Hfpitaph

The Beat Generation has finally got what it always wanted--lost. Essentially the products of a public-relations campaign carried on by amateur flacks in stovepipe slacks, the untalented beats picked their own title and by noisy promotion tried to associate themselves with the talented expatriates of the '20s whom Gertrude Stein named the Lost Generation. With the help of eager squares, including some journalists, the beats even styled themselves a Movement--but it was one of the great stationary movements of all time, since nothing budges that is fueled by pretension and pot.

Now, after less than four years, the beats have all but vanished, leaving behind a curious footnote to the nation's night life: about the only durable mark that the beatniks made on American culture is the coffeehouses that flourish in a dozen cities--and the coffeehouses themselves have been largely responsible for the disappearance of the beats. With cover charges and minimums, they now discriminate actively against the vestigial beards.

Generally the coffeehouses need the tourist trade, and "There aren't enough tourists who can stand the creeps," as one Chicago host puts it. A Manhattan coffee bin has a sign over the door that says DOGS, BUT NO CATS.

Spumoni Sodas. Fresh and cleanshaven, U.S. coffeehouses have emerged from Beatsville to branch out in a dozen directions, becoming everything from Great Books clubs to theaters for silent movies; but most significantly they have become intimate showcases for nascent theatrical talent. Greenwich Village's celebrated Phase 2 offers a sprightly 30-minute review. The present one is called Pass the Nuts, and includes a wonderful satire on Method acting: a student actor pretends he is a seed growing into a tree. Stewed Primes, the long-running revue at nearby Take 3, was so good that it moved into an off-Broadway theater. Caffe Cino, another Village place, concentrates on one-acters, is now doing something called Herrengasse, a Kafkan-Brechtian "sweet and swinging tale of the decline of the West." And Bleecker Street's Premise contains four young actors who do excellent improvisations at the drop of a hint from the audience.

Probably the most sophisticated American coffeehouse is Hollywood's Renaissance, which puts out its own newsletter, holds art classes, has a closet full of chess sets, and has presented such theatrical products as Gian Carlo Menotti's opera The Old Maid and the Thief and a revue based on the cartoon characters of Jules (Sick, Sick, Sick) Feiffer. Renaissance imitations have appeared all over Sunset Strip--the Unicorn, Pandora's Box, Chez Paulette, the Bit--but the closest approximation is Positano at Malibu Beach, where patrons sip $1 spumoni sodas, play Monopoly and pingpong, and take in entertainment that ranges from productions of G. B. Shaw to a nudist-colony director answering questions.

Pink Centaur. Some coffeehouses are far out in a sense no beatnik could ever have imagined. The tony Florian on Boston's Newbury Street serves ten different kinds of coffee, caters to little old ladies nibbling anchovy canapes. Many establishments have specific dedications that would defy the nihilist beatnik code: New Orleans' House of the Fencing Masters, a coffeehouse gallery that displays the serious work of local artists, and the folk-song parlors, such as the Laughing Buddha in St. Louis and Club 47 in Cambridge, Mass., where the Harvard boys listen reverently to the excellent voice of Joan Baez, 20, singing Wildwood Flower and All My Trials.

Some places have grown into nightclubs, notably Chicago's famed Second City and San Francisco's hungry 1; a few are still more or less beat, and suffer for it. The famed Gas House in Los Angeles' Venice West grows ever longer on sideburns and shorter on talent. Denver's Green Spider hides behind an exterior mural of a fat blonde nude dancing with a shocking-pink centaur, and has no entertainment except spontaneous poetry readings by bearded bards who specialize in dirty dactyls.

Sandaled Shades. But mainly, traces of the beat forefathers remain in the coffeehouses only on menus or signs on the walls. Neatly dressed college kids at Caf&233; Bizarre in Manhattan's Greenwich Village observe a sign that advertises POETS AND FOLK SWINGERS, order such delicatessen as the Suffering Bastard Sundae ($4.75 for four). Even Washington, D.C., the municipal square root, has Coffee 'n' Confusion, where manicured men in dark blue suits and ladies in tailored dresses stare at a sign that says WELCOME COOL GOOLS.

But even that sort of absurdity is fading. The beats are gone, man, gone. The bongo drums in Denver's Exodus lie unused and uncared-for. In San Francisco, where it all started, even the Co-Existence Bagel Shop has been closed since autumn. And in Chicago, when a newspaper wanted a "typical" picture of two beats in a coffeehouse, reporters had to comb the city for hours before they found two sad, sandaled shades and dragged them to the Oxford to be shot.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.