Ali Baba Goes to Town is a strange film. It’s a variation of A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court in which Eddie Cantor plays Al Babson, an everyday schmuck who finds himself working as an extra on an Arabian Nights–type picture, out in Hollywood. On set he falls asleep and dreams he’s back in ninth-century Arabia. One scene made a very strong impression on me, I wanted to show it to Tracey, but she’d become hard to pin down, she didn’t call, and when I tried to call her flat there was always a pause on the line before her mother told me she was out. I knew she had her legitimate reasons, she was busy preparing for her stage-school audition—which Mr. Booth had kindly agreed to assist her with—she rehearsed most weekday afternoons in the church hall. But I wasn’t ready to release her into her new life. I made many attempts to ambush her: the doors to the church would be open, sun streaming through the stained glass, Mr. Booth accompanying her on the piano, and if she spotted me spying on her, she’d wave—the adult, distracted greeting of a busy woman—but never once did she come out to talk to me. By some obscure pre-teen logic, I decided my body was to blame. I was still a lanky, flat-chested child, lurking in the doorway, while Tracey, dancing in the light, was already a little woman. How could she have any interest in the things that still interested me?
? ? ?
“Nah, don’t know it. What’s it called again?”
“I just told you. Ali Baba Goes to Town.”
I’d been bold and walked into the church at the end of one of her rehearsals. She was sitting in a plastic chair taking off her tap shoes, while Mr. Booth was still in his corner, messing around with the piece—“Can’t Help Loving That Man of Mine”—speeding it up and slowing it down, playing it now as jazz, now as ragtime.
“I’m busy.”
“You could come now.”
“I’m busy now.”
Mr. Booth packed his music into his bag and wandered over. Tracey’s nose shot in the air, sniffing out praise.
“Well, that was smashing,” he said.
“Was it good, really?”
“Smashing. You dance like a dream.”
He smiled and patted her on the shoulder, and a flush of happiness passed over her face. It was the kind of praise I got from my own father daily, no matter what I did, but for Tracey it must have been very rare, for hearing it seemed to change everything, including how she felt about me, in that moment. As Mr. Booth made his way slowly out of the church, she smiled, slung her dance bag over her shoulder and said: “Let’s go.”
? ? ?
The scene comes early in the film. A group of men sits on the sandy ground, they seem apathetic, depressed. These, the sultan tells Al, are the musicians, the Africans, whom nobody can understand, for they speak an unknown language. But Al wants to talk to them and he tries everything: English, French, Spanish, Italian, even Yiddish. Nothing doing. Then a brainwave. Hi dee hi dee hi dee hi! The call of Cab Calloway, and the Africans, recognizing it, leap to their feet and cry out the response: Ho dee ho dee ho dee ho! Excited, Cantor starts blacking up, right then and there, painting his face with a burned piece of cork, leaving only those rolling eyes, the elastic mouth.
“What is this? I don’t want to watch this!”
“Not this bit. Just wait, Trace, please. Wait.”
I took the remote control from her and asked that she sit back on the settee. Now Al was singing to the Africans, a verse that seemed to swing time itself, flashing far ahead, to a moment when these Africans would no longer be as they were presently, a time a thousand years in the future when they would set the tempo the world wants to dance to, in a place called Harlem. Hearing this news, the delighted musicians stood up and started dancing and singing, on a raised platform, in the town square. The sultana and her advisers look down from a balcony, the Arabians look up from the street. The Arabs are Hollywood Arabs, white, in Aladdin costumes. The Africans are black Americans dressed up—loincloths and feathers, outlandish headdresses—and they play primitive musical instruments, in a parody of their future Cotton Club incarnations: trombones made of actual bone, clarinets formed from hollowed-out sticks, that sort of thing. And Cantor, true to the origins of his name, is the bandleader, with a whistle round his neck, which he blows to end a solo or usher a performer off stage. The song reached its chorus, he told them that swing was here to stay, that there was no avoiding it, and so they must choose their partner—and dance. Then Cantor blew his whistle and the wonderful thing happened. It was a girl—a girl arrived. I made Tracey sit as close to the screen as she could, I didn’t want there to be any doubt about it. I looked across: I saw her lips part in surprise, as mine had done the first time I watched it, and then I knew that she could see what I saw. Oh, the nose was different—this girl’s nose was normal and flat—and there was, in her eyes, no hint of Tracey’s brand of cruelty. But the heart-shaped face, the adorable puffy cheeks, the compact body and yet the long limbs, these were all Tracey. The physical resemblance was so strong and yet she didn’t dance like Tracey. Her arms wheelbarrowed as she moved, her legs flew back and forth, she was a hoofer, not an obsessed technician. And she was funny: walking on her toes or freeze-framing for a second in an absurd comic attitude, on one leg, arms in the air, like the hood ornament of an expensive car. Dressed like the rest—grass skirt, feathers—but nothing could diminish her.
For the big finish the girl came back out on stage and joined all those Americans dressed like Africans, and Cantor himself, and they all stood still in a line and leaned forward at a forty-five-degree angle to the floor. It was a move back from the future: a year later we were all trying it ourselves in the playground, having just seen Michael Jackson in a music video doing the exact same thing. And for weeks after that video first aired Tracey and me and many other kids in the playground tried our best to imitate the move, but it was impossible, no one could do it, we all fell flat on our faces. At the time I didn’t know how it was done. Now I know. In the video, Michael used wires and, a few years later—when he wanted to achieve the effect live on stage—he wore a pair of “anti-gravity” shoes, they had a slot in the heel that engaged with a peg in the stage, and he was their co-inventor, the patent is in his name.
The Africans of Ali Baba nailed their own shoes to the floor.
Six