Beach Party Jingo

“All good teenagers go to California,” Brian Wilson once quipped, “when they die.” Wilson’s remark, far edgier and more richly ironic than any of the hit songs he wrote and sang for the Beach Boys, is invoked by Kirse Granat May in “Golden State, Golden Youth,” a study that deconstructs the popular culture of postwar America and shows exactly how the California dream and the cult of youth came to be linked in powerful but also cynical and even ominous ways.

May, a historian who lives in Boston, digs through the accumulation of cliches and conventional wisdom about the California youth culture, and reveals how the whole phenomenon can be seen as the handiwork of media and marketing entrepreneurs, driven by the profit motive and something much deeper and darker--the fear of class, race and generational conflict.

“Aware of the possibilities of television, music, and film to create a model of the good society, popular culture focused on the commercial possibilities of the baby boomers,” writes May. “A new definable teenage type was created, and it was an ideal of exclusion: white, middle-class, mobile, carefree and conformist.”

May is willing to name names, and she assigns Walt Disney a crucial role in the invention of the youth culture and the conscious decision to plant it in the rich soil of California. The opening of Disneyland in 1955 fixed California in the collective consciousness of a whole generation--and, indeed, the whole world--as “the land of America’s destiny.” Above all, Disney elevated the pursuit of happiness from an aspiration into a commodity to be packaged and sold to what May dubs “the child imagination market.”

“By creating a monument to the dreams of youth, Disney offered a privileged model of life for mass consumption,” she explains. “He turned his corner of the California world into an international symbol of ‘the good life.’”

“Golden State, Golden Youth” invites us to regard the debut of Disneyland as the first of two defining moments for the baby-boom generation, a dividing line between an open-eyed if sometimes grim view of the world and a more comforting but also delusory one that was sold to us along with movies and music, T-shirts and lunch boxes, housing tracts and fast food.

By way of example, May reminds us that “Blackboard Jungle” and “Rebel Without a Cause,” both released the same year in which Disneyland opened for business, offered a dark and dire vision of adolescence in America, but these movies did not depict the experience of the boomers and did not address them as an audience; we were still wearing our Davy Crockett coonskin caps and watching “The Mickey Mouse Club.” By the time the boomers were old enough to buy their own records and tickets, we put former Mouseketeer Annette Funicello’s “Tall Paul” on the charts and lined up to see Sandra Dee in “Gidget.”

At its highest and purest expression, the California youth culture is captured in the iconic image of a buxom Funicello on an idyllically empty beach, dressed in a one-piece swimsuit and holding a surfboard--a promotional photo for “Muscle Beach Party,” one of a series of beach-party movies from American International Pictures. The promise of freedom and pleasure, sexual and otherwise, is unmistakable, especially for a generation of young men who had passed into puberty watching her grow up on “The Mickey Mouse Club,” but the beach-blanket movies were ultimately as safe and sexless as a Disney cartoon.

“We gave the illusion of being daring, but there was a lot of teasing with no real payoff,” Sam Arkoff, co-founder of the company that produced “Muscle Beach Party,” once told a reporter. The beach-party movies, he explains, depicted a teenage utopia in which there were “no parents, no school, no church, no legal or government authorities, no rich kids or poor kids, no money problems--none of the things that plague the young people today.”

The same kind of deception and manipulation, as May shows, was practiced in the music industry. Dennis Wilson was the only member of the Beach Boys who actually surfed, but they elevated the surfing subculture into a shiny new symbol of the California youth culture. The Beach Boys may have lifted their guitar riffs, note for note, from Chuck Berry but, no less than “The Mickey Mouse Club” and “Gidget,” they conjured up “a white, middle-class version of youth.”

“As the Beach Boys told Time,” May writes, “‘We’re not colored; we’re white. And we sing white.’”

The second defining moment, as May sees it, came nine years after the opening of Disneyland: the Free Speech Movement at UC Berkeley, which captured the attention of national media in 1964. The Free Speech Movement can be seen as an example of how baby boomers rejected the phoniness of the California youth culture that had been peddled to them all of their lives. “The Berkeley conflict challenged one of the most powerful and reassuring myths of the postwar period, altering the images of California’s young people that had pervaded popular culture,” writes May. “Berkeley came to represent ‘the depths of disaffection in Nirvana.’”

But the California youth culture did not end with the coming of the counterculture. Indeed, May shows how the phenomenon came full circle, ironically enough, in the gubernatorial candidacy of Ronald Reagan in 1966--the former actor who had hosted the live broadcast from Disneyland on opening day in 1955 now played on the same old Disneyesque themes in his own campaign, setting himself against the “filthy speech movement” and embracing a safe and wholesome vision of youth.

Reagan, for example, was accompanied on campaign appearances by a covey of “Reagan girls,” a carefully orchestrated crowd of young women who wore costumes designed by Nancy Reagan (the maximum waist size was 25 inches) and whose presence was meant to cast the reflected glow of golden youth on the visibly aging Reagan. An instruction manual issued to the young women, as May reveals, reminded them that they “‘represent the young, wholesome, vivacious, natural, all-American girl’ and warned against smoking, chewing gum, drinking alcohol or giving out phone numbers.”

“Golden State, Golden Youth,” wholly fascinating in its savvy take on the making and manipulation of popular culture, ends on an admonitory note: “California represented a cautionary tale,” writes May, “instead of a fairy tale promise.” The baby-boom generation is still enchanted with itself, of course, still gripped by a sense of entitlement and still at risk of sinking into mindless self-regard. As May demonstrates so compellingly, that’s exactly how we were raised, from birth and far beyond.