A Case of Tarantism

They came up out of the Times Square subways like pilgrims bound for Mecca. Most of them were children. Some were draped to the bricks in green porkpie hats, sharp canary-yellow coats, shrunken-ankle pants, and knee-length watch chains which tinkled in the 4 a.m. gloom. Zootsuited or not, they lined up at Manhat tan's Paramount Theater box office and waited. They were jitterbugs, and they were there to dig Harry Haag James, one time circus contortionist, virtuoso trumpeter, and leader of the nation's swing band sensation.

By 10 o'clock, 4,000 of them had squeezed into the movie house. They suffered the feature picture while 4,000 more queued up outside. A policeman, pinned against a door jamb, got two ribs fractured and was removed to a hospital. A plate-glass show window fell in, and the crowding jitterbugs shrieked. Thirty more police arrived. Mounted patrolmen wrangled 75 of the under-admission-age children out of the line and sent them home to mother.

In the lobby a young girl stood silently looking at the blown-up portrait of Harry James--a slender, mustachioed, modest young musician.

A flight of James's photographs, flung down upon the idolaters by a publicity man, broke her reverie. The crowd yelled and scrambled for the pictures. Inside the theater, the feature ended and the expectant jitterbugs tightened up. Ushers moved to the rim of the orchestra pit and faced the audience. The curtain rose. There was Harry James.

Jitterbugs called his name, gripped their hands, seethed in their seats. He began to blow. They swayed, moaned, pulsed, throbbed. Sometimes everyone clapped hands, stamped feet. The scorching Two O'Clock Jump projected eight bugs into the aisles, where they proceeded to lay some iron. Down front an occasional voice prayed: "Come on, Harry!" He and his profane brassy choirs really rocked them.

This spectacle went on all week at the Paramount. Many hepcats sat through most of the seven shows a day, chewing chocolate bars and put-up lunches. Some had passed up $8 in defense plants, $5 in grocery stores, etc., to hear the brazen coloratura of James's trumpet. Puzzled adults who asked what he had never got a clearer answer than: "It does something to your blood." Said the harassed Paramount switchboard operator: "Don't mention the name James to me!"

For over 200 years, beginning in 1374, a dancing mania surged through Europe. Stolid artisans and clerks as well as young people often danced until they dropped from exhaustion. Some became so ecstatic that they killed themselves by banging their heads against walls. The music was usually played on bagpipes.

The mania was called St. Vitus's dance because a visit to the saint's chapel sometimes worked a cure. The modern medical name for it is tarantism, after the wild Italian folk dance, the tarantella. The Italians have a common belief that the tarantella drives out the poison of a tarantula's bite by causing perspiration, and that the dance was named for the spider. Actually, both dance and spider were named for the city of Taranto, which was hit hard by the dancing mania.

The New York Times last week phoned local psychiatrists for a diagnosis of Harry James's rabid fans. The experts agreed that love of rhythm and the desire to dance are "perfectly healthy." One neurologist, who would not let his name be used, explained: "All of life, all humanity, the cosmos itself, is built upon the beat principle. . . . Its appeal is closely connected with mob hysteria, for you see the same responses in Germany, in the Niirnberg meetings, for example, where the multitudes are swung together under control in a certain direction. One of the secrets of Hitler's power as an orator is in his reiteration, in the beat, the pulse, the rhythm of his speech. What he says does not matter." Dr. Foster Kennedy, famed Cornell neurologist, once wrote: "The more primitive a people the more is the beat stressed in their music."

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