50. Stop Those Swinging Girls!

COPYRIGHT 2023 Peter Schmitz - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome to Adventures in Theater History! Here on this show we try to bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m Peter Schmitz, and our sound and music are by Christopher Mark Colucci.

I’m very pleased to note that it’s been two years since Chris and I started working on this show. It was the end of March 2021 that we really began putting out episodes, and now here it is March of 2023. In that very first episode, I believe I assured everyone we probably could tell the entire story of Philadelphia theater history in 50 episodes. But, well, hey look this is the 50th episode and we are not even close to being done. So - plenty more adventures are in store for you in the future, that’s the way to look at it. And there’s plenty to hear about in this episode, too, as we continue  to tell the story of official censorship in Philadelphia theaters. As has been the theme throughout this Second Season - there will be fights, there will be political disputes and controversy, with extra helpings of drama and conflict!

[DRAMA IS CONFLICT THEME]

This time we are really digging into the joys of the Prohibition Era, during the 1920s - A time when what was going on in Philadelphia could really be quite consequential - after all, in those years it was a city of well over 2 million people, the third biggest city in America - in fact it was the 12th largest city in the entire world. 

Now “Prohibition” is generally understood to be the period from 1920 to 1933 when the United States government Amended the Constitution to ban sales and distribution of alcoholic beverages. But as we shall see, this era had a parallel campaign in many American cities like Phladelphia to restrict the intoxicating content of theater as well. As the United States took over leadership on the world stage, its actual stages were featuring that newly energized and self-confident American theater of the 1920s, ready to serve the both high and low entertainment needs of the nation. And there were also those that were there to stop it. 

[MUSIC, UNDER]

It was the first week of September in 1923, and the Philadelphia theatrical season was just getting underway. The first offering booked into the Sam S. Shubert Memorial Theatre on Broad Street was one of those musical comedy revues - with lots of songs, lots of skits, fast-paced comedy, lots of dancing and production numbers, and very little substance. This show was called the “Ted Lewis Frolic,” and like most shows of its kind its ads mostly emphasized all the many charms of its female chorus. In this show they were called The Foster Girls - “twelve pretty young maidens with nimble feet and dancing eyes.”

Now this was not a particularly original idea for a show, but it was a reliable one. For well over a decade, nightclub revues and Broadway spectacles had featured lots and lots of female pulchritude on stage. Along with a cast of comedians, dancers, singers and other artists, these shows might feature a slender plot line, or none at all.  Their titles usually involved the name of the producer who put the show together, and then some word that signaled fun, entertainment and sex. You know, like The Ziegfeld Follies, George White’s Scandals, or Earl Carroll’s Vanities. There was also the Greenwich Village Follies and a Shubert Brothers annually updated revue called Artists and Models. After these shows would run in New York, they would then tour to theaters in other American cities, like Philadelphia. It was an accepted genre, and a quite popular one. When you came right down to it, the whole point, really, was to show either elaborately clothed or barely clothed beautiful young women on the stage. Sometimes their figures were frozen in artistic tableaux, but sometimes they were in motion - and of course every producer kept trying to top the others, or improve on his show from last year, so the amount of flesh on display kept getting more and more audacious.

Ted Lewis was a popular jazz musician of his day, he was not a big name producer. He had been one of the first white musicians to really master the New Orleans Dixieland style, but that wasn’t making him enough dough, so he had put together this particularly ambitious theatrical revue, to mine this well-established and lucrative vein of entertainment. But, you know, Ted wasn’t really a theater producer by trade, and maybe it wasn’t the best organized show. On opening night September 3rd, confusion backstage had held up the curtain by an hour, while the Philadelphia audience waited impatiently. This lack of organization was all the more evident because across Broad Street at the Forrest Theatre, George M. Cohan opened his own delightful new show Little Nellie Kelly without any problems to speak of. [06:22 MUSIC OUT]

But disorganization wasn’t the only problem Ted Lewis faced. Within a few days after its opening, Philadelphia Mayor J. Hampton Moore had received so many complaints about Ted Lewis Frolic that he ordered it - and the Shubert Theatre itself - totally shut down on September 6th, 1923, after holding a hearing about the matter at City Hall. During this hearing much evidence was presented about the supposedly salacious material in Ted Lewis Frolic. Evidence of such morally objectionable incidents - shared by two city detectives and two local theater critics who had seen the show - included the following: A “bedroom scene”, a “camping scene,” a dance in which a woman went through “violent physical contortions,” and another dance in which a young lady “in negligee attire” swung on the pendulum of a huge clock. (Though the detectives admitted the figure was otherwise motionless, and “might have been a statue.”)

The offending bedroom skit, in particular, apparently contained an off-color joke about the nation of France rebuilding her depleted post-World War population by . . .well, a vigorous attention to natural human desires. That’s it. I’m sorry I cannot be more specific - I’m just as curious as you are, but that’s all the newspapers would print about that joke. Representatives of the citizen volunteer group, the “Law Enforcement League” who also went to the show may have been more detailed in their report, which was also shared at the hearing. Anyway, once he saw their report, the Mayor quickly moved to revoke the Shubert Theatre’s license.

“It seems that constant police supervision will be necessary to see that shows do not cater to the vicious and morbid,” said Mayor Moore. “Let there be no misunderstanding. This is a final warning. We will not countenance such shows in this city.” 

Now by this point in our podcast series, we’ve heard quite a number of Philadelphia mayors making similar pronouncements, and promising to stand up for public order and decency. And on the whole that had proved to be a smart political stance for any politician to take. The likely explanation for this whole affair was that Mayor Moore, a loyal member of the Republican Party political machine, had been receiving pointed criticism from Democrats and other reformers for allowing a “culture of vice” in the city’s theaters. Moore wanted to set an example of his rectitude in advance of the upcoming election season.

But Philadelphians don’t like being told what to do, or how to behave, as we’ve also seen. And there were usually plenty of pretty risque shows in Philly, and there must have been quite a demand for them or there wouldn’t have been so many. In 1915 the Philadelphia newspaper Evening Public Ledger made fun of the city of Boston for appointing what the Ledger termed a ‘theatrical Pooh-Bah’ to oversee all the new shows coming out of New York and also in progressive cutting-edge Little theater scene. “Boston will be a laughing stock of other places besides Broadway,” the Ledger opined. And it warned that censorship campaigns always started with putting chorus girls in tights, and ended up by banning plays by respected world authors like George Bernard Shaw.

But now, eight years later, it looked like Philadelphia itself was heading down that very same path. What was perhaps surprising to many Philadelphians was that the mayor had not come down hard on some sleazy burlesque theater on 8th Street, or on the decidedly risque material and flimsy costumes worn in the Marx Brothers show I’ll Say She Is, which had been running at the Walnut Street Theatre all summer long.

(Groucho: “I wanted to play a dramatic part/ The kind that touches a woman’s heart/ To make her cry/For me to die . . “ Chico: “Did you ever get hit with a coconut pie?” Groucho: “There’s my argument - restrict immigration! I think I’ll recite!” “Let her go, all right.” “I think I’ll give a recitation/ Or would you prefer to see me give my Chevalier imitation? IF THE NIGHTINGALES COULD SING LIKE YOU, THEY’D SING MUCH SWEETER THAN THEY DO. ‘CAUSE YOU BROUGHT A NEW KIND OF LOVE TO ME - Well, whaddya think?” “Get me a brick.” “Here’s a brick, I always carry one for this invitation.” “I oughta lay this on your head.” Groucho: “You can’t do that, you don’t belong to the bricklayer’s union!” )

Instead, the mayor had pulled the license to perform for one of the largest theaters in the city, and was threatening the cash flow of one of the largest and most powerful owners in the entire country - the Shuberts.

Lee and J.J. Shubert had immediately hurried down to Philadelphia from New York when they heard about this closing. Through their lawyers, they argued that they were not the producers of Ted Lewis Frolic, and anyway the offending material had not been in the show when it had played the famously censorious Boston the previous week, and had already been removed, anyway. Judge McCullen of the Philadelphia Municipal Court soon agreed with them that the Mayor had acted hastily The judge issued an injunction, reopening the theater for the evening’s performance. The two Shubert brothers, who famously could barely stand each other most days, left Philadelphia’s City Hall triumphantly, arm in arm.

[TRANSITION MUSIC]

And that was the thing about all these censorship fights in the 1920s. While there certainly was a great deal of demand in some circles for increasing control over the wicked theater, there did seem to be even more folks who were highly excited and interested in the prospect of seeing something cutting edge and risque and bawdy. It was a very common ploy of theatrical producers of the era, in fact, to deliberately provoke the censors to come down on them. The producers calculated that they could quickly get a judge to let them open back up on free speech grounds, anyway. And the ensuing media publicity about the censorship was box office gold as far as they were concerned. Once a show was back open again, they could reliably fill the seats with theatergoers who were grateful to the censors for letting them know where the real good and racy material could be found!

That seems to explain this story I found in the Philadelphia Inquirer, on February 17, 1925:

"Maybe it was a press agent's stunt and maybe it wasn't"

"At any rate, the scene was the Forrest Theatre; the time, last night; the occasion, the opening of the Earl Carroll Vanities; the principals, Earl Carroll, Rev. Frederick Poole, the Mayor's representative on the Board of Censors, two policemen and an audience."

"Mr. Poole, who had seen a performance of that same show in Newark, requested Mr. Carroll to 'dress some of the girls in two scenes in tights.' The producer refused, but before the curtain went up, stepped on to the stage."

" 'Mr. Poole has objected to some scenes,' [Carrol] said. 'Do you people of Philadelphia want the show put on as I have conceived it in other cities - even if it means having it closed after tonight - or do you want it changed in accordance with Mr. Poole's suggestions?' "

"The audience indicated it wanted it the naughty way."

"Then Mr. Poole telegraphed General Butler.  . .[and] a conference was held."

" 'It is against the rules of the Board of Censors to allow nude women on the stage. They must wear tights," said Mr. Poole." 

Now, what was going on here? Who was General Butler? Who was Reverend Poole? And wait, Philadelphia had a Board of Censors? Well now yes it did. Philadelphia had a new mayor in town, William Freeland Kendrick, and he was here to clean the place up. Though Prohibition had technically been in effect nationally for three years, everybody knew that it had had almost no effect in the City of Philadelphia. Before the Volstead Act, Philly had been a city full of brewers and distillers, as well as many many chemists. Lots of guys knew how to make alcohol, in one form or another, and they also knew how to sell it to their regular clientele. Philly bars and saloons were operating openly - they were only speakeasies in the sense that the password was “beer” or “whiskey”. Under the easygoing corruption of the Harding Administration, the mostly Republican leadership of the city was off the hook. 

But now Harding was dead, Vice President Calvin Coolidge had taken his place in office, and the newly elected Freeland Kendrick had taken over the reins of Philadelphia city government in January of 1924. Kendrick knew the World’s Fair, the Sesquicentennial Exposition, was about to be mounted in Philadelphia in just two years, and he wanted the city to be ready for it. So, one of the very first things Kendrick did in office was to recruit the famous soldier, Marine Corps Brigadier General Smedley Butler, to become the new director of Public Safety. 

Smedley Butler was from an old Pennsylvania Quaker family, had gone to the Haverford School out in the suburbs, and was the son of a sitting Congressman. But Smedley had made his career in the military, and he was a very un-Quaker-like violent sonofabitch, frankly. For decades now he had been fighting the wars of the growing American Empire. He had fought in Cuba, in the Philippines, in China, and in the “Banana Wars” of Honduras.[17:14] He had been awarded a Congressional Medal of Honor when President Wilson had sent the Marines into Mexico, and then he’d been awarded a SECOND Medal of Honor when the US intervened in Haiti. Butler got the Navy’s Distinguished Service medal for his service in World War I, and after the war became the commanding officer at Quantico Base in Virginia. But things were too quiet. Looking for a new kind of battlefield, General Butler was gratified when President Coolidge recommended that he be temporarily detached from the military to help clean up Philadelphia’s crime and vice. And no sooner was he in the job than General Butler set about smashing up - I mean literally smashing up - all the bars, saloons, breweries and distilleries that were still openly operating in Philadelphia. The general completely transformed the city’s police force, militarizing it, effectively. And get this: Butler commandeered the then under-used Metropolitan Opera House on N. Broad Street. He held mass meetings there with the entire assembled Philadelphia police force, haranguing them from the stage, before sending them out to conduct more raids, to bust up more dens of vice and crime. Butler even raided the upper class hotels of the city, like the Bellevue-Stratford, and poured their stores of gin and scotch into Philadelphia’s gutters. 

And General Butler was happy to work hand-in-hand with the other great innovation of the new Kendrick administration: The Philadelphia Board of Theatre Control - usually referred to by everybody as the Board of Censors. After all, vice was vice, and smut was smut, and corruption was corruption - it was all of a piece.

But was this actually going to happen? Because the members of this new official board were mostly representatives of theater owners and managers. Its head was Thomas M. Love, a longtime employee of the Nixon-Zimmerman Theatrical Syndicate. Theater owner Fred G. Nixon-Nirdlinger himself was another member, as were several other longtime employees of his. So it seems to me that really this “board of theater control” was mostly the theater industry looking after its own commercial interests - oh it would clean up the smut, all right - as long as it didn’t damage ticket sales. Also on the board, surprisingly, was Howard H. Furness, Jr. the great Philadelphia Shakespearen scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, who seemed to be there mostly to be an authority on classical theater and to inform it about the proper meaning of the bawdry and obscure literary references that might puzzle the censors. Tellingly, there was only one clergyman in the whole group, and his name was the Reverend Frederic Poole of the Methodist Church on Arch Street.

Frederic Poole was English, by birth, but had spent many years as a Christian missionary in China. He had met and married a Philadelphia lady missionary there, and had come back to the city with her to help set up a church in the city’s growing Chinatown neighborhood - in the heart of the Tenderloin District north of Market Street. This was not an assignment for the faint-hearted, and once Poole had even been shot in the arm as he got caught in the crossfire during a Tong War between rival gangs. But now things had calmed down, but nobody seems to have counted on was how seriously Rev. Poole was going to take this new assignment to be a theater censor as well.

Poole was not afraid to travel, after all, and he took it as part of his mission to take the train to nearby American cities to catch touring Broadway shows before they came to Philadelphia. He would take careful notes from the audience, and then return to Philadelphia and quietly inform the producers what language in their shows had to go, what numbers had to be cut, and what body parts had to be covered.

Now Rev. Poole wasn’t anti-theater, no not at all. He kinda liked it. He wasn’t a prude, he felt that actors could say ‘damn’ on stage, just not us any what he called “fancy profanity.” Now, unlike our earlier episodes about clashes between the pulpit and the stage, Rev. Poole wasn’t really interested in stopping plays about the Bible or religion or ones that put clergymen in a bad light. The policy of the new board would be one of correction, said Rev. Poole, and not one of obstruction.

The good reverend was evidently quite happy with his newfound importance, even celebrity in the local theater world. He was once persuaded to go on the stage himself - when an actor in a touring company at the Broad Street Theatre fell ill, Poole was recruited to play the character of a doctor in the final scene of Hurricane. Its female star, the lovely actress Olga Petrova, even rewarded Rev. Poole with a warm kiss when the show was all over.

[MUSIC, UNDER]

But the Earl Carroll’s Vanities, now, this show that we mentioned earlier  . . . this was where Rev. Poole was going to draw the line. And Reverend Poole certainly had heard that even in permissive New York City this recent version of Earl Carrol’s Vanities had gotten the famous producer jailed - something about its lobby photo displays of the dancer Kathryn Ray, Carroll’s current mistress. A New York policeman had even once chased Miss Ray around the stage during a show with a blanket, attempting to get her to cover up, for god’s sake, much to the amusement and delight of the audience. But Earl Carroll had just soaked up all the publicity - he gleefully sold even more tickets for folks who were now eager to see what Miss Ray was - or rather wasn’t - wearing.

Now that the show had finished its New York run, Carroll was milking the publicity wherever he went. In every city he would advertise a casting call for a couple dozen local women to help fill out the ranks of the chorus while it was in town. “WANTED” said the ads in the Philadelphia papers, “The 24 loveliest girls in Philadelphia  . .. Rare opportunity for a stage career. Apply in person.”

Poole had caught the show while it was still in Newark before it opened in Philadelphia, and he had informed Carroll these girls, all of them, whether they came from Philadelphia or somewhere else, simply had to wear more clothes. He was particularly concerned about one skit in which Kathryn Ray was apparently affixed to a pendulum which she too swung - seemingly entirely naked - upside down on the pendulum of a huge clock! I don’t know why this recurring image was apparently a trope of 1920’s sexuality, but there it is. As we have already learned, Carroll gleefully refused to change the show on opening night, and even came out onstage at the Forrest Theatre to brag to the audience about it, and cow the censors with the crowd's gleeful approval.

[MUSIC OUT ]

But Carroll had not counted on the determination of Reverend Frederic Poole to rein him in, for once. Summoned to a meeting at City Hall the next morning, and he strolled in nonchalantly, expecting to get away with it again. But then Carroll was alarmed to discover not only Mayor Kendrick and Revered Poole in attendance, but General Smedley Butler himself, glowering and shouting at him from across the table, and threatening him with being thrown in jail once again, and worse. Evidently the New York producer quickly agreed to all the Board of Censor’s demands, and the show was allowed to continue its two week run without further trouble before it left town.

So, was that the way things were going to be in Philly from now on? No semi-nude girls onstage? No racy lyrics? And worst of all, no booze in a quiet hotel bar after the show? Never again?

Well, no, of course not. Philadelphia, and all its gangsters and its bootleggers, and everybody who wanted to see a fun show and have a drink afterwards, just . .  waited this storm out. They knew these guys would all move on. Eventually the other members of the Board began to worry about Rev. Poole and his assiduousness at his job. They began outmaneuvering him on every vote. And by the end of 1926, even Smedely Butler got so much on everybody’s nerves, that he was forced to leave town in defeat, and go back to the Marine Corps. “Cleaning up Philadelphia was worse than any battle I was ever in,” Butler admitted.

And by the end of the decade, even the once tireless Revered Frederic Poole was a spent force. He had won some battles - in the fall of 1927 the Maurine Watkins play called Revelry was withdrawn by Garrick Theatre after it had been flagged for rough language and for mocking American political figures. And Rev. had lost many other battles. For instance, he had been unable to stop his fellow board member Horace Howard Furness from sponsoring and funding a production of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata - certainly one of the most gleefully bawdy and sexually explicit plays ever written. It was staged at the Walnut Street Theatre in May of 1930, over Rev. Poole’s objections. 

And in a public meeting that same year at the Philadelphia Friendship Liberal League, Rev. Poole realized the war he had fought for so long was perhaps now totally lost. After he had patiently explained once again to the meeting that Philadelphia’s show-going public was not as developed or advanced as New York’s “more cosmopolitan” theatergoers, he found himself widely criticized by almost everyone else in attendance. The general opinion in the room was that Philadelphia was plenty sophisticated, thank you very much. And as he listened to this storm of criticism, Dr. Poole just quietly arose from his seat, announced well, he would not stay any longer, struggled into his overcoat, and hustled out the door.

By February of 1932, the Board of Censors found itself with very little to do, anyway. Along with the general downturn in theater activity as the Depression had settled in, there had been another turn in the city’s political fortunes. Prohibition, everybody knew, was about to be repealed, as the nation finally admitted that the great experiment was a terrible mistake. Furthermore, that old political hack J. Hampton Moore was returning to office as the city’s mayor, making it likely that the lenient policies towards the theater were returning, too. Mayor Moore made it clear that when he got into office he would abolish the Board of Theatre Control. 

So Reverend Poole retired from the scene, as it were. In a farewell letter that was published in the papers, Poole wrote that he was happy to have rarely actually needed to threaten to close down a show. “This work has had its troublesome angles and perplexities, yet, withall, its pleasant associations, too, and I shall always treasure the memories of friendships made with many worthy ladies and gentlemen of the stage.”

[TRANSITION MUSIC, UNDER]

October 11, 1933: Sally Rand was coming to Philadelphia with a “ballet troupe” of 16 other girls, it was announced. Three days later, having arrived in the city, The burlesque dancer visited all of Philadelphia's clothing stores, said the newspapers, but claimed she couldn't find a thing to wear. She decided to make herself something instead. "I guess I'll be sewing all week," she declared to reporters. "But I'll have to, for I hear there's to be somebody from the Mayor's office at every performance!"

In truth, Miss Rand was not surprised at all at the official attention she was receiving from the Philadelphia city government. She had, after all, asked for it. Sally Rand was the subject of national press coverage for her infamous fan dance, an act first developed at the Paramount Club in Chicago. In the dance she would play peek-a-boo with the audience's expectations, twirling with enormous feathered fans while the orchestra played a very classy number - Debussy's "Clare de Lune". During that summer's World’s Fair, Chicago’s "Century of Progress,” Rand had been arrested four times in one day for riding a horse in public - supposedly with only her feathers and Max Factor body paint on top of her naked skin. She was given a sentence of one year for these infamous crimes, but it was suspended, so she could continue to perform at engagements in New York - where again she welcomed her inevitable court summons. [FADE MUSIC OUT]

Philadelphia theater owner Joseph Feldman wanted to get in on all this great publicity. Ticket sales were down during the depths of the Depression, after all, and he had a big house to fill. And it seemed that the blue laws - the ones that restricted cabaret and theaters and when they could perform, were collapsing all over the country. With so many folks out of work, and with money so tight, people’s attitudes about sex were getting much more lax.

Joe Feldman contracted with Sally Rand to perform for one week at the Stanley Corporation’s Earle Theatre, an ornate 2700-seat movie and variety palace at the corner of 11th and Market Streets. He hoped she would help draw in big crowds for the movie he was showing afterwards, Golden Harvest. Now this was a big mainstream venue on the main shopping strip in the city! Even though the city government had dropped its Board of Censors, the fan dancer had forced its hand, and felt it had no choice but to do . . . something.

Sent into the breach was Henry Starr Richardson, the former head of the Philadelphia Board of Movie Censors. In the absence of a standing board of live theater review, Mayor Moore used Richardson as his adviser on all such moral matters. He sent Richardson to attend a preview of Rand's fan dance at the Earle, and Mr. Starr, perhaps predictably, declared that unless she put on clothes she could not legally perform in Philadelphia. (During his official inspection visit, Rand gleefully teased Starr that in every show she was wearing skin-tight garments all the time, anyway - or was she? Maybe he’d like to take an even closer look?)

But in public, at least, Sally Rand declared that she would never compromise her bare standards. "This is supposed to be aesthetic," Sally said to a group of eager Philadelphia pressmen. "I am supposed to be a white bird on a moonlight night against a dark background. Who ever heard of a bird in pants?" 

The ensuing publicity was exactly what Feldman and Rand had wanted, and Miss Rand happily twirled away on Market Street all week to Debussy's music, before each screening of Golden Harvest. The fans artfully whirled round and round, and so did Miss Rand and nobody, not even the censors or the cops could tell if she was wearing anything at all. And it was . . . beautiful. It was artful, it was delightful. Houses were packed. And everybody just enjoyed themselves, and laughed at bluenoses still trying to spoil the fun and enforce all these old-fashioned stodgy laws. It’s not that you couldn’t still find examples of fervent denunciations of the wicked stage from the area’s clergymen - but on the whole the fixation on what women were wearing - or not wearing - during shows largely calmed down. 

And by that point, the most of the fervent Philadelphia cultural warriors were leaving the scene. Reverend Frederic Poole lived his final years in retirement in the quiet Philadelphia Main Line suburb of Ardmore, and he died there in 1936, and Thomas Love, his former boss on the Philadelphia Board of Theatre Control, died the following year, in nearby Cynwyd, Pennsylvania. General Smedley Butler, for his part, chose the suburb of Newtown Square to live in when he finally left military service in 1931. Now I can find no record that Gen. Butler spent any time at all worrying much about what was going on in the theaters of Philadelphia from that point on. This soldier had a late in life turn to cranky radical causes and anti-capitalism, and began a regular public speaking tour against war profiteering and American imperialism. “War is a Racket” was the subject of his many public speeches. These speeches were always highly entertaining, and well - colorful. After a lifetime spent in the US Marines, General Smedley Butler just couldn’t keep from cussing, and “hells” and “damns” and worse language kept popping out of his mouth. When Butler made a series of political addresses over Philadelphia radio station WCAU, sponsored by Pep Boys automotive stores, the General was rankled when he was told that he could NOT speak off the cuff, he had to listen to the censors - and stick to the script. They simply would not tolerate any indecency.

[“Drama is Conflict” CLOSING THEME]

So, that’s our show for today. 

Thank you, all  of you, so much for listening to, and for coming along on another Adventure in Theatre History. We wish we could say that the bluenoses and blue laws are gone forever, but we all know all too well, they sure ain’t. But let’s try to forget about that for the moment, and enjoy the cheerful celebrations of a very little-known 1934 Hollywood  short film, complete with a beautiful female chorus in miniskirts and halter tops, entitled “What Price Jazz?”

[ AITH END MUSIC]

COPYRIGHT 2023 Peter Schmitz - ALL RIGHTS RESERVED