The Peppermint Lounge
Revisited
ALL RIGHT, GIRLS, INTO
YOUR STRETCH NYLON DENIMS! You know the ones—the ones that look
like they were designed by some leering, knuckle-rubbing old tailor
with a case of workbench back who spent five years, like Da Vinci,
studying nothing but the ischia, the gemelli and the glutei maximi.
Next, hoist up those bras, up to the angle of a Nike missile
launcher. Then get into the cable-knit mohair sweaters, the ones
that fluff out like a cat by a project heating duct. And then
unroll the rollers and explode the hair a couple of feet up in the
air into bouffants, beehives and Passaic pompadours. Stroke in the
black makeup all around the eyelids, so that the eyes look as
though Chester Gould, who does Dick Tracy, drew them on. And then
put those patient curls in your lips and tell Mother—you have to
spell it out for her like a kid—that yes, you’re going out with
some of your girlfriends, and no, you don’t know where you’re
going, and yes, you won’t be out late, and for God’s sake, like
don’t panic all the time, and then, with an I-give-up groan, tell
her that “for God’s sake” is not
cursing.
At least that is the way it always
seemed, as if some invisible force were out there. It was as though
all these girls, all these flaming little Jersey Teen-agers, had
their transistors plugged into their skulls and were taking orders,
simultaneously, from somebody like the Ringleader
Deejay.
Simultaneously, all over Plainfield,
Scotch Plains, Ridgefield, Union City, Weehawken, Elizabeth,
Hoboken and all the stretches of the Jersey asphalt, there they
went, the Jersey Teen-agers, out of the house, off to New York,
every week, for the on-going Jersey Teen-agers’ weekend
rebellion.
They headed off up Front Street if it
was, say, Plainfield, and caught the Somerset Line bus at the stop
across the street from the Public Service building around 7:30 P.M.
Their bouffant heads would be bouncing up and down like dandelions
until the bus hit the Turnpike and those crazy blue lights out
there on the toothpaste factories started streaming by. They went
through the Lincoln Tunnel, up the spiral ramps into the Port
Authority Terminal and disembarked at some platform with an
incredible number like 155. One hundred and fifty-five bus
platforms; this was New York.
The first time people in Manhattan
noticed the Jersey Teen-agers was when they would come bobbing out
of the Port Authority and move into Times Square. No one ever
really figured out what they were up to. They were generally
written off as Times Square punks. Besides the bouffant babies in
their stretch pants, furry sweaters and Dick Tracy eyes, there
would be the boys in Presley, Big Bopper, Tony Curtis and Chicago
boxcar hairdos. They would be steadying their hairdos in the
reflections in the plate glass of clothing stores on 42nd Street
that featured Nehru coats, Stingy-Brim hats, tab-collar shirts and
winkle-picker elf boots. No one ever seemed to notice how
maniacally serious they were about their hairdos, their flesh-tight
pants, puffy sweaters, about the way they walked, idled, ogled or
acted cool; in short, how serious they were about anything that had
to do with form and each other. They had a Jersey Teen-age
netherworld going in the middle of Manhattan. Their presence may
not have been understood, but it was not ignored. There were
nightspots that catered to them with rock and roll music. And when
the Jersey Teen-agers started dancing in Times Square nightspots,
they were serious about that, too. The Lindy, which was the name
the kids had for what an older generation called jitterbugging, was
already out. The kids were doing a dance called the Mashed Potatoes
and another called the Puppet. Curiously, they were like the dances
at a Lebanese maharajan. There was a lot of hip movement, but the
boy and girl never touched. Then a new variation caught on, the
Twist. There would be the Jersey Teen-agers, every weekend, doing
the Mashed Potatoes, the Puppet and the Twist, studying each
other’s legs and feet through the entire number, never smiling,
serious as always about form. One of these places was the Wagon
Wheel. Another one was the Peppermint Lounge, 128 West 45th Street,
half a block east of Times Square.
THE PEPPERMINT LOUNGE! YOU KNOW ABOUT THE
PEPPERMINT Lounge. One week in October, 1961, a few socialites,
riding hard under the crop of a couple of New York columnists,
discovered the Peppermint Lounge and by the next week all of Jet
Set New York was discovering the Twist, after the manner of the
first 900 decorators who ever laid hands on an African mask. Greta
Garbo, Elsa Maxwell, Countess Bernadotte, Noel Coward, Tennessee
Williams and the Duke of Bedford—everybody was there, and the
hindmost were laying fives, tens and twenty-dollar bills on cops,
doormen and a couple of sets of maître d’s to get within sight of
the bandstand and a dance floor the size of somebody’s kitchen. By
November, Joey Dee, twenty-two, the band-leader at the Peppermint
Lounge, was playing the Twist at the $100-a-plate Party of the Year
at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That, of course, was two years ago.
Everybody knows what has happened to the Jet Set in that time, for
the Jet Set is always with us. But whatever became of the Jersey
Teen-agers and the Peppermint Lounge?
Marlene Klaire, leader of the club’s
Twist chorus line, is standing in the hall off the dressing rooms
in back, talking about the kind of fall it has been for her.
Marlene is a short, lithe, gorgeous brunette. It is right after the
second show, and she has on her Twist chorus satin, a pair of net
stockings, Cleopatra eye makeup and a Passaic pompadour that brings
her up to about six feet four. Yes, there is an institution now
called the Twist chorus line, tended by a couple of choreographers
named Wakefield Poole and Tom Roba. Marlene arrived at the
Peppermint Lounge two years ago via the Jersey Teen-age route, but
now her life is full of institutions.
“The Waddle,” Marlene is saying, “is
one of the dances we were demonstrating the other night over at
Sacred Heart. You get in two straight lines sort of like, you know,
the Hully Gully.”
“Sacred Heart?”
“The Catholic Church. We weren’t
in the church, really, it was the
auditorium. They let us wear our costumes. They were all adults
there. We were teaching them the Waddle, the Dog, the Monkey—the
Monkey is probably the most popular right now.”
Well, all that was with the young
adults at Sacred Heart. And then there was the night the
educational program took her and the girls over to the Plaza Hotel
for the Bourbon Ball, where they showed the Society people the
Waddle, the Dog, the Monkey, the Mashed Potatoes and the
Slop.
“The Society people loved it,” Marlene
is saying, “but the Mashed Potatoes is hard for some of them,
and—”
Marlene came to New York over the
Jersey Teen-age route way back in 1961 when the Peppermint Lounge
was first getting hot. She was from Trenton, and then she had a job
as a secretary in Newark, but then one night she came rolling into
the Port Authority like everybody else and headed for the
Peppermint Lounge. She worked her way up fast. First she got a job
as a waitress, then she got one of the jobs dancing between shows,
in street clothes, which is to say, something like stretch pants
and a mohair sweater, to encourage customers to come up and dance.
Marlene could really dance, and she got a job in the first Twist
chorus line.
Now, two years later, the Jet Set has
moved on from the Peppermint Lounge, but the Jersey Teen-age cycle
is continuing. Inside the club the Younger Brothers and the Epics
are on the bandstand, and Janet Gail and Misty More and Louis and
Ronnie are in street clothes, dancing between shows, and customers
are packed in around them, bouncing. A few leggy kids in red satin
shorts, waitresses, are standing around the sides miming the Monkey
with their hips, shuffling to themselves. And out in the center
nine girls from Jersey, all with exploding hair and Dick Tracy
eyes, have a table and watch the dancing with that same old
dead-serious look. Nobody is doing the Twist anymore. Everybody is
doing something like the Monkey, in which you make some motions
with your arms like you’re climbing the bars of your cage, or the
T-Bird, in which there is some complicated business with the hands
about opening the front door and going inside and mixing a
cocktail. Every now and then Larry Cope, who is one of the Younger
Brothers, will introduce a pure Twist number, but he has to use a
historical preface, sort of like they do at Roseland or some place
when they say, well, now we’re going to have a good old-fashioned
waltz.
The Jersey Teen-age set has no trouble
getting into the place now, although there are always a lot of
tourists, especially on the weekends, who have heard of the Twist
and the Peppermint Lounge.
“—and we had a lot of little kids in
here Saturday, showing them the dances. They were, you know, little
kids, four to ten years old, something like that. They catch on
pretty fast, or at least they see us, you know, shaking around, and
they do that. And then sometimes we get women’s groups. They’re
going to a show or something, and they then drop in
here.”
On the one hand Marlene sees a
limitless future for the Twist as an institution. She figures the
tourists coming to the World’s Fair will add years to its life, and
already she and the dancers are working on an act for the Fair
called “Twisting Around the World,” in which they will start off
doing a native dance from some country when somebody shouts out
“Twist!” in the native tongue, which usually comes out “Tweest!”
and then the native dance becomes the native twist. Marlene had
another idea, which was “Twisting Into Outer Space,” but it looks
like it will be “Around the World.”
In another sense, however, Marlene does
not associate the Twist with the future at all. Marlene’s goal!
Marlene’s goal is … Marlene’s answer should reassure a whole
generation of Jersey mothers about where the Jersey Teen-age
rebellion is heading, it and all its bouffant babies, nylon stretch
denims, Dick Tracy eyes, Nehru coats and Monkey
dancers.
Out in the club the Epics, with four
electric instruments going, are playing “Doing the Dog,” and Misty
is doing the Dog, and Janet is doing the Mashed Potatoes, and Jerri
Miller is doing the Monkey, with a few baroque emendations, but
Marlene reflects a moment, as if upon her busy round of work with
the churches, the benefit balls, the women’s groups and the
youth.
“Well,” she says, “I’d like to teach
dancing, in my own house, you know, the way it was when I took
lessons from my teacher. Or maybe be a psychologist. I used to want
to, and I may still do that. Anyway, I don’t want to live in New
York. I want some place more like where we used to live in New
Jersey. I don’t like living here. There aren’t any
trees.”