As You Enter

The New York World's Fair's amusement zone covers 280 acres -- more ground than the entire Paris International Exposition of 1937. Yet, although the biggest in the history of Fairs, the amusement zone sticks pretty close to any canny Midway's rule-of-three : freaks, peeks and rides. The freak shows boast no overpowering monsters: there are the pigmies and giants, giraffe-necked women and two-headed cows. But of thrill-makers, the Fair has one wow, and for peepshows, in spite of police threats, it contains more public nudity than any place outside of Bali.

Peeks. At its worst, the Fair's nudity is so much peeping tommyrot. Unalluring are the Arctic Girls, frozen inside cakes of ice. Twittering and skipping about with bows & arrows, the droopy Amazons provide a mere comic-strip-tease. NTG's frightened-looking Sun Worshippers make customers the victims of a skin game.

More attractive, although on the pretty-pretty side, are the girls in Living Magazine Covers. Eye-catching are: 1) Rosita Royce's dance with live doves at the Crystal Palace, which ends in purple shadows and a lightning-quick strip; 2) the Crystal Lassies show, where, one at a time, semi-nude girls do semi-classical dances in a domelike hall of mirrors which reflects their images a thousand times over & over.

Far cleverer, far more alluring is the show opened last week by Surrealist Salvador Dali. A writhing plaster castle on the outside, it shrewdly combines surrealism with sex, inside, proves that there is plenty of Broadway method in Dali's madness.

Upon a 36-foot, red-satin bed called "The Ardent Couch" an unclad Venus lies dreaming. Of her four uninhibited dreams, the first--an underwater vision called "Venus's Pre-natal Chateau Beneath the Water"--is the real crowd-catcher. A long glass tank is filled with such subaqueous decor as a fireplace, typewriters with funguslike rubber keys, rubber telephones, a man made of rubber ping-pong bats, a mummified cow, a supine rubber woman painted to resemble the keyboard of a piano. Whatever this may mean as art, the exhibitors did not dilly-Dali over it. Into the tank they plunged living girls, nude to the waist and wearing little Gay Nineties girdles and fishnet stockings. Swimming, grimacing, doing the Suzy Q, milking the cow, playing the "piano," these Lady Godivers, seen at close range and a trifle water-magnified, should win more converts to surrealism than a dozen highbrow exhibitions.

>"The Lunatic Narcissus" reveals a bare-breasted girl, her face caged with roses, her image multiplied by mirrors. > "The Beach of Gala Salvador" exhibits, against a Dali landscape embellished with exploding giraffes, many a famed surrealist emblem: the erotic white gramophone with a woman's high-heeled foot coming out of the horn; watches flattened out like flabby pancakes; "The Aphrodisiac Vampire," with the head of a tiger and a body studded with pony glasses; "The Ex quisite Corpse," its head and neck a curved umbrella handle, its chest a wooden chest, its thighs made of saucepans, its curved piano legs made of chocolate.

With its tanglewood of woozy detail, the Dream of Venus took months to assemble, twice postponed its opening. A typical headache was to find water for "Venus's Pre-natal Chateau" tank that was clear and nondistorting. Ordinary filtered city water finally filled the bill. Another headache was to find 17 girls able to do virtually a vaudeville act under water. Some, like puckish little Kelcey Carr (see cut}, were plucked out of Greenwich Village dives, some were recruited from strictly amateur ranks through friends of the management. All are comely and most of the 17 were able surface swimmers, learned their new trade from a coach.

They performed, one to four at a time, in five-hour shifts; while under water cannot distinguish those outside looking in.

A small part of the show is owned by Surrealist Dali and Julien Levy, who runs a high-brow Manhattan art gallery; most of it by a group of oldsters with Broadway experience. Never publicity-shy, Dali, who recently broke one of Bonwit Teller's Fifth Avenue show windows because Bonwit Teller tampered with his display, is at present berating the Fair because it would not let him exhibit, outside his nuthouse, a woman with the head of a fish. Merrily upping the publicity, Dali's Dream of Venus has sent out a long press release headed: "Is Dali Insane?"

Rides. The Midway has a full Coney-Island quota of thrill machines--whizzing bobsled rides, stratoships, turtle chases, roller coasters. Dwarfing them all is Life Savers' 250-foot Parachute Jump. Using hoist cables, the Jump carries couples seated under big umbrellas to the top in 42 seconds, shoots them down in ten. In its first three weeks the Jump fetched 68,000 customers at 40-c- each, among them Actress Tallulah Bankhead, Attorney General Frank Murphy, Cinemactor Conrad Nagel (thrice), Admiral Byrd (thrice), Musicomedian Victor Moore ("It's too slow going up, too fast coming down"), Bullfighter Sidney Franklin. Other parachuters : a couple who hold the riding record (nine trips), a blind man, a legless War veteran, two drunks who went up with a live duck.

The Parachute Jump is an offshoot of a practical idea, employed since 1932 by the Soviet Union to help train military and civilian fliers. Today, at Hightstown, N. J.'s military training towers, the Jump corresponds to the first step in teaching aviators to bail out. At Hightstown it is called "captive drop with seat"; next comes "captive drop with harness"; there after, free drops without safety cables.

The Fair's Jump is not the first one built for entertainment. Older -- although only 185 feet high -- is one in Chicago's Riverview Park.

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