Rebel Rebel: How Mavericks Made the Modern World

Sam Cooke

It’s always puzzled me how or why Sam Cooke, that impossibly smooth skinned, supremely suave, Ivy League clad singer of sweet soul music, came to such a shockingly ignominious end. The personification of debonair and the natural successor to, Nat King Cole, it seemed as if butter wouldn’t, couldn’t and certainly shouldn’t melt in his mouth but, as events transpired, it surely must have.

Indeed, it was fifty years ago on Friday December 11^th 1964 that The King of Soul, was found, by police, sitting, back against the wall, on the floor of a hotel apartment, naked, except for an over coat and one shoe. He had a lump the size of an egg jutting out of his crown while a 22-calibre bullet nestled in his chest having careered through his lungs and heart. The room, in the sleazy three bucks a night Hacienda Motel - known as ‘a prostitutes’ paradise’ - on Figueroa St. (between Watts and Compton), belonged to its manager - one Bertha Franklin, an exceedingly portly 55 year old black woman with a face like a slashed arse. Outside the sleaze bag flop house; a brand new red Ferrari sat empty except for a bottle of whisky and a copy of Muhammad Speaks (a Black Muslim periodical) on its seats. The car had belonged to Sam Cooke. He had no use for it now. He was dead as a plate.

The White T-Shirt

The humble T-shirt was intended – by its designer or designers unknown – as utilitarian military wear, and was initially doled out to replace the sweaty wool undergarments of US Navy submariners in 1913. Soon after it became US forces PE issue and in 1920, “T-shirt” entered the Merriam-Webster Dictionary.

That year, the University of Southern California stenciled “Property of USC” on its PE-issue T-shirts to stop football players misappropriating them to wear off campus. It didn’t work. The epidemic further spread after Life magazine displayed a soldier in a T-shirt printed with the Air Corps Gunnery School’s logo on a 1942 cover. The first recorded sloganeering T-shirt, proclaiming “Dew-it-with-Dewey” accordingly emerged for 1948’s presidential election, and in the early 1950s, Sam Kantor of Tropix Togs in Miami printed Mickey Mouse T-shirts for Disneyland Corp.

As the printed T-shirt evolved, the plain variety became hip. GIs attended US colleges sporting their army issue, and the plain T-shirt, like the chino and sweatshirt, was adopted by their younger beatnik acolytes. Elsewhere, it was purely a work shirt regarded as unsuitable for anything else. No surprise, then, that East Village hepcat Marlon Brando should wear a T-shirt on Broadway in 1947 and then on film in 1951 – as the blue-collar, belligerently coarse Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire. A hugely divisive style statement, T-shirt sales still totalled $180m by 1953. Brando upped the ante, wearing one as a biker in The Wild One, while James Dean, as troubled and defiant teenager Jim Stark in Rebel Without a Cause, struck a chord with his white T-shirt, blue Lee 101Z Riders, engineer boots and iconic red windbreaker. The T-shirt now suggested danger, drugs, gangs and insubordination, which was all that most self-respecting teenagers could wish for – and the gang connotation has never really gone away. In 2010, Philadelphia Senator Anthony Williams identified “white-T culture” as a major source of power among the city’s white-clad, corner-hanging crims. “We’re penetrating the veil of silence,” he said.

Louise Brooks

“Louise Brooks was the most seductive sexual image of woman ever committed to celluloid and the only unrepentant hedonist, pure pleasure seeker I have ever met and this comes over in her films,” remarked eminent critic, Kenneth Tynan, who spent two days interviewing her in 1978. “And when men bored her she left them and when Hollywood bored her she left and went into retirement from which she never emerged.”

Primarily known for just two European masterpieces, Pandora's Box and The Diary of a Lost Girl, directed in Berlin by Georg Wilhelm Pabst, Brooks made only 24 films during a movie career that began in 1925 and ended, with inscrutable abruptness, in 1938. At the time she was regarded as a second tier star but today, is more well known and admired than any of the huge Hollywood stars who overshadowed her, such as Theda Bara, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson and Lillian Gish, her failure having lasted much longer than their success.

A single minded maverick, she was one of the first, most famous and infamous, ‘flappers’ - brash young women who, in the 1920s, wore short skirts, excessive makeup, smoked, drove automobiles, listened to jazz and visibly flaunted their disdain for the days acceptable behaviour and sexual mores. Indeed, these attractive, reckless, style obsessed flappers girls were, not only perceived as, but certainly were a threat to a society where women were expected to be seen, not heard, obedient and servile – rather like a domestic/nanny with whom you had sex with when drunk and produced offspring with. Said flappers changed all that in a decade and, as such, were infinitely more controversial than rockers, hippies or punk rockers and caused even greater hullabaloo. “The social butterfly type… the frivolous, scantily-clad, jazzing flapper, irresponsible and undisciplined, to whom a dance, a new hat, or a man with a car, were of more importance than the fate of nations," wrote Dr. R. Murray-Leslie in 1920 in an article entitled, Too many Women. Is it the cause of Social Unrest? And undeniably, Brooks (who slept with both Garbo and Charlie Chaplin, but not at the same time) - with her short pioneering Bob haircut, flimsy dresses, flat chest, open sexual proclivity, baffling recalcitrance and passion for drinks, drugs and fags - was the unrivalled Queen of the Flappers. She epitomised the Roaring Twenties and led the way for female emancipation and subsequently the vote and is one of the biggest and most influential style icons of all time.