[From the West End to the West: ‘wild’ or merely the Great White Way, Broadway in New York City, home of America’s equivalent to music hall: vaudeville [1]. It offered a show that mixed a wide selection of variety of acts – listed in wikipedia as ‘popular and classical musicians, singers, dancers, comedians, trained animals, magicians, ventriloquists, strongmen, female and male impersonators, acrobats, illustrated songs, jugglers, one-act plays or scenes from plays, athletes, lecturing celebrities, minstrels, and movies’ [2]. Many of America’s mid-20th century popular stars began their professional lives on its stage. As theatres rushed to convert to cinemas many went on to the movies and triumphed yet again. The variety stage that had nurtured them did not. Born around 1880 vaudeville was gone by the early 1930s.
It could cut things pretty fine – like music hall there was a solid leavening of double entendre from those stars who used it – but ‘vaud’ was never so louche (or downright obscene) as the theatrical family’s black sheep, burlesque, essentially the home of striptease, and showcasing a parade of what H.L. Mencken termed ‘ecdysiasts’, [3] stripping down sandwiched between comedians who, generally bereft of genuine wit, worked unashamedly ‘blue’. It was representative of the mindset and tastes of its mainly working-class audiences (often recent immigrants from Europe). Racial stereotypes were a given; the Marx Brothers for instance offered a Jew (Groucho), an Italian (Chico) and an Irishman (Harpo). There was a WASP (Zeppo) but the others were the top bananas.]
As in music hall there were as many female stars as men. Perhaps the greatest would be Mae West who would one of those who moved seamlessly from stage to screen, but before her came ‘the girl who made vaudeville famous’, Eva Tanguay (1879-1947). Scoring her first hit in 1901, by 1910 – ‘the biggest attraction in vaudeville bar none’ as her rival Sophie Tucker put it – she was earning $3,500 a week –$80,000-plus today – and when in 1924 she launched a list of new songs, the attendant publicity ballyhooed ‘The Dynamic Force of Vaudeville, Resistless as the Torrential Tide That Tosses Madly Over the Teeming Cataract of Niagara [...] As Easy to Check the Rush of Waters Over the Falls as the Oncoming Multitudes of Pleasure Seekers to the Theatres Where the World’s Most Popular Comedienne Appears.’ In truth by then Tanguay was past her prime (and vaudeville too) but for a while she was untouchable. Like West she traded on her independence, her quite literal ‘woman’s liberation’.
Everything came back to sex. The style of dance, the costumes (what there was of them) the song titles. But Tanguay, like her disciple Mae West, was no passive fantasy: she made the rules. If she exploited her body then it was on her own terms. She was combative, self-interested, irrepressible, immodest. Seventy years on and she’d have been a punk. Now she was simply one of a kind. None of which seemed to alienate her audiences who queued round the block. And all of which made her a problem for such magnates as B.F. Keith, along with his partner Edward Albee, the dominant force in vaudeville. On the one hand Keith and his peers promoted their form of theatre as family entertainment – a clean, wholesome environment with its jugglers and animal acts, its country-wide chain of theatres known as the ‘Sunday School Circuit’, all in all the antithesis of shameless, working-class burlesque. On the other, while he cosied up to America’s clamouring, censorious puritans, usually self-appointed, often allied to some hyped-up version of religion and as keen on gain as on God, he remained a business man. Eva Tanguay – racy, suggestive, overt – made sure the bottom line remained black. Blind eyes were turned. [4] Whatever its claims for ‘cleanliness’, vaudeville, after all, was the era’s primary showcase for the sexualized female body. For all the moralistic mouthing, audiences could still enjoy Charmion, whose strip revealed ‘ fearful and wonderful lingerie’, Princess Raja, whose own wriggle outdid that of her attendant snake, and swimming champ Annette Kellerman, whose skills justified an onstage appearance in her bathing costume, her figure carefully accentuated by Edward Albee’s well-lit arrangement of revelatory mirrors. In 1908 there was the Salome craze, featuring various young women giving their own version of the ‘Dance of the Seven Veils’. If one wanted a composite and ideal female performer it was probably ‘Marie’ of the team O’Rourke and Marie, set down by a reviewer as ‘a young woman of lively spirits and exuberant personality who can undress on a slack wire and sing a song at the same time.’ [5]
Tanguay fitted the bill, and moved beyond it. She made it all very clear – even if employing a necessary wink – in her songs: ‘It’s All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It’, ‘I Want Someone to Go Wild With Me’, ‘Go As Far As You Like, Kid’, and ‘That's Why They Call Me Tabasco’ (doubtless both ‘hot’ and ‘saucy’). Above all there was what would become her theme song: ‘I Don’t Care’, premiered in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1909.
It gave her nickname, ‘The I Don't Care Girl’ and the lyrics ran in part:
They say I’m crazy, got no sense,
But I don’t care,
They may or may not mean offense,
But I don’t care,
You see I’m sort of independent,
Of a clever race descendent,
My star is on the ascendant,
That’s why I don’t care.I don't care, I don't care
What they may think of me
I'm happy go lucky
Men say that I'm plucky
I'm happy and carefree
I don't care, I don't care
If I should get the mean and stony stare
And no one can faze me
By calling me crazy
'Cause I don't care
A note on the sheet music prescribed: ‘Sung with increasing volume and rowdiness.’
Tanguay would come to despise ‘that wretched song’ but like a catch-phrase, it was all part of the brand. Other nicknames included ‘The Evangelist of Joy,’ ‘The Electric Hoyden,’ ‘The Queen of Perpetual Motion,’ ‘The Queen of Vivacity,’ ‘The Modern Mystery,’ and the inevitable ‘Miss Tabasco.’ It was all press agent stuff, but Tanguay did her best to live up to her billing. The online magazine Slate looked back on her act in 2009:
‘The effect was heightened by Tanguay's outré appearance and performance style. She had a pudgy face and reddish-blond hair that stretched upward in a snarled pile. (She sometimes dumped bottles of champagne over her head onstage.) She was of average height and a bit lumpy, but athletic; she squeezed herself into gaudy costumes that flaunted her buxom figure and powerfully muscled legs. She delivered her songs while executing dervishlike dances, complete with limb-flailing, leg kicks, breast-shaking, and violent tosses of the head; often, she seemed to be simulating orgasm. Tanguay suffered severe cramps from her performances—backstage, she instructed prop directors to unknot her calves by beating them with barrel staves. She told reporters that her goal was ‘to move so fast and whirl so madly that no one would be able to see my bare legs.’ Then there was Tanguay's voice. She sang in a slurred screech punctuated by yaps and cackles, ricocheting seemingly at random between her upper and lower registers.’ [6]
If some stars boasted of their refusal to carry money, Tanguay went the other way: her billfold, it was claimed, carried nothing smaller than $1000 bills [7]. Her costumes were sensational. A thirty-minute act might include up to ten changes of dress, each one as over-the-top magnificent a confection as the last. Best-known was the ‘$40 dress’, made of 4,000 one-cent coins and created in honour of the newly issued ‘Lincoln’ penny. It weighed 45 pounds. There was the Marseillaise dress, in which she sang the French national anthem dressed in a few tricoleur flags. Tanguay was naturally keen to offer her take on the Salome craze of 1908: she came up with a dance of the seven veils which was maximum dance and minimum veils. Her costume, she claimed, was limited to a pair of pearls.
If there were no actual scandals in her life, she was always happy to create one, picking fights with fellow stars and those critics who dared give an unfavourable review. Her transgressive style extended to her affairs. There was her lover and fellow star, the black comedian George Walker, and her much-publicised engagement (assumed as unconsummated) to the then celebrated cross-dresser and female impersonator Julian Eltinge. In case anyone might be mistaken, she dressed as a man (top-hat and tails) and he as woman throughout the relationship. Tanguay naturally doubled down on the publicity with a song: ‘That Wouldn’t Make a Hit with Me’:
When you marry some old guy
Who hasn’t the decency to die,
Or you marry some old pill
Who you can neither cure nor kill
That wouldn’t make a hit with me
It was, of course, a hit.
Her fans were legion. Among them Aleister Crowley, currently (albeit by his own reckoning) ‘The Wickedest Man in the World’. He saw her in 1912 and claimed her as the perfect specimen of ‘The American genius’, who ‘is, above all things, free; with all the advantages and disadvantages that that implies.’ Tanguay was an epitome, ‘starry chaste in her colossal corruption.’ As for her performance, it
is like the hashish dream of a hermit who is possessed of the devil. She cannot sing, as others sing; or dance, as others dance. She simply keeps on vibrating, both limbs and vocal chords without rhythm, tone, melody, or purpose. … I feel as if I were poisoned by strychnine, so far as my body goes; I jerk, I writhe, I twist, I find no ease. . . She is perpetual irritation without possibility of satisfaction, an Avatar of sex-insomnia. Solitude of the Soul, the Worm that dieth not; ah, me! She is the Vulture of Prometheus, and she is the Music of Mitylene. … I could kill myself at this moment for the wild love of her. [8]
In her time Tanguay was a one-off, but she was also a dry-run for a successor. She was the inspiration – ‘without doubt the primary role model’ according to West’s biographer Simon Louvish [9] – and for a while over-arching rival of the woman who would take her place in vaudeville and thereafter parlay her predecessor’s not inconsiderable level of success into something of a whole different scale.
[1] the name boasts rival etymologies. As stated in the OED (1916): ‘French vaudeville, earlier vau (plural vaux) de ville, vau de vire, and in full chanson du Vau de Vire a song of the valley of Vire (in Calvados, Normandy). The name is said to have been first given to songs composed by Olivier Basselin, a fuller of Vire in the 15th cent[ury]’
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vaudeville accessed 21 Nov. 2018
[3] minted from the Greek ecdysis, molting and first attached to the celebrated stripper Georgia Sothern who had asked the great essayist/critic for a ‘new and more palatable’ term for her occupation)
[4] This was Keith’s way: the ‘Sunday School Circuit’ was also happy to host ‘Art Studies’, i.e. barely draped, if motionless females posed on stage, and such tableaux as ‘The Bridegroom’s Reverie’, featuring a cigar-smoking young man watching as a succession of pretty girls ‘in provocative attire’ stepped through a picture frame.
[5] N.Y. Dramatic Mirror 17 Aug. 1907 p.11
[6] http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2009/12/vanishing_act.html
[7] her fortune was estimated at $2 million; it vanished in the Crash of 1929. She eked out what little she could salvage for the rest of her life and died, impoverished in 1947. Still she was not yet forgotten: 500 people – fans, fellow vaudeville veterans, attended the funeral and the L.A. Examiner headlined the event ‘S.R.O.’ showbiz for ‘standing room only’.
[8] A. Crowley ‘Drama be Damned! An Appreciation of Eva Tanguay’, The International (NY) Apr. 1918 pp. 127-8
[9] Louvish p. 17