December 16, 2025 • 24 mins
On today’s episode, we go back in time to December 16, 1905, to celebrate Variety’s 120th birthday. Showbiz historians David Monod and Peter Rader explain what the entertainment marketplace was like at the time Variety was born.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
We know most of what we know about vaudeville because
of the existence of Variety. Variety was the first to
actually review shows and talk about what was being performed
on the stages.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and
analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's December sixteenth, nineteen oh five.
I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co editor in
chief of Arriety alongside Ramin Setuda. I'm in La He's
in New York, and Riety has reporters around the world
covering the business of entertainment. On today's episode, as teased
(00:47):
in that opening, we'll go back in time to nineteen
oh five. Fiety is marking its one hundred and twentieth
anniversary one two zero. We'll hear all about the business
of vaudeville and variety show entertainment, which was the focus
of the marketplace when we began. We'll hear from David Monno,
(01:08):
professor of American social and cultural history at Wilfrid Laurier
University in Waterloo, Ontario. He's an expert on the vaudeville business.
And we'll hear from author and screenwriter Peter Rader about
how new technology in the form of the gramophone and
one very savvy French actress created the star system that
now rules our world. But before we get to that,
(01:29):
here are a few facts and headlines about Variety that
you need to know. Our first issue hit New York's
newsstands on December sixteenth, nineteen oh five. As we promised
on our front cover, Variety in those days covered vaudeville circuses, parks,
ur lesque fairs, and more. The booking of entertainment for
summer parks and fairs that was a big beat. Each
(01:52):
issue a Variety cost five cents two dollars for a
year's subscription, three dollars for foreign subscribers. On the mast
head we declared a Variety paper for Variety people. Variety
was published on Saturdays out of the Knickerbocker Theater building
in Manhattan at thirty eighth and Broadway. The first issue
had a long and somewhat snarky essay about the vaudeville
(02:14):
business from famous theater critic Acton Davies. Those days, Variety
ran information on new acts, We ran reviews, and we
ran a lot of ads for new acts. Within ten years,
Variety would be such a trusted institution that many vaudeville
artists declared Variety in New York to be their permanent address.
(02:35):
They'd get mail and packages sent there. We'd hold it
for them and they'd pick it up when they got
back into town. Variety was founded by Sime Silverman. He
was a journalist from upstate New York who wrote about
entertainment and vaudeville for numerous New York newspapers. He was
working for the Morning Telegraph when he got fired after
panning a vaudeville show. The theater pulled its advertising and
(02:57):
he got the boot. He got mad, he got inspired,
and he borrowed twenty five hundred dollars from his father
in law to launch Variety. As you'll hear from Professor
David Mono in a Moment, variety was a catch all
term to describe a type of stage show with a
multitude of acts. Vaudeville was a specific form of variety show,
(03:19):
but the concept of the variety show goes back to
the mid eighteen hundreds, so the word variety, in all
of its v tastic glory, was a spot on choice
for the name of Silverman's paper. Silverman Ran Variety, with
a firm hand out of Midtown Offices on forty sixth
Street in New York for nearly thirty years. He died
on September twenty second, nineteen thirty three, in Los Angeles.
(03:42):
He was out there because just a few weeks earlier,
we launched the Daily Variety Edition published out of Hollywood
on September sixth, nineteen thirty three. If all of this
history is as interesting to you as it is to me,
please go find our precious December tenth print edition. It
has a very big section that celebrates Varieties one hundred
and twentieth anniversary by looking at the history of the
(04:05):
business that we cover. It's a terrific issue which also
has the Netflix Warner Brothers paramount Brawl on the cover.
You can, of course, also find it online at Variety
dot com. My colleague Dan do Proolski built out a
nifty Variety one twenty digital hub on Variety dot com.
It also has a slanguage dictionary that explains the zany
(04:27):
words that we made up in a way that really
helped knit the community together. As Sime said, a Variety
paper for Variety people. And now we turn to a
conversation with Professor David Monno. He's the author of Vaudeville
and the Making of Modern Entertainment eighteen ninety to nineteen
(04:49):
twenty five. He has so much insight for us about
what the entertainment marketplace was like when Variety was born.
Professor David Mono, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Well, thank you for your having to hear.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
I went looking for somebody who was an expert on
the business of vaudeville, and your book Vaudeville and the
Making of Modern Entertainment popped up. I was so excited
that you said yes very quickly. As we celebrate Varieties
one hundred and twentieth anniversary, I thought it would be
instructive to talk about what was the entertainment marketplace like
at that time, particularly in New York where we were born.
(05:24):
And of course, if you look through our first bunch
of issues, you can just see the coalescing of this
entertainment infrastructure, so much of it around New York. Professor,
can you sketch the scene if somebody had a dime
or two in their pocket and they wanted to go
out and have a show, and they happened to live
in New York or Boston or a big city where
you could find that. What kind of a marketplace was
(05:44):
it in nineteen oh five.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
It's a transforming one. So there's a fairly wide variety
of new entertainments and there are lingering older entertainments. You
could still go out to see a melodrama if you
were to New York, possibly go out to see a
tent show or a traveling show. If you had a dime.
(06:06):
You'd probably end up going to a pretty cheap, lot
built theater. You wouldn't get into the legitimate in terms
of the conventional theater. Or you go to a burlesque
if you wanted to see a burlets show, or you
could go out and get a drink in a saloon.
But vaudeville was certainly the growing entertainment, and its relationship
with variety was organic. We know most of what we
(06:29):
know about vaudeville because of the existence of variety, and
a variety hadn't been there, it would be a much
darker entertainment for us. It was covered in the newspapers,
but sporadically and usually very briefly. A variety was the
first to actually review shows and talk about what was
being performed. On the stages. But it was also the
(06:51):
first to carry entertainment business news, so we know a
lot about what was happening on the business side from
the page of the Variety. Variety, not the magazine, but Variety,
which is what's really performed in vaudeville, and one has
to distinguish those two. Is a much older entertainment, dates
back to the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, and it
(07:14):
was performed in a number of different venues, and it
would survive long after vaudeville disappeared. I think the two
golden ages of variety were probably about nineteen oh five
to nineteen twenty, and then again in the nineteen sixties
and seventies when TV was full of variety shows, and
so variety is much longer lasting. Vaudeville was really a
(07:36):
business form that organized the variety show and presented in
a different format, and so it is a diverse entertainment market.
Vaudeville it still starts up in the eighteen eighties because
there is an effort across America cities to separate the
(07:58):
barrooms from the theaters. It's considered immoral to sit and
drink and look at a show and so municipal legislation
has passed, and then state legislation has passed across the
northeast and gradually spreads its way west, which prohibits drinking
and watching a show. And as that happens, and owners
(08:21):
have to make a decision are they going to run
a theater and get rid of the drinking or are
they going to stay with a barroom and get rid
of the show. And those who made the decision to
get rid of the barroom and keep the show needed
a new name for what they were doing, and they
latched on the name of vaudeville, which was a French
(08:44):
name that had been used since the seventeen nineties for
a higher class a variety. And that's where Vaudeville came from.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
A give us a sense of what it was like
to go to a vaudeville show at say a big
house in New York.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Sure, peanuts not popcorn. Tina was with the thing of choice,
and people would spit out the shells. One of the
reasons vodola is so transformative is that it was the
first effort to democratize commercial leisure by making it accessible
(09:20):
and by making it inexpensive. So early in the century
of a vaudevill show, depending on if it was a
small theater or a more prestigious theater. A more prestigious
theater may cost you fifty cents that a less prestigious
theory are dying. By nineteen ten, the more prestigious theaters
(09:41):
are charging up to two dollars and they have reserve seating.
The less prestigious have gone up to above thirty five cents,
so there is inflation in prices.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
House lights were.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Left on so that the people on stage could see
the audience very clearly. There was a tradition of getting
up and moving around during the show. You didn't sit
quietly through the show. So a vaudeville show was made
up of somewhere between ten or fifteen short acts that
(10:12):
would last, some of them ten minutes, some of them
twenty minutes, and an act was on that you didn't like,
you could actually get up and leave and come back
twenty minutes later. Reserve seating was quite a new thing.
The best houses introduced the reserve seating in the eighteen nineties.
It was pretty common among the better class of vaudeville theaters.
(10:32):
By nineteen ten, the theater was quite segregated. If you
were an African American, you could only sit up in
the gallery, the top layer of the balcony. Children also
sat there. Vadna was a place where parents would tell
their kids to go after school if they were working late,
and they would give them a dime to go and
(10:54):
sit up in the balcony and stay in the theater
for a couple of hours until they got There was
a board next to the stage which announced the next
act that would come out. It was all carefully timed
because if you wanted to go out to the theater,
you needed to know that at eight ten the act
(11:15):
you wanted to see was coming. On the business of
organizing a Volvoll show it was quite complicated because different
acts used more or less of the stage, and so
theater managers had to organize the show in such a
way that they could close the curtains and put performance
(11:36):
at the front of the stage while they were setting
up the stage behind for the next act. And so
singers and comics were always very popular because you could
close the curtain behind them while you set up the
stage for acrobats or for an animal act, or for
a short play.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Can you talk about the booking processes. I know that
in time that gets developed, But in that nineteen oh five,
in that right turn of the century, was it a
very organized business.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
It started in the earliest days of Vautville, individual theaters
booking their own and performers would correspond with theater managers
to say, I'm going to be in your area in
two weeks time, have you got anything for me? And
so it was a very complicated and hard to work
(12:28):
on my business. Already by the eighteen eighties, various theaters
are beginning to collaborate together because it doesn't take much
to realize that if you can book somebody for three
weeks and then put them on a circuit so that
they would perform one week in one theater, then moved
to the next theater, and then moved to a third theater,
(12:49):
and if they were all close together, the performers would
be more inclined to accept that than they would if
you were just doing an individual booking. And so that's
how the circuits started up.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
If you're a vaudeville performer in these days, will you
have multiple shows a day or is it pretty much
one show a night?
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Most theaters ran between two and four shows a day,
depending on how long those shows are. Some of the
smaller theaters would run four shows a day because they
didn't have enough material, and after nineteen hundred, with short movies,
so that you might have five or six acts, and
in between those five or six acts, you'd show a
(13:29):
couple of films.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
What would say a star, maybe not a megastar, but
an established vaudeville performer, what could they expect to make
a week or a show?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Widely divergent. Now, this is a time when if you
were a a bank clerk, you'd probably be earning about
fifteen hundred to two thousand a year. If you're a
factory laborer, you'd probably be earning about one thousand dollars
a year. A big vaudeville star, the Annette Kellermans, the
Tang Gays, they would be pulling in about two thousand
(14:03):
to three thousand a week, and so it was huge
salaries for the biggest stars. If you were starting out
in pop Vaudville, a small time performing in between movies,
you would probably get fifteen to twenty five dollars a week.
Most vaudvillians would perform maybe twenty weeks a year, so
(14:27):
but it's still meant that if you were a big
vaudeville star, you were forty fifty thousand dollars a year
in income at a time when a bank manager might
be rinning five.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Who were some of the biggest vaudeville stars of the
nineteen oh five nineteen tens.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
The biggest names around nineteen hundred were men. George Froller Golden,
who was really the first stand up comic, was the
highest paid vaudeville performer. Over the course of the first
decade of the twentieth century, they increasingly become women, and
it's the women who were in the highest salaries, people
(15:10):
like Gavatanga, who was for four or five years the
highest paid performer in vaudeville. And at Kellerman she was
a swimmer, an Australian who came and did a diving act.
Harry Houdini was always a big draw, the young Buster
Keaton was with the Keaton family on vaudeville.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Let me wrap up by asking you, I think I
can guess what may have hastened the end of vaudeville
as a dominant entertainment format. I'm guessing movies had something
to do with it. Radio had something to do, but tell.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Me basically competition. Vaudeville always operated on fairly tight margins,
so that you needed to fill your house to about
half full in order to make any money. And as
competition grew in the early twentieth century, not just from movies,
but also from cabaret that are growing up clubs that
(16:02):
are growing up reviews and roof gardens like Sigfeld's Roof
Garden Burlesque, which is also cutting into the law film market.
So all of these different entertainments are starting to chip
away at the money that you can make in entertainment
and buds. In order to respond, they moved towards consolidation
(16:26):
by shutting down less profitable vaudell houses and then investing
heavily in building huge places like the Palace in New York,
which we're going to be opulent, and which were very
expensive to build, and there's a stock market crash which
wipes a lot of them out.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Professor Monell, thank you for helping shed some light on
this and what the industry was like when we were born.
Really appreciate your time and your expertise.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Thank you, simpieving.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
And now we'll hear from Peter Rader, the author and screenwriter.
He wrote a terrific book a few years ago, Playing
to the Gods, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora duss and the rivalry
that changed acting. This great book is about to be
made into a movie directed by Michael Sussi. Here, Rader
talks about the entertainment marketplace in nineteen oh five and
(17:23):
how Sarah Bernhardt was the Taylor Swift of her day.
Peter Rader, author and screenwriter, Thank you so much for
joining me.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
You're so welcome. I'm thrilled to talk about this, Peter.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
People seeking entertainment, what kind of options would have been
available to people in New York circa nineteen oh five?
That era when Variety got started.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
Nineteen oh five is a really interesting year because it's
a year in which emergent technologies are about to revolutionize
the world of entertainment. You have, on the one hand,
from the emergence of Nickelodeon's and cities across America that
were not quite movies yet but sure but novelty shorts
that people would go in and see for five cents,
(18:04):
things like magic tricks or a train coming into a station,
or foreign capitals like Paris and London or Vaudeville. It
would be a series of shorts, your in and out
in twenty minutes, and that was your movie experience of
the day. And then even more revolutionary was that entertainment
had come into the home in the form of gramophone recordings.
(18:29):
The gramophone is that big trumpet record player that you
see on the RCA Victor logo where you'd get your
seventy eight RPM record. It wasn't vinyl quite yet, and
you would crank up your thing. There was no electricity involved.
It was all mechanical. Rank up your thing, it loads
the spring and this record spins for about three minutes,
(18:49):
and suddenly opera is in your home. Certainly, the most
famous opera singer of the day was Enrico Caruso from Naples, Italy,
who was like the Elvis Sinatra of his day. He
was super popular. He was selling records at the time
in the hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions. So
he's on his way to become a platinum recording artist.
(19:11):
And that's the technology that was about to disrupt the industry.
But the legit theater, that's where you went out and
saw things. En mass the Grand Dame of the theater
at the time was Sarah Bernhardt. She was arguably and
to this day, the most famous actress that ever lived.
Everyone knew Sarah Barnhart, whether you had seen her in
(19:32):
person or not, you had read about her in the newspaper,
because she invented the culture of celebrity, which was very canny.
She was her own producer, she ran her own company,
and she knew that the performance didn't end when the
curtain went down. It continued after hours, the after party,
the dinner party, and in the morning papers.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
What put her on the path to becoming really the
first entertainment star.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
Sarah Bernhardt has such a fascinating biography. She was the
illegitimate daughter of a courtisan who was essentially an escort
and a high end courtisan who would be with kings
and princes and very wealthy patrons. But she came into
the world in Paris, France. She was French, and she
(20:17):
absolutely became determined to seize her own destiny, and she
did it relentlessly. She had so much charisma. The way
she died on stage is legendary. She would take two
minutes to fall, spiral down to the floor, shrieking and
in most of her plays, she did die. She often
played tragic heroines who had die. But what really drove
(20:40):
her success was that she realized at some point that
she had so much fame she actually could seize her
own destiny by running her own company. That was unprecedented
for a woman to be running her own company, but
Sarah did it, and she did it brilliantly. She spent
exorbitant amounts of money on costume ums and the staging
(21:01):
and the sets. I mean, she was always on the
verge of bankruptcy and she would always rebound.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
How big of a troop would she have typically traveled
with in her heyday?
Speaker 4 (21:11):
Sarah famously owned a train car, so she had the
Sarah Bernard Express that she would hook on to, you know,
various trains and travel across the country, and it was
pretty much full. So I would say her entourage was
in the thirty to fifty maybe a half dozen to
a dozen of those would be actor. She also created
(21:32):
this idea of merch, so one thing that she did
was sell these souvenir collectibles called cabinet cards, which were
photographs of Sarah Bernhard doing eccentric, exotic things like sleeping
in her signature coffin, which she liked to do, or
wearing a bat hat, which was a hat with literally
(21:54):
a taxidermied bat sitting on it, and various other things.
She liked to dabble in the occult and do things
like Ouiji boards and stuff that was very popular in
the time. So she played with all aspects of her
personality to sort of magnetize and draw people in.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
As you've said, this woman was so ahead of her time.
She would have taken social media and she would just
own the world today.
Speaker 4 (22:20):
She was a prototype for people like you know, Liberaci
and Lady Gaga and David Bowie. The idea of be
eccentric and out there and that actually is fascinating to
the public.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Peter, thank you for coming on and help being a
little part of Variety celebrating are pretty awesome one hundred
and twentieth anniversary.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
You're so welcome. Happy birthday, Variety. This was a lot
of fun.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
As we close out today's episode, we'll give the last
word to Sime Silverman. This is an excerpt from the
editorial that ran in the first issue under the Masthead.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Variety in its initial issue, desires to announce the policy
governing the paper. We want you to read it. It
will be interesting, if for no other reason than that
it will be conducted on original lines for a theatrical newspaper.
The first, foremost and extraordinary feature of it will be fairness.
Whatever there is to be printed of interest to the
(23:16):
professional world will be printed without regard to whose name
is mentioned or the advertising columns. All the news, all
the time, and absolutely fair are the watchwords. The news
part of the paper will be given over to such
items as may be obtained, and nothing will be suppressed
which is considered of interest. We promise you this and
(23:37):
shall not deviate.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Thanks for listening. This episode was written and reported by
me Cynthia Littleton, with contributions from Clayton Davis, Sime Silverman,
and generations of Variety reporters who have labored for the
Mighty be What a history. I love the interviews with
David Mono and Peter Rader so much that longer versions
of both will run on Friday on Daily Variety sibling
(24:00):
podcast Strictly Business Stick Snicks Hick Picks. Please leave us
a review at the podcast platform of your choice, and
please tune in tomorrow for another episode of Daily Variety,
and don't forget to tell us what you think at
podcasts at Variety dot com.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
Thanks, I'm just fascinated that Variety is one hundred and
twenty years old. That really rocked my world.
We know most of what we know about vaudeville because
of the existence of Variety. Variety was the first to
actually review shows and talk about what was being performed
on the stages.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and
analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's December sixteenth, nineteen oh five.
I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co editor in
chief of Arriety alongside Ramin Setuda. I'm in La He's
in New York, and Riety has reporters around the world
covering the business of entertainment. On today's episode, as teased
(00:47):
in that opening, we'll go back in time to nineteen
oh five. Fiety is marking its one hundred and twentieth
anniversary one two zero. We'll hear all about the business
of vaudeville and variety show entertainment, which was the focus
of the marketplace when we began. We'll hear from David Monno,
(01:08):
professor of American social and cultural history at Wilfrid Laurier
University in Waterloo, Ontario. He's an expert on the vaudeville business.
And we'll hear from author and screenwriter Peter Rader about
how new technology in the form of the gramophone and
one very savvy French actress created the star system that
now rules our world. But before we get to that,
(01:29):
here are a few facts and headlines about Variety that
you need to know. Our first issue hit New York's
newsstands on December sixteenth, nineteen oh five. As we promised
on our front cover, Variety in those days covered vaudeville circuses, parks,
ur lesque fairs, and more. The booking of entertainment for
summer parks and fairs that was a big beat. Each
(01:52):
issue a Variety cost five cents two dollars for a
year's subscription, three dollars for foreign subscribers. On the mast
head we declared a Variety paper for Variety people. Variety
was published on Saturdays out of the Knickerbocker Theater building
in Manhattan at thirty eighth and Broadway. The first issue
had a long and somewhat snarky essay about the vaudeville
(02:14):
business from famous theater critic Acton Davies. Those days, Variety
ran information on new acts, We ran reviews, and we
ran a lot of ads for new acts. Within ten years,
Variety would be such a trusted institution that many vaudeville
artists declared Variety in New York to be their permanent address.
(02:35):
They'd get mail and packages sent there. We'd hold it
for them and they'd pick it up when they got
back into town. Variety was founded by Sime Silverman. He
was a journalist from upstate New York who wrote about
entertainment and vaudeville for numerous New York newspapers. He was
working for the Morning Telegraph when he got fired after
panning a vaudeville show. The theater pulled its advertising and
(02:57):
he got the boot. He got mad, he got inspired,
and he borrowed twenty five hundred dollars from his father
in law to launch Variety. As you'll hear from Professor
David Mono in a Moment, variety was a catch all
term to describe a type of stage show with a
multitude of acts. Vaudeville was a specific form of variety show,
(03:19):
but the concept of the variety show goes back to
the mid eighteen hundreds, so the word variety, in all
of its v tastic glory, was a spot on choice
for the name of Silverman's paper. Silverman Ran Variety, with
a firm hand out of Midtown Offices on forty sixth
Street in New York for nearly thirty years. He died
on September twenty second, nineteen thirty three, in Los Angeles.
(03:42):
He was out there because just a few weeks earlier,
we launched the Daily Variety Edition published out of Hollywood
on September sixth, nineteen thirty three. If all of this
history is as interesting to you as it is to me,
please go find our precious December tenth print edition. It
has a very big section that celebrates Varieties one hundred
and twentieth anniversary by looking at the history of the
(04:05):
business that we cover. It's a terrific issue which also
has the Netflix Warner Brothers paramount Brawl on the cover.
You can, of course, also find it online at Variety
dot com. My colleague Dan do Proolski built out a
nifty Variety one twenty digital hub on Variety dot com.
It also has a slanguage dictionary that explains the zany
(04:27):
words that we made up in a way that really
helped knit the community together. As Sime said, a Variety
paper for Variety people. And now we turn to a
conversation with Professor David Monno. He's the author of Vaudeville
and the Making of Modern Entertainment eighteen ninety to nineteen
(04:49):
twenty five. He has so much insight for us about
what the entertainment marketplace was like when Variety was born.
Professor David Mono, thank you so much for joining me.
Speaker 1 (04:59):
Well, thank you for your having to hear.
Speaker 2 (05:01):
I went looking for somebody who was an expert on
the business of vaudeville, and your book Vaudeville and the
Making of Modern Entertainment popped up. I was so excited
that you said yes very quickly. As we celebrate Varieties
one hundred and twentieth anniversary, I thought it would be
instructive to talk about what was the entertainment marketplace like
at that time, particularly in New York where we were born.
(05:24):
And of course, if you look through our first bunch
of issues, you can just see the coalescing of this
entertainment infrastructure, so much of it around New York. Professor,
can you sketch the scene if somebody had a dime
or two in their pocket and they wanted to go
out and have a show, and they happened to live
in New York or Boston or a big city where
you could find that. What kind of a marketplace was
(05:44):
it in nineteen oh five.
Speaker 1 (05:46):
It's a transforming one. So there's a fairly wide variety
of new entertainments and there are lingering older entertainments. You
could still go out to see a melodrama if you
were to New York, possibly go out to see a
tent show or a traveling show. If you had a dime.
(06:06):
You'd probably end up going to a pretty cheap, lot
built theater. You wouldn't get into the legitimate in terms
of the conventional theater. Or you go to a burlesque
if you wanted to see a burlets show, or you
could go out and get a drink in a saloon.
But vaudeville was certainly the growing entertainment, and its relationship
with variety was organic. We know most of what we
(06:29):
know about vaudeville because of the existence of variety, and
a variety hadn't been there, it would be a much
darker entertainment for us. It was covered in the newspapers,
but sporadically and usually very briefly. A variety was the
first to actually review shows and talk about what was
being performed. On the stages. But it was also the
(06:51):
first to carry entertainment business news, so we know a
lot about what was happening on the business side from
the page of the Variety. Variety, not the magazine, but Variety,
which is what's really performed in vaudeville, and one has
to distinguish those two. Is a much older entertainment, dates
back to the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, and it
(07:14):
was performed in a number of different venues, and it
would survive long after vaudeville disappeared. I think the two
golden ages of variety were probably about nineteen oh five
to nineteen twenty, and then again in the nineteen sixties
and seventies when TV was full of variety shows, and
so variety is much longer lasting. Vaudeville was really a
(07:36):
business form that organized the variety show and presented in
a different format, and so it is a diverse entertainment market.
Vaudeville it still starts up in the eighteen eighties because
there is an effort across America cities to separate the
(07:58):
barrooms from the theaters. It's considered immoral to sit and
drink and look at a show and so municipal legislation
has passed, and then state legislation has passed across the
northeast and gradually spreads its way west, which prohibits drinking
and watching a show. And as that happens, and owners
(08:21):
have to make a decision are they going to run
a theater and get rid of the drinking or are
they going to stay with a barroom and get rid
of the show. And those who made the decision to
get rid of the barroom and keep the show needed
a new name for what they were doing, and they
latched on the name of vaudeville, which was a French
(08:44):
name that had been used since the seventeen nineties for
a higher class a variety. And that's where Vaudeville came from.
Speaker 2 (08:53):
A give us a sense of what it was like
to go to a vaudeville show at say a big
house in New York.
Speaker 1 (08:59):
Sure, peanuts not popcorn. Tina was with the thing of choice,
and people would spit out the shells. One of the
reasons vodola is so transformative is that it was the
first effort to democratize commercial leisure by making it accessible
(09:20):
and by making it inexpensive. So early in the century
of a vaudevill show, depending on if it was a
small theater or a more prestigious theater. A more prestigious
theater may cost you fifty cents that a less prestigious
theory are dying. By nineteen ten, the more prestigious theaters
(09:41):
are charging up to two dollars and they have reserve seating.
The less prestigious have gone up to above thirty five cents,
so there is inflation in prices.
Speaker 3 (09:50):
House lights were.
Speaker 1 (09:51):
Left on so that the people on stage could see
the audience very clearly. There was a tradition of getting
up and moving around during the show. You didn't sit
quietly through the show. So a vaudeville show was made
up of somewhere between ten or fifteen short acts that
(10:12):
would last, some of them ten minutes, some of them
twenty minutes, and an act was on that you didn't like,
you could actually get up and leave and come back
twenty minutes later. Reserve seating was quite a new thing.
The best houses introduced the reserve seating in the eighteen nineties.
It was pretty common among the better class of vaudeville theaters.
(10:32):
By nineteen ten, the theater was quite segregated. If you
were an African American, you could only sit up in
the gallery, the top layer of the balcony. Children also
sat there. Vadna was a place where parents would tell
their kids to go after school if they were working late,
and they would give them a dime to go and
(10:54):
sit up in the balcony and stay in the theater
for a couple of hours until they got There was
a board next to the stage which announced the next
act that would come out. It was all carefully timed
because if you wanted to go out to the theater,
you needed to know that at eight ten the act
(11:15):
you wanted to see was coming. On the business of
organizing a Volvoll show it was quite complicated because different
acts used more or less of the stage, and so
theater managers had to organize the show in such a
way that they could close the curtains and put performance
(11:36):
at the front of the stage while they were setting
up the stage behind for the next act. And so
singers and comics were always very popular because you could
close the curtain behind them while you set up the
stage for acrobats or for an animal act, or for
a short play.
Speaker 2 (11:55):
Can you talk about the booking processes. I know that
in time that gets developed, But in that nineteen oh five,
in that right turn of the century, was it a
very organized business.
Speaker 3 (12:07):
Yes.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
It started in the earliest days of Vautville, individual theaters
booking their own and performers would correspond with theater managers
to say, I'm going to be in your area in
two weeks time, have you got anything for me? And
so it was a very complicated and hard to work
(12:28):
on my business. Already by the eighteen eighties, various theaters
are beginning to collaborate together because it doesn't take much
to realize that if you can book somebody for three
weeks and then put them on a circuit so that
they would perform one week in one theater, then moved
to the next theater, and then moved to a third theater,
(12:49):
and if they were all close together, the performers would
be more inclined to accept that than they would if
you were just doing an individual booking. And so that's
how the circuits started up.
Speaker 2 (13:01):
If you're a vaudeville performer in these days, will you
have multiple shows a day or is it pretty much
one show a night?
Speaker 1 (13:09):
Most theaters ran between two and four shows a day,
depending on how long those shows are. Some of the
smaller theaters would run four shows a day because they
didn't have enough material, and after nineteen hundred, with short movies,
so that you might have five or six acts, and
in between those five or six acts, you'd show a
(13:29):
couple of films.
Speaker 2 (13:30):
What would say a star, maybe not a megastar, but
an established vaudeville performer, what could they expect to make
a week or a show?
Speaker 1 (13:40):
Widely divergent. Now, this is a time when if you
were a a bank clerk, you'd probably be earning about
fifteen hundred to two thousand a year. If you're a
factory laborer, you'd probably be earning about one thousand dollars
a year. A big vaudeville star, the Annette Kellermans, the
Tang Gays, they would be pulling in about two thousand
(14:03):
to three thousand a week, and so it was huge
salaries for the biggest stars. If you were starting out
in pop Vaudville, a small time performing in between movies,
you would probably get fifteen to twenty five dollars a week.
Most vaudvillians would perform maybe twenty weeks a year, so
(14:27):
but it's still meant that if you were a big
vaudeville star, you were forty fifty thousand dollars a year
in income at a time when a bank manager might
be rinning five.
Speaker 2 (14:41):
Who were some of the biggest vaudeville stars of the
nineteen oh five nineteen tens.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
The biggest names around nineteen hundred were men. George Froller Golden,
who was really the first stand up comic, was the
highest paid vaudeville performer. Over the course of the first
decade of the twentieth century, they increasingly become women, and
it's the women who were in the highest salaries, people
(15:10):
like Gavatanga, who was for four or five years the
highest paid performer in vaudeville. And at Kellerman she was
a swimmer, an Australian who came and did a diving act.
Harry Houdini was always a big draw, the young Buster
Keaton was with the Keaton family on vaudeville.
Speaker 2 (15:30):
Let me wrap up by asking you, I think I
can guess what may have hastened the end of vaudeville
as a dominant entertainment format. I'm guessing movies had something
to do with it. Radio had something to do, but tell.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Me basically competition. Vaudeville always operated on fairly tight margins,
so that you needed to fill your house to about
half full in order to make any money. And as
competition grew in the early twentieth century, not just from movies,
but also from cabaret that are growing up clubs that
(16:02):
are growing up reviews and roof gardens like Sigfeld's Roof
Garden Burlesque, which is also cutting into the law film market.
So all of these different entertainments are starting to chip
away at the money that you can make in entertainment
and buds. In order to respond, they moved towards consolidation
(16:26):
by shutting down less profitable vaudell houses and then investing
heavily in building huge places like the Palace in New York,
which we're going to be opulent, and which were very
expensive to build, and there's a stock market crash which
wipes a lot of them out.
Speaker 2 (16:48):
Professor Monell, thank you for helping shed some light on
this and what the industry was like when we were born.
Really appreciate your time and your expertise.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Thank you, simpieving.
Speaker 2 (17:02):
And now we'll hear from Peter Rader, the author and screenwriter.
He wrote a terrific book a few years ago, Playing
to the Gods, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora duss and the rivalry
that changed acting. This great book is about to be
made into a movie directed by Michael Sussi. Here, Rader
talks about the entertainment marketplace in nineteen oh five and
(17:23):
how Sarah Bernhardt was the Taylor Swift of her day.
Peter Rader, author and screenwriter, Thank you so much for
joining me.
Speaker 4 (17:30):
You're so welcome. I'm thrilled to talk about this, Peter.
Speaker 2 (17:34):
People seeking entertainment, what kind of options would have been
available to people in New York circa nineteen oh five?
That era when Variety got started.
Speaker 4 (17:43):
Nineteen oh five is a really interesting year because it's
a year in which emergent technologies are about to revolutionize
the world of entertainment. You have, on the one hand,
from the emergence of Nickelodeon's and cities across America that
were not quite movies yet but sure but novelty shorts
that people would go in and see for five cents,
(18:04):
things like magic tricks or a train coming into a station,
or foreign capitals like Paris and London or Vaudeville. It
would be a series of shorts, your in and out
in twenty minutes, and that was your movie experience of
the day. And then even more revolutionary was that entertainment
had come into the home in the form of gramophone recordings.
(18:29):
The gramophone is that big trumpet record player that you
see on the RCA Victor logo where you'd get your
seventy eight RPM record. It wasn't vinyl quite yet, and
you would crank up your thing. There was no electricity involved.
It was all mechanical. Rank up your thing, it loads
the spring and this record spins for about three minutes,
(18:49):
and suddenly opera is in your home. Certainly, the most
famous opera singer of the day was Enrico Caruso from Naples, Italy,
who was like the Elvis Sinatra of his day. He
was super popular. He was selling records at the time
in the hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions. So
he's on his way to become a platinum recording artist.
(19:11):
And that's the technology that was about to disrupt the industry.
But the legit theater, that's where you went out and
saw things. En mass the Grand Dame of the theater
at the time was Sarah Bernhardt. She was arguably and
to this day, the most famous actress that ever lived.
Everyone knew Sarah Barnhart, whether you had seen her in
(19:32):
person or not, you had read about her in the newspaper,
because she invented the culture of celebrity, which was very canny.
She was her own producer, she ran her own company,
and she knew that the performance didn't end when the
curtain went down. It continued after hours, the after party,
the dinner party, and in the morning papers.
Speaker 2 (19:52):
What put her on the path to becoming really the
first entertainment star.
Speaker 4 (19:56):
Sarah Bernhardt has such a fascinating biography. She was the
illegitimate daughter of a courtisan who was essentially an escort
and a high end courtisan who would be with kings
and princes and very wealthy patrons. But she came into
the world in Paris, France. She was French, and she
(20:17):
absolutely became determined to seize her own destiny, and she
did it relentlessly. She had so much charisma. The way
she died on stage is legendary. She would take two
minutes to fall, spiral down to the floor, shrieking and
in most of her plays, she did die. She often
played tragic heroines who had die. But what really drove
(20:40):
her success was that she realized at some point that
she had so much fame she actually could seize her
own destiny by running her own company. That was unprecedented
for a woman to be running her own company, but
Sarah did it, and she did it brilliantly. She spent
exorbitant amounts of money on costume ums and the staging
(21:01):
and the sets. I mean, she was always on the
verge of bankruptcy and she would always rebound.
Speaker 2 (21:06):
How big of a troop would she have typically traveled
with in her heyday?
Speaker 4 (21:11):
Sarah famously owned a train car, so she had the
Sarah Bernard Express that she would hook on to, you know,
various trains and travel across the country, and it was
pretty much full. So I would say her entourage was
in the thirty to fifty maybe a half dozen to
a dozen of those would be actor. She also created
(21:32):
this idea of merch, so one thing that she did
was sell these souvenir collectibles called cabinet cards, which were
photographs of Sarah Bernhard doing eccentric, exotic things like sleeping
in her signature coffin, which she liked to do, or
wearing a bat hat, which was a hat with literally
(21:54):
a taxidermied bat sitting on it, and various other things.
She liked to dabble in the occult and do things
like Ouiji boards and stuff that was very popular in
the time. So she played with all aspects of her
personality to sort of magnetize and draw people in.
Speaker 2 (22:11):
As you've said, this woman was so ahead of her time.
She would have taken social media and she would just
own the world today.
Speaker 4 (22:20):
She was a prototype for people like you know, Liberaci
and Lady Gaga and David Bowie. The idea of be
eccentric and out there and that actually is fascinating to
the public.
Speaker 2 (22:32):
Peter, thank you for coming on and help being a
little part of Variety celebrating are pretty awesome one hundred
and twentieth anniversary.
Speaker 4 (22:39):
You're so welcome. Happy birthday, Variety. This was a lot
of fun.
Speaker 2 (22:47):
As we close out today's episode, we'll give the last
word to Sime Silverman. This is an excerpt from the
editorial that ran in the first issue under the Masthead.
Speaker 3 (22:56):
Variety in its initial issue, desires to announce the policy
governing the paper. We want you to read it. It
will be interesting, if for no other reason than that
it will be conducted on original lines for a theatrical newspaper.
The first, foremost and extraordinary feature of it will be fairness.
Whatever there is to be printed of interest to the
(23:16):
professional world will be printed without regard to whose name
is mentioned or the advertising columns. All the news, all
the time, and absolutely fair are the watchwords. The news
part of the paper will be given over to such
items as may be obtained, and nothing will be suppressed
which is considered of interest. We promise you this and
(23:37):
shall not deviate.
Speaker 2 (23:38):
Thanks for listening. This episode was written and reported by
me Cynthia Littleton, with contributions from Clayton Davis, Sime Silverman,
and generations of Variety reporters who have labored for the
Mighty be What a history. I love the interviews with
David Mono and Peter Rader so much that longer versions
of both will run on Friday on Daily Variety sibling
(24:00):
podcast Strictly Business Stick Snicks Hick Picks. Please leave us
a review at the podcast platform of your choice, and
please tune in tomorrow for another episode of Daily Variety,
and don't forget to tell us what you think at
podcasts at Variety dot com.
Speaker 4 (24:15):
Thanks, I'm just fascinated that Variety is one hundred and
twenty years old. That really rocked my world.
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