospitals have a rule that such specimens should be destroyed, but it is seldom rigidly enforced; no crime is involved in selling one. Dufour can afford to keep companies standing by. The actors need no rehearsal and draw no salary. Early in his biological career, Lew thought of a terrific title for his show— “Life.” He did not pay fifty thousand dollars for this title, as Henry R. Luce did when he had the same inspiration. He did pretty well with his “Life” exhibits, playing state and county fairs and amusement parks, but he didn't get to the big time until he teamed up with Joe Rogers.