Nuts and Fruits with Gypsy Boots

August 19th was the birthday of Robert Bootzin, a.k.a. Boots Bootzin, a.k.a. Gypsy Boots, a.k.a. Nature Boy (1915-2004) (Some sources give 2014, but the birth certificate says 2015). Boots was a TV personality, an author, a restaurateur, a health and lifestyle advocate, and he even released a record album. The common denominator in all of it was that he was a sort of proto-hippy long before it was fashionable, and long afterward as well.

Man, this one is a rabbit hole, and I may well have to do more than one post on the topic. In some sense, I have already covered some of it. The question that fascinates me is “where and when did the back-to-nature movement begin?” The answers are infinite. In a sense, one viable reply might be “one second after civilization came into being”. It’s like matter and anti-matter. Surely the instant that the first city was built, someone had to kvetch about it, no doubt with at least partial justification. Ancient Greece had its equivalents. I’m guessing Ur did too.

But let’s try and stay sane. When did America‘s back-to-nature movement start, and what are its roots? That, too, is way more involved than you may think. It can generally be traced as far back as the lebensreform (life improvement) movement in the Germanosphere in the mid 19th century. And the origins of THAT I am willing to conjecture, have to do with Protestantism, although it was embraced by Jews and Catholics as enthusiastically. Romanticism must have played a role as well. The idea undergirding it is that there is something about the modern world that is unclean and alien to what God intended. Its cluster of beliefs and practices are well known and include physical fitness, vegetarianism and fasting, alcohol and tobacco abstinence, naturopathy and alternative medicine, nudism and sunbathing, hydrotherapy (baths, spa treatments, saunas), organic farming, communal living, environmentalism, holistic education, and cultural borrowings from Asian and Native American religions and paganism, etc etc etc.

I feel the need to interject that very little of this is my bag. I am more partial to those other German contributions: hamburgers and frankfurters washed down with beer while watching World War Two documentaries on the history channel! But there is also plenty about so-called alternative living that I admire and can respect, if mostly from afar. I love hiking in the great outdoors and am very much interested in all religions. But IMMERSING myself in some sort of permanent daily alternative universe is a hard pass.

As we’ve written, Germans were among the first groups to immigrate to the U.S. in the mid 19th century, in fact, at around the very time lebensreform was becoming a thing in Europe. So some of them brought this back-to-nature philosophy with them. It surely dovetailed very nicely with the Transcendental movement that was blossoming locally at the same time. And they brought pockets of it with them all over the country. Here in New York, I associate it with the Hudson Valley and the Catskills. And naturally, they brought it to California, which I’m sure was the first place you thought of when I listed all of those crunchy practices just now. Thus, it didn’t just start in the 1960s and ’70s. Think of the physical culture craze that started in the late 19th century as embodied by Sandow and other body builders, Houdini,Douglas Fairbanks et al); or breakfast cereal entrepreneurs like the Kellogg Brothers and C.W. Post; or the frontier flim-flam man Joseph Knowles, who exploited the trend; or aphorism spouting soap-maker Dr. Emmanuel Bronner; or the charismatic Father Yod.

Yes, one inevitably thinks of cults when one speaks of such movements, and for good reason. The back to nature thing tends to sort itself out and ally with political movements of both the extreme right and the extreme left. Those who stayed in Germany got absorbed into Nazism. Here in the States, one thinks of Charles Manson and scores of other cults that have sprung into being like poison mushroom patches over the past few decades. If this is what it means to get clean, I’ll rest content in my pollution.

Not that Gypsy Boots Bootzin was involved in any cults per se, although the fact that he and 10 or 15 of his buddies, known as the “Nature Boys”, dropped out of society to live off the land in the wilderness around Palm Springs in the 1940s at least rhymes with cultism. They grew their hair and beards long and slept in caves and tree branches. Boots had been living such a lifestyle since 1933 when he dropped out of high school to live the hobo life. He grew up in San Francisco, the son of Russian Jewish immigrants. His proclivities seemed to stem from his mother, herself a vegetarian and hiking enthusiast, a lover of Russian folk dancing, and a considerate soul who fed the homeless with her own home baked bread. Thus, Boots is not German, but the movement they brought to this country spoke to him.

In the ’30s and ’40s, Bootzon’s activities resonated with the first wave of the American folk movement, and later, with the Beats, I think. Gradually, it started to creep into the wider public’s consciousness. In 1948, one of Bootzin’s cohorts eden ahbez wrote a song called “nature Boy” that Nat King Cole actually recorded! The song went all the way to #1 on the charts and was later recorded by Frank Sinatra, Sarah Vaughan, and The Great Society, and used as the theme song for the movie The Boy with the Green Hair (1948). ahbez was featured in Time, Life, and Newsweek, and subsequently wrote several other hit songs. He’ll get his own post here in due course, but the point here is that he raised awareness of the all-natural lifestyle.

As did Boots, starting in 1955 when he appeared on You Bet Your Life with Groucho Marx! He had ample time to talk about his alternative life style on the program. This led to 25 appearances on The Steve Allen Show (see photo above), as well as The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson, and other talk shows in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. He also made public appearances with Spike Jones band, and made flamboyant appearances at parades and sporting events. His catchphrase, yelled loud, often uttered while banging a drum, was “Nuts and fruits with Gypsy Boots!”

In the late ’50s and early ’60s he settled down, relatively speaking, by starting Health Hut, one of Hollywood’s first health food restaurants, getting married and starting a family. His book Bare Feet and Good Things to Eat was published in 1965. Thanks to his Hollywood connections (and loyal restaurant clientele) he began to show up in movies. You can see him in A Swingin’ Summer (1965), Mondo Hollywood (1967), Monterey Pop (1967, not onstage, just walk around), and Childish Things (1969). He released a record album called Unpredictable in 1968, and was an emcee of the Newport Pop Festival that year.

By this point millions of young people were emulating the lifestyle pioneered by Boots and his fellow Nature Boys, amplified (in more ways than one) by the influence of the rock musicians out of San Francisco and L.A. and other places.

By the ’80s things were changing, but Gypsy Boots, now an elderly man, held fast to his ways. He released his memoir The Gypsy in Me in 1993. Later film appearances include cameos in Richard Lewis’s Diary of a Young Comic (1979), Michael Douglas’s The Game (1997), and Apartment 12 (2001), which was written and directed by his son Dan Bootzin, and starred Mark Ruffalo. Dan maintains the official Gypsy Boots web site, which is here and well worth the visit.

Staytuned for my upcoming book Electric Vaudeville: A Century of Radio and TV Variety.