Queen of Vaudeville

The Story of Eva Tanguay

Andrew L. Erdman

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780801449703
• eBook ISBN: 9780801465284
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts

In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879–1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the "I Don't Care Girl"—named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen persona—Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady—and never looked back. Tanguay was, at the height of a long career that stretched until the early 1930s, a trend-setting performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual female entertainer. Whether suggestively singing songs with titles like "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It" and "Go As Far As You Like" or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, she was a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, from Mae West to Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have been both idolized and condemned for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of female sexuality.

In Queen of Vaudeville, Andrew L. Erdman tells Eva Tanguay's remarkable life story with verve. Born into the family of a country doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town, Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. Erdman follows the course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press, declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the history of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new media of radio and motion pictures. With nineteen rare or previously unpublished images, Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star.

1

Freak Baby and the Paper City

EVA TANGUAY once claimed that her father was a Parisian doctor who had set out for the New World from the Old, conquering the rigors of frontier life and thereby reinventing himself. But like other assertions she made, this one appears largely false. She may have fabricated such a tale about her father in part to distance herself psychologically from him. Or she may have been employing a tactic popular with other actresses of the day, who revised their true backstories to make themselves appear more interesting. Adah Isaacs Menken long claimed that her father had been a Jewish merchant (mildly interesting, given the era), while Anna Held, wife of the legendary showman Florenz Ziegfeld, boasted of highbrow Parisian lineage despite the fact that she was half Polish.1

What was beyond dispute is that Eva Tanguay’s father, Joseph Octave Tanguay, came from French-Canadian stock going back at least six generations. The father of Eva’s father was also named Joseph and worked as a farmer, according to a local register. His predecessors had also worked the land, but farming life, it would seem, was not for Joseph Octave Tanguay. In May 1860, before he was twenty-two, he received what passed back then for a degree in medicine. Dr. Tanguay likely learned his trade within an antiquated apprenticeship system, though he may also have briefly attended Montreal’s l’École de médecine et de chirurgie. By 1847, the provincial College of Physicians and Surgeons would require licensure and standardized training, and it was this body that formally recognized him as a doctor on July 7, 1877. In those first days of his medical practice, there was little to hold young Dr. Tanguay back. He and cousin Charles Tanguay struck out for the town of Weedon, Quebec, and set up shop.2

Joseph Octave Tanguay, fils, not only took his medical degree in 1860, he also took a wife. On December 1, 1860, having thrice declared in church their intention of so doing (as tradition required), Joseph Tanguay married Adèle Pajeau with the blessings of both their fathers and a witness named A. Malhiot. Adèle Pajeau was the daughter of a shoemaker, Marcellin Pajeau (sometimes spelled “Pageau”), the husband of Adele Allard. The Pajeaus, while Francophone, were American born. They hailed from the town of Keeseville in upstate New York, across majestic Lake Champlain from Burlington, Vermont.3

Newlyweds Dr. and Mrs. Tanguay moved to the Eastern Township of Marbleton, under ten miles from Weedon, where they occupied a number of residences, often sharing the cramped quarters of boarding houses and simple wood-framed structures. It was said that Dr. Tanguay was “well known and loved” by the local peoples, a “well-remembered . . . country doctor” who made the rounds, traveling, at times even relocating, to the villages of Coaticook, Sherbrooke, and Robinson. He plied his trade wherever patients needed attention and had cash to pay.4

On November 1, 1861, Joseph Octave and Adèle Pajeau Tanguay had their first child, a son. The infant was promptly baptized, perhaps because he was sickly and it was feared he might die. The boy was also named Joseph Octave, and his godmother, Matilde Lafrance, signed the birth certificate. Seven years passed before the appearance of the next Tanguay child. Adolphe Étienne Tanguay was born July 4, 1868. Sometime in his youth—it is not known exactly when—Adolphe Étienne became “Mark.” Six years after Mark was born, the Tanguays welcomed their first female child, Blanche, born Agnès Blanche Tanguay, on July 7, 1874, in the town of Coaticook near the U.S. border. She was baptized there as well, eleven days hence.5

By 1878, the Tanguays and their three children had returned to the hamlet of Marbleton. And it was here, in this microscopic metropolis, not far from the United States and yet somehow worlds away, on the plowshare’s edge between the rural past and industrial modernity, that their fourth and final child, a baby girl, was born. Hélène Eva Tanguay arrived in the world the first day of August 1878. She weighed but five pounds and later claimed to have been as many inches long. For three days she barely moved. Her parents, despite her father’s medical efforts, feared the worst. The infant Eva was placed in a sewing basket “improvised as an incubator” and set beneath the kitchen stove so that the heat might revive the tiny girl.

When she had later become a star, Eva looked back on the circumstances of her infancy and cast them in Barnum-esque terms. For nearly a year, she said, she barely grew or put on weight. She once eagerly told a reporter that people came from all over to see “Dr. Tanguay’s freak baby,” now appearing in the Tanguays’ new home at Harding Corner, a cluster of modest dwellings and simple shops that passed for the business district of the Lime Ridge mining region.6

According to Eva, her diminutive size and birth weight led a nursemaid to remark that the baby girl was only “as big as a pin.” The nickname stuck; friends and intimates called her “Pins” well into adulthood. (Eva never indicated whether they called her the French word for pin, épingle). Beyond that, however, it is unclear just how sickly or in need of cookstove incubation she really was. For she was not baptized until some twenty months after her birth, suggesting that whatever shape Eva Tanguay entered the world in, her parents were not worried about her making a hasty exit. Eva’s godparents were present at the baptism, held at Saint-Michel church in Sherbrooke and presided over by Father Chalifoux. Absent from the occasion, either because of the demands of his schedule, as an omen of things to come, or perhaps both, was her father, Dr. Joseph Octave Tanguay.7

Beyond the fact that she was supposedly a freakish, pin-sized baby, the details of Eva’s early life in Canada are few. She and a playmate named Mabel Barker, neighbor and daughter of James Hugh Barker, a manager at the Dominion Lime mining concern, quarreled often owing to the personality of the “little lioness,” though they just as readily mended fences and moved on as children do. Mrs. F. H. Bradley, who grew up in Sherbrooke, remembered Eva as “a lovable but mildly erratic child. She and I had many a squabble but always made up and were good friends again.” Throughout her life, Eva tried to downplay her erratic and combative nature. But nearly everywhere one looks, those who knew her characterized their relations with Eva Tanguay, both as a child and an adult, as a mix of conflict and closeness.8

In time, bigger problems loomed. Eva had been born five years into what was to become known in Canadian history (and Western history generally) as the Great Depression, which lasted from 1873 until 1896 (after the Great Depression of the 1930s, the earlier period was designated the Long Depression). The doldrums were the result of disastrous economic policy, but more directly of the so-called Panic of 1873, a domino effect of dropping silver prices, industrial overexpansion, and crashing investments both in Europe and the United States. Partially because things may have seemed especially bleak in Canada at the time, and maybe because of a simple wanderlust, in 1883 Dr. Tanguay and his family did what many of their countrymen had done. They made their way south to New England.

Dr. Tanguay chose Holyoke, Massachusetts to put down stakes. Occupying a jutting elbow of land on the west bank of the Connecticut River, about fifteen miles north of the Connecticut state border, Holyoke was in many ways a logical destination for the Tanguays. At the time they arrived, it had one of largest populations of French-Canadian émigrés in the United States. The town even counted a few other Tanguay families, likely cousins or distant relations. A scandal rippled through Holyoke in 1884 when the newly elected truant officer, Wilfred Tanguay, himself committed a grievous act of marital truancy by taking his son and running out on his wife who lay dying of consumption. Officer Tanguay had already induced “a healthy young woman to represent his wife at the medical examinations,” thus obtaining a $15,000 insurance claim for her life.9

Though they were definitely in a new land with novel values, the presence of so many ethnic, cultural, and linguistic brethren also reminded them of a long, ancestral road that led from the Old World to the New. The Tanguays of North America, both those in Holyoke and their relatives back in Quebec, in fact reached back to 1692, when Jean Tanguy, born thirty years earlier in Ploudiry (east of Brest near France’s Brittany peninsula), arrived in the colony of New France. He came to Quebec as a soldier, but Jean Tanguy somehow earned the nickname of La Navette, meaning “the Shuttle,” perhaps referring to his noncombat duties. Tanguy also found an extra a added to his surname—hence, Tanguay—likely the result of how his thick Bretagne accent made it sound to an immigration or military official. Once in Quebec, La Navette married Marie Brochu.10

The Tanguay generations that followed Jean and Marie knew lives of hardscrabble existence. Despite the rigors of frontier life, they and their fellow countrymen grew in number—while the region’s Native Huron inhabitants suffered grievous losses due to war and the diseases of the white man. Blossoming trade in furs also spurred the growing French population; by 1672, there were 6,230 men and 770 women of European descent living in the region. About half of the first wave of immigrants came from a Parisian orphanage, l’Hôpital Général, while one-third hailed from western regions of France, mainly Normandy and Poitou, near La Rochelle. The millions some made in the fur business further attracted more Frenchmen; by the 1780s, there were over one hundred thousand people of European descent living in Quebec. New France had matured into an alluring destination for hearty and ambitious French settlers.11

Most inhabitants of colonial Quebec were granted land under a system known as seigneury, which was little more than a feudal holdover from the Middle Ages. Under seigneury, tenants known as censitaires were given small, rectangular strips of land fronting a river. Charged an annual rent and any number of arbitrary levies by their seigneur overlord, censitaires lived in houses on their lots that together formed a côte. Jean Tanguy and his wife Marie lived on a côte situated on the Saint Lawrence waterway in Saint-Vallier-de-Bellechasse. They had lucked out, though, as the land was given them outright as a kind of wedding gift by the owner, Marie’s father, Jean Brochu.12 Life was surely hard since the growing season was short and about five such seasons were needed for a farming family to achieve self-sufficiency. But hard did not mean impoverished, and Jean and Marie Tanguay were owners, not renters.

The hardships of the land were small compared to the difficulties that came after the British conquest of Quebec and the Treaty of Paris in 1763. With it, the province of Quebec fell under British rule. With the ascendency of the British and the English language, the French speakers of Quebec were officially marginalized.13 It did not help that the Tanguay clan descended from Jean and Marie had by now settled in a region known as the Eastern Townships, a place whose very name suggests an Anglophone majority amid otherwise Francophone Quebecois.The Townships, a loose scattering of villages east of Montreal near the spot where New Hampshire’s northern border meets the sloping Maine frontier, were perhaps the one locale in Quebec where speaking French as the Tanguays did could actually put you in the minority.14

BY COMING from Canada to the United States, the Tanguay clan enacted a cultural narrative that was at once unique and universal. They had suffered economic and political hardship but had survived and even prospered. Working the land led to owning the land. Successive generations of farmers eventually turned out a doctor. And that doctor made his way to an immigrant enclave in a foreign city that in many ways could not have been more different from the traditional, homogeneous, agrarian world the Tanguays had known in the sylvan Eastern Townships of Quebec. For Holyoke, despite the insularity of its French Canadians, was most certainly a hectic, diverse city on the rise, percolating and shuddering with industrial growth. Where the Tanguays’ neck of Canada had been rural, its economy based on farming...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. Freak Baby and the Paper City
• 2. The Sambo Girl in New York
• 3. I Don’t Care
• 4. The Cyclonic Comedienne; or, Genius Properly Advertised
• 5. Riding Salome to the Top
• 6. Rivals, Imitators, and Censors
• 7. Follies and Fortunes
• 8. Men and Other Travails
• 9. Mrs. John Ford
• 10. The Wild Girl
• 11. Knockdowns and Comebacks . . . and Knockdowns
• 12. Death and Other Endings
• Epilogue
• Eva Tanguay Chronology
• Notes
• Sources and Select Bibliography