No Applause--Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous
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No Applause--Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous
336eBookFirst Edition (First Edition)
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Overview
A seriously funny look at the roots of American Entertainment
When Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin were born, variety entertainment had been going on for decades in America, and like Harry Houdini, Milton Berle, Mae West, and countless others, these performers got their start on the vaudeville stage. From 1881 to 1932, vaudeville was at the heart of show business in the States. Its stars were America's first stars in the modern sense, and it utterly dominated American popular culture. Writer and modern-day vaudevillian Trav S.D. chronicles vaudeville's far-reaching impact in No Applause--Just Throw Money. He explores the many ways in which vaudeville's story is the story of show business in America and documents the rich history and cultural legacy of our country's only purely indigenous theatrical form, including its influence on everything from USO shows to Ed Sullivan to The Muppet Show and The Gong Show. More than a quaint historical curiosity, vaudeville is thriving today, and Trav S.D. pulls back the curtain on the vibrant subculture that exists across the United States--a vast grassroots network of fire-eaters, human blockheads, burlesque performers, and bad comics intent on taking vaudeville into its second century.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781429930413 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Farrar, Straus and Giroux |
| Publication date: | 10/31/2006 |
| Sold by: | Macmillan |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 336 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
Trav S.D. is top banana at the American Vaudeville Theatre. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out New York, and Reason.
Trav S.D. is top banana at the American Vaudeville Theatre. His writing has appeared in The Village Voice, American Theatre, Time Out New York, and Reason. He is the author of No Applause--Just Throw Money.
Read an Excerpt
No Applause â" Just Throw Money, or, the Book That Made Vaudeville Famous
By D. Travis Stewart
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Copyright © 2005 D. Travis StewartAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4299-3041-3
CHAPTER 1
WHO PUT THE "DEVIL" IN VAUDEVILLE?
While the vaudevillian, as we commonly think of him, did not take the stage until the late nineteenth century, he carried with him a couple of dozen centuries' worth of baggage. To truly appreciate the revolutionary nature of his performance it behooves us to look at the long, hard road that led him there. And so we begin our journey with a detour — back ... back ... through the murky mists of time ... back to the very dawn of creation ... back to the first act of nonconformity by any sentient being ...
Old Scratch was the first hoofer.
Milton depicts the universe's first slapstick moment in Paradise Lost. Not long after the world's creation, Satan took a wicked pratfall, tumbling earthward out of his privileged digs in the celestial vault, compelling him to toil thereafter amongst all sorts of lame clowns who were made (like him) all too imperfectly in God's image. Mae West said it best: "I'm No Angel."
Despite numerous tragic attempts to create a utopia in our midst, mankind in its weakness finds itself perennially veering from the high road to the trough of low amusements. Historically, that ditch has been a pretty crowded place, full of strange and unlikely company: on the one hand, clowns, jugglers, singers of sweet love songs, and others of their ilk; on the other, tavern-keepers, card sharks, prostitutes, and their brother (and sister) criminals. From the beginning of the Christian era until quite recently, these two groups have always gone hand in hoof: Entertainment and Evil, a double act spawned in the mind of a maniac. Entertainment feeds us punch lines; Evil, with his slow burn, is the straight man. And the dirty-minded maniac? Let's just call him "Reverend."
Ludicrous though it may seem to us to place jugglers, singers, and dancers in a caste with "Gypsies, Tramps, and Thieves," Christians (first Catholics and then Protestants) have done so for centuries. For moral support they need look no further than Saint Paul, who in his Epistle to the Ephesians (5:3 — 4) lumps "foolish talking" and "jesting" in with fornication, uncleanness, and covetousness. In his Epistle to the Galatians (5:21), "revellings" are in a class with "envyings," "murders," and "drunkenness." It is a litmus test that would sully the reputation of an Osmond.
To us, for whom Marilyn Manson is old hat, and who undoubtedly know at least one grandparent who can sing all the words to "Sympathy for the Devil," this is madness. Yet underneath the madness — at least initially — lay a method.
Theatrical performers, consciously or no, practice an art that began as a rite to honor the Greek god Dionysus, a deity principally associated with sexual abandon and intoxication. Aspects of the ceremony — even well after it had evolved into what we now call theater — were by most measures "obscene."
The shadow of Dionysus still darkens our fragmentary memories of antiquity. Thanks largely to the cinema's depictions of life under various caesars, the ancient world retains a distorted Bacchic patina. Say "Rome," and images out of Caligula and Fellini's Satyricon rage through the brain: public baths full of immodest sculptures, patronized by men, women, children, and livestock. Great, fat, oily courtiers in togas recline on silk couches munching pornographic pastries. Frolicking nymphs with grape leaves in their hair play leapfrog in the forest, pausing only to indulge their twin tastes in human sacrifice and lesbianism. Satyrs in outlandish codpieces swing their phalluses at one another, eventually coalescing into a great, heaving, perfumed, peach-colored daisy chain.
The early leaders of the Catholic Church apparently thought such images so horrible they couldn't stop thinking about them.
Come to think of it, neither can I.
Worldliness, materialism, sex, pleasure — all nicely integrated into the philosophies of the ancients — were now tarred with the broad brush of "evil." To turn the pagan Europeans from their wicked ways, some scholars feel that Dionysus was purposely equated with "Satan."
In decorative art and statuary, Dionysus and his cohorts (such as the demigod Pan) had been depicted as goatlike, possessing horns, hooves, and a tail, uncannily resembling what we now think of as the devil. Yet no such description of Satan exists in the Bible. There he is depicted only as a fallen angel, a serpent, or something called Leviathan. How astute (not to mention diabolical) of the Church Fathers to associate the nature-worship of Europe's oldest traditions with Evil Incarnate.
Fourteen or more centuries of official persecution of variety entertainers only make sense in this context — they have their roots in pagan antiquity. Among the first recorded variety performers were the Greek mimes, a motley lot who lumbered out of southern Italy during Greece's Golden Age to juggle, perform acrobatics, dance, and perform comical sketches for the vastly more dignified Athenians. These were very different from our modern mimes, in their whiteface and berets, who walk against the wind and scream-in-an -ever-shrinking-box (those mimes are satanic).
Rome, too, had its mimes; they begin to materialize in the Republic at about 300 B.C. Roman mimes were closely associated with the Atellan farce, ancestor to the Roman comedies of Plautus and Terence, the commedia dell'arte, the comic creations of Shakespeare and Molière, and all slapstick straight through the vaudeville era. The fabula raciniata was a form of early variety that incorporated tightrope walkers, trapeze artists, tumblers, jugglers, sword -swallowers, fire-eaters, dancers, operatic singers, and stilt-walkers. Tony Curtis proudly proclaimed himself among this performing clique in the 1960 film Spartacus: "I yam a magician and seengah of sawngs," he announces in ancient Brooklynese.
Throughout Euro-American history, the descendants of those mimes persisted. During the Middle Ages, itinerant bands of jongleurs, minstrels, troubadours, and similar entertainers would tramp from village to village with their exhibitions of juggling, fire-eating, magic tricks, little songs, and bits of clowning. In Elizabethan England, they came in from the cold and were incorporated into the presentation of great works of dramatic literature as preludes and entr'actes. That tradition was perpetuated in America into the late nineteenth century, when, as one historian put it, "all shows were variety shows."
Yet despite their deathless popularity in every land they roamed, these proto-vaudevillians always found public officials rabid to ring down the curtain.
"The condition of faith and the laws of Christian discipline forbid among other sins of the world the pleasures of the public shows," wrote Tertullian, a theologian of the second century A.D.
With a pitch like that, it's a wonder he made any converts at all. Yet the animus against pagan-derived spectacle by the early followers of Christ is understandable: some of those spectacles had involved the consumption of Christians by the creatures we in the business call "big cats." Siegfried and Roy meet The Faces of Death as staged by Cecil B. DeMille. A "light show" mounted by Nero might consist of hundreds of Christians tied to stakes, coated with tar and set afire. In the Atellan farce an unfortunate Christian named Laureolus is recorded to have been crucified during the show's climax and subsequently torn apart by wild animals. I repeat: this is in a farce. Not in a league with ritual murder, perhaps, but plenty appalling, was the attendant practice of presenting live sex acts as spectacle. In the case of slaves, many of whom were Christian, such performances would have been quite involuntary, and (for some, no doubt) a fate worse than death.
To enter another dangerous arena, drag, or female impersonation, has been a staple of theater since ancient times. This, too, had been a specialty of the Roman mimes, and one imagines a full range of possible transvestisms, from the silly and vulgar buffoonery associated with Milton Berle, all the way to the sort of feminine role -playing that takes place in maximum-security prisons. Ultimately, any lasting bad rep attached to drag would come from both kinds. Neither the shameless fool nor the sexual "deviant" had any place in the Christian order. By the early twentieth century, the feminine artistry of biological males like Julian Eltinge, Bert Savoy, Karyl Norman, and dozens of others would grace even the most conservative stages of America and Europe with little public furor. But they had a long road to walk (in high heels, no less) before they reached that coveted stage.
Fresh from the outrages of Rome, the rancor of early Church Fathers toward the theater is not surprising. But what of the lesser indictments that have haunted performers throughout history until the eve of our own era? What about the claims that the theater is a mere cesspool, a haven for prostitutes, con men, thieves, Satanists, ruffians, and drunkards?
"The participants of show business," wrote columnist Earl Wilson, "are rumpots, nymphomaniacs, prostitutes, fakes, liars, cheaters, pimps, hopheads, forgers, sodomists, slobs, absconders — but halt. I understate it horribly."
As late as 1904, clergyman J. M. Judy wrote in his treatise Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes:
With drunkenness, gambling and dancing, theater-going dates from the beginning of history, and with these it is not only questionable in morals, but it is positively bad ... There you find the man ... who has lost all love for his home, the careless, the profane, the spendthrift, the drunkard, and the lowest prostitute of the street.
The startling fact that emerges from these blanket pronouncements is not the extremity of the views; on the contrary, their assessments are right on the button.
"Cluck, cluck, surely this is an exaggeration," we sophisticated moderns are wont to respond. We laugh off such hyperbolic broadsides as the ravings of a lunatic. We hold this view because the past century has been a time of rehabilitation for the traveling player, not because the charges were ever discredited.
Tempting though it may be to scoff at the bugaboos of less enlightened times, these claims (despite their hysterical and intolerant tone) turn out to have been essentially true. Like Vivie in the Shaw play Mrs. Warren's Profession, vaudeville turns out to be the respectable, bourgeois daughter of a common whore. More accurately, a dynasty of whores stretching back to the Queen of Sheba. The only question has ever been: Do you have a problem with whores?
Throughout most of human history, ladies (and gentlemen) of the evening have been a featured amenity at nearly all theaters. In Rome, the world's oldest profession had developed into a fine art. There are three dozen words in Latin for as many types of prostitute. Four of them (cymbal players, singing girls, harpists, and mimes) have names that also qualify them for the Roman equivalent of the vaudeville stage. The Roman circuses and amphitheaters were handily equipped with special little enclaves called fornices where men could visit a sex worker during intermission. They were sort of like a concession stand, or those guys at the ball games ("Get yer red hots! Get 'em while they're red, get 'em while they're hot! And when we say hot, we mean hot!"). In medieval times, jongleuresses and lady minstrels entertained the populace, but also doubled as damsels-for-hire. Edward II himself was entertained by several of these charmers, who, with names like Pearl-in-the-Egg" and "Maude Makejoy," were doubtless fingering more than lute frets.
According to British historian Fergus Linnane's book London: The Wicked City, Elizabethan theaters were patrolled by girls called "orange sellers," who sold oranges, and were only too glad to peel it off. The Restoration stage gave us the actress-courtesan who accepted lavish gifts, jewels, dresses, an apartment — a living, basically — in exchange for being some admirer's girlfriend. One of the most famous actresses of the age, Nell Gwynn, even became the consort to Charles II. That this should be so is not surprising. Surely it's not nuclear physics to conclude that some of the men in the audience, inflamed by the beauties on stage, hearts thumping, minds racing, would fall all over themselves in a mad scramble back to the dressing room with boxes of chocolates, bundles of roses, bottles of champagne, wallets full of cash, family heirlooms, and probably deeds to property, in order to quiet the howling, libidinous demons inside them. Don't ask me why. I guess that's just how God made us.
Whether or not an actress was actually a prostitute was immaterial. By the late nineteenth century virtually none of them were, but the association remained. This is due to a peculiar phenomenon that still rears its ugly head, what specialists in rape law call "blaming the victim." Because the woman inspires lustful thoughts in a man (whether she purposes to do so or not) she becomes the source of evil. It's rather like the wolf blaming the sheep for looking delicious. So we find women becoming the Daughters of Eve, the Whores of Babylon, the Jezebels, the Delilahs and Salomes. To parade themselves in front of an audience is a brazen act of provocation inspired by Satan himself. Yet, as we shall see, at vaudeville's peak, in the first decade of the twentieth century, Salome would be very much in demand.
Esmerelda in Victor Hugo's The Hunchback of Notre Dame is the archetype of the nascent medieval variety artist: she dances, plays a tambourine, tells jokes, and performs a routine with a trained goat. That dance — that Middle Eastern, sexy Gypsy dance — proves the character's undoing. Ecstatic or "primitive" dancing in medieval and Reformation times was associated with witchcraft because it was believed that the dancer bewitched the male spectator by arousing impure thoughts. The anonymous pamphlet A Pleasant Treatise of Witches (1673) describes such a dance as "diabolical ... they take one another by the arms and raise each other from the ground, then shake their heads to and fro like Anticks, and turn themselves as if they were mad." Hanging, stoning, burning, and drowning were the penalties for such behavior. But in the twentieth century, vaudeville dancers would teach America to shimmy, shake, cakewalk, and Toddle the Tolado.
Similarly reviled were the minstrels, or professional singers of secular love songs. In the Middle Ages, minstrels were particularly execrated by religious authorities, for they went about filling people's heads with seductive thoughts. As the medieval mystic Mechtild of Magdeburg wrote: "The miserable minstrel who with pride can arouse sinful vanity / weeps more tears in hell than there is water in the sea."
To bring the matter closer to home, think of most of the famous singers of the past century. Is there any doubt that the vast majority of them have made more than their fair share of "conquests"? Sinatra, Elvis, and the Beatles amongst them must have dispatched over a thousand women, plenty of them teenagers, most of them one-night stands, all of them somebody's daughter. This wasn't invented yesterday. The guy with the guitar always gets the chicks, even when the guitar is a mandolin and the love song is "Greensleeves."
One of these strolling Lotharios is most germane to our story, for (as tradition has it) he gave vaudeville its name. Some say the word is a corruption of val de vire, or vau de vire, meaning the valley of the Vire River, which is in Normandy, where a troubadour named Olivier Basselin made certain drinking songs popular in the fifteenth century. Thus was vaudeville, like the theater itself, born in a bottle. Imagine the setting: a wayside inn full of drunken, dirty peasants, Falstaff, Nym, and Pistol, feeling up the wenches and making lewd jokes. This would be the variety-arts setting for at least the next three centuries. But while the word "vaudeville" was coined in the Middle Ages, there will be much water (and more alcohol) under the bridge before we arrive at the unlikely destination known as American vaudeville.
Efforts to keep sex off the stage could sometimes backfire. The medieval English had banned women from the stage for fear of encouraging indecent displays. The female roles were all played by young boys in girlish costume. The result was that by Elizabethan times you had the unsettling situation of innocent children playing sensuous female roles like Juliet and Cleopatra, their hair long, their cheeks rouged, and their little eyelashes batting coquettishly. Ironically, an effort to suppress sexuality resulted in something uncomfortably skirting perversion. In this, perhaps, the Elizabethan theater had something in common with prisons, seminaries, English boarding schools, and the navy. Whether or not suspicions of pederasty had any real foundation, though, they added to the theater's stigmatization in some quarters. In 1629, the poet Francis Lenton labeled boy drag one of the "tempting baits of Hell / Which draw more youth unto the damned cell / Of furious lust." But we'll leave this tangent for the friends and enemies of NAMBLA to debate.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from No Applause â" Just Throw Money, or, the Book That Made Vaudeville Famous by D. Travis Stewart. Copyright © 2005 D. Travis Stewart. Excerpted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Title Page,1 - WHO PUT THE "DEVIL" IN VAUDEVILLE?,
2 - GOOD, CLEAN FUN,
3 - BIRTH OF AN INDUSTRY,
THE MANAGERS,
ALL VAUDEVILLE, ALL THE TIME,
THE CUSTOMER IS ALWAYS RIGHT,
BARGAIN BASEMENT,
CIRCUITS,
FLAGSHIPS,
FOREIGN IMPORTS,
MAINTAINING THE ORIGINAL CUSTOMER BASE,
MEASURES OF SUCCESS,
4 - TOOTH AND NAIL,
FORMING THE COMBINE, PHASE ONE,
VICTORIA REGIS,
YOU GOTTA HAVE A GIMMICK,
FORMING THE COMBINE, PHASE TWO,
ORGANIZED SMALL TIME,
THE BATTLE FOR SEATTLE,
OTHER CHAINS,
MONOPOLY, PHASE ONE,
5 - THE PALACE YEARS,
CHIPS OFF THE OLD BLOCK,
FINISHING TOUCHES,
6 - TROUPERS,
7 - THE MARCH OF PROGRESS,
THE PHONOGRAPH,
NEW LIVE COMPETITION,
MOVIES,
RADIO,
TALKIES,
DEPRESSION,
NOT DEAD YET,
VAUDEVILLE DIES ITS "SECOND DEATH",
8 - THE PHOENIX IN FOOLSCAP,
9 - THE CHASER,
THE OVERTURE,
BIBLIOGRAPHY,
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS,
INDEX,
Notes,
Copyright Page,