W.C. Fields from the Ziegfeld Follies and Broadway Stage to the Screen

Becoming a Character Comedian

Arthur Frank Wertheim

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781349949854
• eBook ISBN: 9781349949861
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

This book reveals how Fields became a character comedian while performing in Broadway's most illustrious revue, the Ziegfeld Follies.
As the first biography to use the recently opened Fields Papers at the Motion Picture Academy, the book explores how Fields years as a Follies entertainer portraying a beleaguered husband and a captivating conman became a landmark turning point in his career, leading to his fame as a masterful film comedian. The book also untangles a web of mysteries about Fields's turbulent private life, from the heartrending stories about the tragic relationship with his calculating wife who refused to divorce him, to his estranged son controlled by his mother, to the seven-year extra-marital affair with a chorus girl that led to the birth of an unwanted child.
This electrifying saga illuminates a complex dual personality, whirling from tenderness to brusqueness, who endured so much anguish in order to bring the gift of laughter to millions. Although vilified by Ziegfeld and assailed by demons, Fields survived the cutthroat rigors of Broadway show biz to become a legendary American iconoclast and cultural icon.

Part I
1915: A Momentous Year

© The Author(s) 2016

Arthur Frank WertheimW.C. Fields from the Ziegfeld Follies and Broadway Stage to the ScreenPalgrave Studies in Theatre and Performance History10.1057/978-1-349-94986-1_1

Begin Abstract

1. Confronting Florenz Ziegfeld

Arthur Frank Wertheim¹

(1)

Historian, Rancho Palos Verdes, California, USA

End Abstract

A carpet of fresh grass, the color of light green jade, lay over Central Park on the bright spring morning of May 19, 1915. Further downtown on Broadway near Times Square the boulevard was relatively quiet compared to its evening explosion of theatergoers arriving at showplaces under brightly lit marquees. After completing his last and lengthy world tour in 1913–14, Fields was stunned by the expansion of Times Square, hailed as the “crossroads of the world.” The number of magnificent theaters, lavish restaurants, and elegant hotels had multiplied. The sparking illumination of countless electric lights cast a glittering glow, a radiance hailed as the Great White Way. The area pulsated with energy, excitement, and artistic power unleashing distinct stage productions, a cornucopia of drama, comedy, musicals, cabaret, variety, revues, and numerous others attractions.

At ten o’clock Fields entered through the stage door of the 1800-seat New Amsterdam Theatre to start a new adventure at the home of the Ziegfeld Follies—considered the most spectacular revue on the Great White Way. After arriving he went up a few steps to a long and narrow low-ceiling corridor that led to the stage where he would entertain thousands and become a star comedian.

The auspicious day inaugurated Fields’s lengthy association with Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., impresario extraordinaire of his famous Follies. Fields performed in six annual productions between 1915 and 1925 and also made numerous appearances in shows at the Midnight Frolic, the swanky late-night supper club on the theater’s roof.

At age thirty-five Bill looked fit and trim, his hair still whitish blond, despite his fifteen-year exhausting grind on the vaudeville circuits across the USA and around the world from 1900 to 1915. During these years Fields evolved from a tramp juggler to a silent humorist who used his pantomime skill to generate laughter. Instead of the weekly grind of traveling from one city after another, the Follies also offered Bill an opportunity to stay in New York for several months before the show went on the road.

Fields’s performances in the Follies fueled an extraordinary burst of creativity, spawning one of the most fertile periods in his career. On it stages Fields discovered a new comedic voice though the characters he created in his sketches. The Follies gave him the opportunity to perform diverse speaking parts, including dancing and singing. Most importantly, the revue inspired him to write his own sketches—routines that he later transferred to the screen. By providing the building blocks to become a renowned film comedian, his years at the Follies energized a turning point in his career.

Fields knew that he was about to encounter Broadway’s most powerful producer, who was already celebrated in mid-career for staging dazzling revues. Many epithets have described Ziegfeld’s significance in American popular theater from “The Great Glorifier” (1934) to the “The Man Who Invented Show Business” (2008). ¹ Born in 1867, Florenz Ziegfeld was raised by a well-respected upper middle-class family in Chicago. His father, a German immigrant, operated the Chicago Musical College, a position that made him a significant figure in the Windy City’s cultural life. Uninterested in high culture, the young Ziegfeld preferred popular entertainment, a craze that was sweeping the nation in the late-nineteenth century. He first promoted the appearances of the muscular strongman Eugene Sandow who became famous for his incredible weightlifting feats in a fig leaf costume that attracted society ladies to go backstage to feel his muscles.

While scouting for talent in Europe in 1896, Ziegfeld met the Polish-French actress, Anna Held, a vivacious singer with long auburn hair, glowing brown eyes, and an eye-catching hour-glass figure with an eighteen-inch waist. As her manager and lover, Ziegfeld starred her in many Broadway musicals. They shared a common-law marriage by living together for sixteen years. The pair made many trips to Europe where Held exposed Ziegfeld to French culture and encouraged him to create a revue in the USA similar to the Parisian Folies Bergère. The first Follies premiered in 1907 at the Jardin de Paris night club on the roof garden of the New York Theatre.

After Ziegfeld separated from Held, he met the talented charming stage and screen star Billie Burke at a party in 1913. A year later he married Burke but it was a precarious union. Known as a flirtatious lothario, the producer indulged in extramarital affairs with several Ziegfeld girls, including a passionate romance with the Follies’ star Lillian Loraine. Ziegfeld’s wife and friends called him Flo, showgirls addressed him politely as Mr Ziegfeld, and performers nicknamed him Ziggy.

Burke described the handsome impresario as “slim and tall and immaculate in full evening dress. He had a Mephistophelean look, his eyebrows and eyelids lifting, curved upward in the middle.” Flo’s dark brown hair was parted in the middle and at the end of his “long and slender and graceful” hands were “well-kept nails.” Tall and athletic, his commanding presence dominated a room. When the unpredictable Ziegfeld was mellow, Burke experienced a “small, tired voice” but when angry he yelled in a “large resonant voice,” which caused the recipient to retreat to the nearest exit. As an impeccable dresser, Flo owned a large wardrobe with tailored suits and handmade shoes. He displayed an extravagant life style when traveling, three limousines, a private railroad car, and a luxurious shipboard suite. He and his wife possessed several properties, including Burkeley Crest, a massive twenty-four acre estate at Hastings-on-Hudson about twenty miles north of Broadway. Their country home comprised a huge gabled mansion, bountiful gardens, a menagerie Japanese, tea houses, horse stables, and a plethora of other attractions. They also owned a Florida winter retreat in Palm Beach and a hideaway camp for hunting and fishing north of Montreal. All the theater moguls relished luxury but none outdid Ziegfeld in conspicuous consumption (Fig. 1.1). ²

Fig. 1.1

Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., Impresario Extraordinaire, 1927 portrait by Follies’ photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston (Courtesy of the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., LC-USZ62-55581)

Considered the penultimate impresario, Ziegfeld created the era’s most lavish revue—a smorgasbord of about twenty different scenes divided into two acts. The revue was a unique form of popular entertainment on Broadway from 1894 to 1939, but its heyday was from 1915 to 1925—a period that corresponded to Fields’s appearances. Unlike vaudeville’s string of specialty acts, the revue was shaped around a large cast who appeared intermittently during the performance in distinct acts. Sometimes there was a theme or topic but it often got lost amidst all the spectacular routines. A revue playbill featured stunning show girls, comedians, singers, dancers, and music by rising talented composers such as Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, and Irving Berlin. Adding to Ziegfeld’s extravaganzas were the innovative precision and processional dancing numbers by the innovative choreographer Ned Wayburn. Breathtaking eclectic sets bathed in rich dazzling colors were designed by the avant-garde Viennese designer Joseph Urban.

Fields soon discovered that the highest priority for Ziegfeld was showcasing his gorgeous Ziegfeld Girls, who stunned the audience with their sensuality, beauty, and daring outfits. The Follies’ mantra heralded “Glorifying the American Girl.” Long-legged showgirls strutted down a staircase or across the stage doing the Ziegfeld Walk, a gait accenting straight back, curved pelvis, lifted shoulders, and jutting breasts. The showgirls were attired in eye-catching costumes designed by Lucile (Lady Duff-Gordon), a British couturier whose fashions were the rage among Manhattan’s high society. They appeared in gowns of flowing chiffon, silk, and satin, sometimes rapped in mink and chinchilla, and at other times dressed in bathing suits, short skirts and tights, and risqué costumes with plunging necklines.

Tabloids sensationalized reports about the Ziegfeld Girls having affairs with “stage-door Johnnies” or marrying “sugar daddies.” Most had unhappy brief marriages; some became mistresses such as Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst’s amour; and others graduated to movie fame (Davies, Marilynn Miller, and Barbara Stanwyck, among them). By contrast, many met tragic endings—suicides; alcoholic addiction; multiple divorces ending in abject poverty; and as a finale disappearing into obscurity living lonely lives in old-age actors’ homes. Olive Thomas, one of Ziegfeld’s mistresses, left the Follies for a lucrative film career and married Jack Pickford, Mary’s brother. She died at age twenty-two from mistakenly taking poisonous tablets instead of sleeping pills.

Ziegfeld, an incorrigible lothario, bedded a flock of them and was spotted one day by an unexpected intruder having intercourse on top of his desk. He kept his mistress, Lillian Loraine, in an apartment in the Hotel Ansonia located one floor below the residence he shared with Anna Held. The Great Glorifier of American Beauty ironically touted his alluring women as the centerpiece of his Follies while simultaneously treating them as property.

The Ziegfeld Girl needed to meet several standards. “Beauty, of course, is the most important requirement and the paramount asset of the applicant,” Ziegfeld wrote. “When I say that, I mean beauty of face, form, charm, and manner, personal magnetism, individuality, grace and pose. These are details that must be settled before the applicant has demonstrated her ability either to sing or dance.” ³ According to Ziegfeld, the ideal figure met the measurements of a 36-inch bust, 26-inch waist, and 38-inch hips. He obsessed about the shape of their ankles, the first feature the audience saw when the curtain rose. They were selected from hundreds of white-only applicants, initially appraised by trustworthy assistants who whittled the number down so that Ziggy could make the final selection during auditions. A refined flesh peddler, he transformed the look of the showgirl from the bulky female body found in raunchy burlesque and beer halls to a slimmer, taller, younger, and sexier paradigm of feminine beauty.

Allyn King, a stunning singer and dancer, illustrates how difficult it was to meet these standards. Her career included five seasons as a principal with the Follies followed by appearances in Broadway shows. During this time she struggled with a weight problem due to the fact that producers demanded that she remain slim. Her contract stipulated that she must not “increase in weight more than sixteen pounds or decrease in weight more than ten pounds.” Her twenty-six inch waist could not “vary more than one-half inch.” If so, the producer could cancel her contract after one week’s notice. ⁴ When she failed to meet her contract requirements due to her weight problem, her show business career ended. Bouts of depression caused her to jump to death from a five-story apartment building.

Productions also featured about sixty to eighty lower-paid chorus girls. Many young women around the country dreamed of joining the Follies. In well-publicized auditions, Ziegfeld and Wayburn selected the chorines according to three main criteria: an attractive slender figure, a pretty face, and youthful looks. Personality and talent were two other factors that could get a chorus girl a part.

Patrons especially relished Ben Ali Haggin’s dramatic tableaux, living pictures with motionless showgirls and male cast members depicting an Old Master painting, a historical scene, or an allegorical subject. For the tableaux scenes the Ziegfeld Girls often posed in scanty attire or nude. Nudity was legally permitted by law provided the showgirls were stationary, making the tableaux depictions a daring liberation from restrictive Victorian mores that had constrained the nineteenth-century Broadway theater. Tame in comparison to contemporary freedom on the stage, Ziegfeld’s revue was nonetheless bold for its time, despite the fact that the Follies was not a risqué burlesque show and the comic routines rarely offended. Ziegfeld aimed to achieve a perfect balance between refinement and titillation. During the pre-World War I years and the 1920s the Follies joined with other arts (literature, painting, photography, cinema, among others) to form a cultural rebellion against censorship and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. 1915: A Momentous Year
• 2. The Beleaguered Sportsman
• 3. Entr’actes
• 4. Lampooning the Dysfunctional Family
• 5. Broadway Stardom
• Backmatter