MANNERS & MORALS: Kiddies in the Old Corral

MANNERS & MORALS

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The gesticulating armies of children who will jam Central Park West and Broadway this week to see Macy’s famed Thanksgiving Day parade were prepared for what could only be described as a Sensational Experience. Bands, clowns, floats and gigantic, inflated rubber animals were scheduled as usual. But Macy’s, in one of its super coups, -had also procured the services of the noblest drugstore cowboy of them all—none other than television’s black-clad, white-haired, 55-year-old William (“Hopalong Cassidy”) Boyd.

When he hove into view—a gallant, smiling, if somewhat aging figure, sitting his white, 16-year-old steed, Topper, with the assurance born of a hundred B westerns—pandemonium was certain to reign. The screams, the whistles, the volleys of exploding caps which racket up whenever he rides through the ranks of his wriggling idolaters would probably outdo anything ever heard during the games of ancient Rome.

Sing a Song of Sixpence. Among all the U.S. enterprisers who devote themselves to titillating the unripened mind, none has succeeded as Hoppy has, both with his under-age customers and the thousands of manufacturers, retailers and advertising men who hawk his wares. Last week 63 television stations were pumping out his old movies, 152 radio stations were carrying his voice, 155 newspapers were printing his new Hopalong Cassidy comic strip, and 108 licensed manufacturers were turning out Hopalong Cassidy products at the rate of $70 million a year.

None of this has been as easy as it seems today. Back in the day of the barefoot boy and the pigtailed girl, when children collected bugs and horseshoe nails, licked the eggbeater and looked at stereopticon slides for entertainment, any tailgate medicine spieler (“Get away, boys, you bother me”) could hold them spellbound. Even so, only the more daring of the barefoot set got within range of the flares and banjo music; parents felt that the childish brain should be allowed to age at least as long as good whisky before being exposed to such works of the devil.

But in 1950 the kiddies form a vast, commercial audience, almost as important to U.S. business as their soap-opera-loving mothers; each has become a sort of quivering vacuum tube, and the man who can tune in on exactly the right wave length automatically assumes the same power over the tot that Edgar Bergen holds over Charlie McCarthy. Given just the right nudge, Junior, even at distances up to 3,000 miles, will open his mouth and say, “Mamma . . . buy me . . .”

Last week, as a result, the struggle to stimulate his avarice and his adrenal glands, channel his capacity for hero worship—and, at times, to threaten him subtly with the horrors of being a social outcast (see RADIO)—tied up whole brigades of high-powered executives and fortunes in speculative capital. Twenty-five million U.S. children in the most receptive age bracket (4 to 13) were tumbled ceaselessly in a sea of entertainment, while in the background bugles pealed, hoofbeats drummed, tires screeched, gunfire echoed and stentorian voices bawled the advantages of endless yummy products.

Boots & Saddle. Earlier generations of U.S. children had been exposed to this sort of thing, of course. More than one house was burned to the ground in the ’90s by small boys reading Nick Carter in the attic by candlelight. Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show set hordes of amateur buckaroos to lassoing gate posts and hapless cats. As early as 1907, the Youth’s Companion promised boys who sent in a new subscription and $1.15 a “No. 3 striking bag . . . new pear shape, very popular, particularly adapted for quick work . . .” Girls could earn “artistic wood-burning outfits” by selling goldeye needles.

In the 1920s, a kid with 25¢ and any sort of buyer’s instinct at all could get his blood genuinely curdled once a week at the movies—if he was lucky he could watch Bill Hart galloping noiselessly across the prairie, and shudder at the sight of Pearl White lashed to the railroad tracks. But when radio invaded the U.S. home, children began to absorb this kind of nerve-jangling opiate every day and, when it was refused them, to complain as bitterly as if they were denied nourishment.

When the fevered radio advertisers of the 1930s tried to discover just how much dough could be squeezed out of Junior—a process approached in much the same spirit as that with which the Texas Rangers squeezed information out of Mexican bandits—it seemed improbable that the growing nervous system could stand much more stimulation, or that the tender, childish gullet could gulp down more bread, breakfast food, candy or soft drinks.

This turned out to be a naive underestimate of Junior’s appetites: he pined for more & more entertainment and he got it —almost always with the encouragement of his parents, who discovered that blood & thunder would pacify him almost as effectively as Seconal, and that cutting off his comic books would reduce him to obedience faster than the old-fashioned razor strop.

Before World War II, the networks, it is true, did reform themselves up to a point. Advertising tactics which smacked faintly of blackmail (General Mills once suggested that a character in one of its shows would die for lack of medical attention unless more Wheaties were sold) were reluctantly abandoned.

But to the untrained ear the change was virtually undetectable. The Green Hornet, The Lone Ranger (“Hi-yo, Silver —awa-a-a-a-a-y!”)» Soo-oo-per-ma-a-an, The Shadow, and an ear-shattering collection of other thrillers kept on blasting through millions of loudspeakers; the announcer’s thrilling command—”Ask mother nOw!”—echoed louder than ever. Fancier and more complicated box-top premiums (Planetary Maps, Atomic Bomb Rings, Magni-glow Writing Rings, Detective Badges, Compass-Magnifying Glasses, Explorer’s Sun Watches) came flooding through the mails by the ton.

And on top of all this came television, which not only assaulted the childish ear, but (in the words of Fred Allen) threatened to change Americans into creatures with eyeballs as big as cantaloupes and no brain at all. Last week countless hordes of U.S. children not only went to the movies once a week, listened to their radio favorites among 27 children’s network programs (often reading comic books and blowing bubble gum at the same time), but spent millions of kiddie-hours squinting hypnotically at the 35 shows offered them on flickering television screens.

Home on the Range. The kiddies exhibited a leaping enthusiasm for the new and massive doses of entertainment offered by video. Overnight, almost every little boy & girl in the nation had become a cowboy; in those carefully metered periods which they spent outdoors between programs, they saw cattle rustlers around every corner. They were not the first U.S. children to indulge in make-believe about the Old West. But they were the first to catch the fever simultaneously from coast to coast and to demand such splendid arms and accouterments.

Children with impressively styled cap guns and bejeweled double holsters (many tied to their thighs to facilitate a fast draw) were so commonplace that those without them seemed a little underdressed, and those who still carried such outmoded armament as X-Ray Guns or Atomic Disintegrators, hopelessly oldfashioned. When firing, they sometimes seemed a little confused by their multi-programmed backgrounds; instead of just crying “Bang!” like older generation’s, they imitated rockets and/or ricocheting bullets (“Ptche-e-e-e-e-e-w”), enormous steel springs (“Boing-oing-oing!”), or machine guns (“Ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha!”).

But in all else—even to the horselike galloping which had become as de rigueur among seven-year-old girls (who also whinnied occasionally) as the slouch among debutantes of the ’20s—they were faithful to their hero, the clear-eyed Hopalong. Black Hopalong Cassidy shirts and Hopalong Cassidy pants were simple necessities; the more fashionable put on Hopalong Cassidy pajamas to sleep in a Hopalong Cassidy bed, had Hopalong Cassidy wallpaper (which outsold every design in the U.S. this year), ate Hopalong Cassidy cookies and peanut butter and rode a Hopalong Cassidy bicycle (which has handle bars shaped like steer horns).

Don’t Fence Me In. The man who touched off this twin epidemic of hero-worship and product-hunger had not only done so with Howdy-Doody to left of him and Kukla, Fran & Ollie to right of him, but with little of the background which might be deemed necessary for hog-tying a whole generation. He shudders at western music (particularly when sung by his principal rivals, Roy Rogers and Gene Autry), has never branded a cow or mended a fence, cannot bulldog a steer. Though he has learned to ride competently enough, he would rather see his Nielsen rating drop (last week’s: 34.8) than climb aboard a rodeo bronc.

During his early years in Hollywood, anyone who had predicted that he would end up as the rootin’-tootin’ idol of U.S. children would have been led instantly off to a headshrinker.* Boyd, an Ohio-born laborer’s son, went to California in 1915 because he yearned for money, fame, pretty girls and fun. He was a husky, handsome, good-natured youth with wavy platinum hair, and he hoped the motion-picture business would provide all. It did. He married a Boston heiress, whom he met while toiling as the chauffeur of a for-hire car; when divorce ended the union a year and a half later, he had accumulated such a handsome wardrobe that Producer Cecil B. DeMille personally gave him a job —at $30 a week.

The Deer & the Antelope Play. In the years that followed, he became the romantic star of such films as The Volga Boatman, Two Arabian Knights, Dress Parade, earned $100,000 a year—and spent $127,000 a year. It was the era of Theda Bara, Rudolph Valentino, the fantastic low-taxed Hollywood salary and the uninhibited Hollywood way of life. Bill Boyd accumulated a mansion in Beverly Hills, a beach house at Malibu, a ranch in the coastal hills, numerous bootleggers, and—with his pals Wallace Reid, Jack Pickford, Rod La Rocque—paddled happily with the tide. He got married and divorced three more times, and once during a party bought a yacht because everybody wanted to go for a boat ride.

This full, rich life ended with a bang in 1931. It was a time when many a silent star suddenly became a has-been. Boyd has another reason for his decline: another actor named William Boyd (who had played Sergeant Quirt in the Broadway version of What Price Glory?) was raided by the police during a noisy party and thrown into jail for possession of illegal whisky and gambling equipment. Hopalong-to-be suffered; when newspapers ran his picture by mistake, Radio Pictures tore up a $3,000-a-week contract, pushed him adrift.

It was four years before he got a steady job, playing the part of Hopalong Cassidy in a series of B westerns produced by an oldtime horse-opera manufacturer named Harry Sherman. Boyd and Sherman made 54 Hopalong pictures. Then in 1943, because of rising costs, Sherman stopped producing them. Boyd made twelve more on his own hook, finally was forced to quit too. In 1947, at the age of 52, he was on the beach again, this time apparently for good. But he refused to believe he was through.

His years as Hoppy had changed him. He had stopped drinking, except for an occasional glass of champagne or a little white wine & soda, a drinking regimen he still faithfully follows. He had met and married his fifth and present wife—a pretty, blonde exactress named Grace Bradley, who stayed with him when the going was toughest and converted him into the most faithful of one-woman men. And as far as the public was concerned, he had virtually assumed a new identity—that of Hopalong Cassidy.

In Author Clarence Mulford’s original pulp-paper stories, Hoppy had been a ragged, tobacco-chewing, whiskery cowpoke who walked with a bad limp. But Boyd made him a veritable Galahad of the range—a soft-spoken paragon who did not smoke, drink, or kiss girls, who tried to capture the rustlers instead of shooting them, and who always let the villain draw first if gunplay was inevitable.

Dreamer with a Penny. Boyd gambled everything on getting the television rights to the Hopalong Cassidy pictures, although television was only a vague dream when he began and some of his critics thought he might just as well have been buying up freight space on the first rocket to the moon. He sold his ranch, mortgaged his automobile, moved into a little four-room bungalow in the Hollywood hills (where he still lives), sank every nickel he could beg, borrow or earn into his vast and complicated project. It took almost $350,000 in all, involved years of haggling and the signing of 1,500 separate contracts. But when television became an actuality, he was ready.

He hit one of the most amazing jackpots in the history of the entertainment business. The old Hoppy movies had never sent any motion-picture audiences home with stars in their eyes, but they electrified the junior television slave. Because children like their stories repeated, the films have increased steadily in popularity, even though some are now being televised for the third time. Almost overnight, Boyd found himself a hero—and a hero with the Midas touch.

Jingle Jangle. In the first few months after Hopalong Cassidy shirts and pants were put on the market, the U.S. supplies of black dyes were badly strained; a Los Angeles bakery, which had been flubbing along in seventh place among its competitors for years, leaped to the van with gazelle-like ease simply by using Hopalong to promote its Barbara Ann Bread. Every product that adopted his name (at a fat fee to Hoppy) was sucked instantly into the maw of an insatiable demand.

When Boyd went on a personal-appearance tour across the U.S., he was constantly surrounded by fearsome crowds; 85,000 people rushed through a Brooklyn department store in four short hours simply to take a look at him, and 350,000 people jammed mid-Manhattan streets when he appeared outside the New York Daily News building to advertise the Hopalong Cassidy comic strip.

This phenomenon has had almost as strong an effect on the self-made cowboy as it has on his juvenile admirers. Boyd—who, at 55, is an erect, ruddy man with a direct gaze, a quick smile, and a surprising air of authority and command—now has an almost evangelistic attitude about his success. He discusses himself in the third person—as “Hoppy” or “this character”—and seems to feel that he has retapped the same deep vein of American character which made the Old West, and that it is both his fate and his duty to strengthen the fiber of U.S. youth.

Although he once rebelled at western costumes, he now—in keeping with his mission—wears a ten-gallon hat and cowboy boots at all times. He is also convinced that his public does not consider him an actor, but simply a friend—a sort^ of ^benign but colorful uncle whom it instinctively wants to invite for dinner.

“Look at the way those crowds act,” he said last week. “They all want to touch Hoppy. The women want to kiss him and the men want to hug him. They hold up their little babies to him . . . their own flesh & blood. What do those babies know of Hoppy? . . . Nothing … but the men & women want Hoppy to see those kids. Crowds never pull at Hoppy or try to tear his clothes. If they start pushing, I just say, ‘Now kids … be good kids’—I call them all kids, grown-ups and all—and they settle down.” After a moment he added moodily: “Sometimes I can feel hands all over me when I get home—but they do it because they’re Hoppy’s friends.”

His insistence on the sanctity of this semi-mystical relationship goes beyond mere words. When a department-store manager suggested that crowds which had come to see Hoppy were duty-bound to buy something in return, the people’s friend promptly punched him in the nose. A fortnight ago in Manhattan, Boyd attended an evening performance of the new Ethel Merman musical, Call Me Madam. Crowds in the lobby immediately crushed around him, but when the manager tried to extricate him he roared: “Hey—you! Let go my sleeve. These are my friends, my friend, and I’ll come into your theater in good time.” He was cheered.

The Last Roundup. Although Boyd takes a human delight in making a fast buck, his attitude toward the licensed products which made him most of the $800,000 (before taxes) he earned this year is one of really Hoppy-like restraint. He has refused to license bubble gum, sharp-pointed tops, and nine out of ten of the other products on which he has been asked to put his name, and has insisted on reasonable prices and good quality before giving his blessing to manufacturers.

Part of this attitude may well stem from pure Hopalongishness—a state of mind which has caused Boyd to cease all personal appearances at which his “friends” are charged an admission. But part of it is shrewd business practice. Boyd has no illusions that his popularity can continue at its present rate and he hopes to convert Hoppy from a television idol into a brand name before the roof falls in.

This discretion seems wise. In the face of the barrages of entertainment fired at them by advertisers, U.S. children have not only retained their sanity and their digestions but kept a deadly critical sense. Millions of them listen to radio and watch television with the same blase attitude with which New York subway riders flip through the sensations recounted in the tabloids. In the last analysis, both the advertiser and the entertainer are at their mercy—with their little fingers still gummy from the last helping of breakfast food, they can turn a button and bring industrial empires tumbling down.

Last week Hoppy’s public, by & large, was still wildly loyal to him. But here & there, kiddie-dissension reared its innocent-looking head. A few children seemed in an uneasy state of transition from cowboys to interplanetary travel as depicted in such programs as Tom Corbett, Space Cadet and Space Patrol Others just seemed to think Hoppy was too darned good for this world.

Said nine-year-old Tim Leffler, of San Francisco: “Hopalong’s dull—if he’d only just die once in a while!” Carl Bleiken, a seven-year-old televiewer of Hingham, Mass., complained: “I like Bobby Benson of B-Bar-B Ranch better. He’s more truer. Hopalong never gets wounded, but Bobby Benson does. There’s a whole bunch in Bobby Benson, and they have good teamwork, not like Hopalong Cassidy.” But the deadliest arrow was launched by little Jack Clough of Rye, N.Y. Jeered he:

“Slipalong Catastrophe!”

A cowboy never knew when the herd would tromp him down.

* Hollywood jargon for a psychiatrist.