Al Capone and the 1933 World's Fair by William Elliott Hazelgrove

Author:William Elliott Hazelgrove [Hazelgrove, William Elliott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2017-07-07T04:00:00+00:00

Chapter Twenty-Three

Gold Diggers

In the new capitalism of the early twentieth century, Busby Berkeley’s Gold Diggers told the story of Sally Rand and many other attractive, young, white women looking for fame and fortune.1 The film told it like it was: if you were pretty and sexy, then you had a shot at hooking up with one of the new millionaires minted by the overheated economy of the 1920s. At a time when only 2 percent of the population went to college, the vast majority of young women like Sally Rand heading to New York or Hollywood had only a few tangible assets. Professions for women in the 1920s ranged from teacher or nurse to starlet; the next best thing was marrying well.

Berkeley’s story line took this idea to its logical conclusion, and his musical script revolved around young girls who blatantly admitted to being “gold diggers” and believed that enticing a wealthy man into marriage was as legitimate a profession as any other. As Cheryl Ganz writes in The 1933 Chicago World’s Fair, “The film used the themes of race, class, and the commodification of sex that had been popularized in during the century’s early decades. . . . Its gold-digger chorus girls portrayed modern, aggressive women, always native-born whites, whom professional misfortune might push into prostitution. Seeking security and upward mobility, these attractive characters contrived traps for wealthy men.”2

Sally Rand took the techniques of Ziegfeld’s Follies, with their “ornamental dancers,”3 a step further. Was Sally’s endgame to catch a rich husband? On the surface it would seem that she was out to recapture the fame that had eluded her in Hollywood. The shows at The Paramount were a springboard, as far as she was concerned, and the world’s fair was now looming over Chicago. It was the event of the new century, and Sally Rand had to be a part of it.

Like the girls in Gold Diggers, Sally planned to cash in once she made it and marry well. But maybe a closer model for Rand was a dancer in Paris named Isadora Duncan. “Duncan had performed in revealing tunics that exposed her limbs, a provocative style that pioneered dance as modern art.”4 But Duncan performed during good times for socialites. Rand’s audience was the middle classes hit by the hard times of the Great Depression. They needed more than a woman in a tunic; they needed sex, and sex was sure to sell at the world’s fair.

But Sally, while popular at The Paramount, had no easy access to the fair. The rush of those looking for work with A Century of Progress had developed into a bottleneck. There were too many seekers for too few jobs, and Sally wasn’t even sure what she would do and where. Her friend Holly Knox relays a conversation she had with Eddie Callahan one night, and we can only assume Sally recounted it herself.

In her recollection of that night thirty years later, we glimpse the gold digger scheming to break through.

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