The Theatre: Fair Without Pants

Yokels gaped and the nation’s bustled churchwomen bawled righteous indignation when Little Egypt undulated her brown, pneumatic belly at Chicago in 1893. No more, no less rowdy than the Columbian Exposition, Chicago’s Century of Progress Exposition last week found itself the scene of a turpitudinous squabble which threatened to take on national proportions.

It all started last autumn when Chicago’s architects gave a Fête Charrette for unemployed architects at the Drake Hotel (TIME, Oct. 10). They rigged up a Quartier Latin of wall board and in one of the concessions they established a life class model, better looking than most, who supplied an eyeful to non-professional guests at $1 a head. The venture was such a success that famed John Wellborn Root and other architects got Merchant George Lytton and others to put up a guarantee fund with which to build the $250,000 Streets of Paris on the World’s Fair’s Midway. A good part of the U. S. public has now heard about the Streets of Paris. Some 800,000 sightseers have already been there. The artist’s model stunt was repeated, although the young lady now wears a bit more than she did at the opening two months ago. There is a Folies-Bergère show, a glimpse of a Colonie Nudiste through a keyhole (you see your own head on a painted naked body), beer saloons called Lapin Agile, Rotonde, Harry’s New York Bar. Some of them have floor shows comparing favorably with Broadway’s naughtiest.

At the Streets of Paris concession, complained a lady attorney named Mary Belle Spencer to Judge Joseph B. David last week, ”lewd and lascivious dances and exhibitions” were being held. Mrs. Spencer was particularly shocked by one Sally Rand, a comely show girl who danced in nothing but a pair of feather fans.

“Honi soit qui mal y pense,” remarked the learned jurist.

“But such dancing!”

“Some people would put pants on a horse,” the Judge imperturbably replied.

“But art classes with nude models!”

“If you ask me,” said bored Judge David, “they are just a lot of boobs to come to see a woman wiggle with a fan or without fig leaves. But we have the boobs and we have a right to cater to them. . . . Case dismissed.”

Not so easily dismissed was the next problem which beset the Fair’s night-life concessionaires.

By midnight almost any Midway visitor should have had his fill of the charming Belgian Village, the educational Gorilla Village, the miniscule Midget Village, complete with midget jail, midget court house, midget barber shop. He will have been sufficiently aghast at the monstrosities in C. C. Pyle’s and Robert Ripley’s “Odditorium,” sufficiently thrilled by the dizzying Sky Ride. He will have banged his bones on the breath-taking Cyclone Safety Coaster and the Flying Turns, a toboggan which makes its twists through semicylindrical tunnels. He surely will have wearied his feet after viewing the Pantheon of the War and the similar Battle of Gettysburg cycloramas. In short, the visitor will be ready either for bed or for a place to sit down with a glass of beer or his own hard liquor and have a different kind of fun.

Among places to go to, beside the Streets of Paris, are these: The Pirate Ship, which vulgar “Texas” Guinan left in disgust last week; the vast Old Manhattan Gardens, where the girls wear nothing but silver paint; Old Mexico, where some more employes of C. C. Pyle do the rumba; the Days of ’49, which had very friendly dance hall girls at first.

When last week’s nudity rumpus cast general suspicion on all the Fair’s rowdy, stay-up-late activity, Major Lenox Riley Lohr, the hard-bitten onetime soldier whom the Brothers Dawes made the Fair’s general manager (TIME, May 22), enacted a 1:30 curfew. On none of the three following nights was any patron of the hot spots evicted before 3 a. m.. The concessionaires complained that the only chance they had to make hay was while the stars shone. To them, President Rufus Cutler Dawes replied:

“. . . Suppose some ordinarily nice young fellows had one too many drinks. Suppose they got hold of four or five girls—maybe some show girls that were dancing in the nude, or even others—and carried them on their shoulders down the Midway, naked. It might happen; it’s very possible. What would the Iowa Ministers’ Association, or some other similar group, say about that?”

Added crisp Martha Steele McGrew of Tennessee, Major Lohr’s able assistant and author of the curfew law. after an inspection of the Fair’s night life: “After midnight about three-quarters of the Midway concessions had closed voluntarily. The chief objection to letting the others remain open indefinitely was the problem created by unescorted women who stay on the grounds late at night, too drunk to take proper care of themselves. We’ve had a terrible time keeping them off the trucks that are admitted to the grounds, to bring in supplies and collect refuse, after midnight. We never know when one of them will take a notion to fall in the lagoon.”

But at the week’s end, no one had yet put pants on the Century of Progress’ drunken, naked midnight fun. The showmen even audaciously invited Fair officials to call in the police, if they were willing to risk law suits. Fair officials finally saved their faces by moving the weekday closing hour up to 2 a. m. On Saturdays, they agreed, visitors may raise Ned all night.