p. 1

[close]

p. 2

chapter 2 vaudeville template for the century it isn t what i do but how i do it it isn t what i say but how i say it and how i look when i do and say it mae west in jill watts mae west an icon in black and white i n 1893 the fledgling impresario florenz ziegfeld jr took on management of the strongman eugen sandow to help his father s failing chicago vaudeville enterprise at the conclusion of the initial performance under his oversight the young ziegfeld came on stage and promised a donation to the favorite charity of anyone who would feel sandow s muscles two society matrons mrs george pullman and mrs potter palmer volunteered running her hand over the great sandow s bicep mrs palmer remarked glowingly what wonderful muscles you have mr sandow the press noted her regard ziegfeld s vaudeville enterprise was saved and the great sandow went on to success at the chicago world s columbia exposition as the nation s first body builder flo ziegfeld jr had already launched his career having established the principle that no american upper class or not was too far from his or her own roots not to enjoy popular entertainment by 1909 marking the first appearance of the annual ziegfeld follies three aspects of american entertainment had come to undergird american popular entertainment entrepreneurial drive creative peaks and the availability of a sufficient number of messages to serve the most diverse audience.1 notably absent in the tributes to all things american at the turn of the century was attention to vaudeville cultural custodians had some discomfort with the lively brash entertainment embraced by ordinary people american humor thanks to mark twain was something to be proud of and merited a place in the american pantheon but there was something subversive about vaudeville too much flesh too many immigrants and a bit too much freedom during my youthful days the art critic james huneker recalled it was called the variety stage and was not much talked about in polite society 2 church leaders and marchers in the purity campaigns were concerned with the easy laughter the burlesque of values the displays of immodesty in the cheap places young women of pretty face and buxom form sally forth to show their physical beauties in changing dress and undress and with song and dance display their activity and their person in more or less wanton form 3 a researcher for the progressive reform organization the russell sage foundation had nothing good to say about vaudeville its most striking characteristic is simple stupidity 4 writing in one of the serious progressive monthlies a contributor complained that vaudeville operated under an ethic of giving the public what it wants and producing bilge-water in champagne glasses 5 another monthly characterized vaudeville audiences as intellectually lazy their minds drugged by such a wealth of cheap and obvious entertainment 6 but no matter how commandingly they held up their hands the critics could

[close]

p. 3

not hold back the vaudeville sea vaudeville was the great cheap amusement for the swath of working-class and immigrant americans in the 1880s vaudeville houses were located close to the working-class neighborhoods of its audiences its greatest chronicler was the national police gazette the racy sports magazine known as the barber shop bible to indicate the place where most of its male readers read it boasted that the paper carried the latest of vaudeville news and the snappiest of all girl pictures 7 vaudeville personalities were staples of the yellow press although in a guise of morality when alan dale the theater critic for joseph pulitzer s sensational new york world interviewed the vaudeville star anna held the story was headlined with quivering outrage anna meets alan dale in a nightie the outrage did not prevent the accompanying illustration of ms held in all of her hourglass curves.8 even as working-class appeal continued managers were having increasing success in their appeal to middle-class customers fashionable theaters identified as big-time vaudeville with stages graced by stars from the legitimate theater culminated rather than displaced the kinds of acts that appealed to working-class sensibilities the carriage trade was won over the vaudevillian entrepreneurs liked to call attention to its new middle-class respectability but there was no disguising that vaudeville audiences were various middle and working class immigrant and native born all of whom had expectations that vaudeville had not lost its risqué roots historians have often been misled by entrepreneur s claims of cleanups and moral improvements robert snyder writes such claims were part of an old practice in nineteenth-century show business that of establishing a show s claims to refinement before going beyond the boundaries of acceptability 9 the decision of the american vaudeville entrepreneurs to set their sights on a middle-class audience without giving up the working class base assumed that both audiences would find fulfillment in the properly arranged vaudeville bill the risqué loosened the victorian constraints of the middle class while the so-called middle-class entertainments offered avenues for a working class dedicated to upward mobility such an approach set the stage for american popular entertainment to build a mass audience composed of many segments it was a remarkable feat for american entrepreneurship and for the performers and audiences who made it possible and it put in place the template for american popular culture that dominated the rest of the century the entrepreneurial m odel the great social reformer jane addams yearned for a no-cost american popular culture something akin to folk dancing on the village green organic rather than manipulated vaudeville indeed often seemed to be an american village green democratic in its openness and accessibility to performers and audiences alike but clearly audiences were pursued by vaudeville entrepreneurs who shaped vaudeville and its performers to what were thought to be the values of those who bought the tickets there could be little doubt vaudeville was fitted to an industrialized nation appropriate to a business culture that had discovered the efficiencies of factory production acts were nonstop fast-paced and standardized all in an ongoing loop acts had to be clearly classifiable there were the hebe the dutch the nut and the dumb acts performers were defined by a hit song or by a genre such categorization was in sync with a nation whose products were

[close]

p. 4

standardized by packaging and branding and like other products vaudeville flourished thanks to the nation s railroads the two major vaudeville circuits keith in the east and orpheum in the west were made possible by the railroads distributing vaudeville across the nation as much they carried local brands to national dominance.10 the industrial motif was also apparent in the entrepreneurs relationship vis-à-vis their workers with the exception of a few headliners most vaudeville performers were treated by the circuits as easily replaceable and anonymous like workers on the line performers replicated the same performance several times a day as much as children in factories children in vaudeville were pushed onto the stage by families seeking another wage earner the prohibition of sexual innuendoes on stage did not protect adolescent and young girls from sexual advances off stage not without reason the documentary photographer lewis hine included child vaudevillians in his series on the exploitation of child labor for the bosses however what applied to chorus girls in new york could also apply to vaudevillians interchangeable components in a complex productive process 11 moreover given the numbers of willing men and women seeking entry vaudevillians had little security managers who did not want successful performers to change their act were the first to release performers when they decided the original act had worn out in 1900 when vaudeville managers formed the vaudeville managers association which established a booking office that made it more difficult for vaudevillians to work outside its imprimatur vaudevillians countered with the first of several strikes by their union the white rats stars spelled backward in 1905 the strike produced the trade newspaper variety which attacked and ridiculed the syndicate owners vaudeville managers produced a publication of their own and refused to hire performers or use songs from publishers who advertised in variety s pages.12 after utilizing strategies that were not so different from other entrepreneurs of their time the owners won and the strike failed vaudevillians could not be hired without membership in the approved union the national vaudeville artists supplied by the managers while the discovery of a performer s membership in white rats meant blacklist like other american businesses the vaudeville owners had also discovered that the most successful consumer products of the industrial age were those predicated on middle-class respectability facing down the yellow press the genteel press marketed itself as family newspapers the new york times put itself forward as a paper that would not stain the breakfast cloth that is a newspaper that could be brought into the genteel home unlike the streetsold sensational press in the huge double-page advertisements that supported the middle-class newspapers the era s grand department stores flattered their female customers that the act of shopping itself was putting middle-class life into practice similarly the advertising and packaging for the flood of goods for the home turned on notions of middle-class housekeeping as did the messages from the legions of women s magazines from the 1880s onward mass media messages promoted a national culture of gentility so useful for selling the goods cascading from east coast factories their products arrived promptly on prairie doorsteps thanks to the network of railroads the nation s five express companies and rural home delivery provided by the u.s post office whose postmaster was not so incidentally a former department store scion.13 the availability of similar kinds of goods in all parts of the nation in a generally similar time frame could only encourage the zeal of the new towns

[close]

p. 5

to establish their promise of genteel life not so removed from the male-only belly-up-to-the-bar boy frontier bars western towns sought entertainment that reflected the civilized life they hoped to embody opera houses often constructed close to rail lines in the tacit acknowledgement that entertainment was to be imported rather than home grown welcomed traveling shows musical groups and legitimate theater as much as they did the wells fargo wagon on one such tour the new york symphony orchestra was performing in fargo north dakota when the violinist efrem zimbalist found his knee grabbed by a cowboy shouting god damn it but i like that music 14 no matter how successful the urge for respectability in the west nonetheless mirrored desires of many groups poised between their recent histories and the promise of the future tendencies that were soon recognized by entrepreneurs tony pastor f f proctor martin beck alexander pantages edward albee and certainly b f keith writing for a middle-class magazine audience in 1898 keith framed his goal in terms that were clearly aimed to attract the desired audience two things i determined at the outset should prevail in the new scheme one was that my fixed policy of cleanliness and order should be continued and the other that the state show must be free from all vulgarisms and coarseness of any kind so that the house and entertainment would directly appeal to the support ladies and children in fact that my playhouse must be as `homelike an amusement resort as it was possible to make 15 in vaudeville s ongoing campaign women shoppers were invited to make a show part of their day-out activities class hierarchy ensured by differing ticket costs the owners recognized that respectability did not mean drab comporting with the era s demand for the spectacular keith turned vaudeville theaters into grand edifices of sensual delight as in the 1902 film that spotlighted philadelphia s new house b f keith s million dollar theatre the grand vaudeville theaters were as much sites of city pride as the new department stores the marbled city halls and the museums public art and grand boulevards made possible by the city beautiful reformers but less interested in emulating an unmoving past than in reflecting the energy of the moment the vaudeville entrepreneurs were quick to integrate electrical display on facades that already included exotic ornamentation redolent of imagined egyptian and moorish adventure inside at least in the best of the houses the plaster ornamentation velvet ropes polished brass and chandeliered lobbies were as magical in their promise surely as appealing to upscale working-class audiences as to the middle class and its aspirants vaudeville also benefited from the acting profession s own campaign for middle-class legitimacy the nation s most important women s magazine ladies home journal was helpful spotlighting for example the theatre and its people and giving an aura of respectability to young actresses such as ethel barrymore.16 vaudeville performers without the barrymore theatrical imprimatur also shared in the benign attention may irwin known for her black dialect songs was considered appropriate to offer advice in the monthly cosmopolitan on the business of the stage as a career 17 like theater people vaudeville stars were celebrities at a time when home magazines were finding that features on show business celebrities drew more readers than spreads on the wives of politicians still the campaign for middle-class imprimatur had casualties marie lloyd a star of english music hall known for her unapologetic bawdy working-class humor lost her place on the american stage what

[close]

p. 6

became known as polite vaudeville was the norm and the smaller houses in poorer neighborhoods sank into seediness the performers for ambitious performers respectability posed some difficulties on the keithalbee circuit notices warned artists to avoid offensive language and double entendres as in the sign with no lack of emphasis vulgarity suggestiveness and cuss words must go what was considered vulgar covered a wide swath even forbidden were the words nightshirts and hot dogs such orders came at the behest of edward a albee of whom a contemporary noted it is impossible ignore the fact that mr albee was a child of the transcendental new england with a lot of puritan in his make-up 18 genetics likely had less to do with his policy than the example of commercial theater which had found success by catering its products to women and their assumed standards lest women in the vaudeville audience be offended artists who broke the rules were fined as they were when they went over time limits or fired artists themselves were often squeezed by such rules wanting middle-class legitimacy for the genre but pulled by the dependable audience response to a sexual innuendo moreover from men and women in acrobatic tights to the wink of the comic performers and their audiences were aware that one attraction of vaudeville was in its naughty bits as the progressive caroline caffin observed the fastidious may be a little shocked the fastidious rather like to be shocked sometimes they must not be offended while the seeker for thrills must on no account be bored by too much mildness 19 on the first level keith s dictate of vaudeville as something for everyone came to mean a range of acts that included at least one act or two that pleased some members of the audience enough to put up with the parts that were not so interesting but in practice the something for everyone meant that performers in every act had to provide something for everybody vaudeville was a performance art that had a place for everyone like a bridge over a river audiences could find the place meaningful to them and shut their eyes to the rest vaudeville was filled with sensual pleasure for sure but also cast a wide net of complication and talent the fastidious did indeed like to be shocked sometimes as vaudeville performers were charged with giving meaning to their acts in multiple and even contradictory ways in its thirty-year history on the keith-albee circuit the all-female boston fadette orchestra was booked into vaudeville theaters across the nation 6,000 appearances in all half of them as the headliner the orchestra offered a multitude of levels for audience participation first it was a novelty act with high-class associations on another level as in the suffrage magazine women s journal view it was yet another demonstration of women s competence and thus a call for equality also to be considered was the orchestra s mix of classical and popular music a way to indulge in class attitudes while enjoying syncopation finally the orchestra was not above comic routines including one in which the orchestra members feigning anger walked off the stage leaving the orchestra leader caroline nichols to show off her versatility by playing all the instruments.20 this was a complicated stew that had several lines of attraction the comedy material may have been expected to extend the act s appeal to the working-class ticket holders but there is nothing to suggest that the comedy did not also appeal equally to the middle-class audience by the same token the

[close]

p. 7

bits and pieces of classical music beyond the class attitudes that it may have evoked was not necessarily eschewed by the working-class audience some of whom like the cowboy in north dakota may have been more appreciative than the middle-class members it was purported to attract on the face of it the inclusion of one-act plays was another strategy for middle-class approval since it showcased theatrical stars whose legitimacy did not have to be proved barrymore appeared in a one-act comedy written by j m barrie but it took no special background to appreciate the plot in which barrymore played a divorced wife who successfully makes her way in the world thanks to her ability to type once again there were multiple messages including barrymore s apparent approval of divorce all wrapped in the sensate experience of seeing a famous person close up and the opportunity to be transported by the work of a great artist like sarah bernhardt barrymore was not a momentary comet on the vaudeville stage suggesting her appeal was broad and her place was accepted there was no room for purposelessness in the vaudeville program each position on the bill had a role the second act had a different role in the bill than the third and fourth acts the headliner was not the conclusion of the bill but the act before the final act which was expected to be noisy as the audience prepared to leave in addition to how successfully they filled their roles on the bill however the most long-lasting of the acts included something for everyone in their acts whatever they were drama bicycle acts and the most potent ethnic humor although the ethnic and racial humor in vaudeville now appear appalling al jolson got his start in vaudeville in blackface in an act billed as the jew and the coon at the time ethnic and racial acts were staple tropes that could be adopted by any performer you did not have to be irish to have an irish act german to have a dutch act or asian to perform in yellow face a turban signaled an arab act that could transform a novelty act such as a regurgitator a performer who could regurgitate water like a fire hose into the realm of the mysterious and unexplainable.21 chinese and chinese american vaudevillians often performed in magic and acrobatic acts but white performers also adopted yellow-face makeup and what were considered chinese costumes for those acts chinese and chinese american performers also sang sentimental american popular songs harmonized in barbershop quartettes and participated in blackface acts one prominent chinese performer sang in irish dialect and in german another donned kilts as part of a scottish highland act;22 while at least one white performer leo carrillio advertised himself as the only chinese dialect comedian act.23 eddie cantor performed waiting for the robert e lee in blackface but periodically broke into a jewish accent to mix things up.24 the famous jewish team morris joe weber and moses schoenfeld lew fields performed in comic routines as irish immigrants in blackface and most popularly as germans in a dutch act a german-accented act that jewish performers often adopted in the belief that german was closest to the yiddish accents that may have still characterized their speech weber and fields represented performers of ethnic acts who eschewed their own ethnic heritage of folk songs and dance in favor of a different and constructed ethnicity aimed at a broader appeal when weber and fields opened their permanent broadway house the team found ways to transform the message even more broadly for audiences growing distant from immigrant pasts the barbs of ethnic humor were transformed aimed at the dashing soldiers saintly women and other society folk in efforts of piercing pomposity and verifying superiority ideas

[close]

p. 8

that all could enjoy.25 some jewish performers did take on the hebe act or its variation but increasingly only in ways that could be appreciated by all sophie tucker sang my yiddisha mama in yiddish and english but only when she was sure that her audience would appreciate it as a song about motherhood in general.26 in a later period jack benny s skinflint act lost its vaudevillian hebeact-roots as radio took the act across the nation to audiences who had largely put away immigrant memories or never had them there were also acts that played with gender julian eltinge was a famous female impersonator starring in elaborate productions in female costumes although his photograph was on sheet music without costume neither his gender nor his gender preference was ever in dispute and audiences may have found eltinge s impersonations most about the reassertion of male power in a female-dominated era.27 west was a male impersonator early in her career perhaps a female counter to misogynist male power meantime kate elinor played an outlandish and brash irish woman in an ethnic act most usually in the purview of male comics.28 hints of the homosexual could occur in unlikely places bert williams and eddie cantor played an act in blackface in which cantor is the returning college-educated son to williams as the down-to-earth working man but cantor played the role slight and effeminate with whiterimmed glasses and mincing step 29 cantor s effeminacy although ostensibly about working-class views of the college educated was only one of the many guises that vaudeville provided for homosexual representation in any case the variety of personas was always about blur and it can be argued that the blur was the attraction as it was a way to present multiplicity in a compressed single moment like the chinese performer in a scottish kilt no performer in blackface yellow face or in any of the ethnic modes ever entirely disappeared into the impersonation the doubleness sometimes tripleness made for complex understandings of identity fanny brice who had been born on new york s lower east side but whose childhood was spent in relative comfort in new jersey developed her act using jewish stereotype sometimes blending it with characteristics of blackface jewish performers have often been associated with the use of blackface and blackface was employed by brice tucker cantor nora bayes and most famously jolson who took the tradition to early film however no one who ever saw jolson in blackface as in the 1927 film the jazz singer concluded that he was making a statement about black american identity in the film jolson in blackface sings his heart out to his white jewish mother the woman who supports him over his father s disapproval of his show-business career this was a plot line that likely resonated with members of a national audience who like the jolson character were seeking to find an accommodation between past and present george seldes a progressive critic of the period who lived into the modern era recalled jolson s performance of swanee as an experience in the absurd blackface which is so little negroid that it goes well with diversions in yiddish accents jolson created image after image of longing 30 still blackface cannot be divorced from its racial overtones as scholars explore minstrelsy was a white invention at the hands of pre­civil war white performers who donned blackface in imitation and satire of southern blacks and according to eric lott white male envy of black male bodies.31 by the 1860s african americans took up white minstrel traditions in traveling shows

[close]

p. 9

featuring all-black casts the traveling shows were controlled by white syndicates and aimed at white audiences but in what has been called the trickster tradition black performers and composers served up black caricature that still showed off black talent even in the guise that denied it while black minstrelsy is often portrayed as caricaturing white stereotypes in a resistance mode the dance historian brenda dixon-gottschild argues that to interpret minstrelsy only in terms of white power or black resistance to it is to ignore the african contributions to black performance and its overwhelming impact upon american culture an aesthetic redefinition that would stand american performance on its head 32 the new dances and music new patter and new comic tropics including men as female impersonators that found their way into vaudeville as a result of american minstrelsy were not just driven by either accommodation or resistance to white power she writes but by an aesthetic influenced by including african music and african musical instruments such as the banjo ways of holding and moving the body the enunciation of a song phrase or note dance patterns and call-and-respond traditions drawn from african culture although white audience appreciation of black performance at the time is generally viewed as an expression of their racist views it might also be considered that the appeal to white and black audiences was the realization of something beyond either racial stereotypes or resistance in the end the american negro has come into his own according to one assessment of vaudeville s future the real negro is on the stage himself in full feather for the first time in his history the professional disputant of the white actor in the same line 33 in concrete terms however black performers in white settings had to maintain a complicated balance of white expectations of black performance m sissieretta jones was one of the african american women classically trained at the new england conservatory and subsequently toured internationally on the concert stage when she was prevented from pursing an operatic career in the united states jones reinvented herself as black patti and formed the black patti troubadours a minstrel act that parodied opera but clearly patti was a trickster parodying a form of art in which she herself excelled and which for all the parody was still central to the act in the end what came through loudest was not a satirical representation of a particular group acting above their class by performing opera or even a ridicule of opera as high art but the talent of m sissieretta jones who despite all odds had found an avenue to display it.34 the great vaudevillian bert williams performed in blackface most of his career but in ways that suggest talented actors fanny brice might be another example found opportunity in the blackface mask from all accounts williams s performance in the cakewalk in his half-spoken singing style or in his feigned surprise at audience applause was not the minstrel of white invention williams s use of blackface played up its role as a mask and his singing style was the antithesis of the mode of white coon shouting performance the cakewalk that williams helped popularize was itself a descendant of the slave practice of mocking the dance of their owners and had african roots but it was nonetheless appreciated in its time as an art form without a connection to its antecedents from either black or white audiences a year after his death in 1923 a tribute book sought to explain williams s talent the impresario david belasco credited williams s subtlety his artistic method was so perfect that it completely concealed his artistic mechanics making all which he said and did appear to be wholly unpremeditated while he

[close]

p. 10

seemed entirely unconscious of his comicality of his words and actions 35 a white reviewer noted he is a man of another race who can lampoon us and cartoon us in our own foibles and weaknesses and make us like it 36 he is the only actor i know another reviewer acknowledged who can express melancholy if only for an instant then suddenly cause wild outbursts of laughter and applause in his audience 37 williams was a man of study and erudition and his performance represented the same care as his day-to-day negotiations of the times blackface provided him with the opportunity for multiple identifications as did his usual dress in disconnected pieces of a full-dress suit and an askew top hat but still more subtle than the grotesque exaggeration of minstrelsy costume he had many songs stories and skits in his arsenal but the song nobody was demanded as an encore at every performance regretfully sighingly he responded to the audience calls by searching his pockets finally finding a small notebook he turned its pages wearily until coming across his place he began his song reading the words with difficulty as if the words were not etched into his brain after thousands of performances when life seems full of clouds and rain and i am full of nothin but pain who soothes my thumpin bumpin brain nobody when winter comes with snow and sleet and me with hunger and cold feet who says here s 25 cents go ahead get something to eat nobody the audience always howled and demanded even more encores making us wonder what was so humorous about this doleful account of constant rejection it surely was the antithesis of the happy minstrel he would comply this time his performance suggested but perhaps not next time a recent biographer interprets the performance as a way for him to delay audience satisfaction proving his control over them even as they demanded an encore 38 another way to look at the performance is in terms of audience interaction with the performer a dialogue about power about who is up and who is down and who in the end has control the follies gave williams a platform from which he came to change audience expectations of black performance and he influenced other performers including mae west who credited williams in her own development.39 west also performed for the follies but critics were puzzled was there something male about her performance her dancing seemed close to that of george m cohan was she like the blackface comic frank tinney or was she the vaudeville diva eva tanguay was she too brazen for polite vaudeville was it all a send-up such questions followed west into her film career and even to her later career in las vegas some critics long suspected she was a man in drag one way to interpret west s performance is to consider that she adapted some of the traditions of black american performance one of west s early signature songs was i ve got a style all of my own filled with implied meanings innuendo double entendre boasting sampling imitation and parody that are connected to traditions of black performance west consciously incorporated them all as she described her style it isn t what i do but how i do it.

[close]

p. 11

it isn t what i say but how i say it and how i look when i do and say it 40 all this rejection adoption or rearrangement of identity that williams west and vaudevillians in general represented has been explained in a number of ways jewish performers in blackface bringing their own angst to the form older immigrants given a sense of superiority toward the rube immigrant a controlling device for middle-class audiences fearful they would be subsumed in an ocean of the newly arrived an affirmation of status and a warning of slide the comfort of familiarity or the adoption of africanist traditions that came to influence white performers for some there was clearly the lure of the idea of moving from one personality to another as susan a glenn writes for audiences the pleasures of the comedy of personality were many the fantasy of the fluid self was one appeal 41 it was a fluidity perhaps of a whirlpool not a river movement seemed most about the spinning plate kept aloft as the performer remained in place what seemed admired was the ability to do several things at one time rather than move upward in a hierarchal fashion black patti the boston fadette orchestra the comic who could really play the instrument he was holding and hundreds of other acts turned on the surprise of their versatility it was a characteristic of adaptation perhaps of more necessity in a changing culture than ideas of hierarchy when the society magazine town and country wrote about george m cohan it was in terms of not just his rise but his stretch the headline put it the remarkable versatility and success of george m cohan as author composer promoter and star 42 we might consider that what gave racial gender and ethnic humor such a long life in vaudeville were complications that went beyond ideas of subordination audiences had to ask themselves was it to reject one s own personality to take on another was it a democratic possibility to take on a costume that had originated somewhere else was it indeed an exercise in inferioritysuperiority or a backhanded way to claim allegiance with other members of the disenfranchised the audience and performers william dean howells novelist of the genteel tradition editor and inveterate vaudeville-goer considered that nothing is lost upon the vaudeville audience not the lightest touch not the airiest shadow of meaning 43 no matter the strictures put upon performance the arrangement of the bill or the stereotypes and branding of the act itself what was most important to performance was their communication skills with the audience despite keith s demands that successful acts not change vaudeville performers tailored their performances to audiences as caffin observed they have learned either by experience or instinct so exactly the key to which to pitch their appeal in order to evoke that answering vibration for their audience that they can sound it as will modulate it into what harmonies and expression they please 44 john lahr son of the famous vaudevillian bert lahr recalled how his father found ways to nuance his performance according to his recognition of differences in audiences.45 barrymore returning to vaudeville after periods in the legitimate theater always recognized the talent of the vaudevillian performers to adjust the act to the needs of the audience i found out that you had to be awfully good in vaudeville audiences she said were exacting 46 consequences accrued for performers who were less exact on the pantages circuit harpo marx recalled if an audience didn t like us we had no trouble finding it out we were pelted with sticks bricks spitballs cigar butts peach pits and

[close]

p. 12

chewed-out stalks of sugar cane 47 what audiences demanded was not production-like perfection but a sense that the act was working in the moment brice said her comedy was spontaneous whenever it isn t the feel of the audiences tells me so i throw out that particular piece of business and work out something else to use in its stead 48 nora bayes vaudeville s most successful songstress thought of her audience as friends who were best served by sincerity and simplicity i have never sung the song [a farewell-to-a-soldier song without frankly yielding to its drama and at the farewell moment there are always tears in my eyes as my back is to the audience much of the time they do not know that i am really crying 49 may irwin cautioned a subtle perception of the hidden value of every line is part of the business of the stage and sometimes that requires the most constant study and development 50 while still a teenage performer eddie cantor adopted the rule the audience is never wrong if a performance failed it was either the fault of the material or the manner of presentation 51 his autobiography was titled unambiguously my life is in your hands mae west struggled with finding a way to please changeable and unpredictable audiences i learned to adjust the mood tempo and material of my act i did whatever seemed necessary to get the best response from each type of audience i gave it to them fast or slow or low or mean or sultry i changed a song i adapted myself to the way they liked it best 52 this trend by performers to deconstruct their art for the edification of the general public in interviews in magazine articles and in their memoirs was in line with the campaign to professionalize performance like any other profession was learned that push however confronted the idea that entertainment was an industrialized product timing inflection and wit countered efforts at standardization even at a time when entrepreneurs sought to find formulas that resisted tinkering american trinity ziegfeld follies the follies certainly represented a peak of theatrical production values thanks to the set designs of joseph urban who took his inspiration from a magical medieval past of maxwell parrish illustrations costumes were designed by the british couturier to the higher classes lady duff gordon later said to be the inspiration for ernest hemingway in the sun also rises and were made of the finest materials even when worn in unseen places in terms of its fashion the spectacular and its preference for white female beauty the follies informed the film musicals of the 1930s and 1940s television of the 1950s and the showgirls of present-day las vegas parodies have been scarce although a famous one by lucille ball in her 1950s television comedy series had her toppling down the grand staircase following the weight of the headdress for the most part however a reference to the ziegfeld follies does not provoke a laugh out loud so much as suggest affection for a peculiarly american mélange of excess and elegance sensationalism and sentimentality aloofness and kitsch the emphasis of the follies from its first production in 1909 despite the financial panic and running until 1931 was on opulence on breathtaking technique on light and color all devoted to what was called in the zeigfeld publicity glorifying the american girl the chosen few who became the showgirls were trained in a special walk and fitted out with elaborate costumes with huge headpieces so arrayed the showgirls were expected to perambulate the stage in an unnatural hip-forward walk for the benefit of the costumes and

[close]

p. 13

scenery but they were not expected to display individual talent clearly the glorified american woman was most about knowing her place display and standardization moreover at a time of eugenics the so-called science that saw the aryan american as the repository of the most desired national characteristics the american woman thus glorified was fair skinned and possessed particular kinds of facial features that met the requirements of the american type however in the typical multilevel message delivery of vaudeville the real ziegfeld stars were not american types the follies made stars of eddie cantor sophie tucker bert williams and fanny brice whose acts were ostensibly intended only to fill the time between the showgirls but who instead became the headliners like williams brice provides one example of how she moved beyond her role as a female comic intended to highlight what she was not nor ever could be a glorified american girl brice is most associated with the contributions of jewish immigrant humor to american popular culture and her birth on the lower east side is cited as proof but we know that brice s growing-up years in newark did not offer her enough material to fuel her performing ambitions and for that inspiration she turned to the already established tropes of black dialect and the yiddish theater of her birthplace brice performed in both modes but her earliest success came when she put the two together in the follies of 1910 she received star treatment for her rendition of love joe a black dialect song that turned on seduction but what caused her performance to be praised by reviewers was how she melded the black dialect lyrics with the comic gyrations and expressions that were usual to yiddish comic theater brice received numerous ovations at every performance while the press said she was the real star george seldes thought only jolson could compare with the way brice could hold an audience in the hand 53 and for years afterward audiences remembered her send-up of the boudoir queen camille i have been a bad woman armand but awfully good company 54 in 1914 caffin devoted a book to the examination of vaudeville her account of racial and the ethnic comedians received no special attention like contortionists singers dancers and magicians the humor evoked by the funmakers made no differentiation between the hebrew and the irish comedians or between the blackface humor of al jolson and that of bert williams they were all part caffin suggested without moralizing upon content of the american parade instead she glorified the art and craft of vaudeville stars saw a democratic vista in the variety of performances and indeed viewed vaudeville as the expression of the national folk mote at a time when most progressives attacked syndicate controls in all fields including the substantial syndicated operation of vaudeville caffin interpreted vaudeville as a both a reflection of the audience and under its control well it is your show she concluded if you want it different you only have to make the demand loud enough large enough persistent enough 55 by 1922 herbert croly s new republic called vaudeville the great american art 56 the vaudeville entrepreneurs had sought to build a business along a nineteenth-century vertical business model of ownership of production but in the course of constructing it vaudeville set american cultural production along a course that would have relevance for all of american popular culture american national culture came to be accepted as what could appeal to americans of all classes new forms of sound and film expanded from early working-class audi-

[close]

p. 14

ences to find favor among americans regardless of class background as men and women of all classes increasingly hummed the same songs danced the same dances and admired the same performers the acceptance of american popular culture on such a large scale however served as a barrier for artists who challenged the familiarity of popular culture there were no ready audiences for modernist art in america or indeed for the work of any artists who were not willing to cater to an audience s perceived taste moreover as film recording and eventually broadcast came to offer new opportunities for artistic expression the forms developed according to the successful parameters already in existence the american tripartite of business performance and audience.

[close]