Expertise
BiographyAndrew L. Erdman is the author of Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator, and Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay. With a doctorate in theatre studies from the City University of New York and a master's in social work from Yeshiva University, his books connect the sweep of entertainment history to our inner lives.
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Photo Credit: IM914 Photography |
Q&A with Andrew ErdmanLike many pop culture terms, "vaudeville" encompasses quite a bit, from an aesthetic sensibility to an industry that organized entertainment for profit. Americans had long enjoyed a range of amusements—anything and everything from oddity exhibitions to opera singers. I think the best way to describe vaudeville is this: it was a popular artform in which many different kinds of talents—and one had to use the word "talent" loosely sometimes—appeared in the same show under one roof. Increasingly, shows were packaged and systematized in circuits across North America. Meanwhile, big business began creating vaudeville theatre chains that promised family-friendly shows. Woodrow Wilson once famously said something like the best thing about vaudeville is if you don’t like what you’re watching, wait ten minutes. There'll be something new. That is so fundamentally American, I think. Looking back on my childhood in the 1970s, I can see that variety shows like Carol Burnett, Sonny & Cher, and even later programs like Letterman all inherited a lot of vaudeville DNA. I first encountered Julian Eltinge while researching my last book about vaudeville queen Eva Tanguay. For publicity purposes, the two arranged a faux, gender-bending marriage. I feel this deep connection to late-1800s and early-1900s history, especially in New York City. The vaudeville halls, the immigrant Lower East Side, the horses pulling carts of coal and seltzer—it feels far away and evocative yet very personal and close. I like to say I’ve longed to live in a New York I never knew. However, that’s not entirely true. My grandfather was born in a cold water tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. When I was a kid, he used to take my brother and me to Coney Island. He’d talk about when he was our age, going to a theater and paying a dime for five hours of movies, cartoons, newsreels, cliffhanger serials and maybe a magician or a ventriloquist somewhere in there. I didn't think so. But recently it dawned on me that at the competitive, all-boys sports summer camp I attended for years, we crossdressed. The camp was run by a staunch anticommunist who used to regale us with stories of the Korean War so theatre, music, and crafts were marginal activities. But we put a lot of effort into our plays and musicals. We did Arsenic and Old Lace and Brigadoon among others. In all those productions, camp boys—no pun intended—played women’s parts. Sometimes it resulted in a kind of crazy comedy with, say, a twelve-year-old boy in a dress playing a seventy-year-old woman. But I can also remember the kid who played one of the ingenues in Brigadoon and thinking how gentle, sensual, and, well, womanly he was. It just reinforces how remarkably fluid our behaviors, attitudes, and wishes can be when the context changes. We saw it in World War One and Two. Drag of all kinds was completely normalized in troop shows. We’re like the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park that spontaneously change sex when in a single-sex environment. It’s not perverse. It’s adaptive. We are much more creative and multifaceted than we think. This is apparently quite scary to some. I wish they’d seen our Brigadoon at summer camp. The archival work is such a joyful romp for a document nerd like me. You never know what you will find. You can now explore archival materials electronically that were once only accessible in person. One good example is the Keith-Albee Archive of vaudeville managers’ notes at the University of Iowa. It is a treasure trove of internal memos and notations from the managers of various theaters in the huge Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit. Venue managers had to watch every act and report back to the head office. The notes are short and straightforward so theatres would not waste time with unpopular or inappropriate acts. To see how management perceived Eltinge and how he compared to the other acts on the bill, I looked at hundreds of entries from the years he first entered vaudeville (1905 - 1906). He was an immediate hit, generally an easy artist to work with, and genial to management. By comparison, many vaudevillians showed up drunk, refused to perform in a certain position on a bill, or told jokes too off-color for the time. Sometimes, it’s hilarious reading other entries like, "Newsky Russian Dance Troupe. Performed amazing feats. Audience loved them. One dancer nearly fell off the stage. 13 minutes." I also visited wonderful archives, such as the Northport Historical Society on Long Island, near Julian’s first country home in Fort Salonga. Another crucial aspect of historical research involves getting a sense of what the culture at the time had to say about relevant concepts and ideas, such as gender, masculinity, style, and sex—all of which were changing. That means looking at newspapers, popular literature of the day, and scholarly work—for example, lengthy diatribes by psychologists on whether cross-dressing could make a man "effeminate"—all of which is fascinating. One thing I’ve learned researching Julian Eltinge is the almost predictable way in which elements of a preexisting dominant culture clamp down when they get spooked. Some degree of gender play and sexual freedoms were present through the 1920s—until the economic shit hit the fan, that is. In the late 1920s, actress Mae West wrote some successful plays about sex. But police shut down her play, The Drag, and Mae spent ten days in prison. Press coverage reveals how anxious conservative authorities had become. These fears were weaponized and put into action by the "scientific thinking" of early 1900s sexology that allowed for people to be labeled "perverts" or "inverts" and thrown in a psych hospital by police. So what we are seeing now is, in part, nothing new: same rote techniques, same targeted groups. But what I think is unique and cause for hope about our period is that the myth of "normal" or a return to "the good old days" is more seen for the patent myth or fantasy it is. I do wonder if Julian Eltinge would have allied himself with centrism and conservatism. Or, would he have recognized how fragile and dysfunctional the system was, as many an artist and gender activist does today? |
Also Ask Andrew About
Femininity as drag in turn-of-the-century America
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Podcast Clips
Why Andrew Wrote About Julian Eltinge
Stories of Vaudeville Superstar Eva Tanguay
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Origins of Drag Icon Julian Eltinge |
Advance Praise for Beautiful
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