April 19, 2010 • 25 mins
In a follow-up to the earlier episode on the history of vaudeville, Katie and Sarah take a closer look at some of the most memorable vaudevillians. Listen in and learn more about everyone from the Marx brothers to Winsor McCay in this episode.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and we so
enjoyed doing our History of Vaudeville podcast that we decided
(00:21):
we'd like to talk about some notable performers. So we
put out a call on our Twitter Missed in History
and on our Facebook fan page to see what you
guys would like to hear. So these are all listener suggestions,
and the first one comes from a Twitter follower who
said that if we didn't do this, he would spite
our adorable voices. And I don't know what that means,
(00:41):
but I wasn't willing to risk it. So we're going
to start with the Marx Brothers. Welcome to the Sarah
and Katie Vaudeville Show. Sketch one, the Marx is Grout Show, Harpo,
chick O, Gummo, and Zeppo also known as Julius, Arthur, Leonard,
Milton and Herbert. And I think you have to it
that Zeppo is an improvement on Herbert. Herbert Mars does
(01:03):
not sound particularly exciting. It's not very stagy. Gummo and Zeppo.
Of course, we're out of the act by nineteen thirty five,
but the others became quite famous. I'm sure you've heard
of them. And the Marks brothers were the sons of
Jewish German immigrants, and they grew up in Manhattan's East Side,
and they began in vaudeville as singers, but soon switched
to a comedy act. A lot of it was based
(01:25):
on immigrants stereotypes and accents, like an Italian accent for one,
and a German accent, and they became stars at the Palace.
But even though they were playing up this immigrant based comedy,
they surprisingly didn't fall back on a lot of quote
unquote Jewish humor like some of the other vaudeville acts.
Will talk about later. Most of their sketches were actually
(01:47):
sort of waspy type settings, but there are subtle allusions
to relevant issues. An article in American Scholar that I
was reading a recounts a scene from their movie Monkey Business.
I'm quoting from the article. Groucho snidely informs an Indian chief,
if you don't like our country, you can go back
to where you came from. Earlier in the film, after
(02:08):
horrendous pun by Chicko. Groucho turns to face the camera
and declares, there's my argument restrict immigration. This at a
time when the Patrician Immigration Restriction League had warned against
the corrupting influence of physically, morally and politically in quotes,
degenerate Jews. But well, this is, you know, kind of
this politically outrageous sketch. They also did a lot of
(02:28):
um outrageous physical comedy and outrageous costumes, blonde wigs, the
Italian accents we talked about, painted on mustaches, anarchy and slapstick.
I mean, that was the name of the game. I
was watching a scene before this from A Night at
the Opera, which is possibly the most popular film on YouTube.
And you've got Groucho with his cigar and his glasses
(02:51):
and a bushy mustache and eyebrows, and he keeps inviting
more and more people into this tiny little room with
quips about how crowded it is. It's like a clown car,
you know. He keeps saying stuff like tell them to
send up a bigger room to William and then another
woman opens the door and everyone comes flying out, and
that's one of their most famous scenes. So a lot
of the folks we're going to talk about later have
(03:12):
really successful careers beyond Vaudeville, and that's really more why
we know them today. And if you're going to think
of one of the Marks Brothers going on like that,
it's definitely got to be Groucho. He's the guy who
most people consider to be the real star of the operation,
and he ended up on Long Island hanging out with
all the rich people and feeling terribly out of place.
(03:33):
By his own accounts. A lot of their work before this, too,
had to ended up playing on the idea of exclusion
and of people feeling out of place. And we're just
continuing the theme of it. Okay, our second act is
going to be evelyn Nesbitt. And obviously vaudeville wasn't all
about comedy routines. Like the Marx Brothers, We've got chorus
(03:54):
girls too, and evelyn Nesbitt is kind of the epitome
of a chorus girl. She's the first major it girl
of the twentieth century, and for a time she might
have been one of the most famous people in the
United States. She was born in eighteen eighty four, and
her father's early death forced the teenage, Nez bit to
get into modeling and acting. She ended up being drawn
(04:15):
by Charles Dana Gibson. She's a GiB priddy girl, and
she gets into entertainment and performance. She enters Broadway as
one of the florid Ora Girls, who are pretty prim
young women being serenaded by men in frock coats. Yeah,
we actually have a line from from that act. The
gentleman would say, pretty, tell me, pretty maiden, are there
(04:36):
any more at home like you, to which the maidens
would reply, there are a few kinds, sir, but simple
girls and proper too. So you remember from our earlier
podcast on vaudeville that was a big The family friendliness
of the acts was a big thing. They had to be,
you know, not too risk ay, even if it comes
across as slightly creepy. So it's sixteen. She took up
(05:00):
with a man named Stanford White, who was forty six
and had designed things like the Washington Square Arch. So
he's he's a notable figure, and he supported her and
her family, wined and dined her and had her sit
on his red velvet swing and kick at a wall
of paper parasols. His own particular fetish it's very creepy fetish,
(05:22):
so eventually their relationship turns abusive when he rapes her
after she's passed out and she calls him a benevolent vampire.
She feels like she can't leave him after this, and um,
she's she's got kind of a mixed idea about it
though her whole life there. She says that he's the
only man who she ever loved, but by the time
(05:43):
she's seventeen, he's mostly interested in really young girls and
she's sort of starting to look for new bows. John
Barrymore is one of the men who's available, and as
is a man named Harry k Thaw and Saul was
a millionaire son of a railroad slash coal baron. He
(06:03):
lived in a castle over his mills and begged Mss
Nesbit to marry him and his millions, even though the
other show girls gossiped about how he whipped girls. So again,
clearly we're not getting into a good relationship now, and
she manages to hold him off for a while. She's
still somewhat involved with Stanford White. White actually gets her
into a New Jersey boarding school for a time to
(06:25):
study music and literature. Um the school's run by Cecil b.
DeMille's mother too. On a side note, Um, she eventually
has an operation for what is officially disclosed as appendicitis,
and after she's recuperated enough, Thaw takes Evelyn and her
mother abroad, and this is where things get really bad.
(06:46):
Her mother is very disturbed by thaws mood swings. He's sadistic,
and Um goes from being just you know, worshiping the
two of them too freaking out at waiters yanking off
table clause. She's really bothered by this, so she leaves
her daughter alone with him, and their relationship to gets violent.
(07:07):
He whips her and beats her and finally gets her
to confess the details about her relationship with Stanford White,
and he's just driven mad by jealousy. At this point,
he's always wanted to save her from Stanford White, but
he hates that their relationship with sexual. After a second
trip to Europe, of Alyn gets appendicitis again, at which
point you have to make the conclusion that perhaps it
(07:31):
wasn't appendicitis. That's the issue we're talking about abortion. And
this is when she finally agrees to marry Thaw, who
is still completely obsessed with White, and at a nineteen
o six performance, Thaw finally runs into Stanford White and
shoots him, and this becomes just the most sensational trial
you can imagine. It's called the Crime of the Century,
(07:53):
even though I think we're kind of jumping the gun.
But the first trial is a hung jury, the second
a quits thought by reason of insanity. Nesbit actually testifies
after this huge monetary promise from Thaw's mother, which she
never ends up receiving, but um her her testimony, she
actually holds her own during it. The story of her
(08:16):
life was made into a film, The Girl in the
Red Velvet Swing, which clearly is not as innocuous as
it might sound, and she died in nineteen sixty seven.
But one of the favorite tidbits we came across researching
her was a headline from the New York Times from
nineteen oh seven. That headline is baby named Evelyn Nesbit.
Father and Kalamazoo objected, but mother had her way, which
(08:39):
I mean, the news doesn't get any better than that,
I think. Next, on the stage, we have one W. C. Fields,
whose comedy Stick was about being misanthropic, hating women and children,
um anti establishment and quite fond of the bottle. You
might kind of remind you of Larry David actually herb
your and phusiasm, but but better. I think my first
(09:02):
experience with W. C. Fields was when I was a
small child and it was scarring. I was at MGM
Studios and went up to the W. C. Character and
asked for his autograph in my little book, and he
told me how awful children were, and I cried, and
my mom tried to explain to me that he was
a comedian and that's what he did. But I think
she was angry on my behalf only maybe not a
(09:23):
good character to have at MGM walking around talking to
the kids. But if you've never seen him, he's he's
very recognizable. He's this round man in a top hat
with a big red, bulbous news. He was born William
Claude Dukinfield in eighty and he was of a British background.
He had a pretty complicated home life, as almost all
(09:44):
of our vaudevillians do, and um, you know, some describe
it as happy, others as miserable. It was probably sort
of a mixture of the two. He described himself as
a brady, repulsive child, and he started his career as
a juggler in his teens. His act on the vaudeville
stage was a juggling tramp. He also went on to
(10:06):
the zig filled Follies before becoming a movie star, and
he wrote a lot of his own stuff for the movies,
but under really awesome synonyms like Mohot, Mactaine, Jeeves, and
if you've ever heard May West's famous movie line, come
up and see me sometime. The other half of that
was Fields, who responded, my will, my little chickadee. But
(10:26):
Fields also fit the stereotype of the comedian as a
haunted man. His marriage to his wife Hattie was pretty rough.
Um he met her on stage and he wouldn't give
up his life as a traveling performer. We've learned already
about these vaudevillians traveling on huge circuits all the time,
different city every night practically, and she wouldn't divorce him
(10:49):
because she was Catholic, and so they just had this long,
drawn out, very unhappy relationship. He was estranged from his
son Claude, and had a tense relationship even with his mistress,
and a non existent one with their illegitimate son. But
he put this all into his work. Some of the
kid and wife characters, which are never ever flattering, are
(11:11):
very obviously based on his own family. Sometimes they're even
named by their names, possibly in part because of his
loneliness and the hardness of his life. He's driven to alcoholism,
and he spends his later years in pretty bad health,
and also got the reputation of being pretty difficult to
work with, and that's what made his career flounder later on,
(11:33):
not that Hollywood was treating him the way he'd like.
He was being offered complete direct to be honest, and
he later switched to radio, finding that it served him
a bit better. But again, he was in ill health
and he had cirrhosis from his drinking. Supposedly he was
drinking a case of gin a week by the time
he ended up in the hospital, and any weeks before
(11:55):
he died, he was said to have been found reading
the Bible. And when his friends saw him, you know,
he was known for hating religion, among many many other things,
they asked him why, and he said he was looking
for loopholes. W. C. Fields didn't just like jin though, apparently,
because one of his most famous quotes is I like
children fried. Perhaps with a little bit of ranches some
(12:18):
blue cheese on the side, and that brings us to
our next act. And our next act is bo Jangles,
who was one of the most famous soft shoe and
tap dancers of his age. And he was born Luther
Robinson on May seventy eight in Richmond, Virginia, and his
parents died when he was just an infant, so he
(12:39):
was raised by his grandmother, didn't get a lot of education,
and started dancing at age six for pennies at beer gardens,
which was the saddest little story. Yeah, but he must
be pretty good at it, because at age twelve he
joins a traveling company the South before the war and
eventually goes on a vaudeville circuit, and his agent, Marty Forkins,
(13:00):
helps make him really famous, launch him into that lower
level of vaudeville, to the headliner act um and he's
eventually performing for white audiences, starring in Blackbirds of nine
and putting on this dapper, genteel front. From then on
he does soft shoe and tap and you can think
(13:21):
of him as one of the great dance step originators.
To he invents something called the stair dance, and a
kind of strange thing about him. He's as good at
running backwards as most people are running forwards. Eventually he
became a film star too. He was in The Little
Colonel in Old Kentucky, The Littlest Rebel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
(13:44):
and he was often partnered with a little Shirley Temple.
And he makes a lot of money, up to six thousand,
six hundred dollars in a week for a time, but
he dies poor because he's very generous to his friends
and two people in need. But he's a soo got
a pretty bad gambling habit, especially gambling on the Yankees,
which there was an article about why he might be
(14:06):
the biggest Yankees fan of all time. Um. But he
would even arrange his schedule around the games and own
part of the New York Black Yankees as well. He
was an honorary mayor of Harlem before he died in
November ninety nine in New York. And now we're going
to talk about someone we got a lot of requests for.
(14:28):
Fanny Bryce. Fanny Bryce was one of the great comedians
and singers of vaudeville. She was born Fania borach In
to immigrant parents. Her mother was from Budapest, her father
from Alsace, and she hailed from the Lower East Side.
Her parents owned a saloon there, but her dad was
kind of a deadbeat and a gambler, and Fanny herself
(14:52):
wasn't very fond of school. She did like singing, though,
and after she sang a song in an amateur contest
called when You Oh, You're not Forgotten by the girl
you Can't Forget, she won five bucks and she was
just hooked on the stage at that point and dropped
out of school after eighth grade, and her career shoots
off right from there. It didn't exactly start off Shining Lee.
(15:15):
She got hired and then quickly fired for a George
m cohen show, and then ended up with a touring
company that went broke, so her next option was burlesque,
and this is when she changed her name, possibly to
sound Less Jewish. Her big break was singing Sadie salom
A go home, and to give you some sample lyrics
from the song, don't do that dance, I tell you, Sadie,
(15:37):
that's not a business for a lady. Most everybody knows
that I'm your loving mos Oi oi oi oi, where
is your clothes? And it's a funny take on what's
supposed to be a sexy scene, the disrobing salom A.
And the notable thing about this is that she sang
it in a Yiddish accent, but she didn't know any Yiddish.
(15:58):
They thought she, quote unquote looked Jewish, and so she
was encouraged to fake the accent by Irving Berlin no less,
and that's when she made her mark as a Jewish comedian.
She goes on to become a big success in the
zig Field Follies. But it wasn't all good times for
Fanny Bryce. For one thing, at least part of her
chafed being categorized as a comic actress. That's not all
(16:21):
she wanted to do. She wanted to broaden her repertoire
into drama and become a you know, serious actress in caps.
But no one was interested in Fanny Bryce as a dramatist.
They were interested in her as a comedian only. And
she also married badly to a man named nicky Arnstein,
who happened to be an adulterous and possibly big amous thief.
(16:44):
It's just one step up from Evelyn Nust. But there
he went to sing sing for wire tapping and later
to leaven Worth after five million dollars in bonds mysteriously disappeared,
but she wouldn't leave him. He left her and her
kids first, and she finally decided to get a divorce.
But he did inspire her famous torch song, my Man,
(17:05):
which we have a few lyrics from it. It's cost
me a lot, but there's one thing that I've got.
It's my Man, and that's the one serious thing she
did that people loved. It was an older song that
had been translated, but her version of it was something
that was difficult to forget. And when she sang it
was clear she was singing about Ernstein, and since his
(17:27):
rather criminal pursuits were fairly public, people knew what it meant.
In the n she gets a nose job, and this
is partly her own idea of how to escape this
role that she's been type cast in. But she stars
in some more films. They flop and she ends up
marrying Bill Rose, and that doesn't really work out either.
She found some real stardom in radio with a character
(17:49):
called Baby Snooks, who was a brady little girl and
who didn't have an accent because she didn't have an
accent in that program. She felt like it gave her
better mass appeal. And the movie Funny Girl with one
Barbara Streisand is said to have been modeled after her life.
And I have to give a research mentioned to the
Jewish Women's Archive at jw A dot org, which was
(18:11):
really helpful with this one. But that brings us to
our next act, which is Gypsy rose Lee and June Havoc.
And at the time we're recording this, June Havoc recently died,
so this is fairly timely. If you've heard of or
seen the musical Gypsy. The movie version has Rosalind Russell
and Natalie Wood. It's based on Gypsy rose Lee's memoir
(18:34):
and paints their mother, Mama Rose as the most insane
stage mother you've ever heard of, And June hated the musical.
She's quoted as saying mother was very prim and she
was tiny and lovely with big blue eyes. She was
endearing and alluring beyond belief. If she had drive an ambition,
what's wrong with that? So that's the word from June Havoc.
Louise rose Hovic was born in Seattle, and June Hovic
(18:57):
in Vancouver. Supposedly Louise wade Awapa twelve pounds but one
a healthy baby contest. Nevertheless, after their parents marriage ended,
mom arose saw the stage is salvation for the family.
Louise wasn't great at singing or dancing, but June was
a natural. She was on the vaudeville stage at eighteen months,
and Baby June, as her personage was known, was famous
(19:20):
and making major money by age six. But she wanted
to grow up and stop being dainty. June her name
after she outgrew baby um. And at thirteen, she married
a boy she'd met on the stage, and her mother
promptly tried to shoot him. Um. But we do have
to make a note the mom also had a bunch
of forged birth certificates, so who knew how old she
(19:41):
really was. After June got married and left show business,
life was tough for her, you know, after all, it's
the depression and times are hard for anyone. She and
her husband entered marathon dance contest when you literally danced
till you dropped, and if you want, you'd get fed.
And if you didn't, well, you know you were the
one who dropped on the floor and her marriage wasn't working,
(20:03):
but they stayed together for professional reasons. She went on
to be a success, though although not as famous as
her sister. She wrote and directed plays, wrote a memoir,
performed on Broadway, she acted in film. June did pretty
well for herself, and she was quoted in the New
York Times as saying, my sister was beautiful and clever
and ruthless. My mother was endearing and adorable and lethal.
(20:24):
They were the same person. I was the fool of
the family, the one who thought I really was loved
for me, for myself. So moving on to gypsy life
wasn't easy for her. Either. She's not the cute or
the charming one, and mom Arose makes them shoplift and
lie about everything, so she has this very manipulated childhood
and it's harder for the not blonde, not adorable sister.
(20:48):
She plays a boy in their act most of the time,
and um just a tough stage life. And when June left,
Louise finally had a chance in the Dancing Daughters to
her name, but this was during Vaudeville's dying breath, so
instead she turned to stripping in seedy places, But soon
she'd polished her acts. She made it funny and sexy
(21:11):
instead of just bumping grind. She wasn't even fully naked,
and she became a star and everyone came to see her.
And supposedly her mother's dying words were about taking Louise
to the grave with her. So that's the last word
on Mama Rose. So our final act for the show
is Windsor Mackay, who was a newspaper cartoonist and an
animation pioneer. He's going to plan to vaudeville, though, I promise.
(21:33):
He was born in eighteen sixty seven and in his
early twenties he worked as a poster and a billboard artist,
and he eventually gets a job as an illustrator and
cartoonist in Cincinnati, moves to New York, develops two pretty
popular strips there, and by nineteen o five he's made
his most famous creation, which is Little Nemo in Slumberland.
(21:54):
And I used to have a Little Nemo comic book,
and it's pretty cool if you've never If you've never
seen it, you should look it up. It's really surrealist.
There's not much plot because after all their dreams and
they're just these beautifully rendered drawings and really unconventional and
how they're laid out on the page. In nineteen o
(22:15):
nine he had a very popular vaudeville act where he
did speed drawings of his cartoon characters as well as caricatures.
And if you think watching a cartoonist draw sounds boring,
Sarah can assure you that it is not. Yeah, it's
really pretty cool to watch a cartoonist speed draw. I
saw cal from the Economist at a Second City performance,
and I mean just somebody with a transparency in a
(22:38):
pen and there uh creating political figures or celebrities who
you can recognize with just a few strokes. Pretty neat.
McKay started to play around with animation sometime after this
and did an animated version of Little Nemo that he
added to the vaudeville shows, and he followed this with
nineteen twelves How a Mosquito Operates and in nineteen fourteen
(23:00):
Gertie the Dinosaur, which Gertie the Dinosaur was a pretty
pioneering film. It was the first feature character created just
for an animated film. Before that, the characters had been
pulled from the comic strips, and it took ten thousand
drawings to make up the film, and he had to
draw each one by hand because they didn't know how
to make a stationary background at this time. It's sort
(23:23):
of like how you'd imagine the flint stones. There's action
going on and then there's just the rubble behind them
throughout the imagine drawing that for every cell. But even
though the dino animation was really popular, William Randolph Hurst,
a subject of a previous podcast, made McKay stick to
print cartoons. His next film wasn't until nineteen eighteen, Sinking
(23:46):
of the Lusitania, which used to sell animation, cutting down
on the drawing time, and mackay died in nineteen thirty four,
but a lot of his techniques influenced the work of
animators later on. You know a lot of the great
Disney movies you think of from thirties, forties and fifties
are influenced by McKay's work. And uh, I guess that
(24:06):
brings our vaudeville act to a close. The curtain has clue.
We have one honorable mention, though, and that is Joseph Kugel,
whose French stage name translates roughly as the Fartiste. And
it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. He was
able to break wind on demand, which obviously brought in
some audience members, and that one was suggested to us
(24:30):
by a Twitter follower, so thank you for that. And
if you're interested in slightly more conventional pursuits, you could
check out our article how juggling works if you search
our homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you missed in History Glass blog on
(24:52):
the house stuff works dot com home page
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Katie Lambert and I'm Sarah Dowdy and we so
enjoyed doing our History of Vaudeville podcast that we decided
(00:21):
we'd like to talk about some notable performers. So we
put out a call on our Twitter Missed in History
and on our Facebook fan page to see what you
guys would like to hear. So these are all listener suggestions,
and the first one comes from a Twitter follower who
said that if we didn't do this, he would spite
our adorable voices. And I don't know what that means,
(00:41):
but I wasn't willing to risk it. So we're going
to start with the Marx Brothers. Welcome to the Sarah
and Katie Vaudeville Show. Sketch one, the Marx is Grout Show, Harpo,
chick O, Gummo, and Zeppo also known as Julius, Arthur, Leonard,
Milton and Herbert. And I think you have to it
that Zeppo is an improvement on Herbert. Herbert Mars does
(01:03):
not sound particularly exciting. It's not very stagy. Gummo and Zeppo.
Of course, we're out of the act by nineteen thirty five,
but the others became quite famous. I'm sure you've heard
of them. And the Marks brothers were the sons of
Jewish German immigrants, and they grew up in Manhattan's East Side,
and they began in vaudeville as singers, but soon switched
to a comedy act. A lot of it was based
(01:25):
on immigrants stereotypes and accents, like an Italian accent for one,
and a German accent, and they became stars at the Palace.
But even though they were playing up this immigrant based comedy,
they surprisingly didn't fall back on a lot of quote
unquote Jewish humor like some of the other vaudeville acts.
Will talk about later. Most of their sketches were actually
(01:47):
sort of waspy type settings, but there are subtle allusions
to relevant issues. An article in American Scholar that I
was reading a recounts a scene from their movie Monkey Business.
I'm quoting from the article. Groucho snidely informs an Indian chief,
if you don't like our country, you can go back
to where you came from. Earlier in the film, after
(02:08):
horrendous pun by Chicko. Groucho turns to face the camera
and declares, there's my argument restrict immigration. This at a
time when the Patrician Immigration Restriction League had warned against
the corrupting influence of physically, morally and politically in quotes,
degenerate Jews. But well, this is, you know, kind of
this politically outrageous sketch. They also did a lot of
(02:28):
um outrageous physical comedy and outrageous costumes, blonde wigs, the
Italian accents we talked about, painted on mustaches, anarchy and slapstick.
I mean, that was the name of the game. I
was watching a scene before this from A Night at
the Opera, which is possibly the most popular film on YouTube.
And you've got Groucho with his cigar and his glasses
(02:51):
and a bushy mustache and eyebrows, and he keeps inviting
more and more people into this tiny little room with
quips about how crowded it is. It's like a clown car,
you know. He keeps saying stuff like tell them to
send up a bigger room to William and then another
woman opens the door and everyone comes flying out, and
that's one of their most famous scenes. So a lot
of the folks we're going to talk about later have
(03:12):
really successful careers beyond Vaudeville, and that's really more why
we know them today. And if you're going to think
of one of the Marks Brothers going on like that,
it's definitely got to be Groucho. He's the guy who
most people consider to be the real star of the operation,
and he ended up on Long Island hanging out with
all the rich people and feeling terribly out of place.
(03:33):
By his own accounts. A lot of their work before this, too,
had to ended up playing on the idea of exclusion
and of people feeling out of place. And we're just
continuing the theme of it. Okay, our second act is
going to be evelyn Nesbitt. And obviously vaudeville wasn't all
about comedy routines. Like the Marx Brothers, We've got chorus
(03:54):
girls too, and evelyn Nesbitt is kind of the epitome
of a chorus girl. She's the first major it girl
of the twentieth century, and for a time she might
have been one of the most famous people in the
United States. She was born in eighteen eighty four, and
her father's early death forced the teenage, Nez bit to
get into modeling and acting. She ended up being drawn
(04:15):
by Charles Dana Gibson. She's a GiB priddy girl, and
she gets into entertainment and performance. She enters Broadway as
one of the florid Ora Girls, who are pretty prim
young women being serenaded by men in frock coats. Yeah,
we actually have a line from from that act. The
gentleman would say, pretty, tell me, pretty maiden, are there
(04:36):
any more at home like you, to which the maidens
would reply, there are a few kinds, sir, but simple
girls and proper too. So you remember from our earlier
podcast on vaudeville that was a big The family friendliness
of the acts was a big thing. They had to be,
you know, not too risk ay, even if it comes
across as slightly creepy. So it's sixteen. She took up
(05:00):
with a man named Stanford White, who was forty six
and had designed things like the Washington Square Arch. So
he's he's a notable figure, and he supported her and
her family, wined and dined her and had her sit
on his red velvet swing and kick at a wall
of paper parasols. His own particular fetish it's very creepy fetish,
(05:22):
so eventually their relationship turns abusive when he rapes her
after she's passed out and she calls him a benevolent vampire.
She feels like she can't leave him after this, and um,
she's she's got kind of a mixed idea about it
though her whole life there. She says that he's the
only man who she ever loved, but by the time
(05:43):
she's seventeen, he's mostly interested in really young girls and
she's sort of starting to look for new bows. John
Barrymore is one of the men who's available, and as
is a man named Harry k Thaw and Saul was
a millionaire son of a railroad slash coal baron. He
(06:03):
lived in a castle over his mills and begged Mss
Nesbit to marry him and his millions, even though the
other show girls gossiped about how he whipped girls. So again,
clearly we're not getting into a good relationship now, and
she manages to hold him off for a while. She's
still somewhat involved with Stanford White. White actually gets her
into a New Jersey boarding school for a time to
(06:25):
study music and literature. Um the school's run by Cecil b.
DeMille's mother too. On a side note, Um, she eventually
has an operation for what is officially disclosed as appendicitis,
and after she's recuperated enough, Thaw takes Evelyn and her
mother abroad, and this is where things get really bad.
(06:46):
Her mother is very disturbed by thaws mood swings. He's sadistic,
and Um goes from being just you know, worshiping the
two of them too freaking out at waiters yanking off
table clause. She's really bothered by this, so she leaves
her daughter alone with him, and their relationship to gets violent.
(07:07):
He whips her and beats her and finally gets her
to confess the details about her relationship with Stanford White,
and he's just driven mad by jealousy. At this point,
he's always wanted to save her from Stanford White, but
he hates that their relationship with sexual. After a second
trip to Europe, of Alyn gets appendicitis again, at which
point you have to make the conclusion that perhaps it
(07:31):
wasn't appendicitis. That's the issue we're talking about abortion. And
this is when she finally agrees to marry Thaw, who
is still completely obsessed with White, and at a nineteen
o six performance, Thaw finally runs into Stanford White and
shoots him, and this becomes just the most sensational trial
you can imagine. It's called the Crime of the Century,
(07:53):
even though I think we're kind of jumping the gun.
But the first trial is a hung jury, the second
a quits thought by reason of insanity. Nesbit actually testifies
after this huge monetary promise from Thaw's mother, which she
never ends up receiving, but um her her testimony, she
actually holds her own during it. The story of her
(08:16):
life was made into a film, The Girl in the
Red Velvet Swing, which clearly is not as innocuous as
it might sound, and she died in nineteen sixty seven.
But one of the favorite tidbits we came across researching
her was a headline from the New York Times from
nineteen oh seven. That headline is baby named Evelyn Nesbit.
Father and Kalamazoo objected, but mother had her way, which
(08:39):
I mean, the news doesn't get any better than that,
I think. Next, on the stage, we have one W. C. Fields,
whose comedy Stick was about being misanthropic, hating women and children,
um anti establishment and quite fond of the bottle. You
might kind of remind you of Larry David actually herb
your and phusiasm, but but better. I think my first
(09:02):
experience with W. C. Fields was when I was a
small child and it was scarring. I was at MGM
Studios and went up to the W. C. Character and
asked for his autograph in my little book, and he
told me how awful children were, and I cried, and
my mom tried to explain to me that he was
a comedian and that's what he did. But I think
she was angry on my behalf only maybe not a
(09:23):
good character to have at MGM walking around talking to
the kids. But if you've never seen him, he's he's
very recognizable. He's this round man in a top hat
with a big red, bulbous news. He was born William
Claude Dukinfield in eighty and he was of a British background.
He had a pretty complicated home life, as almost all
(09:44):
of our vaudevillians do, and um, you know, some describe
it as happy, others as miserable. It was probably sort
of a mixture of the two. He described himself as
a brady, repulsive child, and he started his career as
a juggler in his teens. His act on the vaudeville
stage was a juggling tramp. He also went on to
(10:06):
the zig filled Follies before becoming a movie star, and
he wrote a lot of his own stuff for the movies,
but under really awesome synonyms like Mohot, Mactaine, Jeeves, and
if you've ever heard May West's famous movie line, come
up and see me sometime. The other half of that
was Fields, who responded, my will, my little chickadee. But
(10:26):
Fields also fit the stereotype of the comedian as a
haunted man. His marriage to his wife Hattie was pretty rough.
Um he met her on stage and he wouldn't give
up his life as a traveling performer. We've learned already
about these vaudevillians traveling on huge circuits all the time,
different city every night practically, and she wouldn't divorce him
(10:49):
because she was Catholic, and so they just had this long,
drawn out, very unhappy relationship. He was estranged from his
son Claude, and had a tense relationship even with his mistress,
and a non existent one with their illegitimate son. But
he put this all into his work. Some of the
kid and wife characters, which are never ever flattering, are
(11:11):
very obviously based on his own family. Sometimes they're even
named by their names, possibly in part because of his
loneliness and the hardness of his life. He's driven to alcoholism,
and he spends his later years in pretty bad health,
and also got the reputation of being pretty difficult to
work with, and that's what made his career flounder later on,
(11:33):
not that Hollywood was treating him the way he'd like.
He was being offered complete direct to be honest, and
he later switched to radio, finding that it served him
a bit better. But again, he was in ill health
and he had cirrhosis from his drinking. Supposedly he was
drinking a case of gin a week by the time
he ended up in the hospital, and any weeks before
(11:55):
he died, he was said to have been found reading
the Bible. And when his friends saw him, you know,
he was known for hating religion, among many many other things,
they asked him why, and he said he was looking
for loopholes. W. C. Fields didn't just like jin though, apparently,
because one of his most famous quotes is I like
children fried. Perhaps with a little bit of ranches some
(12:18):
blue cheese on the side, and that brings us to
our next act. And our next act is bo Jangles,
who was one of the most famous soft shoe and
tap dancers of his age. And he was born Luther
Robinson on May seventy eight in Richmond, Virginia, and his
parents died when he was just an infant, so he
(12:39):
was raised by his grandmother, didn't get a lot of education,
and started dancing at age six for pennies at beer gardens,
which was the saddest little story. Yeah, but he must
be pretty good at it, because at age twelve he
joins a traveling company the South before the war and
eventually goes on a vaudeville circuit, and his agent, Marty Forkins,
(13:00):
helps make him really famous, launch him into that lower
level of vaudeville, to the headliner act um and he's
eventually performing for white audiences, starring in Blackbirds of nine
and putting on this dapper, genteel front. From then on
he does soft shoe and tap and you can think
(13:21):
of him as one of the great dance step originators.
To he invents something called the stair dance, and a
kind of strange thing about him. He's as good at
running backwards as most people are running forwards. Eventually he
became a film star too. He was in The Little
Colonel in Old Kentucky, The Littlest Rebel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm,
(13:44):
and he was often partnered with a little Shirley Temple.
And he makes a lot of money, up to six thousand,
six hundred dollars in a week for a time, but
he dies poor because he's very generous to his friends
and two people in need. But he's a soo got
a pretty bad gambling habit, especially gambling on the Yankees,
which there was an article about why he might be
(14:06):
the biggest Yankees fan of all time. Um. But he
would even arrange his schedule around the games and own
part of the New York Black Yankees as well. He
was an honorary mayor of Harlem before he died in
November ninety nine in New York. And now we're going
to talk about someone we got a lot of requests for.
(14:28):
Fanny Bryce. Fanny Bryce was one of the great comedians
and singers of vaudeville. She was born Fania borach In
to immigrant parents. Her mother was from Budapest, her father
from Alsace, and she hailed from the Lower East Side.
Her parents owned a saloon there, but her dad was
kind of a deadbeat and a gambler, and Fanny herself
(14:52):
wasn't very fond of school. She did like singing, though,
and after she sang a song in an amateur contest
called when You Oh, You're not Forgotten by the girl
you Can't Forget, she won five bucks and she was
just hooked on the stage at that point and dropped
out of school after eighth grade, and her career shoots
off right from there. It didn't exactly start off Shining Lee.
(15:15):
She got hired and then quickly fired for a George
m cohen show, and then ended up with a touring
company that went broke, so her next option was burlesque,
and this is when she changed her name, possibly to
sound Less Jewish. Her big break was singing Sadie salom
A go home, and to give you some sample lyrics
from the song, don't do that dance, I tell you, Sadie,
(15:37):
that's not a business for a lady. Most everybody knows
that I'm your loving mos Oi oi oi oi, where
is your clothes? And it's a funny take on what's
supposed to be a sexy scene, the disrobing salom A.
And the notable thing about this is that she sang
it in a Yiddish accent, but she didn't know any Yiddish.
(15:58):
They thought she, quote unquote looked Jewish, and so she
was encouraged to fake the accent by Irving Berlin no less,
and that's when she made her mark as a Jewish comedian.
She goes on to become a big success in the
zig Field Follies. But it wasn't all good times for
Fanny Bryce. For one thing, at least part of her
chafed being categorized as a comic actress. That's not all
(16:21):
she wanted to do. She wanted to broaden her repertoire
into drama and become a you know, serious actress in caps.
But no one was interested in Fanny Bryce as a dramatist.
They were interested in her as a comedian only. And
she also married badly to a man named nicky Arnstein,
who happened to be an adulterous and possibly big amous thief.
(16:44):
It's just one step up from Evelyn Nust. But there
he went to sing sing for wire tapping and later
to leaven Worth after five million dollars in bonds mysteriously disappeared,
but she wouldn't leave him. He left her and her
kids first, and she finally decided to get a divorce.
But he did inspire her famous torch song, my Man,
(17:05):
which we have a few lyrics from it. It's cost
me a lot, but there's one thing that I've got.
It's my Man, and that's the one serious thing she
did that people loved. It was an older song that
had been translated, but her version of it was something
that was difficult to forget. And when she sang it
was clear she was singing about Ernstein, and since his
(17:27):
rather criminal pursuits were fairly public, people knew what it meant.
In the n she gets a nose job, and this
is partly her own idea of how to escape this
role that she's been type cast in. But she stars
in some more films. They flop and she ends up
marrying Bill Rose, and that doesn't really work out either.
She found some real stardom in radio with a character
(17:49):
called Baby Snooks, who was a brady little girl and
who didn't have an accent because she didn't have an
accent in that program. She felt like it gave her
better mass appeal. And the movie Funny Girl with one
Barbara Streisand is said to have been modeled after her life.
And I have to give a research mentioned to the
Jewish Women's Archive at jw A dot org, which was
(18:11):
really helpful with this one. But that brings us to
our next act, which is Gypsy rose Lee and June Havoc.
And at the time we're recording this, June Havoc recently died,
so this is fairly timely. If you've heard of or
seen the musical Gypsy. The movie version has Rosalind Russell
and Natalie Wood. It's based on Gypsy rose Lee's memoir
(18:34):
and paints their mother, Mama Rose as the most insane
stage mother you've ever heard of, And June hated the musical.
She's quoted as saying mother was very prim and she
was tiny and lovely with big blue eyes. She was
endearing and alluring beyond belief. If she had drive an ambition,
what's wrong with that? So that's the word from June Havoc.
Louise rose Hovic was born in Seattle, and June Hovic
(18:57):
in Vancouver. Supposedly Louise wade Awapa twelve pounds but one
a healthy baby contest. Nevertheless, after their parents marriage ended,
mom arose saw the stage is salvation for the family.
Louise wasn't great at singing or dancing, but June was
a natural. She was on the vaudeville stage at eighteen months,
and Baby June, as her personage was known, was famous
(19:20):
and making major money by age six. But she wanted
to grow up and stop being dainty. June her name
after she outgrew baby um. And at thirteen, she married
a boy she'd met on the stage, and her mother
promptly tried to shoot him. Um. But we do have
to make a note the mom also had a bunch
of forged birth certificates, so who knew how old she
(19:41):
really was. After June got married and left show business,
life was tough for her, you know, after all, it's
the depression and times are hard for anyone. She and
her husband entered marathon dance contest when you literally danced
till you dropped, and if you want, you'd get fed.
And if you didn't, well, you know you were the
one who dropped on the floor and her marriage wasn't working,
(20:03):
but they stayed together for professional reasons. She went on
to be a success, though although not as famous as
her sister. She wrote and directed plays, wrote a memoir,
performed on Broadway, she acted in film. June did pretty
well for herself, and she was quoted in the New
York Times as saying, my sister was beautiful and clever
and ruthless. My mother was endearing and adorable and lethal.
(20:24):
They were the same person. I was the fool of
the family, the one who thought I really was loved
for me, for myself. So moving on to gypsy life
wasn't easy for her. Either. She's not the cute or
the charming one, and mom Arose makes them shoplift and
lie about everything, so she has this very manipulated childhood
and it's harder for the not blonde, not adorable sister.
(20:48):
She plays a boy in their act most of the time,
and um just a tough stage life. And when June left,
Louise finally had a chance in the Dancing Daughters to
her name, but this was during Vaudeville's dying breath, so
instead she turned to stripping in seedy places, But soon
she'd polished her acts. She made it funny and sexy
(21:11):
instead of just bumping grind. She wasn't even fully naked,
and she became a star and everyone came to see her.
And supposedly her mother's dying words were about taking Louise
to the grave with her. So that's the last word
on Mama Rose. So our final act for the show
is Windsor Mackay, who was a newspaper cartoonist and an
animation pioneer. He's going to plan to vaudeville, though, I promise.
(21:33):
He was born in eighteen sixty seven and in his
early twenties he worked as a poster and a billboard artist,
and he eventually gets a job as an illustrator and
cartoonist in Cincinnati, moves to New York, develops two pretty
popular strips there, and by nineteen o five he's made
his most famous creation, which is Little Nemo in Slumberland.
(21:54):
And I used to have a Little Nemo comic book,
and it's pretty cool if you've never If you've never
seen it, you should look it up. It's really surrealist.
There's not much plot because after all their dreams and
they're just these beautifully rendered drawings and really unconventional and
how they're laid out on the page. In nineteen o
(22:15):
nine he had a very popular vaudeville act where he
did speed drawings of his cartoon characters as well as caricatures.
And if you think watching a cartoonist draw sounds boring,
Sarah can assure you that it is not. Yeah, it's
really pretty cool to watch a cartoonist speed draw. I
saw cal from the Economist at a Second City performance,
and I mean just somebody with a transparency in a
(22:38):
pen and there uh creating political figures or celebrities who
you can recognize with just a few strokes. Pretty neat.
McKay started to play around with animation sometime after this
and did an animated version of Little Nemo that he
added to the vaudeville shows, and he followed this with
nineteen twelves How a Mosquito Operates and in nineteen fourteen
(23:00):
Gertie the Dinosaur, which Gertie the Dinosaur was a pretty
pioneering film. It was the first feature character created just
for an animated film. Before that, the characters had been
pulled from the comic strips, and it took ten thousand
drawings to make up the film, and he had to
draw each one by hand because they didn't know how
to make a stationary background at this time. It's sort
(23:23):
of like how you'd imagine the flint stones. There's action
going on and then there's just the rubble behind them
throughout the imagine drawing that for every cell. But even
though the dino animation was really popular, William Randolph Hurst,
a subject of a previous podcast, made McKay stick to
print cartoons. His next film wasn't until nineteen eighteen, Sinking
(23:46):
of the Lusitania, which used to sell animation, cutting down
on the drawing time, and mackay died in nineteen thirty four,
but a lot of his techniques influenced the work of
animators later on. You know a lot of the great
Disney movies you think of from thirties, forties and fifties
are influenced by McKay's work. And uh, I guess that
(24:06):
brings our vaudeville act to a close. The curtain has clue.
We have one honorable mention, though, and that is Joseph Kugel,
whose French stage name translates roughly as the Fartiste. And
it's pretty much exactly what it sounds like. He was
able to break wind on demand, which obviously brought in
some audience members, and that one was suggested to us
(24:30):
by a Twitter follower, so thank you for that. And
if you're interested in slightly more conventional pursuits, you could
check out our article how juggling works if you search
our homepage at www dot house stuff works dot com.
For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
how stuff works dot com and be sure to check
out the stuff you missed in History Glass blog on
(24:52):
the house stuff works dot com home page
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