Although I was a frequenter of burlesque in its last days, with its comedians, strippers, and feeble orchestra—the Casino Theater in Boston was a good escape from the toils of graduate English at Harvard—I knew little about its more dignified ancestor, the Ziegfeld Follies. So this account of the man and his work was new territory, even though that territory has been pretty fully covered already by Charles Higham’s (1972) and Ethan Mordden’s (2008) biographies.
Cynthia and Sara Brideson propose to examine Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s “multi-layered relationship with his stars, his friends, and his lovers, paired with an examination of the productions, innovations, and content.” Such an examination, they believe, “comes as close as possible to revealing Ziegfeld the man.” In the introduction, they engage in some uncharacteristic wordplay by calling their book “primarily the story of Ziegfeld’s personal follies” which, along with his productions, made his name “a brand that would endure forever.”
Forever is a long time. Ziegfeld, for awhile, was Ziegfeld Jr., his father being the head of a classical music “college” in Chicago and an intimidating “Prussian autocrat” (as someone called him) whose musical tastes held no interest for his son. After working for a time with his father, Florenz Jr. launched as an investigator of more popular forms of entertainment, as they were to be found in New York, London, and Paris. In Chicago, the burlesque appealed to audiences more than higher forms of musical presentation. By the turn of the last century, Florenz Ziegfeld became, according to one historian, “a figure who could fuse naughty sexuality . . . with the savoir-faire of lobster palace society.” The Bridesons take seriously the claim that Ziegfeld raised things to a higher plane and rid burlesque of its low origins.
In Paris, he discovered the first of his “women,” Anna Held, who became a popular star of his earlier revues. The biographers conceive the scene of discovery as follows: “Strolling along the boulevards of Paris while on his honeymoon” (he and Anna were never legally married, since she was already married), Ziegfeld found himself “increasingly enamored with the city’s revues. The shows included tasteful nudity and a joie de vivre that electrified audiences.”
If you can swallow the phrase “tasteful nudity” without smirking, you will also believe that the shows “electrified” audiences and that Ziegfeld became “enamored” with them. The writing here is typical of the popular style in which the biography is told, and a reader must put up with the repeated use of “comedic” as an all-purpose word and “disinterested” to mean not interested.
One will also keep a straight face, more or less, when hearing about a musical comedy from an early revue of Ziegfeld’s, The Parisian Model, in which Anna Held starred and which contained a song titled “Won’t You Be My Teddy Bear?” This number was inspired by the teddy bear craze attendant on President Theodore Roosevelt’s refusing to shoot a bear that had been tied to a tree, and it featured two children dressed as bears and six chorus girls sitting astride fake bears. The biographers call it “a wholesome act in the midst of a risqué show.” Roosevelt must have felt it wholesome enough to have invited Ziegfeld and Anna out to dinner more than once.
Ziegfeld’s finances were always in chaotic shape. His favorite and frequent escapes from economic rigors were expensive cars, splendid clothes, and lots of gambling. Early in the last century, he and Anna took a suite at the famous Ansonia Hotel on upper Broadway, the hotel featuring a lobby fountain with live seals, 2,500 rooms, staircases of green marble, and serving kitchens on every floor. Ziegfeld’s “decadent” apartment contained a salon, a music room, a wood-paneled library, and sizable butler’s pantry—ideal for throwing large dinner parties.
The revues were comparably lavish; for example, the Follies of 1908, which had Adam and Eve viewing the “accomplishments of their progeny.” Its most memorable production number consisted (in the Bridesons’ words) of “chorines dressed as giant mosquitoes flying through the newly-built Holland Tunnel between New York and New Jersey.”
Although more than once here, and in other books about Ziegfeld, we are assured that he had absolutely no sense of humor; perhaps that made him impervious to giant mosquitoes in the Holland Tunnel. As an impresario, not knowing whether or not the antics were funny, Ziegfeld could concentrate on drawing in an audience—in those 1908 Follies, indeed, to the tune of 120 performances. As the chapter heading has it, it was all a “maelstrom of mirth,” although there’s not much mirth in it for the reader, dragged along year by year to hear about fully-described productions.
Surely the most impressive thing about Florenz Ziegfeld was his talent for finding and promoting comedians in the nonmusical parts of the show. In the 1911 Follies they included the rubber-legged Leon Errol as a hapless traveler and the dancer Bert Williams as the clever black porter who prevails over him. One would like to have heard from that revue such songs as “Be My Little Bumble Bee” or “Woodman, Woodman, Spare That Tree”—the latter sung by Williams saluting a convenient elm tree as the only place where he could hide from his shrewish (but nonclimbing) wife. Fanny Brice also performed, and it was the first show for the young Jerome Kern, who joined Irving Berlin as the two most notable songwriters for Ziegfeld shows.
Probably the most ubiquitous comic appearing over a long stretch of productions was Eddie Cantor, often in blackface; Cantor, Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, and Ed Wynn were stellar performers. (It’s interesting that Ziegfeld disliked W. C. Fields, and fortunate for us that we can observe Fields in My Little Chickadee and his other films.)
After romances with Anna Held and Lillian Lorraine—a beautiful woman who could neither sing nor act—Ziegfeld met, at a New Year’s Eve masquerade ball, Billie Burke, whom he would marry and live with until his death in 1932. Burke was an actress, starring in a play by Somerset Maugham, who had brought her to the masquerade.
Despite affairs, and rumors of affairs, on Ziegfeld’s part, he and Billie Burke managed to stay together, often in their various country retreats, especially Billie’s impressive house at Burkeley Crest, Hastings-on-Hudson, New York, where she lived with her mother. Ziegfeld presented them with a cow, among other gifts, and we are told that he enjoyed “rinsing [Billie’s] hair in quarts of champagne to enhance its copper hue.” Somehow, the Bridesons know that Billie Burke liked the champagne enough to “lick any spare trickles from her face.”
Rather than being led through productions I’ll never see—there is a full appendix with all the details—what captured me were the multiple illustrations, many of them vivid, accompanying the text, and oddly placed at the end of the book. Here is Eddie Cantor doing what’s advertised as a “Comedy ‘Clean up’ ” in the 1924 Follies. Here is “Flo” himself, nattily dressed as always—looking as if his ever-present three-piece suit was indeed so ever-present that it didn’t need to be removed at bedtime—surrounded by his “Glorified Girls.” There are pictures of his show palaces, notably the New Amsterdam theater on West 42nd Street with its Art Nouveau architecture, Beaux-Arts façade, an auditorium that could hold 1,700 people, and a rooftop garden.
Most surprisingly and affectingly, there is a photograph of the young Barbara Stanwyck, just turning 15 as she danced in one of the Follies of the early twenties. Stanwyck never looked half as beautiful later as she does here in a sequined dress, sporting a fan. I was less charmed by Clare Luce, dressed in an ostrich feather outfit—although we don’t get to see her mounted on a real live ostrich as she entered the stage.
Still, for all the research and hard work that went into this book, its style is not designed for anyone with the least sense of irony, so that one might balk at the following description of black-and-white photographs of the Ziegfeld girls as “breathtaking.” In case we were lasciviously looking for sensual excitement, the biographers are quick to assure us that “most of them were seminude but tastefully done in an Ancient Greek style.” Nobody can object to Ancient Greece, of course, but to find that the photos were also “tastefully” done makes this bit of folly less fun.
William H. Pritchard is the Henry Clay Folger professor of English at Amherst.
