64. The Big Time: Philadelphia Vaudevillians

COPYRIGHT 2023 Peter Schmitz - All Rights Reserved

[AITH OPENING THEME]

Welcome back to Adventures in Theater History!  Here on this show we bring you the best stories from the deep and fascinating history of theater in the city of Philadelphia. I’m Peter Schmitz - your host, talking to you from high above the city in our studios right off the Executive Suite. Our original theme music is by Christopher Mark Colucci.

Last episode we looked at the story of vaudeville in Philadelphia, and today we are going to discuss some notable individual vaudevillians who happened to come from Philadelphia. Not their entire life stories, but just the story of their time in Vaudeville - how they got into the biz, what their impact was on the genre, and how they got out. And we’re going to concentrate on the stories of three famous Philadelphians, in particular: W.C. Fields, Ethel Barrymore, and Ethel Waters. Here we go!

[TRYOUT TOWN THEME MUSIC]

You may recall my disclaimers in our last episode that Philly was not particularly important in the Vaudeville business, but is that true? In the course of my research on the subject I have seen several modern authors assert that so many vaudevillians came from Philadelphia, that it was known as the “Cradle of Vaudeville” just as it had once been the “Cradle of the Nation.” But you know, I’m not entirely sure what they are basing this assertion on. As far as I can find, during the time of vaudeville’s top years - basically 1880 to 1930, NOBODY called it that. Not a single person. Nobody in the trade paper Variety, or in any other publication of that period. There was a theater in Chicago, The Olympic, that everybody called the “Cradle of Vaudeville” or at least they did until it burned down in 1907. Sometimes you can find the term applied to Tony Pastor’s original New York theater on 14th Street. So how and when this moniker got attached to Philadelphia, somewhere along the line since, is a mystery to me. Because, really, Philly just wasn’t a cradle of vaudeville. Just looking at the biographies of all the hundreds of famous variety performers of the day, far more of them came from New York, Boston, Brooklyn, and Chicago - and that’s not surprising, because as we said, the major vaudeville chains were based in those cities, and that’s where you could get hired. Although there were a lot of small amateur nights and semi-pro vaudeville style entertainments all over Philly, you had to LEAVE town to get a job in vaudeville, as we shall see in almost all the examples we talk about today.

Before we talk about our three main subjects, though, I want to run through a quick rundown of four other Philadelphia performers who also made a splash in their day.

[Three Stooges: “Slowly I turned” - NOT TRANSCRIBED]

The first is Larry of the Three Stooges - the one of the trio with the wild halo of kinky hair that stood straight up out all the time, the gentler stooge who generally tried to mediate between the two other stooges. When I told some folks about my plans for this episode, Larry always seemed to come up first - perhaps because in the childhood of many Americans - well, especially men - of my generation “The Three Stooges” were on the television every day after school, and again on Saturday morning, when the hundreds of short films they made during the 30s and 40s were being shown. He almost always comes up in any discussion about Philadelphia and vaudeville, and to this day you can see a large portrait of him smiling away on South Street near his former childhood home. He was born Louis Feinberg in 1902, and his dad was a South Philadelphia watchmaker, and therefore had some containers of dangerous chemicals in the shop. One day little Louis accidentally spilled some acid on his arm, injuring it badly. After the Feinbergs moved to the Strawberry Mansion neighborhood in North Philly, his parents encouraged him to take up the violin to restore strength in his arm muscles, and he developed real skill at the instrument. In fact he originally entered the vaudeville world as a violin player, and like many Jewish performers of the day, he anglicized his stage name - to Larry Fine. But it was not in Philly but in Chicago that his comic talents were discovered by two of his backstage pals, the brothers Moe and Shemp Howard (formerly Horwitz, who were from Brooklyn). The two Howard’s needed a third “stooge” - that is, an audience plant or stupid sidekick - to help out the star who employed them, the comic Ted Healy, who was then a headliner in the touring Shubert Brothers revue called A Night in Spain. In his act, the large and irascible Healy would batter and slap the three smaller stooges around the stage whenever they displeased him. Eager to blend in, Larry not only learned how to take a face-smack - he eventually developed a callous on his left cheek - he even dropped his native Philadelphia voice and picked up the Howard brothers Brooklyn accent. In the early 1930s the three men got an offer to do comic short films without Healy, and they finally left his act and started knocking each other around instead. By that time, mom needn’t have worried, vaudeville was pretty much gone anyway.

[MUSIC ]

A Philadelphia vaudevillian whom you probably have not heard of, was “Sober Sue.” She had no particular talent - Sober Sue’s act was more passive. She would not laugh at any joke. She would not even smile. Born Susan Jenkins, she was an African American woman who grew up on Wallace Street in the Fairmount neighborhood, just a block south of the city’s infamous Eastern State Penitentiary. In 1901 when she was 20 years old she was discovered by C.A. Bradenburgh, the longtime manager of the Dime Museum on 9th and Arch St. He decided to make her a featured in the show during the Christmas season that year, along with the Whalley Female Orchestra, Burkhart the Monarch of Magicians, and the acrobatic Kemble Trio. “The Only One, SOBER SUE,” the newspaper ads read, “Never laughed and never will. $100 in gold to any man, woman or child who can make her smile or laugh. Tell her what you will. Do what you please, you CAN’T make her smile. Professional humorists and star comedians particularly challenged.” People would show up, tell her jokes, do funny walks, make funny sounds, but Sober Sue would just sit there, stone-faced.

Sometimes traveling comics or clowns from the circus would come in to give it a shot. No dice. Of course the entertainment for the crowd was in watching the frustration of all these guys as they failed to entertain Sober Sue. Early in 1902 she took her act to New York City, where she was performing at Huber’s Dime Museum on 14th Street. The same reward - 100 dollars was offered to anyone who could make her laugh. And thus she made her living. She got 20 bucks a week - not a big salary in vaudeville, but more, I guess, than she would have earned as a household domestic, which unfortunately was perhaps her only other option in those days. But five years later, in 1907, Sober Sue had come back home to Philadelphia, again to the 9th and Arch museum. It was there that Willie Hammerstein, the manager of the most successful vaudeville theater in New York, came down accompanying his father, Oscar, who as you may remember was building an opera house in North Philadelphia at the time. Willie Hammerstein, who had a weakness for sideshow acts, immediately booked Sober Sue for his rooftop Paradise Garden above the Victoria Theatre in Times Square. Sober Sue became a sensation that summer, every newspaper in the country did a feature article about her, and all the humorists who gathered at the Hotel Metropole tried their best material on her. But nothing worked. She wouldn’t laugh. It may just have been that the strain of working long days as a sideshow freak made her too sad. Or maybe she was angry - some of the things that were written about her were pretty racist, after all, and I’ve found quite a few ugly cartoons and caricatures of her in the archives. A reporter in Variety described her viewing one of these drawings, throwing down the newspaper in anger and glaring around the room. “There was no chance of anyone winning the hundred that night,” wrote Variety. 

For years afterwards, the term “Sober Sue” became a byword in American journalism, usually accompanying some story about local ridiculousness. The local baseball team, the local corrupt politicians, their failure to build a good railroad station, or keep the streets clean - why it was guaranteed to make Sober Sue laugh, the editorials would wryly chuckle. But the truth was, Sober Sue couldn’t laugh. And she never had smiled or laughed, even as a child. When she tried, it just made her eyes flow with tears, it hurt so much. Some have speculated that Susan Jenkins suffered from “Moebius Syndrome,” a rare condition characterized by weakness or paralysis of multiple cranial nerves. But I don’t think that’s ever been proved. Anyway, from then on in vaudeville circles, whenever a comic couldn’t get laughs from a house, he’d come back to the dressing room and warn his buddies “there are a bunch of Sober Sues out there.”

[TRANSITION MUSIC ]

Speaking of which, there are no laughs in this next segment, either, in which we briefly consider another Philadelphia vaudevillian. And I got to say, in all the time I’ve been researching and making this show, I think that this is my LEAST favorite Philly theater person ever  - and the lack of enthusiasm on my part may surprise you because the guy I’m talking about is Walter C. Kelly. He was one of the popular and famous Kelly family of Philadelphia. He was in fact the brother of the sainted athlete, businessman, and father of Princess Grace, John B. Kelly - you know as in Kelly Drive, and the John B. Kelly Playhouse in the Park. And one of his OTHER brothers was George E. Kelly, the Pulitzer-prize winning playwright! How could I dislike Walter Kelly, and who was one of the most famous men-about town and bon vivants of his age, a featured guest speaker at every Friars Club roast and Democratic Party “smoker”? Well as the historian Trav S.D. informs us: Grace Kelly’s uncle Walter was one of the few unalloyed racists in big time vaudeville, and often refused to perform on a bill if a Black performer was on it, too. In his youth he had spent some time in Newport News and his act, which he first really developed in 1904, was called “the Virginia Judge,” dressed in legal robes and carrying a gavel, while he enacted presiding over a small town Virginia courtroom. He didn’t need stooges, he played all the parts - including those of the Black men who would be hauled up in front of the judge as hapless defendants, all accused of the sort of petty crimes that in that day were stereotypically associated with the supposed criminality of Blacks - chicken stealing, razor fights, gambling, drunkenness. Kelly would portray the men making their pathetically comic excuses in a supposed negro dialect, but then, switching back to the character as the Virginia Judge would have none of it, down would come his gavel, sending them off to jail, every time, usually appending some mordant witticism as they were led off. Towards the end of his career, as he was getting out of vaudeville, he even made some final recordings of his act: [CLIP NOT TRANSCRIBED]  That’s just a small sample, I won’t trouble you with any more. It gets much worse, believe me, with lots of “boys” and n-words thrown casually around. Kelly stoutly defended what he regarded as the essential truth behind his act, and once wrote in an English magazine, when examining what was then called “The Negro Question in America,” that “the Negro is an awful liar, and being of inferior intellect, a poor liar.”  What makes his routine really sickening to us today is that we know this was an era when thousands Black men were being taken out of those jails and lynched throughout the South, and many others were being packed off chain gangs for trumped-up petty offenses that ended up destroying their lives - and just as in Kelly’s act, their attempts to defend themselves in court  were never given much weight. It wasn’t funny, though I guess many people thought so at the time, because as long as vaudeville itself was thriving, Kelly never stopped working. Walter Kelly regularly headlined the bill in theaters all around the country, and eventually all around the world, and for two decades earned one of the highest salaries in the business - thousands of dollars a week. Now, as we’ve documented many times on this podcast, the early 20th Century was a deeply racist period, and most vaudevillians weren't usually playing right to the audiences who shared those prejudices. But Walter Kelly was doing nothing to repair that situation - if anything he was actively making it a lot worse. 

All I can tell you to make listeners today feel a little sense of delayed justice is that Walter Kelly was badly injured one day in Hollywood California, after trying to escape a speeding Karma - I’m sorry, I read that wrong, make that “a speeding car”. He fell, and hit his head and never regained consciousness. Eventually his brother John Kelly brought him back to Philadelphia, where he died in January of 1939 at the age of 65.

[TRANSITION MUSIC - crossfade with CLIP OF ED WYNN - NOT TRANSCRIBED]

Let’s turn to a happier subject, indeed to a person that was known for his laugh. Because no account of Philadelphia vaudevillians would be complete without Ed Wynn, the wild-haired portly giggling clown with the endless string of bad puns. Born to a Jewish immigrant family in 1886, his father had a millinery and hat business in Northeast Philly. As a student at Central High School, young Isaiah Leopold realized he didn't want to spend his life selling hats, and announced he was going to make a go of it as a comic in vaudeville. (His classmate, the future drama critic Alexander Woollcott, encouraged him to give it a go.) Certain that this venture would be a failure, his father furiously told him to at least change his name so as not to bring shame upon the family. So Izzy Leopold took the goyishe middle name he'd been given at birth - Edwin - and neatly divided it into "Ed Wynn."

By 1910, Wynn was making 350 dollars a week in vaudeville, and was playing Keith’s Theatre on Chestnut Street. When he got his first big Broadway show, The Deacon and the Lady, his dad took a break from his store, and came up to New York to see it. He acknowledged that his son was doing good, but conveniently forgetting his former scorn for a life in the entertainment world.

By the 1920s, Wynn was largely able to give up touring on the relentless grind of the vaudeville circuits, and started headlining Broadway shows - his first one, The Perfect Fool gave him the lasting name of his character. And in whatever skit he appeared in, he always had  some sort of large and ridiculous hat on - perhaps a long-running tribute to the family business back in Philadelphia, the one he had left behind forever.

[TRANSITION - Ethel Barrymore - NOT TRANSCRIBED]

That was the voice of Ethel Barrymore, in a newsreel from August of 1936. The great actress had just turned 57, and as she speaks she is sitting in a wicker chair on a terrace overlooking the gardens of her home in Connecticut. That wasn’t actually the truth, as it turned out. She later changed her mind and kept right on doing plays, radio shows, and movies  - even television . . . almost up until her death in 1959.

But what on earth had happened back in the mid-1930s to temporarily declare she was going to retire? Well I think I have a clue. In her autobiography, entitled Memories, she tells that “when I went to London and played The Twelve Pound Look at the Palladium for a week, an astounding thing happened. They didn’t like the play! They hated it! They said it was old fashioned - I don’t know what they DIDN’T say about it!

Now this must have been a very sobering occurrence for Ethel Barrymore - something that might make her think she was washed up. The Twelve Pound Look was her money spinner, her old reliable. “I had banked on it for so many years, had thought it was practically a classic, and it was a shock to discover that its day was past.” 

Now what was Ethel Barrymore, a legitimate theater actress of the old school, from one of the most distinguished acting families ever to come from Philadelphia, doing in vaudeville at all? Well, just like everybody else, she was making money. In fact her uncle Sidney Drew and his wife Gladys Rankin had been the first one in the family to get a regular paycheck on the vaudeville stage in 1896, doing small serious dramas that were often featured on the bills. But Uncle Sidney was not regarded as the big talent of the family, not at all. It was okay for him, maybe. . True, towards the end of his life in 1901, her own father, the actor Maurice Barrymore, was doing vaudeville, though he was rather driven to it by his faltering memory and rapidly failing health - well, syphilis, really. In fact he was on the stage of the Lion Palace Vaudeville Hall in upper Manhattan when he had his final breakdown in the middle of the act. Fortunately Ethel’s brother, Lionel Barrymore was in the audience, and was able to lead his dad away to a sanitarium. But still, going into vaudeville was generally not something that respectable actors did - 

Not, at least, until a few years later, in the year 1912,  when the great French actress Sarah Bernhart, signed up to do short plays on the Keith-Albee Circuit and got paid VERY handsomely for it. 7000 dollars a week! Hearing this news, a lot of other big name American actors suddenly went right to their agents and producers. You could make HOW much in vaudeville? Where can I get a piece of that action? The new converts to the church of vaudeville included Ethel Barrymore, who had been doing strictly high-class dramas and comedies for the producer Charles Frohman ever since she was 18 years old. The previous year, she had even done a four-character one act, the Twelve Pound Look for him, as sort of an afterpiece to a long evening of various J.M. Barrie plays.

Wrote Ethel of her decision: “I didn’t like any of the plays Mr. Frohman gave me to read over the summer and at last I went to him and suggested that I play The Twelve Pound Look in vaudeville. He threw up his hands in horror. I said: “Why not?  . . Bernhardt has played in vaudeville. Why all this snobbishness, or whatever it is, about it?”

Frohman sent her to see the Western vaudeville producer Martin Beck, who ran the Orpheum Circuit, knowing that Beck did always like to sign up opera singers and ballerinas and other classy acts. When Ethel told him of her determination, Beck hardly hesitated. He quietly wrote something on a little piece of paper and handed it to her, saying “Will this be all right?” She looked at it, and saw that it offered her $3000 a week, and said, “It’s fine.”

Indeed for the next 20 years, whenever she could not find a play to do on Broadway, or a run got cut short, Ethel just got a company of the Twelve Pound Look together again, slipped on over again onto the vaudeville circuit, and happily banked all that sweet dough. She didn’t mind the gig at all.

“It was demanding,” she recalled later, “But very rewarding. I learned so much watching the other artists. I found out that you have to be awfully good in vaudeville. It is a real taskmaster because there are so many acts in it, like slack-wire artists, for instance, that require absolute perfection.”

But what exactly was her act, The Twelve Pound Look? What was its appeal to the public? Why was Ethel so happy to appear in it? I must say that vaudeville historians, on the whole, are very incurious about the play. Nobody seems to have actually read it. They just seem to assume that Ethel was classy, so the play must be classy, and people liked a little class in their vaudeville, it made a nice change from all the jugglers and comic and dancing duos and slack-wire artists.

Well, here on this podcast, looking deeper into things is a service we provide, so here you go: The Twelve Pound Look was a one act play by the author J.M. Barrie (you know, the guy we associate mostly nowadays with Peter Pan, but he was a very popular and well-respected playwright). Barrie had written the piece in 1910, to be performed in sophisticated and artsy places, independent venues called Little Theaters. I have found not only a copy of it, but searching online I recently came across a recording of it - not one with Ethel Barrymore in it unfortunately, she bothered to have it filmed - but in a 1952 kinescope of a TV program called Omnibus introduced by Alistair Cooke. Helen Hayes was performing the role of Kate, the part that Ethel Barrymore usually played.

It turns out that The Twelve Pound Look is sort of a short, precise version of Henrik Ibsen’s famous play A Doll’s House! It’s about the financial and social independence of modern women! In the play, a highly successful middle aged man is preparing to be knighted by the King of England. We see him at the opening rehearsing with his younger wife, practicing just how to bow and get tapped by the sword on his shoulder and all that. Then his butler comes in, announcing that the employment agency has sent over a typist, as he had requested, to help him respond to all the letters of congratulations he is about to receive. The man is astonished to discover that the typist is his FIRST wife, a woman who had quietly walked out of their marriage 14 years ago, slipping out and leaving only a brief letter behind.. Over the course of the subsequent emotional conversation, he demands that she tell him who was the man she left him for. Well, she tells him, it wasn’t any other man, she had simply grown tired of a life in service to all HIS success and HIS accomplishments. She wanted to achieve something herself in life. So, she had sworn that when she, working as a typist, had independently earned Twelve Pounds - just enough money, in fact, to buy a portable typewriter - she would go out into the world and live happily on her own. Here’s Helen Hayes:

[HELEN HAYES CLIP - NOT TRANSCRIBED]

At the end of the play, Kate leaves, bidding her ex-husband goodbye fondly, but warning him that she sees ominous signs on the face of his new wife, too. And indeed, at the end, when his new wife, drearily walks in at the end of the play, dutifully ready to rehearse the ceremony once again where he gets to become a knight, and she is only honored by association, we see the man’s horror as he realizes that he’s about to lose his second wife, as well! She has the Twelve Pound Look!

At a time when American women were just beginning to enter into the workplace in real numbers, and many middle class women were discontented with their own careers, this play evidently had a lot of appeal. It didn’t have the serious heft of George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion or of Ibsen’s play, but I bet it worked its own telling effect on a lot of women’s lives. Funnily enough, in 1923, during the period she was regularly touring in this play, Ethel Barrymore left her own husband, Samuel Colt. Though he was very wealthy, she didn’t ask him for any alimony. She could make her own way in the world, thank you very much.

[TRANSITION MUSIC - leading to W.C. FIELD”S CLIP - “Good evening, my happy little family! How are my Children of the Theater? . . . !”]

In this era of theater history, there is perhaps no more famous Philadelphia vaudeville performer than W.C. Fields. Because of his subsequent successful film career in the 1930s, and his many celebrated appearances on national radio shows well into the 1940s, his voice, mannerisms and dry truculent comic stylings are well known. Even after his death, Fields’ films had a brief revival on college campuses and among hipsters of the 1960s, which is perhaps why you can see his image prominently featured on the cover of the Beatles 1967 album Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band - in the back row, wearing a straw boater, between the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen and the psychiatrist Carl Jung. Edgar Allen Poe, a sometime Philadelphian, is not far away from Fields in this famous arrangement. And his fellow vaudevillians Mae West, Fred Astaire, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy are there too. Back in that day, a lot of college students, and ahem, even some 10 year-olds in the Midwest had a black-and-white poster of W.C. Fields up on their wall, showing him wearing a top hat and suspiciously peering over his cards in a game of poker. 

But long before all those days of my own youth, the future W.C. Fields  was technically born just outside of Philadelphia, in the near southwest suburb of Darby, in January of 1880. His father, James Dukenfield was an immigrant from Sheffield England, was working as a bartender in the hotel his son was born in. His mother was the former Kate Felton - one of the many Feltons in Philadelphia, and she named the boy William Claude after her dear brother, William Claude Felton,  a local luminary. As more siblings arrived, the growing family soon moved up to North Philadelphia. Over the years they would live in several houses in the Rising Sun and Hunting Park neighborhoods. The irascible James Dukenfield frequently quarreled with his equally obstreperous young son, and anyway like most struggling working class families in America, the family expected the oldest son to bring some money in - especially during periods when his hard-drinking father had lost his job. Claude soon abandoned his formal education soon after he had learned to read - an accomplishment that very few others in his family, including his father, had ever managed. He worked hard, but never really happily or well - mostly because he hated getting up in the morning and was always looking for a gig that would let him sleep late. He sold flowers briefly, then worked as a clerk in a cigar stand, where he often fell asleep, and once almost accidentally burned down the store. Moving on to briefly become a “cash boy” at Strawbridge and Clothiers department store, shuttling change from the store tellers out to the clerks at the cash registers, he discovered he hated mindless repetitive menial tasks. He would rather fling coins into the air, just to see if he could catch them and spin them, really. Quitting Strawbridge’s, he joined his father’s new enterprise delivering produce from a wagon to houses in the neighborhood, but his restless and dexterous hands kept trying to juggle the oranges and apples as he ran from the wagon to the customers’ back door.

His father and he got into many arguments about that annoying habit, and all his smart remarks and rebellious ways, often quite violent ones. After once being ordered never to come home again, he didn’t for a long time, and though he did eventually reappear back at the family house, his repeated stays away from home got more extended, especially when a new baby brother appeared, and was crying all right in the tiny house. A new job, helping out on a friend's ice wagon, lasted longer -  but unfortunately you couldn’t really juggle ice. Plus, exhausted from the early hours he had to get up to deliver ice, he was trying to sleep wherever he could - in vacant lots, in stables, in basements, in local barrooms that offered free lunch if he least bought a bottle of ginger beer, in a drafty room that served as a clubhouse that was a hangout for him and his friends in the neighborhood - anywhere he could. His ash blond hair had already earned him the nickname of “Whitey” amongst his pals, and they kidded him too about the bulbous nose that he had inherited from his mother’s side of the grew even bigger, due to repeated exposure to the elements and constant fights he got into with local toughs. By his own account, he often recruited friends into stealing from local shops and could have quickly come to a very bad end.

But fortunately, one hot September in 1895, Claude was handed a free ticket from someone who had gotten it in exchange for posting a window card for a play in their store window. It wasn’t in the immediate neighborhood, but instead was a show at the Walnut Street Theatre. It was a well-advertised comedy, though - called “Eight Bells” - which featured  lots of scene changes and mechanical effects, including an elaborate storm at sea, so he figured he'd give it a try. But he didn’t really want to see the show - he knew the Walnut’s air-cooled auditorium would be mostly empty that steamy Monday evening, and he was hoping to catch some shuteye in one of the seats in the back row.

[MUSIC, UNDER] But instead what he found in Walnut Street Theatre - where amazingly, so MANY significant events in Philadelphia theater history seem to take place - was his future - right at the top of the third act. The setting, according to Fields’ biographer James Curtis, “was the interior of a French mansion, where a servant [played by James Byrne] entered and, after looking around, began juggling the various things he found in the room. Specifically, the routine involved a hat, a cane, and a cigar [and then he] began grabbing items off a nearby table - plates, utensils, food, chairs - juggling them [all] . . the specialty built to hilarious, show-stopping proportions, and Claude, who [that evening] would [normally] have been consumed with dread over the start of a coming workday, suddenly forgot his fatigue and was instantly captivated. . . . What was different and almost unique about the juggling in Eight Bells was the way in which it was integrated into the plot of the show,” . . and instead of being performed by flashy performers in pink tights and sparkly costumes, made it look as if anyone could do it.

Including him. He was thunderstruck and realized he had found what he wanted to do in life. The teenager began haunting the city’s many vaudeville theaters, studying every juggler that came through town. At Keith’s Bijou on Arch Street, he caught the act of James Edward Harrigan, who was billed as “the original Tramp juggler.” Harrigan was also a comedian, building a patter of jokes into his routine - especially when he needed to cover his mistakes and dropped balls. Claude soaked it in and went home to see if he could replicate Harrigan exactly. [MUSIC OUT]

Soon he himself was practicing every minute he could - his friends helped him out by collecting inexpensive and durable common items to juggle - steel balls, old cigar boxes, and hats. For a costume he lifted Harrigan’s tramp idea - along with a lot of the tricks and routines of the older comic. It was easy to find raggedy old clothes, and an application of soot to his cheeks hid his youthful face. He kept it a mute act - he didn’t want to speak. He dreaded learning lines, though did develop a hilarious sotto voce banter, muttering truculently under his breath whenever things didn’t work out.  He was eagerly volunteering to do amateur engagements at political meetings, social clubs and church socials wherever he could, and didn’t even care that these cost him his job on that ice wagon. 

At a place in South Philly called Peabody Hall he first appeared under his new name - no longer the oddly Philadelphia-sounding William Claude Dukenfield, but just W.C. Fields. He even ran off to New York City for a while to see if he could get into the lowest rungs of real professional vaudeville, but failed, that time . . . Coming back to Philly, in the summer of 1898 he finally got an offer to play a professional gig - in an outdoor entertainment resort and picnic ground in Norristown, Pennsylvania, eighteen miles northeast of the city, called Plymouth Park. Fields was offered five dollars a week, of which the management immediately withheld 15 percent as “booking fee” - in the manner of all the larger vaudeville circuits of the day - so Fields was literally losing money to work, after he paid for his carfare and his food. But he leapt at the chance, and the career of W.C. Fields, the comic tramp juggler, began. For the next fifteen years, he almost never left the road. 

[MUSIC,UNDER] Slowly, we can see him paying his dues, joining traveling shows where the manager would repeatedly run away with the box office, leaving the performers salaries unpaid, just before the end of the tour. There were many times when he jumped on empty railcars, just to find a way home. But then he took a step up, joining a burlesque company called The Monte Carlo Girls - which even once played the Trocadero Theatre in his hometown, and his mother was proudly beaming from the front row, and the Inquirer was reporting that he had “Made a great hit” with his hobo juggling act.” 

Inevitably, perhaps, he fell in love with one of the dancers in the show, a slim brunette named Hattie Hughes, and soon she had joined him as an assistant in the act, and together they were blissfully working together in the pier theaters of Atlantic City, New Jersey. Whenever business was slow, Fields would go out into the waves and pretend to drown - his fellow performers would all race to rescue him, and a crowd would gather to see if the poor young man would live - only to see him magically rise to his feet and begin to juggle away! Stay and see the rest of the show as long as you're here, folks, we have sandwiches and drinks for sale in the back. 

As we covered in our season premiere, of course, Atlantic City was then a primary proving ground in American show biz, and this gig served to get him his next job - with a show called Irwin’s Majestic Burlesquers on a tour of the Midwest - though he had a rough moment when one day in Ohio James Harrigan showed up at the stage door and accused him of stealing his act. Which he had, of course, though soon Fields was already adding his own unique elements. But still, he thereafter dropped the ‘tramp’ part of the act, and began calling himself an ‘eccentric juggler’. He learned how to pretend to fail, to let the audience in on the joke, and then to amaze them with a move they had never expected and end the act with a dramatic flourish. He practiced fiendishly, tirelessly, every day, working nine months some times to completely perfect his newest tricks. And whenever he got tired, or felt like shirking and not practicing to improve the act, he would just tell himself: “Okay then, screw back to Philadelphia and get on that ice wagon.” [MUSIC OUT] The constant specter of the ice wagon, of ending his days like his dad working menial jobs in the same old dreary neighborhood of North Philly, drove him like a demon.

But then an angel arrived. The vaudeville producer Martin Beck - the same one who would later employ Ethel Barrymore - caught Fields' act in Chicago and immediately offered him 125 dollars a week to play the Orpheum Circuit out in California. He was finally in the big time! In fact he found himself on the bill with Mr. and Mrs. Sidney Drew. He got great notices from the San Francisco papers, received his first big paycheck, bought a 100 dollar diamond, sent ten dollars to his mother back in Philly, and then used the rest to wire Harriet and told her to come out West and marry him. And she did, and they did. 

[MUSIC  UNDER] And soon they were not just the hit of the Orpheum Circuit but also the biggest and most prestigious houses in New York City. They were getting offers to play in Europe! Now he was the toast of audiences in both Berlin and London. Unlike many other American comedians, Fields found his mute act was perfect for foreign audiences, nothing needed translation. And unlike all the other comic jugglers, who were usually solo acts with Hattie at his side in her form fitting dark tights, he had a brisk, efficient scene partner to contrast with his rumpled and truculent nonchalance . Wrote one observer:

“Should he happen to drop anything, he’d promptly order his charming lady assistant off the stage with such comic absurdity that we want him to drop something else. He’d begin with three balls, casually running them as if they were not even there, occasionally dropping one and then waiting for the rebound . . . the balls would bounce into his back pocket and . . . fly all over his body, resting now and again in the most inconceivable places, with a maximum of movement and a minimum of effort.” He’d juggle his hat, his cigar and his cane off the tip of his shoe, and he work in a tall pile of cigar boxes in a way that both delighted and amazed the audience - sometimes revealing that they were secretly connected by a long elastic cord and then discarding the cord entirely and showing that he didn’t need them at all.

But Fields also learned that seeming too good at its craft had its own problems. August of 1901 he was back at the Bijou Theatre in Philadelphia, working the big time East Coast Keith-Albee circuit, an absolute hometown hero. For the occasion he introduced a new trick in which he would balance his cane, his hat and his cigar all piled up on his foot, and then he would kick all three up in the air. The hat would land on his head, the cigar would fly into his mouth, and the cane would land on his nose where he would balance it once again. But to his annoyance, the very ease and skill with which he pulled off this almost impossible feat let the audience just take it for granted. If it was so easy, why be impressed? “That experience made me very bitter for a while,” admitted Fields. He was beginning to have his doubts about Philadelphia.

[MUSIC OUT]

Which brings us to the famous question, did W.C. Fields hate his hometown? What about the threat to engrave the mordant quip “"On the Whole, I'd Rather Be in Philadelphia" on his tombstone?  What about his cracks about his hometown’s censorious provincialism? “Anyone smiling after curfew in Philadelphia is liable to arrest,” he once said, “ And a woman dropping a glove on a street can be hauled before a judge for strip-tease.” And then of course there’s the great moment from his 1940 movie with Mae West, My Little Chickadee, where his character, the con man Cuthbert J. Twillie, is about to be lynched by an incensed mob in the Old West:


Twillie: “Unhand me, you bearded beavers! [Crowd shouts angrily]
Sheriff: “Do you have any last wish?”
Twillie: “Yes I’d like to see Paris before I die.”
Sherriff: “Awww. . “ [starts to walk away]
Twillie: [hastily] “Philadelphia will do!”

But that was mostly from his later Hollywood period, when Fields was often joining in with the general national ribbing about sleepy old Philadelphia that we talked about last time. But during his vaudeville days, he often happily returned to the city of his birth, visited his family, reconciled with his father - even taught him and his younger brother how to read and write so they could correspond with each other when he was on the road. Took his dad on a trip back to England. During his travels, he regularly came back through Philadelphia again and again, usually on the Keith Albee circuit. When the new Keith Theatre was built on Chestnut Street in 1902, he started appearing there almost every year, always in a prominent position on the bill, and always welcomed by the Philly papers as a hometown boy who made good. Old Whitey Dukenfield, look at him! True, after he had been around the whole globe - which he did twice, playing theaters from South Africa to Australia to Paris, he did notice that Philadelphia’s staid provincialism seemed to be getting deeper every time he came back. 

[MUSIC UNDER]

It didn’t help that he was now estranged from Hattie, who after bearing their son in 1904, refused to travel any more. She wanted to have a simple home life, and instead she just carped at him for more money all the time, writing him harsh and accusing letters. Plus, his favorite uncle, William Felton, had been jiggered out of his municipal job by a new and corrupt administration in City Hall in 1907. Fields began referring to Philadelphia, amongst his friends, as “The City of Brotherly Graft.” And well. . . he wasn’t wrong there, after all.

[MUSIC OUT]

I want to skip ahead now to the year 1915. By this time W.C. Fields had been touring in vaudeville for fifteen solid years, and he was beginning to feel it was time to move on. He’d played every major city in the world, always bringing along trunks full of great literature to read and educate himself, as well one of his series of new girlfriends to keep him company. (He and Hattie would never divorce, but they would never reconcile, either.) He’d had lots of professional success, including a run in the hit show The Ham Tree where he did his juggling routine in a company of blackface comedians, though he never worked in blackface himself. He’d introduced new bits into his act, including a bravura pool table bit, where he wowed the audience with a comically precise and hilarious routine, with a specially designed pool table with rounded bumpers that allowed the balls to sometimes bounce straight up in the air and right into his hip pocket. After a long series of comic failures, the bit would end with him clearing away every single ball with a single shot, which always brought the house down. He’d performed on the same bill with Sarah Bernhardt at the Palace in New York, and for the King of England in London. 

[MUSIC, UNDER]

It was at this point that he was invited to join the company of The Ziegfeld Follies, then preparing for its seventh iteration at the New Amsterdam Theatre in New York. Now to join The Follies, for a vaudevillian, was a little like going to heaven - perhaps only playing at The Palace was a more sought-after gig. Because with the Follies, you were going first class - even though it was more of a burlesque revue - with lots of dancing girls, which vaudeville never featured. But these dancing girls were the most beautiful, tallest, and statuesque dancing girls in the world - by producer Florenz Ziegfeld's own claim, he was “glorifying the American Girl.” [MUSIC OUT] But, you know, it was a Leg Show. Ziegfeld didn’t really care for comics in his show, aside from the best of them all, the Black comic genius Bert Williams, whom he promoted and defended tirelessly. Still there were a lot of other comics in the show already, including Ed Wynn, who had been held over from the previous year's show. Nonetheless, at the urging of his head writer, Gene Buck, he agreed to take Fields into the show, but he had to agree to be in other sketches as well, not just do his silent juggling routine. And Fields also was forced to tolerate that Ed Wynn would sometimes walk on to the stage while he was performing and engage in what was known as “flycatching” - that is trying to upstage the comedian onstage by doing silly gestures - like pretending to catch an imaginary fly. Fields HATED this sort of thing, and repeatedly warned Wynn not to try it too often. Terrified of Fields, who after all had a justified reputation for occasional violence, Ed Wynn mostly stayed away from him.

[MUSIC UNDER] One evening, while The Follies was on tour in Boston, Wynn tried to horn in on Fields while he was doing his pool table routine. Puzzled because he was hearing laughs where he was not expecting them, Fields peered around the stage, looking to see if somebody was flycatching on him again. Finally he spotted Wynn, who had crawled beneath the pool table, and was popping out and making faces at the audience whenever Fields’ back was turned. Without hesitating, Fields brought down the pool cue he was holding right on top of Wynn’s head, making a tremendous crack that echoed throughout the theater, and knocking him out cold. The audience, of course, thinking this was all part of the act, laughed all the louder, especially, when Fields just calmly went on with his routine, stepping over the prostrate body of his fellow Philadelphian. Eventually he came to, and with a few groans was helped offstage, only to meet with a further assault from Fields in the dressing room after the act was over. In later years, Wynn would always try to deny this incident ever happened. But looking at the evidence, for once a Juicy Show Business Anecdote really seems to be true. [MUSIC OUT]

Now, this entry into the Ziegfeld Follies marked a new chapter in Fields career, and presaged his exit from vaudeville and his entrance into other aspects of show biz, like Broadway shows and movies. But I have to note one really amazing thing about this Ziegfeld Follies of 1915. Because this show marked the very first time that, as a theater history guy, I can note that an actual film was projected on a screen and shown onstage as part of the show - and it was incorporated into the action! And it was also the first time the W.C. Fields performed on camera. During that previous summer, Gene Buck arranged for the whole company to take a day trip over to Fort Lee, New Jersey, [MUSIC UNDER] where they quickly filmed, in an afternoon, a parody of - wait for it- the big hit film of that year, D.W. Griffith’s The Birth of a Nation! - My jaw literally hit the table when I came across this story - because it fit so perfectly into the narrative arc of our podcast this season. The footage that they made that day has not survived, but from a description of it, apparently the Follies company, including all the dancing girls, all dressed up in Civil War costumes and lampooned the movie, which they had all seen, it had been showing at the Liberty Theatre in New York, so they all knew it. Fields did not dress up as a character in the action, but just played himself, wandering around in the middle of the action, looking lost. Occasionally, he looked out of the frame, as if someone was talking to him. And then, when this film was added to The Follies, Ed Wynn would appear onstage live, next to screen, and interact in real time with both the action in the movie and tease the actors on film. Flycatching again, you see. [MUSIC OUT]

Well, that was a long section, and I’m afraid we must leave W.C. Fields there, as he suddenly enters the world of Broadway and American film simultaneously, but don't worry, we'll come back to him later in the podcast. It’s time now to move on to our final Philadelphia vaudevillian, Ethel Waters:

When I told my friend, the great and good Dr. Joe Lex, he of the most admirable Philadelphia history podcast All Bones Considered, that I was doing a show that included Ethel Waters, he immediately sent over an article about her that he particularly admired. It was written by someone who was a great jazz singer herself, the late Susanna McCorkle, and it had been printed in American Heritage magazine back in 1994. I am so grateful to Joe, and I was so impressed by this article he sent me, that what I’m going to do is quote extensively from it here, to tell you the story of Ethel Water in the black vaudeville circuits of her day, including TOBA  circuit, or Toby Time, which toured through communities in the South. So the following text - with some elisions and minor additions - is all by McCorkle:

Born in 1896 in Chester, Pennsylvania, south of Philadelphia, to a twelve-year-old rape victim who never fully recovered from the experience, [Ethel Waters] was raised mainly by her grandmother, who worked as a live-in servant but kept Ethel, her mother, and her two alcoholic aunts in a “rickety shanty in the Bloody Eighth Ward.” [MUSIC OUT]  . .  Tall, smart, and tough, [Ethel] was the ringleader of a gang of poor neighborhood kids who stole food to eat and sell and ran errands for the “sporting people” in the area. The children, black, Hungarian, Jewish, and Chinese, . ..  burst into innocent children’s songs to alert prostitutes and petty criminals to the presence of vice squads in the area.

Singing was taken for granted in her family.  . .  Her aunts sang her songs whenever she asked to be told a story, and she [later] remember[ed] that even as a small child she was fascinated to find that in every song there was a story, if she just listened closely enough.

In elementary school she excelled in “elocution” and in “mimicry” but distressed teachers with her “roughness and profanity.” Her grandmother put her in Catholic school for two years, and there she blossomed “under the patience and kindness of the nuns,” developing a sense of right and wrong and feeling protected and encouraged for the first time in her life. Her teenage mother, religious but not Catholic, took her out of the school, but the experience would shape her later life.

To keep her off the streets, her grandmother permitted her to go to one of the few respectable neighborhood dance halls, and she proved such a talented and tireless dancer she was given free admission in exchange for dancing lessons. As often as possible she went to performances by black stock companies at the Standard Theater [on South Street] and sat in the back rows of ten-cent storefront theaters to watch show after show. She would then show off for her gang, imitating everything she could remember.

In her early teens Waters began doing housecleaning, and when her mother became ill, she took over her job as a hotel chambermaid, which she loved. In a newspaper interview she said: “I had about a half hour to clean up each room, but I’d hurry and get them done in about ten minutes, and that left me twenty minutes to act. I’d get in front of the mirror and the show would begin. There I’d be, mugging and acting for all I was worth.…I’d get so carried away with whatever part I was making up for myself that I’d act all over the room and forget what I was doing.…I’d even whistle and applaud for myself when I got through, and then I’d come back and take a bow.” Still, she had no ambition for a stage career. She was so battle-scarred from her years in the streets and in vermin-infested shacks that her one goal was to become [like her grandmother] a “lady’s maid and companion” for a rich woman who would feed, clothe, and shelter her and take her around the world.

In 1917, egged on by friends, she entered a talent contest at Jack’s Rathskeller, a local tavern [on Juniper Street]. .  . .  She was spotted by two black vaudeville performers who offered her ten dollars a week (twice her maid’s pay but considerably less than the twenty-five they pocketed for her work) to join their tour. She chose to do a song she’d heard a female impersonator do and thus became the first woman ever to sing professionally the number now associated with Bessie Smith, “St. Louis Blues.”  . . Conditions on the black vaudeville circuit were mostly uncomfortable and unpredictable but no worse than home. Understandably wary, however, she hung on to her chambermaid job by putting in a substitute whenever she took off on a tour. . . .[MUSIC OUT] 

By her own account Waters never climbed a rung of the career ladder in those early decades without being shoved [by somebody]. She lacked the confidence to try her luck in New York, but she finally took a week’s work in a Harlem stock show. An acquaintance got her a job in a tough uptown dive, Edmond’s Cellar, that was noted for its talented young entertainers and musicians. . . After a couple of jobs in unsuccessful all-black stage shows, she returned to Edmond’s and began to make [what was then called] “race” records [that is, they were specifically targeted to the African American market]. She had a hit with “Down Home Blues” [Music: Down Home Blues]

 in 1921 and took off on a tour of her old stomping grounds, the black theater circuit—this time with better billing and pay. The Harlem showman Earl Dancer now urged her to try the “white time.” She said no. He persisted.  [MUSIC] Finally, “I did it just to prove what a flop I would be. I thought white people weren’t going to get me, wouldn’t understand my type of work—and I wasn’t going to change it.” He brought her new songs, including “My Man” and “He’s Funny That Way,” [and “Dinah”] and got her a Chicago booking. She was an instant hit, hailed by  . .  critics as “the greatest artist of her race and generation.”

[MUSIC OUT]

By the early 1930s, not only a recording star, but a Broadway star as well, Ethel Waters’ going rate in Vaudeville was $3000 a week, the same as the OTHER Ethel, Ethel Barrymore, one of the highest in the business. But once again, we’ll leave the story there, and pick up the careers of Waters, Barrymore and W.C. Fields in later episodes of the podcast this season when we cover the story of their shows coming through Philadelphia. Because like all the people we’ve talked about today - with the possible exception of Sober Sue, whose later years are a bit of mystery - Waters would not live again in Philadelphia during her long and illustrious career. In those days, for show biz folk Philly was a place that you moved on from, not that you made your home base.  

But we’re going to have to leave the story there, and we will pick up the careers of Ethel Waters, Ethel Barrymore and W.C. Fields in later episodes of this podcast, I promise. When we cover their story and all the people we’ve talked about. With the possible exception of Sober Sue, nobody moved back to Philadelphia. For show business folk it was the kind of place you moved on from, not the place you made your home base.

So that’s our show. Thanks again to Joe Lex - you can find them and all the other sources for this episode in the blog post on our website  www. Aithpodcast dot com - that accompanies this episode . By the way, I’m going to record one of the best of these, in its entirety - a series of three articles published in the February editions of The New Yorker Magazine, written by the writer Alva Johnson., It will be a Bonus Episode available to our Patreon supporters only - but you can become one of those supporters, for a very negligible cost. Please consider becoming a patron of theater history! Go to Patreon.com slash AITHpodcast. Or follow on Facebook or Instagram or Mastodon, or email us at a i t h podcast do com - anything you can do, we appreciate it so much.

Thank you for all your kind attention, it’s been a real fun journey preparing and sharing all  these great stories with you. Thanks, once again, for coming along on, on all these Adventures in Theater History: Philadelphia.

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