The Man Who Designed the Future: Norman Bel Geddes and the Invention of Twentieth-Century America

427 Pages·2017·27.08 MB·English

by  B. Alexandra Szerlip

for Kenneth Rexroth
Autodidact, Man of Letters
1905–1982
The United States did not happen, it was designed.
—ARTHUR J. PULOS
We are all swimming underwater and playing hunches.
—DAVE HICKEY
The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does
not own a single minute of tomorrow. Tomorrow!…It lies under the seal of
midnight—behind the veil of glittering constellations.
—EDWIN HUBBELL CHAPIN, 1861
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Introduction
1. The Boy from Adrian (1893–1912)
2. Chicago/Detroit (1913–1916)
3. Hollywood (1916–1917)
4. Manhattan (1917–1919)
5. From Dante to Gershwin (1919–1922)
6. Prelude to a Miracle (1923–1924)
7. Hollywood/Paris (1925)
8. Colossal in Scale, Appalling in Complexity (1926–1935)
9. Goods into Roses (1920s)
10. Skyscrapers/Streamlining (1931–1933)
11. The Democratization of Design (1930s)
12. What Geniuses Worry About (1930s)
13. Too Good to Succeed: The Chrysler Airflow (1933–1937)
14. Fickle Mistress (1929–1937)
15. Birth of a Classic, Death of a Beauty (January 1938)
16. Too Goddamned Waldorf Astoria: The Exhibit That Nearly Wasn’t (1936–
1940)
17. Crystal Lassies; or, The Future Will Be Topless (1938–1940)
18. Elephants in Tutus (1940–1942)
19. “…that stinking, dirty, filthy piece about me in The New Yorker” (1941)
20. All the Wonders That Would Be (1940–1945)
21. Quantity Trumps Quality (1945–1950)
22. Prodigal Daughter (1950s)
23. Edith (1950–1958)
Epilogue
Notes
Bibliography
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Introduction
In 1927, moving pictures became “talkies,” the Cyclone Roller Coaster opened
at Coney Island, and Sinclair Lewis’s brutally satirical Elmer Gantry coexisted
with “Ain’t She Sweet?,” one a bestseller, the other the number one pop single
on the charts. The world’s first underwater vehicular tunnel opened to carry
automobiles under the Hudson River, connecting New York to New Jersey, and
telephone service was established connecting New York to London, San
Francisco to Manila. One of Manhattan’s first skyscrapers, an art deco
masterwork, was completed,1 Duke Ellington’s band headlined at the Cotton
Club, Florenz Ziegfeld opened his eponymous theater (with a mixed-race cast),
and, having produced 16 million Model Ts, Henry Ford reluctantly “switched
gears,” discontinuing them in favor of the more stylish Model A.
America was “potential” writ large, replete with innovators, record breakers,
and newly minted film stars. Shakespeare-reading, movie-star-handsome Gene
Tunney defeated favorite Jack Dempsey for a second time. George Herman
“Babe” Ruth Jr. hit his sixtieth home run. The survivor of a dismal British
childhood, Charles Spencer Chaplin had, in short order, crossed an ocean and a
continent and put Hollywood on the world map, earning a record $16 million
(some $406.5 million today) in the process.
In 1927, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, just two years younger than the
century, flew solo across the Atlantic in thirty-three hours, inspiring everything
from airplane-shaped piggy banks, a George M. Cohan song, a dance (the Lindy
Hop), and a New York Times editorial on his hair. A baby elk in the Brooklyn
zoo was christened “Lindy Lou,” the Pennsylvania Railroad named a Pullman
car after him, and a spectacular Broadway parade in the pilot’s honor (1,800 tons
of ticker tape and confetti) was followed by a celebration dinner requiring
36,000 plates, 300 gallons of green turtle soup, and 12,000 slices of cake.2
The subsequent flights of one-eyed Wiley Post, Ruth Elder, Admiral Byrd,
and Amelia Earhart were nearly overshadowed. Maybe, wrote novelist F. Scott
Fitzgerald—at thirty-one, already on a downward spiral—the “frontiers of the
illimitable air” would provide respite from the party fatigue of the earthbound
Jazz Age.
“Not Mosquitoes but Aeroplanes.” An early Bel Geddes sketch.
(Courtesy: Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin/The Graphic, 1920s.)
Less jaded than Fitzgerald and equally, if not more, renowned in his field, was
a ninth-grade dropout by the name of Norman Bel Geddes.3 At thirty-four, he
was an internationally lauded theater designer who had, among other things,
created sets for the Chicago and Metropolitan Operas and two Gershwin
musicals, re-created the massive, full-scale interior of a medieval cathedral (the
most extravagant and complex set in Broadway history), and reimagined
Manhattan’s Palais Royale, transforming it from a moribund Victorian cavern
into the city’s premier nightclub.
Prior to that, he’d abandoned a successful, hard-won career as an advertising
art director. In 1927, he decided to jettison (if temporarily) this second, equally
hard-won résumé (set and costume designer, lighting innovator, architect) to
embark on a third path—one that would seriously challenge accepted notions of
everything from airplanes, ocean liners, automobiles, locomotives, stoves, and
circuses to the configuration of factories, homes, cities, and transcontinental
highways over the succeeding decades and beyond—a vocation that, as yet, had
no official name.
—
THE PATRIOT, BEL Geddes would later write, “was probably the straw that broke
the camel’s back,” breaking theater’s absolute hold on his attention. A drama
about the assassination of Catherine the Great’s son (with John Gielgud in his
first stateside role), the play opened at Broadway’s Majestic Theatre on January
19, 1927, the culmination of difficult work in challenging circumstances. Bel
Geddes had been called in, “after months of worry,” to salvage the production.4
The play required characters to exit from one of five different locales, mid-
speech, and continue, almost uninterrupted, in another. To meet the challenge of
almost instantaneous scene changes, Bel Geddes had designed a series of sliding
partitions and interchangeable modules, every piece fitting into every other.
Rather than cutting the floor into a revolving stage—the standard solution, which
reduced the performance area by half and accommodated only two scenes at a
time—he’d suspended his five sets on cables so they could be stored high up in
“the flies,” the space above the stage. Once two half-set platforms pivoted out of
the side wings on silent castors to meet center stage, the required “walls” swung
into place, and a hinged “ceiling” folded down.
Critics praised Bel Geddes’s “patrician” lighting (when a door opens on a
monarch’s dark bedchamber, a scarlet uniform streaks across the lights), his
sound effects (a suspenseful pause marked only by the creaking of boots), and
especially his eight elaborate, regal sets, which changed noiselessly, in the
twinkling of an eye. “Vivid, unforgettable…beyond all praise,” wrote the New
York Telegram.5
So ingenious was his interchangeable, raised-and-lowered-by-cable, shifting-
back-and-forth-between-five-settings approach that Scientific American
published a full-page annotated schemata—“How ‘Lightning’ Stage Changes
Are Made.”6
The play itself was less than stellar. “One wishes,” wrote New York Times
drama critic Brooks Atkinson, “that The Patriot moved as expeditiously as its
scenery.” It closed after a five-day run.
Two weeks later, various newspapers announced that the designer was
“deserting” a decade-long theater career and would consider only one annual
production hereafter.
I’m “gradually inclining more and more to a state of hermitage,” Bel Geddes
wrote to a family friend. “I haven’t been all together happy…The dominating
mercenary aspect of theater…wears me down.”7 No one, least of all Bel Geddes,
could have predicted that, in a few short years, his work on The Patriot would