Spectacles: Bridge to the Old World

You get all you can stand for $1.50. Horses dive into water tanks, a British stunt team boing-boings giddily on flexible metal poles, a porpoise who thinks he is a Chris-Craft drags a blonde around on water skis. There are four theaters, all with Broadway-size capacities and customers drifting freely from one to another see everything from first-run movies to geriatric vaudeville. There are goldfish races, jazz bands, a believe-it-or-not museum, ballroom dancing, a Kiddies Theater where nearly all performers are under 16, a diving bell for the observation of bottom life. All this begins on the New Jersey shoreline and seems to end somewhere near the coast of Spain: it is Atlantic City’s Steel Pier, the coelacanth fish of show business, conceived in the age of gaslight and blackface.

On Independence Day this week, the Steel Pier moved into the full swing of its 64th season, so big and boffo that only the Atlantic Ocean can compete with it for the attention of tourists. The pier draws a steady 15,000 people a day, up to 28,000 when the weather stops on double zero. They are what Owner George Hamid calls the “high blue collar types.” To keep them coming, Hamid gives them much more than corny carny fare, pays top fees for entertainment headliners. Among this season’s top drawers: the Stan Kenton and Glenn Miller bands, Xavier Cugat, Charlie Spivak and Gene Krupa, along with such juvenescent goldbugs as Bobby Rydell, Chubby Checker, Paul Anka, and the comparable Fabian, whose singing debut was made at the pier’s Kiddies Theater a short time ago, when he was twelve.

Around the Flagpole. A long time ago, in the opening season of 1898, W. C. Fields played the pier, somewhat out of place on a structure built by Pennsylvania Quakers for concerts in the salt air. For mass popularity the pier had to wait until 1927, by which time Atlantic City had become one of the first of the last resorts.

Noting that the few were giving way to the many, Incumbent Impresario Frank Gravatt gambled $80,000, brought in John Philip Sousa—and the monkey wrapped its tail around the flagpole.

Some yards up the flagpole, Alvin (“Shipwreck”) Kelly was soon compiling a world sitting record (49 days, one hour), Sir Harry Lauder was acrrracking jokes in the Music Hall, and Gertrude Ederle was finning around in adjacent waters. For five years, a whale on a flatcar was a pier feature. The long tradition of diving horses was largely established by a formidable gelding named John the Baptist, a sort of box office Seabiscuit, who plunged for 30 years, always carrying a bareback and more or less barebodied female rider. Over the years, a prodigious, petition-length list of big names showed up to play the Steel Pier, from Eddy Duchin to Paul Whiteman, Ben Blue to Bob Hope, Red Skelton to Betty Grable, Rudy Vallee and Gypsy Rose Lee.

Annie Oakley Explained. Owner Hamid, now 65. bought the Steel Pier in 1945 for $2,500,000, has extended its length to half a mile and its box office to some $2,000,000 a year. Born in Lebanon and a tumbler from the age of three, the improbable Hamid was nine years old when, in Marseille, he met the first two Americans he had ever seen: Annie Oak ley and William F. (“Buffalo Bill”) Cody. Hamid joined Cody’s traveling circus, shined the great man’s boots, kept his highballs full of ice, worshiped him, and has been a lifelong abstainer because he watched Buffalo Bill dissolve in booze.

Meanwhile Annie Oakley gave young Hamid his first English reader and patiently taught him the language—with her petite flat feet soaking in a tub of water.

After Cody folded, Hamid drifted among U.S. circuses until he had one of his own, called “Hamid’s Oriental Circus, Wild West, and Far East Shows Combined.” By 1931 he was running the North Carolina state fair, but when a gubernatorial candidate complained that Hamid was making more money than North Carolina, Hamid moved on huffily to New Jersey, whose state fair he still runs.

Hamid, long since a millionaire, now leaves the day-by-day management of the Steel Pier to his smoothly agreeable, Princeton-educated son, George Jr., 42, and some entertainers are probably thankful that he does. The Old Tumbler has no admiration for the easy somersaults of the Frankie Avalons, the Fabians, the ducktail warblers. “It used to take some body like Sophie Tucker ten years to get her name in lights,” he remembers. “Now you’re on the marquee if you cut a single record. I just can’t take paying these brats $10,000. Goddamit, I used to throw them off the pier.”