The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby

by Tom Wolfe

  Now, two years later, the Jet Set has moved on from the Peppermint Lounge, but the Jersey Teen-age cycle is continuing. Inside the club the Younger Brothers and the Epics are on the bandstand, and Janet Gail and Misty More and Louis and Ronnie are in street clothes, dancing between shows, and customers are packed in around them, bouncing. A few leggy kids in red satin shorts, waitresses, are standing around the sides miming the Monkey with their hips, shuffling to themselves. And out in the center nine girls from Jersey, all with exploding hair and Dick Tracy eyes, have a table and watch the dancing with that same old dead-serious look. Nobody is doing the Twist anymore. Everybody is doing something like the Monkey, in which you make some motions with your arms like you’re climbing the bars of your cage, or the T-Bird, in which there is some complicated business with the hands about opening the front door and going inside and mixing a cocktail. Every now and then Larry Cope, who is one of the Younger Brothers, will introduce a pure Twist number, but he has to use a historical preface, sort of like they do at Roseland or some place when they say, well, now we’re going to have a good old-fashioned waltz.

  The Jersey Teen-age set has no trouble getting into the place now, although there are always a lot of tourists, especially on the weekends, who have heard of the Twist and the Peppermint Lounge.

  “—and we had a lot of little kids in here Saturday, showing them the dances. They were, you know, little kids, four to ten years old, something like that. They catch on pretty fast, or at least they see us, you know, shaking around, and they do that. And then sometimes we get women’s groups. They’re going to a show or something, and they then drop in here.”

  On the one hand Marlene sees a limitless future for the Twist as an institution. She figures the tourists coming to the World’s Fair will add years to its life, and already she and the dancers are working on an act for the Fair called “Twisting Around the World,” in which they will start off doing a native dance from some country when somebody shouts out “Twist!” in the native tongue, which usually comes out “Tweest!” and then the native dance becomes the native twist. Marlene had another idea, which was “Twisting Into Outer Space,” but it looks like it will be “Around the World.”

  In another sense, however, Marlene does not associate the Twist with the future at all. Marlene’s goal! Marlene’s goal is … Marlene’s answer should reassure a whole generation of Jersey mothers about where the Jersey Teen-age rebellion is heading, it and all its bouffant babies, nylon stretch denims, Dick Tracy eyes, Nehru coats and Monkey dancers.

  Out in the club the Epics, with four electric instruments going, are playing “Doing the Dog,” and Misty is doing the Dog, and Janet is doing the Mashed Potatoes, and Jerri Miller is doing the Monkey, with a few baroque emendations, but Marlene reflects a moment, as if upon her busy round of work with the churches, the benefit balls, the women’s groups and the youth.

  “Well,” she says, “I’d like to teach dancing, in my own house, you know, the way it was when I took lessons from my teacher. Or maybe be a psychologist. I used to want to, and I may still do that. Anyway, I don’t want to live in New York. I want some place more like where we used to live in New Jersey. I don’t like living here. There aren’t any trees.”

  Chapter 5

  The First Tycoon of Teen

  ALL THESE RAINDROPS are high or something. They don’t roll down the window, they come straight back, toward the tail, wobbling, like all those Mr. Cool snow heads walking on mattresses. The plane is taxiing out toward the runway to take off, and this stupid infarcted water wobbles, sideways, across the window. Phil Spector, twenty-three years old, the rock and roll magnate, producer of Philles Records, America’s first teen-age tycoon, watches … this watery pathology.… It is sick, fatal. He tightens his seat belt over his bowels.… A hum rises inside the plane, a shot of air comes shooting through the vent over somebody’s seat, some ass turns on a cone of light, there is a sign stuck out by the runway, a mad, cryptic, insane instruction to the pilot—Runway 4, Are Cylinder Lap Mainside DOWN?—and beyond, disoriented crop rows of sulphur blue lights, like the lights on top of a New Jersey toothpaste factory, only spreading on and on in sulphur blue rows over Los Angeles County. It is … disoriented. Schizoid raindrops. The plane breaks in two on takeoff and everybody in the front half comes rushing toward Phil Spector in a gush of bodies in a thick orange—napalm! No, it happens aloft; there is a long rip in the side of the plane, it just rips, he can see the top ripping, folding back in sick curds, like a sick Dalí egg, and Phil Spector goes sailing through the rip, dark, freezing. And the engine, it is reedy—

  MISS!

  A stewardess is walking back to the back to buckle herself in for the takeoff. The plane is moving, the jets are revving. Under a Lifebuoy blue skirt, her fireproof legs are clicking out of her Pinki-Kini-Panty Fantasy—

  “Miss!” says Phil Spector.

  “Yes?”

  “I, like I have to get off the plane.”

  She stops there beside his seat with her legs bent slightly, at a 25-degree angle to her ischium. She laughs with her mouth, yes yes, but there is no no in her eyes, you little bearded creep, you are not very funny. Her face … congeals … she looks at his suede jerkin. She says,

  “Sir?”

  “I, you know, I have to get off,” says Phil Spector, “I don’t want to fly on this plane. Let me—” but she will never figure out about the raindrops. She is standing there hoping this is a joke. “—uh, I’m not putting you on, I’m not putting you down, I’m not anything, all I want is—you know?—just open the door and let me off. I’ll walk back. The rest—everybody—I mean, go ahead, fly.”

  “Sir, we’re already in a pattern. There are seven aircraft, seven jet aircraft, behind us waiting for the runway—”

  By this time Phil Spector’s Hollywood friends, in this nutball music business—there is one of them beside him and a couple of them behind him, they are craning around.

  “Phil! What’s wrong, baby!”

  Phil turns around and says in his soft and slightly broken voice: “Man, this plane’s not going to make it.”

  They all look around, they all look like frozen custard in the seat lights.

  “You know?” Phil says. “It’s not making it.”

  They all look around, the goddamned noise is roaring off the wings, and Phil sits there in that kind of doldrum fury he lives in, his beard, his hair, his suede. O.K., we’re in a pattern, seven jets. But this guy Phil Spector has just produced eight straight hit records—you know? Eight hits! This kid is practically a baby, twenty-three years old, f’r chrissake, and he has made two million dollars, clear. The first teen-age business magnate—living teen tycoon. Like he is programmed into the Whole Life Bit—you know? He does A & R for Daddy God, he’s lucky—you know?—and if he’s getting off—

  So the big chap behind with the moon head and the little Seventh Avenue toy black hat says,

  “Yeah, we wanna get off. There’s something wiggy or something about this plane.”

  “Yeah!”

  “Yeah!”

  The stewardess is looking around, and here is her life being drowned by this little guy—he has a Fu Manchu beard sticking out in front of his hair, his wispy locks are combed back, coming down in back over his shoulders in a kind of pageboy, like Bishop McCullough’s, the heir to Daddy Grace. He has on a suede leather shirt, jerkin style. Somebody’s cone of light lies in Miami saffron pools on his Italian pants. He looks like—what kind of—

  All this commotion. Yeah, says Phil Spector’s pals. It’s wiggy. Off this flying cretin. Phil Spector broods over the raindrops. The stewardess runs for the cabin.

  So they stop the plane, they break up the whole pattern, they knock out everybody’s schedule, they turn the plane around, take everybody off. They check Phil Spector’s luggage for—bombs. Look at this beatnik’s hair in back there, and they stare at Son of Bop in a leather jerkin, ten men in alumicron suits bombarding him with corporate hate rays. But
his pals keep up this strange upbeat talk:

  “Phil, baby, you saved my life!”

  “Phil, if you say it’s wiggy, it’s wiggy.”

  “You done it again, Phil, babes, you done it again!”

  “… You say it’s wiggy, Phil? I say it’s wiggy …”

  “… I hurts, too, D’Artagnan, baby, right here, same as you…”

  “… wiggy …”

  “… baby …”

  “SO,” SAYS PHIL Spector, “They grounded me. They took away my credit cards, they suspended the pilot, I don’t know.”

  Spector is sitting in a little cream room in his office suite at 440 East 62nd Street with his back to a window that is practically on top of the East Side Drive. Twenty-three years old—he has a complex of corporations known as Phil Spector Productions. One of them is Mother Bertha Productions, named after his mother, Bertha. She works for his office in Los Angeles, but only because she wants to. The main organization is Philles Records. Spector has produced 21 “single” Philles records since October, 1962—and sold more than 13 million copies. All rock and roll. His most recent big hit, “Walking in the Rain,” by the Ronettes, went as high as No. 20 on the Cashbox chart and has sold more than 250,000 copies. His latest record, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” by the Righteous Brothers, rose from the 70’s to No. 37 with a “bullet” beside it—meaning “going up fast.” He has produced seven albums. The first teen-age tycoon! He is leaning back in the chair. He has on his suede jerkin, his Italian pants, a pair of pointy British boots with Cuban heels. His hair hangs down to his shoulders in back. The beard is shaved off, however.

  Danny Davis, his promotion man, is talking on the phone in the inner office. A fellow sits across from Spector with his legs crossed and a huge chocolate brown Borsalino hat over his bent knee, like he was just trying it on. He says,

  “Phil, why do you do—”

  “I’m moving the whole thing to California,” says Phil Spector. “I can’t stand flying anymore.”

  “—why do you do these things?”

  Spector—without his beard, Spector has a small chin, a small head, his face looks at first like all those little kids with bad hair and reedy voices from the Bronx, where he was born. But—an ordinary Phil Spector? Phil Spector has the only pure American voice. He was brought up not in the Bronx, but California. It meanders, quietly, shaking, through his doldrum fury, out to somewhere beyond cynical, beyond cool, beyond teen-age world-weary. It is thin, broken and soft. He is only twenty-three years old, for godsake, the first millionaire businessman to rise up out of the teen-age netherworld, king of the rock and roll record producers—

  Spector jumps out of the chair.

  “Wait a minute,” he says. “Just a minute. They’re making deals in here.”

  Spector walks into the inner office, gingerly, like a cowboy, because of the way the English boots lift him up off the floor. He is slight, five feet seven, 130 pounds. His hair shakes faintly behind. It is a big room, like a living room, all beige except for nine gold-plated rock and roll records on the wall, some of Phil Spector’s “goldies,” one million sales each. “He’s a Rebel,” by the Crystals, “Zip-a-dee-doo-dah,” by Bob B. Soxx and the Blue Jeans, “Be My Baby,” by the Ronettes, “Da Do Ron Ron,” “Then He Kissed Me,” “Uptown,” “He’s Sure the Boy I Love,” all by the Crystals, “Wait Til My Baby Gets Home,” by Darlene Love. And beige walls, beige telephones all over the place, a beige upright piano, beige paintings, beige tables, with Danny Davis crowding over a beige desk, talking on the telephone.

  “Sure, Sal,” says Danny, “I’ll ask Phil. Maybe we can work something out on that.”

  Spector starts motioning thumbs down.

  “Just a minute, Sal.” Danny puts his hand over the mouthpiece and says,

  “We need this guy, Phil. He’s the biggest distributor out there. He wants the one thousand guarantee.”

  Phil’s hands go up like he is lifting a slaughtered lamb up on top of an ice box.

  “I don’t care. I’m not interested in the money, I’ve got millions of dollars of money, I don’t care who needs this animal. I’m interested in selling records, O.K.? Why should I give him a guarantee? He orders the records, I guarantee I’ll buy a thousand back from him if he can’t sell them; he sells them, then after the record dies, he buys up 500 cut rate from somebody, sends them back and cries for his money. Why should we have to be eating his singles later?”

  Danny takes his hand away and says into the mouthpiece:

  “Look, Sal, there’s one thing I forgot. Phil says this record he can’t give the guarantee. But you don’t have anything to worry about … I know what I said, but Phil says … look, Sal, don’t worry, ‘Walking in the Rain,’ this is a tremendous record, tremendous, a very big record … What? …. I’m not reading off a paper, Sal … Wait a minute, Sal—”

  “Who needs these animals?” Phil Spector tells Danny.

  “Look, Sal,” Danny says, “this man never made a bad record in his life. You tell me one. Nothing but hits.”

  “Tell him to go to hell,” says Spector.

  “Sal—”

  “Who needs these animals!” says Spector, so loud this time that Danny cups his hand around the receiver and puts his mouth down close.

  “Nothing, Sal,” says Danny, “that was somebody came in.”

  “Joan,” says Phil, and a girl, Joan Berg, comes in out of another room. “Will you turn the lights off?” he says.

  She turns the lights off, and now in the middle of the day the offices of Philles Records and Mother Bertha Productions are all dark except for the light from Danny Davis’ lamp. Danny crowds into the pool of light, hunched over the phone, talking to Sal.

  Phil puts his fingers between his eyes and wraps his eyebrows around them.

  “Phil, its dark in here,” says the fellow with the large hat. “Why do you do these things?”

  “I’m paying a doctor $600 a week to find out,” says Phil, without looking up.

  He sits there in the dark, his fingers buried between his eyes. Just over his head one can make out a painting. The painting is kind of came-with-the-frame surrealist. It shows a single musical note, a half note, suspended over what looks like the desert outside Las Vegas. Danny has to sit there huddled in his own pool of light talking to this animal on the telephone.

  “This is a primitive country,” says Phil Spector. “I was at Shepheard’s, the discotheque, and these guys start saying these things. It’s unbelievable. These people are animals.”

  “What kind of things, Phil?”

  “I don’t know. They look at, you know, my hair—my wife and I are dancing, and, I mean, it’s unbelievable, I feel somebody yanking on my hair in the back. I turn around, and here’s this guy, a grown man, and he is saying these unbelievable things to me. So I tell him, like this, ‘I’m going to tell you this one time, that’s all—don’t ever try that again.’ And the guy—it’s unbelievable—he shoves me with the heel of his hand and I go sprawling back into a table—”

  —Spector pauses—

  “—I mean, I’ve studied karate for years. I could literally kill a guy like that. You know? Size means nothing. A couple of these—” he cocks his elbow in the gloom and brings up the flat of his forearm—“but what am I going to do, start a fight every time I go out? Why should I even have to listen to anything from these animals? I find this country very condemning. I don’t have this kind of trouble in Europe. The people of America are just not born with culture.”

  Not born with culture! If only David Susskind and William B. Williams could hear that. Susskind invited Phil Spector to the Open End television program one evening “to talk about the record business.” Suddenly Susskind and “William B.,” station WNEW’s old-nostalgia disc jockey, were condemning Spector as some kind of sharpie poisoning American culture, rotting the minds of Youth and so forth. That was how it all hit Spector. It was as if he were some kind of old short-armed fatty in the Brill Buil
ding, the music center on Broadway, with a spread-collar shirt and a bald olive skull with strands of black hair pulled up over it from above one ear. There was something very ironic about that. Spector is the one record producer who wouldn’t go near Broadway. His setup is practically out in the East River, up by the Rockefeller Institute. The Rockefeller Institute, for godsake. Susskind and Williams kept throwing Spector’s songs at him—“He’s a Rebel,” “Da Do Ron Ron,” “Be My Baby,” “Fine Fine Boy,” “Breakin’ Up”—as if he were astutely conning millions of the cretins out there with this stuff. Spector didn’t know exactly what to tell them. He likes the music he produces. He writes it himself. He is something new, the first teen-age millionaire, the first boy to become a millionaire within America’s teen-age netherworld. It was never a simple question of him taking a look at the rock and roll universe from the outside and exploiting it. He stayed within it himself. He liked the music.

  SPECTOR, WHILE STILL in his teens, seemed to comprehend the prole vitality of rock and roll that has made it the kind of darling holy beast of intellectuals in the United States, England and France. Intellectuals, generally, no longer take jazz seriously. Monk, Mingus, Ferguson—it has all been left to little executive trainees with their first apartment and a mahogany African mask from the free-port shop in Haiti—let me tell you!—and a hi-fi. But rock and roll! Poor old arteriosclerotic lawyers with pocky layers of fat over their ribs are out there right now twisting with obscene clumsiness to rock and roll. Their wives wear stretch pants to the seafood shoppe. A style of life! There have been teen-agers who have made a million dollars before, but invariably they are entertainers, they are steered by older people, such as the good Colonel Tom Parker steers Elvis Presley. But Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen. Every baroque period has a flowering genius who rises up as the most glorious expression of its style of life—in latter-day Rome, the Emperor Commodus; in Renaissance Italy, Benvenuto Cellini; in late Augustan England, the Earl of Chesterfield; in the sal volatile Victorian age, Dante Gabriel Rossetti; in late-fancy neo-Greek Federal America, Thomas Jefferson; and in Teen America Phil Spector is the bona-fide Genius of Teen. In point of fact, he had turned twenty-one when he made his first clear million. But it was as a teen-ager, working within the teen-age milieu, starting at the age of seventeen, that Phil Spector developed into a great American business man, the greatest of the independent rock and roll record producers. Spector’s mother, Bertha, took him from the Bronx to California when he was nine. California! Teen Heaven! By the time he was sixteen he was playing jazz guitar with some group. Then he got interested in rock and roll, which he does not call rock and roll but “pop blues.” That is because—well, that is a complicated subject. Anyway, Phil Spector likes this music. He genuinely likes it. He is not a short-armed fatty hustling nutball fads.