Eddie Foy Jr. as Eddie Foy Sr.

Today is the birthday of Star of Vaudeville #130: Eddie Foy (for more on this major show business figure see my earlier post). In 1964 Bob Hope, who’d played Foy in the classic 1955 film The Seven Little Foys remade that film for television on his show Bob Hope Presents the Chrystler Theatre (1963-1967), casting the Osmonds as the 7 Little Foys, Mickey Rooney as George M. Cohan, and the actual Eddie Foy, Jr. playing his father. Here’s part one of that show; you’ll find the rest of the show on Youtube as well.

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

And don’t miss my new book Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, just released by Bear Manor Media, also available from amazon.com etc etc etc

Cyndy Fuj’s Vaudeville Family #2: Finlay and Burke

This is part two of the series on the show biz ancestry of writer-actress Cynthia Fujikawa, which we launched here last week. It’s in her own words. 

Lottie Burke (1883-1939) was on all fours when she made her stage debut.  She crawled out during one of John M. Burke’s performances.  Her father scooped her up and threw her into her mother’s arms in the wings. Not long after, John M. Burke, died suddenly while yelling at his stagehands.  Lottie was raised in her grandmother’s boarding house for actors (now known as Aunt Nell’s) in Boston and remained in vaudeville and theatre until the mid 1920s.

Raymond Finlay was a 26-year old actor at the Boston Theatre when he met 16-year old Lottie Burke.  They teamed up personally and professionally and had a long, successful collaboration as Finlay and Burke.  They were known for farce comedies, stage satire, and song & dance.  He was a tall, lanky physical comedian, and she his petite, feminine match.  Their often troubled but lasting marriage their led to a large measure of fame & money, alcoholism, the loss of a couple of fortunes, and the birth of 3 children.  My mom insisted they “played the Palace” and were the family members who achieved stardom.  (I’m still on the hunt for the Palace Theatre playbills, and your research assistance is welcome) I am amazed at the amount of things I have found online about their 115-year old act, so it appears they were doing great.  The news clippings on Burke and Finlay illustrate an act that lasted from 1897 till at least 1923.

They were colleagues of the Four Cohans.  (Lottie had grown up with George M and sister Josie). George M. promised to write a show for the tall, lanky, rubber legged Raymond. Cohan made good on the promise.  But Raymond’s alcoholism made it impossible for him to do the part, and that Cohan re-wrote the show for a shorter man, played the role himself, and it brought fame to George M. (The name of the show? Little Johnny Jones).

Both of their daughters weathered their circus upbringing.  Like Lottie, my grandmother was also raised at Aunt Nell’s boarding house for actors, and her sister was deposited at a convent.  But Lottie trained both girls in the family profession and performed with them as well.  Lottie had my grandmother at Keith’s in Boston in the Living Pictures when she was four.

Lottie, Raymond and their girls toured with the Cohans, as well as Victor Moore and Eddie Dowling.

Irene Finlay (left), Eddie Dowling (center), and Marion Finlay (right).

(Raymond Finlay, center. Eddie Dowling, right.)

Irene Finlay, left. Lottie Burke, center. Marion Finlay, right of Lottie.

However, their cloistered daughter, Irene Finlay, detoured into burlesque in the 1920s.  It was perfectly fine with the libertine Lottie.  But when prudish Raymond found out he tried to throw his wife out a 12-story window in a New York hotel.

Despite their differences, despite Raymond’s missed opportunity as “Little Johnny Jones,” Lottie and Raymond lived a complete life in show business until retiring to their summer home in Onset, Mass.  Lottie’s Flop House, as it was known, became a part time residence for their vaudeville friends, including Lottie’s gay friends, all actors and “undesirables” who would be unwelcome elsewhere.  The party raged on at Lottie’s Flop House until the mid 1930’s. By then vaudeville was more or less over, and so were their fortunes. Raymond Finlay died of throat cancer in 1934.  Lottie’s health failed soon after and she passed in 1937.

Shortly before her death, a solicitor from Dublin called upon her with news of a potential inheritance, which she would have to travel to Ireland to claim.  This was impossible due to her ill health and dismal resources.  The estate had to do with Guinness something or other, and she was encouraged to sign a waiver, which she did, naively (given what we now know about her father John Burke).

PLEASE GO HERE FOR PART THREE OF THIS SERIES: GATES AND BLAKE ET AL.

To find out more about the variety arts past and present, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold. And don’t miss Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube, to be released by Bear Manor Media in 2013.

Cagney as Cohan, Hope as Foy

Today is James Cagney’s birthday (for my full article on him go here). This little clip from The Seven Little Foys (1955) gives us four separate vaudevillians for the price of two: Cagney playing George M. Cohan, Bob Hope playing Eddie Foy. Both Cagney and Hope got their start as hoofers. Hope’s no Cagney but he holds his own in this number. Cagney made Hope agree to get in shape for the routine as a condition for his participation in the movie!

To find out about  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. Also please keep a look out for Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies From Nickelodeon to Youtube, coming out in September 2012

 

George M. Cohan on Film!

Today (among other things to be celebrated) is George M. Cohan’s birthday (for his full bio go here).  Sadly he hated the recording arts, so there’s very little film of him despite the fact that he lived well into the 1940s. But in 1932, he did make The Phantom President, directed by Norman Taurog. This love scene is kind of icky — he’s way too old and creepy for Claudette Colbert here. But you get a sense of his great magnetism and focus as a performer. I certainly wish he had done many more movies!

To find out about  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. Also please keep a look out for Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies From Nickelodeon to Youtube, coming out in September 2012

Vaudeville Movie Double Header on TCM Tonight

One of the most enjoyable parts of working on No Applause and this blog has been watching Hollywood bio-pics of the great vaudevillians. There are more of these movies than you know, scores of them. Most have become obscure, and the heyday for churning them out faded long about the late 1950s. I wouldn’t precisely call watching them “research”. At best they conjure the essence of their subject and tell us something about what the public thought about the stars, or what they wanted them to be. And we get to see one Hollywood star play another major performer (a twofer), usually with lots of musical numbers. Almost all of them are hagiographies, and riddled with historical distortions, misrepresentations and Orwellian rewrites, some to suit the needs of Hollywood storytelling formula, some for reasons of conventional propriety and censorship, and some because the film is being made with the cooperation of its subject, who gets to simply excise what he doesn’t like. (My favorite example of this, because most egregious, is when Jolson’s ex-wife Ruby Keeler in the The Jolson Story is transformed into the anonymous “Julie Benson”. How’s that for break-up revenge? And did they think no one would notice something that major?)

At any rate, two of the best of the genre are playing on TCM tonight, starting at 8pm. I’d be tuning in but for the fact that I’ve already seen them both a gazillion times!

When people ask me what my favorite vaudeville film is I invariably say The Seven Little Foys. This bio-pic of Eddie Foy and the kiddie act he created with his large brood wildly distorts Foy’s life and career, making him look like a loser (when in fact he had been a star for decades) until he hits on the bright idea of solving his fatherhood problems by bringing his kids on the road with him. But this is a terrific family film (I first saw it on tv when I was a kid), which does convey many realities of life in show business. Furthermore, it is one of Bob Hope’s best performances. He is actually trying to stretch here, to do some dramatic acting, as well as revive the singing and dancing skills that had served him well in vaudeville and on Broadway. (A pity his films of the 60s and early 70s leave a lasting lasting impression of a guy who’s just coasting, sleepwalking through his lame vehicles. One thing you could not call Hope was lazy). It’s an interesting performance. As so often happens in these kinds of pictures, it is as much about Hope as it is about Foy. He actually conjures that assholey side we’ve often heard about and uses it in his performance. The result is not perfect (he often comes off as just kind of mopey), but is at least interesting. ALSO: Jerry Mathers (the Beaver) plays one of the Foy kids! At any rate, this is one movie this vaudeville dad has often watched with his own kids.

One of the best moments in The Seven Little Foys is when Hope as Foy is joined by James Cagney, reprising his role as George M. Cohan to perform a number at a show biz benefit. Cagney had told Hope he would only do the picture if Hope would really work hard on his dance routine — and Hope did. He’s no Cagney, but he still impresses, if only because we remember that at that stage he was a middle-aged guy much out of shape and out of practice.

Naturally, Cagney plays Cohan because of his indelible association with the Godfather of Broadway in Yankee Doodle Dandy, also showing on TCM tonight. This movie is one of the few times Hollywood used the full scope of Cagney’s talents. (Naturally, he’s a terrific actor, but they didn’t use those great dancing skills in many musicals). Cagney’s no singer, which is fine; neither was Cohan. And a lot of the film is essentially true, such as its depiction of the hellion George was as a kid, and the interesting relationship he had with his mild-mannered father Gerry (played here with reverence by fellow ex-vaudevillian Walter Huston). However, just as in The Jolson Story, Cohan’s performing ex-wife Ethel Levey is written out, replaced with a mannikin named Mary, ostensibily so Cohan’s song can be named after her. At any rate, this one is a perennial classic — it ought to be screened every 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.

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Ethel Levey

Ethel Levey (today’s her birthday) is unfortunately best known today as George M. Cohan’s wife. Unfortunate, because, if not for that, she’d be known primarily for her own stage stardom, which was interrupted due to that affiliation. Her full bio is here. Below, hear her sing “My Tango Girl’ from the show Hullo, Tango! in 1913

To find out more about  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 #280: Fred Niblo

Such lasting fame as Fred Niblo enjoys today is the result of his success as a silent film director, notably on films with stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Rudolph Valentino. Be that as it may, he, like almost everyone else of that era, cut his teeth on the stage. Born Frederick Liedtke on this day in 1874, he began as a minstrel and magician in small time vaudeville, but eventually honed his act to where he became one of the classiest and best loved monologists in the business. All the while, he was also appearing in legit stage plays. In 1901, he married Josephine Cohan, and would wind up acting in and producing several shows by her brother George M. Josey died young in 1916, and that was around the time Fred went west to begin his successful film career. Though he made a handful of talkies in the early 30s, none of them clicked and he retired soon after. In addition to his many silent classics, Niblo is important for being one of the founders of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, ergo, the Oscars. He passed away in 1948.

o find out more about 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 #261: Ethel Levey

Levey and Cohan

After a head start performing in her native San Francisco, Ethel Levey (b. this day in 1880) came to New York in 1897, singing and dancing at Koster and Bial’s (where she was held over for 20 weeks) and toured with vaudeville companies managed by Weber & Fields and Hyde & Behman. In 1899 she met and married George M. Cohan. The timing was fortuitous; he opened his first full-length show the following year. She was to star in most of his productions through 1906, when the pair broke up. She continued to perform in vaudeville, with sporadic returns to Broadway though the 1940s.This rather talented woman (remember how she played 20 weeks at Koster & Bial’s?) was treated rather ignominiously not only by Cohan (who dumped her when he became famous) but by history. You will find no reference to her whatever, for example, in Yankee Doodle Dandy. In retrospect, she might have fared better on her own! She passed away in 1955.

To find out more about 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.

Paragon Ragtime Orchestra

Like a Coke bottle striking the head of a Kalihari bushman, I took in my mail the other day and found that a letter of introduction and two new CDs had tumbled unannounced from the heavens. The package was a fan letter from someone of whom I was myself already a fan, Rick Benjamin, founder, director, conductor etc etc of the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra.

I’m sure I alarmed him when I told him the first time I saw (heard) his band perform I bust out bawling. I’m not insane, just an incurable sentimentalist. There is no stronger physical evidence of the metaphysical power of music to transcend time and space than the PRO. Essentially, Benjamin’s modus operandi is to play American popular music from around the turn of the last century, with absolute, complete, scientific fidelity to the original. Aided by his vast personal collections of pit arrangements, old cylinders and disks, historical notations and recollections, etc, he gets the music as close as humanly possible to the original, with no compromises or sops to contemporary taste. You can find hundreds of crappy nostalgia records out there containing half-assed versions of Joplin, Eubie Blake and so forth, but they’re always adulterated by weak-sister choices — this mistaken idea that you “have to” meet the contemporary audience halfway. That just waters down the whiskey, man! The proof that Benjamin’s approach is the right one is the stunning power of his music. It is an EXPERIENCE. It is like living Jack Finney’s Time and Again.

So, I want to plug these two new CDs of their’s.

The first is  Black Manhattan: Music of James Reese Europe, Will Marion Cook, and Members of the Legendary Clef Club. The injustice of James Reese Europe’s present obscurity exceeds even that of Bert Williams’. In the years just prior to the advent of jazz he was the undisputed leader of black American music, not only one of its principle shapers, but its ambassador to the broader (white) world. For many years he was the leader of the celebrated Clef Club, a kind of union and professional organization for African American musicians. The record here contains not only music composed by Europe, but by his Clef Club cohorts, such as Will Marion Cook, best known as the composer of Clorindy, or The Origin of the Cakewalk. See this blog in February for a birthday post on Europe himself. Or buy the disk now and read Benjamin’s extremely thorough liner notes.

Even more amazing is their new release You’re a Grand Old Rag: The Music of George M. Cohan. This disk delivers Cohan’s music as you’ve never heard it, mostly because later producers and arrangers have considered modern tastes “too sophisticated” for the Father of Broadway’s music as it was intended to be played. (And they consider themselves too sophisticated for Cohan in general — a universal error I would love to contribute to correcting.) Best of all they got this guy Collin Pritchard to do “Cohan’s” vocals — and he is a ringer — a ringer. He nails the Rhode Island accent like a native (something this native Rhode Islander considers  an extreme rarity), and speak-sings even better than Cagney. And for dessert, a very funny six minute speech by Cohan himself, delivered in 1938. He ends it with something I thought I would never hear with my own ears — Cohan’s age-old sign-off:  “My mother thanks you, my father thanks you…” And so I began the day by weeping in my kitchen. I take it back — I am insane!

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 #28: The Four Cohans

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 through 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.