The Ways of White Folks (7 page)

A thousand pairs of female arms, and some few hundred men’s, were lifted up with great rustle and movement, then and there, toward the sun. They
were really lifted up toward Lesche, because nobody knew quite where the sun was in the crowded ballroom—besides all eyes were on Lesche.

“Splendid,” the big black-haired young man on the platform said, “beautiful and splendid! That’s what life is, a movement up!” He paused. “But not always up. The trees point toward the sun, but they also sway in the wind, joyous in the wind.… Keep your hands skyward,” said Lesche, “sway! Everybody sway! To the left, to the right, like trees in the wind, sway!” And the huge audience began, at Lesche’s command, to sway. “Feet on the floor,” said Lesche, “sway!”

He stood, swaying, too.

“Now,” said Lesche suddenly, “stop!” Try to move your hips!… Ah, you cannot! Seated as you are in chairs, you cannot! The life-center, the balance-point, cannot move in a chair. That is one of the great crimes of modern life, one of the murders of ourselves, we sit too much in chairs. We need to stand up—no, not now my friends.” Some were already standing. “Not
just
when you are listening to
me
. I am speaking now of a way of life. We need to
live
up, point ourselves at the sun, sway in the wind of our rhythms, walk to an inner and outer music, put our balance-points in motion. (Do you not remember my talk on ‘Music and Joy’?) Primitive man never sits in chairs. Look at the Indians!
Look at the Negroes! They know how to move from the feet up, from the head down. Their centers live. They walk, they stand, they dance to their drum beats, their earth rhythms. They squat, they kneel, they lie—but they never, in their natural states,
never
sit in chairs. They do not mood and brood. No! They live through motion, through movement, through music, through joy! (Remember my lecture, ‘Negroes and Joy’?) Ladies, and gentlemen, I offer you today—rejuvenation through joy.”

Lesche bowed and bowed as he left the platform. With the greatest of grace he returned to bow again to applause that was thunderous. To a ballroom that was full of well-dressed women and cultured men, he bowed and bowed. Black-haired and handsome beyond words, he bowed. The people were loath to let him go.

Lesche had learned to bow that way in the circus. He used to drive the roan horses in the Great Roman Chariot Races—but nobody in the big ballroom of the hotel knew that. The women thought surely (to judge from their acclaim) that he had come fullblown right out of heaven to bring them joy.

Lesche knew what they thought, too, for within a month after the closing of his series of Friday Morning Lectures, they all received, at their town addresses, most beautifully written personal notes
announcing the opening in Westchester of his Colony of Joy for the rebuilding of the mind, the body, and the soul.

Unfortunately, we did not hear Lesche’s lecture on “Negroes and Joy” (the third in the series) but he said, in substance, that Negroes were the happiest people on earth. He said that they alone really knew the secret of rhythms and of movements. How futile, he said, to study Delsarte in this age! Go instead, he said, to Cab Calloway, Bricktop’s, and Bill Robinson! Move to music, he said, to the gaily primitive rhythms of the first man. Be Adam again, be Eve. Be not afraid of life, which is a garden. Be all this not by turning back time, but merely by living to the true rhythm of our own age, to music as modern as today, yet old as life, music that the primitive Negroes brought with their drums from Africa to America—that music, my friends, known to the vulgar as jazz, but which is so much
more
than jazz that we know not how to appreciate it; that music which is the Joy of Life.

His letter explained that these rhythms would play a great part in leading those—who would come—along the path to joy. And at Lesche’s initial Westchester colony, the leader of the music would be none other than the famous Happy Lane (
a primitif de luxe
), direct from the Moon Club in Harlem, with the finest Negro band in America. To be
both smart and modern in approaching the body and soul, was Lesche’s aim. And to bring gaiety to a lot of people who had known nothing more joyous than Gurdijieff was his avowed intention—for those who could pay for it.

For Lesche’s proposed path to life was not any less costly than that of the now famous master’s at Fontainebleau. Indeed, it was even slightly more expensive. A great many ladies (and gentlemen, too) who received Lesche’s beautifully written letter gasped when they learned the size of the initial check they would have to draw in order to enter, as a resident member, his Colony of Joy.

Some gasped and did
not
pay (because they could not), and so their lives went on without Joy. Others gasped, and paid. And several (enough to insure entirely Lesche’s first season) paid without even gasping. These last were mostly old residents of Park Avenue or the better section of Germantown, ladies who had already tried everything looking toward happiness—now they wanted to try Joy, especially since it involved so new and novel a course as Lesche proposed—including the gaiety of Harlem Negroes, of which most of them knew nothing except through the rather remote chatter of the younger set who had probably been to the Cotton Club.

So Lesche opened up his house on an old estate
in Westchester with a mansion and several cottages thereon that the crash let him lease for a little or nothing. (Or rather, Sol, his manager, did the leasing.) Instead of chairs, they bought African stools, low, narrow, and backless.

“I got the best decorator in town, too,” said Sol, “to do it over primitive—modernistic—on a percentage of the profits, if there are any.”

“It’s got to be comfortable,” said Lesche, “so people can relax after they get through enjoying themselves.”

“It’ll be,” said Sol.

“We’re admitting nobody west of Fifth Avenue,” said Lesche.

“No Broadwayites,” said Sol.

“Certainly not,” said Lesche. “Only people with souls to save—and enough Harlemites to save ’em.”

“Ha! Ha!” said Sol.

All the attendants were French—maids, butlers, and pages. Lesche’s two assistants were a healthy and hard young woman, to whom he had once been married, a Hollywood Swede with Jean Harlow hair; and a young Yale man who hadn’t graduated, but who read Ronald Firbank seriously, adored Louis Armstrong, worshipped Dwight Fisk, and had written Lesche’s five hundred personal letters in a seven-lively-arts Gilbert Seldes style.

Sol, of course, handled the money, with a staff of secretaries, bookkeepers, and managers. And
Happy Lane’s African band, two tap dancers, and a real blues singer were contracted to spread joy, and act as the primordial pulse beat of the house. In other words, they were to furnish the primitive.

Within a month after the Colony opened in mid-January, its resident guests numbered thirty-five. Applications were legion. The demand for places was very great. The price went up.

“It’s unbelievable how many people with money are unhappy,” said Sol.

“It’s unbelievable how they need what we got,” drawled Lesche.

The press agents wrote marvellous stories about Lesche; how he had long been in his youth at Del Monte a student of the occult, how he had turned from that to the primitive and, through Africa, had discovered the curative values of Negro jazz.

The truth was quite otherwise.

Lesche had first worked in a circus. He rode a Roman chariot in the finale. All the way across the U. S. A. he rode twice daily, from Indianapolis where he got the job to Los Angeles where he quit, because nobody knew him there, and he liked the swimming at Santa Monica—and because he soon found a softer job posing for the members of a modernistic art colony who were modeling and painting away under a most expensive teacher at a nearby resort, saving their souls through art.

Lesche ate oranges and posed and swam all that
summer and met a lot of nice, rich, and slightly faded women. New kind of people for him. Cultured people. He met, among others, Mrs. Oscar Willis of New Haven, one of the members of this colony of art expression. Her husband owned a railroad. She was very unhappy. She was lonely in her soul—and her pictures expressed that loneliness. She invited Lesche to tea at her bungalow near the beach.

Lesche taught her to swim. After that she was less unhappy. She began a new study in the painting class. She painted a circle and called it her impression of Lesche. It was hard to get it just right, so she asked him to do some extra posing for her in the late afternoons. And she paid him very well.

But summers end. Seasonal art classes too, and Mrs. Willis went back East.

Lesche worked in the movies as an extra. He played football for football pictures. Played gigolos for society films. Played a sailor, a cave man, a cop. He studied tap dancing. He did pretty well as far as earning money went, had lots of time for cocktails, parties, and books. Met lots of women.

He liked to read. He’d been a bright boy in high school back home in South Bend. And now at teas out Wilshire way he learned what one ought to read, and what one ought to have read. He spent money on books. Women spent money on him. He swam enough to keep a good body. Drank enough
to be a good fellow, and acted well enough to have a job at the studios occasionally. He got married twice, but the other women were jealous, so divorces followed.

Then his friend Sol Blum had an idea. Sol ran a gym for the Hollywood elite. He had a newly opened swimming pool that wasn’t doing so well. He asked Lesche if he would take charge of the lessons.

“Don’t hurt yourself working, you know. Just swim around a little and show ’em that it looks easy. And be nice to the women,” Sol said.

The swimming courses boomed. The fees went up. Sol and Lesche made money. (Lesche got a percentage cut.) He swam more and drank less. His body was swell, even if licker and women, parties and studio lights had made his face a little hard.

“But he’s so damn nice,” the women would say—who took swimming lessons for no good reason but to be held up by the black-haired Lesche.

Then one summer Lesche and Sol closed the gym and went to Paris. They drank an awful lot of licker at Harry’s bar. And at Bricktop’s they met an American woman who was giving a farewell party. She was Mrs. Oscar Willis, the artist—again—a long way from California.

“What’s the idea?” said Lesche. “Are you committing suicide, Mrs. Willis, or going home, or what? Why a farewell party?”

“I am retiring from life,” said Mrs. Willis, shouting above the frenzy of the Negro band. “I’m giving up art. I’m going to look for happiness. I’m going into the colony near Digne.”

“Whose colony?” said Lesche. He remembered how much colonies cost, thinking of the art group.

“Mogador Bonatz’s colony,” said Mrs. Willis. “He’s a very great Slav who can do so much for the soul. (Art does nothing.) Only one must agree to stay there six months when one goes.”

“Is it expensive?” Lesche asked delicately. “I’m feeling awfully tired, too.”

“Only $30 a day,” said Mrs. Willis. “Have a drink?”

They drank a lot of champagne and said farewell to Mrs. Willis while the jazz band boomed and Bricktop shouted an occasional blues. Then Sol had an idea. After all, he was tired of gyms—why not start a colony? He mentioned it to Lesche when they got out into the open air.

“Hell, yes,” said Lesche as they crossed Pigalle. “Let’s start a colony.”

From then on in Paris, Sol and Lesche studied soul cults. By night they went to Montmartre. By day they read occult books and thought how much people needed to retire and find beauty—and pay for it. By night they danced to the Negro jazz bands. And all the time they thought how greatly they needed a colony.

“You see how much people pay that guy Bonatz?” said Sol.

“Um-huh!” said Lesche, drinking from a tall glass at Josephine’s. “And you see how much they’ll spend on Harlem jazz, even in Paris?”

“Yeah,” said Sol, “we’re spending it ourselves. But what’s that got to do with colonies?”

“Looks like to me,” said Lesche, “a sure way to make money would be, combine a jazz band and a soul colony, and let it roll from there—black rhythm and happy souls.”

“I see,” said Sol. “That’s not as silly as it sounds.”

“Let ’em be mystic and have fun, too,” said Lesche.

“What do you mean, mystic?” asked Sol.

“High brow fun,” said Lesche. “Like they get from Bonatz. What do you suppose he’s got we can’t get?”

“Nothing,” said Sol, who learned to sell ideas in Hollywood. “Now, you got the personality. With me for manager, a jazz band for background, and a little showmanship, it could be a riot.”

“A riot is right,” said Lesche.

When they returned to America, they stayed in New York. Sol got hold of a secretary who knew a lot of rich addresses and some rich people. Together they got hold of a smart young man from Yale who prepared a program of action for a high
brow cult of joy—featuring the primitive. Then they got ready to open a Colony.

They cabled Mrs. Willis at Digne for the names of some of her friends who might need their souls fixed up—in America. They sent out a little folder. And they had the young Yale man write a few articles on
Contentment and Aboriginal Rhythms
for Lesche to try on the high brow magazines.

They really had a lot of nerve.

Lesche learned his lectures by heart that the college boy wrote. Then, he improvised, added variations of his own, made them personal, and bought a morning coat. Nightly he went to Harlem, brushing up on the newer rhythms. In November, they opened cold in the grand ballroom of the hotel facing the Park, without even a try-out elsewhere: Six lectures by Eugene Lesche on Joy in Relation to the Mind, Body, and Soul.

“Might as well take a big chance,” said Sol. “Win or lose.”

They won. In Sol’s language, they wowed ’em. When the Friday Morning Series began, the ballroom was half full. When it ended, it was crowded and Sol had already signed the lease for the old Westchester estate.

So many people were in need of rejuvenating their souls and could seemingly still afford to pay for it that Sol gave up the idea for returning immediately
to his gym in Hollywood. Souls seemed more important than bodies.