ROUNDABOUT
Joey and the revolution
Benny Green
I find it gratifying to discover thirty years after the event what Pal Joey is really about. Its true theme was apparently missed when John O'Hara first published it — even the astute Edmund Wilson 'mistook it for a satire which "represented a contraction of O'Hara's interests " — and any chance there might have been of a reappraisal vanished when the original became hopelessly overlaid, first on Broadway, later in Hollywood.
For years I had assumed that Pat Joey was more or less as Lorenz Hart and Frank Sinatra painted him. I should have known better. Because of its musical transmogrifications, Pal Joey has always been regarded as a lightweight item even for a mere welterweight like O'Hara. a loose bundle of picaresque episodes with no central vision, a book about nothing of any more consequence than a few desultory seductions. All of which is unjust, because if it is about anything, Pal Joey is about a revolution, a social revolution which overturned the leisure habits of a continent, seen through the puzzled eyes of one of its victims.
At the start of the story Joey is a night-club singer, what Wilson describes as "an amoeba of the night-life of the jitterbug era," an opportunist reasonably content with his lot. His work seems congenial enough, and it gives him ample openings to indulge a septic ego by pursuing, and usually catching, a long succession of attractive girls. But soon this picture begins to alter. Joey is not so pleased with his existence after all. He changes jobs with ominous frequency, seems to be haunted by the fear of a vast professional abyss opening up at his feet, and is aware that both his working conditions and those who impose them upon him are often contemptible. We begin to realise that Joey is a man whose options are closing in on him, but it is only through his correspondence with his old friend Ted that he is made to see this for hinisilf. At first Ted and Joey seem to be equals, a couple of also-rans who have shared a common musical past and who are still struggling, each in his own way; to ekape" second-class status. There Is a strong camaraderie between them. When the story opens Ted has loaned Joey fifty dollars and Joey is returning thirty. But as the letters cross the professional gulf separating the two men widens, slowly at first, then more quickly, until in the end they are too far adrift ever to make contact again. Ted is a national, an international figure, while Joey is — what? Only a name which might crop up from time to time when Ted reminisces, an embarrassment whose failure can be rendered palatable to old friends only when thrust deep into a romanticised past.
Why has Joey failed where Ted succeeded? We know that Ted is a violinist, that he forms a band, that he breaks attendance records, becomes a brand image. Joey makes passing reference to Ted's triumphs at two places, the Palomar and the Paramount, and sends out cries for help which his own pride renders so oblique that Ted can have found no trouble ignoring them. At the very end Joey erupts violently. He is alone in a rooming-house writing to Ted when he suddenly reveals that he is not a singer after all, but a failed musician: " I often think to myself that what if I turned out to be a Channcey Morehouse and a Dave Tough? That would mean I was a really good drummer but not the lug that does not know a flammadiddle from a high hat. I put on such a good act here in Chi that I kid myself and think I do not remember how to play." Finally he is too maddened to care what he says: "Ted old friend how the hell are you and how does it feel to be rich? Will bet you put your dough into an insurance annuity and send the rest home to your mother. I never saw you even pick up a tab for 4 mocha java coffees you cheap larceny jerk if ever there was one." We leave him sitting there awaiting the arrival of a prostitute, embittered by the suspicion that Ted has had all the luck, that if only the cards had been dealt differently it might have been him, Joey, in the money. And he is absolutely right.
In 1935, not long after the repeal of the volstead Act, a Chicago clarinettist called Benny Goodman conceived the plan of forming a large, jazz-orientated dance band. It was the best idea Goodman ever had. Now that Prohibition was ended, the jazzmen of Capone's speakeasies needed a new public. Inadvertently Goodman stumbled upon it. On August 21, 1935, in the Palomar Ballroom, Los Angeles, he saw that the dancers were congregating round the bandstand. The Swing Age had begun. Less than two years later, at the Paramount Theatre, New York, 21,000 paid to hear him in one day. He and his rivals, Artie Shaw, Tommy Dorsey, Harry James, became film stars, millionaires, world figures, and, long before the Swing Age petered out in the 'forties, dance-hall jazz had become a mechanistic thing administered by baton-waving businessmen. It was the New Style, and relics like Joey were done for at thirty.
It is Joey's dawning realisation of all this that makes him send Ted harebrained moneymaking ideas, but not so harebrained that they could not work. At one stage he advises Ted to anticipate the coming war and get his band into the forces, "the first swing band in uniform." It sounds mad, but O'Hara wrote his book in 1939, and five years later the missing body of Major Glenn Miller had already become one of the cultural curiosities of the twentieth century. Joey and Ted are complementary figures in the American Dream, and for every Ted there have to be ten thousand Joeys, stranded by the shifting tides of showbiz fashion, cut off by a revolution whose terms they cannot or will not accept. A generation later Ted's own . group was jettisoned from a base in a Liverpool cellar. One day in the 'eighties the Liverpudlians will themselves meet the same fate. And when that day comes, we could do worse than quote Joey, "Merry Christmas, as the saying goes."
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