The Telephone Booth Indian Read online

  Dufour and Rogers began their joint career at the Century of Progress Exposition in Chicago in 1933 and have figured conspicuously on the midways at San Diego, Dallas, Fort Worth, Cleveland, Brussels, and San Francisco since then. Long before 1933 they had worked separately in that curious world of sixty thousand outdoor show people, the “carnies,” who travel from town to town with carnivals. A stranger once asked Joe Rogers whether he had started as a barker with a carnival. “Hell, no,” Rogers replied. “I worked my way up to that.” And anyway, he might have explained, no carnie says “barker.” The man who holds forth outside the show to bring the people in is the “outside talker”; his oration is known as “the opening.” The fellow who guides them about inside the exhibit is an “inside talker.”

  Banks, as might be expected, are reluctant to lend money to carnival people, so Dufour & Rogers finance their ventures largely by selling “pieces” of them to other men in the amusement business—owners of touring carnivals, manufacturers of slot machines, and retired circus proprietors. The ease with which they promote money from this skeptical investing public is evidence of their prestige in the profession. Outdoor showmen always refer to important sums as “paper money.” When concessionaires with less of it ran through their bank rolls at past fairs, Dufour & Rogers bought them out. That way the firm wound up the second summer of the Greater Texas Exposition at Dallas with thirtyeight attractions on the midway, including the “Streets of Paris.” The “Streets of Paris” was a girl show, but even a girl show may prove a good investment after the original proprietor's investment has been written off the books. The competition of palefaced indoor showmen, like some of the concessionaires at the Fair who had a Broadway background, always makes Lew and Joe feel good. “Give me the sky for a canopy,” Rogers once said, “and I will take Flo Ziegfeld and make a sucker out of him. How do you like that?” The difference between what will draw in Beloit, Wisconsin, and what will draw in New York, they think, is not basic, but is chiefly a matter of flash—the old vaudeville word for “class” or “style”—in presentation. “You can buy a ham sandwich at the Automat,” Dufour says, “or you can buy it at the Waldorf. What's the difference? The Waldorf has more flash.”

  The partners have little of that pure enthusiasm for a freak as a freak that distinguishes some of their friends. A man named Slim Kelly, for example, who managed “Nature's Mistakes” for Dufour & Rogers, once spent three months and all his capital in the lumber country around Bogalusa, Louisiana, where he had heard there was a Negro with only one eye, and that in the center of his forehead. Kelly still believes the cyclops is somewhere near Bogalusa but that he may be selfconscious. Lew and Joe feel that the chance of finding a really new kind of freak is a tenuous thing on which to maintain a business.

  Joe Rogers is a hyperactive man in his early forties, with contrapuntal eyes set in a round, sleek head. He has a boundless capacity for indignation, which he can turn on like a tap. Rogers' complexion, when he is in low gear, indicates rosy health. When he is angry, it carries a horrid hint of apoplexy. During the last few weeks before a fair opens, he carries on a war of alarums and sorties with contractors, delegates of labor unions, and officials of the concession department. His theory is sustained attack.

  Once, on being approached by a stranger at the Fair grounds, Joe asked the man his business. “I'm a landscape architect,” the stranger said. “Oh,” Rogers yelled before beginning to bargain, “so you're the muzzler who's going to rob me!” He had a particularly bitter time with the contractor on one of his buildings in Flushing, a tall, solemn, chamberofcommerce sort of fellow whose work Rogers regarded as slow and expensive. “He is a legit guy, a businessman,” Rogers moaned one day, “and he tries to sell me a soft con!” “Con,” of course, is a contraction of “confidence game.” A soft con is one that begins with a plaint, as, “When I made this contract I didn't know the site was so marshy.” A short con and a quick con are less humiliating variants because they are aimed at catching a victim off guard rather than insulting his intelligence. “Me, a showman, a snake guy!” Rogers continued. A snake guy is one who has exhibited snakes in a pit at a fair. The incongruity of the contractor's attempt to invert the natural order appeared to affect Rogers deeply. “Trying to cheat the cheaters!” he screamed. “I'll wrap a cane around his neck!” And he went out looking for the contractor.

  Before he had gone three steps from his office in the “Strange as It Seems” building, however, he had become involved in a quarrel with two gypsies who sought employment in the Seminole Village. “Me Indian,” said the first gypsy, who was swarthy enough to qualify. “You gypsy!” Rogers yelled. “You want to open a mitt joint in my concession! Get outa here!” A mitt joint is a booth for palm reading. Its bad feature, from the point of view of a respectable concessionaire, is the frequent disappearance of patrons' pocketbooks. This provokes beefs, which are bad for business. Rogers' life as opening day approaches is an assault in constantly accelerating tempo. Once a fair has opened, he goes to bed for twentyfour hours and wakes up thinking about the next fair on the international schedule.

  Rogers was born in the Brownsville region of Brooklyn, but for the last fifteen years he has made his headquarters in the Hotel Sherman, a business and theatrical hotel in the Chicago Loop. He finds people out there more compatible. Dufour, however, lives in an apartment in Forest Hills. Between fairs the partners keep in touch by air line and longdistance telephone.

  Lew Dufour is tall, sallow, and bland, and wears his dark clothes with a sort of mortuary elegance. Superficially, he does not resemble Rogers. “Mr. Dufour,” a subordinate once said, “is a mental genius. Mr. Rogers is an executive genius.” When Rogers fails to overwhelm an opponent in a business argument, Dufour takes up the task and wheedles him. It is a procedure used by teams of detectives to make criminals confess. As a unit, Lew and Joe are nearly irresistible. On propositions requiring dignity and aplomb, Dufour makes the first approach. At Chicago in 1934, however, Lew failed to impress General Charles G. Dawes, who was chairman of the finance committee for the Century of Progress. The partners had had a successful first season at the Fair, but the management wished to shift their “Life” show—an earlier edition of “We Humans”—to a less favorable site for the reprise of the Fair. When Dufour failed to move Dawes, Rogers leaned forward, pincered the general with his intercepting eyes, and shouted, “You can't do this to us, General! We are good concessionaires. We made a lot of money for the Fair.” The general said, “How much did you make for yourselves?” “Oh,” said Rogers, suddenly vague, “we made lots and lots.” Rogers says he could hear the famous pipe rattling against the general's teeth from the force of the general's curiosity. “And what do you call lots of money, Mr. Rogers?” Joe's voice became a happy croon. “What I call lots of money, General, is lots and lots and lots.” General Dawes permitted them to keep their old site. Presumably he hoped Rogers might relent someday and tell him. “I just worked on his curiosity,” Joe says, “like I wanted him to come in and see a twoheaded baby.” The partners had made $111,000 on the “Life” show

  A favored type of investment among world'sfair concessionaires is an aboriginal village. Eskimos, Filipinos, or Ashantis usually can be hired at extremely moderate rates to sit around in an appropriate setting and act as if they were at home. The city dweller's curiosity about exotic peoples, built up by a childhood of reading adventure books, is apparently insatiable. Providing suitable food is not such a problem as it might seem once the concessionaire has learned the fact, unreported by anthropologists, that all primitive peoples exist by preference on a diet of hamburger steak. Dufour derives from this pervading passion a theory that all races of man once inhabited a common Atlantis, but Rogers does not go so far. He just says he is glad they do not crave porterhouse. Once engaged, the aborigine must be encouraged and, if necessary, taught to perform some harmless maneuver which may be ballyhooed as a sacred tribal rite, just about to begin, folks. This is ordinarily not difficult
, as the average savage seems to be a good deal of a ham at heart.

  Dufour & Rogers' debut as practical ethnologists was really caused by a large captive balloon that blew away from its moorings at the Century of Progress. The balloon had been one of the sights of the midway, and its taking off left a large site vacant. So Lew and Joe, who already had a couple of other shows, leased the space for a tropical village, which they called Darkest Africa. Some of the partners' acquaintances say they opened with a cast of tribesmen from South State Street, which is in the Chicago Black Belt, but Lew insists that he came to New York to engage them all. “Naturally, there was no time to go to Africa for performers on such short notice,” he says, “but you would be surprised the number of real Africans there are in Harlem. They come there on ships.”

  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.