Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  Meanwhile, in and around Hollywood, two seismic changes had altered the musical landscape during the years leading up to World War II: the explosion of the film industry and the arrival of émigré composers fleeing fascism. By 1933, the dual impact of the Depression and the synchronized soundtrack decimated the area orchestras and concentrated economic opportunities in the hands of movie studios. Over the next ten years, greater Los Angeles became home to dozens of transplanted European composers, many of whom brought in their wake modernist tendencies far bolder than anything Cadman or the Music Club circuit would ever embrace. Cadman responded to each of these changes.

  Cadman's earliest evocations of California reflected an emphasis on the Christian community characteristic of the Hollywood Bowl. Shortly after his arrival, he wrote “God Smiled Upon the Desert (A California Poppy Song)” to a text by Elizabeth Gordon (1917). Though cataloged with his secular songs, a footnote reminds us that it “may be used effectively as a Sacred Solo,” and its musical idiom indeed aims for the ecstatic with gently syncopated, harplike rolled chords. Cadman dedicated the third movement of his piano suite From Hollywood to his mother and their shared Hollywood bungalow at “Sycamore Nook,” with its “tall Tapers of Yucca,—those ‘Candles of the Lord.’” The religious tone here is merely a foretaste of the final movement, “Easter Dawn in Hollywood Bowl,” which spreads its bell-tolling chords over three staves and more than five octaves to evoke “One gigantic Group Soul!…Assembled there in the eternal unquenchable Spirit of Democracy,—to celebrate the Symbol of Eternal Life,—an annual homage to the White Christ.”30

  While the silver screen had made Hollywood a household word even in the 1920s, many residents, including Cadman, believed that natural beauty and civic-religious fervor were the community's real claims to fame. In fact, Cadman's sentiments are echoed quite precisely in the rhetoric of a peculiar little book called Hollywood as a World Center, by Perley Poore Sheehan. Published by the Hollywood Citizen Press only a year after Cadman's suite From Hollywood, Sheehan's monograph deals in an occult geography that places Hollywood at a worldwide crossroads comparable to ancient Byzantium: “It likewise was a place of hills, of fertile seas, blue skies. Its geographical position as to Africa and Europe was like that of Los Angeles as to the two Americas. Also it faced Asia” [emphasis in the original].31 Though he was primarily a screenwriter and secondarily a novelist, Sheehan here acted as chamber of commerce booster, reserving his highest praise for the community music movement and the Hollywood Bowl, which seemed to make “the ancient wish” of the Oberammergau Passion Play “come unbelievably true.” Still more extravagantly, he claimed that the communal feeling sustaining the Bowl sprang from “a new race, an evolving religion, the first stirring of a civilization that will mean not only the coming of a Golden Age like that of Ancient Greece but a second and universal Advent.”32

  In addition to quoting Dane Rudhyar at considerable length, Sheehan devoted six pages to Ferdinand Earle's photodrama on the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, for which Cadman had written incidental music. He discussed the weekly “sings” of the Hollywood Community Chorus, and although he does not mention Farwell by name, Farwell nonetheless returned the compliment in the second installment of his three-part series, “The Riddle of the Southwest,” written for the Los Angeles Times. Here he built on the conceit that “a New York friend” who is visiting the Southland has perceived a special racial potential in the region's populace:

  They are from every State in the Union but more especially from the Middle West and Western States…all pure American stock; people who, pushed by the intense European invasion, migrated beyond the Alleghenies and Appalachians, retaining all the old-time virtues of the race, but shedding many of the old-time narrownesses and intolerances, then migrated into the regions beyond the “Father of Waters” and the “Big Muddy,” and finally across the Sierras and the Rockies to the Pacific Slope, where, as Perley Poore Sheehan so well puts it “the Aryan race is making its last stand.”33

  Sheehan took time to praise Hollywood's multiethnicity, calling the movie studio an “intimately cosmopolitan place.” But Farwell was right about Sheehan's preoccupation with the ever-westward-moving Aryans. The first full page of his text proclaims the rise of Hollywood to be “the culmination of ages of preparatory struggle, physical, mental, and spiritual. In brief, we are witnessing the last great migration of the Ayran race. This is the end of the trail.”34

  Farwell left California in 1927 for his new job at Michigan State University, but Cadman remained in the area long enough to see Hollywood's putative position as the Aryan “last stand” seriously imperiled not just by a general increase in nonwhite population, but more specifically by the arrival of composers like George Gershwin and Arnold Schoenberg. The writing was starting to appear on the wall even in Sheehan's era; he spoke of a “degraded Orientalism that has oozed into [films] from above,” thanks to the “so-called leaders of the industry,” whom he compares to “war-profiteers.” Though not explicitly anti-Semitic, Sheehan's rhetoric evokes familiar stereotypes about the “oriental” Jew. It also carries a strong strain of racial determinism that would be intensified in Los Angeles during the 1930s. As Catherine Parsons Smith has observed, “The nativism that had been one aspect of the old Progressive movement…now, as the émigrés from Hitler gathered in Los Angeles, seemed uglier than ever.”35

  One example of musical xenophobia in Depression-era California can be seen in the Society of Native American Composers. In the late 1930s, Cadman, Mary Carr Moore, and composer-pianist Homer Grunn convened to discuss the best means of bringing American music to the attention of “conductors, most of whom are foreigners.” Building on their earlier efforts under the auspices of the Cadman Creative Club, they organized the California Society of Composers (CSC) and produced two festivals that Smith identifies as among the first in Los Angeles to be devoted to American music.36 The CSC was musically conservative, as were its founders, and Smith astutely observes that their conservative-modernist stylistic spectrum was readily mapped onto a native-alien axis. Out of fear that “their own interests would be swamped in a sea of international-oriented ultra-modernism,” they disbanded the CSC and reorganized with an explicit requirement that members be “native born.”37 They sought support from a roster including Amy Beach, Howard Hanson, Carl Ruggles, and Charles Ives, who lent the society his support until rumors began to circulate that the society was “pro-fascist” and he pointedly withdrew.38 The society reached its greatest prominence when it sponsored the entire 1940-41 season of the Los Angeles Federal Music Project Orchestra, including a performance of Cadman's new “Pennsylvania” Symphony. Californians were impressed, but a reviewer for Modern Music in New York grumbled that the Society of Native American Composers' programming so far had been “very depressing, the usual program featuring items like the Symphony by Charles Wakefield Cadman about which the less said the better.”39

  Cadman felt these conflicts deeply. He was no modernist, but he was also no fascist. He was appalled by the “repugnant” policies of Nazi Germany, and he resigned very publicly from the American Music Committee of the 1936 Olympics—the only member to do so.40 But Cadman did feel a certain need to make a stand against stylistic invasions, especially when the financial stakes were high.

  In 1929, Cadman was on the verge of “breaking into” the movies, having received a six-month thirteen-thousand-dollar contract from the Fox Film Corporation. He quickly became disillusioned by the studio's lack of interest in producing a film version of Shanewis,41 but while under contract, he found himself engaged in a debate that the Los Angeles Examiner covered with military glee: “The war lords in the imbroglio are Charles Wakefield Cadman, famous composer with the William Fox Studios, and Dimitri Tiomkin, pianist-composer for the Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer organization. Cadman advocates the classics and Tiomkin jazz, and war, therefore, is brewing.” Cadman's view was paraphrased thus: “The motion picture industry would gain neither dignity or respect from
the encouragement of jazz…a shallow and soulless mode of musical expression.” Surprised by the fierce reactions that ensued, he tried to backpedal, but he soon found himself in hot water again, this time after attacking movie studios who chose their theme songs for commercial, not dramatic reasons. The results, he claimed were “emasculated” soundtracks, “‘spotted' with cheap and vulgar songs.”42

  For Cadman, the movies were both an impetus to composition and a threat. He moved from Hollywood to La Mesa (near San Diego) in 1929, citing his disillusionment with a city that was “selling solitude at so much per front foot.”43 Although the Hollywood Citizen continued to regard him as a local boy, Hollywood no longer represented for Cadman the site of grassroots communion. Instead, in his 1938 operetta Hollywood Extra, we find that a fully operational studio system has lured the meek but talented Irene away from her home town, Hopetown, Maine. From the moment she arrives, Irene is thwarted by the conniving Rita Lupa, whose director-husband consigns Irene to the “extras” instead of making her a star in the Goldenrod Motion Picture Company's new film about the abducted daughter of an Algerian sheik. Fortunately, Irene's countrified guardian, “Uncle” Abner, arrives to set things straight. Charmed by his rural ways, the studio head, Isaac Goldenrod, arranges a new tryout for Irene and promises to shoot a picture called Uncle Abner on site in Hopetown complete with quilting bees and baked bean suppers. Hollywood lucre is redistributed to Hopetown; and the “oriental” atmosphere of the Algerian picture is replaced by something more homespun and wholesome.

  Both Meet Arizona and Hollywood Extra play on themes of regional distinction, bifurcating the United States on an East-West axis for comic effect: the tenderfoot learns to love the desert, the Hollywood movie mogul waxes nostalgic for a New England he has never known. But it should be noted that the two works suggest quite different things about where the “real” or “native” American spirit may be found. At the Arizona dude ranch, it seems a foregone conclusion that the Vermonter Lettie will drop her eastern sophistication and become a true cowgirl, while in Hollywood it seems as if the pendulum has swung a bit too far—one must look back toward the Eastern Seaboard to rediscover America.

  Given this regional conundrum, and given his conflicted views about Broadway, one wonders what Cadman would have made of George Gershwin's Girl Crazy (1930, filmed in 1932 and 1943)—a far better known “dude ranch comedy” than his own Meet Arizona would ever be. Cadman admired Gershwin. Yet it must have been startling to Cadman and to many other self-styled westerners to see cowboys doing crossword puzzles and dudines dancing to “I Got Rhythm.” Like Meet Arizona, Girl Crazy is an East-meets-West love story, though this time it is New York playboy Danny Churchill who ventures west, not to find love or adventure, but rather to pacify his father, who is disgusted by his philandering. Of course Danny finds and falls for the only girl in Custerville, the postmistress, Molly Gray, and while she might be credited with his conversion to monogamy, there is no sense in which Danny becomes a “westerner.” On the contrary, he manages almost single-handedly to transform dusty Custerville into an upscale dude ranch qua nightclub, complete with dancing girls and a chorus line. Like Danny, Gershwin himself was preparing to move west to California as he finished the show. Fortunately for both of them, the institutions of the eastern metropolis proved easy to transplant; as Robert Kimball and Alfred Simon put it, “Girl Crazy was about as Western as West End Avenue.” In Howard Pollack's words, Gershwin “made the West his own.”44

  Even before Custerville gains its chorus line, matters of local color in Girl Crazy are treated with at least a pinch of salt. Charles Schwartz called it a “ribtickling satire on the Old West,” noting that its signature number, “Bidin' My Time,” was “drawlingly sung by a group called The Foursome, as four lazy, tired cowboys…. But, lethargic or not, they doffed their hats with reverence whenever ‘West,' the word sacred to all self-respecting cowboys' hearts, was spoken.”45In the Broadway show, the curtain rises on a “lonesome cowboy” who sings about taking his “gal” back to the “Rancho X Y Z” and then disappears, never to be heard from again. This number was omitted or obscured in the film versions, leaving the barbershop “Foursome” as the main representatives of cowboy culture. Where Cadman would have used folklore (or at least fakelore), the brothers Gershwin refer to the cowboy crooners of stage and radio.

  Although it was composed and adapted for the silver screen fifteen years before Cadman finished Meet Arizona, Girl Crazy has a far more “modern” sound. Its idiom can still be heard on Broadway, and at least two of its tunes survive today as jazz standards: the ballad “Embraceable You” (a Charlie Parker favorite) and above all “I Got Rhythm,” whose famous reincarnations defy cataloging here.46The show is famous not for its local color and certainly not for its plot (which even the authors considered subpar), but for its position at a nexus of jazz, Broadway, and Hollywood: it helped launch Ethel Merman's career, solidified Robert Russell Bennett's credentials as a “jazzy” orchestrator, and sported a pit orchestra manned by Benny Goodman, Glenn Miller, and Gene Krupa. Girl Crazy's “swing” is not an especially western swing, yet it is so thoroughly woven into the fabric of the show that—even though the cast troops down to Mexico for a spell and despite a reference to Helen Hunt Jackson's Ramona in the number that returns them safely to Custerville—there is nary a habañera rhythm to be heard.

  It should come as no great shock that the Big Apple and the California orange grove bore such different fruit. Despite their contrasts, however, comparing Gershwin and Cadman also reveals continuities in the dramatization of the West. Girl Crazy, Meet Arizona, and indeed all of Cadman's western operettas take racial and regional difference as axiomatic. There is no more important factor in their various plots. Yet these works also explore the ways in which different identities can be “performed,” adopted, or masked as a means of escape, intrigue, romance, or sheer fun. Girl Crazy makes the most of masquerade. Danny, of course, plays cowboy; at one point he also plays cowgirl. The most elaborate costume changes are reserved for Gieber Goldfarb, the New York taxi driver who drives Danny out to the ranch and then stays on as sheriff. Gieber was played by the famous Jewish vaudevillian Willie Howard, who was meant to be recognized. He disguises himself as an illiterate Indian, is mistaken for a certain “college educated Indian,” and, after failing to communicate with that educated Indian in any other way, finds that they can both speak Yiddish!47 Tellingly, when Gieber first encounters the Custerville cowboys, he assumes that they are Hollywood actors, hired for a movie western.

  Although not as radically as the Gershwin brothers, Cadman also thematizes performance and impersonation, most obviously in Meet Arizona, but in other productions as well. Consider the veiled Spanish beauties of South in Sonora, the square dancing emigrants of The Golden Trail, any number of Mexican bandits disguised as upstanding citizens, and even Gow Long with his washtub pantomime. Recall Shanewis, with its singer-heroine moving freely between the white parlor stage and the Indian pow wow. As Tonita, Shanewis, and Tsianina herself make plain, once we acknowledge that regional and racial identities can be performed instead of inherited, we must entertain some productive confusion over what it means to be “native.”

  Cadman began and ended his career best known for his understanding of Native Americans and “native” America, respectively. His work reflects the entire spectrum of early twentieth-century tensions about whether the true West was to be found in indigenous peoples, trail-blazing pioneers, or modern western cities, like Hollywood. That Cadman was not immune to the appeal of Farwell's world historical West is clear enough from his Pageant of Colorado and his Hollywood Bowl experiences. Yet he located most of his western works in down-to-earth places where recognizable characters could interact. He placed these characters on frontiers, borderlands where encounter is inevitable and claims to “native” status can always be contested. All who take the western stage are strangers in these parts.

  PART THREE

  American Pas
torals

  Presently we saw a curious thing: There were no clouds, the sun was going down in a limpid gold-washed sky. Just as the lower edge of the red disc rested on the high fields against the horizon, a great black figure suddenly appeared on the face of the sun. We sprang to our feet, straining our eyes toward it. In a moment we realized what it was. On some upland farm, a plough had been left standing in the field. The sun was sinking just behind it. Magnified across the distance by the horizontal light, it stood out against the sun, was exactly contained within the circle of the disc; the handles, the tongue, the share—black against the molten red. There it was, heroic in size, a picture writing on the sun. Even while we whispered about it, our vision disappeared; the ball dropped and dropped until the red tip went beneath the earth. The fields below us were dark, the sky had sunk back to its own littleness somewhere on the prairie.

  —WILLA CATHER, MY ÁNTONIA

  5

  _______

  West of Eden

  PRAIRIE IDYLLS

  Given Cadman's geographic imagination and his substantial catalog of operas and operettas, it is striking that none involves a farmer, a homestead, or a family of settlers. The emigrant Hurds in The Golden Trail intend to put down roots once their journey is done, but when we meet them they are still traversing land that is pointedly not their own. The Ortego family of The Bells of Capistrano rely on their land for cattle grazing, but they do not till the soil. The impassioned recitation “I Am the Land” by the Mexican fiesta maker Carlos rouses a certain agricultural reverence among the cast of Meet Arizona, yet this feeling is short-lived and foreign to the everyday workings of the dude ranch. The figure of a “thresher” does make a brief appearance in one of Cadman's pedagogical piano sets, but it is included as the “characteristic” component of the suite; the farmer is observed rather than personified, as if he were a curious feature of the landscape itself.1