The Enchanted Quest of Dana and Ginger Lamb

Conclusion

CONCLUSION In judgingDana and Ginger Lamb's contribution to American popular culture, there are two eras to consider: the years when they did their major work, and the far different period during which they continued to be read and were, to some extent, emulated. Some of today's interest in the Lambs is driven by camp affectation. The vivid colors and dramatically poised action of their movie posters, for example, make great decorating touches, and images of Dana in his cut-off jeans and Ginger in her dress skimped out from animal skins add a healthy dose of humor to fantasy. But there is a serious side to the twenty-firstcentury's appreciation of these cultural figures, an ability to read their books and survey their popular reputations with an understanding of how an earlier age viewed itself, and how so many current attitudes first developed. Enchanted Vagabonds was a product of the same times that made Bela Lugosi a leading movie star and Seabiscuit the country's favorite racehorse. Neither would have been as popular in the culture of just a decade before, nor would the Lambs have attracted so much attention. A newly married couple making their way from southern California to Panama in a homemade canoe, living off the sea and the land for three years, was anything but a stunt. Unlike the wing-walking and flagpole-sitting so popular in the Roaring 201 CONCLUSION Twenties, the Lambs' adventurewas more than distracting: it had a point. Their efforts at self-sufficiency were almost exactly contemporaneous with the first three years of recovery plans put in place to help bring America out of the Great Depression. Had they setoff on such an expedition in the 1920s with less than five dollars in their pockets, Dana and Ginger would have been considered fools. Doing so in 1933 simply made them emblematic of a country down on its luck, struggling through hard times, and determined to get through it all by whatever effort could be mustered. Their progress down the coasts of North and Central America could be followed in the newspaper. And why shouldn't they be covered? The Lambs were good news. To them, adversity was a call to adventure; if they could overcome it while dressed like Tarzan and Jane, that was all the better for keeping spirits up. Along the way, they'd be proving that it didn't take the luxuries of civilization to survive—a cheerful report to Americans who, since Wall Street's Black Tuesday in 1929, had lost so many of those luxuries themselves. Who needs them, this plucky couple could ask, doing so well without even the so-called basic necessities. Like Seabiscuit, who would win the hearts of America's racing world even as Enchanted Vagabonds was being written, Dana and Ginger were underdogs. Despite all the odds against them, nobody wanted this couple to lose. And when they won, as the newspapers announced so happily in October 1936, people were eager to attend their lectures and read their book about the experience. The mid-1930s were also the heyday of the classic horror film, which helps explain the Lambs' appeal as well. The camp aspect of these films can be distracting for later generations, who have seen through certain of their themes that were meant to be taken seriously then. Not that Dana and Ginger were any better than their contemporaries: Dana does tell the FBI in November 1940 that a death ray is reportedly being developed—information that is more pertinent to such Lugosi films as Chandu, The Magician (1932) and The Invisible Ray (1936) than it is to anything in military planning. 202 CONCLUSION But their exploits as adventurers corresponded to something substantive (and not just accidental) in Lugosi's work. In The Immortal Count: The Life and films of Bela Lugosi (2003), Arthur Lenning cites the press kit for White Zombie, a 1932 film that emphasized the actor's special appeal: "People—thousands of them—chained by monotony, afraid to think, clinging always to certainties and terrified by the unknown. They live like ants. I want to get away from people. I must get away somewhere where I can be free" (p. 162). Dana and Ginger were always telling reporters just that, and beginning with their three-year honeymoon expedition they certainly got away. But unlike so many others with similar hopes, they made...