Several Seminal Salomés and the History of the Dance of the Seven Veils

Salomé, by Pierre Bonnaud, 1900

Today is St. John’s Day, the traditional birthday for John the Baptist. Note the timing: just as Christmas is pinned close to the winter solstice, St. John’s Day falls right after the summer solstice. No accident! In America the only folks who still give it much attention are the voodoo practitioners of New Orleans; as a culture we’ve transferred the impulse for a summer holiday to the Fourth of July.

At any rate, we take the occasion to talk about a St. John related fad that swept through American pop culture, especially vaudeville, in the early 20th century: the Salomé craze. If you know your New Testament or your Josephus, you know the tale: how Herod’s wicked step-daughter Salomé did a naughty dance (The Dance of the Seven Veils) for daddy, then demanded and received the head of John the Baptist on a platter. The story was tailor made to be a kink in the Victorian moral armor, Biblical in origin yet titillating. It became a frequent subject for painters in the 19th century.

Beardsley illustration for Wilde’s “Salomé”

It finally made its way to the stage (almost) in 1892 with a play by Oscar Wilde. Wilde’s Salomé began rehearsals that year with Sarah Bernhardt as star but was banned by British censors. Something was in the air. The following year Little Egypt made her debut in the Streets of Cairo exhibition in the World Columbian Exposition in Chicago. One used a Biblical justification, the other an anthropological one, but the bottom line was clear: whatever the rationale, people wanted to look at sexy dances. At any rate, Wilde’s Salomé was first published in France in 1893, then in England in 1894, both editions with provocative illustrations by Aubrey Beardsley. The first (private) British production was in 1905, but the ban for public productions was in place until 1931.

Alice Guszalewicz in the Strauss opera

But ya know how it is; if you want to create a market for something, forbid it. So, first buzz was created on the continent. In 1902, Max Reinhardt directed a version in Berlin in 1902. Richard Strauss saw this version, and was inspired to adapt it into an opera, which premiered in in 1905.  But the crucial leap to the popular stage came the following year.

Maud Allan

In 1906 Canadian-born modern dancer Maud Allen premiered her production Visions of Salomé in Vienna. It and she became a sensation. Billed as “The Salomé Dancer” she toured British music halls in 1908, playing 250 stands that year, and published her autobiography. This set off the craze.

Gertrude Hoffman

Gertrude Hoffman was the first to bring the Salomé dance to the American vaudeville stage in 1908, launching the local mania. Read my short squib on her here, and a much more robust post about the Brooklyn Public Library’s Gertrude Hoffman Collection by scholar/ librarian Ivy Marvel here. 

Mademoiselle Dazie

Mademoiselle Dazie was one of the first to imitate Hoffman’s Salomé act and present it on the vaudeville stage though we don’t have a picture of her in costume. Learn more about her here. 

Lotta Faust

Broadway star Lotta Faust was another who got in on the ground floor, touring vaudeville with a Salomé dance as early as 1908. We’ll be writing more about her in the coming months.

Julian Eltinge

Female impersonator Julian Eltinge also include a Salomé  number among his many drag specialties starting in 1908. Another female impersonator who did the Dance of the Seven Veils was British music hall performer Malcolm Scott.

Eva Tanguay

Though we don’t have a photo for it, Eva Tanguay’s 1909 Salomé  was said to have taken the whole thing up a notch, simulating orgasm, and further increasing her notoriety.

Aida Overton Walker

African American vaudevillian Aida Overton Walker toured with her Salomé act in 1911.

The Salomé  fad had wound down on stages by this point. But in later years, there were some notable films that kept the story out there:

Theda Bara

The 1918 film starring the notorious screen vamp Theda Bara is sadly lost — a tragedy for red-blooded heterosexual men everywhere!

Nazimova

The great Russian actress Alla Nazimova’s 1923 screen version was at once too retrograde (it was a long dead fad by the Jazz Age) and too modern (full of art deco design and contemporary dance — who wants a reinterpretation of this quintessential staple?) So it bombed at the box office, although it makes an interesting, if anomalous, artifact.

Kathryn Stanley

Mack Sennett Bathing Beauty Kathryn Stanley posed for this publicity still in 1926, although it doesn’t seem to be in support of a Sennett movie (seems to have been a local stage production). Too bad! A Mack Sennett spoof of the subgenre could have been a major hoot, although I’m sure it would have been deemed too blasphemous by religious groups. That John head needs to grow a beard though.

Salomé, Where She Danced (1945)

The 1945 film Salomé, Where She Danced, put Yvonne de Carlo on the map. And what a map! Va va voom!

Salomé (1953)

We sometimes forget that Rita Hayworth started out as a dancer. She reminds us and then some when she does the Dance of the Seven Veils in the 1953 Hollywood film.

Salomé’s Last Dance (1988)

Typically cray-cray Ken Russell version, complete with an Oscar Wilde framing device.

Salomé (2013)

I was lucky enough to see Al Pacino play Herod in Circle in the Square’s 1992 production of Wilde’s Salomé, with Twin Peaks’ Sheryl Lee as the title character. Pacino chewed up the scenery in the play, perhaps the first time the title character had been bumped from the center of her own vehicle. In 2013, he directed his own movie version and — same thing. Jessica Chastain is Salomé , but I had to hunt around for a bit for a photo where Pacino isn’t hogging the limelight!

My version! How could I not include it? In my 2008 revue No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Show That Made Vaudeville Famous at Theater for the New City I cast Leela Corman (best known as an illustrator and graphic novelist, but who is also an accomplished belly dancer) as Salomé, and Art Wallace as the cat-calling head of John the Baptist. And on that sacrilegious note, we end our post.

For more on the history of vaudeville, including fads and phenomena like the Salomé craze,  consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever titillating books are sold.

The Perennial Mystique of Bettie Page

Bettie Page and sister, Coney Island. Parachute Jump in background

April 22 is the birthday of Bettie Page (1923-2008). I feel sort of Bettie Page cult-adjacent, near but not of the intense widespread worship of this iconic pin-up girl of the 1950s. So many people of my generation are so crazy about her that it fascinates me. I feel I get it even if (for some reason) she doesn’t obsess and beguile me as she does so many other people. It’s almost like she’s the Mona Lisa or something to certain people. Without exaggerating, I must know dozens of women who pattern or have patterned their appearance after her, not just burlesque dancers, but artists of various kinds, painters, musicians, stage directors, and women who are simply into vintage culture. My wife has owned this fridge magnet ever since I’ve known her:

Is it something about the period? Is it the clash between the wholesome and the illicit? There is something about Bettie Page that reminds me of actresses in noir films of the 40s, like Veronica Lake. It’s like she’s the girl next door who is game enough to dabble at being daring without being swallowed up in some sinkhole of ruin. She was literally a secretary who posed for naughty pictures for a decade, then stopped doing that. Interestingly, her life didn’t fall apart (mental illness, several divorces) until AFTER she retired from modelling and became a born again Christian.

There are several points of overlap and interest for me about her life and short career. The first is that she is from the great town of Nashville, home of my ancestors. A lot of classic burlesque girls and pin-ups were of my stock: poor Southern white folk. It’s one of the strong connections I feel to classic burlesque culture — a subject for a planned future post.

The second is that she was discovered at Coney Island! She’d come to NYC to be an actress in 1949. A few months later an amateur photographer named Jerry Tibbs saw her on the beach at Coney and asked her to model for him. Ironically, Tibbs was an NYPD officer and Page’s work would eventually take her into illegal territory. But photos like the one at the top of this post, and this one, are illustrations of her connection to the beach and amusement park at Coney Island:

Betty Page is in several burlesque films of the mid ’50s: Striporama (1953), Varietease (1954), and Teaserama (1955). I became acquainted with these about five years ago in preparation for directing a couple of editions of Angie Pontani’s Burlesque-a-pades. With the passing of 60 years these films have acquired much charm they probably didn’t seem to possess when they were first released, full of theatrical values and efforts that fell by the wayside in such films as the late ’60s gave way to straight up porn.

Also, as we wrote here, in the 1950s, Bettie posed — Believe it or NOT — for Harold Lloyd! The former silent film comedian experimented with taking art shots of sexy girls with a 3-D camera during his retirement. Some are published in the 2004 book Harold Lloyd’s Hollywood Nudes in 3-D. 

Bettie Page photo by Harold Lloyd

In 2004, Gretchen Mol starred in/ as The Notorious Bettie Page. Ironically, I discovered this film backwards. Mol had appeared in the film adapted from my friend Jeff Nichols’ book Trainwreck, American Loser (2007). The Mad Marchioness then referred me back to the Page bio-pic, for which Mol is obviously much better known.

In 2012 the definitive documentary, Bettie Page Reveals All was released. Access it here at the official site.

The mania continues unabated!

For National Bird Day: The Bird Acts of Vaudeville

Rosa Naynon and Her Cockatoos, circa 1907

I’m informed that it’s National Bird Day, which raises the interesting question, “Is it National BIRD Day? Or NATIONAL BIRD Day?” i.e., a day to celebrate all of our avian friends, or just a day to sing the praises of the bald eagle? Well, I know it’s the former, but it does remind me of the old Bob and Ray routine wherein the announcers mistake ground HOG meat for GROUNDHOG meat.

At any rate, I’m sure the intention of today’s observation is supposed to be about naturalism or preservation or something, but I am going to subvert it entirely by celebrating the working beast,the birds who sing for their supper strictly for human entertainment. In his book Vaudeville, Joe Laurie, Jr had this to day about bird acts:

“There were a lot of cockatoo acts (they were easy to train): Swain’s Cockatoo’s, Merle’s Cockatoo’s, Marzella’s, Lamont’s, and Wallace’s. They walked the wire, rang bells, put out a fire in a toy house, etc. Very entertaining. There were Marcelle’s Birds, Camilla’s Pigeons, Conrad’s Pigeons, and of course Olympia DesVall’s was the best bird act of them all. There was also Torcat’s and Flora D’Alizas Educated Roosters, followed by Kurtis’s Educated Roosters.”

Watercolorist Charles Demuth painted this unidentified “Vaudeville Bird Woman” in 1917:

Birds were an integral part of C.A. Wright’s Traveling Tent Show. 

Burlesque dancer Yvette Dare worked with macaws and parrots who were trained to undress her to music:

Dare.

Here’s another one of Madame Marzella, circa 1896

For more on vaudeville history, consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous, available at Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and wherever nutty books are sold.

Don’t Bother With “The Black Crook”

We expressed no little excitement here and here regarding the advent of a show calling itself The Black Crook at the Abrons Arts Center. Marketing materials strongly implied a revival, or revival of sorts, of the seminal production, long regarded as the Ur-show of American musical theatre. And by “implied”, I mean “used the word ‘revive'”.

But that’s not what it is. And now that I read the description more closely, I see that (as one does) I saw what I wanted to see in their p.r. materials: “With new text [and] new songs…a team of only eight actor/ musician/ dancers will perform the full 1866 musical and bring the biggest of all American spectacles into the tiniest of spaces.” This comes much nearer the truth than what I thought I was in for, but still won’t bear fact checking. It does indeed have new text and music, and only eight performers, but they scarcely do any of the rest of what that sentence promises.

I am sorry to report that the production is sort of an ANTI-Black Crook, an avant-garde theatrework that makes a stylistic choice to MOCK The Black Crook, its melodrama and its ballets. Such fragments from the original five and a hour show as they present or re-create drip with oleaginous attitudinizing, lack of conviction, and smarmy superiority. The relationship between this version and the original may be conjectured as roughly equivalent to that between The Beggars Opera and the Threepenny, but in this case with no apparent ideological motivation. It is merely, frankly, fucked with. A dubious honor for a 150th anniversary, but so be it. Such fragments of the original text as we get are wedged between an original “meta” story about the creation of the original show, with the small cast doubling as the author, producers, etc. Little effort is made to differentiate the two realities. In both planes, the actors wear the same clothes, act in the same style, move on the same set. Thus the two worlds bleed together, making what is already an irritating ordeal into a confusing one.

As for the “spectacle”? The first music doesn’t appear until 50 minutes into the show; the first song appears after that. Only a couple of songs are from the original show. And the principal thing we associate with The Black Crook…the ballet chorus? Well, the dancing is done by this cast of eight. Four of them are female. We have gotten very far away from both the spirit and the body of The Black Crook at this stage.

Naturally, I wasn’t expecting the real thing. The original show, as we said, was five and a half hours long and featured a cast of dozens. I expected a truncation, and certainly some scholarly substitution of missing material. The backstory idea I find tedious and commonplace, but if you must do it, I find myself offended by its self-conscious, apologetic approach about the very notion of how 19th century theatre was practiced. This is a self-hating production of The Black Crook if ever there was one, far more about the director’s apparently high self-regard than service to the play, the theatre, or the audience. Unfortunately, I’m not interested in how much smarter Mr. Joshua William Gelb is than the material he took the trouble to excavate. I am interested in the material itself.

There are positive things to say. The cast are extraordinarily talented, however warped and misused their gifts are in the service of this production. In addition to their polished, animated acting, most of them are highly skilled musicians, which is most impressive. One of the songs I heard was exquisitely beautiful. And the costumes, by Normandy Sherwood, are gorgeous. They are the best thing about the production, which is quite a statement to have to make.

I confess I left (at a sprint) during intermission. I would have left about five minutes into the show, once I knew what I’d let myself in for, but there was no way for me to gracefully slip out without causing a ruckus. But I find it inconceivable that the second act would somehow redeem the show, given the choices I suffered through in the first act. If you’re bursting with curiosity about The Black Crook, this is not the show to see. But if you must, you must. Do it here, but don’t let me know about it.

The Barrison Sisters: Don’t Call it Vaudeville

I’ve dithered about this post for a long while, but ultimately decided it can’t go in my Stars of Vaudeville series, for the simple reason that there’s no way in hell that you could ever call this act “vaudeville”. The reason for the quandary: the word appears next to their name wherever it is rendered on the internet. In typical fashion, once an error like that gets out there in gets replicated ad infinitum, and then bounced around forever like a pinball in a machine.

Here’s the thing: the Danish born Barrison Sisters (Lona, Sophia, Inger, Olga and Gertrude) had a dirty act. Like many sister acts of their day, they performed cute musical numbers. But the Barrison Sisters were said to have discovered the path to success through sexy double entendres. Their most notorious routine is said to have consisted of the girls asking the audience “Do you want to see my pussy?” — at which point they would flip up their skirts to reveal kittens strapped to the front of their vajayjays. In the 1890s. Though the great vaudeville circuits were just in the process of being created the tone of the industry was already well established by Tony Pastor, Keith and Albee, F.F. Proctor, Sylvester Poli, Percy Williams and others. Vaudeville was clean. If you did an act of this description in vaaudeville you’d be shown the door before your act was even finished.

So this act can only be said to have been in vaudeville in the broadest, broadest possible use of the term. Perhaps as they might use it in some place like Paris or Moscow, to mean something equivalent to “varities”. In fact, it even sounded too dirty for 1890s burlesque to me. My guess would have been saloon variety, as it might be seen at Koster and Bial’s or on the Bowery or someplace, or your local wild west saloon. But then I went to my go-to reference for early burlesque, the must-own Horrible Prettiness: Burlesque and American Culture, by Robert C. Allen. There, he mentions a strip act by Lona Barrison in burlesque, being reported on in the Police Gazette in 1896, in which she disrobed completely, which back then meant down to her underwear. And really that’s all you gotta know, friends. The Barrison Sisters were not vaudeville but burlesque, friends, and were even getting busted there. 

To learn more about 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.

Happy Birthday, Tempest Storm!

This is the tamest picture of her I could find. Believe me — I looked and looked and looked. Oh, how I looked!

Today is the birthday of burlesque legend Tempest Storm (Annie Banks, b. 1928). We’ve waited so long to do a post on her because her proper birthday doesn’t roll around too often — she’s a leap year baby. And when I say baby, I mean baby!!

Originally from rural Georgia, already a twice divorced child-bride at 20, she decided to put her 44DD-25-35 measurements and fiery red hair to good use by becoming a burlesque performer. She debuted as Tempest Storm at the El Rey Club in Oakland, California around 1950 and went on to become one of the most famous of all burlesque dancers, through her nightclub appearances, pin-ups, movies, celebrity hook-ups (she was married to singer Herb Jeffries and had affairs with Elvis and JFK), and national press in places like Life Magazine.

She danced professionally until she was 67 years old, and still comes out to perform on occasion. You can see her in Leslie Zemeckis’s excellent film Behind the Burly Q. She’s the last of the living legends!

Harry Jolson: Al’s Lesser Brother

Today is the birthday of Harry Jolson (Hirsch Yoelson, 1882-1953). Born in Lithuania, the son of a cantor who would settle the family in Washington DC, Harry was the older brother of singer Al Jolson — who would go on to much greater fame in show business. But being older, it was Harry who ran away and went into vaudeville first.

Around the turn of the 20th century Al joined Harry in New York, where he was already beginning to take his first baby steps in show business. Harry and Al  teamed up in burlesque as “The Joelson Bros.” in an act called “The Hebrew and the Cadet.” Al’s voice was still changing and this is the point of his career where he whistled rather than sang (whistling would always be one of his distinctive trademarks). In 1901 the boys teamed team up with one Joe Palmer as  Jolson, Palmer and Jolson in a sketch called “A Little Bit of Everything”. Palmer was a former headliner who had written the lyrics to “In the Good Old Summertime”. He now had multiple sclerosis and was in a wheelchair. They boys dropped the “e” from their name because it wouldn’t fit on the business cards. Harry played a doctor, Al, a bellhop, and Palmer…the guy in the wheelchair. Al started using blackface at this time, and found that it liberated him so that he could really cut loose as a performer. The act was very successful. In 1905, they were contracted to play Tony Pastor’s but the act split up before the engagement started. Part of the boys’ obligation in the act was to clean, dress and otherwise babysit the infirm Palmer in their offstage moments. The boys had a falling out over who would take care of Palmer on a certain night. They never quite fully made up after this spat.

Now both Jolson brothers were working solo. By accident or by design the Jolson Brothers now cut up the continental U.S. into spheres of influence. While Harry worked the Keith and William Morris circuits in the east as “The Operatic Blackface Comedian”, Al worked Sullivan and Considine in the West as “the Blackface with the Grand Opera Voice”. Within a couple of years, Al became a major superstar, and after that the brothers’ rivalry became something of a joke. Harry was deemed to be no competition for Al, and what small crumbs he enjoyed tended to be crumbs from his brother’s table. While Al starred in Broadway shows and, later Hollywood films, Harry struggled on in vaudeville, often humiliatingly billed as “Al Jolson’s brother”. Here he is in a rare 1929 film clip with Lola Lane:

When vaudeville died, Harry became an agent for a while, representing Al and his wife Ruby Keeler for about seven years. When Al left him, his agency folded and he sold insurance and worked at an aircraft plant during World War Two. He was not mentioned at all in the Hollywood films The Al Jolson Story (1946) and Jolson Sings Again (1949). When Al died in 1950, Harry made a spoken word tribute record called “One More Song”, and also enjoyed some last limelight on radio and television (a show called You Asked for It, on which he sang Al’s “You Made Me Love You”). By these years though, he was failing. He passed away in 1953, three years after the brother who was a thorn in his side all those years.

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