Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 116

108

Popular Culture Review

assumed an almost mythic presidency in early 1961. His assassination in 1963
precipitated a decade of violence and unrest which rocked American culture by the
end of the 1960s.
By 1957, Kennedy was a rising young star: a war hero and author of the Pulitzer
Prize-winning best-seller Profiles in Courage? In September of that year, the
Broadway musical West Side Story' opened on the New York stage with songs from
Bernstein’s score becoming popular hits. Meanwhile, Hollywood faced tremendous
industrial restructuring. The studio system on which classical musical films were
so economically and creatively dependent was collapsing in the wake of federal
antitrust regulation. The 1948 Paramount decision prompted divorcement and
divestiture of studio-owned theater chains and exhibition arms by 1959. (The studio
most noted for its musicals during this period, MGM, was the last to comply with
this ruling.) Even industry censorship by the Production Code Administration (PCA)
regulating Hollywood film content was collapsing by the 1960s. The PCA was
severely weakened after the departure of Joseph Breen in 1954. The Production
Code was liberalized in 1956 and replaced entirely by a ratings system in November
1968. Vestiges of Hollywood’s studio system captured romantic utopian idealism
in classical musical films—especially MGM’s postwar musicals through the 1950s.
This trend continued in hefty-budgeted 1960’s musical blockbusters (often with
an ample dose of escapist thematics) which nostalgically sought to recapture a
hopeful, youthful (yet topical) innocence critically and commercially embraced
by the recurring postwar success of Richard Rogers and Oscar Hammerstein II on
stage, film and television.
The ideal couple found in Hollywood musicals was also prominent on the
New York and national stage. The emergence of Alan Jay Lemer and Frederick
Loewe’s musical Camelot on Broadway in 1960 paralleled the national entry of a
refreshingly promising figure: a symbol of youth and a glamorous icon bringing
vitality and the “Royal Couple” to the Oval Office. “There he was on January 20,
1961, hatless and coatless...the youngest man ever elected President of the United
States.” As David Farber notes in The Age o f Great Dreams, “‘Charisma’ entered
the vocabulary of the nation’s pundits. His wife, Jacqueline stood beside him; her
clothes, her hair, her makeup \