Birth of the Cool

Everyone knows what cool means. Cool is an aesthetic, an attitude, an amorphous but defining quality that is often difficult to explain, but easily recognizable. The Internet is full of cool places like The Cool Site of the Day and Daily Candy and other search engines that aggregate cool. Cool can also be found on the library shelf and any up and coming Hipster can turn to the pages of the book Birth of the Cool: California Art, Design, and Culture at Midcentury and explore the beginnings of Fifties modernist influences on the West Coast.

Besides being an aesthetic and an artifact of culture–individuals and music can also embody cool. Nothing is cooler than Jazz and nobody is cooler than Miles Davis. Davis’ legendary album Birth Of The Cool was released by Capitol Records in 1957 with music from 3 recording sessions and the album is timeless cool and even inspired a whole school of jazz musicians in California known as the “cool school.”

Objects, film, and fashion are also cool. Take Ray Ban Wayfarers, Messenger bags, and Cloverfield. But material cool can translate into consumerism based on a desire to enhance prestige and status by owning certain “cool” possessions. However, this kind of cool is a diminishing equation–affluent affectations are never cool.

Gypsy Rose Lee

The dysfunctional Hovick family has once again been revived on Broadway in “Gypsy” the musical. This time with the considerable talent of Patti Lupone as Mama Rose and under the masterful direction of ninety-year old Arthur who also wrote the book. This tale of the most notorious show business stage mother and her stripper daughter is loosely based on the memoirs of Gypsy Rose Lee. The original 1959 musical was nominated for eight Tony awards and developed by Ethel Merman and David Merrick with music by Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim lyrics.

Gypsy Rose Lee was born Ellen June Hovick in Seattle Washington in 1911. Her sister also strangely named Ellen June Hovick and later known as June Havoc was born two years later. When their parents divorced the girl’s mother, Rose Hovick developed a successful vaudeville act for her daughters aged five and seven, called Baby June and Her Farmboys. Although the act was making $1500 at its height, Vaudeville soon began to fade and Baby June eloped at 13 with a member of the chorus. Mama Rose though was hell bent on continuing without her main talent, and although Vaudeville was a dying art form–burlesque was blossoming and Gypsy Rose Lee was born.

Gypsy Rose Lee went on to a successful career as an actress, author, and talk show host. She wrote three books including the best seller Gypsy, and performed in 12 movies and , but the intimate details of smothering Mama Rose’s life didn’t feed public consumption until June Havoc wrote in her autobiography, Early Havoc. Rose ‘turned toward her own sex,’ at first ruining a lesbian boardinghouse in a 10-room apartment Gypsy rented for her on West End Avenue, and then owning a sort of lesbian farm in her country house in Highland Hills. At a party in that house, Rose pulled a gun on one of the girls, according to Erik Preminger Gypsy’s son and killed a young woman.

Mama Rose’s troubles may have started in her own childhood. Her mother, Anna, had left the family for long stretches, traveling to the Yukon with hats and corsets that she made, selling them to boom town prostitutes. Rose gave her own girls $1 a day to eat, kept them out of school, and rarely tended to their physical or emotional needs. She lived a hand to mouth existence, stealing from other performers, once pushing a pesky hotel manager out a window, and when June married a boy in the act named Bobby Reed, Rose had him arrested and brought to the police station, where she arrived with a hidden gun. When he moved to shake her hand she pulled the trigger twice, but the safety was on.

Hovick died in 1954, and after her death Gypsy began writing her memoirs and they were published in 1957.

Jazz Loft Project

Born in 1918 in Wichita, Kansas, W. Eugene (Gene) Smith was a legendary photojournalist who got his start working for Newsweek. Smith’s stubborn personality and prickly perfectionism however kept him from fitting in at the conservative publication. In 1939 he signed an exclusive contract with Life. Although his time as a staff photographer for Life would be short lived, his association with the publication would be lifelong and troublesome. The photographer would have numerous disagreements with Life and most were centered around the conflict between his singular artistic vision and the magazine’s policies.

When war broke out in 1941 Smith become a war correspondent for Ziff-Davis, publisher of Flying and Popular Photography.