Being a web log for the observations of actor, author, cartoonist, comedian, critic, director, humorist, journalist, master of ceremonies, performance artist, playwright, producer, publicist, public speaker, songwriter, and variety booker Trav S.D.
Today is the birthday of Flora Finch (Flora Brooks, 1867-1940). Born in London, she began her career on the legit stage and in music hall before moving to the U.S. and performing in vaudeville.
In 1908 she became an actress at Biograph, the same year D.W. Griffith and Mack Sennett started at the studio. In 1910, she moved over to Vitagraph, where she was paired with comedian John Bunny. The physical contrast between the skinny, gawky, bird-like Flora Finch, with the grossly corpulent Bunny made for comedy gold. Usually the two played a married couple, with Bunny as sort of a party guy, and Finch as a scold. Their co-starring shorts were nicknamed “Bunnyfinches”, “Bunnygraphs” or “Bunnyfinchgraphs”. Incredibly, 160 of these were made, very few of which survive.
In 1915, Bunny passed away. Finch got her own starring series of comedies for a couple of years, but these weren’t as popular. For the rest of the silent era she was a character actress in features. In the sound era, her parts got smaller and smaller, until she was just a bit player. Her last film was The Women (1939).
And now one of the few surviving Bunnyfinches A Cure for Pokeritis (1912).
Today is the birthday of Louise Fazenda (1895-1962). This adorable Indiana native was hired away from Universal by Mack Sennett in 1915 to play country girls mostly, feisty female rubes with an outsized sense of decency. One of the mostly frequently screened of her Sennett comedies today is Fatty’s Tintype Tangle, in which she plays an innocent stranger accidentally photographed in the park with Fatty Arbuckle, causing marital trouble aplenty.
After leaving Sennett in the early twenties, she tried her hand at vaudeville for several months, then played dramatic roles in features for most of the major studios. In 1927, she married famed Warner Brothers producer Hal B. Wallis and continued to act for another dozen years before retiring to concentrate on her philanthropic activities.
Today is Bobby Clark’s birthday (the guy from whom I stole the glasses).
A tension exists in all comedy teams between the “funny” member(s) and the straight man or stooge. One gets all the glory and is everyone’s favorite – the other remains an unsung hero, truly appreciated by only a few aficionados. The situation can lead to strife, and there are numerous examples of the straight man turning to drink, exploding, and/or just quitting in disgust: Bud Abbot, Ed Gallagher, and Zeppo Marx are some prime examples. But the most extreme and tragic illustration of this psychological phenomenon is that of Clark and McCullough.
Bobby Clark and Paul McCullough were boyhood friends, born and bred in Springfield, Ohio. McCullough was the senior, having been born in 1883, five years before Clark. It is McCulough who introduced Clark to tumbling, and they both took gymnastics lessons at the local YMCA. They made the official decision to team up and go onstage in 1900. Their first real employment was in minstrelsy, where they expanded their skills, learned to sing and dance and other show business fundamentals. From there, they went on to work as circus clowns at Ringling Brothers and others, billed variously as The Jazzbo Brothers or Sunshine and Roses. During these years (1906-11) they developed a routine that was to be a staple of their act for many years, a pantomimic routine involving the pair’s inability to to successfully deposit a chair on top of a table. McCullough, originally the comedian, would say: “It looks simple…but its actually quite complicated.”
By 1912, the boys’ characters had taken shape and they made the plunge into vaudeville as Clark and McCullough. Contrary to standard practice, them team put the “funny” member’s name first. How this evolved is not difficult to imagine. Bobby Clark was a scene stealer who hogged all the attention wherever he went. He was one of show business’s great grotesques; as with Ed Wynn or Groucho or Harpo Marx, he is more “clown” than comedian. His get-up alone qualified him as a sort of honorary Marx Brother. His trademarks were a pair of eyeglasses which he drew directly on his face with grease paint, and a cane, which he apparently carried only to hook things with. Standing a mere 5’4”, and invariably with a cigar in his puss, he would charge around the stage like a scene-chewing dynamo, devouring anything and everything in his path. His leer was downright creepy, a little too real, and more dangerous than Groucho’s. A favorite trick of his was to spit his cigar out and catch it a couple of feet in front of his face, and continue smoking. McCullough was a sort of mixture of the straight man and stooge roles. Slow witted and innocent, he would feed Clark the set-ups for all the laugh lines. Clark wrote all the routines, which consisted of verbal non sequiturs, stunts and sight gags in such profusion and delivered so rapidly that it left the audience gasping for air.
Yet, while, the pair worked steadily in vaudeville, they never headlined.
And, in 1917, they spoiled their chance to do so by participating in the White Rat strike. They were put on the Vaudeville Managers Association’s blacklist and barred from big time. They made a hit in burlesque however, becoming some of the biggest comedy stars in the entire industry, so much so that by 1922, they were able to creep back into vaudeville and receive better and better bookings. In 1922 they were starring in a revue called The Chuckles of 1922 where they were spotted by Irving Berlin. He brought them back to the states to headline his Music Box Revue. It is their big shot. After this the team takes off, starring in numerous book musicals over the next decade, notable Gershwin’s Strike Up the Band, but many others. Vaudeville continued to play a part, and in 1928 they headlined at the Palace. Hollywood also beckoned, and they made several shorts for Fox in the late 20s and some films for RKO in the thirties, while continuing their work in the theatre.
In these later years, Clark literally stole the show, and McCullough had less and less to do. In the films, McCullough contributes little but a rasping laugh, which he does so often it becomes irritating. Sometimes he has no lines—he just laughs at Clark’s. Demoralized, he would ask for less to do, for the little he’d been doing he’d begun not to like. By the mid-30s, McCullough was hardly in their shows at all, and was barely missed. Following a nervous breakdown and a sanitarium stay, he committed suicide in 1936 by slashing his own throat with a straight razor. He’d stopped into a barber shop for a haircut, and picked up the razor when the barber wasn’t looking. Top that for a big finish.
Miraculous as it may seem, Clark managed to recover from this trauma after a few months and went on to become a bigger star than ever, headlining in numerous Broadway book musicals and even legit classics by Congreve, Sheridan and Moliere. He makes an appearance in the 1938 film The Goldwyn Follies. His last Broadway show was 1949, although he briefly came out of retirement for a regional tour of Damn Yankees in 1956. But the stage was Clark’s milieu– he never conquered another medium, which, ironically means that his fame was ephemeral and today he is every bit as obscure as his hapless partner. If only someone could have told that to McCullough.
Laurel is many ways the anti-Chaplin. There is much speculation as to why, given their common background in the Fred Karno troup, there wasn’t more contact between the two former colleagues during their Hollywood years. There was almost none. During a period of some forty years in the States after the Karno troop had disbanded, Chaplin and Laurel are known to have been together exactly twice.
Author Fred Laurence Guiles speculates that Chaplin was insecure; that his fragile ego couldn’t stand the competition. However, this author’s humble theory is rather the opposite. Laurel was in no sense Chaplin’s equal. He’d been his understudy with the Karno troupe. When the tour disintegrated, he made his living for awhile as a Chaplin imitator (one of countless, but adding a legitimate grievance to the disdain Chaplin may have felt.)
Intellectually, Laurel was a lightweight. While Chaplin “found himself” almost instantly at Keystone, floundering only for a few weeks, it took Laurel 11 or 12 years to discover his character — and then only with a partner as a catalyst. While recent effort has been made to elevate Laurel to the status of the great comic directors, in reality he was never any more than a comic journeyman. To his dying day, he had nothing but defensive scorn for those who tried to “say something”, insisting that he just wanted to make people laugh. Of course he did — some of their shorts he did with Oliver Hardy are the funniest movies ever made. But there is nothing in the team’s canon to equal the best of Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd, Langdon,the Marx Bros, or Fields as films.
Chaplin’s scorn may also have had to do with another form of snobbery. Coming from the gutter himself, and now one of the richest men in the world, he associated with the likes of William Randolph Hearst, George Bernard Shaw, Igor Stravinsky, etc. etc. Laurel, as successful as he was, lacked both intellectual pretension and money smarts. At a time when the other great comics’ earnings were in the millions, his were in the thousands — and the bulk of that going to ex-wives. To be so much richer than Laurel might have been embarrassing to Chaplin. Laurel was not in his “class.”
In contrast with nearly every other major comic figure to come out of vaudeville (Chaplin, Fields, Allen, Marx, Williams), Laurel exhibited next to no intellectual pretensions, inclinations or abilities. He lived breathed, ate, and slept gags. Hearing him speak in interviews is a bit shocking. The fact of the matter is, he was like many ballet dancers, opera singers and classical actors – a practitioner of a complex “high” art who shocks you by being an otherwise ignorant and superficial person. In reality, a philosophical nature and book smarts can be a hindrance to a performing artist. While Fred Allen and Groucho Marx were without peer in the delivery of lines, neither could act his way out of a paper bag. Chaplin’s intellectuality eventually alienated him completely from his audience. Stan never tried to do more than connect with an audience and audiences were grateful.
Born in Lancashire in 1890 (the year after Chaplin), Stan was the son of Arthur Jefferson, (a.k.a “Jeff” or A.J.”) a successful actor/manager and playwright. A.J. claimed to be from the same family that had produced Joseph Jefferson (America’s perennial stage Rip Van Winkle in the 19th century) and possibly even a certain American Jefferson who co-wrote the Declaration of Independence.
His parents were struggling during Stan’s early years, but success came to Jeff in 1896, touring the provinces with the melodramas that were so popular in that era. When Stan was 12, the family moved to Glasgow where his father managed the Metropole Theatre.
Stanley had always wanted to follow in his footsteps. A.J. built him his own miniature theatre in the attic when he was nine. When Stan was at boarding school, one of his teachers would wake him up after all the kids were asleep and have him entertain the faculty. Stanley Jefferson was a terrible student but that was overlooked on account of his talent. One day, when he was in his teens, he snuck off to a music hall run by a friend of A.J.’s and quietly, anxiously made his theatrical debut. A.J. approved. He got Stan a job with Levy and Cardwell’s Juvenile Pantomimes, with whom the boy performed for two years.
In 1910, Stan was discovered by Karno. By this time, Chaplin was already the company’s principle comedian. Laurel was made second comedian and Chaplin’s understudy. The two were room mates during the company’s first U.S. tour in 1910. Were they friends? Did they talk? What did they talk about? The world will never know.
Upon the troupe’s return to England, Stan left to tour music hall with his own sketches. He was on the brink of starvation when Karno manager Alf Reeves offered him a slot in the 1912 U.S tour. The troop was an even bigger hit this time around, word of mouth and memory serving to have amplify audience expectations. When Chaplin left the company to make films, Karno lost all of the upcoming bookings. The act disbanded in 1913.
Some went back home to England, but Stanley Jefferson elected to stay in the land of opportunity. He teamed up with two other Karno alum, Edgar and Wren Hurley as “the Three Comiques”. Stanley wrote a sketch for them called “the Nutty Burglars” that played Chicago and environs for several months. On the advice of booking agent Gordon Bostock, the troupe then began to call themselves the Keystone Trio. Stan started to do his character as Charlie Chaplin, and the Hurleys began to do their parts as silent comedians Chester Conklin and Mabel Normand. I guess this was in the days before lawsuits. Anyway, the deception made the act highly bookable, and the team worked the Poli Circuit for many months, finally breaking up over “creative differences”. (“I want to throw the pie!”, “No! I want to throw the pie!”)
In 1915, he teamed with Alice and Baldwin “Baldie” Cooke to form the “the Stan Jefferson trio”. This knockabout team followed very much the same formula as the Keystones (without the silent film star rip-off) with a sketch called “the Crazy Cracksman” they worked the Proctor, Fox, and Pantages circuits for two years.
In 1917, Stan met (and fell for) a woman named Mae Dahlberg, an Australian woman who was part of a dancing sister act. Stan dumped the Cookes and teamed up with Mae, making her both his comedy partner and common-law wife. (the fact that she had an actual husband down under stopped her from becoming the legal Mrs. Jefferson). It was Mae who gave Stan the surname the public came to know him by. With the high degree of superstition so common to stage folk, Stanley realized one day that “Jefferson” has 13 letters. Of course, that numerological handicap never hindered Joseph or Thomas J., but we’ll let that pass. As the two were casting about for names one day, Mae cracked open a history book and saw a picture of Scipio Africanus wearing the traditional laurel wreath of a victorious roman general. And, so, that’s why we call him Stan Africanus. No, no, just kidding.
Stan and Mae struggled together in vaudeville and films for ten years. George Burns spoke highly of their two-act in later years. He recalled that Stan played Mae’s mother, cried a lot, and got pushed around a lot by Mae, who was a sort of matronly Margaret Dumont type.
Unfortunately their relationship was very like that in real life, too. Stan and Mae fought backstage constantly. Not only was Stan hen-pecked (shades of the characters he was to play) but there is evidence that he was abused. He would emerge from many an overheard, overheated dressing room conversation with black and blue marks and scratches. “Do you know that cat I have-?” he began to explain to one friend. “You mean Mae?” was the too obvious rejoinder.
In 1917, the team was booked at the Hippodrome in Los Angeles. Producer Adolph Ramish caught the act and, impressed by what he saw, made a sort of demo film with Stan called Nuts in May. The film previewed at the Hippodrome, where it was seen by both Carl Laemmle (the head of Universal Pictures) and Chaplin, who had been a star for three years by that point. Both expressed an interest in signing Stan, but only Laemmle acted on it. In 1917, Stan launched the “Hickory Hiram” series of silent comedies around the eponymous rural character. The films tanked, proving the adage most succinctly expressed in Abel Green’s most famous variety headline: “Hix Nix Stix Pix”. Will Rogers also learned this the hard way. Jazz age movie audiences did not go in for bumpkin characters. (tastes changed dramatically during the depression, however when Rogers, Chic Sale, and “Ma and Pa Kettle” would click big time with hick shtick. By that time, though, Laurel had long since moved on, to the character we all know him as).
It took years for Stan to catch fire in pictures. All throughout this period, he continued to play in vaudeville with Mae well into 1920s. Unlike Chaplin, who was always well focused on the next move, Laurel seemed directionless, ambitionless, helpless. He never got to the next step without being prodded by others. From 1918-25, he was in and out of silent pictures, making films at various times for Hal Roach, Broncho Billy Anderson and Vitagraph. For most of 1920 and 21 the bulk of his work was in vaudeville with Mae.
But Mae was holding him back. He insisted (no doubt with pressure from her) that she be in his every picture, and audiences didn’t like her. This situation came to a head in 1925, when Joe Rock of the team of Rock and Montgomery was ready to back Laurel for a series of silent shorts, only without Mae. When she balked, Rock held firm, finally offering her a most unusual and humiliating deal. He would give her several thousand dollars, along with some jewels she had pawned, if she would go back to Australia. When Stan showed no inclination to demur, she accepted the offer, which was ironclad. The ship’s purser had strict instructions: Mae would not receive her payment until the ship was a day out at sea. Stan was finally free.
In 1926, he accepted an offer from Hal Roach (producer of Harold Lloyd, “Our Gang”, Charley Chase, and many others) to direct and write shorts. He seemed quite content to be behind the camera, when one day an accident got him acting again. One of the Roach players named Oliver Hardy had scalded himself with gravy and Stan had to substitute for him.
It was director Leo McCarey who teamed Laurel and Hardy in the 1927 vehicle Putting Pants on Philip. It took the team several films before they found their formula, largely assisted by McCarey. McCarey thought of the matching bowler hats, for example.
In 1929 they made their first talkies. Audiences were delighted to discover that their voices were absolutely perfect for their characters. Their first feature was the 1931 Pardon Us. In 1932, they embarked on a triumphant tour of England, where they were literally mobbed, getting their first sense of their huge success. In 1933, their short The Music Box was an Oscar for Best Live Action Comedy Short Subject. From the late 20s through the mid 30s they were one of Hollywood’s most popular comedy teams, cranking out some 70 shorts and ten features – some of which (in terms of the laughter generated) are among the most perfect comedies ever made.
But the clock was ticking. After seven years of this incredible success, a monster was waiting in the wings. Laurel and Hardy were soon to be menaced by a new kind of competition: the smart, sophisticated talkie. It was now the era of the screwball comedy, and Capra, Lubitch, Hawks, etc. were in. Slapstick was out. Without sensing this sea change, Stan started making the wrong career decisions. In 1936, he toyed with the idea of leaving Roach
He formed “Stan Laurel Productions” but that entity was never much more than a name. Oliver Hardy was staying with Roach, and there was no way Laurel could work as a single with the character he had created. The team broke with Roach together in 1940. No other studio would sign them. The team was in a real bind for some while until columnist Louela Parsons persuaded Daryl Zanuck at 20th Century Fox to do so. The situation for Laurel and Hardy at Fox was worse than any they had ever endured before. Disrespected, shunted aside, they were given only low-quality projects that were produced according to assembly line production values. Unable to watch themselves on the screen any longer, the team voluntarily broke their own contract in 1945, preferring not to do any films at all, then to do the films they were doing.
But there was life in the old boys yet. A 1947 tour of England played to sold out crowds. In the late 40s their earlier films started to be shown on television and they began to receive a huge new flood of fans – more than they had ever enjoyed in the past. Their last film Robinson Crusoe-land a.k.a. Utopia a.k.a Atoll K was bizarre and atrocious, ending their cinema career on a sour note. But they squeezed in another successful tour before strokes felled both Laurel (1955) and Hardy (1956). Hardy passed away in 1957.
Laurel managed to fight his way back and was quite vital for almost another decade.
His last utterance was a joke. As his nurse was assisting him in his sickbed, he said “I’d rather be skiing than doing this. The nurse said, “Do you ski, Mr. Laurel?” and he said, “No, I but I’d rather be doing that than this.” He passed away in 1965.
Here’s Laurel’s earliest surviving picture Just Rambling Along (1918):
For someone of my age, Jack Albertson was VERY present in the early 1970s: Grandpa Joe in Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory (1971, pictured above), Manny Rosen in The Poseidon Adventure (1972, the first movie I ever saw in a theatre) and Ed Brown in the hit tv series Chico and the Man (1974-78), which co-starred him with Freddy Prinze. The casting of the latter was a stroke of genius, juxtaposing as it did the new show business with the old.
Albertson had started out with a vaudeville dance act called the Dancing Verselle Sisters (one assumes he wasn’t one of the sisters). In burlesque and in the Catskills he partnered with Phil Silvers, and from there went on to Broadway, films and television. He is one of the few people to win a Tony, an Oscar and an Emmy. He is also one of the few people (George Burns was another) to enjoy his greatest fame as a senior citizen. He passed away in 1981.
This clip is from the tv show “Insight” — in it he seems to reprise some of his old burlesque material:
Today is the birthday of Lew Pollack (1895-1946). A New York native he started out as a boy singer with Walter Damrosch’s choral group. He sang and played vaudeville and composed music for silent films. He became an important Tin Pan Alley songwriter, collaborating with such big wheels as Erno Rapee,Ned Washington and Jack Yellen. Songs he had a hand in included “Charmaine”, “Diane”, and the popular children’s song “Go In and Out the Window”. He also composed the scores to such films as Pigskin Parade, One in a Million, Life Begins n College, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and Captain January.
Here’s the Pollack tune “At the Codfish Ball” from Captain January with Shirley Temple:
Something about this part of the west produced a lot of silent comedians: Buster Keaton and Fatty Arbuckle were both born in Kansas. Harry Langdon came from Council Bluffs, Iowa. Born in 1884, he ran away at age 12 to join Dr. Belcher’s Kickapoo Indian Medicine Show. Over the next few years he worked a variety of medicine shows and circuses, doing acrobatics, singing in blackface, and performing lightning sketches (drawing pictures really fast). In 1899, he entered vaudeville with a chair balancing act. climbing to the top of a mountain of chairs and bottles, and making the whole assemblage sway back and forth precariously.
In 1903 he launched the act for which he was famous over the next twenty years: “Johnny’s New Car”. With his wife and partner Rose Frances Mensolf, Langdon would appear onstage in a stalled car, and attempt to get it going again. The crux of the act was that it was a special gag car, which progressively broke into pieces as the act went on, until it was just a pile of parts on the stage by the end.
As clever a gimmick as this is, the real attraction was Langdon, a funny little man with a baby face and a slow reaction time, forever scratching his head and pursing his lips in underplayed consternation while appalling things happened around him. He began to bring this quality to the screen in 1923 in a series of shorts for Principal Pictures. The following year he was traded to Keystone and that is where he became a star. Working with director Frank Capra, Langdon developed his character further, into a sort of “baby man”, a very strange clownish character that had some of the qualities of a child and some of an adult. (Some assert that his character was the basis of Stan Laurel’s more famous later work; I think there is a strong argument to be made that this at least partially true). In the late twenties, Capra and Langdon began to do features. The first three The Strong Man; Tramp, Tramp, Tramp; and Long Pants) were very successful, but then Langdon, who’d let success go to his head, fired Capra and began to direct on his own. But while he might have been a rival to Chaplin in front of the camera, behind it he was no competition. His career rapidly went into the toilet. He continued to work in talking shorts for Columbia in the later years, but these never caught fire. He died in 1944.
Here he is in 1927′s Fiddlesticks, with music by Ben Model:
Jack Pepper (born Edward Jackson Culpepper this day in 1902) was a singer, dancer and uke player from Texas who (after forming part of a trio with his two sisters) first attained fame as one half of the act Salt and Pepper. After this, he married and formed a team with Ginger Rogers from 1929 to 1931, and they were indeed, Ginger and Pepper. After this, he apparently ran out of spices to get involved with.
Completely coincidentally, I saw him hosting a 1929 Movietone Revue (his first film appearance) a couple of days ago. His patter was quite scattershot and poor but his singing was compelling. He was a buddy of Bob Hope’s. After a wartime stint in the USO, the last few decades of Pepper’s life seems to have been restricted to playing very small bit parts in Hope’s and other’s films. His daughter Cynthia became a successful film and television actress in the 1960s. Pepper passed away in 1979.
Best known today as the voice of Jiminy Cricket in the 1940 Disney film Pinnochio, Edwards (June 14, 1895 – July 17, 1971) probably gained his widest popularity on radio. He was also big in vaudeville, films, and had a successful recording career. As the name implies, he accompanied himself on the uke. He entered vaudeville in the late teens. In 1920, he paired briefly with singer/dancer Pierre Keegan in an act called “Jazz As Is”. He cut his first record in 1922. His pleasant, smooth voice with its folksy edge made quite a hit, and by 1924, he was playing the Palace. Broadway shows included Mimic World of 1921, Lady Be Good (1924), and numerous others.
His film career was launched with The Hollywood Revue of 1929 wherein first made popular the song “Singin’ in the Rain”. More than 80 films followed. In clips, one who expects to find a Burl Ives-looking character based on his voice, will be surprised to see a good-looking young man with a Rudy Vallee like appeal.
In 1932, he launched his first radio show. In 1949, he launched two different TV shows on CBS: The Cliff Edwards Show and The 54th Street Revue. He died in 1971.
Here he is singing “Hang on to Me” in this 1935 technicolor short:
Poodles was the greatest comic trick rider of the century, and possibly of all time. He is credited with having done more to advance the art of trick riding than anyone since Philip Astley, the inventor of the circus.
Born in Barnsley, England in 1891, Poodles was the rare vaudevillian who was actually a member of a show business dynasty. The Hannefords are a performing family that can trace their roots at least as far back to 1778 (when one of them juggled for George III) and continue to perform to this day. As you would imagine, the Hannefords are principally circus folk, though Poodles was so successful he made frequent forays into vaudeville, musicals, films, and television.
An aunt dubbed him Poodles, claiming he looked like one (which he did — except for the lack of kinky hair, a long snout, or dog ears). His parents were superb equestrians, and Poodles, who was far from shy, was part of the act from early childhood. His comic talents emerged when Poodles had just executed an absurdly hard routine involving acrobatics on the back of a moving horse (somersaults, handsprings, balancing a table) but the audience somehow managed to remain unimpressed. Apparently Poodles was so good, he made it look like anyone could do it. To remind them that it was hard, he put on clown get up, and began to make his act a bit hair-raising, constantly leaving the audience in doubt as to whether he was about to fall off the horse or not as he careened round the ring. This is showmanship akin to that of Houdini, who stretched out his escapes to far longer than they actually required, or the juggler who always drops a ball for the greater applause he gets when he finally gets them all up in the air. Ironic, but true—audiences are more impressed by men than supermen.
The Hanneford act was soon in demand. Poodles went on to create many of equestrian tricks that still have the power to astound. For example, from a standing position, he was able to do a backflip from one running horse to another following behind it. He was the only rider who could step off the side of a running horse. He got into the Guinness Book of World Records for performing a running leap onto a horse at full gallop then stepping off again…26 times in succession.
On top of this, he was funny, so that he was soon getting offers in other media. He played in vaudeville many times, but there were few venues large enough to accommodate him. The Hippodrome in New York was one to which he frequently returned. Poodles made 42 two-reel shorts, many directed by Fatty Arbuckle. He worked in films through the 1950s, mostly in bit parts and specialties, notably with Shirley Temple in Our Little Girl (1935) and both the stage (1935) and screen (1962) productions of Billy Rose’s Jumbo. As late as the 1960s, he could be seen on theEd Sullivan Showand similar TV programs.
Poodles worked the horse act until his sixties, when he began to fall back on his second specialty—bullwhip cracking. In his last years, he and some of his family worked in New York’s fabled and short lived amusement park Frontierland, where he toiled until passing away in 1967. Members of his family continue to perform at circuses throughout the world to this day. In 1995, he became the only comedy rider ever inducted into the Clown Hall of Fame.
July 20
Burlesque-a-pades
Burlesque Blitz
Kraine Theatre
August 7
Trav S.D. & The Bathing Beauties
Coney Island USA
Sept 25
Talk on Vitagraph
Brooklyn Public Library
Who and What is TRAV S.D.
Trav S.D. n. 1. Travesty…parody, satire, burlesque and the grotesque. 2. A potent hallucinogen resembling LSD. 3. The alter ego of Donald Travis Stewart (born Westerly, Rhode Island, Nov. 8, 1965) * * * * * *
Performer, writer and producer Trav S.D. is the author of over 100 plays (for stage, screen and radio), 300 published articles, and the book "No Applause, Just Throw Money, The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous" (Faber & Faber, 2005). A frequent radio guest and public speaker, his voice has been heard on the Leonard Lopate Show (WNYC), The Sound of Young America (NPR), The Joey Reynolds Show (WOR), Cat Radio Café (WBAI), and a dozen others throughout the country. He interviewed over 200 artists on Indie Theatre Now, a regular podcast and tv show on nytheatre.com between 2007-2009. He has contributed to the New York Times, American Theater, the Village Voice, Time Out New York, the New York Sun, Reason, and many others, and now writes the downtown theatre column for The Villager/ Downtown Express/ Chelsea Now.
His plays include "The Fickle Mistress", recently workshopped at Dixon Place starring Molly Pope, Everett Quinton and Jan Leslie Harding, (with full production slated for 2014); "Willy Nilly" a musical about the Manson Family that was an extended hit of the 2009 NY Intl Fringe Festival and "House of Trash", published in Plays and Playwrights 2001. His works have been presented at Joe’s Pub (the Public Theatre), LaMama, Theater for the New City, NYMF, NYC Fringe, the Ohio Theatre (Soho Think Tank), HERE, Dixon Place, the Brick, Metropolitan Playhouse, and, regionally and internationally, in London, Portland, Minneapolis, Austin, Seattle, and Providence. He has also presented hundreds of New York's top variety acts through his American Vaudeville Theatre. His new book "Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy & Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube" will be released by Bear Manor Media in February 2014.
