Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator
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Drag artists were huge in vaudeville, musical comedies, and the movies. But none—none—were bigger than Julian Eltinge (1881-1941). Often called “the most beautiful woman on the stage,” he was a superstar female impersonator whose art, work, and life embodied the many conflicting and bewildering cultural attitudes toward masculinity, gender, sexuality, and authenticity. Beautiful is the first-ever full-length biography of this artistic marvel who defined his era—and whose story can tell us much about ours.
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"Beautiful is not just a biography, it is a profoundly immersive, compulsively readable tale told with rich and decadent accuracy, a bite into a Big Apple long gone by, loaded with juicy, eye-popping characters you can hardly believe were real."
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Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay
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From Mae West to Madonna to Lady Gaga, women superstars have been both idolized and condemned for their blatant displays of female sexuality. It all started with the "I don't care girl" famed vaudeville star Eva Tanguay. Whether singing suggestively or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, the notorious and brazen Eva set the vaudeville and musical comedy world on fire.
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"In his loving new biography of this long-forgotten celebrity, Andrew Erdman brings Tanguay back to life warmly.... You can almost feel the same electricity audiences of the early 20th century felt at just the mention of her name."
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Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals and the Mass Marketing of Amusement, 1895-1915
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This work looks at the often racy and sexually charged nature of the vaudeville stage. But even with a bevy of provocative performers, big-time vaudeville managed to market itself as pure, safe, and morally acceptable. This work compares the industry's promotional practices to those of other emergent mass-marketers of the vaudeville era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
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"Erdman's most significant contribution lies in his well-documented discussion of how the notion of vaudeville's moral purity was crafted."
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