Exactly What Were Ward and June Up to After the Beaver Went to Bed? Jimmy Vargas Takes a Look at a Telling Relic from the 50s. In 1952 a tome erupted from the sewers of America's sin alley, gushing its spurious ink into book form, shattering the smug social and political tectiles of America.Its title? USA CONFIDENTIAL. It was a searing post-coital cigarette burn to the seductive warblings of the Kinsey Report, a corrosive Zippo salute from yesteryear's male before the incendiary no sex war-cry of bra-scorcher Betty Friedan, and a premonition of American social decay that allowed for Marshall Mcluhan’s, Anton La Vey’s and Alvin Toffler's smooth segues into the sixties to exploit America's already shattered moral psyche, all of them becoming messiahs of a new permissive order. Catapulting into the national best sellers at number two for 1952, USA CONFIDENTIAL, made uneasy bedmates with the Revised King James Bible, which held it off from the national top spot with a Mosesian righteousness. But only just. These apostles of apostasy and social decline were two New York tabloid hucksters: Jack Lait, who worked for the Hearst paper chain, and nightclub proser, poseur, and entertainment goss' hound for the New York Herald, Lee Mortimer. The sleaze and sinuendo of America was taken out of the pool hall, the clip joint, the burleycue cooch joints and five-dollar cribs and bound in respectable hardcover green canvas ( something I guess to match the Ethan Allen Revolutionary repro furniture in the loungeroom ) and placed on the coffee tables of Middletown Yankeeville Ozzies and Harriets right alongside the new edition of their also recently purchased King James bible. Yeah Salvation and Sin. America? What did she do? She chose both. Lait and Mortimer had already curried up expectation of something nasty, polluting the clean drinking water of this fair nation with their three previous tomes Washington Confidential an indictment on the swish, red-wearing public servants, Chicago Confidential, a piss-paean to the Sicilian brotherhood, and New York Confidential, a hate / love letter to the racket roach-filled Big Apple of their wordscape back yard. If you have one noir strand embedded in your DNA, the lusty images and script conjured by USA Confidential will vibrate in your veins, burst your blood vessels, and scorch your peepers. It is the first and ultimate black bible. Saying it as it was, as it is, and shall forever be. For in the beginning there may have been the word. But that word was sin. USA Confidential is a national occult phone directory of every venality available on tap to American men and women post war. The fifties were not polite. Nor was it righteous. Leave that to the nostalgiaists. In reality it was a fetid fornicating fug-fest of political social and sexual dislocation, and USA Confidential proves it, nominating names and volunteering sordid libertines. Proffering directions, addresses, names, street corners, and reservations if one wanted to sample the forty-eight different local cuisines of adultery, gambling, narcotics, miscegenation and other delectable perversities, it was an alternative underground Route 666 for those who traveled the left hand path in a grunting Big Daddy Roth-mobile. Lait and Mortimer spiel it like bucolic spielers outside a bawdy burlesque house. Your guides and goaders as they direct one across this immoral Rubicon that is the American waste-scape. They switch caps from passage to page. Moral promoters of the immoral. The capricious captains of the good boat Sewer USA. "SEATTLE...SKIDROW on the SOUND’ they wrote, ‘...likes to think of itself like a miniature San Fran...but it smells of fish. Rivoli Burlesque is the only place in town where chorus girls play in the flesh, and the majority of them have plenty of it. Most of them are bags. Those who want the best send for call girls provided by every cab driver and bell boy. The best are expensive, metered from 20 dollars an hour to 100 dollars a night..." If a guy didn't have that kind of green, Lait and Mortimer recommended..... '...streetwalkers who are common and lousy, favorite gathering is the "Totem Pole" on skidrow..." Traveling salesman? Meeting up in New Orleans for a get together with other company swabs? "Gertrude Yost 935 esplanade phone FR-4814...agent supplies party girls for conventions..." Looking for a little bit of foreplay action before giving Aunty Gertie a call? "Striptease at DAN'S INTERNATIONAL SETTLEMENT... where girls strip and do dirty dances. This tawdry cafe is noted for its dwarf waiters chosen so they don't obstruct the patrons view of the stage." But the national ass-grinding just wasn't happening in sleazy sidestreets of sin alley USA, it was at the top of the town too, which was conducting it's own fiscal screwing of the nation on the sly. Lait and Mortimer played this canard like an outraged Jimmy Stewart / Mr. Smith goes to Washington. "The casualties in Korea are frightful, and treasury figures show Truman taxed America more between July 1 1945 and July 1 1950 than the entire national bill from the founding of the government in 1789 until he took office including two world wars the civil war and thirteen years of Roosevelt. 20 billion dollars more in five years than all of his predecessors exacted in 136 years...and yet Washington demands millions more...it issues fraudulent figures...we are rich in deflated dollars..." Tired of paying an indiscriminate tax to fuel a war you didn't vote for...Well how about a migratin' to Texas !!! "Money talks, Texas has money. That’s why it gets favorable laws, such as the joker in the income tax which allows oil speculators to take 27 half per cent off the top of their income for depletion plus permitting them to charge off about 90 per cent of the cost of sinking the well against current operating expenses if it hits, and deducting all if it doesn't." While you're at it, why not unhitch your troublesome spouse in Texas while you're there? "For residents of the state, grounds for mental cruelty which can be anything, including burping at the breakfast table, an uncontested divorce costs 35 dollars, and Texan law does not recognize alimony." Feeling free and frisky now? Want to practice the US-Latin Good Neighbor policy? Why not head on down south out of Dallas towards the border? Plenty of senoritas who are more than happy to raise their flamenco dresses and mambo their muchacha-chas with your chachos. "San Antone...Matamores street ...whores cost you five, ten dollars...all the tamales have Latin pimps...they usually roll customers, and being Latin gentlemen do no work, drink tequila." Or no? The femme ain’t your thing, you trill to the sound of a canary of your own color? Then why not try San Diego? "The fairy fleet has landed and taken over the nations most important army base....Lonesome B-girls sit by themselves, moodily getting drunk alone while the fairy dives roll merrily.....there is nothing anywhere as disgusting as the 'Cinnabar' in the 800 block. Its waiters are prancing misfits in peekaboo blouses with marcelled hair and rouged faces..." This town has it all...Mexico is on its border and is its private larder/garage, whether it be drugs, or chopped up cars. Great entrepreneurial opportunities await!! "The smuggling of sleeping pills bought in wholesale lots, in Mexico for a cent and a half each, packaged in San D and sold in Los Angeles for 25 cents each." Or how about taking a detour to that upright bastion of propriety and the home of the American Revolution, or as Lait and Mortimer describe it... "BOSTON ...Baked Beans and B-Girls....!!! "Apparently Puritanism backfires in reverse, a society that frowned on sex woke up to find sex gone underground...Massachusetts and Connecticut are the only two states where rubber contraceptives are forbidden by law...Scollay Square...the No Mans land ...its stripteasers are the lowest, its whores the cheapest, and its denizens the most degraded." The lingo, the walk, the mean addictions of the jail-yard in the nineteen-fifties had already insidiously invaded Pleasantville, USA. Beyond the concern that your next-door neighbour could be a pinko, there was also the disturbing fear that they might also have been eyeing your new Chevrolet, your house, or even your daughter with more than a neighbourly gleam in their peepers. "In the land 9,028,535 individuals have been arrested in crimes serious enough to involve fingerprinting... a tenth of the adult population with an equity in crime...." But also the sins of the sons and daughters are litanized scrupulously in the USA Confidential's 396 pages with Lait and Mortimer as fortunetellers on the carney fairground of post war adolescence. And surprisingly they were dead on the money. In their chapter "HOPE OF THE FUTURE", they take the baseball bat to that insidious thing called Jive, and the roaches that snack on it. "The plague of juvenile delinquents is more than a fad, its a fanatical drive tied up with religious and political overtones, a sort of secret society...teenagers speak their own mystic tongue, unintelligible to adults.....their cells are juke box joints, soda dispensaries and hot record shops...like a heathen religion it is all tied up with tomtoms, hot jive and ritualistic orgies of erotic dancing, weed smoking and mass mania...many music shops purvey dope, assignations are made in them...." And could it have been that our hosts Lait and Mortimer were private card-carrying members of the KKK? "Here is where white girls are recruited for colored lovers.....Another cog in the giant delinquency machine is the radio disc jockey, this character has become the high priest....we know many platter spinners are hop heads..." How about this for prescience? This written twenty-five years before Stonewall. "Confidentially men aren't men...The whole nation is going queer..the mayor of one of our cities is a swish...the masculinization of women, the feminization of men, is obvious where one travels in this nation...it is as pitiful a menace as the nation faces." USA Confidential was a document of America's absolute moral decline already in the making. Seek it. Read it. Weep. They nailed your sin before you were even born. (C) JIMMY VARGAS 2008. |
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