Hula-la!

The bright plastic things were to be seen everywhere--along Paris' Champs-Elysees, in the stodgiest of London shops, in the geisha houses of Tokyo, even among the smart luggage of the Queen Mother Zaine of Jordan, who was on her way home. Prime Minister Kishi of Japan got one for his 62nd birthday, and a Belgian expedition setting out for the Antarctic announced it was taking 20 along to keep its members fit and happy. Not since the Yo-yo had a U.S. craze spread so far so fast. The hula hoop had circled the globe.

Each country came by the craze in its own way. In Paris, Jacques de Saint-Phalle, whose respectable business has been the manufacture of plastic tubes for hospitals and laboratories, decided to hop aboard the bandwagon--but on "a snobbism level." In France, he reasoned, the quickest way to get a fad started was to set the intellectuals to doing it. First intellectual to have her picture snapped inside a hoop: Franchise (Bonjour Tristesse) Sagan. With shapely entertainers getting into the act, Saint-Phalle had another fear: that the church might find the hula movement erotic and condemn it.

Chamber of Artisans. In Britain more than a quarter-million hoops had been sold in one week before the fad reached the editorial attention of the London Times, a sure sign that normalcy is returning. In Poland--so far the only Communist state to succumb to the latest U.S. export--the shortage of hoops has become critical. Complained one youth wjeekly: "If the Ministry of Light Industry and the Chamber of Artisans do not embark upon the production of hoops, we will be seriously delayed in hula hoop progress, especially on the international level.''

Hips, Neck & Knees. In Germany such celebrities as Max Schmeling and his ex-movie actress wife Anny Ondra have posed twirling what the Germans call Swing Reifen, Sport Reifen, Hula Reifen or Hulahupp. A Hanover store increased its sales by offering to deliver well-wrapped hoops after nightfall to childless couples who were too sheepish to carry them home. In Finland there are hula marathons that set contestants to twirling hoops about the hips, neck and knees all at once. In Japan, where some 3.000.000 hoops have been sold, people queued up in Tokyo department stores to buy tickets enabling them to get hoops later. In Johannesburg only the white kids can afford the 65-c- hoops, but charitable organizations have begun handing out hoops to poor Negro children. And in Geneva, the city of Calvin, the familiar phrase to express bewildered surprise has now become "Hula-la!"

But as the young and old, the famed and the obscure, twirled away, regardless of race, creed, nationality or color, a few somber voices were raised against the universal dizziness. After a small girl was killed running after her hoop, Japan banned the hula from the streets. Tokyo was filled with agonized adults complaining of slipped disks and dislocated backbones. Many industrialists were alarmed that their countries were running short of plastic tubing. "House construction," reported Amsterdam's Het Vrije Volk, "is stagnating." In Leiden, Holland a woman was just about to undergo surgery for appendicitis when the doctors discovered that her real trouble was a torn abdominal muscle resulting from hooping. Last week the British Medical Association sedately warned: "No one with a known heart disease should try it, and anyone who is out of training should not go hard at it right away."

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