In the spring of 1944, while working in a Chicago shoe store, Eugene Gilbert, an aggressive high-school senior, observed a serious weakness in his employer’s manner of doing—or, rather, of not doing—business. The shelves were stocked with sports shoes of just the kind that Gilbert’s teenage classmates affected, and yet almost no young people patronized the store. “I talked the boss into making a study of why teenagers didn’t buy his shoes,” he has said. “We found that it was because they didn’t know the store had the shoes. So the store began to advertise to teenagers about its sports shoes, and we got their business. It was that simple.” It has been that simple time and again since; Gilbert has made a career of observing—and calling attention to—the obvious. He is now sole owner of Eugene Gilbert & Co., a Manhattan firm that does a gross business of between half a million and a million dollars a year, mainly by making studies of teenage buying habits.
Gilbert was born on June 1, 1926, on the North Side of Chicago. When he was still a boy, his father, a haberdasher, died, leaving his wife and two children—Gilbert has a sister—in modest circumstances. Gilbert went to a local public grammar school and then to Senn High School, where he was a mediocre student but a campus leader—an organizer of dances and a wielder of votes. His energy, enthusiasm, and nerve were such that although English was one of his poorer subjects, he got himself elected editor of the school paper in his senior year. After school hours, he worked in the shoe store where the Big Idea had its humble genesis. Luck, it is true, played a considerable role in Gilbert’s early success, for he happened to choose teenage research as a profession at the very moment when business people were becoming aware of teenagers as a well-defined market and people in general were becoming aware of them as a caste apart, or even, in the view of some anthropological thinkers, a culture apart. But luck played no role at all in another big factor in his success—his realization that teenagers would be better than adults at questioning teenagers. This dawned on him one day when a veteran lady interviewer, accustomed to grilling grownups, showed up at Senn High and started asking his classmates, on behalf of an oil company, whether they owned cars, whether they drove their parents’ cars, how big their allowances were, and so on. It was apparent to Gilbert that a lot of the answers the good lady was conscientiously taking down were plain spoofs, and it occurred to him that a teenager couldn’t be kidded so easily, and, furthermore, would be more effective in getting his fellow-teenagers to talk freely. This simple idea is still the backbone of his business.
After graduating from Senn High, Gilbert began a desultory pursuit of a B.A., successively attending three local colleges—North Park, Wright Junior, and the downtown-Chicago branch of Northwestern. The only courses that interested him much were those in math and business, and early in 1945, while at Wright Junior, he put his talents to profit by founding the Gil-Bert Teen Age Services. Thereafter, his interest in a B.A. rapidly became, as it were, academic. He was soon down to a couple of business courses in the Northwestern night school, and presently he dropped out altogether; he was too busy making money to waste time learning how to make it. His decision to leave college crystallized when he entered a new course and discovered that the businessman-professor was one of his clients “He gave me a rather strange look,” he recalls.
Gilbert’s, or Gil-Bert’s, first big-time client was the Marshall Field department store. “I called up the sales-promotion head for young men’s clothes and told him, ‘I think I can show you how to increase your sales,’ ” he said recently. “I got an appointment easily. After I’d outlined a survey of style preferences, he asked how much it would cost. ‘Oh, about forty-five,’ I said, meaning forty-five dollars. ‘That’s too much,’ he said. ‘It’s not worth over twelve hundred to us.’ I said that would be all right. The cost of the survey came a lot closer to his figure than to mine. I’d thought the kids would do the interviewing just for the experience, but, of course, I had to pay them. And I’d forgotten completely that I’d have to pay someone to tabulate the results.” If young Gilbert was ignorant, he was not innocent. A little later, he persuaded a columnist for one of the Chicago papers to give him a write-up—not a difficult feat, because the “teenage-tycoon” angle was a natural. Two days before the column was scheduled to appear, he had several girls he knew write notes, unsigned and in longhand, on pink stationery, and mail them to a few dozen important Chicago businessmen in envelopes marked “PERSONAL.” The notes read, “Be sure to read —’s column tomorrow.” There seems no reason to doubt Gilbert’s assertion that most of the recipients read the column. “Of course, I wouldn’t do that sort of thing now,” Gilbert says. “When I started out, I was strictly jive talk and blue jeans. It took me a while to get myself taken seriously.” In the early days, his extreme youth cut both ways, impressing some businessmen but alarming others. Fortunately, he was eighteen years and eleven months old when he set up his business, so if, later on, he wanted to stress the boy-wonder theme, he would say he started at eighteen, and if he wanted to emphasize his maturity, he would make it nineteen.
Now that Gilbert is all of thirty-two—a reasonable span of years—he can act his age. Eleven years ago, he moved his business to New York and gave it a more conservative name, and he has been diligently extending its scope ever since. It is a one-man firm. Gilbert has had associates in the past, but essentially he is not an associative type. One partnership broke up the day the partners got their first assignment. “We couldn’t seem to agree on how to split the take,” he says. In any case, Gilbert’s clients are buying his know-how and his reputation; they want Eugene Gilbert in person. Not a man to pass up chances, Gilbert makes himself available to non-clients, too—as a consultant, at the glamorous price of a thousand dollars a day, or a hundred and twenty-five dollars an hour. (Not many people have bought him for the whole day—after all, senior partners in the top Wall Street law firms charge only a hundred dollars an hour for their time—but a number have bought him for an hour or two.) He also disseminates his know-how in a weekly column called “What Young People Think,” syndicated by the Associated Press, and last year he got out a book called “Advertising and Marketing to Young People.” As for his business proper, he runs it with the minimum of overhead—about fifteen employees, and a small suite in a not very new office building on Forty-second Street, off Third Avenue. The important assets are mostly under his hat, or would be if he wore one; namely, a large stock of information about American teenagers. This stock is perpetually added to by the efforts of a national network of some five thousand high-school and college students and five hundred high-school and college teachers, all employed on an hourly basis to ask teenagers the questions that Gilbert’s clients want to have asked—or, more precisely, the questions that Gilbert persuades his clients they want to have asked. The answers give a fairly broad view not only of the teenage market but of the teenage culture.
“All in all, the juvenile market runs at retail to a staggering $33 billion annually,” the editors of Life exulted last spring. In their excitement, they forgot to furnish any hint as to how the figure was arrived at, or how it is divided among infants, children, and teenagers. Gilbert is able to be more exact; American teenagers, he points out, now spend—apart from what their parents spend on them—some nine and a half billion dollars a year, a figure related to the fact that there are seventeen million American teenagers, with an average income, in the form of earnings and allowances, of something over ten dollars a week. And in his various studies he has divided and redivided, dissected and redissected this market in every imaginable way.
To some extent, the teenage market—and, in fact, the very notion of the teenager—has been created by the businessmen who exploit it. According to the economics textbooks, a demand arises for, say, pink typewriters, and then entrepreneurs arise to satisfy it. In reality, it is often impossible to say which came first, the demand or the means of satisfying it. The circle has no beginning. The simple act of asking teenagers what they want is part of the process; perhaps no girl would have thought of wanting a pink portable if some teenage interviewer, working for Gilbert and his client, the Royal Typewriter Company, had not asked her whether she would fancy one. The whole business tends to make the teenagers class-conscious, so to speak; the more they find advertising directed at them qua teenagers, and the more they are polled on their peculiar tastes and interests, the more their sense of themselves as a special group is enhanced. “We are the Pied Pipers of the youth market,” Gilbert has remarked, apparently forgetting the end of the story.
By the same token, it is difficult, if not impossible, to say to what extent the press, the movies, and other mass media have reflected the teenager and to what extent they have molded him. A disquieting aspect of a society like ours is that since one of the most important criteria of each individual’s behavior is the way other individuals are behaving, the mere publicizing of irrational or anti-social acts stimulates more such acts. A few years ago, for example, Life ran an article about teenage hot-rodders, with the aim of reducing accidents caused by such automotive acrobatics as “chicken” contests. (In these, two drivers speed toward each other down the middle of the road, and the loser is the one who pulls over first; if neither pulls over, both lose.) But Robert Petersen, the publisher of the magazine Hot Rod, says the article had just the opposite effect. Inadvertently, it suggested that chicken contests meant thrills and that to get into trouble with the cops meant prestige, and the result was an increase in hot-rodding accidents. Publicity has similarly affected rock ’n’ roll. Like the dancing mania of the Middle Ages, this sort of movement is self-expanding; the more it seems that “everybody” is doing a thing, the more “everybody” feels he must do it. The newspapers headline the latest criminal exploits of teenagers, the magazines run articles on juvenile delinquency, magistrates make indignant speeches from the bench, “West Side Story” depicts gang warfare in terms of “Romeo and Juliet” (dressed up with music by Bernstein and choreography by Robbins), the movies present the teenager as sinister but exciting—and an image is built up that in most cases merely impels him to behave rudely at breakfast but in others tempts him to go in for more sensational misdeeds, preferably in bad company. Mischief is usually more attractive to a child than virtue, if only because virtue is what grownups expect of him, and when mischief can be pursued with others, as part of a recognized “movement,” it becomes even more seductive.
Indeed, the first association that most adults have with the word “teenager” is “juvenile delinquent.” “My husband was two hours late getting home the other night,” a New York housewife told a neighbor last summer. “Oh, my God, I thought, the teenagers have got him!” The teenage movie villain with his Presley sideburns, his Brando leather jacket, his tight blue jeans, and his cold-eyed air of one who lives by a code better suited to tigers than to people, is now as familiar a figure on the screen as the Western badman. In “The Wild One,” he and his roaring motorcycles took over a town of helpless adults; in “Rebel Without a Cause,” one of those well-intentioned sociological-psychological “documents” that somehow manage to convey the idea that anti-social behavior is both normal and attractive, he fought with knives, guns, and automobiles; in “Touch of Evil,” he was even more terrifying than Orson Welles; in “Blackboard Jungle,” he spent a hundred minutes pushing around poor old Glenn Ford (thirty if he was a day), a worm of a high-school teacher, who turned only in the last reel, when several of his pupils tried to kill him during a class in English Comp.
And what has been done in make-believe in the movies has also happened in real life. “Until quite recently, the rebellion of youth could be viewed with the detachment usually accorded anything so common and natural,” the late Dr. Robert M. Lindner, author of “Rebel Without a Cause,” a psychiatric study that is connected with the movie only by its name, told a Los Angeles audience four years ago. “The brute fact of today is that our youth is no longer in rebellion but in a condition of downright active and hostile mutiny. Within the memory of every living adult, a profound and terrifying change has overtaken adolescence.” Dr. Lindner isolated two main aspects of this change. One is the tendency of today’s youth to “act out . . . his inner turmoil, in direct contrast to the suffering-out of the same [inner turmoil] by adolescents of yesteryear.” The piratical daydreams of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer are put into practice by our teenagers. The other peculiar trait of the modern adolescent is, according to Dr. Lindner, “the abandonment of that solitude which was at once the trademark of adolescence and the source of its deepest despairs as of its dubious ecstasies. And frequently this solitude was creative. From it sometimes came the dreams, the hopes and the soaring aims that charged life henceforward with meaning and [gave] us our poets, artists, scientists. . . . But youth today has abandoned solitude in favor of pack-running, of predatory assembly, of great collectivities that bury, if they do not destroy, individuality. . . . In the crowd, herd or gang, it is a mass mind that operates—a mind without subtlety, without compassion, uncivilized.”
The press bears out Dr. Lindner’s generalizations. Every week—sometimes it seems every day—there are several reports like the following, from the News:
The ironically named Arabian Sportsmen (odds of two—or four, or eight—to one are considered quite sporting in these circles, and so is kicking a victim when he is down) is one of the teenage “bopping,” or fighting, gangs that have sprung up throughout the city since the war. Another is the Egyptian Dragons, fifteen of whose members were arrested last summer for the murder of Michael Farmer, a fifteen-year-old cripple, at a city swimming pool; of them, eleven were fourteen or younger. Some of the gangs, as these two indicate, go in for romantic names—the Crusaders, the Corsairs, the Templars, the Golden Wings, the Sand Street Angels, and, barely squeaking in under the rope, the Astoria Gents. Other gang names are naïvely terroristic—the Cobras, the Scorpions, the Comanches, the Huns, the Demons, the Gowanus Stompers. There is even a bunch that calls itself the Villains. Two of the largest and most dangerous of the gangs are named, for reasons now lost in the mists of history, the Bishops and the Chaplains, while another is even more mysteriously named the Jonquils. The police estimate that there are about a hundred and twenty such wolf packs in the city, with a total membership of eight thousand.
Things got so bad last winter that the Board of Education suspended some seven hundred violent and insubordinate pupils, and Mayor Wagner, fearing that the summer vacation would bring on “a period of youthful violence never equalled in the city’s history,” instituted a “crash program.” Social-work agencies, the Youth Board, and the police cut down on their own summer vacations, and reinforced patrols were assigned to parks, beaches, pools, and playgrounds. These drastic measures produced some results: Teenage murders and felonious assaults dropped, and, for the first summer in years, there was not a single “rumble,” or gang fight. But teenage crime in general continued to rise. While the gangs are to blame for some of the city’s teenage crime, they just do not have enough members to account for most of it. Police Commissioner Kennedy has pointed out that three-fifths of the arrests for burglary, half of those for holdups, and three-fourths of those for auto thefts in the city last year involved teenagers. Moreover, while the total number of arrests last year was twenty-eight per cent higher than in 1953, arrests in the sixteen-to-twenty age bracket went up forty-two per cent, and—most disturbing of all—arrests of children fifteen and younger went up a hundred and five per cent. Bill Sykes has been supplanted by the Artful Dodger, and the modern American boy doesn’t need any grown-up Fagin to teach him his trade, either.
It is not just a matter of big-city wickedness. Quite the contrary. Figures compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation show that teenage crime in communities of twenty-five thousand or less was sixteen per cent higher last year than the year before, in contrast to a mere eight-per-cent rise in the big cities. In general, the F.B.I.’s figures followed the same pattern as Commissioner Kennedy’s. Reports to Washington from the police departments of twelve hundred and twenty cities showed that arrests of persons under eighteen rose ten per cent in 1957, a year when arrests of persons of all ages rose only four per cent, and that fifty-four per cent of the burglaries in those cities and sixty-seven per cent of the auto thefts were committed by teenagers. The single note of cheer was that of those arrested for aggravated assault and for murder only nine per cent and six per cent, respectively, were teenagers. Across the nation, it seems, crimes against property, rather than against persons, are the kids’ specialty. One wonders whether the statisticians have allowed for the take in their estimates of teenage income.
Nor is it any longer a matter simply of poverty, broken homes, substandard housing, and the other classic causes of juvenile delinquency. Harrison Salisbury, in a book called “The Shook-Up Generation,” based on a notable series of articles on the city’s gangs that appeared in the Times last winter, reveals that teenage terrorism has been far more prevalent in some of the new housing developments than it was in the slums they replaced. And a more recent survey by the same paper found that in the suburbs of New York teenage crime has been increasing faster than the teenage population, and sometimes even faster than teenage crime in the nation as a whole. The report continued, “Social workers generally said they sensed [in these suburbs] an increase in youthful offenses involving alcohol and sex. Several, who noted that the 10,000 [suburban] youngsters in trouble last year came from . . . areas of preponderantly ‘good homes,’ suggested that delinquency might not be primarily a matter of economic deprivation.” This view, challenging the fundamental assumptions of the orthodox social-work approach, so far lacks supporting charts and tables, but it may soon get them.
There is thus some justification for the present tendency to equate “teenager” with “juvenile delinquent.” And Commissioner Kennedy was right when he said, “It is no comfort to anyone to proclaim that only three per cent of the city’s youngsters ever come into contact with law enforcement.” Yet while three per cent is twenty-five thousand—or quite a juvenile army—it means that ninety-seven out of every hundred of the city’s teenagers are not juvenile delinquents. The teenagers have created a world of their own, but it is not primarily a criminal world, absurd or repugnant though it sometimes appears. Adolescence, at any time and in any place, is an unsettling business; its very name is repellent—only slightly less so than that of its kid sibling, Pubescence. The index to “The Stormy Decade—Adolescence,” by Drs. George J. Mohr and Marian A. Despres, begins with Acne and runs on down through such topics as Aggressive Behavior, Anxiety, Boy Crazy, Catatonic Behavior, Colitis, Delinquency, Exhibitionism, Fantasies, Fixations, Infantile Sexual Impulses (Persistence of), Kleptomania, Lying, Masturbation, Menstruation, Narcissism, Obesity, Paranoid Ideation, Peeping, Stealing, Suicide, Truancy, and Weakness (Need to Deny). When one considers the natural ills that adolescent flesh is heir to, one can be more philosophical about the extra touches our teenagers have contributed.
Like other tribes, the teenagers have their folkways. The notes on tribal customs that follow are meant to be suggestive rather than definitive; the Malinowski of the teenage culture has yet to appear.
First, though, it should be made clear that all facts and figures about teenagers are open to the same objection that any other generalization about a group is open to; that is, they don’t apply to individuals. Many teenage boys don’t own a pair of blue jeans, and many teenage girls don’t wear bobby socks; the research department of the magazine Seventeen found that one-fourth of the girls wear stockings every day and that half of them wear stockings on weekends. There is no such thing as The Teenager, any more than there is The Middle-Aged Man, The Suburbanite, or The Combustion Engineer. And there are special difficulties in this particular field. For one thing, teenagers in big Eastern and Midwestern cities like New York and Chicago behave, on the whole, in a less specifically teenage manner than those in the rest of the country; they have less opportunity to take part in sports and to tinker with automobiles, and are more conservative in their dating habits. For another, there is something artificial about the concept of the teenager; it would be more natural to divide the young into grammar-school students (six through thirteen), high-school students (fourteen through seventeen), and college students (eighteen through twenty-one). Surely the thirteen-year-olds have more in common with the twelve-year-olds just below them in school than they have with the nineteen-year-olds in college, or even with the fourteen-year-olds just beginning high school. But the statistics are mostly set up on a teenage basis, and since current usage leans that way, too, perhaps the main thing to be emphasized is the long, dark corridor between childhood and maturity.
Furthermore, most generalizations about teenage behavior are based on the results of polling—a complicated art, which has not been reduced to a science. One recalls gaffes like the late Literary Digest’s forecast that Landon would be elected President in 1936, and the almost universally predicted victory of Dewey over Truman in 1948. These are rare, but lesser slips are not. For instance, Sidney Ascher, one of Gilbert’s competitors, declared in 1955 that statistics (his, anyway) showed that teenagers decided what television programs would be looked at “in seventy-four out of every hundred U.S. living rooms.” TV Guide, a weekly that has more than five million readers, wove a diaphanous lead article around this alleged statistic. But, as Gilbert at once wrote the editors, “There are only 9,000,000 families with teenagers. There are close to 35,000,000 families with TV sets. For teenagers to control ‘seventy-four out of every hundred’ they would have to have bicycles and a minimum of three hands.” What made all this especially depressing was that three months earlier Variety had printed Mr. Ascher’s figures, had been duly corrected by the ever-vigilant Gilbert, and had accepted the correction, noting that Mr. Ascher, apart from getting his figures confused, had inadvertently omitted the word “radio” from his statement. This was rather like omitting rice from a description of the Chinese diet, since listening to disc-jockey programs on the radio is one of the chief teenage stigmata.
Nor is the academic method of polling always foolproof. For almost twenty years, the Purdue Opinion Panel, which was founded, and is still directed, by Dr. H. H. Remmers, a professor of psychology and education at Purdue University, has been surveying teenage opinion. By now, it has established itself as the most authoritative academic group in the field. Yet a reading of a volume by Dr. Remmers and a colleague named H. W. Radler that was published last year by Bobbs-Merrill, under the rather too ambitious title of “The American Teenager,” gives rise to misgivings. Not about the so-called processing of the material; the I.B.M. machines have classified, subdivided, and cross-indexed everything with their usual remorseless thoroughness. It is the material itself that makes one wonder. One of the Purdue group’s major efforts has been its Youth Inventory, which it takes by “administering” to thousands of high-school and junior-high-school students a set of two hundred and ninety-eight tersely phrased questions and propositions on the subject of “what things bother teenagers.” Each student is asked to check off a yes after any that apply to him or her. A glance down this lengthy list produces a feeling of dizziness. Although from No. 259 (“I don’t hear very well”) to No. 261 (“I have no appetite”), for instance, is a reasonably short step, these are followed almost at once by No. 265 (“I’m concerned with what life is all about”) and No. 266 (“I’m confused in my religious beliefs”). And what seven-league boots of intellection could compass No. 293 through No. 296 (“Can I believe advertising?” “What is eternity?” “Does it really pay to be honest?” “I wonder about the afterlife”)? Yet boys and girls still in the seventh grade are expected to tick off—yes or no—whether they are troubled by these four problems, or by the two hundred and ninety-four others, which include “People stare at me” and “My nose is ugly.” The curious may learn, courtesy of I.B.M., the precise percentage of Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish respondents who were bothered by having people stare at them (four, six, and nine, respectively), and the geographical distribution of those who thought their noses were ugly (seven per cent in the Midwest, eight in the East, ten in the Mountain-Pacific States, and eleven in the South). If it is bewildering merely to glance through almost three hundred items ranging from “How do you fill out application blanks for college?,” through “I get tired easily,” all the way to “What can I contribute to civilization?,” then one wonders whether a teenager’s pencil checks indicating which are his own problems have very much significance. One’s skepticism grows when one discovers that three per cent of the seventh- and eighth-grade boys queried (and one per cent of the high-school boys) answered yes to Problem No. 244—“I am bothered by menstrual disorders.”
Another weakness of the academic mind in dealing with teenagers, as with other topics, is a tendency to substitute vocabulary for thought. The eminent Harvard sociologist Talcott Parsons has defined the three chief aspects of teenage culture as:
Practically anybody would agree with this summary, and practically anybody could have made it, though in less stately language: Teenagers are disobedient, group-minded, and unrealistic.
These caveats having been registered, the time has come for field notes on teenage culture.
Teenagers read a magazine called Mad, which ridicules the movies, television, advertising, and other aspects of mass culture. Indeed, it is teenagers who have been mostly responsible for the fantastic success of the publication, which in a few years has built up a circulation of a million and now has half a dozen imitators, including Frenzy and Thimk. Mad expresses the teenagers’ cynicism about the world of mass media that their elders have created—so full of hypocrisy and pretense, so governed by formulas. But Mad itself has a formula. It speaks the same language, aesthetically and morally, as the media it satirizes; it is as tasteless as they are, and even more violent. Mad’s slogan used to be “Humor in a Jugular Vein,” and though it has abandoned the slogan, it still taps the vein. So a Romanized barbarian might have rebelled against the decadence of Rome, and such, essentially, is the quality of teenage revolt today.
Teenagers communicate extensively by telephone—an average of an hour a day, says Gilbert, and, among girls of sixteen and over, eighty minutes. “It’s the most important thing in the teenager’s life,” one young person explained to a Gilbert interviewer. “It keeps him in contact with his friends and gives him a social life.” A team of sociologists at Ohio State, after going through their own tribal rituals, reached much the same conclusion. The young phone addict, in their view, is “developing his personality,” which is probably true enough; the value of that personality is not a scientific question. The Ohio State savants look suspiciously on the teenager who shies away from the instrument; perhaps he is insecure, or perhaps—even worse—he has no friends to call up.
Teenagers, according to Gilbert’s statistics, spend an average of two and sometimes as many as five hours a day listening (with half an ear, anyway) to the radio and over an hour watching TV, which means, if one adds the time at the telephone, that they put in an appalling number of hours hooked up to some kind of communications machine. Children under twelve are the chief TV watchers. Teenagers prefer the radio, because of their addiction to disc jockeys, and because they can do their homework while the music rocks’n’rolls.
Teenagers now drink more than they did ten years ago. In 1944, Gilbert’s agents reported that twenty-nine per cent of the girls they questioned on the subject said they drank beer; the figure has since risen to fifty-nine per cent. Dr. Matthew Chappell, of Hofstra College, reports that eighty-six per cent of all teenagers in Nassau County, on Long Island, drink, as opposed to sixty-four per cent in Racine, Wisconsin, and fifty-six per cent in Sedgwick County, Kansas.
Teenagers Go Steady more than they used to. Gilbert estimates that sixty per cent of today’s teenagers engage in the practice. Some observers see this trend as one more instance of the dominance of the American male by the American female, on the theory that Going Steady means the imposition of monogamy at an early age. But Gilbert’s researches show that, monogamous though it is while it lasts, Going Steady does not usually lead to marriage—or teenagers don’t think it does. “GOING STEADY MEANS FOR NOW BUT NOT FOR KEEPS,” reads the headline over one of Gilbert’s syndicated weekly columns. Still, since Going Steady obviously leads to a closer emotional relationship than miscellaneous dating, there is some reason here for parental concern, especially in the light of a survey of five thousand teenagers that Gilbert made in 1955 for This Week. Asked “how far” they thought it was proper for a Going Steady couple to “go,” eleven per cent replied “Only kiss,” ten per cent replied “Light necking,” eighteen per cent replied “Petting,” while nearly sixty per cent felt that it was right to do “anything they want.” Whatever the reaction of parents to this information, their chances of doing anything effective about it have steadily diminished. “Less than ten years ago,” Gilbert notes, “the high-schooler was restricted as to the functions he could attend on school nights and the time he was due home.” In 1955, though, Gilbert’s samplings indicated that fifty-three per cent of high-school students were allowed to date on school nights, and that twenty-five per cent of these could stay out as late as they liked. The erosion of parental control has been so rapid that quite a few young adults whose dating was closely restricted while they were teenagers have kid brothers and sisters who enjoy almost complete freedom. New York teenagers are, oddly enough, less sophisticated, or at least less advanced, in regard to sexual behavior than their country cousins. They average 1.3 dates per week, as opposed to 1.9 for teenagers elsewhere, and they go in more for group dating, which is to pairing-off as root beer is to beer. Girls outside New York begin dating at fourteen, New York girls at fifteen.
Teenagers are surprisingly ignorant of the Bible. A recent Gilbert column, summarizing the results of a poll, said, “Less than 30 per cent could manage a passing mark on a grade-school-level Bible test.” Only three in ten of those questioned knew about Doubting Thomas, less than half knew that Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt, not one in ten could identify Pontius Pilate, and not one in fifteen knew who saw the handwriting on the wall or who sold his birthright for a mess of pottage. Almost a third didn’t know that Jesus was born in Bethlehem. Three-fourths of the Jews and Protestants interviewed didn’t consider themselves “religious” and didn’t go to synagogue or church regularly. Three-fourths of the Catholics did go to church, but their scores on the Bible test were not appreciably better.
Teenagers are not much interested in political issues. This is partly because they can’t vote, but only partly. In 1956, Gilbert found that only two out of every five college students eligible to vote planned to do so, and other investigations have shown that this lack of interest is even more pronounced among their immediate juniors. In 1957, the Purdue Opinion Panel invited teenagers to express themselves, anonymously, on whatever problems were bothering them, and of two thousand-odd letters received, just one mentioned the atomic bomb. Ironically, political apathy is one of the few areas in which teenagers follow their elders’ lead. Little more than half the electorate bothers to vote, even in important elections, and a 1954 survey that Professor Samuel A. Stouffer, of Harvard, made for the Fund for the Republic—its results were published as a book entitled “Communism, Conformity and Civil Liberties”—showed in detail that our adults care little about questions broader than their personal lives and interests. The Stouffer survey also showed that a good part of the Bill of Rights is rejected by a high percentage of American adults. A bare majority said yes when asked “If a person wanted to make a speech in your community favoring government ownership of all the railroads and big industries, should he be allowed to speak, or not?” and sixty per cent wanted to deny free speech to irreligious speakers, with sixty-eight per cent opposing it for “an admitted Communist.” Here, too, the teenagers lamentably follow their elders’ lead. They are curiously willing to let “the government” restrict civil liberties—curiously, that is, considering their own resistance to control. Gilbert reports that one out of three teenagers “approves of a central government agency to act as censor” and that almost half of all teenagers think the police should be allowed to tap telephones in order to get evidence against suspected criminals and “radicals”—two repressive measures that are so far just a gleam in some senator’s eye. Similarly, Purdue found that forty-one per cent of teenagers did not favor freedom of the press, thirty-four per cent thought that “the government should prohibit some people from making speeches,” and fifty-eight per cent believed that “the police or the F.B.I. may sometimes be right in giving a man the ‘third degree’ to make him talk.”
What is puzzling—or would have been puzzling a generation ago—is that in teenagers these illiberal opinions do not appear to be connected with any strong belief in the capitalist status quo. Quite the contrary, as Gilbert sadly observes in his book:
Assuming that those questioned were neither socialists nor anarchists—an assumption warranted by their views on civil liberties—one is inclined to conclude that American youth is as cynical in the fifties as it was idealistic in the thirties. Conformism also plays some part. “American teenagers, Remmers and Radler write, “show substantial class differences in many aspects of their behavior, problems, and aspirations, but in their desire for popularity and their conformist attitude, they are as one. . . . [The] most striking and consistent fact that has emerged from our polls [is] the phenomenon of . . . extreme sensitivity to the opinions of others, with a concomitant conformity.” Conformists are not likely to be much concerned about minority rights. How deep the passion for conformity goes in our teenagers, at least in words, is revealed by the response that the Purdue panel got to the proposition “Obedience and respect for authority are the most important habits for children to learn.” Three out of four agreed. Even odder was the discovery, by Gilbert’s interviewers, that eight out of ten teenagers questioned were in favor of the draft—or said they were.
Teenagers—male—devote a good deal of their energy working on and driving hot-rod automobiles, but by no means all teenage males are hot-rodders; the expense alone precludes that. Some months ago, a Michigan hot-rodder, feeling that Gilbert had abused the term in one of his weekly columns, set him right:
One of Gilbert’s clients—Robert Petersen, a relaxed, friendly, crew-cut young Californian—has made a publishing career out of unveiling this meaning. Ten years ago, Petersen, who is the same age as Gilbert, launched Hot Rod, which he claims was the first magazine in this country to be edited exclusively for drivers, rather than manufacturers and sellers, of automobiles, and he has since added five related magazines to his string—Motor Trend, Motor Life, Car Craft, Rod & Custom, and Custom Cars. The combined monthly circulation of the six now comes to a million and a half, which, together with a circulation of two hundred thousand copies for ’Teen, the newest Petersen monthly, yields him a gross of six and a half million dollars a year. “The young American male has only one real interest—his car,” says Petersen, who claims that more of that species read his magazines than read Life or the Saturday Evening Post. But while there are, of course, thousands of teenagers who are sufficiently well off or sufficiently resourceful, or both, to assemble and maintain a hot rod, probably more than half of the actual owners of such cars are elderly males of twenty-five or thirty. Usually there is a constellation of five or six teenagers revolving, like planets, around each car, the older boys helping the owner with his endless tinkering, the younger ones running errands. The owner and his satellites all ride around together in the car, take their dates out in it, and collectively belong to one of the scores of hot-rod clubs that have grown up in the last half-dozen years—largely through the efforts of Petersen and of Wally Parks, who is the editor of Hot Rod and the president of the National Hot Rod Association. The two men started the Association in 1951, as a rehabilitation measure; hot-rodders were racing on the public highways, getting arrested and getting killed. The Association has promoted the building of special “drag strips” for racing and has encouraged civic virtue among hot-rodders. The members of some of the clubs actually patrol the roads, looking for motorists in trouble. When they have done what they can for them, they roar off, leaving a printed card: “YOU HAVE BEEN HELPED BY MEMBERS OF THE SUPERJET RODS”—or whatever the club’s name is. It makes an impression.
Teenagers are the most assiduous moviegoers in the population, and their tastes are taken seriously in Hollywood. “NEED STARS WITH A COKE-SET DRAW,” a headline in Variety read not long ago. They even have their own special kinds of films. Mostly Grade B or C productions, these fall into three categories: teenage problems, rock ’n’ roll, and horror. Teenagers are the subjects of the first (“Hot Rod Rumble,” “Juvenile Jungle,” “Live Fast, Die Young,” “High School Confidential”), the heroes of the second (“Rock Around the Clock,” “Jailhouse Rock,” “The Cool and the Crazy”), and the victim-villains of the third (“Blood of Dracula,” “I Was a Teenage Werewolf,” “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein”). A moral peculiarity of all these films is that it is never quite clear how the audience is supposed to feel about the dramatis personae, since everybody, admirable or despicable, behaves the same way—tough, sexy, jive-talking, and generally hopped up. This ambiguity may reflect the teenager’s own confusion as to whether he’s a Good Guy or a Bad Guy—or, more exciting and romantic, both at the same time. It certainly reflects the instinct of Hollywood to have it both ways, pleasing the P.T.A. as well as the Problem Child. In “High School Confidential,” the hero begins as a villain—insulting the teachers, threatening the boys with his switchblade and the girls with his Presley stare, pushing dope in the locker room—but in the last reel it turns out he’s working for the F.B.I. Master Hyde, meet Young Dr. Jekyll.
The formula gets its ultimate twist in the enormously successful teenage horror films. (“I Was a Teenage Werewolf” cost less than a hundred and fifty thousand dollars to make and so far has taken in over two million.) In these, there are two villains—one of them an adult scientist who is responsible for his acts, the other his helpless instrument, an innocent bystander (teenage), whom he transforms into a monster. The teenage moviegoers can thus blame everything on the grownups who have created them—a symbolism too obvious to be called Freudian. In “I Was a Teenage Frankenstein” (at last reports, it was doing even better than “Werewolf”), a mad scientist, carefully identified as British, causes considerable havoc in an American college town by carpentering together a Being out of parts of recently deceased teenagers, much as a car is assembled in Detroit. Since the scientist wants physical perfection, he will accept only teenage corpses—a rather crude bit of audience flattery. Dr. Frankenstein hopes to achieve world renown, and possibly a Nobel Prize, with this superman, or superteenager, who is also called Frankenstein—a new high in the abuse of Mrs. Shelley’s original concept. The Being is presented as a wistful creature who, like other teenagers, longs only to be accepted by the Coke-and-marijuana crowd. As a means to this end, he wants a new face—naturally enough, considering what happened to his old face in a fatal automobile accident that, by a diabolical (or perhaps providential) chance, took place just outside Doc Frankenstein’s laboratory, in the basement of Old McCollum Hall, After the Being has killed two other teenagers—a blond coed, whom he strangles when she fails to respond to his advances, and a handsome youth, whose face is needed as a spare part—the film ends, not unexpectedly, with the murder of Frankenstein (doctor) by Frankenstein ( monster).
In “Blood of Dracula,” the victim-villainess is a sensitive, spirited girl who, after her mother dies and her father marries a particularly loathsome blonde, is shipped off to boarding school. There she falls under the (literally) hypnotic spell of a masterful lady science teacher, who aspires to put an end to the manufacture of atomic bombs by molding her pupil into a creature of such unmitigated evil that the world will “wake up” and “outlaw war.” The logic is not wholly lucid, but neither is the lady science teacher. The girl leads a miserable life, getting way behind in her homework and sprouting fangs whenever the teacher broadcasts to her telepathically. She finds that study and vampirism just don’t mix. After several of her schoolmates have perished, with appropriate screams, the girl ends the film in classic style by disposing of her teacher and herself.
One might be inclined to think that Mr. Herman Cohen, the enterprising entrepreneur who produced both these films, as well as “Werewolf,” was not an outstanding benefactor of youth. This, however, would be a superficial view, according to Dr. Martin Grotjahn, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of Southern California School of Medicine, who regards horror films as a form of “self-administered psychiatric therapy for America’s adolescents.” Dr. Grotjahn, as quoted in Variety, is quite positive about it:
A concurring opinion has been submitted by Dr. Marshall Wheeler, director of research for the Reiss-Davis Clinic for Child Guidance, in Los Angeles: “Our modern Frankenstein movies are no more terrifying to a child than such Biblical stories as the whale devouring Jonah or Daniel in the lions’ den.” Whether it dispels or reinforces anxieties to inspect at close range every crevasse in a seared human face, and whether Jonah and Daniel are strictly comparable to Master Frankenstein and Miss Dracula—since, after all, the former pair came through intact—are matters best left to the professors. Meanwhile, Mr. Cohen, who, in the interests of scientific knowledge, saw to it that the press received the opinions of Drs. Grotjahn and Wheeler, is continuing his healing mission. Last summer, he released “How to Make a Monster” and then left for London to produce another psychiatric film—“Horrors of the Black Museum,” in full color
Above all, Teenagers rock ’n’ roll—the very term is orthographically unsettling. Here teenism reaches its climax, or its nadir—at any rate, its least inhibited expression. Here one may observe in their purest forms the teenagers’ defiance of adult control, their dominance of certain markets, their tendency to set themselves up as a caste, and the tribal rituals and special dialect they have evolved. “The Big Beat is here to stay. The music market, for the first time in history, is completely dominated by the young set.” So wrote Mr. Charles Laufer, editor of ’Teen. In a later issue, a couple of tribesmen responded from Danbury, Connecticut: “We absolutely, positively agree that rock ’n’ roll has to be here to stay. It’s our music! The older generation has a tendency to go for classical music and standards. They have their place but so does rock ’n’ roll, so why do they knock the beat? Rock ’n’ roll is our way of showing how we feel. Fast music is a way of keeping up with the pace of the world. The world will be ours in a few years—so why fight it?” This tocsin rings ominously in adult ears, which find rock ’n’ roll even less interesting musically than the insipid ballads that Crosby and Sinatra crooned to earlier generations of adolescents. It seems to consist of nothing but a simple beat and lots of noise; submerged in the pounding surf of rhythm, the tune is as hard to find as it is in Schoenberg. Sigmund Spaeth has described rock ’n’ roll as “a reversion to savagery.” Mitch Miller, director of Columbia Records’ popular-music division, calls it “musical baby food” and explains its vogue with the Gilbertian phrase (W. S., not Eugene) “the worship of mediocrity, brought about by a passion for conformity.”
Almost the only adult—except the adults making money from it—who regards rock ’n’ roll as something more than a pain in the neck is the British anthropologist Geoffrey Gorer, who published some speculations on the subject in the magazine Encounter about a year ago. While he agreed that rock ’n’ roll is musically dull (“remarkable only for its resolute rejection of the rhythmic complications and subtleties of jazz and ragtime”), he saw in the craze a great deal more than mere foolishness or perversity. Taking off from Nietzsche’s contrast between Apollonian and Dionysian types (in the former “the values are order and proportion,” in the latter “sensation and self-abandonment”), he suggested that rock ’n’ roll is a Dionysian revolt against a predominantly Apollonian society, an instinctive effort to redress a balance that has swung too far from spontaneity, ecstasy, and “the full use . . . of the striped muscles”:
One of the many reasons adults dislike rock ’n’ roll is that it has largely driven other kinds of popular music off the airwaves. The disc jockeys play only the most popular records (the Top Twenty is the usual formula), and because their largest and most enthusiastic audience is teenage, rock ’n’ roll seems to pound out twenty-four hours a day. There are now some three thousand disc jockeys—it is hard to believe that before 1935, when Martin Block invented the art form, there wasn’t a single one—and they are a powerful force in the music market. Mr. Miller, of Columbia Records, thinks they have abused their power. Not long ago, he spoke bluntly to a convention of disc jockeys: “You went and abdicated your programming to the eight-to-fourteen-year-olds, to the pre-shave crowd that makes up twelve per cent of the country’s population and zero per cent of its buying power, once you eliminate pony-tail ribbons, Popsicles, and peanut brittle. Youth must be served—but how about some music for the rest of us?” What Eugene Gilbert had to say about the zero per cent and the peanut brittle, in a heavily statistical letter to the editor of Time, which had quoted from Miller’s speech, may be imagined. He has recently got into the disc-jockey act himself; newspapers subscribing to his weekly A.P. column also receive a list of the week’s Top Twenty records, as established and certified by Eugene Gilbert.
In the record business, the situation is better, from the adult’s standpoint, even though teenagers have muscled in heavily there, too. The business is booming. In 1939, it grossed seven and a half million dollars, and last year it grossed over four hundred million. Teenagers are largely responsible for the fantastic inflation of the number of labels, from the three companies that did most of the 1939 business to over a thousand today; a new company can be founded on one best-selling record by some hitherto unknown teenage “composer,” who generally sings his own opus, with suitable guitar plonkings. But although teenagers, shepherded by the disc jockey, strongly influence the record business, they don’t dominate it. Records, like books, can be made for comparatively small groups of customers—in contrast to the mass audience of radio and television—and the grownups still have a fighting chance. Surprisingly, classical L.P.s account for about the same proportion—one-quarter—of total record sales as single pop records, a category that includes almost all rock-’n’-roll releases. Pop L.P.s—show tunes, jazz, and so on—come to about forty per cent of the total, and the remaining ten per cent is divided among such categories as country music, hymns, and poetry readings. Teenagers, of course, don’t buy rock ’n’ roll exclusively; a major record company recently told Gilbert’s researchers that teenagers bought not only ninety per cent of its single records, as one might expect, but also half its L.P.s.
Perhaps the chief adult objection to rock ’n’ roll is to the sexy nature of the lyrics—Variety calls them “leerics”—and of the bumps and grinds executed by certain singers. The sexual overtones are odd, considering that the rock-’n’-roll audience is now believed to lie mostly between the ages of eight and fifteen—much younger than the crowd that listened to the crooners twenty years ago. Perhaps this is another instance of the striking tendency of the young in America to mature—or, anyway, to act independently of adult control—at an increasingly early age. The damage, however, may be less than alarmed parents fear. For all its Dionysian verve, rock-’n’-roll dancing is curiously sexless. “Despite the pelvic contortions of a few singers, and the double meanings in the words of some lyrics,” Mr. Gorer writes, “I should consider rock ’n’ roll the least sexual type of social dancing which Europe has seen in the last couple of centuries; instead of a stylisation of courtship and wooing, there is practically no physical contact nor opportunity for conversation; the dance can only be performed if the pair are in good rapport before they step on to the dance floor.” The accuracy of this analysis may be verified by a look at a current television hit show—Dick Clark’s “American Bandstand,” in which young Mr. Clark, a former disc jockey, presides over the revels of a roomful of teenagers, who rock ’n’ roll to songs like “Skinny Minnie” (“She ain’t skinny, she’s tall, that’s all”). The show has eight million look ’n’ listeners, half of them adults (another example of the blurring of age lines), and provokes forty-five thousand letters a week, or the equivalent of four people sitting down to write Mr. Clark every minute of the day and night—God knows what about.
Teenagers not only consume rock ’n’ roll but also create it, or think they do. Quite a few of its composers and performers are not much older than their fans. “The kids don’t want recognized stars doing their music. They don’t want real professionals. They want faceless young people doing it in order to retain the feeling that it’s their own.” This observation, by the implacable Mr. Miller, is undeniable. Rock ’n’ roll is the teenage frontier, the “career open to talent,” the jackpot that capriciously pays off to a few members of the tribe. There is eighteen-year-old Ricky Nelson, who, after years of stooging on his parents’ “Ozzie and Harriet” radio and television shows, took up his guitar and made a record of “Be-Bop Baby” that sold more than a million. There are those seventeen-year-old twins from Hicksville, Long Island, Jim and John Cunningham, who write their own songs, use their friends as a testing bureau, and market the approved numbers—which they sing themselves—to millions of their fellow-teenagers. There is that fourteen-year-old English boy improbably named Laurie London, whose recent American tour was a great success; his big record hit, another million-seller, is a version of the Negro spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands.” Before London came along, the song was mostly identified with Marian Anderson. “I’ve never heard her sing it, but I’d like to,” he says. “My treatment is of a nice pop song with a beat.” Miss Anderson, who has heard London sing it, says merely, “It was not meant to be this way.” In a higher age bracket, but typical, because of the suddenness with which he hit the jackpot—and because of the random quality of his success, no more explicable on the ground of personal talent than the success of any other slot-machine player—is the twenty-four-year-old singer Jimmie Rodgers, who a year or so ago was getting hamburger money by collecting Coke bottles in the back alleys of Los Angeles, and who is now making about two hundred thousand dollars a year. He has a pleasant voice, a good sense of rhythm, and average skill with the guitar; unable to read music, he started out by memorizing songs as they came over his car radio. One imagines an even less musically literate troubadour preparing his repertoire by sitting in his car and listening to Mr. Rodgers coming over the airwaves, and so on, like that unsettling baking-powder label with a picture of the can on it, which bears the picture of another can, et cetera ad infinitum
“The feeling that it’s their own,” mentioned by Mr. Miller, is largely an illusion. The Children’s Crusade undoubtedly threw up some inspired teen-age leaders, but the very notion of a crusade came from the grownups. Similarly, a fifteen-year-old may write or sing a rock-’n’-roll number, but, whether he knows it or not, his elders have been there before him. The term was coined by an adult disc jockey, Alan Freed—still a high priest of rock ’n’ roll—who in 1949 began plugging, on Station WJW, in Cleveland, what were then called “race records;” that is, “rhythm” and “blues” numbers that appealed especially to Negroes. Freed thought whites might also go for this kind of music if it had a broader name, so he called his program “The Moondog Rock ’n’ Roll Party.” (The original Moondog, a Times Square personage, eventually enjoined him from using that name, but no one has contested his right to “Rock ’n’ Roll.”) In 1952, Freed gave the first of several Moondog Balls, in the Cleveland Arena—or, rather, he intended to do so. The Arena has a capacity of ten thousand, and thirty thousand showed up, the result being a mild riot, no ball, and lots of publicity. In 1954, Freed made his first rock-’n’-roll broadcast over WINS, in New York, and the following year he gave two dances at the St. Nicholas Arena, into which seven thousand teenagers, or double the hall’s capacity, jammed each time. In 1956, Columbia released the first rock- ’n’-roll movie, “Rock Around the Clock,” starring Freed. In 1957, Freed put on a Christmas show at the New York Paramount, and it drew the biggest crowds in that theatre’s history. There are now said, by not disinterested observers, to be four thousand Alan Freed Clubs here and abroad, and Freed is said, by the same observers, to receive ten thousand fan letters a week. Last spring, he finished up a New England tour with a rock-’n’-roll party at the Boston Arena that worked on its audience of five thousand to such effect that after the show they not only tore the neighborhood apart but stabbed, robbed, and/or beat fifteen persons. Freed was indicted for inciting “the unlawful destruction of property,” and Boston and several other cities banned rock-’n’-roll shows thenceforward. Apollo had struck back at Dionysus, as he had in London a bit earlier, when the normally well-behaved British teenagers were stirred by “Rock Around the Clock” to dancing in the aisles, and even in the streets. Their behavior, venial by American standards, caused a scandal; there were a few arrests and more than a few letters to the Times.
The great symbol of rock ’n’ roll, of course, is not Alan Freed but Elvis Presley, the Southern back-country boy who began his big-time career only two years ago and who, before he was drafted, last March, received fifty thousand dollars for three brief TV appearances. As Freed stands for the blues-rhythm-Negro element of rock ’n’ roll, so Presley stands for the country-music element—hillbilly songs, folk tunes, and cowboy ballads, most of them composed in Tin Pan Alley and all of them heavily corned with sentiment. Of the current rock ’n’ rollers, Presley is by far the most vulgar, to use the word in its good sense (earthy) as well as its bad (coarse). Imitators on the order of Jerry Lee Lewis, recently extruded from England when it became known that his bride and travelling companion was thirteen, are just vulgar-bad. But Presley has a Greek profile, an impressive physique, lots of animal magnetism, and a not disagreeable singing voice; in fact, it is rumored that he had some talent before Hollywood and television got hold of him. Because of his uninhibited pelvic movements and the vulgar-good-bad way he sings his “leerics,” most parents take an even dimmer view of Presley than of other rock ’n’ rollers. For somewhat the same reasons, he has the most enthusiastic teenage following in the business. Wherever he sings, “I LIKE ELVIS” buttons sprout like mushrooms.
A riposte to Presley was made in the spring of 1957 by Robert Cenedella, Jr., an apprentice at the Art Students League, and Edmund Leites, a freshman at Yale, who together got out an “I LIKE LUDWIG” button, bearing a portrait of Beethoven. They opened their campaign at the New York High School of Music and Art, from which both had graduated the year before. On the first day of hostilities, a thousand students appeared wearing “I LIKE LUDWIG” buttons. Four days later, five thousand students, in all parts of New York, were wearing them, and in a few weeks orders began to come in from the rest of the country. Casals and Piatigorsky wore the buttons while playing at concerts, the Philadelphia Symphony ordered ten thousand, and “I LIKE LUDWIG” clubs were organized. Presently, the counter-revolution was global, since rock ’n’ roll, like other American cultural products, has spread everywhere. Native epigones of Presley, equipped with guitars and self-confidence, have roused teenagers to a Dionysian frenzy in Germany (Peter Kraus), England (Tommy Steele et many al.), Brazil (Cauby Peixoto; “For Cauby we will go through anything!” some of his girl admirers shouted from jail after a Cauby-inspired riot in Rio), and Japan (Frank Akagi, Masaaki Hirao, Keijiro Yamashita; it’s “Rock Around the Crock” over there). The orders from abroad for “I Like Ludwig” buttons were often accompanied by letters expressing surprise that American teenagers cared about Beethoven; this was before Cliburn, and Russian students were especially incredulous. To date, a hundred thousand buttons have been sold, at fifteen cents each.
Elvis, however, is outlasting Ludwig. The Leites-Cenedella counter-ploy has subsided, but Presley has not. Though he is doing his stretch in the Army, his records are still in demand—thirty million have been sold to date—and he has a new movie out. (It’s about a simple farm boy who becomes a famous singer.) His position is not all that it was, however. Gilbert’s paragraph on “the Elvis Presley phenomenon” in the October, 1956, issue of a newsletter he occasionally sends out to clients and prospects makes strange reading today:
Whatever the reason—perhaps Presley is too vulgar for effective commercial exploitation, which is always put off by anything real, or perhaps the teenage market is just too tricky for Davy Crockett-type manipulation—the top brains have failed. As a selling device, Presley has not become the teenage equivalent of Howdy Doody, or of Walt Disney’s more recent Zorro. And while he continues to lead the field in rock ’n’ roll, he no longer automatically gets top place in singers’ popularity polls among teenagers. One of his strong rivals is Pat Boone, a gentle, pious, earnest young married man with four children, who graduated last spring from Columbia College with a B.S. magna cum laude, and who, as an old-style crooner, is the antithesis of Presley. (The only encouraging thing about teenagers’ tastes is that they are unpredictable.)
In one respect, though, Presley remains unchallenged. His fans are really fanatics—such fanatics, in fact, that they seem to have little energy left over for anything else. Even by teenage standards, Presleyland is a backward region. Gilbert’s A.P. column of last March 13th reported that only a third of the Presley fans interviewed said they belonged to “a club, society, or other group operated by their school, church, or community,” compared to half the adherents of Pat Boone and Perry Como. As students, Presley fans got an average grade of C, while the Boone-Como admirers achieved a B average. Even more revealing, while one in three Boonesters said he tried to get “the best possible grade,” only one in ten Presleyites admitted this.
These generalizations are supported by the letters Gilbert receives from Presleyites—they write in more frequently, and far more emotionally, than any other group of teenagers—whenever he publishes findings unfavorable to their hero. Some of the responses to the March 13th column were exceptionally fine specimens of demotic abuse:
Rock ’n’ roll plays one more important part in the teenage syndrome. It is the teenagers’ link to the nihilism of our time—to the Beat Generation and hipsterism. Except for a few precocious sports (in both senses of the word), even the rank-and-file hipsters are well out of their teens, while some of their leaders are positively venerable; Jack Kerouac is pushing forty, and Kenneth Rexroth will never see fifty again. Hipsters dig cool, or progressive, jazz, which is as intellectual as rock ’n’ roll is primitive. Their culture heroes run from Buddha to the late Charlie Parker, a Negro saxophoning genius who had a lot to do with inventing progressive jazz, but definitely do not include Elvis, although there is a romantic feeling for the late James Dean, whom the teenagers have a super-romantic feeling for. Nor can it be said that rock ’n’ roll is the kindergarten of hipsterism, since, in contrast to the Flaming Youth of the twenties, most teenagers quickly turn into Nice Young Married Couples. Hipsterism is a postgraduate course—the novelist Norman Mailer thinks “the hipsters may be the beginning of a new world revolution, like the Early Christians”—and most Americans never get beyond high school. Nevertheless, there is a connection. Rock-’n’-rolling teenagers are likely to express themselves—or, rather, to not express themselves—in the “hip” vocabulary, which is as eloquent as a stammer, as meaningful as a grunt. And they share the hipsters’ contempt for respectability; they, too, feel alienated from adult culture (including spelling and grammar), and they, too, value Dionysian sensation as The Greatest and ever strive to Get With It. In the struggle with Apollo, the teenager is the temporary ally of the hipster, even if later on, in his twenties, he becomes the most Apollonian of credit managers.
Eugene Gilbert’s professional life is marked by a persistent effort to escape Teendom, as it is sometimes horribly called, and an equally strong inner pull toward that which he would flee. His office, for example, is very posh, with contrasting walls, a portable bar (which he rarely remembers to use), Goya etchings, modernistic furniture, and a number of aggressive curios, including an elaborately carved rhinoceros tusk and two sets of huge ivory chessmen, one from Java and one from China. Until this month, there was also a large portrait of a man in fancy dress, which he found in an apartment he once rented. It wasn’t a very good picture, and he had no idea who painted it or who sat for it; it was there because he thought a big picture was needed in that particular corner. He has now replaced it with a portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds, which steps up the cultural voltage considerably. “I did the place up this way because I didn’t want to be reminded of teenagers any more than I had to,” he explains. Yet Teendom keeps creeping in. A moment later, he is comparing the relative drawing power of cherry-vanilla and butter-pecan ice cream in the junior-high market with an enthusiasm suggesting that his own butter-pecan days are not as far behind him psychologically as they are chronologically.
Gilbert’s apartment, on Central Park South, is also designed to serve as a refuge from Teendom. It is full of period furniture, silver bowls, Meissen figurines, and jade temple pieces. There is also an excellent Joseph Stella water color, a Moroni portrait, less excellent but older and bigger, and a rather startling Rosetti nude. In decorating both his office and his home, he was helped by his attractive young wife, who came to work for him five years ago, during a vacation from Bennington, and left college, while she was still a teenager, to marry him. His book is dedicated to “the prettiest interviewer, who later became my partner for life, Barbre R. Gilbert.” She still works for him, her main job being to help out on the A.P. column. The Gilberts are both ardent van Gogh fans. “ ‘Lust for Life’ was my exposure to van Gogh,” Gilbert says. “I became very much enamored of his work. I must have a van Gogh sometime, if I can ever afford to. I had a chance at a drawing once, at a Parke-Bernet auction. I kept in the bidding up to seven thousand, and then Barbre got her hand over my mouth. When we were in Holland summer before last, we hired a car and made a special trip to the Kröller-Müller Museum, in Otterlo, to see its van Goghs. It was rainy and cold, and the car had no heater, but we kept on; after all, it was a pilgrimage. Then, when we finally got there, we found that all the van Goghs were in Philadelphia.”
Gilbert’s style as a businessman wavers between Teendom and boredom. In conversation, he mixes terms like “valid” and “modus operandi” with expressions like “chugalug,” which is onomatopoeic teenage slang for a beer-drinking party. His prose ranges from Johnsonian solemnity to Boswellian frivolity. An example of the former is a memorandum he recently wrote to Mr. Byron Reed, who was then vice-president in charge of marketing for the Hollywood V-Ette Vassarette brassière-and-girdle company, about—or, rather, re—“Use of Research Material and Student Leaders for Promotional Purposes.” A few excerpts may suggest the broad sweep of this document:
In carefree moments, however, Gilbert is apt to abandon such portentous prose for a vein that the editors of Mad might envy. There is, for example, the letter he wrote from Algiers a couple of years ago to Stanley Gillette, vice-president in charge of sales of Van Heusen shirts:
Somewhere in the dialectical interplay between the high seriousness of the memorandum to one vice-president and the low comedy of the letter to the other lies, perhaps, one explanation of Gilbert’s success. “I eat lunch either very fancy or very simple—a sandwich sent up from the drugstore or some first-class place like the Chambord,” he says. There is a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to lay it on the line and a time to kid around, and Gilbert knows when to do which.
_(This is the second of two articles on Mr. Gilbert.) _♦
