From Mae to Madonna

Women Entertainers in Twentieth-Century America

June Sochen

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780813191997, 9780813121123
• eBook ISBN: 9780813182827
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

Entertainers were the first group of successful women to capture the public eye, taking to the stage in vaudeville and film and redefining their place in society. June Sochen introduces the white, African American, and Latina women who danced on Broadway, fell on bananas in silent films, and wisecracked in smoky clubs, as well as the modern icons of today's movies and popular music. S

ochen considers such women as Mae West, Bette Davis, Shirley Temple, Lucille Ball, and Mary Tyler Moore to discover what show business did for them and what they did for the world of entertainment. She uses the life of 30s and 40s Latina star Lupe Velez as a case study of the roles available to Latinas in popular culture. She then contrasts her story with that of the African American action star Pam Grier to demonstrate the old and new ways minority women are portrayed in popular culture.

From Mae to Madonna places each woman within the context of her time and talks about her relationship with dominant female stereotypes. Sochen discusses women's roles as Mary, Eve, and Lilith and asks thought-provoking questions. Why did the Depression give women movie stars so many important roles while the so-called feminist 1970s did not? Why has television been a congenial venue for women comics while film has not? In examining how entertainers worked within or transformed particular genres and how their personal and public lives affected their careers, From Mae to Madonna casts the spotlight on a series of remarkable women and their dramatic effect on America's popular culture.

1

Black Women Vaudevillians

By the 1880s, show business had a history, one that largely excluded women. Young boys played the female parts in many nineteenth-century theatricals, and respectable women, white and African American, avoided the stage as an unladylike place to be. But in the late nineteenth century, things changed. Popular culture joined with the new and growing cities and increasing industrialization to become big business. Commercial entertainments had already existed, but most people amused themselves in informal, free, and communally developed leisure activities. The newly discovered profit-making potential of show business transformed popular culture into for-profit entrepreneurial businesses that conveniently forgot or ignored old strictures about women on display in public places. More and more patrons paid to attend the popular theater and musical shows performed by professionals. Both venues grew beyond anyone’s expectations. New immigrants and longtime city dwellers flocked to the new variety shows. People still organized their own amusements, of course, but the new popular and profit-making shows increasingly captured the attention and the money of more and more people. In an interesting reinterpretation, old cultural views of women, as old as the colonial settlements, slowly changed as women moved into the music hall. “Painted women,” the term often assigned to the new women singers and dancers in the new vaudeville houses, suggested their dubious status. Respectable women in all communities did not paint their faces with cosmetics or show off their bodies in skimpy clothing in public. Women performers were eyed uneasily as closer to prostitutes than professionals, but they were looked at, occasionally admired, and slowly accepted as part of the new entertainment landscape.

Entrepreneurs quickly saw the profit potential in featuring attractive young women on the stage, but they also shared the society’s racial and, in this case, gender attitudes. It is no surprise, then, to discover that those same owners of mainstream vaudeville houses were slow to include women of color. By contrast, African American men, usually in blackface (they had to use black cork to darken their faces as did white men playing African American men), sang, danced, and joked in minstrel shows, the precursors to the variety shows, sometimes before white and sometimes before black audiences. While all women had limited roles in nineteenth-century theater, black women were shunned entirely. However, show business became the first venue to break down all gender and racial barriers. Theater owners always searched for ways to increase audiences—and their wish for greater profits overcame their prejudices.

At the turn of the century, both black and white women began to appear in vaudeville shows, the variety shows that became increasingly popular in the growing cities of America. Nine or eleven acts in length (usually five or six before intermission and four or five afterwards), vaudeville shows allowed diverse audiences to see jugglers, dancers, comics, actors, and animal acts, something to please each and every taste. Immigrant members of the audience enjoyed the short acts—and if they didn’t like what they saw, they shouted their disapproval. Chorus lines became an accepted feature of the show, and the need for talented and pretty young women increased. The solo dancer, the singer, and the female half of a duet became standard fare.¹ Teenage boys no longer played women.

Vaudeville producers auditioned shapely young women dancers and singers as alluring bait for the ruly and unruly men who frequented the neighborhood saloons-turned-variety-shows as well as the new downtown theaters. While a serious effort was made to bring respectability to vaudeville theaters, and thereby appeal to women and children as audience members, men remained the mainstay of audiences. The dominant image projected by the new women vaudevillians was usually of a sweet Mary in need of male protection, or rarely, a spunky Lilith; the sexy Eve startled and intrigued the growing audiences. Attractive young girls dreamed of show business success, and New York City became the mecca of the entertainment world. Many aspiring singers and dancers broke into the business in their hometown of Memphis, St. Louis, Chicago, or San Francisco. They honed their singing, dancing, and acting skills there with the hope that it would lead to national success.

While the making of any woman entertainer requires an analysis of her biography, her work, the genre within which she performs, and the society in which she lives, sometimes one variable dominates, thereby determining the outcome. In discussing black women vaudevillians, society’s attitudes on race and gender clearly played crucial roles. While all women had to overcome the whorish image associated with show business, black women had the additional burden of the color line. Besides the basic prejudice that prevailed, the actual color of the woman’s skin played an active role in deciding whether or not she could be on stage: the darker the woman’s complexion, the less likely that she would be booked into the show. White audiences preferred lighter-skinned black women while black audiences often shared the same view, unconsciously or consciously accepting the white standard.

The subject of color, of course, is an exceedingly sensitive one in this country. In the black press, however, some black theater critics criticized the audiences’ preference for light-skinned mulattas over the deeper-colored women. White was right in terms of the styles and desired images for black women, a sad but understandable phenomenon. In 1923, critic George Schuyler wrote, “Why don’t they put beautiful chocolates and handsome black girls on the stage?”² No one answered Schuyler’s question to his satisfaction. The slavish imitation of white culture’s view of feminine beauty became an embarrassing reality, particularly to African American intellectuals.

The more conventional dilemma of trapping women in rigid stereotypical roles plagued black women vaudevillians. Black women, like their white sisters, had to be pretty and slim to be in a chorus line; they had to portray the sweet young thing beside the strong, male hero; and they had to be the butt of the male comic’s humor. The universality of the female cultural stereotype prevailed. Not only was beauty culturally defined in the white community and accepted in large parts of the black community, but the acceptable images for women were the same. In the movies, however, Hollywood created the Mammy type for black women, a nurturing mother who cared for white children with loving kindness, clearly, a white wish. A sexy, black woman was not allowed on the movie screen for fear of offending white tastes. Heavy-set women of both colors could succeed in non-romantic roles if they combined their song with a joke. Bessie Smith, a great black blues singer, defied the stereotype and sang about romance on the vaudeville stage but also mocked her willingness to be deceived by no-account men. Audiences laughed or smirked when they heard the hefty Bessie lament her lost loves, but they quieted down when her velvety voice sounded through the room. The combination of humor with pathos and a self-deprecatory style became the acceptable trademark for women who did not have the fashionable figure and the cultural standard of good looks. Predictable images were forgotten in the face of great talent, but in a sense, the fondness for women who went against type could be seen as strong evidence for the persistence of that very type. An occasional exception can be made because it does not deny the rule.

A slim, lithe Florence Mills, who was a singing sensation and the darling of African American and white critics alike in the mid-1920s, was more likely to be cast as the ingenue in a black musical. The lighter skin, the slimmer form, and the more delicate facial features gave her and others like her a place in the theater. This formula, of course, pertained to white women entertainers too. But black women vaudevillians had to contend with both gender and racial prejudices. They had to operate within more delicate boundaries than any other group of entertainer. Black male entertainers had to observe racial stereotypical images, and white women entertainers had to follow gender rules, but only black women vaudevillians had to observe racial and gender restrictions, making them a unique group of performers.

The vaudeville circuit was hard on all entertainers, including the stars and the chorus members. Beginning roughly in the 1890s and continuing through the 1920s (the depression years saw the death of vaudeville), performers traveled from town to town, often doing two or three shows a day. They performed in one small town for three days, traveled on the fourth, and put on their next show for another three days. They stayed in substandard hotels, and in cities where the theaters catered to white and black audiences, the black women entertainers, if they were lucky, found themselves eating in segregated restaurants; more likely, they ate in the kitchen with the cooks and waiters. The whole system was run by the Theater Owners Booking Association, commonly known as the TOBA (tough on black asses). This organization booked most of the black acts and shows throughout the country and usually had the entertainers’ interests last on their list of concerns.³ In the South, the players appeared in segregated black theaters from Indianapolis, Indiana, to Jacksonville, Florida.

Edith Wilson, a singer whose career began in the 1920s, later remembered times when she was the only black woman in a show with white entertainers; she could not stay in the same hotel with the rest of the troupe or eat dinner with her fellow performers. If she was in an all-black show, the whole group stayed together in inferior lodgings.⁴ Black women vaudevillians, then, found that race, gender, and the general hardships of early show business made their career choice a difficult one. Maximum-hour laws did not apply, and the women often worked a seven-day week. There was no day of rest. Working conditions varied but were generally poor; all of the dancers shared a single dressing room, and the star had no special treatment. The constant traveling and the lack of supervision contributed to society’s view that women entertainers were a shady lot and that this was not a profession for respectable young women.

When the performers played in northern cities, the show was geared to a white-majority audience with the black patrons sitting in the balcony. In the South, segregated seating also prevailed, though some theaters in both regions became predominantly black theaters with few white patrons. Robert Mott’s Pekin Theater in Chicago, for example, opened in 1906, established a black repertory company, and catered to a black audience. With twenty talented artists in tow, Mott produced a new play every two weeks.⁵ The Lafayette Theater in Harlem also played to Harlemites with whites occasionally visiting from downtown.⁶ Many other Harlem theaters in the years 1910-19 and the 1920s also attracted white audiences.

TOBA gave the women vaudevillians some measure of job security as they booked acts for theaters throughout the region and “guaranteed” the performers so many weeks of work. Contracts, however, were never written, and entertainers could find themselves in towns where the audience was sparse and the booking abruptly canceled. There was no unemployment compensation and no assurance that the theater would be heated on a cold evening. Women often found their male traveling companions to be protectors against rowdy members of the audience; the troupe sometimes functioned as an informal family with members looking out for each other. Often, casual sexual liasons formed between members of the group and this could lead to temporary, or more rarely, permanent attachments. Many of the young women began touring as teenagers, and they welcomed the support of their male colleagues.

Black vaudeville juggled many balls in the air at once. The producers offered acts that appealed to black pride and virtuosity while not offending white audiences; similarly, if the show too consciously aped white ways, many blacks objected and demanded material that reflected black culture. When black comics performing for black audiences adopted the same characteristics that white audiences expected of them, they often encountered opposition. The women were confronted with another difficulty: they were expected to preserve the womanly images shared with white women while asserting their independence. Black women vaudevillians, then, operated within boundaries that they did not create but had to follow. Racial and gender images combined with a business that offered no protection to its workers made for hard times for black women vaudevillians.

Black blues singers sang novel and bawdy lyrics within a melodic line that emerged from the Negro spiritual and the farm song.⁷ They secularized and bowdlerized a religious and rural subject matter which scandalized the religious members of the community. In addition, the singers and composers adapted a musical form that came from the black community and combined it with many themes that black women shared with white women. The musical style they created, the blues, had the sound of the African American experience, while the words described the tragic, universal womanly experience.

The blues singers sang out of the particular situation they knew, but their words resonated with all women. Ida Cox sang “Wild Women Don’t Have the Blues” and reminded her listeners that, though women wished for faithful lovers. “Go home and put my man out if he don’t act right. Wild women don’t worry.” A woman rejected by her lover became a theme with which all women could identify. The eternal rivalry for men’s affections was effectively captured in the popular vaudeville tune “He May Be Your Dog, but He Is Wearing My Collar Now.” Ida Cox also sang “Western Union Blues” about a rejected woman and “Tree Top Papa” about an unfaithful lover. One singer might record the song and, by so doing, popularize it for many others to sing. Romance gone sour never lost its appeal to both the women and men in the audience.

Black women entertainers, like black women intellectuals in subsequent generations, found their allegiances torn between their gender concerns, which allied them with white women, and their racial identity, which brought them closer to black men. Bawdy black and white women entertainers, who will be discussed in the next chapter, defined themselves as outside the racial and gender mainstream and were able to explore the human possibilities more fully than most others. While most bawdy white women sang and joked to a very select audience in expensive nightclubs, black bawdy women singers had a larger following in black cabarets that catered to all classes of black people.

In black vaudeville, as in white vaudeville, men dominated all aspects of the business. A white majority and a black minority of producers booked most of the acts, owned most of the theaters, and acted as agents to the entertainers. A few black women, however, became producers, unusual entrepreneurs in a male-dominated business. Mabel Whitman, for example, is an interesting case of a woman who produced a show starring her sisters. She planned the program, handled all of the arrangements, and competed for bookings with the prominent men in the business. The Whitman Sisters, as they were known, performed for more than twenty years, traveling the circuit from small town to small town. Mabel created new musicals to showcase the talent of her sisters. Her troupe, however, remained the exception; they were not joined by large numbers of women producers. As competition increased and profit declined, black male producers lost out to more and more white men.⁸

Some black performers worked for the white Pantages Circuit and the Loews Circuit, but rarely for the Keith and Albee Circuit, the aristocrat of all vaudeville circuits. Stars such as Ethel Waters and Bessie Smith got dates from white producers, but the overwhelming majority of black vaudevillians worked within the TOBA and lost their jobs during bad economic times. The period of black vaudeville extended from the 1890s to the 1930s; black musicals, a subgenre that arrived on Broadway at the turn of the century, had a long run through 1910 and then disappeared from the Broadway stage for a decade. Composer James Weldon Johnson called that decade “the term of exile” from Broadway. However, the black musical returned to Broadway in the 1920s.

Besides the musical theater, of course, was the rise of the cabaret or nightclub. This venue provided new opportunities for black women singers and dancers. Connie’s Inn and the Cotton Club are the most famous of numerous Harlem nightspots that employed women entertainers. Quite elaborate musicals were staged there; sometimes, productions that originated in the clubs found a new home on Broadway, such as the successful Hot Chocolates, which began at Connie’s Inn and ended up at the Hudson Theater in 1929. Exposure to a Broadway audience, of course, expanded the black woman star’s identity and led to fame in both the black and white worlds.

The n...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Black Women Vaudevillians
• 2 Bawdy Women Entertainers
• 3 Entertainer as Reformer
• 4 Women Movie Stars as Role Models
• 5 Child Stars
• 6 Minority Women in Popular Culture
• 7 Women Comics
• 8 Change within Continuity
• Epilogue: Where Are We Now?
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index