OF BALLYHOO AND BEACH BALLS

Imagine my consternation in the early days of Willy Nilly when a short green bus pulled up to the curb in front of Dixon Place, and a slobbering mob of propeller hat-wearing troglodytes began to stumble toward the theatre, a spectacle reminiscent of Dawn of the Dead.

“Those can’t be the critics!,” I cried, clutching my director’s hand until he fainted from a loss of blood circulation. But alas, they were. Our suspicions were confirmed when we saw that some of the creatures held memo pads and number two pencils in their trotters.

 

By the time the dust had settled several weeks later, we were satisfied. Several critical voices –a couple of them major – expressed delight at what we’d labored so hard to bring them, and we wound up with a page and a half of superlative pull-quotes. Ah, but those first couple of nights! It was as though we’d been set upon by a coalition of the blind, the deaf, and the stupid (but unfortunately not the dumb). The unkindest cuts came from a couple of second tier scribblers from two of New York’s top ranking critical organs, who brought their prodigious storehouses of cultural knowledge and keen descriptive powers to bear in the service of deriding a wayward beach ball, which had managed to accidentally bounce from the set into the audience on opening night. This ball was apparently a sort of bete noir to these critics, possessing all the malevolence of Moby Dick. Like toddlers, or perhaps kittens, they were mesmerized by it. It was the sun around which their reviews revolved. Like fops of the Restoration, each scrutinized the ball down his nose through a pince nez, laughing the ball to scorn. Unfortunately (for me), somewhere behind, underneath, around the ball – unnoticed — there had been a play.

 

This is the story of my life. The independent theatre artist, of necessity, must wear many hats in order to bring his work before the public. In my convoluted career, I’ve learned something of marketing, and I’ve found it to be a double edged sword that cuts deep.  I have serious things I want to say. I express these ideas through comedy. And then I get out there and start selling. And the hard selling I do almost always backfires in the end. Part of the audience, expecting the unchallenging spectacle the hype seems to promise, exits the theatre disappointed and perplexed. (Hey, man, what was that? That was just weird!) Another part takes the hype at its word and watches the play through the jaded lenses I myself have ground. This bunch never does see the play. They merely confirm what they’ve already decided based on the marketing material. In sum, rather than looking with their eyes, they believe just what they have already been told. It is especially depressing when purported theatre critics are guilty of that level of superficiality; but it turns out most of them are.

 

With Willy Nilly, director Jeff Lewonczyk and myself, by joint consent, decided to announce the show as an “exploitation” and mirror the techniques of the mainstream media apparatus in cravenly making entertainment out of murder. By doing so, we hoped to make people think. Our hype almost always serves a double function – genuine marketing, and a simultaneous parody of marketing. This time out, the promotions fulfilled their more quotidian agenda. Filling the houses turned out to be no problem, at least on the initial run. But the bit about getting audiences to think is a tough nut to crack. As a general rule, it turns out audiences and critics believe everything they’re told – hook, line and sinker. If you paint a canvas entirely red and call it “A Study in Blue”, damned if they won’t see the blue – and only the blue – in it. We announce a work of exploitation, and many reviewers therefore leave their critical faculties at the door. (Others, perhaps, never possessed such faculties to begin with). The result: a passel of reviews that ought to be more embarrassing to their authors than the admittedly uneven play should be to its creators. Certain of their lapses amount to critical malpractice. Thus, for example, the lyrics to Willy Nilly’s opening song “Psychedelic Mushroom Cloud Cuckoo-land” (the title of which is a Joycean style portmanteau phrase compressing “psychedelic mushroom”, “mushroom cloud” and Aristophanes’ “cloud-cuckoo land”)  “failed to impress” one reviewer. To another, the climax of the show (which illustrated social breakdown by setting a Living Theatre style contact improv to a sonic collage modeled on “Revolution #9”) “just fell apart”. A number of these whiz kids demonstrated a lack of awareness of pop culture so great that they plainly had never heard of either Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In or Tiny Tim – phenomena at the pinnacle of mainstream prominence at the time of the play’s events (youth is no excuse for such a level of ignorance—at least not in someone who presumes to don the mantle of critic). By the same token, a few equated the presence of a square, deadpan narrator with Rod Serling (apparently the only such character they’ve encountered) rather than Jack Webb or the hundred or so other white-sock wearing cop and D.A. types more germane to Willy Nilly.

And, as always seems to be the case, the play’s more serious underlying themes went completely unnoticed, even by the show’s many champions. Even a page and a half long monologue of deadly earnest content justifying the author’s intentions (a blatantly Euripidean device I often resort to, one that would make Neitzche spin in his grave) failed to clue scribblers in. All I can do is take solace in the fact that comical writers with serious aims are rarely “gotten” the first time around. To Shaw’s contemporaries, Mrs. Warren’s Profession was just a scandalous play about hookers. Unless you announce yourself as serious, and then act serious, and then shove your serious intentions down people’s throats and up their asses, most people will only register the foolishness. If you think this maddening predicament isn’t what inspired Moliere to write The Misanthrope, you’ve got another thing coming.

 

Moliere knew his misanthrope from the inside; he thought the character’s dark thoughts at times, or he couldn’t have written them. But he also possessed the wisdom not to give in to despair. Cooler heads prevail in the play, and Moliere went on to write many other brilliant comedies. We profit by his example by climbing back into the saddle with Kitsch, which opens at Theater for the New City on November12. It is a farce, based on the Roman playwright Plautus’s Twin  Menaechmi by way of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. We hope audiences will merely enjoy themselves. It is a machine to make people laugh. In fact, we hope audiences never bother themselves with this essay. It will ruin the show for them.

 

On the other hand, we hold critics to a higher standard. We hope they will bring to the table more than a superficial working knowledge of Top 40 theatrical hits.

 

A familiarity with ancient comedy would help; the play derives more from Plautus (by way of translation) than from Shakespeare. The play’s main architecture is classical: it is divided into five acts, and maintains a careful geometric organization of characters and events that owes more than a little to Aristotle.

 

A knowledge of the early works of Brecht would also assist the critic. (Happy End and St. Joan of the Stockyards were particular inspirations). Young Brecht was a parodist. In the tradition of Aristophanes, Rabelais, Cervantes, and even Bach, his technique early on was to vacuum up cultural products and glue them into his theatrical vehicles; so much so that he was often accused of plagiarism. Yet Brecht was a man of his time and place. In fact, he is the foremost advocate of a theatre oppositional to classical values, even to our own times. Like Eisenstein and Meyerhold before him, he sought a way to theatricalize the Hegelian dialectic; his Epic theatre would build not to some single satisfying climax as in the Aristotelean theatre, but mimic the variety theatre and the novel by containing strings of discrete moments, each with its own point, flattened out over a picaresque journey. The historical moment described in Kitsch­ – the fall of the Berlin Wall and the momentary culture clash between the twin materialist philosophies of capitalism and communism – provides fodder to explore the dialectic (embodied here in separated twins who spend their lives in the two warring blocs – half money-grubbing decadents, half over-regimented sheep). In Kitsch, classicism wars with Epic technique (songs, intertitles, direct address). Ideas are thus embodied in the silliness, for those able and willing to look beyond the veil.

 

And to quote the television pitchman: “But wait: there’s more!” For the play parodies Brecht. In plays like Happy End, St. Joan and In the Jungle of Cities Brecht had betrayed (intentionally or otherwise) an imperfect knowledge of the America he depicted (a knowledge gleaned almost entirely from Hollywood movies and popular songs). We do the same with our own sketchy, romanticized idea of Berlin. The play is written in the voice of a translator, as though from across a great distance. The fabric of the play thus describes a world where communication within and across cultures is at the very least troublesome, and at its worst, impossible. For the playwright who grapples daily with such problems of communication (spawning, for example, this essay), the theme is a highly personal one. But the Timonist in me fears that the majority of reviewers (let’s not call them critics) will receive precisely none of these elements I’ve described, having been distracted by some untied shoe or unbuttoned fly.

 

 

 

The opinions expressed in this editorial are solely those of the author. His professional associates, past and present, had no hand in its creation, and are just as annoyed as you are.

Stars of Vaudeville #77: Marie Dressler

The title of Marie Dressler’s autobiography, Confessions of an Ugly Duckling sums up her career in a nutshell. Despite being a trained opera singer and a gifted actress, she had the body of a football player and the face of a mastiff. Unconquerable nature decreed that she must therefore play comedy and this she did to great popular effect for many decades.

 

She was born Leile Koerber in Cobourg, Canada in 1869. As a child, she wanted to be a bareback rider in the circus, so her family was actually relieved when she declared she wanted to be an actress. When she a mere 14 years old, she answered an ad for a place in a traveling stock company, and got the part. Her great size allowed her to claim to be an adult; she also brought along her sister to “chaperone and play small parts.” After an unhappy love affair with one of the company, she decamped  and joined up with an opera company. Though she was merely in the chorus, she had the temerity to dream about one day playing the role of Katisha in The Mikado, thoroughly learning the part in her spare time. Miraculously, the company decided to do The Mikado, the actress playing the part of Katisha sprained her ankle, and the assigned understudy was unprepared. Marie went on. For the next several years, she was to tour with various opera companies, her salary gradually increasing to the point where she could support her entire family.

 

In 1896, she appeared with Eddie Foy in Chicago in a production of Little Robinson Crusoe. When Robber of the Rhine a play by Maurice Barrymore, flopped at the 5^th Avenue Theatre, she found herself stuck in New York and out of work. To earn some money, she sang at the Atlantic Garden on the Bowery and Koster and Bial’s. Numerous parts arrived in time, including one in Princess Nicotine with Lillian Russell. Her first big hit was the 1896 The Lady Slavey, which ran for four years.

 

From 1900-04, she worked in vaudeville and burlesque doing coon songs and impersonations. She continued to return to the vaudeville stage periodically throughout her career, even while succeeded in other arenas. Between plays, she would work up a vaudeville sketch with a partner. One, called Tess of the Vaudevilles played 10 weeks straight at Proctor’s 58^th Street. In 1919 she headlined at the Palace.

 

In legit, Joe Weber hired her for his company casting her in Higglety-Pigglety, Hotel Topsy Turvy etc, and many other farcical “burlesques”. Her biggest meal ticket was a play called Tillie’s Nightmare, 1910, which ran for 5 years, and then kept extended its life through motion pictures. In 1914 Mack Sennett did a film version starring Dressler called Tillie’s Punctured Romance which also included Charlie Chaplin. Any illusions that Sennett had suddenly acquired class by bringing this Broadway play to the screen will be dispelled by the titles of the sequels he did which also starred Dressler: Tillie’s Tomato Surprise (1915) and Tillie Wakes Up (1917).

 

Work dried up for Dressler in the 1920s, but in the 30s things were looking up indeed. Hollywood came knocking with a string of great roles. The talking Dressler proved herself to be a hot ticket. She played grand dames and homeless women with equal gusto. Among the films she did were Anna Christie (1930), Min and Bill, for which she won the Best Actress Oscar (1930), and Dinner at Eight (1934). The last film was released posthumously. But she had the pleasure of knowing that she was Hollywood’s number one box office draw for the last four years of her life.

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Stars of Vaudeville #76: Ed Wynn

ED WYNN, “THE PERFECT FOOL”

In an age of grotesque comedians, Ed Wynn was one of the most outre, easily in a league with Groucho and Harpo Marx and Bobby Clark. Promoted as the “Perfect Fool” , his instantly recognizable get-up was almost that of a circus clown. His egg shaped body was covered in a too-tight jacket and baggy pants. A tiny derby topped his head. His eyebrows were highly arched, like a cartoon’s, and large round glasses framed his glassy, fishy eyes. His quavery voice, lisp and frequent use of the phrase “ya know” were almost certainly the basis of the vocal characterization of McDonald’s “Mayor McCheese” character. It can hardly be surprising that Wynn was quoted by his grandson as saying,  “I never wanted to be a real person.”

Real or not, Jack Benny called him “the world’s greatest comedian”. George Burns said he was “the greatest of us all.” Critic John Mason Brown called him “the King of Nonsense and the Emperor of Idiocy.”

Isaiah Edwin Leopold was born in Philadelphia in 1886. His father was a middle class hatter who’d immigrated from Prague, a domineering character, who would have like to see his son follow in the family business. By 1901, the boy made his stage debut as Ed Wynn (an interpolation of his middle name). The next year, he partnered with Jack Lewis to form a team known variously as “Win and Lose, The Rah Rah Boys” and “The Freshman and the Sophomore.” This act, which satirized college students, aimed to be more intelligent than the Weber and Fields-style knockabout Wynn was accustomed to seeing on stage. (“Rah! rah! rah! who pays the bills? Ma and Pa!”)

Wynn performed in numerous vaudeville sketches and solo pieces over the years. Notable among these was “The Boy with the Funny Hats,” (based on cutting up he had done in his father’s shop as a youngster) and his 1913 sketch “The King’s Jester” which he debuted at the Palace. The premise of the latter sketch had Wynn as a court jester scheduled for execution unless he could make the King laugh. His many attempts leave the King stone-faced. Finally, in desperation, he whispers something into the King’s ear. The King laughs. Wynn says “I didn’t know you wanted THAT kind of joke!” and kicks the King in the rear. Blackout.

In the mid-teens he began to work in Broadway revues, starting with the Zeigfeld Follies in 1914. In the 1915 edition, there occurred one of the most notorious anecdotes in the annals of show business. While W.C. Fields was doing his famous poolroom routine, he noticed that he was getting laughs in all sorts of places where laughs shouldn’t be. He looked down and saw that Wynn had snuck under the pool table and was making faces at the audience. Horning in on another performer’s act is a big no-no, for starters. To doublecross Fields was suicide. Without acknowledging that he had seen Wynn, Fields waited for the right moment, and then cracked Wynn over the skull with his pool cue, knocking him out cold. The audience roared, thinking it was all just part of the act and Fields went on coolly with his routine.

Presumably Wynn learned his lesson that day, though it was soon to become moot – by the twenties, he was producing, directing, writing and starring in his own Broadway vehicles, proving that any resemblance between Wynn and an actual idiot was purely illusory.  Wynn’s leadership in the Equity strike of 1919 made him persona non grata with Broadway producers. No one would hire him. Many a performer would have thrown up his hands. Wynn responded by putting on his own show Ed Wynn’s Carnival at the New Amsterdam theatre in 1920. It was an instant sell-out.

Audiences warmed to Wynn for a variety of reasons. His own taste in gags was surreal. (A typical Wynn invention is his “fool-proof alarm clock” – a lit candle stuck in one’s ear at bedtime.) At the same time there was warmth and a genuineness to his performances. He seemed almost maternal as he shepherded his performers around stage, and a fundamental sincerity underlay all of his preposterous pronouncements, which not only helped to make seem a literal idiot, but also served to make him likable. At no time did you get the idea that he thought he was above that character. He WAS that character. That quality of honesty was to serve him well when he began to take on dramatic roles in his later years.

The series of shows Wynn produced through the twenties and early thirties were Wynn’s highest realization as a performing artist. To this day, despite ample record of Wynn’s comic genius on film, radio and TV, one continues to think of this string of Broadway smashes as the pinnacle of Wynn’s career. Each was based around the familiar character Wynn had been developing in vaudeville. Among the most successful of these tailor-made starring vehicles were The Perfect Fool (1921), The Grab Bag (1924), Simple Simon (1930) and The Laugh Parade (1931). His last Broadway vehicle was a wartime effort to revive vaudeville, 1942’s Laugh, Town, Laugh.

From 1932-37 he played “The Fire Chief” on the eponymous radio program sponsored by Texaco. The show helped to make Wynn a household word throughout the nation. In 1949, the first television program bearing the name The Ed Wynn Show debuted on local a Los Angeles station. (This is the show where Buster Keaton’s comeback is said to have began). Wynn then worked as one of four rotating hosts of NBC’s Four Star Revue, alternating the slot with Jack Carson, Danny Thomas, and Jimmy Durante. In the fifties, he began to stretch himself with dramatic roles in such productions as Rod Serling’s original TV version of Requiem for a Heavyweight (1956) and the 1959 film The Diary of Anne Frank. Wynn continued to play variations of his old character right through to the end however, notably in various Disney movies, such as Alice in Wonderland (voice over as the Mad Hatter), The Absent-Minded Professor, and Mary Poppins. Wynn died in 1966, thankfully not long enough to see some of his most endearing mannerisms appropriated by an eight foot tall talking cheeseburger. Although, with his sense of humor, he might have been fine with that.

DISTINGUISHED PROGENY: Ed’s son Keenan Wynn was a well-known character actor in Hollywood from the 1940s through the 1970s. He started out as Van Johnson’s comic foil in romantic comedies. Younger viewers would recognize him in such films as Dr. Strangelove (“You know who you’re gonna have to answer to? The Coca Cola Company” ) and Nashville (“That’s my niece. She’s from California.”)

 

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Raise High the Roofgreen

Some may recall that back in March I put on a burlesque show to benefit Theater for the New City’s effort to build a green roof — they’ll be one of the first, if not the first, to have such a facility in the city. Tomorrow night, one of my fellow committee members Paulanne Simmons is taking her turn at bat, with a big benefit show that will feature (among others) Broadway lights like Tammy Grimes, Betsy Von Furstenburg, as well as myself and several cast members from Kitsch, providing samplings from the new show. For more info about this worthy event, go here.

 

Stars of Vaudeville #75: Willie and Eugene Howard

 

WILLY: We were born in Russia.

 

REPORTER: What part?

 

WILLY: All of us!

 

REPORTER: Were your parents Russian?

 

WILLY: No, they took their time.

 

REPORTER: Do you have any brothers and sisters?

 

WILLY: Yes, we have one brother, who’s deaf and dumb and he stutters.

 

REPORTER: Deaf and dumb, but he stutters?

 

WILLY: Yeah, he’s got three fingers missin.’

 

Willie and Eugene Howard were among the first openly Jewish entertainers to tread the American stage. Not only were they Jewish but they played Jews, which was a peculiarly vaudevillian concept. Just as real Irishmen (like Eddie Foy, Harrigan and Hart, and Maggie Cline) played stage Irishmen, and real Blacks (like Walker and Williams, Mantan Moreland and Pigmeat Markham ) played stage Blacks, Willie and Eugene played caricatures of Jewish people.

In their field, they were tops. George Jessel said “Willie Howard was the best of all the revue comics, bar none”. In 1929,  Variety called Eugene “a flawless straightman”.

 

EUGENE: Why, I’ve had my nose to the grindstone fifteen years.

 

WILLY: (regarding his nose) You should have seen it before he started.

 

Actually surnamed Levkowitz, the boys were born in Neustadt, Silesia, Eugene in 1880, Willie in 1883. The family immigrated to Harlem. The early part of their story parallels that of the Jolson brothers. The father was a cantor who taught his boys to sing in hopes that they will serve God. Instead, they run off and join the theatre.

Willie and Eugene both began their careers in 1897, but independently of one another. Eugene’s first job was in the chorus of a show called The Belle of New York at the Casino Theatre. Willie was hired to sing from the balcony at Proctor’s 125^th Street, a common stage trick in those days.  It was also how Al Jolson got his start. Zeigfeld hired Willie to do this bit for his show The Little Dutchess but his voice started to change, and so he was let go.

 

Willie and Eugene teamed up for the first time in 1902 with a sketch they called “The Messenger and the Thespian”.  The boys did dialect humor, opera parodies and comedy crosstalk. Willy was an an expert at foreign accents, and though he usually did Yiddish, there were times when he would also do Spanish or Scottish or any number of others. The situation usually featured Willie as some sort of troublesome servant (frequently a waiter or a bellhop), and Eugene as an authority figure (a customer or manager of some kind). Willy could also do killer impressions of top vocalists of the day such as George Jessel, Al Jolson, Gallagher & Shean, and Eddie Cantor. the visual effect was enhanced by the fact that Willie stood less than five feet tall, weighed 95 lbs., and had caved in shoulders, wild eyes and “professor” hair. Signature bits included “French Taught in a Hurry” in which did rapid doubletalk; “Quartets from Rigoletto”, which he would perform with large, buxom ladies (stealing glances at at their breasts the whole time); and “Comes the Revolution”, in which he would play a radical agitator.

 

Willie and Eugene worked strictly in vaudeville for the next ten years, and then in 1912, began to intersperse their vaudeville bookings with numerous turns in major Broadway revues like the Shuberts’ Passing Show series and George White’s Scandals. The last of these was Ballyhoo of 1932.

 

Eugene retired in 1940 to manage Willy, who performed in several more Broadway shows and in night clubs before passing away in 1949. Eugene joined him on the other side in 1965.

 

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Stars of Vaudeville #74: Olsen and Johnson

Today is the birthday of Ole Olsen.

OLSEN AND JOHNSON “The Mad Monarchs of Monkey Business”

The most famous effort of John “Ole” Olsen and Harold “Chic” Johnson was the Broadway revue Hellzapoppin, the culmination of their 25 years as vaudeville headliners, which opened in 1938 and ran for years. Though most critics disliked the show strenuously, audiences were crazy about it, and in 1941 it was turned into a movie. Other Broadway shows followed: Laffing Room Only (1945), Funzapoppin (1949), and Pardon My French (1950)—all basically continuations of Hellzapoppin. You might say  the various versions of Hellzapoppin were on stage continuously for over 10 years.

 

Olsen and Johnson created a mad universe very much akin to that of the Marx Brothers, with one salient difference. A Marx Brothers production pitted three lunatics against a sane universe. In Olsen and Johnson, the team and the universe were equally insane, and the boys were the audiences’ ambassadors into that world. For example, in the Marx Brothers, only Harpo could cataylze a truly surreal physical moment, as when in Animal Crackers some statues came to life, or in A Night in Casablanca, when Harpo held up the facade of a building just by leaning on it. In Olsen and Johnson, anyone and everyone could do such things. An unexpected cow might fall from the sky, and the events was pretty much taken in stride. Anything the mind could conceive happened. The gags were fast, funny and cartoon-like, anticipating Mel Brooks, early Woody Allen, Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In and Monty Python’s Flying Circus. It’s a world where a man with a camera around his neck walks in and says to the team “May I take your picture”? When given permission, he walks up and lifts a painting off the wall, and walks off with it. Entrances and exits by stooges were constant to deliver such gags. (One of their perennial supporting players was Joe Besser, that bizarre man in the Fauntleroy suit from the Abbot & Costello TV show, and Shemp’s brief replacement in The Three Stooges.)

 

The boys themselves had snappy, modern personae. They dressed sort of like Abbot and Costello, in a couple of business suits. Both were equally crazy – there was no straight man. You’d never know it from the way they behaved, but they were actually a couple of Swedes from the Midwest.  Both were born in the early 1890s and graduates of Northwestern University –making them among the very few vaudevillians to attend college.

 

Like Jimmy Durante and others, they started out as musicians (Olsen as a fiddler, Johnson as a ragtime pianist) but cutting up gradually overtook the music. They met while playing in the same dance band in Chicago. The band broke up, so they decided to form a team. Olsen and Johnson debuted at small Chicago nightclub in the mid-teens, improvising songs and ad-libbed patter. By 1918, they were working at New York’s Royal Theatre, where Variety caught them and wrote them a rave. Though they started out in the lowly Pantages circuit, by the late 20s they were knocking them dead at the Palace. A 1922 tour of London was ill-fated when Olie fell sick for the entirety of the trip. Sophie Tucker and the Marx Brothers were among those who came to the sick room to cheer him up.

 

They’d made several films for Warner Brothers and Universal, but almost all of them have fallen by the wayside. They also briefly tried a TV show based on their revue format called Fireball Fun for All in the late 1940s, but it also tanked. It was in the live experience that Olsen and Johnson truly clicked, and when vaudeville died, and the revues dried up, there was always Vegas and the nightclubs. They remain a team to this day. Chic (d. 1962) and Olie (d.1963) are actually buried side-by-side in Las Vegas Cemetery.

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Stars of Vaudeville #73: Will Rogers

 

Will Rogers’ place in the hearts and minds of Americans transcended the limits of mere show business. He was regarded as a kind of American Saint, a sort of cross between Mark Twain, Abraham Lincoln and George Bernard Shaw. A “cowboy philosopher” who expressed harsh and amusing truths in a bluntly honest way reminiscent of the blurted pronouncements of children and old folks – funny because shocking because true. Co-star Peggy Wood called him a “puncturer of self-made balloons”. Rogers became larger than life, a sort of symbol of the common man. His fame and relevance only grew until the day he died, and when he did, at the age of 55, it was a national day of mourning.

He was born in 1879, in what was then known as Indian Territory (later Oklahoma). His full name at birth was Colonel William Penn Adair Rogers, after an admired military leader. Rogers was roughly 1/6 Cherokee Indian. (father 1/8, mother ¼). He was fond of saying “My folks didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they met the boat.”

 

Contrary to his image, it is a shock to learn that Rogers grew up a spoiled rich kid. His father was a well-to-do rancher  (60,000 acres) and politician. In the Indian Territory days he was a member of the Cherokee Senate; he was also a delegate to the convention that drafted the Oklahoma Constitution. Perhaps the only hint of Will’s earlier life of privilege that he retained was an unapologetic fondness for polo in his later years. The youngest of 7 children, Rogers was the baby of the family, and got away with plenty of mischief.. His mother died when he was 10, leaving his upbringing even more unsupervised.

 

Like many vaudevillians, Rogers didn’t finish school, but not out of need or neglect in his case. He was wild and undisciplined and was thrown out of many schools, most of them private boarding schools. Even so, he was quite close to graduating when he finally quit for good. As a kid, he spent all of his time doing rodeo tricks and it got him into plenty of trouble. He would rope girls with a lasso for kicks. He once broke the arm off a statue by roping it; on another occasion he roped and injured the teacher’s horse. He was addicted to all sorts of practical jokes. Also, as later became well known, his grammar and spelling were atrocious, which might have been charming in a syndicated column, but surely can’t have sat well with his teachers.

 

Rogers ran away from military school at age 18 to go on a cattle drive. During those months, he lived the life of a real cowboy, living outdoors on the range, sleeping on the ground at night, eating meals around a campfire. In 1901, he competed in riding and roping contests in a rodeo show run by Colonel Zach Mulhall. Realizing he’d never be tops in the rodeo world, in1902 he departed for Argentina to work on ranches. Dissatisfied with that experience, he next worked a cattle boat en route to South Africa. While in that country, he happened to meet a traveling vaudevillian named W.C. Fields in (where else) a bar. Shortly thereafter, Rogers finally became a performer for good. He joined Texas Jack’s Wild West Show as a rider and roper, working there for 9 months. as “the Cherokee Kid”. From there, he went on to work at the Wirth Bros. circus in Australia, and wended his way home by way of San Francisco in 1904. Almost immediately, he rejoined Col. Mulhall for a rodeo exhibition at the St. Louis fair. In 1905, Mulhall brought a “small picked bunch” with him for a performance at Madison Square Garden.

 

When the engagement closed, Rogers stayed behind in New York to break into vaudeville. He had trouble getting managers to book him at first but finally debuted at Keith’s Union Square during the 6-8 slot, the so-called “dinner” show. Not many people were there, of course (they were all eating dinner!). Rogers went on 5^th in the bill and was a hit anyway. In no time, he was booked at Hammerstein’s Roof.

 

His early act was almost entirely an exhibition of skills. He’d make a spectacular entrance on Teddy, his horse, jump off and send him into the wings with a slap on the hindquarters. He began his sequence of tricks to the accompaniment of the orchestra playing familiar cowboy songs. He had an assistant named Buck McGee who rode a horse around stage that Rogers would rope in various ways. Felt was attached to the horse’s hooves so he wouldn’t slip on the stage. One of Rogers’ tricks was to toss two lassos at the same time, one over the rider and one over the horse’s hooves. Other tricks included the Texas Skip (where he jumped in and out of a vertical loop), and the merry-go-round, where he passed the spinning rope from hand to hand, under his legs, and behind his back. His show-stopper was the “crinoline”, in which Rogers played a lasso out so far it went way out over the audiences heads. Like a golfer with his various clubs, Rogers had a whole array of different sized (length, width, thickness) ropes to accomplish his different tricks. Most of these tricks can be seen in the 1922 film The Ropin’ Fool.

 

Contrary to popular belief, Rogers had some patter in his act from the very beginning, in the form of little remarks to cover his flubs. Despite the fact that he was the premier lariat artist of his time, such failures are common even to masters. How to deal with them is the mark of a true performer. “I don’t have any idea I’ll get it, but here goes”, is reported to have been his first line on stage. Initially he was flummoxed, not to say angry, that people laughed when he spoke. To an audience of New Yorkers, Will’s folksy turn of expression and his Western accent were alien things, just as nutty in their way as Fanny Brice’s Yiddishisms. When he perceived that this was to his advantage, Rogers relaxed some and played it for all it was worth. He began to cook up lines, especially for the act. Many remarks taken for ad libs are in fact worked out in advance. “I’m handicapped up h’yar, the manager won’t let me swear when I miss, ” always got howls. He’d written it out earlier on a piece of hotel stationary.

 

Gum chewing was another early trademark. In that era of propriety and “elocution” public gum chewing was considered rude. Rogers was so natural and unapologetic about it, he helped make it socially acceptable. He even worked business with the gum into the act. If he missed a trick, he might pause a minute, then go upstage and stick the gum on the scenery then go back and try the trick again, as though the gum had hindered him somehow.

 

Rogers began to extend the reach of his jokes to cover other performers or the condition of the theatre itself. A favorite lark was to rope a stagehand and drag him onstage. The gesture strikes on as analogous to his verbal humor – it was an impish way of saying, “Come on, buster, you’re no better than the rest of us, I’m gonna see that you remember that.”

 

The act was a true novelty at first; no one was doing this sort of thing in vaudeville, though after he became successful he had many imitators. In those days most comedians self-consciously crafted personae for themselves over a number of years. Weber and Fields didn’t speak in Dutch malapropisms and hit each other over the head at home.  Rogers (like most modern comedians ) was “himself”. Of course, unlike many modern comedians, his actual identity was intrinsically interesting. Rogers was immediately in great demand all over the country. When he arrived at a town he would help publicize his performance by riding down the main street on a horse with a sign reading “Will Rogers, the Lariat King”.

 

From 1906-7 he toured the major European capitals. He was much adored wherever he went, except Germany, where he was nearly arrested for roping a fire warden who happened to be standing backstage during his show. The humorless audience nearly lynched him and he fled the country. In the age of Kaiser Welhelm, Germans didn’t like the idea of being “cut down to size.”

 

In 1910, Rogers developed a new, more streamlined act, discarding the expensive horse roping equipment and entourage, and concentrating a bit more on the humorous monologue. Some rope tricks were retained however. In some ways the new act was more “vaudevillian”. Rogers would swing his lasso while riding a unicycle, climbing a stepladder, or rolling a cigarette. He even sang something called “The Hound Dog Song”.

 

“I wish there was a vaudeville like there was in those old days,” Rogers once said, “No branch of entertainment was ever so satisfying to work in.” Still, you’ve got to grow in some direction. In 1912, he was cast in the musical The Wall Street Girl which also starred Nora Bayes. It was his unfortunate duty on opening night to have to announce the sinking of the Titanic to the audience.  Following this acted a sort of master of ceremonies in a Shubert revue The Town Topics, which was lavish that it collapsed after just a few weeks.

 

In the summer of 1915, Will accidentally dove into a shallow pool, damaging his right arm and side. The incident forced him to learn many of his tricks with his left hand, and to develop his humorous patter even more, thus strengthening his act still further.

 

That year he debuted on the very first night of the very first season of  Zeigfeld’s Midnight Frolics. Because the same audience returned to this show every night, Rogers needed a constant influx of new material. His wife Betty suggested that he go to the newspapers for topical events. Rogers began scanning the paper every day for what he called “fresh laid jokes”. This act, usually prefaced by the familiar remark, “All I know is what I read in the papers,” was immensely successful. In 1916, he moved down to the Follies, the more prestigious Zeigfeld show, in addition to his nightly turn in the Frolics. With three shows to do a day, Rogers relied on three separate editions of the newspaper a day for fresh material. (The modern equivalent would be to constantly monitor the internet or a cable news network).

 

Ziegfeld and Rogers were strange bedfellows indeed. Zeigfeld, the humorless, but sophisticated urban womanizer vs. the very married, apparently incorruptible, almost child-like Rogers. The two never had a contract, but made their agreement on a handshake, and neither of them ever let the other down.

 

In 1916, Rogers had the terrifying honor of performing for Woodrow Wilson, perhaps the first time in history a standing president was publicly kidded by a comedian in person. Wilson took it all with good humor, and the tradition has never gone out of fashion to this day.

 

In 1918, he began to star in movies, and he would do so right through the silent era and well into the era of talkies. His first roles were straight dramatic parts for Samuel Goldwyn, but by the mid-twenties he was into more appropriate territory with Hal Roach comedies. Still, these were slapstick, and Rogers was never a pie-in-the-face sort of comedian. He was primarily verbal. Starting in 1929, he did 20 talkies for 20^th-Century Fox. These films were huge hits, proving you had to HEAR Rogers. In 1931, he was of the nation’s top ten box office attractions. The following year he was second in the land, and in 1934, he came in first. To give some perspective on what time has wrought, the Marx Bros. and W.C. Fields were far less popular cinematic draws at that time. Notable films from the thirties included the original version of State Fair,  Dr. Bull,  Judge Priest and Steamboat Round the Bend. He was the master of ceremonies at the 1933 Oscar award ceremony.

 

Based on the success of his self-penned monologues, he began writing for publication. His first book The Cowboy Philosopher at the Peace Conference came out in 1919. For various newspapers he covered every political convention starting in 1920. His much cherished humor column began was published 1922-35. Critics began to compare him to Twain and Ade. The writing was ungrammatical and misspelled (and unlike those other humorists it was unintentional) but it was nonetheless wise and witty. In 1925, he toured on the lecture platform, commanding high fees for engagements that lasted 1-2 hours in towns all over the country. He even played Carnegie Hall, the first time a comedian had done so.

 

His radio career spanned 1926-35. In 1933 he started The Good Gulf Show featuring “the famous alarm clock”. Rogers would set the clock, and when it rang, wherever he was, he would stop talking. The fifteen minute show consisted of unedited live topical extemporization. Rogers was most effective during the depression, when his warm, reassuring voice in the home had the same effect as Roosevelt’s. It made people feel better. During the 20s he had been popular because he was an oddity—a sort of throwback to the Wild West days. During the depression he was popular because he symbolized the common man and he told the unvarnished truth about what was going on. His work was akin to that of Carl Sandburg, John Steinbeck and other chroniclers of the era. FDR loved him, and Rogers loved FDR right back.

 

Rogers’ restless love of travel, and his boundless trust in his fellow man combined to cut his life short at the age of 55. A huge fan of aviation, which was still technically in its infancy, he jumped at the chance to fly with Wiley Post to map a postal route from Alaska to Siberia. Not to put too fine a point on it, Rogers was such a trusting man, he flew in a home-made plane with a one-eyed guy to a place without any airports. The 1935 plane crash hit the nation hard. Not since Lincoln’s assassination had the whole country mourned a single man so intensely. By the end of life, Rogers had outgrown show business entirely. He was simply a great man.

 

His legacy lives on. In 1940, Will Rogers, Jr. was elected to congress. James Whitmore played Rogers in many one man shows beginning in 1969. In 1991, Keith Carradine starred in The Will Rogers Follies on Broadway.

 

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Stars of Vaudeville #72: Ethel Waters

From poverty and marriage at age 13, Ethel Waters was to go on to earn one of the highest salaries in vaudeville ($3000-4000 a week), becoming a huge star of stage and screen.

Waters got her feet wet on the TOBA circuit, debuting at Baltimore’s Lincoln Theatre at age 17. By the mid-twenties, she was a star of black vaudeville, and other opportunites started to open up. In 1925 she had a double breakthrough, inking a contract to record for Columbia Records, and securing a booking to success Florence Mills at the Plantation Club. In 1927 she starred in the Broadway show Africana at the Daly Theatre. In that year, too, she crossed over into mainstream vaudeville, debuting at the New York Palace. By the following year, she was headling at the Chicago Palace. In 1930, she starred in Lew Leslie’s Blackbirds with Mantan Moreland and Buck and Bubbles. In 1933 she introduced the song Lena Horne was later to become famous for “Stormy Weather”, at the Cotton Club. That year she also made the short Rufus Jones for President featuring a pint-sized Sammy Davis, Jr. A star of radio and live performance throughout the 30s and 40s, she also principal roles in the films Cabin in the Sky (1943) and Pinky (1949) . She was in both stage and screen versions of Carson McCuller’s Member of the Wedding (1950 and 1952, respectively). For the last two decades or so of her life, she would only sing spirituals, and criss-crossed the country with evangelist Billy Graham, paving her way for her inevitable passage to Glory in 1977.

 

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Stars of Vaudeville #71: Fanny Brice

A pox upon me for a clumsy lout. Yesterday was Fanny Brice’s birthday and I completely forgot to do her blog post. Well here she is, better late than nevah.

Best known today via Barbara Streisand’s portrayal of her in the musical films Funny Girl and Funny Lady, Brice was actually rather unlike Streisand in appearance. Tall and gangly like Olive Oyl, with two bright crescent-shaped eyes on either side of her parrot-like nose, Brice was always using this mug for low comedy effect, crossing her eyes, and so forth. She usually spoke with a Yiddish accent for laughs, although she didn’t actually speak that way herself. Brice made her fame parodying the sort of women she wasn’t (cinematic vamps and high-class society dames with English accents), thereby allowing the audience to laugh at them and her at the same time. She also became very well known for singing sentimental character songs crafted around the names “Sadie” and “Rose”.

 

Born Fanny Borach in 1891, her parents ran a saloon in Newark where Fanny sang and danced as a child. Her father was a drunk from Alsace. Her mother, who wore the pants in the family, was from Hungary. The mother ran the saloon, but the father drank the profits. So they moved to Brooklyn, where the mother sold real estate, which you couldn’t drink, at least.

 

At age 14, Fanny won an amateur contest at a Brooklyn theatre when she sang “When You Know You’re Not Forgotten by the Girl You Can’t Forget.” She took the name “Brice” from a  neighbor. She got a job early in the chorus of a Cohan musical starring Victor Moore The Talk of New York (1907) but was fired for joking around during rehearsal.

 

Hired by the Columbia Burlesque Wheel, she commissioned two songs from the then unknown Irving Berlin. One of them was “Sadie Salome, Go Home”. She was a hit in The College Girls in 1910. She performed in the Zeigfeld Follies in 1910 and 1911. Like Jimmy Durante, she was one of the few to make it big in show business PRIOR to working in vaudeville. When she worked in vaudeville it was strictly prestige dates such as Hammerstein’s Victoria and the Palace. A number of Shubert musicals followed, such as The Whirl of Society (1912) and The Honeymoon Express. In the years 1916-23, she returned to the Follies. In the late 20s, it was back to vaudeville.

 

Her one shot at a real starring role in a talkie, the 1927 vehicle My Man (based on her theme song) was not a real hit. As Joe Smith of Smith & Dale said, “She was a very funny girl, but a good actress for only about fifteen minutes.” The truth was, she couldn’t act—she mugged too hard, and played her roles from too great a distance. You can see it in the 1936 film The Great Zeigfeld: in her big dramatic scene, in which she plays herself, she is definitely weeping tears of glycerine.

 

Brice divorced her husband, jailed gangster Nick Arnstein in 1927 and married impresario Billy Rose in 1929. A number of Rose vehicles followed, such as Sweet and Low (1930), and Billy Rose’s Crazy Quilt (1931), with Phil Baker and Ted Healy. She did a Zeigfeld Follies in 1934, where she introduced her popular character Baby Snooks. In 1936 she separated from Billy Rose. Illness (spinal neuritis) and divorce caused her early retirement from the stage. She moved out to L.A. where she starred as Baby Snooks on radio, and took bit parts in movies for the remainder of her career. She died in 1951 of a cerebral hemorrhage.

 

The 1939 film Rose of Washington Square is supposedly based on Brice’s relationship with Arnstein. Unfortunately, it stars Alice Faye and Tyrone Power, which is sort of like casting mayonnaise and white bread in a story about mustard and pumpernickel. Lacking any hint of humor or spice, the film also makes the traditional Hollywood mistake of featuring 1939 music and fashions in a story set twenty years earlier. Funny Girl (1968) gets it better, but somehow seems to be more about its star Barbara Streisand than about Brice. The film focuses on Brice’s problematic relationship with Arnstein (Omar Sharif), who comes off in the movie – unaccountably – as a saint. the 1975 sequel Funny Lady is about Brice’s rocky marriage to Rose. Brice herself managed to make a cameo from beyond the grave in the 1983 Woody Allen film Zelig, thanks to Modern Movie Magic.

To find out more about these variety artists and the history of vaudeville, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Theatre of Blood

One of my favorite movies opens tonight at the Film Forum and will play all week. In Theatre of Blood, Vincent price plays a demented ham who fakes his own death in order to get revenge upon a gaggle of theatre critics who’ve literally driven him mad. One by one, he bumps them off in clever, amusing ways drawn from the great plays of Shakespeare. And each critic is played by a hilarious British character actor (Robert Morley as a big, preening sissy stands out in my memory). And for sex appeal, there’s Diana Rigg as Price’s dutiful, equally insane daughter. This movie is as delicious as a bag of Halloween candy — with no apples.

Watch this spot a few days from now, for a suprising follow up to this post. And for more info on the current showing of Theatre of Blood, go here.