Ziegfeld and His Follies

A Biography of Broadway’s Greatest Producer

Cynthia Brideson, Sara Brideson

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780813175027, 9780813160887
• eBook ISBN: 9780813160894
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Theatre

PART 1

Anna and Flo . . . and Lillian, 1867–1913

Shine on harvest moon, for me and my gal.

—Jack Norworth, “Shine on, Harvest Moon” (1908)

1

The Showman, the Strongman, and the Girl with the Eyes

In 1867 a man with the impressive title of Herr Doktor Florenz Ziegfeld Sr. opened the Chicago Musical College. If one were to step into the professor’s hall at any time of the day—morning, afternoon, or night—one would hear young pupils tapping out the melodies of Beethoven, Mozart, and Schubert. Herr Doktor would be standing behind his students at the piano, beaming with pride that the compositions the students were playing had been written by grand maestros from his native Germany. The classical tunes rang out in stark contrast to the city noise outside: the roar of intersecting railroad lines, the clip-clop of horse-drawn cabs, the shouts of newsboys reporting the latest headlines.

By the 1880s, one member of Professor Ziegfeld’s college was as incongruous to the institution as the racket of the city. He bore the same name as the professor, but their similarities ended there. At age sixteen, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. was a slightly built young man with a face that was both sensitive and sardonic. Journalist Djuna Barnes later called him “close-mouthed and satirical-eyed,” but this description was applicable even in his teen years.¹ Sometimes he wore a smirk on his lips, but more often, even when he seemed to be enjoying himself, he wore an expression of funereal solemnity. Young Ziegfeld spent his afternoons studying not the compositions of Mozart or Beethoven but the throbbing urban life of Chicago.

Professor Ziegfeld saw his son’s interests as a snubbing of the traditions he had shared with all his children. Ziegfeld’s three younger siblings (Carl, William, and Louise) all attended the musical college and eventually worked there, but for Junior, sitting for hours learning a foreign language composed of sharps, flats, A notes, and G notes spelled drudgery. He was the eldest son in the family, but he had the impetuosity and lack of patience for anything passé that is more characteristic of a younger sibling. According to Ziegfeld’s daughter, Patricia, “From the moment that Daddy was old enough to be coaxed over to the piano, it was painfully obvious that he was tone-deaf and had absolutely no aptitude in the performing arts. He also failed to exhibit even the faintest interest as he grew older in mastering the intricacies of college administration.”² Young Ziegfeld intuitively knew that the classical works of Schubert and Mozart were not going to win mass audiences’ attention in post-Civil War America, even if his father made the opposite argument.

Ziegfeld’s complete lack of interest in the musical college was, to say the least, a difficult fact for his father to face. The professor prized the reputation he had earned among the crème de la crème of Chicago’s first families; they all sent their children to him for music lessons. He felt comfortable consorting with the city’s finest families, for as a child prodigy, he had been trained at the Leipzig, the most famous conservatory in Germany. Following graduation, Ziegfeld had been in high demand and received offers to teach music and give concerts in various countries in the Western Hemisphere, from Russia to the United States. Professor Ziegfeld chose to move to New York, where he partnered with famed piano salesman W. W. Kimball and music publisher George Root to sell instruments and sheet music. He relocated to Chicago in 1863, but his early attempts at entrepreneurship failed.

Professor Ziegfeld found more success in his personal life; on May 17, 1865, he married Belgian immigrant Rosalie de Hez. Rosalie’s background was as illustrious as that of her husband. She was the grandniece of General Etienne Gerard, Napoleon’s marshal. Their first child, Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., was born on March 21, 1867. Two more sons, Carl (born in 1869) and William (born in 1873), and one daughter, Louise (born in 1875), followed. The Ziegfelds’ lack of formal religious affiliation is proved by the fact that their children were baptized under different faiths. Florenz was baptized Catholic, his brothers Lutheran, and his sister Methodist. Rosalie herself was Catholic, and her husband was Lutheran.

With a wife and newborn son to provide for, Professor Ziegfeld resur rected his musical conservatory in the year of Ziegfeld Jr.’s birth. The college struggled for the next five years and, remarkably, survived the Great Fire of 1871, although the blaze destroyed its structure and instruments. The professor, however, was not deterred; he posted signs amid the ruins of Chicago only days after the fire, announcing the reopening of the school. As the institution was being rebuilt, Ziegfeld took eleven of his pupils to Germany, where composer Franz Liszt planned a dinner in their honor. Ziegfeld’s relationship with one of the most highly regarded European composers greatly contributed to making him a confident, self-sufficient entrepreneur who was as resilient as Chicago itself.

The Chicago Musical College reopened and subsequently moved to various locations, ending up at 1448 West Addams Street in 1882. The final locale was a tall brownstone building that served the dual purpose of conservatory and family home. West Addams Street was not where the richest Chicagoans lived; nor was it in a family-friendly suburb. Though maintaining a close rapport with the upper crust was necessary to gain patrons to support his academy, Ziegfeld was more like his eldest son than he may have realized. His conservatory was located in the Loop, Chicago’s business district. Professor Ziegfeld (like Florenz, years later) enjoyed being in the center of a city that was booming both literally and figuratively. Between 1865 and 1871, the city’s population exploded from 179,000 to 334,000.³ Its flourishing economy made it a Mecca for upper-class families, most of whom could afford to have a piano in the house and were willing to pay for their children to be instructed at institutions such as the Chicago Musical College. What allowed many of these families to be upwardly mobile was entrepreneurship, and arguably, the most ambitious entrepreneurs were German immigrants who, like Ziegfeld, were well established in their home countries and came to America with the hope of using their talents to the greatest advantage—and profit.

Nowhere was the country’s, and Chicago’s, boom more apparent than in the entertainment industry. Some deemed the industry immoral because it pulsated with a sensual vitality. On the higher end of the entertainment spectrum was classic theater, including opera; in the middle was the circus; and on the lower end was minstrelsy, melodrama, and burlesque, a form of entertainment that had originated in London. The bulk of Chicago audiences fell outside the highbrow category and preferred burlesque. In burlesque houses, the shows were irreverent satires of clas sics: Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice was made into Shylock: A Jerusalem Hearty Joke, and Verdi’s Il Trovatore became Kill Trovatore! More offensive was the brazen flouting of decency. Women played sexually aggressive characters and wore clothes that left little to the imagination. Historian Robert G. Allen offered a more favorable interpretation of burlesque’s place in society: “Without question . . . burlesque’s principal legacy as a cultural form was its establishment of patterns of gender representation that forever changed the role of the woman on the American stage . . . it playfully called attention to the entire question of the ‘place’ of woman in American society.”⁴ Not surprisingly, editorials condemning burlesque only made it more popular.

Not a mile from the Ziegfeld home were establishments as lowbrow and popular as burlesque theaters: houses of gambling and prostitution. The popular music of the era reflected the warring lowbrow and highbrow cultures—temperance songs competed with drinking songs or tunes about “swells” (men who appreciated good drink and good living). Young Ziegfeld may have heard the music of Franz Liszt and Johann Strauss in the confines of his home, but on the steps of his family’s brownstone, he was more enticed by tunes that rebelled against the traditions of his father.

British journalist George W. Stevens aptly described the different realms in which Chicagoans lived. He called the city “the most beautiful and the most squalid, girdled with a twofold zone of parks and slums . . . where women ride straddle-wise and millionaires dine at midday on the Sabbath. . . . Where in all the world can words be found for this miracle of paradox and incongruity?”⁵ The paradox of Chicago made it ripe territory for a future showman, a boy who longed to break from his father’s traditionalism and explore the lives and tastes of the rich, the poor, the lowbrow, the highbrow—and always the unique.

Dissociating himself from his father was not an easy task for young Florenz. In their biography of Ziegfeld Jr., Richard and Paulette Ziegfeld describe the professor as being a sort of caricature of a “Prussian autocrat,” complete with “booming voice and commanding presence.”⁶ He was rather intimidating, but not intimidating enough to keep young Ziegfeld out of trouble. By 1883 Ziegfeld had succeeded in making the Chicago Musical College a small but well-respected player in Chicago’s eclectic entertainment culture. The conservatory enjoyed a steady stream of up to 900 students from society families. The school had broadened its offerings beyond music to elocution, languages (German, French, and Italian), and dance instruction. Since his recognition by Liszt, Ziegfeld had established ties with the conductor of the Chicago Orchestra and Johann Strauss. In 1872 he even convinced Strauss to participate in the Boston Peace Jubilee. His father’s ability to persuade great celebrities to come to America impressed Ziegfeld Jr. more than the professor’s musical acumen.

However, Ziegfeld Jr. still showed no signs of emulating even the characteristics he admired in his father. He spent his spare time honing his skills as a sharpshooter rather than as a classical musician. The conservatory’s small attic, according to Ziegfeld’s daughter, had bullet holes in the wall as evidence of the boy’s target practice. But whether he knew it or not, his marksmanship was a talent he had inherited from his father. The professor was a member of the Illinois National Guard.

Sharpshooting was of much more interest to Ziegfeld Jr. than any scholastic pursuits at either Brown Elementary School or Ogden High School. Despite Brown’s reputation for a strong academic regimen, its stringent curriculum did not reform Ziegfeld or its other well-known alumni, Eddie Foy and Lillian Russell. Billie Burke recalled, “He always flattered himself that he never even went to school, but bless his heart, if he didn’t he was pretty well self-educated. I remember his father used to lock him in to make him practice piano, but even then he found his way out, through making up to the cook I believe.”⁷

Ziegfeld’s parents decided a summer spent on a cattle ranch in Wyoming would fulfill the boy’s thirst for independence and all-American adventure. According to Patricia Ziegfeld, “Grandma and Grandpa Ziegfeld tried in vain to discover exactly what their oldest son was interested in.”⁸ Contrary to his parents’ expectations, Ziegfeld’s time in Wyoming made an impression on him that only increased his interest in showmanship. Gilbert Seldes of the New Yorker wrote in 1931: “His pleasures to this day are traceable to this experience. He is an excellent rider, a remarkable shot, and a passionate fisherman. A few years ago, when a Follies was opening in Atlantic City, he startled his associates by breaking innumerable clay pigeons with shots over his shoulder and without altering his funereal expression, doing trick riding . . . on the placid sands in front of the theater.”⁹

Ziegfeld honed these skills in the hope of becoming like his new idol: Buffalo Bill Cody. While in Wyoming, Ziegfeld had caught a glimpse of Cody’s Wild West Show as it was passing through the state. Cody was unlike any man Ziegfeld had ever seen. He did everything in a big way—he dressed loudly, he staged his shows elaborately, and he promoted them sensationally. He once attracted audiences by claiming he could scalp an Indian in five seconds. Cody’s technique was the complete opposite of the subtle showmanship employed by Ziegfeld’s father. The professor hosted small after-hours dinner parties for Chicago’s dominant musical figures, rewarded his best students with diamond pins donated by wealthy patrons, and employed a hansom cab to pick up arriving students at the train station. Ziegfeld was absorbing his father’s technique, but he yearned to combine his father’s tastefulness with Buffalo Bill’s flamboyance.

Once he was back in Chicago, Ziegfeld could not believe his luck when Buffalo Bill Cody’s show came to town. Several tall tales exist about what happened next. Some claim that Cody picked Ziegfeld out of the audience to engage in a shooting match with Annie Oakley, which the boy won, and Cody subsequently hired him to be part of the entertainment. No evidence exists that such a contest ever took place. In fact, Annie Oakley did not join Buffalo Bill’s show until 1885, two years after the supposed match with Ziegfeld. According to Patricia, Ziegfeld snuck away to see the show and followed it as it traveled through the Midwest. But her father’s caprice didn’t last long: “The runaway was caught up with at the next town and brought home again, but the damage had been done. Daddy had experienced show business and independence in one heady draught, and though he returned home outwardly docile he was only biding his time until his big chance came again.”¹⁰

The outwardly docile Ziegfeld continued to work for his father until 1893, advancing from assistant treasurer to treasurer and finally to general manager at the conservatory. Despite his conventional occupation, Ziegfeld still managed to find excitement. His tall stature, Roman nose, thoughtful eyes, and dapper attire made the young man popular. Billie Burke stated, “He was a great favorite in Chicago society in his twenties, squiring among others the daughters of the fabulously wealthy Pullman family.”¹¹ He often hosted Chicago cotillions during the day, while at night he perfected his favorite hobby: dancing. He won numerous local dance contests, and for the rest of his life, he helped set trends in dance. In the early 1900s he played no small part in the national dance craze—the turkey trot. Gilbert Seldes called Ziegfeld “a fanatical turkey trotter,”¹² and Rennold Wolf, who wrote sketches for the Follies, claimed that all the champion trotters followed Ziegfeld from restaurant to restaurant or from cabaret to cabaret.

Dancing was more than a hobby to Ziegfeld; it was an art in which he wanted to become a master. Seldes noted, “He was always interested in dancing and theatricals—his passion for the theater is not a passion for money as much as it is a genuine development of all the major interests of his life.”¹³ His interests in life—dancing, girls, and theater—wove together perfectly. In the exclusive clubs where he danced, he found ample audiences on which to test his business ven...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction: “A Man of Triple and Quadruple Personalities”
• Part 1: Anna and Flo ... and Lillian, 1867-1913
• Part 2: Billie and Flo ... and Marilyn, 1914-1923
• Part 3: The Darkest Hour of Success, 1923-1932
• Part 4: The Legacy of Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., 1932-
• Epilogue: “You Can’t Ever Kill Magic”
• Appendix: Shows Produced and Coproduced by Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index