The World полностью

Although America had stayed outside Wilson’s League of Nations, the economy was booming, the stock market soaring, the Twenties roaring and American ‘good feeling’ conquered the world. At home, where alcohol was still banned, Americans drank in blind tigers – covert bars or speakeasies – to the sound of jazz, a word that originated in jasm, which among black musicians in New Orleans meant sexual energy. Jazz, a fusion of African-American blues, ragtime and jig piano, was developed there in New Orleans. Its seminal ballad, ‘Strange Fruit’, sung by Billie Holiday, recounts a lynching: most of the musical movements that swept twentieth-century Euro-America would be rooted in the horror and passion of the African-American experience. F. Scott Fitzgerald, a young novelist who chronicled the careless wealth and mysterious pasts of the new grandees in his novel The Great Gatsby, called the period the Jazz Age. In Chicago and New York at the same time, vertiginous skyscraping towers were built. Jazz was now embraced by white Americans spending money made in industry, on the stock market or from crime in glamorous clubs controlled by Italian, Irish and Jewish gangsters where Scottish and Canadian whisky was served. Lucky Luciano was recruited as a hitman by the pudgy, epicurean New York padrino Joe Masseria; Meyer and Bugsy often assisted at his killings. Masseria was confronted by challengers and survived (with only two bullet holes in his hat) a gun-blazing assassination attempt, with hitmen firing tommy-guns while riding on the running boards of a motor car. He emerged as capo di tutti capi – boss of bosses – forcing other Mafiosi from Detroit and Buffalo to pay tribute.

‘The Brain’ Rothstein was the quintessential Roaring Twenties man of elegant violence, holding court at racetracks, restaurants and blind tigers surrounded by his bodyguards, but even he could not control his gambling addiction, and he accumulated a debt that led to his shooting. Dying in hospital in 1928, he refused to reveal his killers. ‘You stick to your trade,’ he told the police, ‘I’ll stick to mine,’ joking, ‘My mudder did it.’

In Paris, the end of war and pandemic sparked a joie de vivre, les années folles – Crazy Years – when a black ex-soldier Jim Europe and his Harlem Hellfighters brought American ragtime and the Charleston to the city in their Revue Nègre. Paris was dazzled by a nineteen-year-old American mixed-race dancer, Josephine Baker from Missouri, who had started dancing on St Louis street corners but hated American racism. ‘I just couldn’t stand America,’ she said, ‘and I was one of the first colored Americans to move to Paris’ – which she took by storm, dancing almost naked except for a loincloth of bananas. ‘The most sensational woman anyone ever saw,’ recalled an American novelist, Ernest Hemingway. It was not just music: in 1927, Baker was the first African-American to star in a movie, a silent French production La Sirène des tropiques, but it was American cinema that now conquered the world. If a family of Russian immigrants pioneered the ‘talkie’, it was a piratical Irish banker who made the first movie fortune that helped launch his family as an American political dynasty.

RIN TIN TIN: KENNEDY, LITTLE CAESAR AND FDR

On 6 October 1927, at a Warner brothers’ cinema in New York, the Warner brothers premiered their first talkie movie, The Jazz Singer, using the new Vitaphone system. When the star, Al Jolson, delivered his trademark ‘Wait a minute, you ain’t heard nothing yet,’ the audience were first astonished and then almost hysterical. The movie made the Warners $2.6 million and opened a new era.

Edison’s patent had allowed him to claim a film monopoly until 1915, when it was overturned, but already others were making silent movies. By the time Edison died in 1918, a generation of Russian Jews – furriers, glovers, cobblers – had moved to Hollywood, attracted by the sunny climate, ideal for filming. In 1917, the four Warners had founded Warner Brothers, which first made money in a film about German atrocities, then lost more in a story about venereal disease and then made it big with a series featuring a dog named Rin Tin Tin whom Jack Warner thought was cleverer than most of his actors.

As 15,000 theatres across America showed movies and millions listened to the radio, the business attracted a banker from Boston, Joe Kennedy, the fair-haired Bostonian dynamo who had proclaimed himself ‘America’s youngest bank president’ while making a fortune on the stock market. Kennedy understood that movies along with radio would change life. ‘This is another telephone,’ he said, ‘and we must get into this.’