Swing: from Time to Torque (Dance Floor Democracy at the Hollywood Canteen)

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Swing: From Time to Torque (Dance Floor Democracy at the Hollywood Canteen)

by Sherrie Tucker

2013

This is the published version of the article, made available with the permission of the publisher. The original published version can be found at the link below.

Sherrie Tucker. (2013). “Swing: From Time to Torque (Dance Floor Democracy at the Hollywood Canteen.” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences 142(4):82-97.

Published version: http://www.dx.doi.org/10.1162/DAED_a_00243

KU ScholarWorks is a service provided by the KU Libraries’ Office of Scholarly Communication & Copyright. Swing: From Time to Torque (Dance Floor Democracy at the Hollywood Canteen)

Sherrie Tucker

Abstract: The Hollywood Canteen (1942–1945) was the most famous of the USO and USO-like patriotic nightclubs where civilian hostesses jitterbugged with enlisted men of the Allied Nations during World War II. It is also the subject of much U.S. national nostalgia about the “Good War” and “Greatest Gen- eration.” Drawing from oral histories with civilian volunteers and military guests who danced at the Hol- lywood Canteen, this article focuses on the ways that interviewees navigated the forceful narrative terrain of national nostalgia, sometimes supporting it, sometimes pulling away from or pushing it in critical ways, and usually a little of each. This article posits a new interpretative method for analyzing struggles over “democracy” for jazz and swing studies through a focus on “torque” that brings together oral history, improvisation studies, and dance studies to bear on engaging interviewees’ embodied narratives on ideo - logically loaded ground, improvising on the past in the present.

There is No Color Line at This Coast Canteen –Chicago Defender, January 30, 1943 What does it mean to have a body that provides an institution with diversity? –Sara Ahmed, On Being Included1 Democracy! That’s what it means, Slim! Everybody equal. Like tonight! All them big shots, listening to little shots like me, and being friendly! –Sgt. Brooklyn Nolan, Hollywood Canteen (1944)

SHERRIE TUCKER is Professor of The Hollywood Canteen (October 3, 1942– American Studies at the University November 22, 1945) was the most famous of the of Kansas, Lawrence. She is the au- thousands of uso-like nightclubs where civilians thor of Swing Shift: “All-Girl” Bands entertained military personnel during World War of the 1940s (2000) and coeditor of II. Patterned after New York’s Stage Door Canteen, Big Ears: Listening for Gender in Jazz the club featured volunteers who hailed mostly Studies (with Nichole T. Rustin, 2008). Her articles have appeared from the guild and unions of the motion picture in such journals as American Music, industry, including glamorous stars like Rita Hay- Black Music Research Journal, and worth, Deanna Durbin, and Hedy LaMarr. Bette Critical Studies in Improvisation. Davis was the president of the Hollywood Can-

82 teen; John Gar½eld was vice president. In This article is part of a larger study in Sherrie its own time, the Hollywood Canteen be- which I take the dance floor of the Holly- Tucker came a powerful backdrop for publicity wood Canteen as a lens for exploring photos of movie stars appearing patriotic swing culture as war memory in the United by jitterbugging to swing music with sol- States. By war memory, I am thinking of diers, feeding them, signing autographs, the cultural repository that literature and generally being friendly and gener- scholar Marianna Torgovnick has called ous with their time, beauty, and fame. the war complex, or the particular ways The Canteen remains one of the most rec - that national memory of World War II ognizable articulations of swing as a sym- continues to express, for many Ameri- bol of the United States, its jitterbugging cans, “how we like to think of ourselves soldiers and glamorous hostesses epito- and to present ourselves to the world, mizing a selfless, innocent “Greatest Gen- even at those times when the United eration,” a uni½ed nation of “Good War” States has been a belligerent and not- nostalgia. much-loved nation.”4 The Hollywood Yet the Hollywood Canteen is also Canteen is part of a larger package of nos- remembered as the site of conflict when talgia of uncomplicated American good- Canteen board members fought over ness during World War II that has played, whether people could dance across race and continues to play, a powerful role in lines. When challenged by those less constructing national memory and re- keen on integration, Bette Davis and John cruiting patriotic identi½cation (even for Gar½eld, along with members of the seg- those too young to remember the war). regated locals of the Los Angeles musi- What explains the persistent appeal of cians unions, threatened to pull their swing dance, and what alternate narra- support. While the “knockdown drag out tives are forgotten when swing memory ½ghts” about integrated dancing (in seg- as war memory is the only one remem- regated Hollywood) might suggest that bered? Of the sixty people I interviewed, all was not well at the dance floor of the most of the white participants remem- nation, the narratives that circulated bered an integrated dance floor, while about these battles served to prove that most people of color remember a segre- the Hollywood Canteen was an especially gated, or partially segregated, space. democratic space. Such civil rights angles Nearly everyone thought the Canteen dominated Canteen coverage in the na - had something to tell us about democracy tional black press, popular front press, in the United States. It is in the push and and Down Beat, while mentions of race- pull of those multiple, contradictory, dif- mixing at the Canteen were absent from ferently embodied orientations to Holly- the mainstream press.2 The democratic, wood Canteen memory that I’ve found a integrated dance floor became promi- new way to dance as a swing scholar in- nent in biographies and autobiographies terested in music, race, and democracy. of celebrities of the era, and is well cov- This essay focuses, in part, on Amiri ered in scholarship by historians of jazz Baraka’s (then LeRoi Jones) grammatical and swing, World War II, and Los Ange- intervention indicated in the title of his les, as well as in World War II documen- Blues People essay “Swing: From Verb to taries and museum plaques.3 Nonethe- Noun.”5 In this piece, Baraka identi½es less, the lasting image in national mem - effects of cross-cultural musical travels ory is the white jitterbugging starlet and from black to white America by tracking soldier. the historical route of swing from some-

142 (4) Fall 2013 83 Swing: thing African American musicians did with one who is not at home.”7 Mackey argues From Time pulse and forward motion in big band for a practice that would remember that to Torque music in the late 1920s through the 1930s, other is what people do; it is not what peo- to the static commodity that became ple are. Drawing a distinction between known as Swing, a brand name genre that two verb forms of other, he identi½es 1) after 1935 spoke primarily to mainstream artistic othering as a practice of “innova- white America (and middle-class black tion, invention, change on which cultural America), and that largely withheld pro½ts health and diversity depend and thrive”; and jobs from African American musi- and 2) social othering as “the centralizing cians. In the war years, swing was not of a norm against which otherness is only a brand, but a kind of national anthem measured, meted out, marginalized.”8 for the United States, then ½ghting for The cultural verb “to swing,” then, is but world democracy with segregated armed one of many examples of artistic othering forces, segregated blood supplies, and a practices of African Americans, people social, legal, material, and spatial land- who have been subjected to social other- scape entrenched in uneven and incon- ing. Guests and volunteers at the Holly- sistent rules about race that white people wood Canteen did and experienced both. often were oblivious to. The Hollywood Social dancing and its music are both Canteen, with its iconic jitterbugging social and artistic practices–and dancers hostess and soldier, functioning as war who swing to music that swings may navi- memory about a Greatest Generation gate social othering and artistic othering conceived as diverse, but nearly always in dynamic tension, even in the most depicted as white, would seem to epito- noun-destined times and places. Writing mize the noun-side of Baraka’s analysis. about another dance floor in her book But my adherence to Baraka’s verb/noun I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a analysis was challenged by conversations Practice of Freedom, dance and movement with diverse former Canteen-goers, who scholar Danielle Goldman argues that told wildly different stories about their although New York’s Palladium was bodies on the late swing era dance floor. unique in its integration in the 1950s, it Poet and novelist Nate Mackey’s 1995 was still “not a ‘free’ space where every- twist on Baraka’s essay, “Other: From thing was equal and anything was possi- Noun to Verb,” helps our understanding ble.” But rather than taking evidence of with an alternative grammatical inter- contradiction as occasion to debunk the vention, moving the concept of other, integrated dance hall, Goldman empha- rather than swing, from noun to verb sizes the importance of attending to mul- form.6 Mackey intended to shake up tidirectional desires and interpretations. institutional multiculturalism “redress” In her analysis of improvised dance as a projects that “nounify” aggrieved com- “practice of freedom,” she acknowledges munities as “others” for the institution to that a “variety of constraints imposed by assist, manage, and include. A multicul- racism, sexism, and physical training turalism project that seeks to diversify shaped how people moved,” and that one white space by including others resem- dancer’s experience of a powerful mo- bles what race scholar Sara Ahmed has ment, “while meaningful in many ways, called the hospitality model of diversity, in [was] neither shared by, nor identical for which “whiteness is produced as host, as the dance hall’s many patrons.”9 For that which is already in place or at home. Goldman, to let go of an assumption of To be welcomed is to be positioned as the “sameness” or consensus of dance expe-

84 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences rience does not diminish the political haps it is precisely swing’s dual history as Sherrie power of dancers’ abilities to “interact musical melting pot and crime scene of Tucker with constraints,” and in fact, it com - appropriation that positions it to acquire prises “the possibility for meaningful ex - such a seductive national memory as uni- change.”10 The contradictions and incom- versally American and democratic. What patibilities of dance floor memories at if swing excels as a national music, not in the Hollywood Canteen are absolutely spite of, but because of its ability to mean necessary to understand its democratic different things to many people, while potential. also signaling a uni½ed wartime America? An assumption of sameness dominates Although the image of the idealized sol- the either/or noun-verb dichotomy in dier-hostess jitterbugging couple was scholarship on swing’s ability to repre- presented at the time (and rolled out sent American identity. For African Amer- many times since) as a nostalgic repre- ican studies scholar Perry Hall, the polar- sentation of national unity and American ized analyses are that: 1) swing was an likability in a time of war, the former unusually integrated cultural formation, Canteen-goers that I talked to often nar- expressing populism and multiethnic, rated the hinges of noun and verb forms multicultural, and interracial mixing as of swing and other. Listening to former particularly American; or 2) swing repre- Canteen-goers remembering their young sented a blatant example of white Ameri- swing-dancing bodies is one way to re- can appropriation of black American cul- member connections between the dance ture.11 floor and the commotion against its sur- Rather than arguing one side or the face, to explore in swing memory the ten- other, I am interested in swing’s capacity sions of America as the many and the one. to slip between these poles. If, as cultural and gender theorist Inderpal Grewal has When swing scholarship shifts from argued, America continues to be imag- music to dance, the analytic center tends ined as simultaneously multicultural and to pivot from time to torque. “To swing,” white, both within the United States and de½ned by jazz and swing scholars who from the perspective of other nations,12 focus primarily on music, tends to apply then the easy slide between swing as either to conjugation of rhythm, tempo, pulse, multicultural populism or white domina- and the forward motion often, but not tion de½nes its symbolic potency. How always, achieved in the emphasized sec- neatly the popular national narratives ond and fourth beats of the four-four about swing musicians who pioneered rhythm. Jazz critic Kevin Whitehead de - the integration of a segregated industry, scribes swing as a “headlong, but relaxed and patriotic jitterbug dancers who inte- sense of propulsion, as if the music was grated the dance floor, ½t what historian skipping down the sidewalk. It often Nikhil Pal Singh has called “civic myths relies on small surges and hesitations, on about the triumph over racial injustice” placing a note or accent just in front of or that have become “central to the resusci- behind where a metronome or tapping tation of a vigorous and strident form of foot would put it.” But, he adds, “Count American exceptionalism.”13 Basie’s bassist Walter Page could place When swing culture is narrated as his notes squarely on the beat and swing America’s “triumph over racial injustice,” like crazy.”14 it drowns out critical opportunities for When dance scholars talk about swing, examining continuing inequalities. Per- however, we enter a world of physics, the

142 (4) Fall 2013 85 Swing: “centrifugal force, torque, and momen- identi½ed as swing’s “aesthetic articula- From Time tum” that “keep the partners spinning tion of cultural equity.” to Torque smoothly.”15 Historian Lewis Erenberg To onlookers, the lindy or jitterbug has emphasized the role of the “intimate may look like a back-and-forth, in-and- communication” of the “dance’s hand out motion. But to dancers, “swing” is clasp,” necessary in order to ensure “that less like the sway of a pendulum, and the couple could survive the centrifugal more like what would happen if you force and the obstacles of the dance.”16 could “swing” that pendulum at the end Jazz historian Howard Spring has argued of a string around and around over your that it was this new “more physical” way head.20 The heavy end becomes airborne of dancing–involving more parts of the and seems almost weightless only when body and more movements per measure you achieve the optimum combination of (four instead of two)–that spurred the force, rotation, and distance. Swing it too new musical approaches to rhythm and placidly and it doesn’t get off the ground. timbre in the music that became known Swing it too hard and the string slips out as swing.17 Swing dance scholars often of your hand and the pendulum flies identify the radical reworking of “ball- through the neighbor’s window. But room conventions of leaders and follow- swing it just right, just fast enough, with ers” into what historian Terry Monaghan just enough bend to the arm to adjust the called a more “mutually assertive” rela- speed for the weight–torque it accurately– tionship.18 and you and your dance partner achieve a Many scholars have highlighted the greater level of turning power than either “breakaway” as the de½ning property of could achieve alone. the lindy hop and jitterbug, representing In their book Physics and the Art of the integration of individual and com- Dance: Understanding Movement, physicist munity, improvised solo and ensem- Kenneth Laws and dance pedagogue ble–the dance version of what has been Arleen Sugano de½ne torque as “a kind of celebrated as the democratic principle of force that causes a rotation, like the hand jazz. “In most couple dances (the waltz turning a screwdriver or two hands turn- and the foxtrot, for instance),” writes ing a T-shaped wrench to tighten bolts on philosopher Robert Crease in his explo- a car wheel.”21 For solo dancers, torque ration of Hollywood representations of is applied to the floor through the feet, the lindy hop, “the partners hold each one pushing one way and one the other. other closely enough so that they generally In partner dance, the floor and feet still need to do identical footwork with re - do this work, but in relation to the torque verse parity lest they tread on each dancers apply to one another. Like a other’s feet.” What was radically new in physicist, the experienced swing dancer the lindy, then, was the “development of appears to defy gravity, not by ½ghting it, the breakaway,” which “made possible a but by knowing its rules, and using this flexible couple dance with room for knowledge to accurately apply the laws improvisation. Partners could do mark- of turning power, weight, velocity, dis- edly different steps–even ones unknown tance, and shape. The swing, then, for to and unanticipated by one’s partner– the lindy or jitterbug, is not all in the as long as the basic rhythm was pre- rhythm, the tempo, or even the steps. served.”19 It was the “continuous rhyth- Swing is in the crouch, bend, lean, mic play” and “driving reciprocal dy- weight, speed, balance–torque. Music namic” of dance partners that Monaghan that swings, for experienced swing danc -

86 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences ers, is music conducive to the achieve- mated the dance of people blocked by Sherrie ment of torque. restaurant and nightclub admission poli- Tucker Writer and performer Brenda Dixon cies, as well as the people who were largely Gottschild has observed that although unaware that Los Angeles was segregat- the dance was “gender-democratic” in the ed? Many different cultural associations, relatively shared athleticism of the lead embodied experiences, and skill levels and follow, race democracy was limited were brought to dance. An exuberant when white rebellion was projected onto lead who learned from the movies might black survival. She argues that the lindy fling his protesting partner around like a hop was titillating to white youth “in rag doll, while a flight-ready follow may flight from the Protestant ethic” in ways never snap her partner out of his self- it could not be to African American youth conscious two-step (one interviewee living “on the edge, literally and ½gura- called it “the GI shuffle”). But it was also tively.”22 The same pivot points that con- possible to achieve mutually enjoyable tributed to the lindy’s “potential to (though differently experienced) torque: undermine and subvert racism” and that to connect with another through touch led to integration of racially segregated and feel, ½nd the point of connection in space (“almost always in the black com- which bodies move one another, impro- munity”) also rendered swing culture vising across shared or different orienta- ripe for white primitivist titillation. For tions (including degrees of resistance, white dancers socialized in a culture that centers of gravity, and mass) and strike a constructed blackness as undisciplined, balanced pattern of tension and release ecstatic, and prone to sexual abandon, that maintained “I” and “we,” the indi- the swing-out was about letting go of all vidual and the collective–what we might control, missing altogether what was call the physics of swing democracy. The new in the lindy for black dancers.23 By breakaway didn’t facilitate this on its the 1940s, the shift from the lindy to the own. Neither did the couple steps. The jitterbug (amid other changes accompa- swing is in the torque, without which the nying the mainstreaming of swing) breakaway and coupling have no connec- sometimes obscured its origins in black tion. At the Hollywood Canteen, and else - culture. But even this cross-cultural am - where, dance floor democracy is collabo- nesia could not prevent the flow of rative and physical and not guaranteed. “primitivist” associations for many white How might we reconceptualize the ar - social dancers (and ½lm directors) who ticulation of democracy and swing cul- often saw the jitterbug as pulling out the ture as the torque as practiced on the stops, rather than as a communicative unsteady dance floor, and not in the reas- partnership between a (more) democra- suring rocking motion of the pendulum tized lead and follow that sought flight swing or in the patterned opportunities through balance. for relative freedom and individualism in Among other things, the Hollywood the breakaway? How do we speak of Canteen was a democratically conceived, torque in relation to social power imbal- explicitly patriotic, mostly white, sup- ances of race, gender, class, sex, and posedly integrated dance floor in a segre- rank? Is there a way to store past torque gated white part of Los Angeles (a for the future, in self-narrative, for exam- sprawling city, most of which was, in the ple, in stories of improvised moves on the 1940s, permeated with racially restrictive dance floor? Nostalgia is emptied of housing covenants). What desires ani- torque. But some ways of remembering

142 (4) Fall 2013 87 Swing: and telling turn the nostalgia into some- meaning. From my own dance as an From Time thing else, through tone and gesture, interviewer, researcher, scholar, and to Torque humor, and critique. How do people writer, I try to pick up new kinds of criti- apply turning power to narrative per- cal engagements with swing culture as formances of memory? Sometimes, the war memory. Instead of reifying or torque is in the telling. debunking the nostalgia, I listen for what happens to the nostalgia in Canteen- One dancer narrates her body dancing in an goers’ narratives as they tell me about the unexpected way: perhaps she breaks the rules, club, as well as the social, geographical, dances across race. Somehow this breach cre- and historical ground navigated on their ates an even more democratic dance floor nar- way to, through, and out of it, and how rative than if there hadn’t been a rule to break. they connect that with the present mo - Another would-be dancer describes the impact ment of the interview. I ask for the of rejection on the “inclusive” dance floor, dance–then try to follow–though I am, maps what it should have been like as a vision of course, the one who initiates, records, of democracy. Another compares the Holly- and analyzes the event. I ask questions. wood Canteen with another, even more demo- They answer. But they also ask questions cratic dance floor in a more racially inclusive and I answer. I try to lead in such a way neighborhood of Los Angeles. Another ascribes that I eventually follow, I want to fol- the democratic achievement of the Hollywood low–at least until I return to my of½ce, Canteen to the radicals on the staff, rather where I will write about the event with- than to the inherent niceness of Tom Brokaw’s out my partners’ input. But in the mo - Greatest Generation. ment of the dance, my listening/follow- Literary scholar and oral historian ing body sends intended and unintended Alessandro Portelli argues that the point responses to my partners, who read me, of oral history is not to replace “previous perhaps changing directions as a result truths with alternative ones,” but to lis- of something that happens between us– ten to them together, for how “each pro- a laugh, a missed joke, body language vides the standard against which the read as interest or disinterest–as my other is recognized and de½ned.”24 Lis- partners narrate order into the disorder I tening to the oral narratives in relation to initiated when I ask them to share mem- one another, to the of½cial story, and to ories of their visits to the Hollywood archival documents, I am not sifting evi- Canteen. dence for a preferable version of the past. I careened out of each interview re- Instead, I listen for relationships–pulling thinking the jitterbugging soldier-hostess together and pushing apart–to better dyad, not as a closed symbol of the na - understand the persistence and perfor- tion, but an opening for thinking from mativity of swing culture as war memory. more than one side, and even more than I hear the “of½cial” memory of the Hol- two sides. For dancers, the dyad was serial lywood Canteen in virtually every inter- and temporary, moving from one partner view; sometimes in unison with it, some- to another in gendered roles of “lead” times in dissonance, and usually a little of and “follow.” I did not literally dance each. Oftentimes, there is some point at with my interviewees, but I did interact which I hear the familiar tune torqued in with them in their homes, apartments, the telling, in which the teller leans away retirement facilities, and over the phone, from the of½cial memory, applying a bit seeking connection on the narrative of pressure that changes its direction or ground of dance. We tested each other’s

88 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences responses and moved accordingly; inter- of Los Angeles, in which most people of Sherrie preting each other in the moment, trad- color lived south of downtown and east Tucker ing questions and answers, follow-up of Main in what was, in the 1940s, known questions and stories. I felt myself pulled as the Eastside, but is today known as into many relationships and orientations South L.A. Feeling we were on the same to swing’s national potency in the 1940s page, I asked my usual follow-up ques- and the present, meanings that never tions: “What happened? What were the stray too far from the race of space and rules?” bodies, be it multicultural bodies in color- This is where Mel took the lead. blind space, blatant segregation, or the “Are you black or white?” he asked. defeat of the color line. My interviews “I’m white,” I said. with former Canteen dancers often felt Somehow, I got the sense that this didn’t like what sociologist Black Hawk Han- surprise him. But my racial identi½cation, cock has called embodied practices of once said aloud, became a mutually con- race.25 scious part of our interaction. Our interview turned in different ways than if I “Are you black or white?” asked Mel had been able to continue to abstractly Bryant, within the ½rst ½ve minutes of sense myself as racially neutral (a white our ½rst telephone conversation about the habit, and a researcher habit, intensi½ed Hollywood Canteen. by the telephone). Now, as Mel gave me So far, I had been leading. I initiated the an answer, it was in the context of what call (referred by his sister, trumpet player had become an overtly cross-racial dance. Clora Bryant, whom I had interviewed “For black people, integration isn’t just many times for my book on all-woman about rules. It’s about body language and bands). I introduced myself, and told him a look on the face. There doesn’t have to that his sister had mentioned that he had be a rope across the room. No one has to attended the Hollywood Canteen while say anything for you to know when you on leave from the Marines. He said yes, are not wanted.”26 this was true. I asked him if I could inter- I am not the ½rst white person Mel had view him for my book (yes, again). Then explained this to in his lifetime. Asking I asked him if the dance floor was inte- me to racially identify had a performative grated, as reported in the black press, the function in our conversation, shifting the musicians’ union magazine, and Down concept of racial integration out of the Beat. realm of policy or intentions and into the “Don’t you believe it, Sherrie,” he re - realm of embodied knowledge. My ques- plied. “Don’t you believe it.” tions about “what happened” and “what I hadn’t believed that a dance floor in were the rules” did not get at his embod- Hollywood at that time could be easily ied experiences, memories, or what he integrated, and I was eager to learn more had to say about the dance floor at the about how the Hollywood Canteen fell Hollywood Canteen. Race at this point in short of its stated goals. I knew that Mel the interview has to do with different ori- had been a Los Angeles-based actor for entations to the question of what consti- most of his life, and that he would have a tutes an integrated social space. What Mel unique perspective as an African Ameri- had to say about his memories of the dance can military guest who would have floor did not ½t the framework I present- already known the limits of segregated ed, in which a club was either integrated Hollywood within the social geography or segregated, where we could name

142 (4) Fall 2013 89 Swing: what was happening and pin down the ing in a new direction. Instead of stand- From Time rules. ing with Mel, facing an imperfectly inte- to Torque In asking me to racially identify, Mel grated Canteen, I had turned toward him reoriented our conversation so that it had and listened from my body across the room for his embodied knowledge, shaped phone lines to his telling of his embodied by a Jim Crow childhood growing up in a experience. Considering his dance floor small segregated Texas town, a career as perspective helps me to factor body lan- an actor spent moving through predomi- guage and facial expressions into the nantly white crowds in a racially marked social geography of memory at the Holly- body, basic training with other black wood Canteen as a together-but-unequal recruits under white of½cers at Montford democratic space–an acutely accurate Point, a furlough spent trying to recon- portrait of U.S. notions of integration as nect with his new hometown and inter- “democracy,” writ in Mel’s memory of rupted acting career in Los Angeles, and moving through racially differentiated memories of his long postwar acting Canteen space. The transmission of body career. To white Canteen-goers, the pres- language and facial expression is, admit- ence of a lone black body moving through tedly, limited in a phone interview. To an otherwise apparently white crowd speak of visual transmission over the could be seen as evidence of integration voice-concentrated medium of the phone (interpreted as either a symbol of America added another layer of embodied aware- or a caution of un-Americanism in Holly- ness–not more or less intimate–but a wood, depending on the viewers’ visions of recon½guration of the contact points of how racial difference and democracy intimacy to our conversation. were interconnected–both interpretations The next time that Mel and I spoke, he had currency during World War II). But set his Hollywood Canteen memories from the perspective of the person or per- within a longer trajectory organized sons whose burden it is to integrate the around his life as an actor and singer. He room, this same event could register as ev- told of leaving Denison, Texas, after his idence of white space, a lack of integration. high school graduation in 1942, strug- Mel is explaining to me, explicitly as one gling to ½nd housing (“skid row”) and black person explaining something to work (a busboy in a cafeteria) in Los one white person, how, from the perspec- Angeles, and being “discovered” by ma- tive of a black person, the text of the jor ½gures of black Hollywood, actor crowd–the “body language” and “look Mantan Moreland and actor/agent Ben on the face”–could indicate a segregated Carter, who helped him land the title role space, even if a black Marine was wel- in the mgm patriotic short ½lm Shoe comed into the club. This kind of segre- Shine Boy (1944). At the same time that gation could pass as integration to most the pathway he had hoped and struggled white people in a Hollywood night spot. for was rolling out to meet him, the “The Hollywood Canteen is something to impending interruption of military ser - be remembered, and something to be re - vice loomed. He enlisted in the Marines, gretted,” said Mel. “It was a different thing, hoping to be trained in Southern Califor- a wonderful thing to have a place where nia, but was sent to a segregated black soldiers could go, but it wasn’t integrated training camp in North Carolina. When in an equal way.”27 Mel returned to Los Angeles on leave in I emerged from this ½rst of two tele- 1944, he arrived as a Marine on a fur- phone interviews with Mel Bryant, turn- lough, but also, importantly, as an actor

90 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences who had made one movie and hoped to to drop us off in a pit or something. We Sherrie renew contact and resume his Hollywood couldn’t dance with any of the stars.29 Tucker career. Slaughter. Pit. Word choices, rather than Mel’s stories of Montford Point, like the even keel of his measured speech and his stories of Hollywood, tell of navigat- baritone voice, conveyed the anger and ing courses paved in paradox, maddening hurt he ascribed to unequal togetherness. combinations of possibility and restric- I asked if there were black hostesses on tion. He weaves in and out of Montford the nights he was there, to which he re - Point and the Hollywood Canteen as he plied, “No, no. Oh, no.” tells me about that time; and indeed, “So you’re describing a kind of segrega- there are more intersections than one tion?” I asked, still on a mission, it seems, might imagine. A movie star acquain- to classify the place as inclusive or exclu- tance from Hollywood–Tyrone Power– sive. was serving as a Marine in North Caroli- “That’s what it was,” said Mel, “segre- na at the same time as Mel. In one story, gation. Bette Davis, she tried her best to Mel tells how his friend, the famous actor, break it down. She was all against it. But took him to see the swimming pools at the powers-that-be won out.” Again he nearby Cherry Point where the white advised me to take stories about integra- Marines were based. This is a story of his tion in Hollywood with a grain of salt. friendship with a big star, but it is also a story of segregated and unequal condi- I’ve heard some of those tales about how tions for black Marines. Montford Point we were welcome anywhere. The Ambas- also had a pool, he tells me, but black sador Hotel is there in Hollywood. I went Marines couldn’t use it, only the white to see Lena Horne there. The man took me of½cers.28 and sat me right in the kitchen almost. I The proximity and restrictions from couldn’t see Lena for the kitchen.30 swimming pools and movie stars at Mont- I returned to the question of rules and ford Point mirror his stories of placing policy, only this time I was more careful himself again and again in restricted Hol- to work it as one dimension of the unpre- lywood, where he is successful, well- dictable, improvised volunteer setting of liked, but always out-of-bounds. On unequal togetherness he had described in leave in Los Angeles, he stayed as a guest our ½rst conversation. Did rules factor in the home of the black actor and agent into body language, facial expressions, and who had discovered him, Ben Carter. being led to a far corner of the room? Wearing his Marine uniform, he boarded “There had to be a rule, Sherrie, for it to the Red Car and rode west and north to be that blatant. It was so obvious that we the Hollywood Canteen. His voice is slow were separate. Like later on they said, ‘sep- and low when recounting his approach. arate but equal,’ but we weren’t equal.” The Canteen was a very strange place. You He was, of course, paraphrasing the now know, you’d go up to the front door, like historic 1954 Brown v. Board of Education usually you’d go with two or three other decision that overturned legalized segre- buddies in the service. And they would sit gation in the United States, a reminder you down on one side of the building, and that legal precedent would not incorpo- the whites on the other side of the building. rate this logic until a decade after his And the ½rst time they did that, I was won- Canteen visits and military service. dering what was going on. Are they leading “If it was really equal, it wouldn’t need us to slaughter? I thought they were going to be separate,” I echoed.

142 (4) Fall 2013 91 Swing: “No,” said Mel, “We’d be all together.” ply and easily integrated. But Mel, through - From Time As we wrapped up our conversation, out our interview, has pushed back at this to Torque Mel talked about his later movies and tele- interpretation, applied torque by expos- vision shows, his relentless efforts to ing the torqueless results of a democratic integrate professional and public spaces dance of the colorblind leading the color- in Las Vegas and Hollywood throughout blind. He reads others reading his body, his career, and the lingering exclusions. and he narrates the contradictions of Painful among his postwar examples was Canteen inequality: it is wonderful on his story of being denied entry when he the one hand, and hierarchical and racial- tried to see his former Marine Captain, ly exclusive on the other. The Canteen is Bobby Troupe, perform at a Hollywood rendered a barely open door–like that of nightclub. the mgm commissary, the lounge in the Just before we hung up, I pulled us once Ambassador hotel, casting calls in the more toward the Hollywood Canteen. I motion picture industry–one that had to asked Mel if he remembered any black be used again and again, under uncom- volunteers at the club, celebrities perhaps. fortable and sometimes humiliating cir- He paused for a minute. “I remember cumstances, if it was ever going to pro- Louise Beavers said she was going out vide entry. To perform, in our interview, one night, but I don’t know if they let her the stickiness of this door seemed a way in or not.” He chuckled. “I’m sure they for Mel to write/right himself as an actor must have. Surely they wouldn’t turn her on the democratic dance floor. This out. Because she had just done that pic- together-but-not-equal integration, as ture, Imitation of Life with Claudette Col- remembered and narrated by Mel, in- bert, where she played the black lady that cluded being allowed in (unlike most made a fortune for the white woman.” He Hollywood nightclubs), then being led to laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure they let her in!”31 certain parts of the club with other black The rhetorical mode again: a critical, servicemen, not being allowed to dance not literal spin, as I took it, but one that with the stars, feeling more tolerated torqued the either/or of the together-but- than welcomed, and not seeing any black not-equal basis of inclusion that Mel hostesses. connected with the Hollywood Canteen Mel’s narrative of not dancing torques within his broader repertoire of World the inclusion model of integration, turn- War II memories. Black people were al- ing Hollywood (and U.S.) democracy to lowed in these together-but-not-equal face the contradictions of unequal to- spaces (the Canteen, Hollywood, the mil- getherness. Some stories about achieving itary), but only within the same social torque on the dance floor also “torque relations as depicted in the movies: never back”: when people narrate dance floor equals, always at the service of white peo- memories in such a way as to channel ple. The uncomfortable tangle of a soldier- expectations of the typical telling of dem- actor relegated by race to the far corners ocratic dancing, and then lean at a bit of a of the room excludes him, even while it different angle, bend the knees a little includes him in a space that was adver- more, shift the play of pattern and sur- tised at the time, and celebrated for de- prise, turning it into something else. These cades afterward, as the apex of progres- are the moments when narrative pressure sive movie star-soldier hospitality. His applied to the dance floor of the nation presence may have supplied evidence for produces a different kind of dance floor some dancers that the Canteen was sim- democracy.

92 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences Jeni LeGon (born Jennie May Ligon) was were putting their lives on it, so it didn’t Sherrie a well-established dancer in theaters and hurt us to do that, you know. I didn’t like Tucker movies, a chorus line organizer, and a it particularly.”32 dance teacher when she began receiving Jeni narrated her integration of the calls to bring her chorus line and dance hostess-side of the Canteen as a moral students up from the Eastside to the Hol- compromise. She agreed to dance, not in lywood Canteen two or three times a order to approve of the Canteen as a sym- month between November 1942 and April bol of democracy, but to support black 1943. She was still a well-known dancer soldiers who would otherwise be ignored and dance teacher when I ½rst inter- in a club that white liberals viewed as viewed her in 2004. In her late eighties, integrated. Importation of black host- she was enjoying her celebrity amid the esses for clubs in locations where black tap revival. She maintained an active people did not–and were not allowed schedule, giving workshops around the to–live was a common solution for some world, and speaking about her long ca- white-dominated usos and uso-like reer that spanned from the chorus line of Canteens that “welcomed” soldiers of the Count Basie Orchestra in the early color, while at the same time preventing thirties, to seasons on black vaudeville mixed dancing. Although the black press with the Whitman Sisters, to an on-and- vociferously critiqued the many Jim Crow off relationship with the motion picture canteens that turned black soldiers away, industry, dictated by the limits of success the same newspapers did not fault those in Hollywood for black artists. Her dance that called upon black hostesses to inte- sequences were often truncated or cut, a grate the dance floors of clubs in white- pattern she attributes to the jealousy of restricted areas such as Hollywood. powerful white women stars who did not Instead, the readiness of black communi- wish to be upstaged. ties to supply last-minute hostesses was In 1941, she helped her brother, Alfred celebrated as an expression of the Double Ligon, purchase books in preparation of Victory campaign, combating racism at opening the ½rst black bookstore in Los home and fascism abroad. For example, Angeles, and she ran her dance school out in a March 1943 story in the California of the same building on East Jefferson in Eagle, the secretary of the segregated the Central Avenue District. It was in the black musicians union local 767, Florence midst of her varied career training danc- Cadrez, was congratulated for securing ers, putting acts together, and perform- “Mates for Sailors” when a Canteen Of- ing in clubs, theaters, and movies that ½cer of the Day called her up with the someone called her up and asked her to emergency alert that “90 Negro sailors bring her chorus line to volunteer at the were arriving at the Hollywood Canteen Hollywood Canteen. “They just called me in two hours.” Cadrez was able to rustle directly and asked me if I could bring the up “30 Negro girls” who “were ready and girls down. At ½rst I objected.” As she waiting when the sailors arrived.”33 recalled, the caller explained that the Can- But in recounting the integrated Holly- teen “needed black girls to dance with wood Canteen’s dependence on the lengthy the black boys. And I said, ‘Well, I don’t commutes of black women from the East- like that.’ And they said, ‘Well, that’s the side on an on-call basis, Jeni’s narrative rules,’ or something like that.” She thought takes us to the other side of that phone it over and decided to take her dancers up call, to the point of view of a black dancer to Hollywood. “I ½gured, well, the boys and actress. To secure black “mates” for

142 (4) Fall 2013 93 Swing: black men is cause for hesitation because danced similarly and we were good together. From Time of the racist history that constructs black And so that’s what it was. He’d throw me to Torque men as predators of white women. The out and I’d come back, we’d do the boogie, labor of all hostesses was to cheerfully all that sort of business. It was just a fun entertain all military guests, but while thing, and we were having such a good some white interviewees told stories of time, he and I, you know, enjoying one an - dancing across race without incident, other’s ability to do the things that we could others spoke of being instructed not to do together, not having seen one another dance across race, and even of a shore or known anything about one another patrol of½cer who beat up black men who before. danced with white hostesses. By this I heard Jeni’s telling of this story as an logic, the labor of imported black host- artistic othering in which she animates esses ensured same-race democratic danc - her younger self at the Hollywood Can- ing, enlisting black hostesses in the service teen as a political actor who torques her of whiteness that can see itself as inclu- intended role as an othered political sive. But, as Jeni told me in our interview, action ½gure. She narrates herself and her the city had far more welcoming places dance partner as modeling alternative for black soldiers–not in Hollywood, but notions of democracy on the dance floor, in the Eastside. “They could come to the while other national subjects watch and black clubs, in the black neighborhood, cheer. In saying yes to the white soldier, which was Central Avenue, of course. We not because she “can’t say no” but because had a whole bunch of clubs and they she thinks he is a damn good dancer, she could come there and have a ball if they is saying no to a nation that imagines wanted to, you know. But the Hollywood black male predators and white female Canteen was supposed to be top dog . . . prizes. And in narrating this dance as tak- so, naturally everybody wanted to go . . . ing place in a segregated environment, because it was Class A.” she says no to Hollywood’s claims to col- But one night. . . there was one white boy on orblindness. While critical of the of½cial the floor dancing with different girls and story, Jeni’s story also highlights a utopi- they weren’t dancing very well, and I was an vision of interracial jitterbugging at dancing with one of the black boys, and the Hollywood Canteen, albeit from the [the white boy] was watching me and I was point of view of a black woman exercis- watching him because he was such a damn ing agency. Dance floor democracy, in her good dancer. So, anyway, what turned out telling, is not guaranteed. It is achieved in was that he came and asked me to dance the moment, among a small set of danc- with him and I said sure. And we went out ers attuned to each other’s moves and a and started jittering, and everybody on the crowd of appreciative onlookers, within floor moved out and let us take the floor and against and despite constraints. And and we just had a ball. And he and I danced it is achieved in the interview, as she all over that bloody room that time. And torques back in what she chooses to tell everybody just stood back and cheered and the academic, whose questions, inflec- carried on, and it was really fun. I mean, tions, and responses also exert energy in you know, just the black and white thing this transaction. and that was the end of it, but this particular night, we showed them it just didn’t have Mel Bryant and Jeni LeGon are just to be that way. We were just rhythmically two of sixty former Canteen-goers who wedded, you know what I mean, we just shared with me their very different narra-

94 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences tives of navigating the swing dance floor Hollywood Canteen analysis that could Sherrie of the nation sixty-½ve years after the include them all would torque the of½cial Tucker fact. As I listened to former Canteen-goers story through differentiated dance floor traverse the social geographies of memory, travels, yielding both less and more room narrating in the present their youthful to move. In telling the dance floor of the swing dancing bodies moving through nation as a place where some bodies patriotically charged space, I could usually achieve flight, some bodies are grounded, pick up some strains of the uni½ed feel- and some bodies are injured, we accom- good version of World War II swing nos- modate more restrictions, but also more talgia (pitched at different volumes); but interpretative space, more unexpected I also heard it actively pushed and pulled turns, more critique. In fact, one could say by narrators approaching it through that in their differences, dissonances, and unique orientations to its social geogra- sporadically achieved torque, the Canteen phy. Even those whose memories most interviewees achieve more democracy– resembled the sentiments expressed by if the goal of a democratic dance floor is nostalgia offered insights into the differ- not only to divide people in half and ence it makes to imagine an embodied match (some of ) them in ideologically point of view from one or the other side appropriate paired units of lead/follow, of the jitterbugging couple. but also to create a space where all orien- In our interviews, former Canteen-goers tations pull, all touches transmit and danced with and against the footsteps of receive signals, and all bodies and power that idealized jitterbugging couple. A relations are weighted into the equation.

endnotes Author’s Note: This article is drawn from my forthcoming book, Dance Floor Democracy: The Social Geography of Memory at the Hollywood Canteen (Duke University Press). I am very grateful to Ken Wissoker and the anonymous readers for all their feedback about this project. I am also grateful to all the interviewees, as well as the copanelists and participants at confer- ences, talks, and seminars, all of whom have turned me in ways that helped me get this work off the ground at key moments. A special thank you to Christopher Wells for the dance les- sons, both theory and practice. Thank you also to Duke University Press for permission to publish this section in article form. 1 Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 49. 2 See, for example, “No Jim Crow at Calif. Canteen,” Afro-American, May 8, 1943; “Bette Davis Upholds Mixed Couples at Movie Canteen,” Chicago Defender (national edition), January 9, 1943; and “Canteen Heads Have Row over Mixed Dancing,” Down Beat, April 15, 1943, 1. 3 James Spada, More Than a Woman: An Intimate Biography of Bette Davis (New York: Bantam Books, 1993), 193; Bette Davis with Michael Herskowitz, This ’N That (New York: G.P. Put- nam’s Sons, 1987), 128; and David W. Stowe, Swing Changes: Big-Band Jazz in New Deal America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 161–162. 4 Marianna Torgovnick, The War Complex: World War II in Our Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 2. 5 LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka, “Swing: From Verb to Noun” (1963), reprinted in The LeRoi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader, ed. William J. Harris (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 1991), 33–50.

142 (4) Fall 2013 95 Swing: 6 Nathaniel Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” in Jazz Among the Discourses, ed. Krin Gab- From Time bard (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 76–99. to Torque 7 Ahmed, On Being Included, 43. 8 Mackey, “Other: From Noun to Verb,” 76–77. 9 Danielle Goldman, I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 22. 10 Ibid., 54. 11 Perry A. Hall, “African-American Music: Dynamics of Appropriation and Innovation,” in Borrowed Power: Essays on Cultural Appropriation, ed. Bruce H. Ziff and Pratima V. Rao (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 31–51. 12 Inderpal Grewal, Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), 19. 13 Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country: Race and the Un½nished Struggle for Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 17. 14 Kevin Whitehead, Why Jazz?: A Concise Guide (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 10. 15 Joel Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine: Modernity, Technology, and African American Culture between the World Wars (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2003), 258. 16 Lewis A. Erenberg, Swingin’ the Dream: Big Band Jazz and the Rebirth of American Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 52. 17 Howard Spring, “Swing and the Lindy Hop: Dance, Venue, Media, and Tradition,” American Music 15 (2) (1997): 191; and Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York and London: Schirmer Books, 1979), 315–316. 18 Terry Monaghan, “Stompin’ at the Savoy–Remembering, Re-Enacting and Researching the Lindy Hop’s Relationship to Harlem’s Savoy Ballroom,” in Dancing at the Crossroads: African Diasporic Dances in Britain: Conference Proceedings, ed. Caroline Muraldo, Mo Dodson, and Terry Monaghan (London: London Metropolitan University, 2005), 36. 19 Robert P. Crease, “Divine Frivolity: Hollywood Representations of the Lindy Hop, 1937– 1942,” in Representing Jazz, ed. Krin Gabbard (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1995), 209–210. 20 Ethnomusicologist Christopher Wells experiences this difference between what looks linear from the outside and what he experiences as a dancer as a “tension and release feel,” in which even the slotted send-out associated with West Coast style is hardly linear, but built from the gathering and sending of energy. Christopher Wells, conversation/demonstration, Charlotte, North Carolina, April 2012. 21 Kenneth Laws and Arleen Sugano, Physics and the Art of Dance: Understanding Movement, 2nd ed. (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 70–71. 22 Brenda Dixon Gottschild, Digging the Africanist Presence in American Performance (Westport, Conn., and London: Praeger, 1996), 56, 22. 23 Dinerstein, Swinging the Machine, 258–268. 24 Alessandro Portelli, The Death of Luigi Trastulli, and Other Stories: Form and Meaning in Oral History (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), viii–ix. 25 Hancock was speaking of predominantly white revivalists in the 1990s. See Black Hawk Han - cock, “American Allegory: Lindy Hop and the Racial Imagination,” Ph.D. dissertation, Uni- versity of Wisconsin-Madison (2004). See also Eric Usner, “Dancing in the Past, Living in the Present: Nostalgia and Race in Southern Californian Neo-Swing Dance Culture,” Dance Research Journal, Congress on Research in Dance 33 (2) (2001): 87–111; and Juliet McMains and Danielle Robinson, “Swinging Out: Southern California’s Lindy Revival,” in I See America

96 Dædalus, the Journal ofthe American Academy of Arts & Sciences Dancing: Selected Readings, 1685–2000, ed. Maureen Needham (Urbana: University of Illinois Sherrie Press, 2002), 84–91. Tucker 26 Mel Bryant, telephone interview with author, July 25, 2000. 27 Ibid. 28 Mel Bryant, telephone interview with author, October 28, 2000. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid. 32 Jeni LeGon, telephone interview with author, November 26, 2004. 33 “Flo Cadrez Gets Mates for Sailors,” California Eagle, March 17, 1943.

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