Kroger Babb's roadshow: how a long-running movie walked the thin line between exploitation and education

Reason, Nov, 2003 by Joe Bob Briggs

Shortly thereafter the handsome pilot has to leave town on business, but he continues to write to her. When he mentions in one of his letters that it's been four weeks since he left, Joan suddenly becomes concerned. She checks her calendar and is obviously worried. She goes to her mother and asks if she has any "hygiene books," but her parent is flabbergasted by the request. "You're not married yet," says Mom.

A short time later Joan's father notices an article in the newspaper: A young man named Jack Griffith--the pilot who took her virginity--has been killed in a plane crash. Joan drops a dinner plate when she hears the news, goes to her room, tears up the love letter she's just written, and puts her head down on her desk.

At this point the film would stop entirely and the house lights would come up. Elliot Forbes, an "eminent sexual hygiene commentator," would stride onto the stage and deliver a 20-minute lecture on the need for openness in sex education, the morality of the times, the biology of the body, and what the community can do to avoid the ruination of its youth.

If anyone checked the credentials of Elliot Forbes, he would have discovered that the speaker was the busiest man in the history of the lecture circuit, appearing 78 times a day in cities scattered from Maine to Oregon. There were actually 26 Elliot Forbeses, one for each roadshow, and Babb hired most of them from the ranks of retired or underemployed vaudeville comedians. They knew how to work crowds with a combination of earnestness, humor, and downhome "just folks" patter that would always crescendo at the moment when they held up two paperback books--one called Man and Boy, the other called Woman and Girl--and made a spiel for "a set of these vitally important books to be read in the privacy of your own home." Two women in nurse uniforms--supposedly stationed in the theater to take care of people who fainted or had heart attacks--would then pass among the crowd collecting money and distributing the volumes.

The books themselves were rehashes of venereal disease and pregnancy information that could be obtained at any public health agency. The Elliot Forbes speech was what is known in the carnival world as a "blowoff," long used in 10-in-one freak shows to hustle additional money from people who had already paid an admission price. In any good blowoff, there's the constant implication that the "good stuff" is in the attraction you haven't paid for yet--in this case, the book. Forbes' main job was to sell the books, which frequently augmented the box-office take by as much as 50 percent. In 1957, for example, at a four-week showing of Mom and Dad in Baltimore, the box-office gross was $82,000, but 45,000 copies of the books were sold, resulting--after deducting printing and expenses--in a $31,000 additional profit.

The Busybody Villainess

After Forbes had left the stage and the money had been collected, the film would resume with our heroine sick to her stomach, sleeping late, and discovering that her clothes no longer fit her. (The actors never use the word "pregnant.") After a few scenes of dramatic desperation--including an off-screen suicide attempt--Joan's brother forces her to tell him the truth. Knowing he can't trust their straitlaced parents, he seeks advice from Carl Blackburn, a kindly teacher who was fired from the high school for teaching sex education and now sells insurance. After a night of agonizing, Blackburn calls on Joan's mother and informs her that "your daughter is going to have a baby."