World: As You Enter

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The New York World's Fair's amusement zone covers 280 acres — more ground than the entire Paris International Exposition of 1937. Yet, although the biggest in the history of Fairs, the amusement zone sticks pretty close to any canny Midway's rule-of-three : freaks, peeks and rides. The freak shows boast no overpowering monsters: there are the pigmies and giants, giraffe-necked women and two-headed cows. But of thrill-makers, the Fair has one wow, and for peepshows, in spite of police threats, it contains more public nudity than any place outside of Bali.

Peeks. At its worst, the Fair's nudity is so much peeping tommyrot. Unalluring are the Arctic Girls, frozen inside cakes of ice. Twittering and skipping about with bows & arrows, the droopy Amazons provide a mere comic-strip-tease. NTG's frightened-looking Sun Worshippers make customers the victims of a skin game.

More attractive, although on the pretty-pretty side, are the girls in Living Magazine Covers. Eye-catching are: 1) Rosita Royce's dance with live doves at the Crystal Palace, which ends in purple shadows and a lightning-quick strip; 2) the Crystal Lassies show, where, one at a time, semi-nude girls do semi-classical dances in a domelike hall of mirrors which reflects their images a thousand times over & over.

Far cleverer, far more alluring is the show opened last week by Surrealist Salvador Dali. A writhing plaster castle on the outside, it shrewdly combines surrealism with sex, inside, proves that there is plenty of Broadway method in Dali's madness.

Upon a 36-foot, red-satin bed called "The Ardent Couch" an unclad Venus lies dreaming. Of her four uninhibited dreams, the first—an underwater vision called "Venus's Pre-natal Château Beneath the Water"—is the real crowd-catcher. A long glass tank is filled with such subaqueous décor as a fireplace, typewriters with funguslike rubber keys, rubber telephones, a man made of rubber ping-pong bats, a mummified cow, a supine rubber woman painted to resemble the keyboard of a piano. Whatever this may mean as art, the exhibitors did not dilly-Dali over it. Into the tank they plunged living girls, nude to the waist and wearing little Gay Nineties girdles and fishnet stockings. Swimming, grimacing, doing the Suzy Q, milking the cow, playing the "piano," these Lady Godivers, seen at close range and a trifle water-magnified, should win more converts to surrealism than a dozen highbrow exhibitions.

>"The Lunatic Narcissus" reveals a bare-breasted girl, her face caged with roses, her image multiplied by mirrors. > "The Beach of Gala Salvador" exhibits, against a Dali landscape embellished with exploding giraffes, many a famed surrealist emblem: the erotic white gramophone with a woman's high-heeled foot coming out of the horn; watches flattened out like flabby pancakes; "The Aphrodisiac Vampire," with the head of a tiger and a body studded with pony glasses; "The Ex quisite Corpse," its head and neck a curved umbrella handle, its chest a wooden chest, its thighs made of saucepans, its curved piano legs made of chocolate.