Stars of Vaudeville #35 & 36: Blossom Seeley & Benny Fields, and Larry Semon
The birthday of two completely unrelated vaudevillians today: Blossom Seeley and Larry Semon.
BLOSSOM SEELEY (AND BENNIE FIELDS)
This adorable husband-wife team was still kicking around within the living memory of the Pepsi generation, enjoying a healthy second career performing in night clubs and on the Ed Sullivan Show throughout the 1950s. When Benny passed away in 1959, Blossom cheerfully plugged on halfway through her seventh decade in show business.
She had begun professionally at the turn of the century at age 10 under the name “The Little Blossom”. As she grew less little (that is, uh, “blossomed”) she developed a reputation for being the hottest girl singer around. She knew how to deliver a rag or jazz number in such a way that you would want to leap out of your seat and dance. She lit up the joint with her sassy renditions of “Way Down Yonder in New Orleans” “I Cried for You” “Somebody Loves Me”, “Toddling the Tolado” and “Put Your Arms Around Me, Honey”. Throughout the teens she alternated vaudeville with musicals such as Lew Fields’ The Henpecks (1911, also with the Castles) and the Shuberts’ The Whirl of Society (1912, also with Al Jolson). In the mid-teens she performed with a trio called Seeley’s Syncopated Studio.
In 1921 she started working with Fields, who sang harmony, played the piano, and did the comedy chores. The pair was married the following year. As a team Blossom Seeley and Benny Fields headlined in Big Time vaudeville throughout the twenties and into the early thirties. George Gershwin wrote a 25 minute jazz opera called “Blue Monday” for them to sing in the 1922 George White’s Scandals. The number was pulled for being too highbrow and debuted with the new title “125th Street” at Carnegie Hall in 1925.
In 1936, Seeley made the ultimate sacrifice. Though she was plainly the star of the act, she retired to support Benny in the development of his career. As a solo artist, Fields flopped around awhile, made a few movies, but never caught fire. The two experienced a resurgence beginning in 1952 when they appeared as a team again at L.A.’s Coconut Grove club in conjunction with the release of their bio-pic, starring Betty Hutton and Ralph Meeker.
LARRY SEMON
From the late teens through the late twenties, Larry Semon was one of the most successful silent comedians in the country, second only to Chaplin in popularity and salary. This despite a last name more appropriate for a porn star!
Born the son of a vaudeville magician named Zera the Great while touring in West Point, Mississippi in 1889, Larry participated in the act until he was 13, doing acrobatics and pantomime. His father’s dying wish, however, was that Larry honor his talent for drawing by going to art school, which he subsequently did. By his early twenties, Semon was a popular cartoonist for the NY Evening Sun.
As we have seen in our description of Willie Hammerstein, famous cartoonists drawing cartoons onstage were occasionally considered a viable act. (Look, if people will watch cooking shows or golf on TV, they’ll sit for anything). In 1913, Semon made his vaudeville debut at the Fifth Avenue Theatre.
Semon had an inventive gag mind. It was only natural that the silent film industry would hire someone whose brain worked like his to write and direct comedies. Vitagraph snatched him up in 1916. By the next year, he’d convinced them to let him star. He was a weird looking dude, and the gags he invented were enough to make him a big hit with audiences despite the fact that he was no actor. Successful shorts included Huns and Hyphens, Frauds and Frenzies and Bears and Badmen (they all had titles like that). Among his collaborators were director Norman Taurog, who was to be a director of awful Hollywood comedies for the next fifty years, and Stan Laurel. Semon’s undoing was features. When he tried the longer format in the mid-twenties he ran aground on his inability to sustain a story. In 1928 he went bankrupt, had a nervous breakdown, and died of TB, in that order.
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.
