I really should have known about this topic of this blog post a long time ago!
When I was originally recorded the chapter from 42nd Street back in the Fall of 2023, it was meant as a Bonus Episode for our Patreon members only.
Six months later, in March of 2024, as I was deep in my the production of my own book Adventures in Theatre History: Philadelphia, I brought this episode out for release in the regular podcast feed. I was so fixated on larger task ahead of me, that I really didn't have time to do extra background research and make my usual proper blog post.
Because of this, I was totally unaware that in the intervening period Prof. Maya Cantu of Bennington College in Vermont had brought out her book Greasepaint Puritan: Boston to 42nd Street in the Queer Backstage Novels of Bradford Ropes with University of Michigan Press.
Cantu's book solves so many of the mysteries about Bradford Ropes that had so puzzled Richard Brody in the New Yorker article I cited in the episode. Her discoveries included previously unknown photos from the late 1920's of Ropes and his longtime dancing partner, Marian Hamilton:
These photos were in the possession of the National Portrait Gallery in London, but had not previously been connected to Ropes because they were filed under the name "B. Bradford," which was Ropes' stage name.
According to Cantu, Marian Hamilton was the dance partner (in shows that performed in New York, London and Paris) of Bradford Ropes from 1925 through 1928. She is also very likely the 'Mary' to whom he dedicated his novel 42nd Street.
This is what the publisher's copy on Amazon.com says about Greasepaint Puritan:
Greasepaint Puritan details the life and work of Bradford Ropes, author of the bawdy 1932 novel 42nd Street, on which the classic film and its stage adaptation are based. Each of Ropes’s long-forgotten novels was inspired by his own experiences as a performer, and focused on the lives of gay men in show business, offering rare glimpses into backstage Broadway. But why did Ropes’s body of work, and consequently his biographical footsteps, disappear into such obscurity?
Greasepaint Puritan aims to find out and reclaim his story. Descended from Mayflower Pilgrims, Ropes rebelled against the “Proper Bostonian” life, in a career that touched upon the Jazz Age, American vaudeville, and theater censorship. We follow Ropes’s successful career as both a performer and the author of the trilogy of backstage novels: 42nd Street, Stage Mother, and Go Into Your Dance.
Populated by scheming stage mothers, precocious stage children, grandiose bit players, and tart-tongued chorines, these novels centered on the lives and relationships of gay men on Broadway during the Jazz Age and Prohibition era. Rigorously researched, Greasepaint Puritan chronicles Ropes’s career as a successful screenwriter in 1930s and ’40s Hollywood, where he continued to be a part of a dynamic gay subculture within the movie industry before returning to obscurity in the 1950s. His legacy lives on in the Hollywood and Broadway incarnations of 42nd Street—but Greasepaint Puritan restores the “forgotten melody” of the man who first envisioned its colorful characters.
I had once been a follower of Cantu over Twitter, but I lost touch after I left that social media platform in November of 2022, so I suppose that's how I missed the news of her book. In fact I lost touch with many of the other scholars in the field that I had once regularly communicated with it there.
Recently I created an account on Bluesky, and to my delight I was able to re-connect with almost all of my old Twitter friends, including Dr. Cantu. Anyway, I'm glad to make amends now by drawing attention to her excellent work about Bradford Ropes, and I congratulate her on this ground-breaking work!
