I am honored to have been immortalized in the pages of Molly Crabapple’s terrific new graphic novel Scarlet Takes Manhattan. One look below I think will convince you of the superiority of the imagination (yowza!) over this “stale and unprofitable existence.”
The book goes on sale today, with a signing party tonight at the Slipper Room. For more info: mollycrabapple.com
Some major international theatre encyclopedia (I forget which, but I believe Geilgud was the titular editor) made me furious once for its dismissive description of Sam Shepard. The assessment was something along the lines of “amazingly inept in his early work but he eventually started writing real plays in the late 1970s.” This is a common attitude among the general public (insofar as they ever think about such things) but the G.P. can be forgiven for occasional philistinism: they’re too busy building bridges and serving lattes and driving taxi cabs to dwell much (at all) on theatrical aesthetics.
Critics and editors, however, should know better. As I recall, the edition of the book of which I’m thinking was from the 1980s or 90s. Shepard’s freeform experiments – as valid as those of Allen Ginsberg, Jackson Pollock or Lester Young – were by then decades old, and clearly not a matter of ineptitude but bold artistic choice. And furthermore, they were clever, powerful, funny, poetic, and theatrical in a way that most conventional playwriting rarely seems to be.
Dismissal of this kind of experimentation has been my bete noir for decades. I came to New York with a trunk full of such plays, many of them produced for audiences of appreciative crickets. It turns out I was two decades behind the times, but also two decades ahead. There now seems to be a receptive audience again (if a downtown one) for wildly nonlinear work, largely I think due to the indefatigable proselytizing of artists like Mac Wellman, Richard Foreman and the Wooster Group. And you could have knocked me over with a feather when I discovered Young Jean Lee’s work was of the same type.
I’d seen her name (if not her work) constantly, reinforced by the branding masterstroke of her naming her theatre “Young Jean Lee’s Theatre Company”, after the fashion of dance troupes. I’d seen but one of her plays “Christmas”, which must be the most economical play to produce ever written: it consists of a set (a tiny house) and taped voices – but no live actors. Other than this, her popular downtown hits (the ones contained in the just published Songs of the Dragons Flying to Heaven) are new to me. And new is the operative word. Her writing has remarkable freshness and spontaneity, as though she’s managed to switch off the inner censor that usually throttles the id before it wriggles out into the ether. Consistency of character, voice, situation are all intentionally up for grabs.
What makes her work still more interesting is that this formalism (or antiformalism, which of course a kind of formalism) is mixed with devastating honesty. The freeing up her own voice enhances, rather than diverts from, the expression of her identity as an Asian-American, as a woman, as a Pacific Northwesterner, as a jack Christian, as a whatever else she is. Her work represents a new, far richer and more highly evolved state of affairs than the literal-minded, often autobiographical identity-based writing that was so popular in the 1980s. (The stridency of that writing can be forgiven though when you recall the presence of the character “Long Duck Dong” in the 1984 film Sixteen Candles. I am a vaudevillian and that character even offends me.)
Young Jean Lee deals with such stereotypes from a seeming position of strength. She can slap them around, she can explode them, she can ignore them, she can even pay them homage. In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals the purported villain is “Fu Manchu” — not the historical dynastic ruler, but something closer to the reprehensible stereotype once played by Peter Sellers. But not quite. The character is black, though dressed in Chinese clothes. In the original production, it was played by Thomas Bradshaw. And though he is the traditional villain, and seems that way for awhile, in the end, he and all the “oriental masses” are wiped out by a pair of stereotypical white people named Terence and Sheila (the supposed victims) using an “oriental killing machine”.
In The Appeal, “Coleridge”, “Wordsworth” and “Byron” fight like a bunch of high school girls, and even sort of talk like them. While they are poets and banter about poetry and philosophy, the names of the characters are carrying most of the symbolic freight. Their speech is contemporary and frequently moronic. (This is a technique I call the “Whatever Aesthetic” and credit to Gen X and the trickle-down influence of punk. The humor derives from a certain “fuck you” to the expectations of the audience. I’ll expand on this idea in a future post).
All playwrights with any self-awareness know that all of their characters are merely some version of themselves. Lee takes that fact of life and makes it manifestly obvious, in much the same way that many painters set out to show that paintings are “just paint on canvas”. Her plays, despite the fact that many have several characters and “situations” (if not exactly plots) still feel like stream of consciousness interior monologues taking place inside the head of Young Jean Lee. Some stretches are like automatic writing – surreal. Some express modern angst, neurosis, self-doubt, self criticism. Some express racial bugaboos. Some express metaphysical questioning. Pullman, WA (named for no reason and for every reason in the world after her home town) contains all these streams, and are spoken by three characters who are “named” after whoever is playing them at the time. In essence it is a soliloquy.
These two tendencies (the free exploration of stereotype and this flattening out and splintering of character) come together in the title piece, in which the characters are merely divided into “Koreans” and “White Persons” and the theme of racial identity is kicked around like a pig’s bladder. A major color in her work is the latent cruelty in the seemingly gentle – it appeals to me very much. Traditionally, Asian women are socially docile. Layered over this, you have the Evangelical Christianity Lee was raised in. But bubbling and simmering beneath them both…let’s just say I wouldn’t want to take one of those kicks (but of course I have, every time one of her characters levels a shot gun at Europeans. Thank God I’m part Cherokee or I might be dead!)
And speaking of thanking God, the most recent play in the bunch Church deals with her religious upbringing. An appropriate subtitle might be “The Revenge”. A bunch of smiling, bubble-headed Christians preach to the audience, the things they say growing crazier and more nonsensical as they go along, but their attitude remaining the same. Anyone who has ever watched JoelOsteen knows this isn’t absurdism, but kitchen sink realism.
Happy Birthday to swimming vaudevillian Annette Kellerman, born this day in 1887. The racy outfit above corrupted even Edward F. Albee, who had special mirrors built in the audience so they could see her “backside”.
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.
No knee-jerk fan of either technology or audience interaction, I literally had to be pulled off a bar-stool and dragged up the street to participate in Gyda Arber’s inaugaural edition of Suspicious Package last summer. I was surprised to find it an extremely pleasant experience. A half dozen strangers are handed hats, ipods and character names, then sent on their way. The ipod delivers a series of commands (e.g., walk to such and such a location); lines of dialogue to read; old time radio style interior monologues; and actual movie-like scenes. Each participant thus has a different journey; each experiences a different piece of the same story, in this case, a murder mystery. It’s all a great deal of fun, although last year I did wind up walking a couple of blocks in the wrong direction, and then had to go really fast to catch up.
This year no one had to twist my arm to go (and Gyda’s a good arm-twister). I volunteered. And it was even more of a hoot. This year’s story is a science fiction yarn concerning an evil pharmaceutical company, a plague, nanobots, and mind-control. The mind control theme is reinforced by the fact one is being told what to think and do by an electronic voice for 45 minutes (which is less “science fiction” than you probably think, when it comes to that). Certain technical aspects of the experience have been improved upon over last year’s, and the audio and video vignettes contain a wider cast of characters, all duly hilarious.
They’re all my friends so I make no pretense at objectivity. I will say that if they asked me to play charades at a party, I’d tell ‘em to take a hike — but I’d participate in Suspicious Packages again in a heartbeat.
Go here, if you would like to live the experience: http://www.bricktheater.com/antidepressant.
(adapted from a talk given at the Barnum Museum, Bridgeport, CT, November 2005)
Most books on vaudeville devote at most a mention or two to P.T. Barnum (July 5, 1810 – April 5, 1891). In No Applause, I spent half a chapter on the man, and at a pivotal point in the history. He deserves it.
If George Washington is the Father of our Country, P.T. Barnum is the Father of the Soul of Modern America, of Public Relations, of Show Business. He is one of the premier (and most convincing) apologists for the capitalist system. His autobiography Struggles and Triumphs sold second only to the Bible in the 19th century not only because Barnum lived one of the most amazing lives ever recorded, but because the book is a testament through and through to the American way of life.
It’s easy to mythologize someone like that (since I just did) so it’s useful to remember that a myth is often a projection or a distillation of certain qualities or inclinations prized by the society at large. So while most of this essay will be about how we became a Barnum Nation, it’s worthwhile to second look at how we were already a Barnum nation and how that fact gave us Barnum.
Other than the massive circus organization that continues to bear his name, Barnum is probably best remembered today for a quote he apparently never said (but ought to have): “There’s a sucker born every minute”. That’s quite a thing to say, whether he said it or not. More interesting to me is the fact that when it is quoted, it is generally done NOT with disgust and indignation, but with something like an admiring smile. How can this be? It is the sentiment of a rogue! It is the maxim of a con artist! I suspect the reason why the quote doesn’t make us hot under the collar is that, even though it’s wrong to swindle somebody, that doesn’t stop the process from sometimes being a damn good joke. If I steal all my friend’s clothes while he’s taking a shower in the locker room, to him it’s a mean trick but to everyone else it’s entertainment. Chances are, he’ll laugh about it himself once he gets his clothes back.
They don’t teach this in most grammar schools, but America actually has two mythical foundings. There’s the one at Plymouth Rock, the attempt to build a Puritan utopia in New England. And there’s the other one, in which the Dutch were said to swindle the Indians out of Manhattan for a handful of beads. To oversimplify, the Puritan Way was “work, pray, do good works, and in the end your reward is heaven.” The more earthly and earthy philosophy is: “You mean I have to wait until I die to have any pleasure and even then there’s no guarantee? What’s wrong with enjoying life now?” A crucial figure, if not THE crucial figure in transforming American society from one of the first type to one of the second, was P.T. Barnum.
Barnum grew up in Bethel, Connecticut. Even in the 19th century, the state was still overwhelmingly Puritan (or Congregationalist, as the creed came to be known.) Barnum was raised in the Universalist faith. As the name implies, Universalists believed everyone was going to heaven. This was a relatively new heresy at the time, one which I believe provided Barnum with the intellectual ammunition he needed when he helped bring about the Amusement Revolution.
Consult Roget’s Thesaurus under “amusement”: you will discover an amazingly broad list of human activities, embracing holidays, sports, games, jokes, toys, parties, dancing, theatre, carnivals etc etc etc. Throughout Medieval times most of these activities answered the description of folk practices. Professionalism in fun was discouraged, even outlawed. Performers and exhibitors were transients; they moved from town to town so they wouldn’t get arrested. In earliest days they would perform or exhibit outdoors. Later, theatres were built for the more legitimate, established companies, but the transient performer and exhibitor exist all the way to modern times.
FOR CLARITY:
PERFORMER: actor, clown, magician, musician, puppeteer, acrobat, juggler, fire eater, dancer etc etc etc.
EXHIBITOR: A person who exhibits trained or rare beasts, novel machines (automata, magic lanterns, etc), panorama displays, and deformed humans or other curiosities of nature.
All of this predates Barnum by centuries. Which is why we say we were already a Barnum nation before Barnum was born. In fact, as has been pointed out, Barnum originated virtually none of his famous attractions. He sought them out, discovered them when they were already being exhibited by someone else, bought their manager’s out and then gave them the benefit of his own genius for exploitation, making unprecedented use of the newly inexpensive newspapers which had only been on the scene since the 1830s.
The first stage of his revolution was the legitimizing of spectacle. When Barnum started out, there were already a few museums in existence: Peal’s in Philadelphia, Kimball’s in Boston, Scudders in New York. More generally exhibitors would rent a storefront or hall, or put up a tent, or open the back of their wagon in order to display a curiosity, which was promoted with newspaper ads and handbills. Barnum started this way himself with his first attraction, Joice Heth the purported nurse of George Washington. He had been a clerk, bookseller, newspaper publisher and promoter of lotteries before purchasing the services of slave woman Heth in 1835. He made a brief stir showing her off, but she died within months, and Barnum traveled with circuses for the next five years before buying Scudder’s Museum.
Scudder’s was a shabby, run-down establishment full of taxidermy displays before Barnum transformed it into the American Museum. He legitimized it by making it fabulous. The building was an advertisement for itself. He placed the flags of all the nations of the world on the roof; they could be seen a mile away. There were 100 oval shaped paintings of animals on the outside of the building. Inside, the building was the equal of every other existing show or exhibition put together: fortune tellers, jugglers, snake charmers, fat boys, flea circuses, a dog who could knit, an orangutan, phrenologists, the Feejee Mermaid, the Wooly Horse, the midget Tom Thumb, a beluga whale etc etc etc. THEN Barnum bought what was then an unprecedented amount of advertising. Billboards, ads on wagons, ads in newspapers. On top of this there was the actual coverage he secured in news items about his exhibitions (and his frauds).
At the same time he professionalized and created the amusement industry, Barnum legitimized it by trying to wipe out its bad associations. Such show business as existed back then was in total disrepute, not just because the opinion makers were Puritans and Victorians, but because it deserved to be disreputable. Variety entertainment was usually presented in saloons, and so invariably accompanied by drunkenness, gambling, prostitution, and so forth. This was no less true of theatres, which were famous for racy plays and assignations of ladies of the evening.
Dubious characters were thrown out of Barnum’s American Museum. Yes, he presented freak shows – but freak shows with class. Barnum and Tom Thumb even gave a command performance for Queen Victoria. Furthermore, after he’d been operating a number of years Barnum converted to temperance and began presenting respectable anti-alcohol melodramas in his so-called lecture room. It became socially acceptable to attend Barnum’s theatre. At around the same time (1850) he engineered the highly successful American tour of the Swedish Nightingale Jenny Lind. A popular singer on the continent, in Barnum’s hands she acquired the image of a sweet, soulful, feminine angel, someone a clergyman would be proud to have sing in his parlor. The usual image then of a professional singer was closer to the character played by Marlene Deitrich in Destry Rides Again.
These are the elements of Barnum’s contribution to the foundations of show business: professionalization, propriety, public relations. His career was to last another 40 years, during which he would enjoy countless more triumphs like these, but those initial breakthroughs were the real turning point.
One thing about explorers is that, once they’ve blazed a new trail it’s usually a little while before others follow in their footsteps. Mass settlement of North America didn’t start until decades of visits by the first modern European explorers; and we still haven’t been back to the moon. Likewise, it was a few decades after Barnum’s revolution that others began to follow his example in any kind of applied and significant way.
One of these was a gentleman commonly considered the Father of Vaudeville. Antonio “Tony” Pastor (not to be confused with the big band singer of the same name). Billed as a child prodigy, Pastor sang as a little boy at temperance meetings and (significantly) at Barnum’s museum. He became a circus ringmaster at a young age and did that for many years until the Civil War broke out, which naturally curtailed the activities of most traveling shows. Pastor went back to his hometown New York City and, though he was a teetotaler, started singing in saloons. Pastor’s role always seemed a lot like the “chairman” in the British Music Hall. He sang songs but also functioned as master of ceremonies. In 1865 he opened his first music hall. Technically, the place was a bar, but right away he set about making enhancements that indicated the direction in which he intended to go.
Pastor promised “fun without vulgarity”, throwing any troublemakers out on their ear. In 1881, he moved his premises to an area around Union Square then known as the Rialto. It was the legitimate theatre district, but also the ladies’ shopping district. Furthermore, he removed alcohol from the premises completely, just as Barnum had done before him. This is the first time this had been done in a music hall. The idea was to attract women and children in addition to men. He mounted a massive advertising campaign, offering door prizes: coal, flour, dishes, sacks of potatoes, dress patterns, sewing machines and even whole dresses. The show, too, had to be cleaned up. Instead of rowdy saloon acts, he set new standards for gentility. Pastor’s most famous creation was Lillian Russell, a refined operatic singer whom was held up to be the most beautiful woman in the world. Really Helen Leonard from Iowa, pastor proclaimed he’d imported her from England at great trouble and expense. Women idolized Russell and many of his other famous female singing stars, like May Irwin, Fay Templeton and Blanche Ring. Of course Barnum had set the precedent with Jenny Lind.
For the kids, of course, there was clowning, magic, acrobatics andthat staple of vaudeville, the kiddie act. A songwriter named Gus Edwards (most famous for the song “In the Good Old Summertime”), got his start at Tony Pastor’s and produced a number of acts over the dacdes starring children, with names like “the Newsboy Quintet” and “the Nine Country Kids”. And kids must have loved the fact that Pastor still dressed like a ringmaster, with top hat, swallowtail coat and handlebar moustache.
So that’s one line leading from Barnum to vaudeville – Tony Pastor and “refined vaudeville”. Here’s another –
In the wake of the success of Barnum’s American museum, numerous others crept up, none of them near the scale of Barnum’s. In fact, most of them were quite shabby. New York had perhaps dozens of them, most of them clustered around the Bowery. They became known as dime museums because of their popular prices. They generally offered low rent versions of the freakier aspects of Barnum’s, the sort of attractions that would later be associated with sideshows: Zip the Pinhead, JoJo the Dog-faced Boy, and similar unfortunate specimens.
One of the pre-eminent New York dime museums was a place called Bunnell’s. A young man who worked both there and at P.T. Barnum’s circus was named Benjamin Franklin (“B.F.”) Keith. (K as in RKO). Keith a Yankee from New Hampshire and in 1883 he moved to Boston to start a museum he called the Gaiety. On view there you could find a stuffed mermaid, a tattooed man, a chicken with a human face and Baby Alice (a prematurely born human infant). Upstairs in a little hall, he presented variety shows. By all accounts the operation wasn’t doing too well until one day he hired an old circus friend named Edward Albee (the grandfather by adoption of the famous playwright). Albee was a down-Mainer from a rich family, and he worked circuses as a grafter, specializing in short-changing the customers. With Albee as his general manager, Keith abandoned the freakish dime museum side of Barnum’s legacy and adopted a little professionalism, propriety and public relations. The Keith organization in all its forms and incarnations is the heart of the vaudeville story and embraces far more than can be touched on in this essay. It became the dominant Big Time chain in the country eventually encompassing 400 theatres including most of the important vaudeville houses in the country. The organization was around for 50 years; here we just want to touch on Barnum’s legacies.
Professionalism. Keith and Albee made a pile of money doing pirated versions of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas which they presented to the public at a tenth of the cost of what the opera houses charged. With these proceeds they built ever more fabulous theatre in Boston, then in Providence, Philadelphia, New York, then all over the country. Just as Barnum had made the American Museum architecturally conspicuous, Albee (the driving force behind Keith) made their vaudeville houses showplaces in and of themselves. (See page 96 of No Applause for a description of one of their theatres).
Propriety. Second, largely at Mrs. Keith’s instigation, Keith’s theatres had to be proper. Anyone guilty of swearing or saying anything otherwise objectionable, even “slob” or “Holy Gee”, would be fired. The performers soon learned to toe the line. Keith’s became known as the Sunday School Circuit. (For a description of one of the premier wholesome acts of the day, see yesterday’s post about the Four Cohans).
Public Relations. But when we think of Barnum today we don’t necessarily think first of propriety—that was really just the most successful of his p.r. campaigns. When it came to p.r. flair few of the vaudeville managers had anything like a Barnumesque inventiveness or charm, Tony Pastor and Willie Hammerstein (p.128 of No Applause) being exceptions. Most were bland, colorless CEOs. Instead, interestingly, the best promoters in vaudeville were the acts themselves. Harry Houdini’s entire career was a series of stunts, ensuring that his names would stay in the newspapers throughout his career. Eva Tanguay billed herself as “The Girl Who Made Vaudeville Famous”. She got headlines by beating up fellow chorus girls and showing up in a costume made of Lincoln pennies.
Hoodwinking the public was good sport and good business. A cockney performer named Muriel Harding became famous as Olga Petrova. She never ceased using her fake Russian accent onstage or off. A singer named Louise Kerlin took the name of novelist Theodore Dreiser’s brother Paul Dresser, a popular songwriter. Dresser wrote songs for Louise to sing and have her out to be his sister: Louise Dresser. A Chinese magician named Chung Ling Soo made life hell for a Chinese magician named Ching Ling Foo. Chung was a fake (his real name was Robinson) but he was actually a much better magician than Ching. Besides, by then, Ching had his hands full with other copycats, such as Tung Pin Soo, Long Talk Sam, Han Pin Chen, Li Ho Chang, Rush Ling Toy and ten or so others. The Great Houdini was not only hounded by the Great Boudini, but – intentionally – the Great Hardeen, who just happened to be Houdini’s brother Dash. Will Rogers would ride into town on his horse with a sign advertising his performances. Al Jolson put an ad in Variety that read “Watch Me – I’m a Wow”. Does the spirit informing all this showmanship sound familiar? It ought to. Marilyn Manson, Paris Hilton, J.Lo and 10,000 others have carried the Barnum philosophy forward to the present day, for better or worse – probably both. And lest ye have doubt…
To find out more, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.
The only thing I’m proud of about vaudeville is that I got out of it. The houses are not all Orpheums and Keith – not by a long way. There are only a few good houses and the others I wouldn’t like to talk about – right out loud.
- George M. Cohan
George M. Cohan is unjustly in disfavor nowadays, and has been for something like 60 years. Because of this, most of America has forgotten what all of America used to know – that he spent his first four decades as part of the most tightly knit family in show business history.
The ancestral name is actually O’Caomhan. George’s paternal grandfather first changed it to Keohane and then later to Cohan when he moved to U.S. The name was pronounced with the accent on the second syllable “co-HAN” until George – -for whatever reason, switched it to “CO-han” causing subsequent generations to mix it up with Cohen, and assume that Cohan was Jewish. In really, you couldn’t get any more Irish.
George’s old man Jerry (Jerome) may have been the most beloved man in show business. He was legendary for his sweet manner, his modesty and his generosity. He never aspired to be anything more than what he was – a journeyman song-and-dance man, happy to be just a professional in show business. No doubt he was grateful not to have to work at his original trade, which was saddle and harness making. He’d settled in Providence, having migrated down from Boston, where his father had made his first American home. Jerry was good at Irish dancing, particularly clog dancing and he played both the harp and the violin. he started working the new England variety circuits in the 1870s. In 1874 his sister introduced him to Helen (“Nellie”) Costigan whom he married straightaway. Having no show business background or apparent inclinations, she worked first as a ticket seller where Jerry played. When an actress in the show walked out abruptly however, Nellie was drafted. Though she’d never been onstage in her life, she’d seen the show many times, and hit the ground running. After that she never looked back.
The children arrived in short order. First Josephine (“Josie”) in 1876, and then George on July 4 (of course!) in 1878. Nellie had them both in Providence, but brought them both on the road as babies where they were parked in drawers and trunks while the older Cohans performed. In 1883 they became regulars on the young Keith circuit, with which they were to have a close relationship for almost twenty years.
It was only natural for the children to join the act. The kids crossed the Rubicon at ages 7 ½ and 8, Josie doing contortions, George playing violin. This despite the fact that he hated the violin and wasn’t any good at it. He was a cocky s.o.b., which, in the last analysis, was the only really necessary ingredient for success in vaudeville. The squirt told Edward Albee that he had a solo violin act, and he could pay him whatever amount he thought was fair. when Albee handed him $6, he put the fiddle away never to touch it again.
In 1891, the family scored a hit in the legit play Peck’s Bad Boy, in which George played the title character,”Henry” by name. George found out early on that success could be a curse. Kids up and down the circuit wanted to know if he was as “bad” a boy as the one in play, and picked fights with him in every town he played.
When still only a boy, George began exhibiting the intense hunger for excellence and success that set him apart. He persuaded Nat Goodwin to let him sit in on rehearsals for A Gilded Fool, just so he could study his technique. Inspired by Dion Boucicault, he began to write his first plays and songs. By 1893, young George was badgering Jerry to move the family to New York where they could really make a name. Jerry, who had no such ambitions, axed the idea. When George ran away to go there himself, Jerry relented and the Cohans moved to New York.
They prepared a special act for the debut at Keith’s Union Square. Called Goggles Doll House, the act was a sort of showcase for each of the four of them. The parents would do some crosstalk, Josie would do her artistic dancing, and George would sing and dance. To George’s chagin, the manager decided to split them up into three acts. George’s act was the weakest of the three. There was no way he wouldn’t look bad without the framing device of the family act. Already smarting from this blow, he began to throw his famous attitude around at the morning rehearsal on opening day, hogging the house pianist for ten minutes over his allotted time. When the stage hands and others chastised him for it, he let loose with a string of unfortunate remarks of the “One day I’ll buy and sell lowlifes like you” variety. By way of reward, the stage manager gave him the first slot in the bill, the spot usually reserved for animals and acrobats. George bombed all week.
Meanwhile, Josie was a smash, and was instantly booked for a solo engagement at Koster and Bial’s. Jerry and Nellie had also been offered bookings for their two act, but, characteristically turned the work down and kept it a secret, so as not to hurt George’s feelings. Strange to think that, by all outward signs, George M. Cohan was the least promising member of his family at this point.
On the other hand, he was a pretty fair little writer. He’d been applying himself since he was ten, and he had a knack for it. Probably spurred on by his mediocrity (at that stage) as a performer, he set to work trying to write good, professional commercial songs. In 1893, his first “Why Did Nellie Leave Her Home?” was published by W. Amark & Sons, the leading publisher of the day. This was followed by “Venus My Shining Love” and several others.
Suddenly the demand for George’s songs, patter and sketches was so great he couldn’t supply them fast enough. Mae Irwin performed one called “Hot Tamale Alley”.By the following year, he was earning more than Josie, though she was doing very well for herself as a single. Despite her success, Josie wanted to go back to doing a family act. They gave it a shot, but bookers weren’t too interested.
In 1895 they were hired as a unit to perform in the Gus Williams play April Fool. Here George first distinguished himself as a performer, accidentally discovering one of his trademark eccentric dances, that scissor-like arm-and-leg movement that dancers frequently still do at the climax of their act – an invention of Cohan’s. Unfortunately he blew a good thing after 35 weeks of this successful show by having a fight with the company manager, and the family was once again “at liberty”.
The next year was the worst of their careers. The family mounted four tours of four separate shows, each of which closed 2 weeks after opening. They were about to collectively concede that Josie ought to go out on her own again as a single, when they were called to do a replacement gig at Hyde and Behman’s. The Cohans opened the show, but managed to go over big anyway, receiving five curtain calls. It was at this engagement that George debuted the families’ tag line: “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you, my sister thanks you, and I thank you.”
Suddenly, the Four Cohans were a Big Time act, with George eclipsing Jerry as the family’s manager. Where Jerry had been a pushover, George conceded nothing. Soon they were earning one of vaudeville’s top salaries. This screeched to a halt in 1899, when he had an altercation with B.F. Keith about the family’s billing. As the playwright recalled years later, the exchange went like this:
KEITH: Well, I’m sorry. It’s some mistake, some press agents or sign painter’s mistake, not mine.
COHAN: It isn’t mine, either.
KEITH: What are you going to do?
COHAN: What would you do in my position?
KEITH: If I’d been associated with a man as long as you people have with me, I’d certainly go thorugh for him.
COHAN: Well, Mr. Keith, I haven’t any particularly fond memories of you. The only thing I can recall in the early days of Keith is a lot of hard work, a lot of extra performances, a lot of confinement, six and seven and eight shows a day, running up eighty and ninety steps to the dressing rooms, and a million rules and regulations hanging all over the place. Any time you wanted to smoke you had to go into a little tin closet. So the nice little speech you just made to me, inviting me to go through with the broken contractual conditions, doesn’t mean much. Besides, Mr. Keith, I remember a little incident in Providence on a Saturday night. You didn’t have enough to meet the payroll. And you came back to ask us if we’d mind waiting until the following Tuesday or Wednesday. And my father, Jerry, said “Why, no, if you’re short, and maybe we could lend you a little money, and how much do you want?” And you said about $600 and we let you have it.
KEITH: I don’t remember it.
COHAN: Another thing you probably don’t realize, Mr. Keith, that we are getting a whole lot more money in outside booking than we did when we signed this contract three years ago.
KEITH: Oh, that’s the idea. You want more money.
COHAN: Yes, a whole lot more.
KEITH: I understand now; it’s a shakedown.
COHAN: Call it what you like, Mr. Keith, but just because of that crack, I’ll make you a promise right now—that no member of the Cohan family will ever play for you again as long as you are in the theatrical business.
For plenty of people, such hot-headedness would have meant the end of a career. For George it was the beginning. In recent years, his one-act plays had been a staple of the act. In 1901, following the lead of his hero Ned Harrigan, he adapted one of these The Governor’s Son, to full length.
Over the next ten or fifteen years he was to have a major impact on the American theatre, with a new, realistic style of writing; a vigorous and speedy manner of staging; and, above all, his songs, which were to become a permanent staple of the American repertoire. The early vehicles included Running for Office (1903), Little Johnny Jones (1905); 45 Minutes from Broadway (1906); Popularity (1906); The Talk of New York (1907);. 50 Miles from Boston (1908); The Yankee Prince (1908); The Man Who Owns Broadway (1909) , Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford (1910); and Seven Keys to Baldpate (1913).
Classic songs from the period include: “Yankee Doodle Dandy”, “Give My Regards to Broadway”, “Life’s a Very Funny Proposition After All”, “45 Minutes from Broadway”, “Mary’s a Grand Old Name”,“It’s a Grand Old Flag”, “Harrigan”, and “Over There”.
Along the way he became rich and powerful as a producer, along with his partner Sam Harris, building the Cohan and Harris and George M. Cohan theatres.
Right along, the other three Cohans had been starring in the productions as well, but in 1914, they all retired, Jerry and Nellie to live out their old age, Josie to get married. Two years later Josie died of heart disease. Jerry went the following year. This succession of blows seems to have knocked the wind out of Cohan, and, although he continued to write, produce, direct, score and act for over 20 more years, from here on in he was increasingly out of step with the public. His highest accolades in later years came from his work as an actor, as in his only film The Phantom President (1932), and the original production of Eugene O’neill’s Ah, Wilderness! He was praised for his calmness and focus as an actor, developing a style that was notably carried on by his most famous disciple as a performer, Spencer Tracy.
Cohan passed away in 1941, just long enough to approve of James Cagney’s bio-pic about him Yankee Doodle Dandy. In 1968, a revue George M! starring Joel Gray, was on Broadway, using Cohan’s songs.
Cohan’s musical comedies have not withstood the test of time, probably because they’re dated, but, more importantly, they depended entirely upon his own personality. They were vehicles for him. Cohan is yet more proof that, for the old vaudevillian, personality was everything. His plays were less than literature, his songs were simple, he was only good as an eccentric dancer, and his voice was below average. Together, somehow, it added it up to more than the sum of its parts.
HAPPY FOURTH OF JULY!!!!!!!!!
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.
LEON ERROLL
Leon Erroll’s schtick was a comic drunk bit, which he milked for most of his career. The character was not a down-and-outter. Usually, it was more of a bourgeois hail-fellow-well-met…a Rotarian, trying to sneak in at 2 in the morning so the wife won’t hear. The piece de resistance to his characterization was his patented, rubbery-legged walk, which made it look as though he would collapse to the ground any minute.
He was born in Sydney, Australia in 1881. His folks wanted him to be a doctor (whose folks don’t?) but while he was at college, he started writing, directing and performing his own revues. Over the next few years, he appears to have done everything, touring Australia, New Zealand, and the U.K. in vaudeville, stock companies, circuses and musicals. Along the way, he played Shakespeare, was an acrobat, and sang in operetta.
In 1904, with all that experience under his belt, he decided to have a go at America. With partner Stella Chatelaine, he started working the San Francisco area and the Northwest. In 1905 he started managing a traveling burlesque company out of Portland but the venture went bust. he arrived back in San Francisco just in time for the 1906 earthquake. He continued to work the burlesque circuit with his own original comedies for the next several years.
In 1911, he came to New York, appearing in the Zeigfeld Follies that year. In this and the next follies he formed a sort of ad hoc comedy team with Bert Williams in two show stopping sketches. In one, Erroll played a drunk trying to find his way through Grand Central Station, and Williams played the red cap, who eventually leads him up into the construction scaffolding. The following year, Erroll reprised the drunk role, and Williams was a Hansom cab driver. Erroll was with the Follies through 1915, at the same time doing vaudeville engagements on the side. By 1919, he was a headliner at the Palace. He directed (and sometime starred in ) 20 Broadway shows during this period, including The Century Girl (1916), Hitchy Koo (1917) and Hitchy Koo of 1918.
From the mid-twenties on, he concentrated on films, mostly of the quickie-cheapie variety. He co-starred with Lupe Velez in the popular “Mexican Spitfire” series, and also a series of films adapted from the “Joe Palooka” comic strip. His legs gave way for good in 1951.
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.
The greatest juggler of his day and an influence on W.C. Fields and many others, Cinquevalli’s real name was the more prosaic Paul Kesner. Born in Lissa Poland in 1859, he was apprenticed at age 13 apprenticed to a gymnast/aerliast named…Cinqevalli. Kesner took his last name. It was a common practice for acrobats to do that in those days. As you’ll see from many another upcoming example, joining an acrobatic troup was literally like joining a family. (Opponents of domestic partnership and gay marriage take note!) By 1885, Paul C. had developed an act called “The Human Billiard Table” wherein he would play a game of pool on his own back. I guess he shot the balls…um…into his pockets!
His first U.S. tour was in 1888 (which was when Fields first caught him) and he returned in 1910 to work the Keith circuit, including 10 weeks at Keith’s Union Square—not too shabby. During World War I he was mislabled a German and that was it for his career. He died shortly after the war in 1919.
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.
Maureen Van Trease is — if you’ll pardon the expression — a dead ringer for Dorothy Parker, that legendary quipster and writer of thanatoptic light verse, short stories and criticism. The picture above is of Parker but it might as well be Van Trease. (Although, at 5′ 0″, Van Trease would have towered over Parker , who stood a mere 4′ 11″. There is an excellent representation of the famous wit at Madame Tussaud’s. It is roughly the size of a six year old).
Perhaps to compensate for her physical slightness, Parker became larger than life. She is one of those whose legend was so large that it has long outlived its tiny creator. She ranks with Shaw and Wilde as one of the most quoted writers of modern times. She is the subject of Alan Rudolph’s 1994 film Mrs. Parker and the Viscious Circle. New York even has a rather large and flourishing club called the Dorothy Parker Society , dedicated entirely to doing…Dorothy Parker type stuff.
Van Trease wrote and stars in Those Whistling Lads, an educational show about Parker’s life and work designed to tour colleges, and presented recently in the Planet Connections Theater Festivity. The play cleverly juxtaposes enactments of her poems and stories, with bits of Parker’s real life. Humor and tragedy go hand in glove in parker’s life and art… suicide attempts, failed and aborted pregnancies, unrequited romances and alcoholism fueled her writing, making for some of the darkest “light comedy” in the written record. Van Trease does a good job of connecting the two levels of reality, although the show ends rather abruptly — could use some kind of definitive button, some assessment or conclusion for us to carry out of the theatre with us. Her performance is also great, undoubtedly closer to the real Parker than Jennifer Jason Leigh (who was much criticized for her slurred diction in the Rudolph film). And the rest of the ensemble gamely attack their multiplicity of parts in scenes both serious and silly. All in all, I think Mrs. Parker would approve.
MAY IRWIN, “Madame Laughter”
Mae Irwin spent her career alternating between the legit theatre and vaudeville, but her most lasting legacy is the fact that she is one of the first vaudevillians (make that one of the first people) preserved on celluloid, in the 1895 flicker The Kiss. The film captured her for a brief moment in her starring role in the show The Widow Jones. That was the whole film, just the kiss. Talk about cutting to the chase! And here it is:
Born in Whitby Canada in 1862, she started out singing in the church choir. She debuted with her sister in a straight show at the Adelphi Theatre in buffalo in 1876. The pair worked as coon shouters and toured the Midwest. Tony Pastor spotted them in Detroit and brought them back to work at his Metropolitan Theatre in New York the following year. In 1883, Mae was booked as member of Augustin Daly’s company, where she starred for many years. In 1907 she returned to vaudeville, capitalizing on her skill and reputation as a low comedian, and her commodious, matronly body. She continued to work both vaudeville and the legitimate stage until retirement in 1920.
Douglas Gilbert recounted one notable occasion when she stepped out of retirement, however. At age 70, she was called frantically and begged to subsitute for a perfomer who’d gotten sick at a benefit show. At that point, Mae a wealthy old woman who’d been out of performing for well over a decade. She told three stories and sang a song called “The Bully” and brought the house down.
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.
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