Just as a point, though, the goatee, baret, and bongos are
beat cliches popularized on television of that era. If you
look at William Claxton's photographs of the LA Jazz Scene
circa 1952, you'll see that most of those guys wore their
hair exactly like Ed Burnes as Kookie, or Elvis Presley for
that matter. It was these cool cats that Elvis was taking his
cues from, but he was not sophistocated enough to be one of
them. Not many in LA sported beards at that time. If you look
at the old photos of Jack Kerouac and Neil Cassidy, they,
too, wore pompadore hairstyles, no facial hair. Those were
the real beats. Sure, there were some bearded types playing
bongo drums in Washington Square, but according to Dave Van
Ronk, they were outcasts even in the beat community, easy to
poke fun at. The beats were beatific, that's where the name
comes from. They were ultra cool, unmoved by anything except
jazz and fast cars. They used drugs and alcohol, engaged in
group sex, read Satre and Robe-Grillett, and wrote the last
American poetry.
Patrick King
--- Dick Lochte <
dlochte@gmail.com> wrote:
> About Kookie -- no way was he a beat or even
a
> hipster, exactly. He was
> cool, and the idiom he used was a faux teenage
SoCal
> beachboy patois, closer
> to a ring-a-ding Sinatra wannabe than a jazzbo
or
> coffee house habitué® No
> goatee on that boy, daddy-o. He was
parking
> convertibles at Dino's on the
> Strip, for goodness sake. It should be noted
that
> neither he, nor Dino's nor
> Jeff Spencer for that matter appear in the
source
> novellas by Roy Huggins
> that first ran in Esquire and the Saturday
Evening
> Post.
>
> As for crime novels featuring beats, I think
there
> were a few. They appear
> in Thomas Dewey's A Sad Song Singing, at least
one
> of the Ross Macdonalds
> (The Zebra Striped Hearse, maybe), a Travis
McGee
> (boy, all those color
> titles run together, but maybe the one with the
hot
> air balloons). Weren't
> the coffee house and the jazz club fairly
standard
> locales for mysteries of
> the period?
>
> Dick Lochte
>
>
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