Stars of Vaudeville # 510: Frank Carter

Singer/dancer Frank Carter (1888-1920) is sadly better known for his death than his life. The young performer met Marilyn Miller when they performed together in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1918. They fell in love and married, which infuriated the possessive Ziegfeld, who fired Carter from the Follies of 1919. Miller was performing in that show when she learned that Carter had died in a car crash on his way to meet her.

A Kansas City native, Carter had gotten his start as an usher and occasional extra at his local theatre. He worked his way into show business first as a high-diving daredevil, then as a slide singer in a local nickelodeon, and then into vaudeville. A successful engagement at the Victoria theatre led to a tour of English music halls lasting until the eve of the First World War. Carter returned to conquer American vaudeville again..and to the Broadway revue that led him to Miller. Miller considered him the love of her life. So much so that she buried him in the $35,000 mausoleum pictured above, and had herself interred with him when she herself passed (despite two subsequent husbands).  The monument is in Woodlawn Cemetary in the Bronx.

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.

Marilyn Miller in “Sally”

Today is the birthday of the great Broadway star Marilyn Miller (for more on her and her early vaudeville career go here). The 1929 clip below is from her stage and screen hit “Sally”. A couple of minutes into the clip it bursts into glorious Technicolor:

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.

Stars of Vaudeville #222: Marilyn Miller

Marilyn Miller (born Mary Ellen Reynolds this day in 1898) began her vaudeville career at age four under the nom de guerre Mademoiselle Sugarlump. From here she joined her family’s musical vaudeville act The Five Columbians, consisting of herself, two siblings and her parents, which is cuter than The Cowsills. After about a decade, she was spotted by Lee Shubert who put her in several of his Passing Show reviews. From here she graduated to Ziegfeld shows. In his autobiography, Eddie Cantor writes movingly how he and his pals Van and Schenck (her co-stars in the Follies of 1919) cheered her up when she learned that her husband Frank Carter had been killed in a car accident. Miller was all of 21 then, a little young to be a widow. She had bad luck in the marriage department. Her next husband (1922-27) was the notorious drunken and syphilitic wastrel Jack Pickford (Mary’s brother). Her main claim to fame was to be Broadway musicals, in which the singing-dancing five foot tall Miller was to star throughout the 1920s and early 30s. She played the title roles in Sally (1920-23), Peter Pan (1924-25), Sunny (1925-26)and Rosalie (1928), and starred also in the Depression era musicals Smiles (1930-31) and As Thousands Cheer (1933-34). She was ripped untimely from this mortal stage in 1936 after going into the hospital for a simple sinus operation.

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.