I DON’T MEAN FOR THIS TO SOUND LIKE “I HAD A
VISION” OR anything, but there was a specific starting point for
practically all of these stories. I wrote them in a fifteen-month
period, and the whole thing started with the afternoon I went to a
Hot Rod & Custom Car show at the Coliseum in New York. Strange
afternoon! I was sent up there to cover the Hot Rod & Custom
Car show by the New York Herald Tribune, and
I brought back exactly the kind of story any of the somnambulistic
totem newspapers in America would have come up with. A totem
newspaper is the kind people don’t really buy to read but just to
have, physically, because they know it
supports their own outlook on life. They’re just like the buffalo
tongues the Omaha Indians used to carry around or the dog ears the
Mahili clan carried around in Bengal. There are two kinds of totem
newspapers in the country. One is the symbol of the frightened
chair-arm-doilie Vicks Vapo-Rub Weltanschauung that lies there in the solar plexus of
all good gray burghers. All those nice stories on the first page of
the second section about eighty-seven-year-old ladies on Gramercy
Park who have one-hundred-and-two-year-old turtles or about the
colorful street vendors of Havana. Mommy! This fellow Castro is in
there, and revolutions may come and go, but the picturesque poor
will endure, padding around in the streets selling their chestnuts
and salt pretzels the world over, even in Havana, Cuba, assuring a
paradise, after all, full of respect and obeisance, for all us
Vicks Vapo-Rub chair-arm-doilie burghers. After all. Or another
totem group buys the kind of paper they can put under their arms
and have the totem for the tough-but-wholesome outlook, the Mom’s
Pie view of life. Everybody can go off to the bar and drink a few
“brews” and retail some cynical remarks about Zora Folley and how
the fight game is these days and round it off, though, with how
George Chuvalo has “a lot of heart,” which he got, one understands,
by eating mom’s pie. Anyway, I went to the Hot Rod & Custom Car
show and wrote a story that would have suited any of the totem
newspapers. All the totem newspapers would regard one of these
shows as a sideshow, a panopticon, for creeps and kooks; not even
wealthy, eccentric creeps and kooks, which would be all right, but
lower-class creeps and nutballs with dermatitic skin and ratty
hair. The totem story usually makes what is known as “gentle fun”
of this, which is a way of saying, don’t worry, these people are
nothing.
So I wrote a story about a kid who had
built a golden motorcycle, which he called “The Golden Alligator.”
The seat was made of some kind of gold-painted leather that kept
going back, on and on, as long as an alligator’s tail, and had
scales embossed on it, like an alligator’s. The kid had made a
whole golden suit for himself, like a space suit, that also looked
as if it were covered with scales and he would lie down on his
stomach on this long seat, stretched out full length, so that he
appeared to be made into the motorcycle or something, and roar
around Greenwich Village on Saturday nights, down Macdougal Street,
down there in Nut Heaven, looking like a golden alligator on
wheels. Nutty! He seemed like a Gentle Nut when I got through. It
was a shame I wrote that sort of story, the usual totem story,
because I was working for the Herald
Tribune, and the Herald Tribune was
the only experimental paper in town, breaking out of the totem
formula. The thing was, I knew I had another story all the time, a
bona fide story, the real story of the Hot Rod & Custom Car
show, but I didn’t know what to do with it. It was outside the
system of ideas I was used to working with, even though I had been
through the whole Ph.D. route at Yale, in American studies and
everything.
Here were all these … weird … nutty-looking, crazy baroque custom cars,
sitting in little nests of pink angora angel’s hair for the purpose
of “glamorous” display—but then I got to talking to one of the men
who make them, a fellow named Dale Alexander. He was a very serious
and soft-spoken man, about thirty, completely serious about the
whole thing, in fact, and pretty soon it became clear, as I talked
to this man for a while, that he had been living like the
complete artist for years. He had starved,
suffered—the whole thing—so he could sit inside a garage and create
these cars which more than 99 per cent of the American people would
consider ridiculous, vulgar and lower-class-awful beyond comment
almost. He had started off with a garage that fixed banged-up cars
and everything, to pay the rent, but gradually he couldn’t stand it
anymore. Creativity—his own custom car art—became an obsession with
him. So he became the complete custom car artist. And he said he
wasn’t the only one. All the great custom car designers had gone
through it. It was the only way. Holy
beasts! Starving artists! Inspiration! Only instead of
garrets, they had these garages.
So I went over to Esquire magazine after a while and talked to them about
this phenomenon, and they sent me out to California to take a look
at the custom car world. Dale Alexander was from Detroit or some
place, but the real center of the thing was in California, around
Los Angeles. I started talking to a lot of these people, like
George Barris and Ed Roth, and seeing what they were doing,
and—well, eventually it became the story from which the title of
this book was taken, “The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline
Baby.” But at first I couldn’t even write the story. I came back to
New York and just sat around worrying over the thing. I had a lot
of trouble analyzing exactly what I had on my hands. By this time
Esquire practically had a gun at my head
because they had a two-page-wide color picture for the story locked
into the printing presses and no story. Finally, I told Byron
Dobell, the managing editor at Esquire, that
I couldn’t pull the thing together. O.K., he tells me, just type
out my notes and send them over and he will get somebody else to
write it. So about 8 o’clock that night I started typing the notes
out in the form of a memorandum that began, “Dear Byron.” I started
typing away, starting right with the first time I saw any custom
cars in California. I just started recording it all, and inside of
a couple of hours, typing along like a madman, I could tell that
something was beginning to happen. By midnight this memorandum to
Byron was twenty pages long and I was still typing like a maniac.
About 2 A.M. or something like that I turned on WABC, a radio
station that plays rock and roll music all night long, and got a
little more manic. I wrapped up the memorandum about 6:15 A.M., and
by this time it was 49 pages long. I took it over to Esquire as soon as they opened up, about 9:30 A.M. About
4 P.M. I got a call from Byron Dobell. He told me they were
striking out the “Dear Byron” at the top of the memorandum and
running the rest of it in the magazine. That was the story, “The
Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby.”
What had happened was that I started
writing down everything I had seen the first place I went in
California, this incredible event, a “Teen Fair.” The details
themselves, when I wrote them down, suddenly made me see what was
happening. Here was this incredible combination of form plus money
in a place nobody ever thought about finding it, namely, among
teen-agers. Practically every style recorded in art history is the
result of the same thing—a lot of attention to form, plus the money
to make monuments to it. The “classic” English style of Inigo
Jones, for example, places like the Covent Garden and the royal
banquet hall at Whitehall, were the result of a worship of Italian
Palladian grandeur … form … plus the money that began pouring in
under James I and Charles I from colonial possessions. These were
the kind of forms, styles, symbols … Palladian classicism … that
influence a whole society. But throughout history, everywhere this
kind of thing took place, China, Egypt, France under the Bourbons,
every place, it has been something the aristocracy has been
responsible for. What has happened in the United States since World
War II, however, has broken that pattern. The war created money. It
made massive infusions of money into every level of society.
Suddenly classes of people whose styles of life had been
practically invisible had the money to build monuments to their own
styles. Among teen-agers, this took the form of custom cars, the
Twist, the Jerk, the Monkey, the Shake, rock music generally,
stretch pants, decal eyes—and all these things, these teen-age
styles of life, like Inigo Jones’ classicism, have started having
an influence on the life of the whole country. It is not merely
teen-agers. In the South, for example, all the proles, peasants,
and petty burghers suddenly got enough money to start up their
incredible car world. In fifteen years stock car racing has
replaced baseball as the number one sport in the South. It doesn’t
make much difference what happens to baseball or stock-car racing,
actually, but this shift, from a fixed land sport, modeled on
cricket, to this wild car sport, with standard, or
standard-looking, cars that go 180 miles an hour or so—this
symbolizes a radical change in the people as a whole. Practically
nobody has bothered to see what these changes are all about. People
have been looking at the new money since the war in economic terms
only. Nobody will even take a look at our incredible new national
pastimes, things like stock-car racing, drag racing, demolition
derbies, sports that attract five to ten million more spectators
than football, baseball, and basketball each year. Part of it is a
built-in class bias. The educated classes in this country, as in
every country, the people who grow up to control visual and printed
communication media, are all plugged into what is, when one gets
down to it, an ancient, aristocratic aesthetic. Stock-car racing,
custom cars—and, for that matter, the Jerk, the Monkey, rock
music—still seem beneath serious consideration, still the preserve
of ratty people with ratty hair and dermatitis and corroded
thoracic boxes and so forth. Yet all these rancid people are
creating new styles all the time and changing the life of the whole
country in ways that nobody even seems to bother to record, much
less analyze.
A curious example of what is happening
is Society, in the sense of High Society, in New York City today.
Only it isn’t called High Society or even Café Society anymore.
Nobody seems to know quite what to call it, but the term that is
catching on is Pop Society. This is because socialites in New York
today seem to have no natural, aristocratic styles of their
own—they are taking all their styles from “pop” groups, which
stands for popular, or “vulgar” or “bohemian” groups. They dance
the Jerk, the Monkey, the Shake, they listen to rock music, the
women wear teen-age and even “sub-teen” styles, such as stretch
pants and decal eyes, they draw their taste in art, such as
“underground” movies and “pop” painting, from various bohos and
camp culturati, mainly. New York’s “Girl of the Year”—Baby Jane
Holzer—is the most incredible socialite in history. Here in this
one girl is a living embodiment of almost pure “pop” sensation, a
kind of corn-haired essence of the new styles of life. I never had
written a story that seemed to touch so many nerves in so many
people. Television and the movies all of a sudden went crazy over
her, but that was just one side of it. A lot of readers were
enraged. They wrote letters to the publisher of the Herald Tribune, to the Herald
Tribune magazine, New York, where it
appeared, they made phone calls, they would confront me with it in
restaurants, all sorts of things—and in all of it I kept noticing
the same thing. Nobody ever seemed to be able to put his finger on
what he was enraged about. Most of them took the line that the
Herald Tribune had no business paying that
much attention to such a person and such a life as she was leading.
Refreshing! Moral Outrage! But it was all based on the idea that
Jane Holzer was some kind of freak they didn’t like. Jane
Holzer—and the Baby Jane syndrome—there’s nothing freakish about
it. Baby Jane is the hyper-version of a whole new style of life in
America. I think she is a very profound symbol. But she is not the
super-hyper-version. The super-hyper-version is Las Vegas. I call
Las Vegas the Versailles of America, and for specific reasons. Las
Vegas happened to be created after the war, with war money, by
gangsters. Gangsters happened to be the first uneducated … but more
to the point, unaristocratic, outside of the
aristocratic tradition … the first uneducated, prole-petty-burgher
Americans to have enough money to build a monument to their style
of life. They built it in an isolated spot, Las Vegas, out in the
desert, just like Louis XIV, the Sun King, who purposely went
outside of Paris, into the countryside, to create a fantastic
baroque environment to celebrate his rule. It is no accident that
Las Vegas and Versailles are the only two architecturally uniform
cities in Western history. The important thing about the building
of Las Vegas is not that the builders were gangsters but that they
were proles. They celebrated, very early, the new style of life of
America—using the money pumped in by the war to show a prole vision
… Glamor! … of style. The usual thing has
happened, of course. Because it is prole, it gets ignored, except
on the most sensational level. Yet long after Las Vegas’ influence
as a gambling heaven has gone, Las Vegas’ forms and symbols will be
influencing American life. That fantastic skyline! Las Vegas’ neon
sculpture, its fantastic fifteen-story-high display signs,
parabolas, boomerangs, rhomboids, trapezoids and all the rest of
it, are already the staple design of the American landscape outside
of the oldest parts of the oldest cities. They are all over every
suburb, every subdivision, every highway … every hamlet, as it were, the new crossroads, spiraling
Servicenter signs. They are the new landmarks of America, the new
guideposts, the new way Americans get their bearings. And yet what
do we know about these signs, these incredible pieces of neon
sculpture, and what kind of impact they have on people? Nobody
seems to know the first thing about it, not even the men who design
them. I hunted out some of the great sign makers of Las Vegas, men
who design for the Young Electric Sign Co., and the Federal Sign
and Signal Corporation—and marvelous!—they come from completely
outside the art history tradition of the design schools of the
Eastern universities. I remember talking with this one designer,
Ted Blaney, from Federal, their chief designer, in the cocktail
lounge of the Dunes Hotel on “The Strip.” I showed him a shape, a
boomerang shape, that one sees all over Las Vegas, in small signs,
huge signs, huge things like the archway entrance to the Desert
Inn—it is not an arch, really, but this huge boomerang shape—and I
asked him what they, the men who design these things, call
it.
Ted was a stocky little guy, very
sunburnt, with a pencil mustache and a Texas string tie, the kind
that has strings sticking through some kind of silver dollar or
something situated at the throat. He talked slowly and he had a way
of furling his eyebrows around his nose when he did mental
calculations such as figuring out this boomerang
shape.
He started at the shape, which he and
his brothers in the art have created over and over and over, over,
over and over and over in Las Vegas, and finally he
said,
“Well, that’s what we call—what we sort
of call—‘free form.’”
Free form! Marvelous! No hung-up old
art history words for these guys. America’s first unconscious
avant-garde! The hell with Mondrian, whoever the hell he is. The
hell with Moholy-Nagy, if anybody ever heard of him. Artists for
the new age, sculptors for the new style and new money of the …
Yah! lower orders. The new sensibility—Baby baby
baby where did our love go?—the new world, submerged so
long, invisible, and now arising, slippy, shiny, electric—Super
Scuba-man!—out of the vinyl deeps.