Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 117

West Side Story and Kennedy’s Camelot

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American” aspersions on Kennedy’s character based on his Irish Catholic ethnic
and religious affiliations. Three weeks before the November 1960 U.S. Presidential
election, as West Side Story was being adapted to the screen, Norman Mailer’s
writing efforts successfully glamorized Kennedy as a hero to get him elected. Mailer
reflected on the previous July 1960 National Democratic Convention in Los Angeles
to “re-imagine” the political event as a musical: “the band kept playing the campaign
tunes, sashaying circus music, and one had a moment of clarity, intense as a deja
vw, for the scene which had taken place had been glimpsed before in a dozen musical
comedies; it was the scene where the hero, the matinee idol, the movie star comes
to the palace to claim the princess, or...the football hero, the campus king, arrives
at the dean’s home surrounded by a court of open-singing students to plead with
the dean for his daughter’s kiss and permission to put on the big musical that
night” (Mailer, 1960, 27).
In July 1960, as Kennedy was heralded as Presidential nominee at the
convention in Los Angeles, Jerome Robbins rehearsed dance sequences for the
filming of West Side Story in New York: “Look,” the music ceased. “I want the
movements sharp— like a pistol shot” (Robbins in Becker). The film was in
production in October, as Mailer wrote t h e t h ir d p r e s id e n t ia l p ape r — The Existential
Hero, “Superman Comes to the Supermarket” where he reconstructs Kennedy’s
heroic procession into the convention preceding his nomination: “The television
cameras were out...One saw him immediately. He had the deep orange-brown suntan
of a ski instructor, and when he smiled at the crowd his teeth were amazingly white
and clearly visible at a distance of fifty yards...the prince and the beggars of glamour
staring at one another across a city street...surrounded by a mob...one expected at
any moment to see him lifted to its shoulders like a matador being carried back to
the city after a triumph in the plaza.”4
Mailer’s THIRD PRESIDENTIAL PAPER was tremendously successful in
using screen images of Hollywood stars and fairy tale royalty to present Kennedy
as an ideal all-American hero. Once elected, Kennedy’s nationally televised January
20,1961 Inaugural Address embodied a hopeful “New Frontier.” A young glamorous
president emerged—a hero who set fashion, broke with the conservative Eisenhower
tradition, and lent utopian romance to the nation in 1961. In Washington, as on
Broadway and in Hollywood musicals, a young chic ideal couple set the stage for
“Camelot.” In this spirit of heroism and romantic individualism, Kennedy’s
Inaugural Address set the motto for a new era: “And so, my fellow Americans: ask
not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country”
(Kennedy, vii). Camelot’s cultural moment of hope was a refreshing deviation
from the past ten years which had witnessed many failures of the American dream.
The establishment of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in 1949
signaled the loss of the notion of an isolationist America. Robert Ray notes the