June 11, 2018 • 38 mins
Eltinge was one of the highest-paid and most famous actors of the early 20th century, and acted alongside Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino. What made him famous was his skill at female impersonation.
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. They were
going to talk about one of the highest paid and
most famous actors of the early twentieth century. I know
(00:23):
we've been on kind of an entertainment kick lately. That
was actually yep. Uh So, this particular actor acted alongside
Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Rudolf Valentino. It was friends
with Charlie Chaplin. He had a Broadway theater named after him,
and he was one of the first movie stars to
build his own mansion in Los Angeles. But his name
(00:46):
is not nearly as familiar today as all those other
stars that I just mentioned, because what made him famous
was his skill at female impersonation, which fell increasingly out
of favor later on in his career. He is Julian Elting,
and in nineteen fifty, almost a decade after his death,
he was still being described as the greatest of all
(01:06):
impersonators of women, and a one note that I do
want to make about how to say his name. There
are numerous print sources from when he lived that insists
that it was pronounced elting like with a hard G.
But there is a lot of old footage floating around
as well as more recent footage of people talking about
(01:27):
him where people say it Eltinge. And apparently he picked
a stage name on purpose because of the potential for
mispronouncing it, thinking that it would quote serve to fix
it more firmly with the public. Uh so, just we're
just gonna go with elting I mean, I understand, for example,
(01:50):
my name gets mispronounced all the time, but to me
it's fun because my maiden name was very boring and
no one ever rested. So I'll answered to Frey fry free,
any of those work fine well. And I definitely never
saw any footage of everybody of anybody saying welcome Julian
Eltinge and like, that's not how you say that. I mean,
(02:13):
I want to say el tins just reading it because
there's an e on the end, right, But no, So
for today it's l ting mm hmm. And Julian el
ting was born William Julian Dalton known as Billy, on
May fourteenth, eight one, some sources reported as eighteen eighty three, though,
So just know that if you go looking. He was
(02:35):
born to Michael and Julia Baker Dalton in Newtonville, Massachusetts.
Today Newtonville is one of the villages that makes up
the city of Newton. Four days after his birth, he
was baptized at Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church.
From there, Elting's story about how he got into show
business immediately gets fuzzy just from moment one. According to
(02:57):
some sources, the family moved west in pursuit of the
gold rush not not long after he was born. They
headed to California first, and then they backtracked to Butte, Montana.
So one would have been well after the peak of
the gold rush in California. But Baute was in its
mining heyday right around then, so that might make a
(03:17):
little bit of sense when he failed to make it
as a prospector, though Michael Dalton started working as a barber.
In this version of the story, Julia Dalton encouraged the
young billy to dress up and entertain patrons at nearby saloons,
but when his father caught him dancing in address, he
beat him as punishment and then sent him back to
(03:38):
Boston to live with an aunt. The other most common
version of Billy's early life is that at the age
of ten, he got a part in the Cadet Theatricals,
and these were all male performances that were staged by
the First Core of Cadets. The First Core of Cadets
was a volunteer militia connected to Boston's upper class. A
lot of its members were Harvard graduates with their own
(03:59):
all male theater experience in the form of Harvard's Hasty
Pudding Theatricals. The Cadet Theatricals were staged for fundraising purposes,
in this case to pay for the construction of an
armory that still stands today as the castle at Park
Plaza and in Boston. I found numerous references to the
fact that the reason they needed to an armory is
(04:21):
because they were afraid of an immigrant worker uprising, and
I went looking for exactly what that was, I mean,
other than just the tone of the time, Like, was
there a specific thing that prompted them to need to
build a giant castle like armory because of the threat
of immigrant worker uprisings? I did not go far enough
(04:42):
down that rabbit hole to answer it while writing this podcast,
but as the story goes, young Billy stole the show
so thoroughly that the group started writing parts just for him. So,
regardless of which of those stories is closer to the truth,
it does seem that at the age of fourteen, Billy
(05:04):
Dalton was in Boston working at a dry goods store,
and in nine hundred he definitely did have a role
in the Cadets theatrical production of Milady and the Musketeer,
which was a parody of the Three Musketeers. He had
been taking dance classes with Lila Vaile's Wyman, who ran
a dance school above Boston's Tremont Theater she had reckoned.
(05:26):
She had recommended him to Robert Barnett, who did everything
from writing to producing with the Cadet Theatricals. I have
a question, yep, it's there any possibility that these variant
stories of his background were maybe seated by him, the
person who also chose a name that could be pronounced
differently to set himself in people's minds. That is likely, um.
(05:51):
And there's I mean, there's also there's stuff that as
I was researching this, there would be lines in in
papers that were like, you should take all of this
media coverage with a grain of salt, because a lot
of this, like entertainment reporters would just make up quotes
from people. By this point, working with the Cadet Theatricals,
(06:11):
Billy Dalton had already started going by the name Billy Elting,
having borrowed the surname of a childhood friend. He wasn't
a member of the First Core of Cadets or a
Harvard graduate, even though later publicity would claim that he
had gone to Harvard. Nevertheless, he was cast as Mignonette,
and this may be where the discrepancy and his birth
year comes from. He was about to turn nineteen, but
(06:33):
the rest of the cast thought he was more like
fifteen or sixteen. Milady and the Musketeer raised thousand dollars
to help pay off the mortgage on the First Core
of Cadets giant castle like Armory, and the show was
generally praised. Elting's performance in particular, was very well reviewed,
with some Boston papers saying that he was a better
(06:54):
dancer than the man in the lead female role. The
next year, Barnett was Stay Aaging, a show for the
Bank Officers Association. Like the First Core of Cadets, the
Bank Officers Association staged all male reviews to raise money,
in this case for a fund to help its members
if they became ill or disabled. The play was missed Simplicity,
(07:15):
and Barnett wrote the role of Claire Deloineville for his
rising star Billy Elting. Here is how the Boston Evening
Transcript reviewed this performance. Quote as in the Cadet Theatricals,
one had here fresh proof of how bewitchingly, intoxicating, le
beautiful a young man can be in girl's clothes. Anything
(07:35):
more unsettling than Mr. Elting's Claire Deloineville were hard to imagine.
Even his veiled baritone voice had the perturbing, velvety charm
of a rich, subdued contralto. There was not an item
in his whole appearance, look, manner, and action that was
not delusively feminine. Looking into a mirror, he might like
(07:57):
narcissus fall in love with himself. That reviewers seems almost angry,
and how good a female person he is. Miss Simplicity
brought in ten thousand dollars for the Bank Officers Association.
In three they put on Barren Humbug, described as a
Hungarian musical play with Elting cast in the role of
(08:17):
Countess Sylvia. Although the show itself drew mixed reviews, Elting's
performance was once again highly praised. The Sunday Harold called
it a revelation, and its reviewer wrote, quote one almost
wondered if the bank officers had not secured a remarkably
attractive actress to play the role. At this point, Milly
Elting was well known in Boston and to some extent
(08:40):
outside of it, because some of the shows that he
was in would sometimes go on tour after the end
of their Boston run. But after his performance and Miss Simplicity,
he got a chance to go on Broadway. And we
will talk more about that. After a sponsor break. After
(09:00):
the Boston run of Miss Simplicity closed, composer and producer
Edward E. Rice hired Julian Elting, who by now had
dropped the name Billy, to appear on Broadway. The show
was Mr Wicks of Wickham and it opened at the
Bijou Theater on September nineteen o four, and his role
of John Smith, Elting dressed as a woman and sang
(09:21):
a song called not Like Other Girls. That's how many
times called the show. Quote catchy and refined, and called
Elting's performance one of its two big hits, but The
New York Times called it a poor show, poorly acted
with no redeeming features. It's just like movie reviews today. Um.
(09:44):
In spite of those decidedly mixed reviews, this was a
great time for Elding to make his way to New York.
Theater in New York City goes way back before the
nineteen hundreds, but the theater district we now know as
Broadway was just getting started in nineteen o four. The
Amsterdam and the Lyceum were two of the earliest Broadway theaters,
and they were both built in nineteen o three. In
(10:07):
nineteen o four, Long Acre Square was renamed Times Square
after the New York Times opened its office tower at
the intersection of forty two and Broadway. The Times Square
subway station to open that year as well, and theater
started relocating from the Union Square and Medicine Square Garden
areas to this newly booming district. By thanks to all
(10:28):
the newly installed electric lighting, this stretch of Broadway would
be called the Great White Way. Vaudeville was also thriving
in New York at this time, Both vaudeville and American
burlesque had roots in the minstrel shows that had been
popular in the United States from the early nineteenth century
through the years after the end of the Civil War.
(10:49):
In minstrel shows, white actors in black face put on
acts that lampoon and stereotyped black people, sometimes lifting the
work of black playwrights and songwriters to do it. Although
women eventually became a bigger part of minstrel performance, especially
in the earlier years, women's roles were usually played by men. Minstrel, vaudeville,
(11:11):
and burlesque shows all had some elements in common, but
with a very different theme in tone. By the time
that minstrel shows fell out of favor, female impersonation and
male impersonation were both part of vaudeville and burlesque. Vaudeville
impersonators were often very careful to frame their acts as
wholesome family entertainment, while burlesque impersonators sometimes took a more
(11:35):
satirical or titillating approach. Elting had made his vaudeville debut
at B. F. Keep's Theater in Boston, and he continued
his vaudeville performances as he was becoming more well known
in New York. Female impersonators in general tended to be
some of Vaudeville's highest paid performers, and Elting was one
of the highest paid among them. For his act, he
(11:57):
put on a corset, dresses, makeup and win eggs, and
he wedged to speed into dainty little shoes to carry
off the illusion that he was a beautiful woman on
a stage. He also sang as a bare tone opting
opting not to use a falsetto voice or to otherwise
try to make his voice sound higher than it really was.
Sometimes he'd take his wig off at the end of
(12:18):
his performances to show the audience that he was a man.
Here's how he described it quote, A man on the
stage must make up differently than a woman. His idea
is to give strong lines to his face, accent the
masculine traits, and tone down whatever softer feminine lines nature
has endowed him with. In my work, it is just
(12:38):
the opposite. I must tone down the dominant masculine characteristics
of my face and figure and seek to bring out
those feminine lines that even the most masculine man has
somewhere about him. A man does not have to worry
much about the correct color of rouge or powder to
go with his complexion. But with a woman's makeup, that
is where you find true art. Whether it was on
(13:01):
uh more traditional Broadway theater or whether it was in vaudeville,
Julian Elting and his female impersonation became enormously popular, especially
among women. In the words of comedian and actor W. C.
Fields quote, women went into ecstasies over him, men went
into the smoking room, and as a side note, are
(13:24):
recent podcast subject Windsor Mackay drew him as part of
an act at the Orpheum Vaudeville Theater in Chicago. We
did not mean for all of these things to interlode,
didn't uh. In fact, we had already um I in
my imagination that episode had already even come out to
(13:44):
listeners when I discovered that. But my that's not correct.
We had recorded it, but it wasn't actually released as
of when we are doing this right now in the studio.
So in New York, Elting became friends with playwright and
composer George M. Cohen, who the song give my regards
to Broadway and along with a lot of other big
names in show business. Cohen was a Freemason and a
(14:06):
member of Pacific Lodge number two thirty three. Elting eventually
joined the Freemasons as well, and was able to make
a lot of show business connections through the through the lodge.
By seven, Elting was so famous that he was able
to go on a European tour to Vienna, Berlin, Paris
and London. In London, he gave a command performance for
(14:27):
King Edward the Seventh that Windsor Castle. The King was
so delighted that he gave Elting a white bulldog as
a thank you gift. In nineteen ten, The Fascinating Widow
debuted in New Jersey with Elting as the star. Auto
Harbuck had written the play especially for him, and it
featured Elting in male and female roles, with a lot
(14:49):
of costume changes back and forth between them. The basic premise,
Elting plays a man who gets into legal trouble after
punching someone in the nose and disguises himself as the
eponymous Fascinating Widow to make his escape. Because of the
huge success of The Fascinating Widow, these quick changes between
masculine and feminine clothing became a hallmark of Elting's performances.
(15:14):
I wish I had a good grasp of the logistics
of that. Yeah, I tried to figure out um exactly,
like I tried to get a better play by play
of how all this would go down. I am imagining
there were stage hands and and dressers and costumers helping
with all of the quick changes. But I didn't find
(15:36):
a lot of discussion of that. Like I mean, I've,
you know, done enough theater that I I know how
a quick change of clothing works. But it's the makeup
that makes me go After we had just heard in
his own words, how differently you had to do makeup
for performing as a woman versus performing as a man.
It just gives me curiosities. There was makeup and hair involved,
(15:59):
and core And also he was not a small person.
He like I saw one thing that said he was
six feet tall and another that said that he was
five nine, But the five nine was talking about when
he was doing his teenage roles, So like he he
wasn't a petite person. So like he was wearing these
(16:19):
custom made gowns that would would fit his rather large
body and putting on corsets and on and on. It's
it seems exhausting to me. I would watch that part
of the show. Can I pay to sit backstage and
watch that happen? But this same year that we're talking about,
before we went on our divergence on quick Changes, Elting
(16:41):
became the highest paid male actor in the country with
a contract that guaranteed him three thousand dollars a week.
Producer A. H. Woods also offered him a contract plus
ten thousand dollars capital to start the Woods Elting in
Bloom Theater Company. Construction on the Elting Theater on Street
started in nineteen eleven. The Fascinating Widow opened on Broadway
(17:03):
that year as well, running for fifty two performances before
going on tour. Fifty two doesn't sound like a lot
in terms of today's Broadway schedule, where shows will run
for years and years and years and years, but at
the time that was a more successful run. The Elting
Theater opened in nineteen twelve after Julian had returned from
(17:26):
touring with The Fascinating Window Widow, but by the time
the theater was finished, he was drawing crowds that were
just too big for the Elting Theaters eight and eighty
nine seats to handle. He never wound up performing at
the theater that was named after him. He also eventually
sold his share of the theater company back to A. H. Woods,
saying that he liked being on stage a lot more
(17:48):
than he likes trying to run things. Elting was at
the height of his theatrical career, but the tone of
his press coverage started to shift in the nineteen teens.
In most of viewers wrote about his flawlessly pulling off
the illusion of femininity, the loveliness of his voice, and
his skill at dancing. But over the next few years,
(18:09):
more and more of his reviews were laced through with
the idea that female impersonators were suspicious and that Elting
stood out in contrast to them. One review ran in
The New York Evening World that said, quote, there are
a host of female impersonators, and those who are not
abominations are pests. Elting is the exception. This media coverage
(18:31):
reflected shifting social views. Gender roles were starting to shift
in the wake of World War One, and, as as
so often happens when social norms are starting to change,
people who lived outside of those norms in one way
or another, we're seen as at best suspects, so female
impersonation was being seen less as a suitable form of entertainment,
(18:54):
especially for women, and more as some kind of hints
that a performer might be dv in some way. Elting
worked continually to combat this suspicion. On stage. He refused
to take flowers when they were offered to him from
the footlights, because that would be too feminine. He also
only took parts where there was some need for his
(19:15):
character to cross dress. The reasons for cross dressing weren't
necessarily wholesome. Sometimes it was to escape after having committed
a crime, but it's not portrayed as just for fun
or because he enjoys it. His nineteen fifteen role in
Cousin Lucy is a good example. Written by Charles Klein
with music by Jerome Kern, Cousin Lucy is a three
(19:37):
act musical farce about a man who fakes his own
death and assumes the identity of his air that being
Cousin Lucy. This play required Elting to make dozens of
costume changes, with the costumes themselves being one of the
most highly praised things about the show, but the reviews
highlight what we've just been talking about. The October nine,
(19:59):
fifteen edition of The American Theater reads quote. A considerable
number of persons resent the appearance on the stage of
female impersonators, and the more capable they are in presentation
of female charms, vagaries, and foibles, the more deep rooted
becomes the prejudice. On the other hand, there would seem
to be a still greater number who fairly batten on
(20:20):
such anomalous fair. Julian Elting, the real leader in this
curious form of art, has made a fortune imitating the
fair sex. Offstage, Elting presented himself as abundantly masculine. He
smoked cigars and boxed, including staging boxing matches for public
display when he was on tour. There were also rumors
(20:42):
that he started fights with anyone who dared to call
him a sissy. This masculinity played a part in his marketing.
To His publicity photos always included pictures of him and
masculine attire as his quote real self, in addition to
the pictures of him in feminine costume. Sometimes posters and
programs for the shows included both pictures together in one frame.
(21:06):
In interviews, he also talked about how this was just
an act, that he didn't enjoy wearing dresses, and that
if he could make his living without doing female impersonation,
he certainly would. Even though female impersonation was starting to
be viewed with increasing distrust, Elting's biggest career move was
still to come. And we're going to talk about Elting
(21:28):
in Hollywood after a sponsor break. Julian Elting had become
famous on stage in New York City. His name was
so synonymous with female impersonation that it became shorthand for
stage roles that involved cross dressing, sort of like Timmy
(21:49):
was cast in the Julian Elting role in the play.
This made the research interesting. As I was reading archival
newspaper articles, there were all these results for Julian Elting
that were really about other people being described as being
in the Julian Elting role. This work, though, was really
taking its hole on him. Most of his performances required
(22:10):
numerous high speed changes in and out of costumes, and
his feminine costumes tended to involve corsets and layers and
heavy gowns, and just doing that work under hot stage
lights in theaters that didn't have air conditioning was exhausting
his most successful plays also went on tour after they
closed their runs, making stops and cities large and small,
(22:33):
and the travel itself was almost as physically demanding as
the time on stage. So as films started to grow
in popularity, the idea of starring in them wasn't just
about potentially becoming even wealthier and more famous. It was
about working on a schedule that didn't require thirty five
costume changes a night under hot lights. He wouldn't have
(22:54):
to keep an entire show's worth of lines committed to memory,
or take his work on the road. He could at
his work to studios and sets and actually have time
to rest between pictures. If he was working in film,
he'd also have more time to devote to some of
his other pursuits. There was a Julian Elting cosmetic line,
which included a particularly popular cold cream keeping up that
(23:17):
masculine appearance. There was also Julian Elting Cigars. He published magazines,
including Julian Elting's Magazine of Beauty Hints and Tips. One
of these tips was that women should take up boxing
to help improve their confidence. Elting was also a supporter
of the movement for women's suffrage and a proponent of
the idea that you should just lay off what other
(23:40):
women are wearing. In the interview with the Boston Globe,
he said, quote, let woman be happy in her own way.
If she thinks she looks well with a barrel of
false hair on her head, let her wear it. If
she wants to powder, to paint, or to crowd a
number two shoe on a six and a half foot
let her do it if she can. When a reporter
rebutted that this hypothetical person might be making a caricature
(24:02):
of herself, Elting answered, quote, possibly, but she doesn't know it.
On the contrary, she believes she has added to her
personal adornment. I repeat, let her go on thinking so
since it makes her happy. Spending more time in front
of a camera instead of on stage gave Elting more
time and more energy for all of this stuff that
we've been talking about. He made his film debut with
(24:25):
a cameo in How Molly Malone Made Good in nineteen fifteen.
In nineteen seventeen, he signed a three picture contract with
Lasky Paramount Company, and all that touring that he had
done with the stage performances really paid off. The huge
audience that he had already established followed him directly to
movie theaters, and for a time he was a bigger
box office draw than Charlie Chaplin. His films included silent
(24:49):
adaptations of some of his stage work, including The Fascinating Widow,
and in many he had the starring role. He was
Clifford Townsend, who disguised himself as the idle adventuring woman
in The Adventurous. In Made to Order, he disguised himself
as a woman to infiltrate a gang of diamond smugglers.
In Madam Behave, he was Jack Mitchell, who disguised himself
(25:12):
as the aforementioned Madam when an important witness disappears during
a court case. He also appeared in an all star
production of patriotic episodes for the Second Liberty Loan with
Mary Pickford, after which she nicknamed him Lady Bill. Combined
with his stage work, Elting's work in film made him
incredibly wealthy. After his death, the Associated Press reported that
(25:36):
at his wealthiest, he'd been worth about three million dollars.
It was also during his time in Hollywood that he
built his Los Angeles mansion, a Spanish colonial revival full
of antiques called Villa Capistronome. This was one of several
homes he owned on both coasts, and he lived there
with his mother. Even at the height of his film popularity,
(25:58):
he did do some work on stage, and he continued
to be well received, especially when he went back to
the city where he got his start. One review from
Boston in nineteen eighteen read quote, although it is a
corking good bill all the way through the program at
Keith's this week, if deprived of all but the headline act,
would fill the house for the headliners. Julian Elting, native Bostonian,
(26:22):
sometime member of the Boston Cadets and leading female impersonator
in the world, who, after winning laurels on many stages
and on the screen, is back for the brief space
of a week on the stage where he made his
professional debut. You wouldn't know it from that review, but
the widespread suspicion of cross dressing and female impersonation was
(26:44):
really growing in the late nineteen teens. The public, the media,
and law enforcement began to conflate the idea of cross
dressing with the idea of homosexuality, which at the time
was viewed as deviant homosexuality and cross dressing became were
and more entwined in people's minds, and more and more
cities and states passed laws to ban both homosexual behavior
(27:07):
and cross dressing. In California, where Elting was living, so
called crimes against nature had been outlawed since in eighteen fifty.
The law was updated to name specific sex acts in
nineteen fifteen, and at the same time, police in California
started rating and breaking up drag parties, balls, and other
events where people, especially men, cross dressed, charging those arrested
(27:32):
with quote social vagrancy. Elting managed to keep his stage
and film career going in spite of all this social change.
Through the nineteen twenties. His movies were a huge box
office draw, and he was still performing to sell out
crowds at theaters all over the country. But then in
nineteen thirty he dropped from public view. The Motion Picture
(27:54):
Production Code AK the Hayes Code, was released that year.
It was, more formally quote a code to maintain social
and community values in the production of silence, synchronized and
talking motion pictures. Under the heading of sex. Number four
was sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden
(28:14):
and that included female impersonation. Elting had spent his entire
life trying to completely separate himself from anything that might
make anyone think he was, in the language of the time,
an invert. If he had ever done anything to make
anyone think that he was having a relationship with another man,
his career would have been over immediately. We just had
(28:36):
an episode on James Whale, who was like totally contradictory
to this idea. He was an openly gay man at
the same time as this, But James Whale's career was
not dependent upon him doing something that was already seen
as suspicious in terms of gender. He was also not
performing for the public like as a director, he was
(28:57):
removed from the public eye. So Julian Elting never had
a public relationship with anyone. He didn't even have close
friendships with other men in his industry. When he died,
hundreds of people came to his funeral, but everyone who
spoke at it could only really talk about his career.
No one could talk about him as a person because
(29:19):
no one really knew him, and it's not completely clear
what elting sexual orientation was. Harry Hay was co founder
of the Matachine Society, which was one of the first
gay rights organizations in the United States back when the
gay rights movement was known as the homophile movement. He
told historian and author Daniel Herowitz that Elting was involved
(29:41):
with other men in a phone interview that he gave
in But the creators of a documentary called Lady Bill
The Julian Elting Story give a totally different read of
his life. In their projects description at the New York
Foundation for the Arts, they say, quote, it has taken
years to uncover the threads of Elting's private life, but
we have finally located family and relatives of friends, many
(30:03):
of whom retained both his possessions and letters. Every bit
of evidence points to the fact that Julian Elting was
not a homosexual. In fact, fear of public condemnation transformed
Julian Elting into a man with a distinctly a sexual
personality who poured his soul into the perfection of his art, which,
in the end, in spite of all his efforts to
(30:25):
maintain its legitimacy, became the object of ridicule and hate.
This makes his tragedy perhaps even greater, Regardless of the
question of identity. Same sex relationships were suspicious at best
when Julian Elting lived, and he made a lifelong effort
to give the world absolutely no cause for suspicion. But
(30:46):
that couldn't protect him from a rising tide of homophobia,
or from the perception that homosexuality and cross dressing were
absolutely connected. It also couldn't protect him from laws that
were passed because of this perception. In other words, the
Hayes Code meant that Elting could not work in film.
The increasing existence of laws against cross dressing meant that
(31:08):
he could not work on stage either. All of this
happened not long after the onset of the Great Depression,
during which Elting lost most of his fortune, so he
mostly disappeared for about a decade, during which time he
struggled with alcohol abuse. In ninety Elting tried to make
a comeback. He was supposed to appear at Hollywood's Cafe
(31:29):
Rendezvous in January of that year, but the police wouldn't
let him in. When they finally did let him perform,
it wasn't as a female impersonator. Instead, he wore a
tuxedo with one of his dresses next to him on
a mannequin. He performed the songs that he was scheduled
to sing, and in between them he described the dresses
he would have had on if he had been allowed
(31:51):
to do so. Back in New York, lyricistem producer Billy
Rose had opened a nightclub called the Diamond Horseshoe and
the Paramount Hotel and Tie Square in ninety eight, and
in nineteen forty one he invited Elting to perform there.
Elting did go on, but he became ill during a performance,
and he was found dead in his apartment on March seventh,
(32:12):
nineteen forty one, at the age of fifty nine. The
cause of his death is not clear, and although he
continued to be known as the greatest of all impersonators
of women for at least a decade after his death,
his name mostly faded from public memory. So to end
on a slightly happier note, the Elting Theater still exists today.
(32:34):
It became a burlesque house during the Great Depression, and
when obscenity laws put an end to burlesque performance, it
was made into a movie theater. It closed for a time,
and then on March second, it was moved a little
more than a hundred and fifty feet down forty two
street from the seventh Avenue end of the block toward
the eighth Avenue end, and there it became the lobby
(32:55):
of a MC Empire five. During this move and restoration concern,
emitters pieced together a mural that had been part of
the original Elting theater. It portrayed the three muses and conservatives.
Work involved reassembling the pieces of the mural, repairing some
cuts and holes, and removing all of paint. As they worked,
(33:15):
they came to the conclusion that all three of the
muses are Julian Elting, based on similarities to his appearance
and demeanor and clothing and his publicity photos. So if
you go to the AMC Empire twenty five your Times Square,
you can look up at the ceiling. That's probably Julian
Elting looking back at you. That's so cool. Now I
know what I'm gonna do next time I'm in New York.
(33:38):
I kept looking. I was like, that's the theater right
by where we always stay whenever we're in New York.
For so also giant thanks to my friend Amy for
loaning me the Book of Bohemian Los Angeles and The
Making of Modern Politics by Daniel Hurwitz, which inspired this episode,
like maybe a year ago, Amy, I promise I'm going
to bring this book back to you the next time
(34:00):
I see you. I have now had it for an
embarrassingly long time. No one ever land me anything. I
think we all fall victim to that, especially you know,
in a job like ours, where we're doing lots of reading.
It's easy for books to get shuffled around on the
priority list. That's something things don't make it back up
for a year, it happen. I even I had read
(34:21):
the book. I had thought I should do a podcast
sometime on this Julian Elting person. Uh, And then I
brought the book with me to return it to her,
and then left it behind by accident when we went
to dinner. And that, Yeah, I'm just not very responsible
with other people's belongings apparently. So that's the story of
(34:43):
Julian Elting. Now, do you have a listener mail for us?
I do. This is from Erica. Erica says, thank you
for your wonderful podcast. I found it several months ago,
and it has made my commute and busy work portions
of my job so much more enjoyable. I very much
enjoyed your recent episode on a lot of rhine ger,
especially the portion about her film Prince Ahmed. I was
immediately reminded of the Prince Ahmed character in Aladdin, which
(35:07):
touches on the same stories. I wonder if that was
a deliberate inclusion by Disney, perhaps as a homage to
her pioneering work. It seems there are several references to
her film in Disney's Aladdin, apart from the name itself,
including the battle with Jafar as a giant snake. I
am also reminded that I had meant to email you
after I listened to the Last Carolina Parakeet episode in March.
(35:30):
Just one month after that episode aired, the last male
Northern white rhino died after months of failing health. He
was named Sudan and living in a conservancy in Kenya
which have been trying to save the species through breathing attempts,
which failed. This leaves only two female northern white rhinos
left in the world. Both are there at the same conservancy,
(35:51):
and the only hope for the species is advances in
cell biology or cloning and rhino I vf listening to
the fate of Lonesome George of my Heart. But I
thank you for breaking more attention to the destruction of
these subspecies thanks to human activity. Thanks again for all
the fascinating topics. I always look forward to the next releases.
Best Erica. I don't know if Holly has answers to
(36:14):
the Aladdin question, since that episode was her research. I
don't have a definitive answer. I will tell you this,
particularly after having worked on Drawn. The more people you
talk to in the animation industry, the more you realize
almost all of them really love animation history. So I
would be shocked if that were not a purposeful direct reference.
(36:38):
Oh yeah, cool. If you have not listened to Drawn,
that is the podcast that Holly has been working on
with Cartoon Network. That is lovely. Why, thank you, and
I'll talk about cartoons, which is like heaven. And I
also wanted to read this email because of the part
about the last northern white Rhino that did seem to
(36:58):
happen almost immediately after that episode came out, which is
that doesn't happen that often, but periodically we will put
on an episode and then right after that something will
happen that seems directly connected to what we just talked about.
And so when that happened, we had a lot of
people that were like, oh, did you hear about the rhino? Yes,
we had some very sad story. So if you would
(37:21):
like to write to us about this or any other podcast,
History podcast, we're at History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com. And we're also on social media as a
miss in History. That is our Facebook and Pinterest and
Instagram and Twitter. And you can come to our website,
which is missing history dot com, find show notes for
all the episodes Holly and I have done together and
a searchable archive of every episode ever. And you can
(37:43):
find and subscribe to our podcast or drawn at Apple podcast,
Google Play, wherever else you get podcasts. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff
works dot com
Welcome to steph you missed in history class from how
Stuff Works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. They were
going to talk about one of the highest paid and
most famous actors of the early twentieth century. I know
(00:23):
we've been on kind of an entertainment kick lately. That
was actually yep. Uh So, this particular actor acted alongside
Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Rudolf Valentino. It was friends
with Charlie Chaplin. He had a Broadway theater named after him,
and he was one of the first movie stars to
build his own mansion in Los Angeles. But his name
(00:46):
is not nearly as familiar today as all those other
stars that I just mentioned, because what made him famous
was his skill at female impersonation, which fell increasingly out
of favor later on in his career. He is Julian Elting,
and in nineteen fifty, almost a decade after his death,
he was still being described as the greatest of all
(01:06):
impersonators of women, and a one note that I do
want to make about how to say his name. There
are numerous print sources from when he lived that insists
that it was pronounced elting like with a hard G.
But there is a lot of old footage floating around
as well as more recent footage of people talking about
(01:27):
him where people say it Eltinge. And apparently he picked
a stage name on purpose because of the potential for
mispronouncing it, thinking that it would quote serve to fix
it more firmly with the public. Uh so, just we're
just gonna go with elting I mean, I understand, for example,
(01:50):
my name gets mispronounced all the time, but to me
it's fun because my maiden name was very boring and
no one ever rested. So I'll answered to Frey fry free,
any of those work fine well. And I definitely never
saw any footage of everybody of anybody saying welcome Julian
Eltinge and like, that's not how you say that. I mean,
(02:13):
I want to say el tins just reading it because
there's an e on the end, right, But no, So
for today it's l ting mm hmm. And Julian el
ting was born William Julian Dalton known as Billy, on
May fourteenth, eight one, some sources reported as eighteen eighty three, though,
So just know that if you go looking. He was
(02:35):
born to Michael and Julia Baker Dalton in Newtonville, Massachusetts.
Today Newtonville is one of the villages that makes up
the city of Newton. Four days after his birth, he
was baptized at Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church.
From there, Elting's story about how he got into show
business immediately gets fuzzy just from moment one. According to
(02:57):
some sources, the family moved west in pursuit of the
gold rush not not long after he was born. They
headed to California first, and then they backtracked to Butte, Montana.
So one would have been well after the peak of
the gold rush in California. But Baute was in its
mining heyday right around then, so that might make a
(03:17):
little bit of sense when he failed to make it
as a prospector, though Michael Dalton started working as a barber.
In this version of the story, Julia Dalton encouraged the
young billy to dress up and entertain patrons at nearby saloons,
but when his father caught him dancing in address, he
beat him as punishment and then sent him back to
(03:38):
Boston to live with an aunt. The other most common
version of Billy's early life is that at the age
of ten, he got a part in the Cadet Theatricals,
and these were all male performances that were staged by
the First Core of Cadets. The First Core of Cadets
was a volunteer militia connected to Boston's upper class. A
lot of its members were Harvard graduates with their own
(03:59):
all male theater experience in the form of Harvard's Hasty
Pudding Theatricals. The Cadet Theatricals were staged for fundraising purposes,
in this case to pay for the construction of an
armory that still stands today as the castle at Park
Plaza and in Boston. I found numerous references to the
fact that the reason they needed to an armory is
(04:21):
because they were afraid of an immigrant worker uprising, and
I went looking for exactly what that was, I mean,
other than just the tone of the time, Like, was
there a specific thing that prompted them to need to
build a giant castle like armory because of the threat
of immigrant worker uprisings? I did not go far enough
(04:42):
down that rabbit hole to answer it while writing this podcast,
but as the story goes, young Billy stole the show
so thoroughly that the group started writing parts just for him. So,
regardless of which of those stories is closer to the truth,
it does seem that at the age of fourteen, Billy
(05:04):
Dalton was in Boston working at a dry goods store,
and in nine hundred he definitely did have a role
in the Cadets theatrical production of Milady and the Musketeer,
which was a parody of the Three Musketeers. He had
been taking dance classes with Lila Vaile's Wyman, who ran
a dance school above Boston's Tremont Theater she had reckoned.
(05:26):
She had recommended him to Robert Barnett, who did everything
from writing to producing with the Cadet Theatricals. I have
a question, yep, it's there any possibility that these variant
stories of his background were maybe seated by him, the
person who also chose a name that could be pronounced
differently to set himself in people's minds. That is likely, um.
(05:51):
And there's I mean, there's also there's stuff that as
I was researching this, there would be lines in in
papers that were like, you should take all of this
media coverage with a grain of salt, because a lot
of this, like entertainment reporters would just make up quotes
from people. By this point, working with the Cadet Theatricals,
(06:11):
Billy Dalton had already started going by the name Billy Elting,
having borrowed the surname of a childhood friend. He wasn't
a member of the First Core of Cadets or a
Harvard graduate, even though later publicity would claim that he
had gone to Harvard. Nevertheless, he was cast as Mignonette,
and this may be where the discrepancy and his birth
year comes from. He was about to turn nineteen, but
(06:33):
the rest of the cast thought he was more like
fifteen or sixteen. Milady and the Musketeer raised thousand dollars
to help pay off the mortgage on the First Core
of Cadets giant castle like Armory, and the show was
generally praised. Elting's performance in particular, was very well reviewed,
with some Boston papers saying that he was a better
(06:54):
dancer than the man in the lead female role. The
next year, Barnett was Stay Aaging, a show for the
Bank Officers Association. Like the First Core of Cadets, the
Bank Officers Association staged all male reviews to raise money,
in this case for a fund to help its members
if they became ill or disabled. The play was missed Simplicity,
(07:15):
and Barnett wrote the role of Claire Deloineville for his
rising star Billy Elting. Here is how the Boston Evening
Transcript reviewed this performance. Quote as in the Cadet Theatricals,
one had here fresh proof of how bewitchingly, intoxicating, le
beautiful a young man can be in girl's clothes. Anything
(07:35):
more unsettling than Mr. Elting's Claire Deloineville were hard to imagine.
Even his veiled baritone voice had the perturbing, velvety charm
of a rich, subdued contralto. There was not an item
in his whole appearance, look, manner, and action that was
not delusively feminine. Looking into a mirror, he might like
(07:57):
narcissus fall in love with himself. That reviewers seems almost angry,
and how good a female person he is. Miss Simplicity
brought in ten thousand dollars for the Bank Officers Association.
In three they put on Barren Humbug, described as a
Hungarian musical play with Elting cast in the role of
(08:17):
Countess Sylvia. Although the show itself drew mixed reviews, Elting's
performance was once again highly praised. The Sunday Harold called
it a revelation, and its reviewer wrote, quote one almost
wondered if the bank officers had not secured a remarkably
attractive actress to play the role. At this point, Milly
Elting was well known in Boston and to some extent
(08:40):
outside of it, because some of the shows that he
was in would sometimes go on tour after the end
of their Boston run. But after his performance and Miss Simplicity,
he got a chance to go on Broadway. And we
will talk more about that. After a sponsor break. After
(09:00):
the Boston run of Miss Simplicity closed, composer and producer
Edward E. Rice hired Julian Elting, who by now had
dropped the name Billy, to appear on Broadway. The show
was Mr Wicks of Wickham and it opened at the
Bijou Theater on September nineteen o four, and his role
of John Smith, Elting dressed as a woman and sang
(09:21):
a song called not Like Other Girls. That's how many
times called the show. Quote catchy and refined, and called
Elting's performance one of its two big hits, but The
New York Times called it a poor show, poorly acted
with no redeeming features. It's just like movie reviews today. Um.
(09:44):
In spite of those decidedly mixed reviews, this was a
great time for Elding to make his way to New York.
Theater in New York City goes way back before the
nineteen hundreds, but the theater district we now know as
Broadway was just getting started in nineteen o four. The
Amsterdam and the Lyceum were two of the earliest Broadway theaters,
and they were both built in nineteen o three. In
(10:07):
nineteen o four, Long Acre Square was renamed Times Square
after the New York Times opened its office tower at
the intersection of forty two and Broadway. The Times Square
subway station to open that year as well, and theater
started relocating from the Union Square and Medicine Square Garden
areas to this newly booming district. By thanks to all
(10:28):
the newly installed electric lighting, this stretch of Broadway would
be called the Great White Way. Vaudeville was also thriving
in New York at this time, Both vaudeville and American
burlesque had roots in the minstrel shows that had been
popular in the United States from the early nineteenth century
through the years after the end of the Civil War.
(10:49):
In minstrel shows, white actors in black face put on
acts that lampoon and stereotyped black people, sometimes lifting the
work of black playwrights and songwriters to do it. Although
women eventually became a bigger part of minstrel performance, especially
in the earlier years, women's roles were usually played by men. Minstrel, vaudeville,
(11:11):
and burlesque shows all had some elements in common, but
with a very different theme in tone. By the time
that minstrel shows fell out of favor, female impersonation and
male impersonation were both part of vaudeville and burlesque. Vaudeville
impersonators were often very careful to frame their acts as
wholesome family entertainment, while burlesque impersonators sometimes took a more
(11:35):
satirical or titillating approach. Elting had made his vaudeville debut
at B. F. Keep's Theater in Boston, and he continued
his vaudeville performances as he was becoming more well known
in New York. Female impersonators in general tended to be
some of Vaudeville's highest paid performers, and Elting was one
of the highest paid among them. For his act, he
(11:57):
put on a corset, dresses, makeup and win eggs, and
he wedged to speed into dainty little shoes to carry
off the illusion that he was a beautiful woman on
a stage. He also sang as a bare tone opting
opting not to use a falsetto voice or to otherwise
try to make his voice sound higher than it really was.
Sometimes he'd take his wig off at the end of
(12:18):
his performances to show the audience that he was a man.
Here's how he described it quote, A man on the
stage must make up differently than a woman. His idea
is to give strong lines to his face, accent the
masculine traits, and tone down whatever softer feminine lines nature
has endowed him with. In my work, it is just
(12:38):
the opposite. I must tone down the dominant masculine characteristics
of my face and figure and seek to bring out
those feminine lines that even the most masculine man has
somewhere about him. A man does not have to worry
much about the correct color of rouge or powder to
go with his complexion. But with a woman's makeup, that
is where you find true art. Whether it was on
(13:01):
uh more traditional Broadway theater or whether it was in vaudeville,
Julian Elting and his female impersonation became enormously popular, especially
among women. In the words of comedian and actor W. C.
Fields quote, women went into ecstasies over him, men went
into the smoking room, and as a side note, are
(13:24):
recent podcast subject Windsor Mackay drew him as part of
an act at the Orpheum Vaudeville Theater in Chicago. We
did not mean for all of these things to interlode,
didn't uh. In fact, we had already um I in
my imagination that episode had already even come out to
(13:44):
listeners when I discovered that. But my that's not correct.
We had recorded it, but it wasn't actually released as
of when we are doing this right now in the studio.
So in New York, Elting became friends with playwright and
composer George M. Cohen, who the song give my regards
to Broadway and along with a lot of other big
names in show business. Cohen was a Freemason and a
(14:06):
member of Pacific Lodge number two thirty three. Elting eventually
joined the Freemasons as well, and was able to make
a lot of show business connections through the through the lodge.
By seven, Elting was so famous that he was able
to go on a European tour to Vienna, Berlin, Paris
and London. In London, he gave a command performance for
(14:27):
King Edward the Seventh that Windsor Castle. The King was
so delighted that he gave Elting a white bulldog as
a thank you gift. In nineteen ten, The Fascinating Widow
debuted in New Jersey with Elting as the star. Auto
Harbuck had written the play especially for him, and it
featured Elting in male and female roles, with a lot
(14:49):
of costume changes back and forth between them. The basic premise,
Elting plays a man who gets into legal trouble after
punching someone in the nose and disguises himself as the
eponymous Fascinating Widow to make his escape. Because of the
huge success of The Fascinating Widow, these quick changes between
masculine and feminine clothing became a hallmark of Elting's performances.
(15:14):
I wish I had a good grasp of the logistics
of that. Yeah, I tried to figure out um exactly,
like I tried to get a better play by play
of how all this would go down. I am imagining
there were stage hands and and dressers and costumers helping
with all of the quick changes. But I didn't find
(15:36):
a lot of discussion of that. Like I mean, I've,
you know, done enough theater that I I know how
a quick change of clothing works. But it's the makeup
that makes me go After we had just heard in
his own words, how differently you had to do makeup
for performing as a woman versus performing as a man.
It just gives me curiosities. There was makeup and hair involved,
(15:59):
and core And also he was not a small person.
He like I saw one thing that said he was
six feet tall and another that said that he was
five nine, But the five nine was talking about when
he was doing his teenage roles, So like he he
wasn't a petite person. So like he was wearing these
(16:19):
custom made gowns that would would fit his rather large
body and putting on corsets and on and on. It's
it seems exhausting to me. I would watch that part
of the show. Can I pay to sit backstage and
watch that happen? But this same year that we're talking about,
before we went on our divergence on quick Changes, Elting
(16:41):
became the highest paid male actor in the country with
a contract that guaranteed him three thousand dollars a week.
Producer A. H. Woods also offered him a contract plus
ten thousand dollars capital to start the Woods Elting in
Bloom Theater Company. Construction on the Elting Theater on Street
started in nineteen eleven. The Fascinating Widow opened on Broadway
(17:03):
that year as well, running for fifty two performances before
going on tour. Fifty two doesn't sound like a lot
in terms of today's Broadway schedule, where shows will run
for years and years and years and years, but at
the time that was a more successful run. The Elting
Theater opened in nineteen twelve after Julian had returned from
(17:26):
touring with The Fascinating Window Widow, but by the time
the theater was finished, he was drawing crowds that were
just too big for the Elting Theaters eight and eighty
nine seats to handle. He never wound up performing at
the theater that was named after him. He also eventually
sold his share of the theater company back to A. H. Woods,
saying that he liked being on stage a lot more
(17:48):
than he likes trying to run things. Elting was at
the height of his theatrical career, but the tone of
his press coverage started to shift in the nineteen teens.
In most of viewers wrote about his flawlessly pulling off
the illusion of femininity, the loveliness of his voice, and
his skill at dancing. But over the next few years,
(18:09):
more and more of his reviews were laced through with
the idea that female impersonators were suspicious and that Elting
stood out in contrast to them. One review ran in
The New York Evening World that said, quote, there are
a host of female impersonators, and those who are not
abominations are pests. Elting is the exception. This media coverage
(18:31):
reflected shifting social views. Gender roles were starting to shift
in the wake of World War One, and, as as
so often happens when social norms are starting to change,
people who lived outside of those norms in one way
or another, we're seen as at best suspects, so female
impersonation was being seen less as a suitable form of entertainment,
(18:54):
especially for women, and more as some kind of hints
that a performer might be dv in some way. Elting
worked continually to combat this suspicion. On stage. He refused
to take flowers when they were offered to him from
the footlights, because that would be too feminine. He also
only took parts where there was some need for his
(19:15):
character to cross dress. The reasons for cross dressing weren't
necessarily wholesome. Sometimes it was to escape after having committed
a crime, but it's not portrayed as just for fun
or because he enjoys it. His nineteen fifteen role in
Cousin Lucy is a good example. Written by Charles Klein
with music by Jerome Kern, Cousin Lucy is a three
(19:37):
act musical farce about a man who fakes his own
death and assumes the identity of his air that being
Cousin Lucy. This play required Elting to make dozens of
costume changes, with the costumes themselves being one of the
most highly praised things about the show, but the reviews
highlight what we've just been talking about. The October nine,
(19:59):
fifteen edition of The American Theater reads quote. A considerable
number of persons resent the appearance on the stage of
female impersonators, and the more capable they are in presentation
of female charms, vagaries, and foibles, the more deep rooted
becomes the prejudice. On the other hand, there would seem
to be a still greater number who fairly batten on
(20:20):
such anomalous fair. Julian Elting, the real leader in this
curious form of art, has made a fortune imitating the
fair sex. Offstage, Elting presented himself as abundantly masculine. He
smoked cigars and boxed, including staging boxing matches for public
display when he was on tour. There were also rumors
(20:42):
that he started fights with anyone who dared to call
him a sissy. This masculinity played a part in his marketing.
To His publicity photos always included pictures of him and
masculine attire as his quote real self, in addition to
the pictures of him in feminine costume. Sometimes posters and
programs for the shows included both pictures together in one frame.
(21:06):
In interviews, he also talked about how this was just
an act, that he didn't enjoy wearing dresses, and that
if he could make his living without doing female impersonation,
he certainly would. Even though female impersonation was starting to
be viewed with increasing distrust, Elting's biggest career move was
still to come. And we're going to talk about Elting
(21:28):
in Hollywood after a sponsor break. Julian Elting had become
famous on stage in New York City. His name was
so synonymous with female impersonation that it became shorthand for
stage roles that involved cross dressing, sort of like Timmy
(21:49):
was cast in the Julian Elting role in the play.
This made the research interesting. As I was reading archival
newspaper articles, there were all these results for Julian Elting
that were really about other people being described as being
in the Julian Elting role. This work, though, was really
taking its hole on him. Most of his performances required
(22:10):
numerous high speed changes in and out of costumes, and
his feminine costumes tended to involve corsets and layers and
heavy gowns, and just doing that work under hot stage
lights in theaters that didn't have air conditioning was exhausting
his most successful plays also went on tour after they
closed their runs, making stops and cities large and small,
(22:33):
and the travel itself was almost as physically demanding as
the time on stage. So as films started to grow
in popularity, the idea of starring in them wasn't just
about potentially becoming even wealthier and more famous. It was
about working on a schedule that didn't require thirty five
costume changes a night under hot lights. He wouldn't have
(22:54):
to keep an entire show's worth of lines committed to memory,
or take his work on the road. He could at
his work to studios and sets and actually have time
to rest between pictures. If he was working in film,
he'd also have more time to devote to some of
his other pursuits. There was a Julian Elting cosmetic line,
which included a particularly popular cold cream keeping up that
(23:17):
masculine appearance. There was also Julian Elting Cigars. He published magazines,
including Julian Elting's Magazine of Beauty Hints and Tips. One
of these tips was that women should take up boxing
to help improve their confidence. Elting was also a supporter
of the movement for women's suffrage and a proponent of
the idea that you should just lay off what other
(23:40):
women are wearing. In the interview with the Boston Globe,
he said, quote, let woman be happy in her own way.
If she thinks she looks well with a barrel of
false hair on her head, let her wear it. If
she wants to powder, to paint, or to crowd a
number two shoe on a six and a half foot
let her do it if she can. When a reporter
rebutted that this hypothetical person might be making a caricature
(24:02):
of herself, Elting answered, quote, possibly, but she doesn't know it.
On the contrary, she believes she has added to her
personal adornment. I repeat, let her go on thinking so
since it makes her happy. Spending more time in front
of a camera instead of on stage gave Elting more
time and more energy for all of this stuff that
we've been talking about. He made his film debut with
(24:25):
a cameo in How Molly Malone Made Good in nineteen fifteen.
In nineteen seventeen, he signed a three picture contract with
Lasky Paramount Company, and all that touring that he had
done with the stage performances really paid off. The huge
audience that he had already established followed him directly to
movie theaters, and for a time he was a bigger
box office draw than Charlie Chaplin. His films included silent
(24:49):
adaptations of some of his stage work, including The Fascinating Widow,
and in many he had the starring role. He was
Clifford Townsend, who disguised himself as the idle adventuring woman
in The Adventurous. In Made to Order, he disguised himself
as a woman to infiltrate a gang of diamond smugglers.
In Madam Behave, he was Jack Mitchell, who disguised himself
(25:12):
as the aforementioned Madam when an important witness disappears during
a court case. He also appeared in an all star
production of patriotic episodes for the Second Liberty Loan with
Mary Pickford, after which she nicknamed him Lady Bill. Combined
with his stage work, Elting's work in film made him
incredibly wealthy. After his death, the Associated Press reported that
(25:36):
at his wealthiest, he'd been worth about three million dollars.
It was also during his time in Hollywood that he
built his Los Angeles mansion, a Spanish colonial revival full
of antiques called Villa Capistronome. This was one of several
homes he owned on both coasts, and he lived there
with his mother. Even at the height of his film popularity,
(25:58):
he did do some work on stage, and he continued
to be well received, especially when he went back to
the city where he got his start. One review from
Boston in nineteen eighteen read quote, although it is a
corking good bill all the way through the program at
Keith's this week, if deprived of all but the headline act,
would fill the house for the headliners. Julian Elting, native Bostonian,
(26:22):
sometime member of the Boston Cadets and leading female impersonator
in the world, who, after winning laurels on many stages
and on the screen, is back for the brief space
of a week on the stage where he made his
professional debut. You wouldn't know it from that review, but
the widespread suspicion of cross dressing and female impersonation was
(26:44):
really growing in the late nineteen teens. The public, the media,
and law enforcement began to conflate the idea of cross
dressing with the idea of homosexuality, which at the time
was viewed as deviant homosexuality and cross dressing became were
and more entwined in people's minds, and more and more
cities and states passed laws to ban both homosexual behavior
(27:07):
and cross dressing. In California, where Elting was living, so
called crimes against nature had been outlawed since in eighteen fifty.
The law was updated to name specific sex acts in
nineteen fifteen, and at the same time, police in California
started rating and breaking up drag parties, balls, and other
events where people, especially men, cross dressed, charging those arrested
(27:32):
with quote social vagrancy. Elting managed to keep his stage
and film career going in spite of all this social change.
Through the nineteen twenties. His movies were a huge box
office draw, and he was still performing to sell out
crowds at theaters all over the country. But then in
nineteen thirty he dropped from public view. The Motion Picture
(27:54):
Production Code AK the Hayes Code, was released that year.
It was, more formally quote a code to maintain social
and community values in the production of silence, synchronized and
talking motion pictures. Under the heading of sex. Number four
was sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden
(28:14):
and that included female impersonation. Elting had spent his entire
life trying to completely separate himself from anything that might
make anyone think he was, in the language of the time,
an invert. If he had ever done anything to make
anyone think that he was having a relationship with another man,
his career would have been over immediately. We just had
(28:36):
an episode on James Whale, who was like totally contradictory
to this idea. He was an openly gay man at
the same time as this, But James Whale's career was
not dependent upon him doing something that was already seen
as suspicious in terms of gender. He was also not
performing for the public like as a director, he was
(28:57):
removed from the public eye. So Julian Elting never had
a public relationship with anyone. He didn't even have close
friendships with other men in his industry. When he died,
hundreds of people came to his funeral, but everyone who
spoke at it could only really talk about his career.
No one could talk about him as a person because
(29:19):
no one really knew him, and it's not completely clear
what elting sexual orientation was. Harry Hay was co founder
of the Matachine Society, which was one of the first
gay rights organizations in the United States back when the
gay rights movement was known as the homophile movement. He
told historian and author Daniel Herowitz that Elting was involved
(29:41):
with other men in a phone interview that he gave
in But the creators of a documentary called Lady Bill
The Julian Elting Story give a totally different read of
his life. In their projects description at the New York
Foundation for the Arts, they say, quote, it has taken
years to uncover the threads of Elting's private life, but
we have finally located family and relatives of friends, many
(30:03):
of whom retained both his possessions and letters. Every bit
of evidence points to the fact that Julian Elting was
not a homosexual. In fact, fear of public condemnation transformed
Julian Elting into a man with a distinctly a sexual
personality who poured his soul into the perfection of his art, which,
in the end, in spite of all his efforts to
(30:25):
maintain its legitimacy, became the object of ridicule and hate.
This makes his tragedy perhaps even greater, Regardless of the
question of identity. Same sex relationships were suspicious at best
when Julian Elting lived, and he made a lifelong effort
to give the world absolutely no cause for suspicion. But
(30:46):
that couldn't protect him from a rising tide of homophobia,
or from the perception that homosexuality and cross dressing were
absolutely connected. It also couldn't protect him from laws that
were passed because of this perception. In other words, the
Hayes Code meant that Elting could not work in film.
The increasing existence of laws against cross dressing meant that
(31:08):
he could not work on stage either. All of this
happened not long after the onset of the Great Depression,
during which Elting lost most of his fortune, so he
mostly disappeared for about a decade, during which time he
struggled with alcohol abuse. In ninety Elting tried to make
a comeback. He was supposed to appear at Hollywood's Cafe
(31:29):
Rendezvous in January of that year, but the police wouldn't
let him in. When they finally did let him perform,
it wasn't as a female impersonator. Instead, he wore a
tuxedo with one of his dresses next to him on
a mannequin. He performed the songs that he was scheduled
to sing, and in between them he described the dresses
he would have had on if he had been allowed
(31:51):
to do so. Back in New York, lyricistem producer Billy
Rose had opened a nightclub called the Diamond Horseshoe and
the Paramount Hotel and Tie Square in ninety eight, and
in nineteen forty one he invited Elting to perform there.
Elting did go on, but he became ill during a performance,
and he was found dead in his apartment on March seventh,
(32:12):
nineteen forty one, at the age of fifty nine. The
cause of his death is not clear, and although he
continued to be known as the greatest of all impersonators
of women for at least a decade after his death,
his name mostly faded from public memory. So to end
on a slightly happier note, the Elting Theater still exists today.
(32:34):
It became a burlesque house during the Great Depression, and
when obscenity laws put an end to burlesque performance, it
was made into a movie theater. It closed for a time,
and then on March second, it was moved a little
more than a hundred and fifty feet down forty two
street from the seventh Avenue end of the block toward
the eighth Avenue end, and there it became the lobby
(32:55):
of a MC Empire five. During this move and restoration concern,
emitters pieced together a mural that had been part of
the original Elting theater. It portrayed the three muses and conservatives.
Work involved reassembling the pieces of the mural, repairing some
cuts and holes, and removing all of paint. As they worked,
(33:15):
they came to the conclusion that all three of the
muses are Julian Elting, based on similarities to his appearance
and demeanor and clothing and his publicity photos. So if
you go to the AMC Empire twenty five your Times Square,
you can look up at the ceiling. That's probably Julian
Elting looking back at you. That's so cool. Now I
know what I'm gonna do next time I'm in New York.
(33:38):
I kept looking. I was like, that's the theater right
by where we always stay whenever we're in New York.
For so also giant thanks to my friend Amy for
loaning me the Book of Bohemian Los Angeles and The
Making of Modern Politics by Daniel Hurwitz, which inspired this episode,
like maybe a year ago, Amy, I promise I'm going
to bring this book back to you the next time
(34:00):
I see you. I have now had it for an
embarrassingly long time. No one ever land me anything. I
think we all fall victim to that, especially you know,
in a job like ours, where we're doing lots of reading.
It's easy for books to get shuffled around on the
priority list. That's something things don't make it back up
for a year, it happen. I even I had read
(34:21):
the book. I had thought I should do a podcast
sometime on this Julian Elting person. Uh, And then I
brought the book with me to return it to her,
and then left it behind by accident when we went
to dinner. And that, Yeah, I'm just not very responsible
with other people's belongings apparently. So that's the story of
(34:43):
Julian Elting. Now, do you have a listener mail for us?
I do. This is from Erica. Erica says, thank you
for your wonderful podcast. I found it several months ago,
and it has made my commute and busy work portions
of my job so much more enjoyable. I very much
enjoyed your recent episode on a lot of rhine ger,
especially the portion about her film Prince Ahmed. I was
immediately reminded of the Prince Ahmed character in Aladdin, which
(35:07):
touches on the same stories. I wonder if that was
a deliberate inclusion by Disney, perhaps as a homage to
her pioneering work. It seems there are several references to
her film in Disney's Aladdin, apart from the name itself,
including the battle with Jafar as a giant snake. I
am also reminded that I had meant to email you
after I listened to the Last Carolina Parakeet episode in March.
(35:30):
Just one month after that episode aired, the last male
Northern white rhino died after months of failing health. He
was named Sudan and living in a conservancy in Kenya
which have been trying to save the species through breathing attempts,
which failed. This leaves only two female northern white rhinos
left in the world. Both are there at the same conservancy,
(35:51):
and the only hope for the species is advances in
cell biology or cloning and rhino I vf listening to
the fate of Lonesome George of my Heart. But I
thank you for breaking more attention to the destruction of
these subspecies thanks to human activity. Thanks again for all
the fascinating topics. I always look forward to the next releases.
Best Erica. I don't know if Holly has answers to
(36:14):
the Aladdin question, since that episode was her research. I
don't have a definitive answer. I will tell you this,
particularly after having worked on Drawn. The more people you
talk to in the animation industry, the more you realize
almost all of them really love animation history. So I
would be shocked if that were not a purposeful direct reference.
(36:38):
Oh yeah, cool. If you have not listened to Drawn,
that is the podcast that Holly has been working on
with Cartoon Network. That is lovely. Why, thank you, and
I'll talk about cartoons, which is like heaven. And I
also wanted to read this email because of the part
about the last northern white Rhino that did seem to
(36:58):
happen almost immediately after that episode came out, which is
that doesn't happen that often, but periodically we will put
on an episode and then right after that something will
happen that seems directly connected to what we just talked about.
And so when that happened, we had a lot of
people that were like, oh, did you hear about the rhino? Yes,
we had some very sad story. So if you would
(37:21):
like to write to us about this or any other podcast,
History podcast, we're at History Podcast at how stuff works
dot com. And we're also on social media as a
miss in History. That is our Facebook and Pinterest and
Instagram and Twitter. And you can come to our website,
which is missing history dot com, find show notes for
all the episodes Holly and I have done together and
a searchable archive of every episode ever. And you can
(37:43):
find and subscribe to our podcast or drawn at Apple podcast,
Google Play, wherever else you get podcasts. For more on
this and thousands of other topics, does it how stuff
works dot com
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