Above: The Cat and the Fiddle (Pete Gordon) and Mickey Mouse (a monkey in a very creepy costume) were featured in 1934's Babes In Toyland.
We close out the old year and ring in the new with a bit of song and dance from three musicals that entertained New Yorkers in the waning days of 1934.
The work of composer Jerome Kern and lyricist Oscar Hammerstein II were prominent in two of those films, adapted from successful Broadway productions—the romantic comedy Music in the Air and the sentimental Sweet Adeline. Success on the stage did not necessarily translate to the screen in either case, according to critic John Mosher.
And there was Babes in Toyland, a Hal Roach film headlined by the comedy duo Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy. The film was well received by critics, including Mosher, who wrote that Babes in Toyland “was far more successful than [1933’s] Alice in Wonderland, and the children will probably be far less bored by it than they generally are by those films designed especially for them.” However, similar to Alice the costumes seem creepily crude, such as the weird rubber pig costumes and the almost terrifying Mickey Mouse, portrayed by a hapless monkey dressed to resemble the big-eared icon. It was apparently the first and last time Walt Disney allowed the Mickey Mouse character to be portrayed outside of a Disney film. No wonder.
* * *
Alms for the Poor
Woolworth store heiress Barbara Hutton was one of the richest women in the world in the 1930s, and her lavish lifestyle in the midst of Depression attracted the attention, and the ire, of newspaper columnist Ed Sullivan. In his “Notes and Comment,” E.B. White made this observation:
* * *
Oh Baby
Most of us know something about the weird and somewhat tragic tale of the Dionne quintuplets, raised from infancy before the public gaze and exploited to sell everything from dolls and books to soap and toothpaste. When E.B. White made this brief mention in his “Notes and Comment,” the story of the quintuplets was still a jolly one, and their delivering physician, Dr. Allan Roy Dafoe had gone from being a country doctor to one of North America’s most trusted medical authorities. Dafoe would become the childrens’ guardian and impresario, and make a fortune marketing their story and images.
* * *
In the Year 2400
“The Talk of the Town” examined the “Buck Rogers” craze, fed by a cartoon strip, a radio show, and an array of toys.
* * *
What’s It All About, Alfie?
Art and architecture critic Lewis Mumford offered praise for Alfred Stieglitz’s latest exhibition at the photographer’s gallery, An American Place. Mumford noted Stieglitz’s “astringent quality” that rose above the philistine tastes and “stupidities” of American life.
* * *
From Our Advertisers
The back cover of The New Yorker was coveted by tobacco companies, the makers of Camels and Lucky Strikes (seen here) both featuring sumptuous photos of stylish women using their product, women being a key growth market for the companies…
…same for the brewers, who also sought out female consumers to bolster sales of their brands…
…Ponds continued to roll out the seeming legions of socialites and lower-tier royalty to sell their jars of cold cream…
…the magazine’s ads were often directed at middlebrow class anxieties, as we see here…
…by constrast, this ad from Bonwit Teller (graced by fashion illustrator W. Mury) took us out of the stuffy parlor and onto the beckoning beaches of the Caribbean…
…we move on to our cartoonists…all of the spot illustrations in the issue were holiday-themed, and here are a few choice examples…
…Daniel ‘Alain’ Brustlein introduced a bit of color to a monastery’s dining hall…
…James Thurber continued to explore the dynamics between the sexes…
…Barbara Shermund did a bit of dreaming with her modern women…
…Carl Rose gave us Christmas cheer, with some reservations…
…and lastly, Perry Barlow with something for the holiday procrastinator…
Above: Newsreel cameramen perch on boards resting on a windowsill to get a birds-eye view of a passing parade, circa 1930. (Public Domain Image)
We marvel at, and sometimes decry, today’s instantaneous news coverage of wars, disasters and the like, but ninety years ago newsreel crews did a remarkable job of filming and delivering the latest news to thousands of theaters across the U.S. and around the world.
In his “A Reporter at Large” column, Morris Markey penned a lengthy account of Fox Movietone’s coverage of the SS Morro Castle disaster. En route from Havana to New York City on Sept. 8, 1934, the luxury liner caught fire near the New Jersey coast. Due to the ship’s design and the ineptitude of the crew, the blaze claimed 137 lives. Markey described how newsreel crews—with their bulky cameras and sound equipment—went into action, including a cameraman who “goaded” a pilot into taking him aloft through vicious weather conditions.
Somehow the cameraman aboard the airplane (which was forced down by weather three times) was able to get his footage to the Movietone office by noon, less than seven hours after the office first received word of the disaster. By three o’clock, five thousand feet of film from all sources was being developed.
Markey concluded with this observation about the “rugged” and persistent newsreel cameramen:
In the aftermath of the Morro Castle disaster, a scene of enormous tragedy was turned into a tourist attraction…
Fox Movietone News produced sound newsreels from 1928 to 1963, and in the UK as British Movietone News…here is Movietone footage of the Morro Castle disaster, as presented by British Movietone in 1934:
* * *
Up In The Old Hotels
Last week “The Talk of the Town” looked in on one of Manhattan’s oldest saloons, McSorley’s. For the Sept. 22 “Talk” the subject was “Oldest Hotels,” two of which, The Cosmopolitan and The Grand, remarkably survive to this day.
* * *
The Six-Million Dollar Road
The first roadway designed exclusively for automobile use was likely the Long Island Motor Parkway, privately built by William Kissam Vanderbilt II because he wanted a road suitable for auto racing. He established the Vanderbilt Cup races on local roads in 1904, but after two spectators were killed and many others injured, in 1908 he began building what would become a 45-mile (72 km) toll road from Queens to Lake Ronkonkoma. After two mechanics were killed in a 1910 race, the New York Legislature banned racing on the road, which the state took over in 1938.
* * *
From Our Advertisers
I have nothing against accordion music, despite years of exposure to Lawrence Welk during my youth, but I find it hard to believe that a Park Avenue socialite (identified here as Mrs. René Du Champ Bellinger) would contemplate tormenting her posh friends with a Hohner squeezebox…
…Esquire magazine was barely a year old when it posted this ad in The New Yorker…its appeal to men (and their anxieties) keeps it going today…
…it’s interesting how companies in the 19th century and on through the 1950s featured idealized, bird’s eye images of their factories in advertising, doubtless believing that consumers associated size (and smokestacks) with prosperity, and therefore a quality product…
…White Rock, however, has used the image of the Greek goddess Psyche for more than a century to promote the purity of its spring water…
…purity was also the main point of this ad from Daggett & Ramsdell, who hawked their wares to the Park Avenue set…after more than 130 years D&G is still in the beauty business…
…this next ad is almost unbelievable…single rooms starting at $5, double rooms $7, and a whole suite for $10…at the Plaza…okay, $10 is roughly equivalent to $225 today, but half of that could get you a single…
…and yet another unlikely claim from R.J. Reynolds regarding the energizing qualities of their Camel cigarettes…it seems the last thing you would need while climbing a mountain is smoke in your already over-taxed lungs…
…however, let’s give proper due to Georgia Engelhard (1906–1986), who scandalized the mountaineering world by ditching the Victorian climbing skirt in favor of a pair of climbing pants. Engelhard was the first female climber to ascend many of the peaks in the Rockies…
…it seemed like nearly everyone smoked in the 1930s, even in ads that had nothing to do with tobacco companies (detail)…
…on to our cartoons, we begin with Richard Decker and some retail competition…
…George Price drew up a curiosity even Robert Ripley couldn’t believe…
…Robert Day examined advances in evolutionary science…
…E. Simms Campbell offered up this abbreviated love story…
…Peter Arno gave us a director with a god complex…
…and one from Ned Hilton, and a new perspective on flying…
…on to Sept. 29, 1934, with a cover by Arnold Hall, who produced at least twelve covers for The New Yorker between 1933 and 1939…
…and we go straight to ads, beginning with this alarming image that greeted readers on the inside cover…why would this prompt anyone to purchase a can of onion soup?…
…the Rainbow Room on the 65th floor of Rockefeller Center opened in 1934, and it quickly became a focal point for the city’s elite…
…Lucky Strike continued its series of ads featuring fashionable women looking smart with their product…
…our cartoons include this spot illustration by Otto Soglow, who did spots for The New Yorker for many years…although Soglow’s Little King moved to the Hearst newspapers, he continued to contribute cartoons to The New Yorker until 1974…
…George Price continued to explore life as a levitating man…
…the enforcement of the Hays Code had this teen in a “fix,” per James Thurber…
…Gluyas Williams continued his exploration of various crises, this time in the music world…
…Alan Dunn gave us a glimpse of civilization via the pharaonic sculptures that were emerging on the face of Mt. Rushmore…
…and we close with the wonderful wit of Barbara Shermund…
The news of the day in May 1933 included a visit to the U.S. by Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, a controversial Diego Rivera mural at Rockefeller Center, the abandonment of the Gold Standard, and the continuing saga of legal beer.
Writing under the pseudonym “Guy Fawkes,” Robert Benchley opined on the state of the print media in “The Wayward Press”…an excerpt:
* * *
From Our Advertisers
I wonder what it was like to cruise on the Dnieper River for fourteen days through “Colorful Ukrainia” during the Great Famine that Stalin imposed on that land, killing as many as five million people…
…more ads from the back pages touting various libations including Trommer’s “White Label” beer, a drink made from conch juice called “Konktail,” and an ad illustrated by William Steig promoting “imitation gin and other flavors” made by Red Lion…none of these products exist today…
…however you can still buy canned spaghetti, if that is your thing, but not “Force” breakfast cereal…
…still more selections from the back pages…on the left, an ad for Pear’s Soap that introduced us to “wise parents” whose children “are well-bred—the ‘nice people’ of tomorrow”…on the right, the lifeless gaze of a woman who pondered how life could be better in Tudor City…and in the middle, an unlikely one-column ad from luxury car maker Pierce Arrow…the automaker was America’s answer to Rolls Royce, but the Depression would take it down by 1938…
…I’m guessing the Velveeta is the mild one…
…technology was transforming beachwear, including this “Swagger Boy” outfit spun from Dupont’s latest synthetic, Acele…
…B. Altman, on the other hand, went full-color to promote their exclusive, imported fabric under the trade name Meadowbrook…
…and who ever thought a tire could look so posh, here dominating a gathering of the smart set…
…and look at this swell, sporting top hat and walking stick, but he also knows a good value when it comes to his tires…
…we move on to our cartoons with James Thurber and a lot of people apparently going nowhere…
…Helen Hokinson’s girls were all ears at the latest club gathering…
…Otto Soglow’s Little King got in on the excitement of legal beer…
…and we continue to the issue of May 20, 1933, with a cover by Arnold Hall, who did at least eight covers for The New Yorker during the 1930s…
The big news in this issue was Mexican artist Diego Rivera and his controversial mural at Rockefeller Center. Rivera’s New Yorker profile was written by Geoffrey Hellman (1907–1977), who beginning in 1929 served as the magazine’s principal writer for “The Talk of the Town.” Here’s an excerpt, with illustration by Al Frueh:
What got Rivera in hot water with John D. Rockefeller Jr. and family was a mural that departed somewhat from the artist’s earlier study sketches—Rivera had been hired to depict “man at the crossroads,” looking to the future with uncertainty but also with hope for a better world.
According to a 2014 story by NPR’s Allison Keyes, leftist organizations and various communist groups in New York criticized Rivera for agreeing to work with capitalist paragons like the Rockefellers. In response, Rivera sent assistants to find a picture of Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin. “If you want communism, I will paint communism,” he apparently said.
The subsequent inclusion of Lenin in the mural led to protests by the Rockefeller family, the press and the public. Rivera was ultimately asked to leave the country, losing yet another commission for the Chicago World’s Fair. Rivera got paid for his Rockefeller Center mural, but the work itself was demolished.
After returning to Mexico Rivera recreated the mural, adding some vengeful references (see below) to his 1934 work, Man, Controller of the Universe.
Rivera’s wife, Frida Kahlo, had accompanied him to New York, and during their time in the states (1930-34) she produced a number of now-famous paintings. However in 1933 she was not recognized as a serious artist. Indeed when she visited with the Detroit News in 1932, the headline read, “Wife of the Master Mural Painter Gleefully Dabbles in Works of Art.” In the same vein, Hellman perceived Kahlo as nothing more than a pretty helpmeet.
Rivera’s Rockefeller Center mural was eventually replaced in 1937 by American Progress, painted by the Spanish artist José Maria Sert:
The irony of the Rivera controversy was not lost on E.B. White, who offered this ballad in response:
* * *
Keep it in Your Pocket
E.B. White again, this time opening his column with thoughts on the anti-Hitler parade that was held in New York.
White refers to his “swastika watchfob”…before the Nazis came to power, the swastika was known to many cultures as a symbol of prosperity and good luck.
In his weekly column Howard Brubaker added this observation regarding life in Nazi Germany…
Back home, folks could still enjoy a taste of Germany that wasn’t associated with violence and hate…an excerpt from “The Talk of the Town”…
* * *
From Our Advertisers
The architecture profession fell on hard times during the Depression. In 1931 the Architects’ Emergency Committee began promoting the talents of unemployed architects who were willing to work for less than half their ordinary fee, limiting charges to materials, a small amount of cash, and a place to sleep…this is an example of a series of ads that ran in The New Yorker in the spring of 1933…
…one profession not feeling the hard times?—the makers of tobacco products, and specifically cigarettes…
…speaking of hard times, we turn to our cartoons and Gardner Rea…
…and we close on a bright note, otherwise known as Peter Arno…