Read Online The Devil's Playground: A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square by James Traub - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: James Traub
Tags: History
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headgear more fantastically involved; and every year the show became faster, more elaborate, and more polished. In 1909, Ziegfeld featured Lillian Lorraine, whom he had proclaimed “the most beautiful woman in the world,” and with whom he was then conducting a clandestine affair. Lillian appeared as a replica of Maxfield Parrish’s famous cover girl from
Life
magazine and sang “Nothing but a Bubble” from what appeared to be the inside of a soap bubble; later she appeared at the controls of a prop airplane hanging from the rafters as she sang, “Up, Up, Up in My Aeroplane.” The first act closed with “The Greatest Navy in the World,” in which the girls pressed lights attached to their costumes, went behind a screen, and produced the effect of forty-eight illuminated battleships riding on the waves of New York harbor.
The
Follies
was not wholly a matter of delivering up chorus girls under conditions of high velocity and precision engineering, for Ziegfeld employed the leading choreographers, lyricists, writers, and performers of his day. He provided a home for many of the great vaudevillians of his time, including brassily Jewish singers like Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker. And Ziegfeld brought the
Follies
to a much higher level of sophistication after the show moved in 1913 from the Jardin de Paris, the roof garden of the New York Theatre, to the main stage of the New Amsterdam—a major step up in prestige. Indeed, it took Ziegfeld to bring to the New Amsterdam a sense of glamour in keeping with the theater itself. The great impresario often presented stars like Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, and Eddie Cantor in a single show. And as designer—one might almost say “cinematographer”—Ziegfeld hired Joseph Urban, a Viennese émigré who was the leading set designer of his day and an artist of very great talent. Urban turned the giddy
Follies
into a unified work of art. For the 1917
Follies,
according to Ziegfeld’s biographer Charles Higham, “Urban created a Chinese lacquer setting, which dissolved in showers of colored water, followed by three sets of crossed red and gold ladders. Sixty girls in Chinese costumes climbed up and down in unison while the ladder rungs glowed in the dark. . . . An opalescent backdrop was laced with what seemed to be thousands of pearls.”
All the great cultural critics of the day felt called upon to anatomize the Ziegfeld revue; it was, like the Berlin ragtime song, a central piece of cultural property. Edmund Wilson found its air of mechanical perfection frigid. On the other hand, it was just this air of polish that delighted the essayist Gilbert Seldes, who took the position that mechanical perfection was our destiny whether we liked it or not. The revue, Seldes wrote in
The
Seven Lively Arts,
was the foremost expression of the “great American dislike of bungling, the real pleasure in a thing perfectly done.” And Ziegfeld was its foremost exponent. “He makes everything appear perfect by a consummate smoothness of expression,” Seldes wrote. “It is not the smoothness of a connecting rod running in oil, but of a batter where all the ingredients are so promptly introduced and so thoroughly integrated that in the end a man may stand up and say, This is a Show.” Ziegfeld didn’t aim at greatness; he aimed at delight. He was, in this and so many other respects, the very incarnation of Broadway.
THE LIGHTNESS, THE SPEED, the wit that Ziegfeld infused into his shows, and that his rivals supplied to their own revues and that sparkled in the roof gardens along Broadway, began to alter the climate of Times Square. The lobster palace came to seem increasingly formalistic, even dull. Julius Keller, the owner of Café Maxim, wrote in his memoirs that he realized some time around 1909 that customers would no longer be satisfied with lobster thermidor served on gilded platters. They needed action. Keller recalled the waiters who used to bawl out tunes at the German dive in the
Life
magazine and sang “Nothing but a Bubble” from what appeared to be the inside of a soap bubble; later she appeared at the controls of a prop airplane hanging from the rafters as she sang, “Up, Up, Up in My Aeroplane.” The first act closed with “The Greatest Navy in the World,” in which the girls pressed lights attached to their costumes, went behind a screen, and produced the effect of forty-eight illuminated battleships riding on the waves of New York harbor.
The
Follies
was not wholly a matter of delivering up chorus girls under conditions of high velocity and precision engineering, for Ziegfeld employed the leading choreographers, lyricists, writers, and performers of his day. He provided a home for many of the great vaudevillians of his time, including brassily Jewish singers like Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker. And Ziegfeld brought the
Follies
to a much higher level of sophistication after the show moved in 1913 from the Jardin de Paris, the roof garden of the New York Theatre, to the main stage of the New Amsterdam—a major step up in prestige. Indeed, it took Ziegfeld to bring to the New Amsterdam a sense of glamour in keeping with the theater itself. The great impresario often presented stars like Will Rogers, W. C. Fields, and Eddie Cantor in a single show. And as designer—one might almost say “cinematographer”—Ziegfeld hired Joseph Urban, a Viennese émigré who was the leading set designer of his day and an artist of very great talent. Urban turned the giddy
Follies
into a unified work of art. For the 1917
Follies,
according to Ziegfeld’s biographer Charles Higham, “Urban created a Chinese lacquer setting, which dissolved in showers of colored water, followed by three sets of crossed red and gold ladders. Sixty girls in Chinese costumes climbed up and down in unison while the ladder rungs glowed in the dark. . . . An opalescent backdrop was laced with what seemed to be thousands of pearls.”
All the great cultural critics of the day felt called upon to anatomize the Ziegfeld revue; it was, like the Berlin ragtime song, a central piece of cultural property. Edmund Wilson found its air of mechanical perfection frigid. On the other hand, it was just this air of polish that delighted the essayist Gilbert Seldes, who took the position that mechanical perfection was our destiny whether we liked it or not. The revue, Seldes wrote in
The
Seven Lively Arts,
was the foremost expression of the “great American dislike of bungling, the real pleasure in a thing perfectly done.” And Ziegfeld was its foremost exponent. “He makes everything appear perfect by a consummate smoothness of expression,” Seldes wrote. “It is not the smoothness of a connecting rod running in oil, but of a batter where all the ingredients are so promptly introduced and so thoroughly integrated that in the end a man may stand up and say, This is a Show.” Ziegfeld didn’t aim at greatness; he aimed at delight. He was, in this and so many other respects, the very incarnation of Broadway.
THE LIGHTNESS, THE SPEED, the wit that Ziegfeld infused into his shows, and that his rivals supplied to their own revues and that sparkled in the roof gardens along Broadway, began to alter the climate of Times Square. The lobster palace came to seem increasingly formalistic, even dull. Julius Keller, the owner of Café Maxim, wrote in his memoirs that he realized some time around 1909 that customers would no longer be satisfied with lobster thermidor served on gilded platters. They needed action. Keller recalled the waiters who used to bawl out tunes at the German dive in the
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