American Vaudeville [1 ed.] 9781952271076, 9781952271069

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Praise for American Vaudeville “Hilsabeck’s essays excavate vaudeville’s archival remains, reveling in its greasepaint and slap shoes, boas and tightropes. He does not shy away from vaudeville’s ranker bits—its controlling monopolies and its racism and the ways it could, and did, devour its own. But neither does he short-sell its beauty. Rather, in these pages, transcendent artifice and wonderment ride in tandem with the tragic and tawdry, and all of it is shot through with the gloriously absurd. One comes away from Hilsabeck’s deeply researched work with a sense of history as spectacle, and spectacle as history. Like the stages that are his concern, Hilsabeck’s linked, lyric essays ‘would tell the story of America to America’—‘what we were, which is what we are.’ ” —Tina Post, University of Chicago “Geoffrey Hilsabeck recounts the often bizarre details of vaudeville, the most popular live entertainment in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, and, more importantly, he evokes the feeling of this eclectic, rapid-fire amusement. Hilsabeck gives vaudeville new life, from its physical immediacy to its ethereal reach.” —M. Alison Kibler, author of Censoring Racial Ridicule: Irish, Jewish, and African American Struggles over Race and Representation, 1890–1930

IN PLACE Jeremy Jones, Series Editor Elena Passarello, Series Editor This Way Back Joanna Eleftheriou The Painted Forest Krista Eastman Far Flung: Improvisations on National Parks, Driving to Russia, Not Marrying a Ranger, the Language of Heartbreak, and Other Natural Disasters Cassandra Kircher Lowest White Boy Greg Bottoms On Homesickness: A Plea Jesse Donaldson

AMERICAN VAUDEVILLE Geoffrey Hilsabeck WITH A FOREWORD BY

LUC SANTE

West Virginia University Press • Morgantown

Copyright © 2021 by West Virginia University Press All rights reserved First edition published 2021 by West Virginia University Press Printed in the United States of America ISBN 978-1-952271-06-9 (paperback) / 978-1-952271-07-6 (ebook) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Hilsabeck, Geoffrey, author. | Sante, Luc, writer of foreword. Title: American vaudeville / Geoffrey Hilsabeck ; with a foreword by Luc Sante. Description: First edition. | Morgantown : West Virginia University Press, 2021. | Series: In place | Includes bibliographical references. Identifiers: LCCN 2020051361 | ISBN 9781952271069 (paperback) | ISBN 9781952271076 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Vaudeville—United States—Miscellanea. | Hilsabeck, Geoffrey. Classification: LCC PN1968.U5 H55 2021 | DDC 792.70973—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051361 Book and cover design by Than Saffel / WVU Press Cover image: The Three Keatons [Buster, Joe, & Myra]. Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library Digital Collections.

For Buster Keaton

“This book was started in the Vaudeville Varieties on the Kansas Frontier in the lead miming [sic] country.” .

—Billy Wylie, Joplin, MO, June 9, 1877

Contents Foreword 

  xi

Creation Myths  Vanishing Act  Just What Was Vaudeville?  At the Wonderland  Dreamsweat  Jacks-in-the-Pew  Bright Particular Star  The Jonah Man  The Muting of the Strings  Obituaries and Obsolescencies  The Playhouse  History 

   3   13  21   35  47  57  69  87  101   113  121  129

Acknowledgments  Notes  Sources  Illustration Credits 

  133   135  141  145

Foreword For a little more than half a century, vaudeville was American popular culture. It wasn’t an aspect of it, or even its cornerstone, but—before there were records or movies or radio—the thing itself. It was crowded and complicated and awesomely various, artistic and polished and artless and crude, sumptuous and threadbare, noble and contemptible. It ran from Shakespearean monologues to dog acts, from trapeze aerialists to drunk routines, from Irish tenors to blackface minstrels. Its very origins were racist, but it enabled Bert Williams, an African American, to be hailed as the funniest man in the country. It enabled Julian Eltinge to become an enormous star as a female impersonator in a time when cross-dressing was actually illegal in many cities. It enabled Eva Tanguay to become a great success despite the fact that she lacked all the conventional talents. You just had to see her, but none of us did. The date often given for vaudeville’s end is 1930, when the New York Palace, vaudeville’s epicenter and Olympus, closed down for good. A few geniuses had

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Foreword

managed to swim to the shore of the movies and thrived there: Buster Keaton, W. C. Fields, Harpo Marx, Fred Astaire. But in that different context their work was reframed, and we can only triangulate and guess what it was like on the stage—we cannot, for example, reconstruct Fields’s apparently astonishing gift for juggling. And we have no hope of adequately picturing the audiences that encouraged and supported and maybe sometimes heckled them, the American public that remembered farming, had never been abroad, expressed itself in fistfights, wore layers of clothes on the hottest days, either knew Latin or could barely read, had never been taught the distinction between an indoor and an outdoor voice. The twentieth century changed everything, and the last vaudeville spectators died at least thirty years ago. Geoffrey Hilsabeck caught the vaudeville bug and went looking for its traces in the archives, where some of them cannot even be consulted until technology finds a way to prevent them from crumbling into powder. He does not attempt to write its history—that was done a number of times soon after its demise for the benefit of those who remembered. Instead he tries something more difficult; he imagines himself into its aura, looks for the subjective experience, tries to balance its alluring strangeness with the most repellent strands of American culture—racism, cruelty, ignorance—that sometimes seem like the only connections between vaudeville’s time and

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ours. Hilsabeck is intuitive, canny, penetrating, and wise, and he has absorbed and can play all the tones in the vast calliope of the American language. American Vaudeville is a short book, but it is dense with evocation, each sentence expanding to fill the room. You will read it more than once. Luc Sante

xiii

Creation Myths

Creation Myths

In the beginning God created heaven and earth and continuous vaudeville. An upright piano fell from the rafters and shattered. Sweep, sweep, sweep came the brooms. My bareness! My bareness! they seemed to say. And the evening and the morning. A thin, faded backdrop flopped to the stage floor. That was the third day. Then it was George Lockhart’s famous troupe of performing elephants! It was Boney, the only Elephant bicyclist in the world! Boney is a wonder! He rides a wheel! He’s with a jag! And Davy Crockett: a Symphony and Julian Eltinge, the famous female impersonator. The green facts began to sing. On the sixth day, the waves at Coney Island crashed black and white and silent against the shore. On the seventh day, the houselights came up, and the doors flew open, and Walt Whitman could be seen rubbing himself against things, thinking. He was celebrating the Sabbath, his beard full of receipts.

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American Vaudeville

Or maybe vaudeville began when a donkey, no, a dog was fucked by a god—no, this was America in the nineteenth century: a dog fucked a god, an injured god quietly convalescing in a military hospital. It happened at night. The smell of the Civil War hung in the air. Then Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his journal, “hunger for objects. All men look hungry.” Buster Keaton was born, and later Frank Tinney was making a thousand dollars a week at Hammerstein’s with a blackface act that consisted of little more than saying tra la la. “The Arrival of the Fast Mail,” “Burning Field Waste.”

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Creation Myths

Unless there was no beginning. Unless everything was and is and always will be on the move, like a man on fire. A music box—or is it a clock?—it’s a curious musical machine—is performing every day except Sunday at Mr. Pacheco’s warehouse, the door popping open and out parading six musicians in white shirts playing the changes. In the illuminated path of a magic lantern a pied piper is dancing a jig. And at the Mercury, Benjamin Abram is setting a chair on his forehead. He is making a feather jump from one part of his body to another.

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American Vaudeville

Was it Mr. Morrison, a hocus-pocus man, who set the whole thing in motion, in the attic of the John Street Theatre, 1787, performing his tricks by torchlight to the squeak of fiddles? Or Hyman Saunders doing three acts of sleight of hand in a well-lit room of a private house, or Faulks, the first American circus, playing the French horn while standing on a horse near a slaughterhouse on the Bowery? Who knows. The world moves in pointless orbit. A monkey kept a watchful silence above a crowd of shoppers one sunny afternoon, while south of there an actress and her maid drowned in Kill Van Kull, nearby birds snatching at old lauds with their beaks. There was a production of Richard III at the John Street followed by the antics of Harlequin and attended by a delegation of Cherokee chiefs. That sounds like vaudeville, its mix of high art and low comedy, the tragic quickly absorbed into the absurd. Or was vaudeville frictioned into existence three months later, when the chiefs were back at the John Street, now on stage, though, not in the audience, performing something billed as a War Dance?

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Creation Myths

For thirty years, from, say, B. F. Keith and E. F. Albee’s first continuous show at the Bijou Theatre in Boston, 1885, to the proliferation of nickelodeons and the opening of the first Hollywood studio in a roadhouse on Sunset Boulevard in the early teens, vaudeville was the most popular form of entertainment in the country. America at the turn of the century was an electric world of widely available shredded wheat, cotton candy, Ferris wheels, and semiautomatic rifles, filing cabinets, and disposable razors. Then as now people wrung their hands over the meaning of America. To say, finally, what it means. “American history needs a connected and unified account of the progress of civilization across the continent,” wrote the historian Frederick Jackson Turner in 1889 in a review of Theodore Roosevelt’s The Winning of the West. Over the next thirty years, vaudeville would answer Turner’s call with parody, sentimentality, racist caricature, virtuosity, slapstick, song and dance, and anarchy. It would tell the story of America to America, with a clown playing the president in motley, on a donkey instead of a horse, illuminated by electric lights rather than the star-spangled western night.

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American Vaudeville

It still does, tell that story I mean, the so-called American experiment in all its wickedness and absurdity. Vaudeville fills my screens, the dime novelty and minor celebrity, the melodrama, monologues, and rough-and-tumble fights. It spills out across newspapers and magazines. Bodies race across the stage, sing their song, and are gone. Two men, barefoot, fight in a cage. George Zimmerman returns after a season away with a plaintive lament. Fullstage number: men march in formation, armed to the teeth with Remingtons, Lugers, Sig Sauers, carrying Tiki torches they bought in bulk online. And Blake Lively’s legs literally go on for days. What we were, which is what we are. BTW check out this DIY chicken breast. America at the turn of the century, not connected or unified, nothing classical about it, and far from civilized: it’s all fistfights and rainbows here. Sparrow the Juggler with his shadow, Gagnoux. La Belle Dazie. Remembering Rosa Parks and Andy Warhol. Le Grohs. An acrobat on a bicycle holds up a mirror to the audience, then another and another. Then he smashes the mirrors with a hammer.

10

Vanishing Act

Vanishing Act

In one of the loneliest countries in the world, in a room empty but for a few people, I sit at a table and pencil in dates. Vaudeville is the romance of dates and theaters and cities scrawled into a performer’s notebook—“Dec. 28 Orpheum, N.Y., Jan. 4. 11. 16. 25 Open, Feb. 1. Youngstown Ohio, Feb. 8. Keith, Boston”—and the sadness behind that romance. Susan Howe: “I wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate.” I scroll through yards of microfilm in an unsystematic, olfactory sort of way. Vaudeville was everywhere and then, suddenly, nowhere. What’s left? Random scraps and fragments— managers’ reports, train schedules, loose sheets of paper someone used to jot down jokes, photographic negatives I have to hold up to the light to see—saved from the great fires of history by chance and scattered willy-nilly across a half-dozen archives. Like this one, a pocket graveyard on the fifth floor of a university library, in the town, incidentally, where my father was born. My right leg shaking like the needle of a sewing machine, I comb through dozens of folders and boxes, each artifact protected from my living oils by a plastic shroud. Volume I is too fragile to permit even reading-room use. It has been unbound, unbodied, that stretch of vaudeville coaxed finally to the vapor and the dust. That which was drifts in the atmosphere above us, or up among the stones and empty space, or farther still, spewing from a geyser on

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one of Saturn’s moons. God I feel like soberfaced Frank Clayton, star of his one-man show “Nonsense.” Or like Enoch, “The Man Fish,” who stood in a vat of water with a tin can on his head playing the trombone. Then he ate a banana. We have each been granted the gift of our own insignificance. The boardinghouses are gone, Mrs. Scully’s at 311 14th Street, the Smith and Bussey houses on Great Jones Street. The theaters are gone, 210 Bowery, 585 Broadway, Waldman’s New Theatre, Howard Athenaeum in Boston, the Temple Theatre in Detroit, makeshift theaters in Toppenish, in Walla Walla, a freight car in Centralia, IL, the end of a pier in Gloucester. Barns, warehouses, factories, markets, and stables were all converted into vaudeville theaters, churches too, pews removed to make room for tables and chairs, balconies become private boxes, pulpit and choirloft stage and proscenium. And the vaudevillians, the musicians, magicians, and animals, the contortionists, jugglers, opera singers, and clowns—they’re gone too. It’s early July. I have come to visit the dead. Come for their bones. To fall asleep over them.

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Vanishing Act

A hand, another, whiter hand—like something off a cave wall, some old Indian painting made with sand and animal fat and albumen—but why this pair of shoes, flat and black, together at the heel and splayed an inch in front? Whose feet are these? What clown, comic monologist, hypnotist, or actor crammed his ungainly human hooves in them? Or is all of vaudeville in there like a genie in a bottle? I remove what’s left of vaudeville piece by piece. The surviving marks, the vestiges. I prefer these objects to the armies of facts that march up and down the pages of all the books about vaudeville that I’ve read. I can hold them. They connect me materially to the past. Make of it a place where people lived. Vaudeville. It’s like some lost city. I see the name on a map. Vaudeville. With its theaters and its denizens, its anthems and its ethos. I am its lonely archaeologist, dusting the screws with a brush, fitting together the pieces, dressed all in navy and gray. Vaudeville. Buried under its streets are older streets that belonged to older cities, the minstrel show, the medicine show, the circus, the melodrama, the museum, and it, in turn, has been buried by radio, movies, television, the internet. The city has vanished. The city persists. Is it late? Yes, it’s late. It’s late but it’s early. It’s always early when we begin our work.

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American Vaudeville

What can I say? I want a country, even though countries are nations, and nations are monstrous. It’s America I’m after, the wretched republic to which I swore my allegiance, hand over heart, as a child. Whitman’s dirty plural. A kind of family farm I have inherited from my ancestors. No one can remember anything about the lives that were lived there before they built their fires. Not that generations matter, some great great etc. who signed the Declaration, who fought in the wars and built the railroads and farmed the land. Another cart arrives. I walk all day through the buildings and with the people and in the wind, a wind that hymns.

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Just What Was Vaudeville?

Just What Was Vaudeville?

Vaudeville shows were moody, like my days, full of strange combinations, modern in the way they lurched from high to low, from the tragic actress Nance O’Neill in “The Jewess” to the dancer Possum Welch, from Dr. Lorenzbreakabones to “Shakespeare in Tabloid Form.” A good showman laid out a show, wrote Brett Page in 1915 in Writing for Vaudeville, “not by rule, but by feeling.” A vaudeville show featured seven or eight acts, often opening with a dumb act while people found their seats, then a song-and-dance act, maybe a playlet, and a big name or two. After the intermission came comedy, typically, and sometimes a full-stage act. The show closed with sight gags. Here’s the lineup for opening night at the Palace: the Eight London Palace Girls, McIntyre and Hardy, the Eternal Waltz (a condensed version of a Viennese opera), the Four Vannis (a high-wire act), La Napierkowska (pantomime and parodies of the modern dancers Isadora Duncan and Ruth St. Denis), Ota Gygi (billed as court violinist of Spain), Hy Mayer (a cartoonist for the Times), “Speaking to Father” (a playlet), and Ed Wynn in a comic sketch. The conventional wisdom is that vaudeville was cheap, superficial, thoroughly middlebrow—a “lunch-counter art,” was how one critic put it—but I am struck by the range of emotions on this Palace bill, which moves quickly from the earthy hyperbole of opera to the airy flights of four acrobats in tights and spangles gliding through space, the very image of

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American Vaudeville

transcendence and relief. And after that? The via negativa of satire and absurdity: a comic dancer (the loss of comic dancing feels especially acute to me) tramping around what Henry James called the “grey void” of the stage, meaninglessly waving her arms.

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Just What Was Vaudeville?

But the Palace only opened in 1913. Long before the Palace, there was Tony Pastor’s New Fourteenth Street Theatre, which opened on October 24, 1881. Pastor’s career provides a rough sense of the arc of vaudeville, from its origins to its most commercial expression at the turn of the century. Pastor started as a singer at the age of six, performing duets for meetings of the Hand-in-Hand Temperance Society in the early 1840s. From there he went to P. T. Barnum’s museum, where he was billed as a child prodigy and sang songs in blackface. He joined a minstrel show at ten and a traveling circus at eleven, where he worked his way up from errand boy to equestrian, acrobat, ringmaster, and clown. He performed with the circus until the start of the Civil War. During and after the war, Pastor ran a series of theaters in New York, first on the Bowery and later farther uptown on Broadway: Volk’s Garden, which he renamed Pastor’s Opera House, then 585 Broadway, and finally Pastor’s New Fourteenth Street Theatre. Annie Oakley performed there. So did Fred Watson’s dogs and Mlle. Paquerette, who could wrap her arms all the way around her body until they met back up in front. So did Eva Tanguay.

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American Vaudeville

Eva Tanguay was the Queen of Vaudeville. At the height of her career, she made three thousand dollars a week with an act that combined song, dance, sexual innuendo, and a feverish, childish abandon. She clapped, banged her feet, and sang sentimental ballads. She sang a popular drinking song while dousing herself in champagne. She sang “I Want Someone to Go Wild with Me,” “I’m Crazy about That Kind of Love,” “I Don’t Care.” Her boundless energy was a source of awe. She had wild, unruly hair and wore weird costumes like a chandelier and a crown of flags and a thing with feathers. There was a dress made out of Lincoln pennies, which she tore off one by one, tossing them into the audience. She changed six or eight times during her twenty-minute act, always on stage, behind the piano or in a dark corner. Nothing coy or decorative about her, as with so many women on vaudeville. She was powerful. Your hands itched as you sat on your seat and watched her flare up like a match just struck. You wanted to be up there with her, wearing nothing and running amok, and you wanted nothing to do with her, that fierce excess of flesh, the fearful image of freedom. When she was done, you demanded more, a dozen encores at least.

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Just What Was Vaudeville?

“Miss Eva Tanguay, Keith’s Theater, Philadelphia, Pa. My Dear Madam :— While sitting in the Auditory at Keith’s yesterday, I received the sum of two cents, and while it has been my custom in the past to acknowledge remittances of money, I take the pleasure at this time to thank you for the same. I enjoyed your entertainment very much, but only as I have in the past, and I assure you that I will avail myself of every opportunity to hear you in the future, on your visits to Philadelphia. Wishing you a Very merry christmas and a happy prosperous new year and would be pleased to receive your card and autograph as a Remembrance of your Theatrical Successes, I beg to remain, Very respectfully yours,”

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American Vaudeville

All around, rapid expansion of agriculture and mining and manufacturing: from the small farm and the workshop to the factory and the corporation, everyone on the move, in a hurry, heading out West or into the city, which flashed across a hundred small towns and hill farms in the form of the crack express train, or limited. Its cars were crowded with actors, jugglers, and dancers, champion roller skaters, mediocre ventriloquists. Smoke was a sign of prosperity. Watching smoke and clouds mingle in the blue distance through the window of his study, the Rev. Josiah Strong murmured to his son, taking dictation, “The creating of more and higher wants.” A pause. Suddenly he thundered, “America!” America, the boy mouthed, writing its letters in neat script in his father’s journal.

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Just What Was Vaudeville?

Chocolates; hotels; chafing dishes and samovars from the Philadelphia Electric Company Supply Dept.; pianos; uniforms; diamonds; the Jefferson Dye Works; Dr. Margaret Ruppert’s elimination of superfluous hair (“No electric needle: no uncertain or poisonous lotions. Destroys the hair follicles, impairing further growth. Surgeon Chiropody.” Dial Walnut 7021.); cigars; beer, whiskey, sarsaparilla and orange phosphate, sweetened condensed milk; gloves (Astoria, Majestic, Peerless, Carlton) and hats; Eva Tanguay; Harry Armstrong, the Clever Minstrel Delineator; omega oil for rheumatism; razors; cocoa; collars; pepsin gum; court plaster to heal cuts, abrasions, hangnails, split lips, burns, and blisters; Mr. Barney Fagan; baths; waters like Spring Mohican Water, “a delightful table water. Efficacious for Diabetes, Bright’s Disease, Renal Insufficiency”; oysters; imitations of famous artists by La Belle Blanche; Sozodont tooth powder; coffee, syrup; Vaseline; the Gomery-Schwartz Motor Car Co. with the Hudson Super Six: phaetons, town cars, limousines, sedans, roadsters, cabriolets, “80 Per Cent. More Power”; muslin underwear; Sally Lomas, the Dancing Marvel; trunks; Wormwood’s Dog and Monkey Circus; lump and crushed coke; Tonson’s Sure Headache Cure; bologna; corsets; typewriters; Prof. Zayno’s School of Stage Art: private lessons in elocution, vocal culture, dramatic art, and new dancing specialties—fire dances,

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American Vaudeville

sand, buck and wing, serpentine, clog, jig, cakewalk, and soft shoe dances; lumber; chewing gum; carpets; The Four Cuttys; hosiery; Marvel Whirling Spray Douche; Shake-In-Your-Sox, The Great Foot and Skin Powder; Obliterine (“ladies! why suffer the annoyance of superfluous hair, whether on the lip, arms, between the eyes or upon a mole?”); Ernest Hogan, the Unbleached American; the Mackinaw Refrigerator; a twelve-day cruise to Nova Scotia and Newfoundland; coal; feathers.

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Just What Was Vaudeville?

Eva Tanguay was the Evangelist of Joy and the Mistress of Grace, “outrivalled by the pitter patter of humming bird surprises founded on the broad lines of absolute freedom,” yes an “eccentric cyclonic personality,” a “veritable bundle of nerves,” “a live wire—constantly moving and excitable,” a “fascinating whirlwind.” She was “one of the oddities of the American stage.” “She doesn’t act. She just is”—or was, yes, she was “a star in the theatrical world by reason of her 10 H.P. dynamo electric personality, that is a veritable Marconian transmitter of attractive vibrations.”

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American Vaudeville

And yet Eva Tanguay herself admitted to having no actual stage skills; she was not beautiful, could not sing or dance. Reviewers described her voice as a “hairshirt to the nerves” and compared her dancing to a “mad dog fleeing a mob of small boys.” What then made her all that money? Just her raw, boundless energy, the “elastic intensity” of her performance? Did people go to see her the way they went to Niagara Falls? Was she, like the falls, a manifestation of the natural world, of those ancient, sprawling rivers and towering mountains? A symbol of infinity? Did people worship, in their churchesturned-theaters, this skipping and shouting jolie laide, the simultaneous expression and realization of energy— energy becoming conscious of itself?

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At the Wonderland

At the Wonderland

The 1889 Indian Appropriations Act opened up the Cherokee Outlet, a slice of land just south of the Kansas border with Oklahoma, where Cherokees, Chickasaws, Choctaws, Creeks, and Seminoles had lived before being pushed out by people like my grandparents’ grandparents. On September 16, 1893, to the sound of trumpets and gunshots, one hundred thousand homesteaders, or strippers, raced into the territory, some on foot, some on wagons, some even on bicycles, to claim a corner of what would now be called the American landscape. Close on their heels came gamblers, pickpockets, prostitutes, and the Cutler-Bryant 10-Cent Medicine Show. Joe Keaton, a comic dancer with a blackface monologue, performed in the show. So did the boss’s daughter, sixteenyear-old Myra Cutler. The two fell in love. They eloped and went to New York to ply their trade, first at Huber’s, a dime museum in Union Square where they met Harry Houdini and performed in the galleries alongside acts like Matthews’s Goat Paradox, Wild Eagle Bill, Whale Oil Gus and Little Monday with their arctic relics, and Marazona the glass eater. They went from there to Tony Pastor’s theater, where they literally and figuratively flopped. The Keatons then traveled back to Kansas to form a medicine show with Houdini, which they performed in the coal- and zinc-mining camps recently established there. Their son, Joseph Frank Keaton, later known as

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Buster, was born in Piqua, KS, in 1895, at the butt end of Thoreau’s “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century.” Five years later he walked on stage at the Wonderland Theater in Wilmington, DE, dressed like his father in a torn tux, oversized slap shoes, and a bald cap.

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At the Wonderland

Backstage at another Wonderland, Moore’s Wonderland in Detroit, 1895, the Black comedian Bert Williams painted his face with burnt cork, something he had vowed never to do, but the act—he was one half of a two-man— was flagging. Williams was the straight man, good looking, a little slow. So what if he slowed down even more? What if he sunk down into the mud and breathed there? The act went over that night, Williams later put it, like a house on fire. He said he discovered his sense of humor that night, could finally get next to himself on stage. There was a character now to inhabit, one whose manner and dialect were as foreign to him as if it were Italian. For Williams the blackface mask was a place to hide. Behind it, that night, he sang one of his own songs, rather than received material, for the first time: “Oh, I Don’t Know, You’re Not So Warm.” I had a girl, and her name was Pearl, I thought her heart was mine; I gave a French dinner, I thought I was a winner, I’d have bet my life against a dime. I told her how I loved her, but she said she’d not be mine . . .

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American Vaudeville

As a kid in the Bahamas, Bert Williams mimicked everything, every person, animal, and object he encountered. He was a natural at it. He got his start in show business at sixteen in Riverside, CA, working as a barker for a medicine show and a singing waiter in a Black quartet. At eighteen he went on the road with three white classmates from Stanford, performing in lumber and mining camps around Monterey for unenthusiastic, sometimes hostile audiences of laborers. When the tour was over, and it ended early, Williams burned all his clothes. Never would say why. That was 1892. One hundred sixty-one Black men, women, and children were lynched that year, the highest on record. Williams, though, was undeterred, bit hard by the theatrical bug. He decamped to San Francisco’s Barbary Coast, where he sang ballads in taverns and joined a group of singing Hawaiians. He took up with the Mastodon Minstrels, a mixed troupe, half-White, halfBlack, and met George Walker, who would become his longtime stage partner. Walker and Williams split from the minstrel troupe and made their way east to Chicago with an act they called “The Two Real Coons.” As Bert Williams refined his performances, he began to incorporate more of the Jim Crow character that T. D. Rice had originated and scores of other white minstrels had shaped over the previous half century, the clumsy tongue and shuffle, but before 1895 he refused to wear blackface.

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At the Wonderland

Jim Crow came on stage in 1829, a white man with a black face. Jim Crow was the creation of T. D. “Daddy” Rice, the “Ethiopian Delineator,” who dressed himself up in rags and covered his face with burnt cork, imitating a crippled stable boy he had once seen in Louisville or Cincinnati or Pittsburgh or a man named Cuff who carried luggage from steamboats to hotels for tips and let boys pitch pennies into his open mouth. Others followed, George Washington Dixon and his character Zip Coon, Jim McAndrews with his popular skit “Watermelon Man.” In the winter of 1842–43, Daniel Decatur Emmett, Billy Whitlock, Dick Pelham, and Frank Brower, four out-of-work musicians hanging around a hotel on the Bowery, decided to form a band with banjo, fiddle, tambourine, and bone castanets and to perform in blackface. They called themselves the “Virginia Minstrels.” They developed an act that combined music and parody. That act quickly evolved into the minstrel show, an enduring form of entertainment that dominated American popular culture for nearly thirty years until it was absorbed by vaudeville. In the temples of minstrelsy, Black people had big eyes and gaping mouths and giant feet; their children were “darky cubs”; when they got sick they drank ink to restore their color. On vaudeville White and Black performers, men, women, and children, comedians

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American Vaudeville

and dancers and acrobats, wore blackface. Sometimes they played the minstrel part. Often they just wore the makeup.

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At the Wonderland

After the Wonderland, Williams and Walker were ascendant. They were at Koster & Bial’s in New York the next year and on Broadway with a musical called In Dahomey by Easter, 1903. Bert Williams: “The way we’ve aimed for Broadway and just missed it in the past seven years would make you cry. We’d get our bearings, take a good running start and—land in a Third Avenue theater. . . . I used to be tempted to beg for a fifteen dollar job in a chorus for one week so as to be able to say I’d been on Broadway once.” Whatever that success cost Bert Williams is not for me to say. I am not one from below. My Whiteness, what is it made of? My shoes adorned with flowers. Two men in whiteface and white, ruffled leotards juggle glass bottles between them and trade lines. “I have a heart of stone and a mind like a sieve.” “Left my memory in the money bag.” Bottles fall and shatter on the stage floor: empire music. “I wear my innocence proudly.” “Bury my victims in the riverbank.” Shards everywhere. Bits of rope and postcard, charred scraps of fabric, bones half-eaten by earth. Bert Williams wanted to be a great artist. He wanted to honor his talent, to be famous, bask in that vast, mutable sky of other people’s attention. Vaudeville, rich with talent from around the world, riven by contradiction, mired in racial hatred, was the muddy gunk in which he had to work. Bert Williams and his ambition and his genius and his compromises and his privacy.

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Meanwhile, with little Buster in the fold, the Keatons were back at Tony Pastor’s by 1904 but now with a successful family act built around Buster’s pratfalls. A veteran performer by the time his son came on stage, Joe Keaton had realized at the Wonderland what he had on his hands. He had felt the room shift. Lightness filled the space, a loosening of the shoulders, all the lines relaxing and vanishing. There was money there. Joe knew that. Myra sewed a harness with a suitcase handle on it into Buster’s coat. Joe would pick him up and toss him into the audience. He would wipe the floor with him like he was a mop. The Three Keatons evolved over time with no two shows quite the same. Improvisation, that great American art that was practiced by Italians on the streets of Rome and Florence in the sixteenth century. I, extempore. Joe might come out and start reciting a speech or a poem or sing a sentimental ballad like “Where Is My Wandering Boy Tonight?” Then little Buster would enter, carefully select a broom from one end of a wooden table, and start sweeping the tabletop. He might notice some invisible object and move it off the table, which would annoy Joe, who would put it back before returning to his song, at which point Buster would remove the object again, and on and on in escalating violence.

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Dreamsweat

Dreamsweat

Vaudeville emerged from the chaos of the nineteenth century—the time of my great-grandfather’s great-grandfathers and grandfathers and father—inherited its habits and prejudices, and added a few of its own. It rose from the bed of the nineteenth century like a clerk getting ready for work in his bachelor flat, still wet with dreamsweat. The strange dream of the Eclectic Remedy Co., a man selling infant soothers laced with opium and tonics made of red pepper and turpentine. The strange, unruly dream of the circus, which Emily Dickinson watched pass from her bedroom window and days later could “still feel the red in [her] mind.” A dream of emerging markets. Of unfixed address. A disquieting, erotic dream of tableaux vivants—“The Greek Slave,” “Venus Rising from the Sea,” “Suzanne in the Bath”— dream of speeches, conventions, nominations, camp meetings, singing families. Of minstrel shows. A dream of wires, a gathering of wires. A terrifying dream of Barnum’s American Museum burning down and with it two whales, an elephant, wax figures of Christ and his disciples, an electric eel, monkeys, big and little monkeys, young, old, and middle-aged monkeys, happy monkeys, sad monkeys, monkeys that fought with each other and were beaten by the Management for it.

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The minstrel show, the circus, melodrama, dime museums, medicine and boat shows, and local stuff, too, political speeches and parades, song-and-dance performances at temperance societies, sermons, these are the sources of vaudeville, the lakes that make up the tablelands, the rivers that feed the mighty Mississippi: the Missouri, the Ohio, the Wabash, and the Tennessee. They throw their waters south to the Gulf of Mexico, warm as a bath, warm as the silver bath in which images are fixed.

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Dreamsweat

At the Ramona, East Grand Rapids, MI: Erz Herzog Joseph’s Gypsy Band. Herr Holtum catching a cannonball. The Three Richards and the Lunatic Bakers. Annie Hart’s Rough Riders with Charles E. Grapewin and Anna Chance. El Cato plays Bach and Liszt on a xylophone. Xylophone and accordion. Guitar and ukulele. The whistler Charles Mildare. Snare drums and banjos, banjos to animate sand jigs and clog dancing, a gold banjo set with jewels. After a few bars on the banjo, John Carl would stop suddenly to recite Shakespeare, both straight and in burlesque, what were known as “Bughouse Hamlets.” Carl was always associated with a song called “The Lively Flea”: Feeding where no life may be, A dainty old chap is the lively flea. Feeding where no life may be, A dainty old chap is the lively flea.

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American Vaudeville

At Coney Island’s Dreamland: “Music and Fun in a Butcher Shop.” “A Blue Grass Widow.” Rousby’s Electrical Novelty. The monologist Clifton Crawford, his hair whitened, sings with a squeaky voice and then recites “Charge of the Light Brigade.” Max Waldon doing fourteen minutes of female impersonation. The Metropolitan Quartet belts out arias. Byers and Hermann in pantomime with one doing contortion work—or Ferreros, the musical clown with an educated dog— or Chalk Saunders with his well-known “Physgogs”—or W. C. Fields, Amerous Werner, Friscarry. “The Frog’s Paradise.” Prelle’s Talking Dogs. Holdin’s Mannikins, the Great Sandor Trio. The Two Vivians are sharpshooters. Thomas Edison’s Vitascope.

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Dreamsweat

As early as 1896, movies became a regular part of many vaudeville shows. They were known as “the flickers” and often placed at the end of the bill in a spot traditionally reserved for dumb acts and visual novelties. Edison liked to buy up old locomotives and stage train collisions to film. Flickering celebrities, local actualities. “The Gardener and the Bad Boy.” The projector was as much of an attraction as the images it projected, which might include the surf breaking on a stretch of beach; a boxing match between a tall, thin man and a short, fat one; a few seconds of a popular farce repeated over and over. Any sense of diminishment the audience might have felt at seeing these performers made two-dimensional was replaced by their sense of wonder at the technology by which they were so reduced, the black magic used to trap them in this strange machine, a woodland creature speaking light with a box of a body set on four spindly legs.

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Jacks-in-the-Pew

Jacks-in-the-Pew

Aristotle identified the sphere as the perfect shape. Vaudeville was, like me, all lines. Two men juggled standing on unsupported ladders. The Tom-Jack Trio threw snowballs at triangles. Amateurs and experts, apprentices and journeymen graced its stages, Eva Tanguay and Bert Williams but also a hypnotist named Ahrensmeyer. Nobodies, wannabes, hangers-on: the archive is full of them, its folders and boxes minor monuments to people who, but for a few scraps of paper preserved in plastic, grouped and catalogued, left no trace on this earth. Small talents, forgotten acts. Jacks-in-the-pew. Many likely died in poverty and all in relative obscurity. They tried. And mostly they failed. Mostly they knew loneliness, the loneliness of nothing theaters in nowhere towns, like the theater below a bowling alley in Lancaster, PA, or the theater in Ohio that wasn’t actually a theater but a butcher shop. They knew disappointment when their act fell flat and they weren’t asked back. They knew sweaty desperation. The Great, the Marvelous Carlosa, the World’s Greatest Ladder Balancer. She wrote to her booking agent from Springfield, MA, October 1898, looking for work. “D. Sirs, I have all time open after November 7th. Different from the rest so everybody says.” The DeBeaumonts were dancing magicians. They brought Merry Moments of Modern Magic, Mirth, and Mystery. They wrote en route. “My dear Sir: You will doubtless remember the writer . . .” When William

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James said that all the human heart wants is a chance, surely he had the DeBeaumonts in mind, or poor Joe Allen, bitter, hungry Joe Allen, stranded in Petoskey, MI, with no money to get home to his wife because his act had been scrapped by the manager of the Robbins Little Trixie Co. A tramp juggler who can’t juggle—a vaudevillian without vaudeville—a skipping stone that stopped believing in itself halfway across the glistening river Is.

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“Dear Sirs.—,” writes Ms. Helen N. Bovee, the World’s Greatest Lady Hypnotist, “Have you completed your list of attractions for Lyceum Entertainments for the coming season? If not,—how would a good lecture on Hypnotism, Mesmerism, and Kindred Subjects, illustrated with live good subjects, to be used in cataleptic posing; (2) holding up of three heavy men on body while suspended by heels and neck; (3) sewing lip by needle and thread without pain or loss of blood; (4) up to date mind-reading lists,—take with you and your patrons?”

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American Vaudeville

“There is a crack in everything God has made,” said Emerson. The vaudevillian was proof of that. Itinerant, tribal, superstitious, she carried her belongings in a trunk with separate compartments for her shoes, her iron, her washcloths and sponges and soap. It was bad luck to whistle in your dressing room or to throw away your dancing shoes, and woe to the performer who saw a bird land on her windowsill. Her life was filled with risk, skirted by failure, a freelance performer always begging for work. What was it like to hop on stage and play for a crowded hall or to scattered applause? How did rehearsal feel, especially the solo performers practicing their acts in giant, silent privacy, a privacy so giant and silent that planets must have spun through it? The Great Thurston. The Great Larry Leroy. The Great Koppe. Each greedy for the song of the I-singer. Come, Koppe, deliver your “excruciatingly funny monologue.” You are “the Only,” “the Original,” a good egg with a good, yellow heart but no star, sadly. A hack, a sad sack, at best a Bottom. You were touched once in a dream by a goddess and could never shake the feeling. You spent your life chasing it. Your permanent address was a newspaper office.

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Jacks-in-the-Pew

The two great ambitions of every vaudevillian were to own their own home and to play the Palace. To play the Palace was to have made it. The Palace embodied one of vaudeville’s essential contradictions. On its first floor was the theater, a teeming mass of humanity entertaining itself with variety. There, individuals performed unique acts, often of tremendous complexity and skill, which they had developed over many years, progressing, as it were, from apprentice to journeyman to master craftsman. The best ones were skilled improvisers, highly sensitive to the audience and able to adapt rapidly. In these and other ways, the vaudevillian was more artisan than factory worker and belonged to a preindustrial, antebellum America. Upstairs, though, on the upper floors of the Palace, buzzed the United Booking Office. The UBO was B. F. Keith and E. F. Albee’s corporation. From their vantage point, vaudeville was a machine. Albee went so far as to call their theaters “amusement plant[s].” Along with Martin Beck, who ran the Orpheum circuit, Keith and Albee had a monopoly on vaudeville theaters across the country, with few big-time theaters not owned, leased, or operated by one of these two circuits. Performers under contract to UBO were allowed to play only these two circuits—eventually they would merge into Keith-Albee-Orpheum—and no others. Under Keith and Albee, variety entertainment was no longer a matter negotiated between performers and audiences but involved

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lawyers, accountants, booking and browsing agents, administrators, and other middlemen. The brand mattered. All material was overseen and often shaped by Albee, who communicated daily with managers around the country. Bills were fixed each week down to the minute by the manager. Individual acts became part of the vaudeville machine, interchangeable and forced to fit the needs of the bill, the house, the brand. There was briefly a union calling itself the White Rats, but it was crushed by Albee after a failed strike in 1916. Meanwhile, on stage and backstage, on trains and in boardinghouses, veteran entertainers who had spent much of their lives, often in obscurity, building up a body of knowledge and a peculiar set of skills, worked their magic. For better or worse they had, in the words of George Fuller Golden, head of the White Rats, “coined their hearts into laughter and song.” Orville Stamm. Karyl Norman who walked to the front of the stage, a bob wig framing his small face, his lips painted into a heart, painted eyelashes, a beaded dress that hugged his torso, and white furs tumbling down his arms, to sing, “I want to go where daisies grow, through fields of flowers, down by the old red school.”

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“This is a new male single from the west. Randall has a routine of talk relating his experiences while soldiering during the World War. He wears a black alpaca tux with a shiny black helmet for a derby. On his left arm he has the red inverted V that denotes discharge from service. His war material and experience in the camp from the time he receives the postal marked greetings up to the day of his discharge, is well written and cleverly constructed. His talk drew laughs impartially from the ex-service men and the non-martial females present. Randall lapses unconsciously into a Jewish dialect and it is most noticeable. He has two vocal numbers, the first being his introductory song, a medley of popular songs about his trip to France, and the other a Spanish ‘Si Si Some More,’ sung with tambourine, etc. He also uses ‘Only a Dream of the Past.’ ” This act ran for sixteen minutes. It was performed in blackface, to signal, I suppose, that despite the uniform this was all in good fun. Bobby Randall, a new male single from the West, wearing blackface and slipping into his Jewishness by accident while he told his knight’s tale: a real American if ever there was one.

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Bright Particular Star

Bright Particular Star

Oh vaudeville I love you, amateur and democratic, always in motion. I walk through the tall grass of you with my hands open and out to the sides. Vaudeville the Queen of Toe Dancing. You crisscrossed the countryside by train along with itinerant embalmers and preachers. Vaudeville with your professors, your champion roller skaters, your tubas wound with electric lights. I love your clowns and comic dancers, your Bughouse Hamlets. I find myself in your lack of arc, your love of bicycles and hard rhymes. You were as incoherent and multiply determined as a newspaper. I love Harpo Marx and James “Jimmy Vee” Bevacqua. But oh vaudeville I hate you too. You were all exploitation and caricature, bad jokes and bad taste, tawdry and sad in the early days, on the margins, and as empty as a big-box store when Keith and Albee were through with you. You grew out of the minstrel show and the freak show and the medicine show. Vaudeville the Fire and Mirror Dancer. Vaudeville the Electric Boy. America’s Minstrel Misses. You played the piano by shooting its keys. Full of odious opinions, riddled with violence. Light fare for ladies out doing some shopping, for the clerks in high collars who spent all week performing their subordinacy in offices. You were the perfect amusement for a country of grifters and innocents. The cute shrug of your shoulders, the arsenic in your smile.

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American Vaudeville

You were Westerman and Hopkins performing Indian songs in redface and feathers in some mountain town. Hopkins finishing with a lament before being shot and killed in front of a tepee.

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Bright Particular Star

The best acts lived these contradictions. They stranded themselves in the middle of our muddy, fetid river and reached down into the sandy bottom to find the sublime. Bert Williams with his pantomime and his songs. Eva Tanguay’s frantic dancing. Julian Eltinge, the great Julian Eltinge.

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American Vaudeville

The door to Julian Eltinge’s dressing room is painted black. When knocked, it rattles in its frame. He stands in front of a mirror, whitening his face and neck with powder. He’s taken off his clothes (a brown suit hovers against the wall, a pair of brown loafers snug below), his bathrobe hangs loosely off his waist, and he’s dipping a sponge into a cigar box full of white powder and touching it to his skin. He works with the semiconsciousness of an expert. At each touch of the sponge, his body becomes softer, rounder. Curves emerge. . . . next day decided that I would wear skirts at the entertainment to be given in Reading. Mrs. Wyman became interested, and I worked hard three hours a day for weeks at a time. I learned to dress from the skin out.

All the time he talks, he works away. By now the first layer of powder has stiffened and a second has been loosely applied. He rubs cold cream into his cheeks and forehead, over his nose with two smooth strokes, over his ears and behind them under the little cap covering his hair and then down to his neck, grabs a rag from the dressing table and wipes off some excess cream and then puts more powder on his face with the sponge and on top of that a layer of rouge. “It depends on where you put the paint, not how much you splash on,” he says, not looking at me, focused entirely on the transformation at hand. He rubs blue-black

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grease paint around his eyes and works it into the rouge and powder, adding contrast to his face, blackens his eyebrows, reddens his lips. Like a painter he dips a sharp little stick into a metal cup, which has been heated over a candle, and transfers beads of a black, sticky mixture to his eyelashes, a little black bead on each trembling lash. I have made a study of it, the dress, the mannerisms, all the little details that are lost sight of by those who see the performances, but all of which go to make it complete. Only the strictest attention to detail could accomplish these results, and since I made my first appearance with the Cadets in “Miladi and the Musketeer” I have steadily tried to improve my impersonations.

Now he’s screwing his face into knots, pulling it first to one side and then the other, working it like putty, angling his jaw up and down, and, as he does that, drawing faint, nearly invisible lines, which, together, will help him transform into a widow, a bride, a king’s daughter. From there, he turns to his hands. First he shaves his fingers, then he rubs cream and powder into the palms and the backs of the hands and down each finger, thinning them, stretching them out, sanding off the roughness around the knuckles. The average impersonator does not pay much attention to his hands, but I spend almost as much time making up my hands

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American Vaudeville

as I do on my face. A woman’s hands are very different from a man’s, and no matter how good the impersonation may be otherwise, it will be sadly marred if proper attention is not paid to the hands. I made a study of the hands of women in Raphael’s paintings, and following out the shadows and the long, tapering effects . . .

Forty-five minutes and the makeup is done but nothing else yet, a transformation of head, neck, shoulders, hands, and wrists but not waist or hips, no costume, head of a woman but still the trunk of a man, robe hung loosely around him. The most difficult thing for an impersonator is to use his feet and arms properly. One does not begin to realize the difference between the sexes until he tries this, and I may say that it was my ability to carry my arms properly that got me into the business.

He is a professional and an expert, relishes the details of his craft, describes again and again the tremendous work, the study and practice, that he has devoted to it. And it is true, he is an artist, and I am struck, watching him get ready, by the artistry, above all the fierce attention to detail, because without the parts, without all the little parts, there can be no satisfying whole. And yet the means by which he claims to have arrived at this art, the French fashion plates and the classes, “studying the

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Bright Particular Star

styles constantly in their kaleidoscopic changes,” as he says, and “trying to keep up to the advanced moods,” seem wrong, or not quite right. He works, he says, from the outside in, through careful study and close observation, a mimic, a mirror. But if he really wants to carry the thing off, doesn’t he also have to work from the inside out, to rely not only on study and observation but also on intuition and impulse? At this point, Shima, his Japanese handler, pads wordlessly into the room, carrying a corset in one hand and a massage prod in the other. Shima goes right to work, applying the prod to Eltinge’s shoulders and back. That done, he slips the corset over his head and tugs on its silk laces, hard, harder, until the frame is satisfactorily condensed. My waist measure when I get into my corsets is just twentythree inches, and I have to train myself to breathe almost entirely with my upper chest.

The corset settled, an Empire gown is floated over his winnowed frame—“A woman’s dress must have temperament. To be effective gowns must have personality.”—a pair of high-heeled shoes is brought out from a closet and slipped softly onto his feet, and, finally, a beautiful black wig, raven-black, lustrous, is settled on his head like a crown and fastened with pins.

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American Vaudeville

This was at Keith & Proctor’s 125th Street Theatre. Benjamin Chaplin impersonated Abraham Lincoln in a playlet called “In the White House.” Max Duffek plucked the strings of a zither, his face tucked between his feet, and then blew on a cornet while a stagehand stood on his stomach. Max York led a troupe of acrobatic terriers. A comedian told bad jokes and sang topical songs in blackface. Or it was early 1906 at Chase’s Theater in D.C. and Charles J. Ross and Mabel Fenton had presented their severely abridged Oliver Twist, the famous Old Guard Band had played patriotic songs, Watson’s Farmyard Circus had clucked and neighed on stage, the Reiff Brothers were finishing their hard shoe dance, and Julian Eltinge, “the most fascinating woman on the American stage,” was about to come on.

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Bright Particular Star

At Keith & Proctor’s or Chase’s or later the Palace, where he earned a staggering $3,500 a week, Julian Eltinge became a Spanish dancer, a Gibson girl, a tomboy, a bride. His twenty-minute act typically cycled through four or five different impersonations, each in a different costume, some with singing and dancing. He became the Goddess of Incense in a clinging white dress, bare feet, and a jeweled headdress, burning incense and beautiful vases and shrines arranged around him. He became “The Modern Sandow Girl” doing exercises advocated by famous strongman Eugen Sandow in a chic slip while singing, In the days gone by all the girls were shy And domestic in their way They would never roam they would stay at home And they’d sew and they’d cook all day. . . . But the girl of today is a wonder they say She goes in for athletics and sport. . . . His act had a sense of humor but never devolved into parody or caricature. People loved his impersonations of women for their uncanny accuracy. There was no satire or campiness to his drag, and no aura of deviance either. Eltinge was not a clown. A hoax, maybe, a huckster, like Jay Gatsby both a fraud and a demigod.

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Julian Eltinge was not always Julian Eltinge. He did not become Julian Eltinge until his turn in Baron Humbug, an amateur theatrical staged at the Tremont Theatre in Boston by the First Corps of Cadets. 1903. The reviews were not good, but the young actor playing Countess Sylvia was singled out for praise. He was the show’s “bright particular star,” and his performance had clarity and magic to it. “Not once during the evening,” gushed the reviewer, “was there a single false movement or gesture.” Eltinge was twenty years old at the time. He stood 5'9", was thick and barrel-chested, with a baritone, but when he draped himself in an orange gypsy jacket and a skirt full of flounces and sang, “I have often stray’d in the garden fair, / Idly passing the hour away,” or floated across the stage in a lime green crepe de chine gown, he became something else, something light, fine, and capable of grace. By then he had put in years of hard work, lessons and practice, late nights in Mrs. Lilla Viles Wyman’s dance studio above the Tremont. He had lied his way into the First Corps of Cadets, claiming he was several years younger than he was (just as he would later lie about having gone to Harvard). And he had, at some unrecorded point in time, found his genius. It was female impersonation. Somehow, all at once or over several months, in the studio or at a performance, out West or in Boston, he discovered that the medium of female impersonation—the wigs, the rouge and powder,

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the dresses, and the steps—was the medium in which to immerse himself. That there was his style and there his greatness. With that, everything changed. So, like James Gatz, he needed a new name. William Julian Dalton, of Newtonville, MA, son of a mining engineer, sometime bank clerk and clerk at a dry goods store, became Julian Eltinge, borrowing his last name from the actress Rose Eytinge, who had once played for Abraham Lincoln, or from a friend in Butte, where he had spent part of his itinerant boyhood. It was as Julian Eltinge that he was lifted from sleepy Boston by the producer E. E. Rice and transported to New York, where in a short time he would become one of the most sought after and highest paid performers on vaudeville.

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Eltinge distinguished himself from the crowded field of female impersonators with the sheer skill of his impersonations and a knack for publicity and brand management. Managing his brand meant going to great lengths, offstage, to demonstrate his manhood. Photo spreads and profiles in trade papers like Variety and the New York Dramatic Mirror showed him chopping wood at his farm on Long Island and told stories, often planted by his manager, about him punching stagehands who made cracks about his act. He was “a quiet, sturdy young American dressed in neat tweeds,” wrote one journalist. Another described him as “broad-shouldered and strong” and as having “already licked three or four stagehands who called him Lucy,” a “nice, clean, young fellow.” He just happened to be a crack female impersonator, and, as he liked to say, if it didn’t pay so well, he wouldn’t bother with it. It’s funny: reading about Eltinge today, we can barely imagine his act, the one he performed on stage for paying audiences, free as it was of irony. That part is lost to history, as foreign now as a rhapsode reciting an epic poem. But we can see so clearly the other act, the one he performed offstage that everyone around him failed to recognize, in which he became a man, buttoned up in those neat tweeds, hot-tempered. The writers whom Eltinge invited into his dressing room

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to watch him get ready assumed he was putting on a mask, when he was in fact painstakingly taking one off in an incredible sleight of hand. But can that be right? Or is it not so simple? Who knows. Ralph Ellison: “America is a land of masking jokers.”

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The traces of Julian Eltinge that remain in the archive on yards of microfilm and photographic negatives and in private collections give little insight into who he was underneath his costumes. There are no letters, no diary entries, that tell the whole truth or give us a complete picture, and even if there were, why should we believe them? Julian Eltinge was probably as illegible to himself as he is to us. The act, meanwhile, the art: that’s gone for good. I follow Eltinge from his dressing room to the stage and watch from the wings while he walks in costume out of the shadows and into the bright lights. He waves. He stands there, and he waves, and then he slips off his gloves, grabs a wine glass from the table, and starts singing. Shima stands next to me, and Eltinge walks over to us every five minutes or so to change costume. Shima changes his slippers, slides off a pair of black stockings and pulls on a gray one, unzips the Empire gown and lets it fall to the floor, and replaces it with another outfit. Eltinge’s face during these changes is still, unlit, stoney, until he walks back into the stage lights, and it fills with animation. They repeat this ritual several times, until finally Eltinge is finished and takes his bow. He is called back to the stage three times. After the last bow, as he walks offstage, he waves his wig at the audience from the wings. “Why do I do that?” he later says to me. “Because the wig does all the work. It should have some recognition.”

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The Jonah Man

The Jonah Man

By 1909 Bert Williams, whom W. C. Fields called the funniest and the saddest man he ever knew, was a star. He had a solo act, his longtime partner George Walker having contracted syphilis and with it a stutter and memory loss. To many, Williams was Mr. Nobody, “the darky,” a descendant of the Jim Crow character from the minstrel tradition. To some, though, he must have been more than that. To some, at least, he must have been human: from Jim Crow to the Jonah Man. “I am the Jonah Man,” he said about his stage persona, “the man who, even if it rained soup, would be found with a fork in his hand and no spoon in sight.” Williams was a gifted mimic and a brilliant writer. His solo act consisted of stories—lies, he called them, tall tales—and original songs delivered in his distinctive warble. The archive houses two notebooks, which together preserve dozens of his songs and stories. The glorious pantomime is lost. Only the words remain.

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“I Got” 1. There was a brown-skin “dolly” that I used to often see; But “dolly” somehow never paid no ’tention ’tall to me. — So: I got tired foolin’ ’roun’ I got myself a job downtown. I got last week, my first months pay—then— I got busy right away. Chorus. I got an almost brand new Stetson hat. I got a pongee satin knit cravat. I got a shirt made out of pure “cereese.” I got for each foot a new sock apiece. I got a pair of tans they were a “beaut.” I got a nifty little pinch back suit. I got dressed and I looked hot—when I got on all that I got. 2. On Sundays with my wardrobe on, I’d stand around all day,

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The Jonah Man

But somehow on these Sundays “doll” would never pass my way. —And— I got pale and nervous too. I got just like them heroes do. I got to actin’ “nuts” they say, —then I got sight of “doll” one day: Chorus. I got a chance to tip my hat and bow. I got a notion in my head somehow— I got from her what seemed a friendly smile. I got to goin’—followed her a mile. I got my nerve and took her by the han’. I got a glimpse of a long, tall, dark man— I got cold feet on the spot And that is not all that I got. Extra Chorus. I got no right to kick, and wouldn’t—but I got my nifty pinch-back suit all cut. I got the pongee tore off my cravat. I got all lost from my Stetson hat. I got a brand new pair of midnight eyes. I got a nose just twice it’s [sic] reg’lar size. The Judge was hot and like as not That accounts for the “time” that I got.

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The covers of the notebooks are monogrammed B.W., for black and white, for b/w, where Bert Williams worked, between the somebody behind the mask, the one who lived and died, and the Mr. Nobody in front, an American bardo in which a light-skinned Black immigrant from the Caribbean played not a southern “darky,” exactly, but a white minstrel in blackface playing that southern darky. “I shuffle onto the stage, not as myself. A black face, rundown shoes and elbow-out make-up give me a place to hide. Nobody in America knows my real name and, if I can prevent it, nobody ever will.” He tugged at his cuff. He looked out into the darkness and listened. First student of the Drama — Now, you’ll enjoy this fellow, he is very funny. I remember the last time I saw him just before I left to join the Lafayette Zouaves in 1869. He is always good. Perhaps you don’t fancy blackfaced comedians? Second student of the Drama — My dear old chap, I am not so particular as all that. I can still laugh, I hope, without prejudice. These sort of fellows can be very funny if they don’t overstep the line of probability. You know what I mean, if they are true to life. First student — As I remember him (of course this is a long time ago, when I was more susceptible to the theater perhaps and less exacting in my standards), he had an unction, a je ne sais quoi, a mimicry that was truly African.

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Second student — African humor as I recall it in my college days was chiefly delightful because it had that inimitable banjo flavor. Does he play the banjo? First student — Oh yes. Plays it with masterly humor. In fact, he makes the banjo, a very inarticulate instrument, speak, actually speak! Second student — Ah, that interests me. He must have a true spark, then, in spite of being funny. First student — I understand he is a very serious chap outside of his profession. Reads by himself, don’t you know, and all that.

Bert Williams, the funniest man in America: not only a clown but also a satirist, not only a satirist but also a tragedian. His favorite of his stories was about a circus lion. Speakin ’bout hosses always puts me in mind of a circus. One time I was stranded in a town an’ a circus come along so I went an’ told the manager that I was desperate an’ jus’ had to have work. He said, “Well one of our best lions died last week and as we saved the skin, if you want to you can git in it and be a lion till somethin’ better comes along.” Naturally I grabbed it and that same afternoon I made my first ’pearance as “The King of the Jungles.” Then here comes the man what does the stunts inside of the animals cages. He come in my cage first an’ after

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’splainin’ ’bout what a fine specimen I was and how much trouble they had ketchin’ me in Africa. “Now ladies and gent’men to show you how much we have tamed and trained him; I am goin’ to turn him into this next cage with this large and f’rocious Bengal Tagger.” I imeegitly backed into the furthest corner of my cage. The man opened up the door between the two cages, drawed out a big pistol an’ say, “Git in thare or I’ll blow yo’ head off.” An’ kinder under his breath he say to me, “And that goes too.” And then he took and fired the gun off once up over his head to show me that it would shoot and I looked up and seen the hole it made in the roof of the cage so I jus’ went on in the nex’ cage and got right down on my knees and commence prayin. And this big Bengal Tagger leaped todes me and jus’ as my heart was gittin’ ready to stop for good, that Tagger took and leaned over and I heard him whisper right in my ear, “Don’t be skeered pal; I’m colored same as you.”

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Bert Williams collapsed on stage in Detroit and died soon after. 1922. He was forty-seven. What killed him? Was it his drinking? Or the loneliness of being a Black performer in a segregated society? “I was thinking about all the honors that are showered on me in the theater; how everyone wishes to shake my hand or get an autograph, a real hero you’d naturally think. However, when I reach a hotel, I am refused permission to ride on the passenger elevator; I cannot enter the dining room for my meals, and I am Jim Crowed generally.” Was it allowing white people their innocence every night that killed him? Their baroque contempt? Or did he simply die from exhaustion, the sheer hard work of being a great performer? The years of study and practice. “I have studied it all my life,” he said, “unconsciously during my floundering years, and consciously as soon as I began to get next to myself. It is a study that I shall never get to the end of, and a work that never stops, except when I am asleep.” What did the daily ritual cost him—the getting next to himself? “Whose house is that? Moggs. What in the world is it built of? Logs. Mostly, what animals do you have around here? Frogs. What sort of soil have you? Bogs. What do you live on, chiefly? Hogs. Have you any friends? Dogs.” Williams was the poor, hapless sap dressed in rags, tails cut off of his coat, fake collar, no cuffs, ratty white gloves, who suffered continual misfortune, weathering the baffling acts of fate with a shred of faith and a scrap of dignity.

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“Nobody” When life seems full of clouds an’ rain and I am filled with naught but pain, who soothes my thumpin’ bumpin’ brain? Nobody When winter comes with snow an’ sleet, and me with hunger and cold feet, who says “Ah, here’s two bits, go an’ eat!” Nobody I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody, I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no time! And until I get somethin’ from somebody, sometime, I don’t intend to do nothin’ for nobody, no time! When I try hard an’ scheme an’ plan, to look as good as I can, who says “Ah, look at that handsome man!” Nobody

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When all day long things go amiss, and I go home to find some bliss, who hands to me a glowin’ kiss? Nobody I ain’t never done nothin’ to nobody, I ain’t never got nothin’ from nobody, no time! And until I get somethin’ from somebody, sometime, I don’t intend to do nothin’ for nobody, no time!

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I run my finger over the embossed initials, lift up the life’s work, what’s left of it: two bound folios. Headstones. Bert Williams may have been the greatest comic America has ever produced, an ocean of comedy if all that was left of the ocean was what was contained in all the seashells in the world. His instruments: an untrained singing voice, a gift for mimicry, and large, balletic hands. His wife, Lottie, loved his hands. She insisted that his gloves be removed at his funeral.

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The Muting of the Strings

The Muting of the Strings

Somewhere around the turn of the century, still early in vaudeville’s career, at the Crescent Theatre in Brooklyn, or maybe the Temple Theater in Cleveland, Burke’s dogs disappeared into the shadows on the screen behind the stage. Edison’s Vitascope, Lumière’s Cinématographe. “A Dip in the Sea.” “Parade of the 96th Infantry.” The end is always buried in the beginning. We just can’t see it. By 1904 the first narrative films—“Life of an American Fireman,” “The Pioneers,” “The Moonshiners”—were being made. In 1910 D. W. Griffith made “In Old California” in Los Angeles, and in 1911, in a roadhouse on Sunset Boulevard, the first Hollywood studio appeared. The blur and talk of vaudeville were slowly being smothered by the overpowering, all-encompassing image— silent film instead of oratory—the big screen like two hands muting the buzzing strings of the nineteenth century.

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By 1919 there were twenty thousand vaudevillians in the U.S. and work for less than half of them. The ones who didn’t make it sold their clothes and passed the hat in bars, singing, “Kill It Babe.” The Death Trail, the Aching Heart. “Maspeth, Long Island, Aug. 2. Charles King, a vaudevillian, committed suicide here last Friday morning by firing a 32-calibre bullet through his right temple. He had not worked for two months and had no future bookings.”

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The Muting of the Strings

By the twenties, Eva Tanguay’s body was sagging, losing color, slipping away from her. In 1925, at forty-seven, she had her face covered in acid and oil until it blistered and the wrinkled top layer of skin could be peeled away. Her cheeks and eyebrows were lifted, and several inches of flesh were removed from her neck. A few years later, she joined a touring company called “The Stars of Yesteryear,” which was made up of faded former vaudevillians, corpses and ghosts, dead stars and death masks. Eva Tanguay lived out her last decade in Los Angeles. Her veins collapsed. Her eyes failed. Rheumatism, kidney failure, a hemorrhage in her throat while she slept that left her covered in blood. She had gotten her start at an amateur night in her hometown of Holyoke, MA, and gone on to play every corner of vaudeville, big and small, New York to Seattle. There had been lovers and husbands, like John Ford, an undistinguished song-anddance man and a terrible alcoholic, and Roscoe Ails, who once punched her so hard in the face that her vision never recovered. She was near the oldest, broadest gods—pure force, plain old desire—but so beautifully human: incarnate, an artist. Listen, she said from the stage. The world is vibrating, stretching, compressing. It hums. Waves slam against the sea floor. Listen to this teeming, swampy body, she said, shaking with eros and on the verge, on the canyon edge, of collapse. Say yes, she said. And she said and she said and finally, on January 11, 1947, in her

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house at 6207 Lexington Avenue, Hollywood, she died. Suffered a stroke. By then she had spent or lost all her money. She quickly fell into obscurity. They say she was writing a memoir.

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The Muting of the Strings

“Dear Mr. Ford— This letter is from Eva Tanguay (of the stage) I hope you remover [sic] me, once you were in the audience when I played Detroit and anyone who has seen me before the footlights is interested in me. Somehow I prompted to write you—I’m not asking for money—you may know my case, I went almost totally blind a few years ago. This stopped my success at the theatres, I had invested three hundred thousand in real estate, fourteen houses in Hollywood, thinking it would protect me in my old days. But now I have lost all, after two operations on my eyes I now have perfect vision (wearing glasses) but have an alarming case of arthritis. It is a terrible ailment being unable to walk, I was thinking in the generosity of your heart could give me a car. I know you have given many away and to people who could buy one. I have always had a car having owned eleven, but now have nothing. I live off a sort of an alley in a small house which is set in back of a big one, there is no view other than the backyards of other houses paying twenty a month—you get an idea of what it is like. I do not go out for I cannot walk far. It is very sad to have had so much and be cut down to poverty, but my illness prevents me from doing any work. Although I could sing on radio of [sic] the programme was without the audience viewing the entertainer, I have earned thirty-five hundred a week, three thousand and

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most always twenty-five hundred, so you may know I’m no tramp, having lived the very best, my home consisted of gold glasses silver plates and everything that meant refinement, now I’m alone and cut off entirely from my world I so loved. If I had a car I could go out afternoons and might connect some way with managers, agents and find something to do. Think it over Mr. Ford, I would give the story to the newspapers although you don’t need the publicity, it would be thought a mighty noble deed on your part. I can drive but there is no way of me getting one—God Bless you Respectfully, Eva Tanguay”

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The Muting of the Strings

Eva Tanguay is buried in the Hollywood Forever Cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard in Los Angeles. Los Angeles is full of the vaudeville dead. Fred Astaire is buried in the Oakwood Cemetery. Buster Keaton is buried in the Forest Lawn Cemetery, as are W. C. Fields and Julian Eltinge. Groucho Marx is buried in Eden Park Cemetery. Harpo’s ashes, meanwhile, are scattered in the sand trap at the Rancho Mirage golf course in Palm Springs. I’m like Harpo. I don’t want to be buried in the humid, wormy earth. I want my internal organs used for scientific research, my eyeballs tossed into the ocean, and my teeth preserved in a jar and kept in a trunk with my favorite books. Everything else should be burned and dispersed, but where? Nowhere comes immediately to mind as the fit resting place for my paltry remains. Wherever, I guess. Bury me in the air so I can continue to drift across this country that I still love. My country.

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Obituaries and Obsolescencies

Obituaries and Obsolencies

Behold! Vaudeville, another of America’s homegrown religions, has died. It died on September 3 at its home in Coral Gables, FL. Its death was announced on Tuesday by a stepladder someone left out in the yard. Look up, the ladder said. Look outside the rings of Saturn. See a moon there, two-faced, Janusish. Vaudeville was, like you, a state of manyhood, incoherent, divided against itself, a mongrel feeling in the chest and head. At the Iroquois, Erie, PA: Duffy and Sweeney fry eggs on stage. At Chase’s Empire, Cleveland, OH: a mind-reading dog, talking dogs, Doherty’s Poodles, Mme. Schell and her Performing Lions, Marian’s Dog Pantomime. At the Lion Palace, Buffalo, NY: Mae West wiggles on a chair, singing, “Rag, Rag, Rag.”

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Last sentence of the final report, Keith’s Theatre, Providence, RI, April 9, 1923. Filed by Forest Lardner. “We undoubtedly will have a better week with this bill especially as it is the last week of vaudeville. NO CUTS.” The Palace closed its doors in 1932, and by the end of the decade, the stink of obsolescence had affixed itself to anything vaudeville-related. “Mr. Jones was a derelict, an old vaudeville actor,” says the Reverend Mr. James Jefferson Davis Hall in Joseph Mitchell’s article “A Spism and a Spasm,” and that does seem to have been the popular consensus by 1939, when the New Yorker published Mitchell’s essay and Nathanael West published The Day of the Locust, which featured among its freaks, con men, child actors, and cowboys a former vaudevillian named Harry Greener, who had been forced by circumstance to sell shoe polish door to door to make a living but still imagined himself on the vaudeville stage. Once a vaudevillian, always a vaudevillian, hearts indelibly coined.

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Julian Eltinge attempted to carry his career forward into cinema, but unlike some of the younger, broader performers—the Marx Brothers, Buster Keaton, Fred Astaire—his act did not translate well onto film. He died twice. The first death came in 1940, when Eltinge appeared at a club called the Rendezvous in Los Angeles. Because of a city ordinance against cross-dressing, Eltinge had to settle for standing beside a rack of his costumes, giving the characterizations while wearing a tux: separated from himself by the state, reduced to description. Is the scene tragic, grotesque, or absurd? Old, fat, Learish Julian Eltinge still in touch with his gift but unable to embody it because of what time has done to him and his profession, standing on stage in a tuxedo (and yet so exposed) talking to a dozen people. Pale, pathetic Julian Eltinge, head high but with something missing, as though some essential part of himself that had lived in those clothes now hanging lifelessly on the rack had been forcibly removed from him, like a surgery, and all that was left was a hollowed frame in a hospital gown open at the back. Dying Julian Eltinge (he would be dead within the year), or maybe dead Julian Eltinge, his act past due, his art out of date, maybe just little William Julian Dalton, a boy on stage in a tux telling a room full of strangers about a dream he had. The second death came even more quietly on March 7, 1941, in his apartment at 433 W 57th Street, an address which no longer exists.

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The Playhouse

The Playhouse

We are left with traces: a few flat descriptions in books, some scratchy studio recordings, the archive’s evidence, and what survives in early Hollywood. The anarchic Marx Brothers. Fred Astaire dancing on sand. Astaire grew up on vaudeville, performing a song-and-dance act with his sister, Adele. Their first show was in Keyport, NJ, at the end of a pier. They went from Keyport to Perth Amboy, Passaic, Paterson, Lancaster, “along with the inevitable dogs, the acrobats, the monologists and the illusionists,” then out to California, back through the Midwest, where for years they played on UBO’s small-time circuit, and finally the big-time in Texas and later New York. Like Keaton, Fred Astaire’s performance style was shaped by these formative years on vaudeville. His ease and cheer and presence, the air under his feet. “Believe it or not, there is even an artistic way to pick up a garbage can,” he writes in his memoir. Buster Keaton survives, his great stone face, which he picked up on vaudeville, where deadpan was king. Pan was slang for face. The clown put on a dead face, like a death mask, that plaster cast made soon after someone died in the days before photography, and walked among the living, having learned as a kid that there is something hilarious about that. He wore a mask. It was rather an archaic thing to do. It let silence back into life.

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Back home I sit on the floor, on a faded brown and red rag rug that belonged to my grandparents, one stray thread of which I absentmindedly pick, the outward expression, perhaps, of some inward tension, a knot of unarticulated feelings, of grief even, and watch The Playhouse. The Playhouse is Buster Keaton’s memoir, a remembering and reimagining of childhood by a guy who grew up on vaudeville, never went to school, his days spent in theaters and on trains with jugglers, dancers, actors, musicians, and animal imitators. In The Playhouse Keaton plays . . . Buster Keaton. The movie opens with Keaton walking to the ticket booth outside a theater. He spends his last quarter on a ticket and walks inside to find himself watching himself. Conducting and consulting and telling jokes to himself. As Keaton playing an audience member says to himself playing the wife of that audience member after scanning the program, “this Keaton fellow seems to be the whole show.” So much has changed. Too much has been lost. Vaudeville has shrunk to the size of a single, flickering man made two-dimensional by machines. The movie is silent, the man is alone. A minstrel act commences. Seven White, sober-faced men sit in a semicircle on stage with two Black men on the ends, Tambo and Bones. Two men in blackface, I should say. Buster Keaton plays every part. The emcee stands up. “Mr. Bones!,” the title card reads. “I understand you had a cyclone in your town.” Mr.

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Bones stands up. Another title card: “Yes, the storm was so bad it blew a silver dollar into four quarters.” Tambo stands. Title card: “That’s nothing! We had one blew a wart off a man’s nose.” What was it Frederick Douglass said about blackface minstrels? “The filthy scum of white society, who have stolen from us a complexion denied to them by nature, in which to make money, and pander to the corrupt taste of their white fellow citizens.” But not my Buster, surely, not my everyman. Scum, thief, panderer, it’s true. The minstrel show gives way to two synchronized dancers with canes—still Keaton—who perform a song-and-dance routine. Vaudeville. Then the stage, the entire theater, is gone, and we are in an apartment. The Buster Keaton character is being woken up from a dream, the dream of the minstrel-show-turned-vaudeville-show, a dream in which he played every part. His landlord towers over him, smoking a cigar. Two men tramp into his bedroom and take everything, dresser, bed, even the walls have to go. They crash to the ground. The world is literally falling apart around him. Outside the falling walls, though, is the inside of the theater. We are back on stage. The Buster Keaton character is woken up from his pleasant dream by the cold reality of rent and debt, except he’s not, because everything, furniture, walls, even Keaton himself, are props for a playlet about a guy who dreams of vaudeville. Only in a movie, which can be framed, is largely a matter of framing, could

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we be fooled into thinking that Keaton’s room was the whole world. Twins then mirrors doubling and quadrupling them. A trained monkey that Keaton, in monkeyface, mimics, squatting on the seat of a chair for tea, riding a bicycle through a makeshift obstacle course of bottles. Zouaves in a military farce. Endless slapstick. Shot through it all are Buster Keaton’s beautiful movements. His genius fills everything around him. Even the brooms fall with precision. Suddenly a woman is drowning in a tank full of water. Keaton grabs a sledgehammer, drags it on stage, and smashes the glass. Water floods the theater, washing the audience out of their seats and into the street. And so the movie goes from gag to gag like a rosary, simply the activity of a body in space, merely an affirmation of material existence. Close to joy and sorrow. Keaton’s films are full of wrecked houses and ruined towns. They often end in chaos, an avalanche, a tornado, or, in The Playhouse, a flood. The republic is always in upheaval. But Keaton doesn’t grieve. He moves. He runs up a ladder into the rafters and back down and through a door and out another to the box seats and then the orchestra pit full of water swimming to safety in a boat made of a bass drum with a violin for a paddle.

History

History

I came to vaudeville with my curiosity and my grief. Came to mourn the loss of the thing, the muting of its strings, to stand at some distance throwing flowers on its grave and savoring the dark wisdom that comes with such a visit: that everything goes until it’s gone, gestures and manners, the vast storehouse of memories. The thing, the living thing, retreats into its absences, the empty air between the atoms, in the atoms. Such a tragic magic act. We are shoddy prophets, knowing it all will end just not where or when. Poor-sighted, stumbling. I wanted the past, a stone to hold. And I got it, cold and remote and planetary in its mystery and distance. But I also got something else. History. The river we swim in, arms splashing the heltering-skeltering present. My pale mass immersed, adrift in the American landscape, burnt and flooded, bloated and starved, everywhere rigged with singing wires. Singing distortion, infringement, profanation. Where “Cremation” is an eight-minute act that consists entirely of reducing a woman to ashes. Where not only do people paint their faces black with burnt cork to tell jokes but also where people laugh at those jokes, finding peace there and happiness, not chaos and violence. Wolves at the Door. A Sugar Moon. Singing abuse, irreverence, contempt. Singing in the voice of the inheritance—son of the son of the—the smoky voice of destruction. Where spent matches will have to serve. Where the big river seeps and meanders, and the deadly estimate rises.

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Acknowledgments Excerpts from this book, in different versions, have appeared in Tupelo Quarterly and in a chapbook, titled Vaudeville, published by The Song Cave in 2012. Thank you to the editors of both. Thanks also to Dan Bevacqua, Suzanne Buffam, Josh Hudelson, and Cutter Wood for coaching me through early drafts of the book. Thanks to Luc Sante for his foreword and to everyone at WVU Press. Thanks to my family. And thanks, above all, to Johanna: we are pulling it off.

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Notes Epigraph. This book was started . . . Emerson Collection on Vaudeville 1877–1928, Billy Rose Theater Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY.

Creation Myths 6  hunger for objects . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson in His Journals, ed. Joel Porte (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 290. 9  American history needs a connected and unified account . . . Quoted in Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 13.

Vanishing Act 15  I wish I could tenderly lift . . . Susan Howe, The Europe of Trusts (New York: New Directions, 1990), 14.

Just What Was Vaudeville? 23  not by rule, but by feeling Brett Page, Writing for Vaudeville (1915; repr., Charleston, SC: BiblioBazaar, 2007), 20.

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23  lunch-counter art Edwin Milton Royle, “The Vaudeville Theater,” Selected Vaudeville Criticism, ed. Anthony Slide (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1988), 213. 24  grey void Henry James, The American Scene (New York: Scribner, 1946), 195. 27  Miss Eva Tanguay, Keith’s Theater, Philadelphia . . . Eva Tanguay Papers, Benson Henry Ford Research Center, The Henry Ford, Dearborn, MI. 28  the creating of more and higher wants Quoted in T. J. Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009), 32. 29  No electric needle . . . and all other quotes on page Eva Tanguay Papers. 31  outrivalled by the pitter patter . . . and all other quotes on page Eva Tanguay Papers. 32  hairshirt to the nerves and mad dog fleeing a mob of small boys Quoted in LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012), 129. 32  elastic intensity Eva Tanguay Papers.

At the Wonderland 38  restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century Henry David Thoreau, Walden (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 329. 39  “Oh, I Don’t Know, You’re Not So Warm” Bert Williams, “Oh! I Don’t Know, You’re Not So Warm,” (London: Charles Sheard and Co., 1896), African American

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Sheet Music, Brown University Library, https://repository .library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:23686/. 43  The way we’ve aimed for Broadway . . . Quoted in Ann Charters, Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams (New York: Macmillan, 1970), 71. 49  still feel the red . . . Quoted in From Traveling Show to Vaudeville, ed. Robert M. Lewis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 108. 51  feeding where no life may be . . . Quoted in Douglas Gilbert, American Vaudeville (New York: Dover Publications, 1968), 42.

Jacks-in-the-Pew 59  D. Sirs . . . All quotations of letters in this chapter are from the Emerson Collection on Vaudeville, 1877–1928, Billy Rose Theater Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY. 62  There is a crack in everything . . . Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Compensation,” Emerson’s Prose and Poetry, ed. Joel Porte and Saundra Morris (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001), 143. 62  Excruciatingly funny monologue . . . Emerson Collection on Vaudeville. 63  amusement plant[s] Quoted in American Vaudeville As Seen by Its Contemporaries, ed. Charles Stein (Boston: Da Capo, 1985), 10. 64  coined their hearts . . . George Fuller Golden, My Lady Vaudeville and Her White Rats (New York: The Board of Directors of the White Rats of America, 1909), 83.

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64  I want to go where daisies grow . . . Quoted in Anthony Slide, Great Pretenders: A History of Female and Male Impersonation in the Performing Arts (Hopkins, MN: Olympic Marketing Corp., 1986), 41. 65  This is a new male single . . . Keith/Albee Vaudeville Theater Collection, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, IA.

Bright Particular Star 74  next day decided . . . All quotations from the Robinson Locke Collection 1720–1947, Billy Rose Theater Division, New York Public Library, New York, NY. 78  the most fascinating woman . . . Quoted in Laurence Senelick, “Eltinge, Julian,” in American National Biography, https://doi.org/10.1093/anb/9780198606697.article .1801631. 79  in the days gone by . . . Quoted in Laurence Senelick, “Lady and the Tramp: Drag Differentials in the Progressive Era,” in Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts, ed. Laurence Senelick (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 1992), 29. 80  bright particular star . . . Quoted in Anne Alison Barnet, Extravaganza King: Robert Barnet and Boston Musical Theater (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 134. 82  a quiet, sturdy young American . . . Quoted in Laurence Senelick, “Lady and the Tramp: Drag Differentials in the Progressive Era,” in Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Different in the Performing Arts, ed. Laurence Senelick (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 1992).

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82  broad-shouldered and strong . . . Robinson Locke Collection. 83  America is a land of masking jokers Ralph Ellison, “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke,” in The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison, ed. John F. Callahan (New York: Penguin Random House, 1995), 109.

The Jonah Man 89  I am the Jonah Man . . . Quoted in Charters, Nobody, 105. 90 “I Got” Bert Williams Jokebooks, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York Public Library, New York, NY. 92  I shuffle onto the stage . . . Quoted in Charters, Nobody, 15. 92  First student of the Drama . . . Quoted in Charters, Nobody, 15. 93  Speakin ’bout hosses . . . Bert Williams Jokebooks. 95  I was thinking about all the honors . . . Quoted in Charters, Nobody. 95  I have studied it all my life . . . Quoted in Charters, Nobody. 95  Whose house is that? . . . Bert Williams Jokebooks. 96  “Nobody” Quoted in Charters, Nobody.

The Muting of the Strings 104  Maspeth, Long Island . . . Keith/Albee Vaudeville Theater Collection.

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107  Dear Mr. Ford . . . Eva Tanguay Papers.

Obituaries and Obsolescencies 116  We undoubtedly will have a better week . . . Keith/ Albee Vaudeville Theater Collection. 116  Mr. Jones was a derelict . . . Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel (New York: Vintage, 2008), 87.

The Playhouse 123  Along with the inevitable dogs . . . Fred Astaire, Steps in Time (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 24. 123  Believe it or not . . . Astaire, Steps in Time, 7. 125  The filthy scum of white society . . . Quoted in Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), 15.

140

Sources The principal archival collections I consulted were the Emerson Collection on Vaudeville, 1877–1928, and the Robinson Locke Collection, 1720–1947, both in the Billy Rose Theater Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, New York, NY; Bert Williams Jokebooks, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the New York Public Library, New York, NY; the Eva Tanguay Papers at the Benson Henry Ford Research Center, the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, MI; and the Keith/Albee Vaudeville Theater Collection, Special Collections Department, University of Iowa Libraries, Iowa City, IA, a trove of vaudeville material that happened to be discovered by a fire underwriter in the 1970s, in the basement of a theater that was about to be demolished, and later made its way to Iowa. For background information on vaudeville, I read the books of Anthony Slide, The Vaudevillians: A Dictionary of Vaudeville Performers (Arlington House, 1981), Selected Vaudeville Criticism (Scarecrow, 1988), and Great Pretenders (Olympic Marketing Corp., 1986),

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Sources

his illustrated history of male and female impersonation. Robert C. Toll’s books On with the Show (Columbia, 1976) and Blacking Up (Oxford, 1977). From Traveling Show to Vaudeville: Theatrical Spectacle in America, 1830–1910 (Johns Hopkins, 2003), edited by Robert M. Lewis, and American Vaudeville As Seen by Its Contemporaries (Da Capo, 1985), edited by Charles Stein. The books of Joe Laurie Jr.: Showbiz: From Vaude to Video (Henry Holt, 1951) and Vaudeville: From Honkytonks to the Palace (Henry Holt, 1953). Douglas Gilbert’s American Vaudeville (Dover, 1940); Vaudeville U.S.A. (Bowling Green, 1973) by John E. Dimeglio; With Amusement for All: A History of American Popular Culture Since 1830 (Kentucky, 2012) by LeRoy Ashby; The 7 Lively Arts (Dover, 2001) by Gilbert Seldes; and Writing for Vaudeville by Brett Page (BiblioBazaar, 2007), a reprint of a manual from 1915. Annals of the New York Stage (Columbia, 1927), George C. D. Odell’s staggering record of seemingly every theatrical event in New York City from colonial times to the turn of the twentieth century was a tremendous resource and pleasure. Then there were the books by and about vaudevillians. Fred Allen’s memoir Much Ado about Me (Little Brown, 1956), Groucho Marx’s Groucho & Me (Virgin, 2009), Harpo Speaks (Limelight, 1961), Buster Keaton’s autobiography My Wonderful World of Slapstick (Da Capo,

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1982), as well as Marion Meade’s Buster Keaton: Cut to the Chase (HarperCollins, 1995) and Buster Keaton (Tantivy, 1967) by J. P. Lebel. Fred Astaire’s Steps in Time (Harper & Row, 1959). Eddie Cantor’s My Life Is in Your Hands (Blue Ribbon Books, 1932) and As I Remember Them (Duell, Sloan, and Pearce, 1963), and George Fuller Golden’s My Lady Vaudeville and Her White Rats (The Board of Directors of the White Rats of America, 1909). Robert S. Bader’s Four of the Three Musketeers (Northwestern, 2016) on the early days of the Marx Brothers. Armond Fields on Tony Pastor (Mcfarland, 2012), Richard Zoglin on Bob Hope (Simon & Schuster, 2014), Bluford Adams and Neil Harris on P. T. Barnum. To write about Bert Williams, I read Nobody: The Story of Bert Williams (Macmillan, 1970) by Ann Charters, Introducing Bert Williams (Basic, 2008) by Camille F. Forbes, and The Last “Darky” (Duke, 2006) by Louis Chude-Sokei. For Eva Tanguay, Andrew L. Erdman’s The Queen of Vaudeville (Cornell, 2012), and Rank Ladies (University of North Carolina, 1999) by M. Alison Kibler. There is no book-length biography of Julian Eltinge, but Laurence Senelick’s entry in American National Biography, together with his chapter on Eltinge in Gender in Performance: The Presentation of Difference in the Performing Arts (University of New England Press, 1992), were invaluable resources for understanding this mysterious performer. The chapters on him also draw on

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Sources

Extravaganza King: Robert Barnet and Boston Musical Theater by Anne Alison Barnet (Northeastern University Press, 2004), Tintype Ambitions: Three Vaudevillians in Search of Hollywood Fame by Joan M. Vale (University of San Diego Press, 1986), and “Gender and Performance: An Introduction to Female Impersonation in the West which includes an Analysis of the Performances of Julian Eltinge and Charles Ludlam” (master’s thesis, Brown University, 1986) by Jay Wilson Dorff IV. What else? Eric Lott’s Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (Oxford, 1995); Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003) by Luc Sante; The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age by Alan Trachtenberg (Hill & Wang, 2007); Rebirth of a Nation: the Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 by T.  J. Jackson Lears (HarperCollins, 2009); and Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture (University of North Carolina, 1991) by Robert C. Allen, as well as Allen’s dissertation “Vaudeville and Film 1895–1915: A Study in Media Interaction” (University of Iowa, 1977).

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Illustration Credits All photographs reproduced by permission from the New York Public Library Digital Collections. Two Certis Bangs (vaudeville) (Billy Rose Theatre Division, image ID TH-59499) Baronn (Vaudeville) (Billy Rose Theatre Division, image ID 77724) Scrapbook, ca. 1913–15 (Jerome Robbins Dance Division, image ID Y94B408_18478D1) The Three Keatons [Buster, Joe, & Myra] (Billy Rose Theatre Division, image ID ps_the_2591) Lionel (vaudeville) [The Danish Platin-Wonder] (Billy Rose Theatre Division, image ID TH-30085) Farina (Vaudeville) (Billy Rose Theatre Division, image ID TH-11745) Julian Eltinge (Photo by White Studio, Billy Rose Theatre Division, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, TH-10457) Three-quarter length portrait of Bert Williams, ca. 1911 (Photo by Lumiere, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Photographs and Prints Division, image ID 1696442)

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Eva Tanguay (Billy Rose Theatre Division, image ID TH54735) Vaudeville and Burlesque Dancers 9 (Jerome Robbins Dance Division) Nesbit and Clifford (Photo by Dietz. Jerome Robbins Dance Division, image ID y99f355_100) Griffin Twins, ca. 1923–24 (Jerome Robbins Dance Division, image ID variety_0431v)

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