From fashions to fallout shelters, reporting on Tinseltown’s hottest fads preoccupied the fan mags from their earliest days. For example, Motion Picture (Sep 1925) observed,” The stars of Hollywood are divided between building country homes and buying whippets. Every season the style in dogs changes. Two years ago it was police dogs; last year it was Scotch terriers. Now these little racing hounds. I never have been able to find out what becomes of the discarded crop of the previous year. Anyhow, to belong, you have to own one of these nervous little black streaks.”
By the ‘50s, it was bongo drums (Modern Screen, Dec 1955) and “color coding”: “Kathy (Real McCoys) Nolan arrives at the studio every day wearing hair clips to match her blue MG. The ‘color code’ is Movietown’s latest teenage fad, and Kathy’s blue hair clips mean ‘Up in the clouds, going steady’” (Movieland and TV Time, Dec 1959). In the early ‘60s, as May Mann (Movie World, Nov 1961) reported, “Everyone out here is putting in bomb shelters. Tony and Janet have one on their hilltop. Dinah Shore and George Montgomery have converted a fireproof film vault into a shelter… Bob Wagner and Natalie Wood have a modern one. And they cost from $3500 up.”
No fad, though, was bigger than the Twist. Columnist Armand Archerd (Movie Stars, March 1962) noted, “Needless to say Hollywood goes all the way with everything — so it was only natural that ‘the twist’ would be a real grabber in glamorville — with some of the least likely characters the best twisters! You could have knocked me over with a feather when Kirk Douglas featured the twist at his birthday bash. At the post premiere-party of Flower Drum Song, Natalie Wood and Warren Beatty beat out a mean twist.” As Warren told Archerd, “‘We learned it at the Peppermint Lounge!’”
How to Twist? The fan mags offered both illustrations and instructions. In “How Hollywood Twists!” (Movie TV Secrets, April 1962), a choreographer described how it’s done: “‘You and your partner face each other in a boxing-like stance. Then you start twisting: the bottom half of you going one way, the top half the other. If you can keep your twisting in time to music without breaking, you’re Twisting.’” The feature also offered a simpler explanation: “‘You light a cigarette, drop it on the floor, step on it with your foot and start twisting it out with your entire body.’”
Twist sightings were everywhere: “Sammy Davis Jr. opened his act [at the Copacabana] by introducing his mom, who came out on the floor doing the twist!” (Movie Life, July 1962). “Frankie Avalon was seen teaching Sophie Tucker to twist” (Scott Muni, Movie Stars, Feb 1962). “Jack Lemmon pays no attention to the teasing reminder that he’s getting too old to twist”; ditto for Bob Hope who, “ignoring doctors’ orders to slow down, spins wildly” (Snooper, Motion Picture, Feb 1962). In the same issue of Motion Picture Rona Barrett reported, “People were literally swinging from chandeliers and dancing on table tops at the Crescendo the other eve when Chubby Checker brought his Twist to our town, which I was doing with Frankie Avalon almost two years ago in Philadelphia. I have never seen a dance craze storm a country like this has! Swinging from the rafters: Glenn Ford and Joanna Moore.”
Photoplay (Feb 1962) even debated the “Social Mystery of the Year: Do They or Don’t They Twist at the Kennedys?” The feature cited a UPI teletype notice that “‘President Kennedy’s guests are doing The Twist and other new dance steps at a White House party tonight.’” In “a party post-mortem,” Presidential Press Secretary Pierre Salinger “firmly and unequivocally denied that President Kennedy or anyone else had danced the dance which has virtually hypnotized the rest of the nation — from the blue bloods of society to the fuzzy-cheeked teenagers with the duck-tailed hairdos.” But later reports confirmed that, while “Jack and Jacqueline merely remained very interested spectators,” their guests, led by Mrs. Kennedy’s personal designer, Oleg Cassini, did indeed engage in “this New Frontier of the dance,” signaling “the start of one Twistcapade after another in the mansions of the capital city” (The Twist Magazine, 1962).
The dance craze made Chubby Checker a household name and led not only to chart-topping records but to a succession of Twist-themed films. Entire magazines were devoted to the Twist, with features that highlighted celebrity sightings, illustrated the dance steps — and offered psychological explanations: “‘For me,’ says one leading expert on human behavior, ‘it is a violent expression of today’s youth in a world full of troubles. It seems people are Twisting to twist themselves away from reality!’” (“The Psychiatrist Who Analyzed the Twist,” The Twist Magazine, 1962).
Debates arose as to who could claim credit for inventing the Twist — Hank Ballard, who wrote the hit song; Chubby Checker, who brought it to electrifying life; or others. Gossip columnist “Snooper” (Motion Picture, April 1962) wrote, “Louis Prima is telling everybody who will listen that he — not Chubby Checker — invented the Twist. He says he used to call it several other names — but it was always the Twist when he did it.” And Elvis was a frequent mention: “The Twist is new only because the ‘squares’ are just now catching on to what Elvis started five years ago!” (TV Picture Life, July 1962). Fred D. Brown (Movieland and TV Time, April 1962) reported, “As the Twist picks up momentum as the nation’s biggest dance craze, Elvis Presley is quietly chuckling over the whole thing. ‘Sure, I’m laughing,’ he says. ‘When I did the Twist while singing, it was called vulgar. And by many of the same people who are Twisting in public now.”
Post-Twist, other dance crazes made their way into Hollywood circles, first the Bossa Nova, then the Watusi: “Tuesday Weld had to be confined to her home after she threw her back out doing the Watusi” (“Under Hedda’s Hat,” Photoplay, Aug 1964). At a Watusi party at PJ’s (a West Hollywood “sawdust and beer palace”) thrown by director Vincente Minnelli, “Gina Lollobrigida, a wild watusier, sat in a corner booth most of the evening” (Rona Barrett, Movie Mirror, Sep 1964). And a feature on a “Watusi weekend” celebrating actress Jill Haworth’s 19th birthday, described Tuesday Weld as “a Watusi addict,” though “Watusiing comes in second in favor of bullfighting for Stephanie Powers” (Modern Screen, Oct 1964).
*Fan magazine ad for “a lithe, blithe dancetime sheath in fluid rayon crepe, its curvy cling zinged with a tri-fringe hemline, fringed bodice” (TV Picture Life, July 1962).
Image credits, clockwise from upper left: (1) The Twist Magazine 1962; (2) Teen Screen March 1962; (3) Motion Picture Apr 1962; (4) Movie Life June 1962; (5) Motion Picture Apr 1962; (6) Movie TV Secrets Apr 1962.
I grew up not far from. Hollywood in the 50s and 60s. We never did the twist at any school dances. We thought it was square.
Hollywood, as usual, lead the way. The Twist is ranked number 451 on the Rolling Stone magazine’s list of The 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
My aunts taught me to dance when I was four or five. The pony, the jerk, and the swim were fun but took some concentration at first. The twist felt so organic and free. Those how-to-twist quotes were hilarious!