Vaudeville - No Applause, Please, Just Throw Money by Trav S.D.

Vaudeville gave us many performers whose careers we've come to know from their eventual migration to Hollywood and the movies.  In turn, some movies managed to chronicle vaudeville performances and preserve them on film so we can enjoy them today.  It's a special relationship.

I've mentioned before on this blog the other points on the "star" that comprise the universe of the twentieth century actor: movies, of course, but also the stage, radio, and television.  The fifth point on the star is vaudeville.  I consider this separate from "the stage" because it was a unique world apart from full-length dramas, comedies, or musicals. 

Cary Grant started in vaudeville. Those simple acrobatics he performed in Holiday (1938) were learned when he was a youth, when he was Archie Leach, in vaudeville.

W.C. Fields, sure, and Mae West, and the Marx Brothers, but they essentially brought their vaudeville acts to the screen.  Mr. Grant, or we should say, Mr. Leach, morphed into something and someone altogether completely new.  The movies created many "personas" for many actors whose images, not to say talents, were a work in progress. Vaudeville was the training ground.

This post is just to point you in the direction of a swell book that is a terrific survey of vaudeville if you know little about it and want to know more:  No Applause - Just Throw Money, by Trav S. D. 

A few years ago I reviewed his book on silent film comedy, Chain of Fools, here.  He also writes the blog Travalanche, a wealth of information on classic films and vaudeville.  He's one of my favorite writers.

As I've mentioned in this post a few weeks ago, I'm currently working on a book about a summer stock playhouse on Mt. Tom in Holyoke, Massachusetts.  Vaudeville played an important part in the early days of this theater, and Trav's book has been a most enjoyable part of my research.

His knowledge on this art form and era is impressive, and you will be hard pressed to find a guide to this fascinating world more articulate and funny.  It really is a very enjoyable book, and I recommend it to anybody interested not only in vaudeville, but in classic films.  Exploring the history of vaudeville will enhance your appreciation of classic films. 

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Next week we continue our series on the current state of the classic film fan with a discussion with Patricia Nolan Hall, aka Caftan Woman.

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Vaudeville Hangs On in 1943

The Death of Vaudeville gets mentioned from time to time in movies of the 1930s, but here in Holyoke, Massachusetts (and not a few other places) in 1943, vaudeville hung on as a supplement to the movies. The war brought round the clock working shifts and a round the clock demand for entertainment.

Here at the New Holyoke Theater we have six “headline” acts: Rex Webber, “a vocal allusion”; Senna and Dean in a skit; comedian Ted Leary; dancers Gavin and Astor; acrobats the Winnie Dolly Trio; and singer Joe Martini, three shows a day.

As you can see, they were an addendum on the bill to the film “Johnny Eager” with Robert Taylor and Lana Turner. In this ad, the movie seems almost like an afterthought. Tommy Reynolds and his Orchestra also appeared, at jacked-up wartime prices of 55 cents and 25 cents for kids.

Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942) - Part 1

For Independence Day here in the U.S., today and tomorrow will be a nod to “Yankee Doodle Dandy” (1942) a fast-paced film that captures three American traits: unabashed and sentimental patriotism, a love of nostalgia, and consuming ambition. Perhaps they go hand-in-hand, but much of the nostalgia in this film is not so much about a past era of American patriotism, but rather a past era in this nation’s history of vaudeville and stock theatre.

James Cagney won his Academy Award for this film, a departure from his usual tough guys and gangsters, and is supported by Walter Huston (who received an Academy Award nomination) and Rosemary DeCamp as his parents, his real-life sister Jeanne Cagney as his sister Josie, and his real-life brother William is the film’s producer. As with most Hollywood biopics of the day, the life of song-and-dance man George M. Cohan is complimentary, avoiding controversy, and sometimes a bit light on the facts, including the omission of Cohan’s children or his first marriage, and including the fact that the medal President Franklin Delano Roosevelt presented Cohan in 1936 (not after we were involved in World War II as in the film), was a Congressional Gold Medal, not a Medal of Honor.

What is captured is a warm affection for Cohan’s place as a pioneer in American musical comedy. He did much to represent, and to appeal to, the common man in his shows, and the film is rife with fun and poignant montages of theater marquees of his plays. The hardscrabble life of the stock players in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the theatrical Cohan family and many others endured is pictured in shots of luggage plastered with labels, gloomy boarding houses, forlorn train depots, and always another theater and another audience.

We see a lot of theater in this film. This is one of those musicals that realistically presents its musical numbers as re-creations of the Cohans’ act. Unlike other musicals of the day where people tend to burst into song for no reason and violins are heard mysteriously from heaven knows where, the songs here are performed as they would have been performed on stage for an audience. Director Michael Curtiz crams a great deal of material in this entertaining film. We see the backstages, the dressing rooms, we see the front of the house from over the shoulders of a woman, who like the woman playing Fay Templeton on stage, is dressed in the Belle Époque style. We see the footlights, and the backdrops, and if not all aspects of Cohan’s life are presented before us, surely the lure and the atmosphere of the theatre he loved are presented to us with loving detail.

Cagney’s vigorous, stiff and rather marionette-appearing style of tap dancing and his surprisingly Boston-intoned tenor show us that he was himself, like Cohan, a song and dance man in vaudeville before he ever pushed a grapefruit in anybody’s face on film. Seeing Walter Huston lead the Cohan family in their performing quartet is a joy. Cagney’s scene with Huston upon the death of George M. Cohan’s father is one of the most affecting either man ever filmed.

And then, of course, there is the compulsory flag waving. Fay Templeton, when approached by Cagney to appear in his new show, decries Cohan’s material as “loud, vulgar flag waving.” Her manager insists Cohan has captured the mood of the nation, “He’s the whole darned country squeezed into one pair of pants…George M. Cohan has invented the success story and every American loves it because it happens to be his own private dream….” These themes of ambition and pride and patriotism may well be intertwined and ingrained in us, for any immigrant’s arrival to this country is based on ambition. It is as basic to these immigrants as an idea of “freedom,” for the freedom to be ambitious is as dearly held as the freedom of religion or speech. We are perhaps the only nation on earth which has declared in writing, in our Declaration, the right to “the pursuit of happiness,” an idea which other cultures may find hedonistic or frivolous. To be sure, we can sometimes be both.

More tomorrow on “Yankee Doodle Dandy.”

Sponsored Link:
Yankee Doodle Dandy [DVD](1942) DVD

New Charlotte Greenwood Biography

Charlotte Greenwood, in her day one of the foremost comediennes of stage and film, is finally the subject of a biography. Grant Hayter-Menzies has written “Charlotte Greenwood: The Life and Career of the Comic Star of Vaudeville, Radio and Film,” utilizing a number of personal notes and memorabilia the actress left to their mutual friend, playwright William Luce.

Published by McFarland & Company in May 2007, this new biography gives us a chance to re-examine the career of a remarkable talent. Mr. Hayter-Menzies kindly answered a few questions for me on his book, for which he interviewed Shirley Jones, who starred with Miss Greenwood in “Oklahoma.” The challenge of course is when the subject was born in 1890, there are few colleagues left to interview, even though Greenwood’s career spanned nearly fifty years. Much of the source material comes from Miss Greenwood herself.

Both Miss Jones and the author comment on Charlotte Greenwood’s honesty in her performances. Mr. Hayter-Menzies remarks, “Even in her crazier roles - with the high kicks, the splits, the Camel Walk (her dance routine involving a flat-handed crawl off the stage) - you feel like a real person is in front of you.”

“I think this realness, honesty, and empathy, was based on the fact that Charlotte regarded herself immensely privileged to be an actor. As Shirley Jones notes elsewhere, Charlotte took all the pleasure in her work, after 50 years on stage and screen, that a much younger person, full of youthful ideals, would have shown. She had somuch to give, and she wanted everyone giving her their attention to have as much pleasure and inspiration as she got from performing. She really loved people and had no hesitation about showing it.”

Theatre critics lauded Greenwood as a special talent, and in one of her earliest film reviews for “So Long Letty” (1929), which featured a character she was to portray in several plays and films, the New York Times commented that she was “largely responsible” for the lively picture, doing “exceedingly well in her part of the light-headed wife.”

According to Hayter-Menzies, “She was in Los Angeles touring ‘So Long Letty,’ the first of her several spin-off musical comedies based on a character, Letitia Proudfoot, that she had played in a show called ‘The Pretty Mrs. Smith,’ and was tapped by Jesse Lasky to star in a film called ‘Jane.’ She confided to a reporter during this time that playing ‘Letty’ in the theatre and shooting ‘Jane’ on the Famous Players set nearly exhaustedher. Perhaps this contributed to her early lack of appreciation for movie-making. But the most important factor was the lack of a live audience and little control over what she could do with the characters she played. And there was a certain snobbery among theatre people from New York in that day that movies - what Charlotte called ‘the flicks’ - were not as good as theatre and a passing fad. It is significant that the first serious dramatic parts Charlotte played and was critically acclaimed for came about in the live theatre, not in films. She always preferred that one-on-one experience with a live audienceto the static strictures of movie making. Yet that wonderful directness from years of live theatre served her very well on film.”

By the early 1940s, though her reputation for comedy was still respected, she was invariably referred to, perhaps even dismissed in articles as merely “cutting middle-age capers” (NY Times, October 18, 1940 on “Down Argentine Way”) and appearing “with legs like stilts.” (NY Times, December 23, 1943 on “The Gang’s All Here”). Still, there was more to Charlotte Greenwood than an almost gymnastic dancing ability and a deft way with a comic line.

The author describes what he feels are a couple of her finest roles: “In my book I make it clear that in terms of how much of the total Charlotte Greenwood went into the characterization, how well directed she was and how thoroughly explored her talents were, the role of Aunt Eller in ‘Oklahoma!’ is Charlotte's best. And, too, there's her ‘trial run’ for Eller, the role of Aunt Penny in the 1944 drama, ‘Home in Indiana,’ which contains Charlotte's first filmed dramatic scene - and a knockout of a first scene it is, too. But in terms of comedy, it doesn't get much better than her role as the ex-cabaret dancer turned investor's wife, Mrs. Peyton Potter, in Busby Berkeley's wild wartime musical, ‘The Gang's All Here.’ She's elegant, she's a klutz, she's a wisecracker and she's justbeautiful to look at and to hear. Her jitterbug sequence, in a long gown and with a man young enough to be her son, is a classic.” (See the link below to watch this classic scene on YouTube.)

Perhaps most poignant about Miss Greenwood’s career is that she regarded it as somewhat accidental.

“I was astonished, first off, that she never intended to become a comedian.” Mr. Hayter-Menzies responds, “From her earliest girlhood she wanted desperately to be a seriousdramatic actor, and that was an ideal that she kept close to heart her entire career - it wasalso one that was reinforced when great drama critics in New York and London acclaimed her in roles that used this largely untapped talent. I was also amazed that her other ideal had been to sing opera - in fact, she studied voice very seriously and I have her music, showing how many arias and art songs (Brahms was a favorite) she worked on. In the 1930's she was still suggesting to the press that she might perform a recital of Brahms songs. She was vocally so unsuited to this material that the idea of her performing Brahms songs or opera arias publicly is rather harrowing. On the other hand, you have to love and applaud the woman's bravery, her gallantry.”

A woman 5’10” tall was considered to be an Amazon in those days, and her ability to use her height and flexibility became a large part of her stage and screen persona. Mr. Hayter-Menzies notes that, “Accident played such a part in making her the beloved comedy figure she was. Charlotte realized her height and leanness were an effective gimmick by accident, and through a great deal of pain. She and her partner EuniceBurnham were performing their act, ‘Two Girls and a Piano,’ in a Wichita theatre in the mid-1900's. Both were elegantly gowned, and while Eunice accompanied at the upright Charlotte sang ballads. One night, she let herself emote with her hands and arms, and the house was in stitches - the more she tried to over correct, the more they liked it. Charlotte was devastated, as she had always been laughed at, since childhood, forher physique. But Eunice convinced her to go with the flow, and the act became a comedy routine that broke box office records and made the pair famous on the vaudeville circuit.”

Quoting Miss Greenwood’s notes for the memoir she was never to write, “In that decision, I had learned the most valuable lesson of my career - that of subjugating self. I was ready for a career as a clown."

“She loved, above all, making people happy,” the author notes, “even if she had to learn to make herself happy in the process.”Another incongruous element in Miss Greenwood’s career is that she often played a man-chasing spinster, yet in real life was married twice. Her second marriage to songwriter Martin Broones was a long and very happy marriage.

“Charlotte was no more gangly and skinny than Julia Roberts or Darryl Hanna, but inthe tastes of the time she was not a girl whom anybody thought any man would want to marry,” Mr. Hayter-Menzies explains, “Hence the Letitia or Letty character and her many iterations, who was always chasing after a man, physically subduing him (as she does with Eddie Cantor, Bert Lahr and Buster Keaton in her early 1930's comedies), or outwitting men one way or another in her theatre roles (Abby in ‘The Late Christopher Bean"’ being a good example). She knew she was stereotyped, especially in Hollywood, and she went with it, because it was what gave people pleasure. That she was in factan elegant woman, versed in classical music and opera, a collector of Chinese art and thepaintings of Sir Jacob Epstein, was the reality that only her friends ever saw.”

What the author hopes the reader will take away from this biography of Charlotte Greenwood is, “That behind every stereotype there is a real person - that the clown we laugh at is a human being, with loves, hates, fears and all the rest that goes with being mortal. And the message that Charlotte ends her memoirs with: go with your inspiration. It will lead you to just where you want to be.”

The book can be ordered through Amazon, Borders, Barnes & Noble, or through thepublisher, McFarland & Company. The publisher's listing for the book is:http://www.mcfarlandpub.com/book-2.php?id=978-0-7864-2995-0

Grant Hayter-Menzies will be reading from his book at The Drama Bookshop in New York City at 6 p.m., September 11, 2007. This link below is to The Drama Bookshop event: http://www.dramabookshop.com/NASApp/store/IndexJsp?s=storeevents&eventId=345212

This is Mr. Hayter-Menzies' website with photos and more info on Charlotte Greenwood: http://solongletty.tripod.com/.

Thanks very much to Grant Hayter-Menzies for this interview. I think perhaps we’ll give Charlotte Greenwood the last word. Here's a YouTube clip of Charlotte doing that jitterbug scene from “The Gang’s All Here” (1943). Keep in mind, she was about 53 years old when she did this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJQksW2vGIA