Albert Carroll: Kind of a Drag

Today’s as good a day as any to tell you about Albert Carroll, an extraordinarily talented and well-known guy in his day to have become so obscure in ours. Carroll was a Broadway actor,  dancer, impressionist, female impersonator, lyricist and choreographer. Sources differ as to his birth. IBDB gives ca. 1895-1956, and a 1900 Chicago census seems to bear this out. IMDB gives march 13, 1898 through 1970, although they might be conflating him with another Albert Carroll, possibly the New Orleans piano player, who was African American. To further confuse matters, our subject sometimes rendered his name as Albert J. Carroll.

I’ve gotten some info about his earliest years from F. Michael Moore’s book Drag! Male and Female Impersonators on Stage, Screen and Television. Moore says that Carroll staged an amateur revue in Chicago when he was 16, and that when he got to New York, he performed during interludes in silent movie screenings. About his private life, or how he came to New York I’ve so far found nothing. Since his earliest credits were all with the Neighborhood Playhouse we can make some deductions about he got his start on the stage. The Neighborhood Playhouse was founded in 1915 and had grown out of youth education programs at Henry Street Settlement on the Lower East Side, which remains a center of theatrical activity to this day. Carroll’s first couple of shows with the company appear to have opened at the downtown theatre and then moved to the Maxine Elliott Theater on Broadway.  He’s about the right age to have been involved with Henry Street’s theatre programs in his late teens and young adulthood, and gotten involved with the company that way. His first professional credit was a show based around visiting British actress Gertrude Kingston in 1916. The next was a play called 39 East by Rachel Crothers in 1919, in which Carroll appeared with Henry Hull and Alison Skipworth. It was made into a silent film the following year with a much of the same cast, including Carroll.

For the next three decades Carroll was to be a star of Broadway, often with Neighborhood Playhouse productions, in over three dozen shows. He was a notable stand-out as performer, choreographer and lyricist in several editions of the revue called the Grand Street Follies, participating in the inaugural 1922 edition, as well as ones in annual editions from 1924 through 1929. Other revues he appeared in included The ’49ers (1922),  The Garrick Gaieties (1930), The Ziegfeld Follies (1931) and The Seven Lively Arts (1944). In these revues he was famous for impersonating famous actors and dancers, many or most of whom were female.  He did impressions of both John and Ethel Barrymore. He also did Pavlova, Irene Castle, Lynne Fontanne, Bea Lillie, Gertrude Lawrence, Laurette Taylor, Groucho Marx, and NYC Mayor Jimmy Walker.   Some photographs of him in character can be found of him on a blog called the Mouse Art Notebooks. He also contributed humor, poems and stories to the New Yorker between 1927 and 1930. He also acted in straight plays and comedies and even classics. His last known credits are musicals with the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey in 1946 and 1947. After this he appears to have returned to Chicago, where he passed away about a decade later.

Several sources say the great Southern novelist Thomas Wolfe disliked Carroll, whom he met in the 1920s through the Neighborhood Playhouse’s set and costume designer Aline Bernstein, who was Wolfe’s patron and lover. (He is said to have been uncomfortable with Carroll’s flamboyant and foppish personality, i.e. he was homophobic).

Another interesting tidbit: Carroll’s younger brother Eugene “Gene” Carroll had a vaudeville career, and hosted a local television show in Cleveland for decades.

To find out more about 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. For more on silent  film please see 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

NORMA TERRIS: THE ORIGINAL MAGNOLIA

NORMA TERRIS: THE ORIGINAL MAGNOLIA

Today is the birthday of Norma Terris (Norma Allison, 1904-1989).

Originally from Kansas, Terris started out in vaudeville performing singing celebrity impressions, an act that sounds not unlike that of Elsie Janis. I see it claimed in various places that she was featured in the Ziegfeld Follies, however my own Follies resources (bills for each year) and IBDB don’t reflect that. She may have been a replacement, or toured with the show. However, she was definitely featured doing her impersonation specialty in two Shubert revues A Night in Paris (1926) and A Night in Spain (1927). This lead to her best known theatrical credit: she was the original Magnolia and Kim in the first productions of Show Boat (1927-1929 and 1932). She was tried in two Hollywood features, Married in Hollywood (1929) and Cameo Kirby (1930), but apparently she did not click in pictures; when films were made of Show Boat in 1929 and 1936, she was passed over.

She starred in a couple more short-lived Broadway shows (her last was in 1938), then sang for ten seasons with the Municipal Opera Company in St. Louis. After this she retired to Connecticut with her husband. Ironically, it is her activity during this “retirement” for which she may be best known today, for she became heavily involved, both as a singer and a benefactor, with the Goodspeed Opera Company, which named one of its theatre buildings in her honor.

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.

Ina Claire: Impressionist at 17

Today is the birthday of stage and screen actress Ina Claire (nee Fagan, 1893-1988). The Washington D.C. native got her start in vaudeville as an impressionist at age 17 before breaking into Broadway in 1911 in The Quaker Girl. She was popular enough to be a featured performer in the Ziegfeld Follies in the mid-teens, and was a major star of stage comedies by the likes of S.N. Behrman, George Kelly and Somerset Maugham through the end of the 1930s (her last stage role was The Confidential Clerk in 1954). Her film career was less stellar, although she did get some prominent roles, notably in The Royal Family of Broadway (1930–she played the Ethel Barrymore character), and Ninotchka (1939). She was married three times, once to the actor John Gilbert.

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.

Elsie Janis and Her Gang

Here’s Our Elsie, Just Back from “Over There” Where She Cheered Up Our Boys

Elsie Janis was so dependent on her domineering stage mother that she remained in some senses a “child star” until well after her fortieth year. Ma Janis did everything for her: coached her on her performance, kept her schedule, made the bookings, selected her material, chose her wardrobe, and chaperoned her dates. Irene Castle called Ma Janis Elsie’s “ringmaster” and “Svengali”. “for pure drive and ambition,” she said, “no mother manager…ever approached Ma Janis.”

Liz Bierboner (Ma’s real name) was a born entrepreneur and a frustrated performer. At first she sold real estate, and gave elocution lessons in the Columbus, Ohio area, but when Elsie came along in 1889, she became her main project. Precocious Little Elsie first performed publicly at age 5, debuting at a church entertainment. In 1897 she went professional, specializing in impressions of famous vaudeville stars, but also singing and dancing well enough to pull them off.

Elsie’s (Liz’s) big break came in 1900, when Elsie was 11. It so happened that she had known President McKinley from his days as Ohio governor. Based on this old connection, Elsie was booked for a “command performance” at the White House. Following that engagement, she was truly in demand. At Mike Shea’s Theatre in Buffalo, she started out in the number two slot. By the following week she was headlining. Her 1905 performance at New York’s Casino Theatre Roof Garden set the town abuzz, with her impressions of Weber and Fields, Faye Templeton and Lillian Russell. later that year she played London and Paris. Her repertoire grew over the years to include: Vesta Victoria, Eddie Foy, Eva Tanguay, Ethyl Barrymore, Anna Held, Harry Lauder, Irene Franklin, Pat Rooney, Frank Tinny, George M. Cohan, Sarah Bernhardt, Nazimova, Bert Williams, Fanny Brice, Will Rogers—effectively half the people in these annals.

To say that her mother was overprotective would be an understatement. Her insistence that “Elsie must not be overworked” ensured that Elsie would be weak, sickly and frail throughout her life. Worst of all, she kept Elsie away from suitors, protecting her career, but insulating her also from the satisfactions of marriage.

Nevertheless, Elsie spent World War I patriotically entertaining the troops, sometimes quite close to the front. “The war was my high spot” Elsie said, “and I think there is only one peak in this life.” You can see a cool re-creation of her wartime act in a 1927 Vitaphone short she did, available in Warner Bros’ The Jazz Singer boxed set.

While she continued to perform after the war, the spark had sort of gone out, and her career was not as successful again. She retired in 1932 upon the death of her mother, without whom she was effectively helpless in show business. When she died in 1956, her good friend Mary Pickford was at her side.

Personal note–I got a burst of local pride in reading Elsie’s autobiography So Far, So Good! when I learned that for a time she spent her summers in my hometown (actually one town over) back when it was a fashionable destination for wealthy New Yorkers. Here are the Narragansett Towers as I knew them growing up:

And here they are as Elsie knew them, when they were part of a huge casino that later burned down:

One of the reasons, no doubt, I spend most of my time looking backwards.

To learn more about the roots 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. For more on comedy film history see 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