Fanny Brice's Baby Snooks

It should be noted that I believe the song that Fanny Brice is said to have sang in the 1939 article by James Street was actually Three Little Fishes (Itty Bitty Poo), a "Southern children's song" written in 1939 by Josephine Judson Carringer.

According to this article, Josephine Judson Carringer was musically gifted, highly intelligent, ad entered college when she was 16 yrs old. She wrote Three Little Fishes with Betty Lynn Kirk, her sorority sister at the University of Tennessee in the late 1930s. They then sold the song for $200 and Saxie Dowell adapted the lyrics and music into the piece that became a number one hit in 1939 as performed by the Kay Kyser orchestra with Ish KaBibble singing.

According to Time, June 19, 1939, "Saxie Dowell recently heard, in the South, an old nursery tune called Down in de Meddy. He thought it mighty cute." We can't blame Saxie for the giant PR machine which would deny buying music (especially for a mighty cute old nursery rhyme song), and so we can likely believe the rest:

The result was published last April by Santly-Joy-Select, Inc., which got out The Music Goes 'Round and 'Round and admits to liking "crazy things." Under its title Three Little Fishies, Saxie Dowell's song last week had set something of a current record by leading the field in sheet music sales for a month.

Three Little Fishies has verses which can be sung either in English (Down in the meadow in a little bitty pool) or in "fish talk" (Down in de meddy in a ITTY BITTY POO). The chorus can be sung only one way: Boop boop dittem dattem whattem Chu! The song, likely to cause reverse peristalsis in fastidious stomachs, is all about some "itty fitties" who "fam and dey fam" until they "taw a TARK!" (shark). Den dey fam back to deir poo. The publishers, wary of overplugging Three Little Fishies, withheld it from all but a few big orchestral names—Hal Kemp, Guy Lombardo, Kay Kyser, Paul Whiteman, each of whom recorded it. The song was plugged on the radio by Mildred Bailey, Fannie Brice, Judy Starr. Along with the itty fitties, fat Saxie Dowell fam into such fame that he is now thinking of leaving Hal Kemp and starting a band of his own.

The song is a relative childhood classic -- that is to say, if you had a corny family like mine, you heard your relatives sing it. Often. You may have even heard Madonna and Rosie O'Donell perform a cover of the tune.

Now, you might be wondering why I'd be taking so much time to discuss a cute old kids' song here at SPS. Well, the idea of Baby Snooks, the bratty character played by Fanny Brice fascinates me.


It plays well-enough on the Baby Snook radio shows but, as Brice was fond of dressing & behaving 'in character', once you can see as well as hear it takes on other elements.

Putting a grown woman in little-girl-garb may have it's humorous elements, but it also says something about power & dominance -- and you don't have to be a perv to see it. Little girls are innocence, but they are also property; they belong to daddy. Short baby-doll dresses, oh-so fashionable these days, communicate these things -- innocence and access -- which is why I don't own a single one of those monstrosities.

Having a bratty girl-child mouth-off to her master may be cute, but underneath it all lies -- as sure as those ruffled panties -- the idea that she will eventually heel and heed her master. Or, if she does not, then he is less-than-a-man and plays cuckhold to her charms. Sure, all this can only make it funnier; but did they get it?

Without Brice & Snooks, we likely wouldn't have had Lily Tomlin's Edith Ann on Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In -- but there's a huge difference between the two.


Tomlin's Edith Ann appeared alone in her giant rocking chair where she told stories about her family & dog. Having her be alone could have been a choice to deal with scale; but even so, simply being alone meant Edith Ann was not (as) eroticized.


Baby Snooks, by comparison, not only acted with others but interacted physically with them, drawing in all those adult contexts. There is a large difference between discussing a punishment, a la Edith Ann, and showing a grown woman dressed as a child over the knee of her daddy figure like Baby Snooks; the image has erotically charged elements.


At the base of this humor is prettified misogyny &/or glorified cuckholding. It's all good & fine for adult role-play sex-scenarios, really; but as entertainment one really ought to be aware that's what they are enjoying.

Baby Snooks (with Hanley Stafford as "Daddy") was performed on television only once (and this was Brice's only TV appearance too), on CBS-TV's Popsicle Parade of Stars in 1950 (one year prior to Brice's death). Entertainment folks document Brice's height &/or age as the reason for its failure, and Brice herself is said to have admitted that the character of Baby Snooks just didn't work properly when seen... But come on!

This wasn't the first time Baby Snooks had appeared before people. Baby Snooks was even in Judy Garland's Everybody Sing (1938) prior to radio success.



While Brice & Garland are wonderfully funny in that scene, this was not the usual Baby Snooks routine. Baby Snooks was built on the annoying relationship with her father and, sometimes, other men. The Baby Snooks character had been preformed live on stage for years and, height of male actors aside, there clearly were other issues at work here.


In his book Fanny Brice, Herbert G. Goldman writes of a Baby Snooks performance with Bob Hope (links again added by SPS):

Fanny, who rejoined the Follies at the Winter Garden, was still not in the best of health, and had to clear her throat in her Snooks scene Hope. "That's my cold clearing up," she ad-libbed at one point.

"I thought you were just oversexed," was Bob Hope's quick reply. The line stayed in.

Yeah. No wonder it just didn't work properly on television.

I wonder just what it is that people were thinking about Baby Snooks at the time.

You can download 10 Baby Snooks shows from me for just $3.

Note: Gone Fishing (06/01/1939) & Baby Fish Story (04/11/1940) have quite a bit of similar content for a woman who eschewed rehearsals, saying she wanted to give performances a spontaneity and unpredictability that would be lost with an over-familiarity with the lines and other players. That could just be the writers milking their own jokes. What do you notice about the shows?

Adamant Eve, 1949

Sheet music for the 1949 varsity show performance of Adamant Eve. Songs: I Didn't Know it Was That Good and Kissing Me; lyrics by Moe Jaffe and music by Clay Boland. Cover illustration by Lou Day. Via University of Pennsylvania Archives.

Ladies & Gents Noir Thriller

According to the AP, director and playwright Paul Walker's prize-winning play, Ladies & Gents, is a noir thriller performed entirely in the covered men's and women's bathrooms in Central Park's Bethesda Terrace.

The action takes place near the sinks and urinals; the audience stands, clustered in front of the row of stalls. Each of the two pieces that comprise the play runs simultaneously in both bathrooms, and it doesn't matter the order in which they are seen; the audience splits in half and switches facilities at intermission.

Set entirely in a bathroom, the show portrays the seedy underside of 1950s Dublin, when double-talking politicians professed piety but entertained prostitutes on the side.

"So, pretty much like the state of New York right now," Walker said in an interview this week, referring to former Gov. Eliot Spitzer's prostitution scandal. "These themes are always relevant."

Walker and Karl Shiels, the artistic director of the experimental Dublin theater troop Semper Fi, decided an actual bathroom was the best place _ no, the only place _ to stage the play.

See also: Canadian Press' AP review.

Of Bottoms Up, Getting Your Kicks, And Kicks In The Pants

The above illustration is by Bradshaw Crandell & from Ted Saucier's Bottoms Up, Greystone Press, NY, 1951.



Saucier was the publicist for the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel for nearly four decades, and this was likely all the authority needed to author a book of cocktail recipes for the elite -- and which appear to be, at least in part, credited to the elite.

For example, Bottoms Up is the first known reference of a vodka martini in the United States, a recipe credited to celebrity photographer Jerome Zerbe. (Zerbe was a long-time companion of the society columnist and writer Lucius Beebe. Beebe reportedly made so many flattering references to Zerbe in his newspaper column, "This New York," that rival columnist Walter Winchell suggested that the column name should be changed to "Jerome Never Looked Lovelier." Together, Zerbe and Beebe created El Morocco's Family Album.)

As a side-trip, some info on the Waldorf-Astoria -- and certainly such a grand old hotel deserves it's due at a sex history blog. (If only to see that our fascination with celeb watching isn't all that new.; perhaps at a later date we'll dish on the more sordid happenings of bedrooms.)

From a 1931 article titled, At Home To Society:

The hyphenated name caught the public's fancy: a great hotel—a name big enough to apply. The comedians and humorous writers of the day took it up and played upon it—a sure sign of popularity.

"Meet me at the hyphen," said one wag.

"Where is that?"

"Between the Waldorf and the Astoria," was the reply, That joke immediately traveled to Kalamazoo, jumped to Des Moines, leaped to San Francisco, and was soon told in the Hong-Kong Club. Going the other way, within a few weeks it was served as a relish at the Sphinx bar in Cairo with the newest American cocktail. By the spring of 1899 somebody was singing on the stage a song called "The Waldorf-Hyphen-Astoria," whose words various New York papers printed.

Here's a scan of Waldorf "Hyphen" Astoria, words and music by E.C. Center and Jackson Gouraud (via NYPL Digital Gallery).



Here are the lyrics:

We have all met those guys who affect to patronize
The hotel with the hyphenated name
But if it should befall that on them we'd try to call,
It would be hard to find them just the same.
After hunting long and well through each separate hotel,
Without result, a fellow must decide,
They may be on the square, but if they are living there,
It must be on the "hyphen" they reside.

Chrous: At the Waldorf "Hyphen" Astoria,
No matter who or what you are,
Be sure you not to Oscar as you enter.
Just speak to him by name,
And for "ten" he'll do the same--
That's the proper thing at the Waldorf "Hyphen" Astoria.

The 'Oscar' mentioned, according to Nancy Groce in New York: Songs of the City, is "Oscar Tschirky, the Waldorf-Astoria's powerful and punctilious headwaiter". And the song may have mocked the name, but was more about the who's who which stayed there -- and resulting gawkers:

Of course, like today, not everybody seen there was actually a guest or a patron of the hotel's extremely expensive restaurant, the Palm Garden. Many, like the poseur in the 1897 song "Waldorf 'Hyphen' Astoria," simply hung around for a glimpse of the rich and famous.

The song was sung by John Parr in A Reign of Error, a musical farce featuring The Rogers Brothers.



It seems the production had been around earlier, and the song added later (March 19, 1899, The New York Times)



The same allure & authority Saucier & the Waldorf-Astoria held for publishers captured the attention of Hefner and Bottoms Up received a dandy review in the second issue of Playboy -- sure the nude illustrations helped *wink*


(Images via A Dash of Bitters.)

This collector cannot be restrained from wanting such a book. (Give me the $200 for the signed copy at eBay, will ya? I'd settle for any decent copy of Ted Saucier's Bottoms Up, actually; but why should I settle for anything?)

Nor can she help (nor be stopped) from noting this little piece of irony discovered during her research...

In 1931 some clever person (known only by the initials M.C.) 'respectfully' suggested that "the militant suffrage movement, now on the rampage in England, be referred to as 'The Reign of Error'."


It would seem that M.C. was unaware of both theatre & popular music to feel they had coined such a phrase. (Unless they were just 13 years of age at the time the letter to the editor was penned.)

So we begin with an illustration of a naked lady using ice tongs to select men she'll consume and end with a person wishing women would remain less than equals in the eyes of the law.

I leave it for you to discuss.

Film On Flesh

In Gracie's review of John & Mary (1969), there are images from the film of one of those gosh-darn-cool-big-city parties where those naughty artistic folks projected film onto live nude girls a female nude.


I've not seen the film (yet), but have, naturally, heard-tell of such things. When I read/saw the John & Mary review, I was reminded that I'd recently stumbled upon some more recent projection photographs and I realized something... Why I had not thought much of them.

I then tried to retrace my Internet-steps, which was not easy. I couldn't find the original photographer's website -- and I searched, doggedly, for over an hour, with no luck (which made this female bitchy). Instead, I offer you this: The Living Canvas.



What strikes me, when I think of those radical retro artsy projection parties, is the fleeting nature of moving images upon flesh -- which also moves. You have the magic of something seen on, by not felt by, the model/canvas/person. You have the ephemeral quality of it all happening in moments, and then it's gone.

It's titillating, transitory... Arousing and alive. And then it's over. No matter how young, ripe and lush the body, the life, the party or event, everything ends. Only to live on in memories and flashbacks, I suppose.

I 'get' the performance, be it the old or artsy party or the new theatrical event; but the photographs seem to loose something. What they 'gain' in ability to keep, they loose in luster. The very stillness of the human form, the lack of movement, even subtle breathing, puts the matter of 'alive' into question and the moment saved is really not the moment at all.

When performance, however subtle, is replaced by a pose, it's just film on film.

No longer is the flesh really a part of the image at all.

And for me, the thrill is gone.

The Savage 70's

A retro postcard for Casino de Paris at the old Dunes in Las Vegas. Casino de Paris, with it's cast of 100, was conceived, produced and directed by Frederic Apcar, and came to the Dunes in '63.

I cannot make out the artist name on the illustration (no credits are on the back), nor do I know if the nude blonde with a tiger is representative of any particular star. Any help is appreciated.

I just love that the risque card was sent to, "Dear Mother & Father".


According to the image below, via Las Vegas Mikey, Savage '70's started in 1970. (The postcard's postmark is difficult to read; it looks like it could be 1971.)



Related:

* Mondo-Vegas on the Dunes Hotel

* more images & info on Casino de Paris

* a Dunes menu with the same art

* Loulou Gasté (related to photo of Loulou Gasté & Line Renaud in front of classic Dunes sign promoting Casino de Paris, below)

Of Mae West, Radio & Dummies

On December 12, 1937, Mae West appeared in two sketches on ventriloquist Edgar Bergen's radio show, The Chase and Sanborn Hour, then the currently the highest-rated program of the year. She appeared as herself, promoting her Paramount Pictures film, Every Day's a Holiday. On the radio show, West, as to be expected, flirted with Charlie McCarthy, Bergen's dummy, and displayed her risqué wit & sexual euphemisms.


Here's an snippet of the second sketch, via the Mae West Gala blog:

Charlie: Could you even like Mr. Bergen?

Mae: Ah, Mr. Bergen. He’s very sweet. In fact, he’s a right guy. Confidentially, yuh’ll have to show me a man I don’t like.

Charlie: That’s swell! Bergen’s your man. You know, he can be had.

Mae: On second thought, I’m liable to take him away from yuh.

Charlie: Well, if you take Bergen away, I’m speechless. (Laughter.)

Mae: Why don’t you come up … uh, home with me now, honey? I’ll let you play in my woodpile. (Laughter.)

Charlie: Well, I’m not feeling so well tonight. I’ve been feeling nervous lately. I think I’m gonna have a nervous breakdown. Whuup! There I go.

Mae: So, good-time Charlie’s gonna play hard to get? Well, yuh can’t kid me. You’re afraid of women. Your Casanova stuff is just a front, a false front.

Charlie: Not so loud, Mae, not so loud! All my girlfriends are listening.

Mae: Oh, yeah! You’re all wood and a yard long …

Charlie: (weakly): Yeah.

Mae: Yuh weren’t so nervous and backward when yuh came up to see me at my apartment. In fact, yuh didn’t need any encouragement to kiss me.

Charlie: Did I do that?

Mae: Why, yuh certainly did. I got marks to prove it. (Snickering from audience) An’ splinters, too. (Laughter).

If that last line sent the NBC censors and the FCC into panic, it was the earlier sketch which was the most trouble.

The earlier sketch starred West and Don Ameche as Adam and Eve in the Garden Of Eden. Here's part of it, as reported by Time on Jan. 24, 1938:

Snake: That's the forbidden tree.

Eve: Oh, don't be technical. Answer me this—my palpitatin' python—would you like to have this whole Paradise to yourself?

Snake: Certainly.

Eve: O.K., then pick me a handful of fruit— Adam and I'll eat it—and the Garden of Eden is all yours. What do ya say?

Snake: Sssounds all right . . . but it's forbidden fruit.

Eve: Listen, what are you—my friend in the grass or a snake in the grass?

Snake: But forbidden fruit.

Eve: Are you a snake or are you a mouse?

Snake: I'll—I'll do it. (hissing laugh)

Eve: Now you're talking. Here—right in between those pickets.

Snake: I'm—I'm stuck.

Eve: Oh—shake your hips. There, there now, you're through.

Snake: I shouldn't be doing this.

Eve: Yeh, but you're doing all right now. Get me a big one. ... I feel like doin' a big apple.

Snake: Here you are, Missuss Eve.

Eve: Mm—oh, I see—huh—nice goin', swivel hips.

Snake: Wait a minute. It won't work. Adam'll never eat that forbidden apple.

Eve: Oh, yes, he will—when I'm through with it.

Snake: Nonsense. He won't.

Eve: He will if I feed it to him like women are gonna feed men for the rest of time.

Snake: What's that?

Eve: Applesauce.

The sketch was written by Arch Oboler (before his Lights Out fame). According to Old-Time.com:

NBC wanted to present something special for Miss West, so the powers that be turned to one of their most promising young writers, Arch Oboler. "That script came about this way," Oboler recalled on television’s The Merv Griffin Show on August 2, 1973. "NBC called upon me one day in Westwood . . . they were in trouble on the Edgar Bergen show. I knew they always were in trouble on that show, but they were in particular because John Erskin had written a book called Adam and Eve. Miss West didn’t like it, Charlie didn’t like it, Edgar . . . didn’t matter [jokingly laughs], and Don Ameche was playing the lead. So they asked me, would I write this ten-minute sketch? Well, I wasn’t interested in writing for Miss West. Finally, they waved enough money at me, and my good resolves went down the drain, but I made one condition: I said I would write about Adam and Eve only if I could take it out of the book – which I collaborated with years before – that is the Bible [jokingly]. The show was to be rehearsed on Saturday, going on the air on Sunday. This was Thursday, so I stayed up all night with my dear wife, who I married because she knew how to take things down, and I wrote this sketch. It was taken right out of Genesis."

..."Now one thing the powers-that-be forgot," recalled Oboler, "that in those days, unlike today, there were three things that an actress could not do. One was to have a child out of wedlock. Two, she could not swear, and three, she could not wear glasses. It was thought terrible for an actress to wear glasses. Well, Miss West, having all the usual good sense of all of us, didn’t wear her glasses during the rehearsals so she, being very nearsighted never saw my script. She bluffed her way through. It wasn’t until air time that she walked on stage waving these glasses, put them on . . . and for the first time saw the script. The result was disaster. What she did to ‘Adam and Eve’ the Arabs had never done so miserably."

Dorothy Lamour recounted in her 1981 autobiography, My Side of the Road, "One week our special guest was Mae West, who was to play Eve to Don Ameche’s Adam, in a takeoff on the Bible story. Church groups were outraged and the mail came pouring in. I can’t even remember what she said that was so terrible, but I’m sure it was mild by today’s standards."

What Mae West said wasn’t so bad as how she said it. Telling the serpent that "I feel like doin’ a big apple" was one comment ad-libbed, but when the serpent got stuck between the picket fences in an attempt to fetch the forbidden fruit, West exclaimed with the emotion of a woman going through an orgasm, "They’re – They’re! Now you’re through!"

Edgar Bergen was shocked. "We had to have a star each week," he recalled, "and she seemed a logical choice. She was a sex star. We were fully aware of that. ‘Adam and Eve’ as you probably know, had been performed before without any untoward incidents. Possibly our program being on Sunday and having a little fun with the Bible was dangerous. We always had two rehearsals; one on Saturday evening, after which we rewrite and tighten, and then we would do a Sunday afternoon read-through. At that read-through, Mae read her lines straight. It was obvious she knew what she was doing – how to lay out line – but she didn’t give things that Mae West twist until the broadcast. I’ve always said that we had far more permissive material on a previous show."

The conversation/performance was considered so risqué & bordering on blasphemous that not only was the FCC involved, but West was banned from being featured -- or even mentioned -- on the NBC network. She did not perform again on radio until 1949.

Of her performance, Mae West, in her autobiography Goodness Had Nothing to Do with It, said:

There was nothing offensive in the dialogue or it would never have gotten on the air in the first place. I only gave the lines my characteristic delivery. What else could I do? I wasn't Aimee Semple McPherson. Or Lincoln at Gettysburg, or John Foster Dulles, or even Eleanor Roosevelt. I was Mae West. Sunday on radio doesn't alter one's personality. The trouble wasn't caused by the portion of the program in which I traded wisecracks with the bundle of splinters called Charlie McCarthy. It was the 'Adam and Eve' sketch, with me as Eve and Don Ameche as Adam. The sketch had been approved by the radio people and their usual vice-presidents, as all material must be before it is permitted to be broadcast to an innocent America. I had scarcely had time to read over the sketch before the broadcast rehearsal.

But West's performance wasn't the only trouble with the Adam & Eve sketch.

A woman from Texas had written a story about Adam and Eve and claiming plagiarism she sued the network, NBC, and Arch Oboler. Oboler had to go to court and via that same Old-Time.com link, the writer recalls:

"His first question," continued Oboler, "was ‘Mr. Oboler, where were you on February twenty-second – blah, blah, blah.’ And as long as I live, I’ll remember my answer because I was under oath. I said, ‘In the bedroom’ because, you see, Miss West does all of her business in her bedroom. She pays her bills in her bedroom, and she rehearses in her bedroom. So the judge’s next question – he looked at me very suspiciously as if I were the Henry Kissinger of my time – and he said, "Exactly, Mr. Oboler, what were you doing – and remember you’re under oath – what were you doing with Miss West?’ And his face turned bright red and he said, ‘I withdraw the question.’ And that was the end of that."

Ha!

Few opportunities and heavy NBC censorship means there are few radio shows with Mae; you can find a few of them at Old Time Radio Show Catalog, and at eBay (including this record album).

When asked about being censored Mae West reportedly said, "I believe in censorship. After all, I made a fortune out of it."

Fanny Brice, Al Jolson & The Seven Lively Arts

As promised in part one, more on Fanny Brice (with a generous dollop of Al Jolson).





This from the The Seven Lively Arts, by Gilbert Seldes, this is The Daemonic in the American Theatre (pages 191-200).

ONE man on the American stage, and one woman, are possessed--Al Jolson and Fanny Brice. Their daemons are not of the same order, but together they represent all we have of the Great God Pan, and we ought to be grateful for it. For in addition to being more or less a Christian country, America is a Protestant community and a business organization-and none of these units is peculiarly prolific in the creation of daemonic individuals. We can bring forth Roosevelts--dynamic creatures, to be sure; but the fury and the exultation of Jolson is a hundred times higher in voltage than that of Roosevelt; we can produce courageous and adventurous women who shoot lions or manage construction gangs and remain pale beside the extraordinary "cutting loose" of Fanny Brice.

To say that each of these two is possessed by a daemon is a mediaeval and perfectly sound way of expressing their intensity of action. It does not prove anything-not even that they are geniuses of a fairly high rank, which in my opinion they are. I use the word possessed because it connotes a quality lacking elsewhere on the stage, and to be found only at moments in other aspects of American life-in religious mania, in good jazz bands, in a rare outbreak of mob violence. The particular intensity I mean is exactly what you do not see at a baseball game, but may at a prize fight, nor in the productions of David Belasco, nor at a political convention; you may see it on the Stock Exchange and you can see it, canalized and disciplined, but still intense, in our skyscraper architecture. It was visible at moments in the old Russian Ballet.

In Jolson there is always one thing you can be sure of: that whatever he does he does at the highest possible pressure. I do not mean that one gets the sense of his effort, for his work is at times the easiest seeming, the most effortless in the world. Only he never saves up-for the next scene, or the next week, or the next show. His generosity is extravagant; he flings into a comic song or three-minute impersonation so much- energy, violence, so much of the totality of one human being, that you feel it would suffice for a hundred others. In the days when the runway was planked down the centre of every good theatre in America, this galvanic little figure, leaping and shouting--yet always essentially dancing and singing--upon it was the concentration of our national health and gaiety. In Row, Row, Row he would bounce up on the runway, propel himself by imaginary oars over the heads of the audience, draw equally imaginary slivers from the seat of his trousers, and infuse into the song something wild and roaring and insanely funny. The very phonograph record of his famous Toreador song is full of vitality. Even in later days when the programme announces simply "Al Jolson" (about 10.15 P.M. in each of his reviews) he appears and sings and talks to the audience and dances off-and when he has done more than any other ten men, he returns and, blandly announcing that "You ain't heard nothing yet," proceeds to do twice as much again. He is the great master of the one-man show because he gives so much while he is on that the audience remains content while he is off-and his electrical energy almost always develops activity in those about him.

If it were necessary, a plea could be made for violence per se in the American theatre, because everything tends to prettify and restrain, and the energy of the theatre is dying out. But Jolson, who lacks discipline almost entirely, has other qualities besides violence. He has an excellent baritone voice, a good ear for dialect, a nimble presence, and a distinct sense of character. Of course it would be impossible not to recognize him the moment he appears on the stage; of course he is always Jolson-but he is also always Gus and always Inbad the Porter, and always Bombo. He has created a way of being for the characters he takes on; they live specifically in the mad world of the Jolson show; their wit and their bathos are singularly creditable characteristics of themselves-not of Jolson. You may recall a scene I think the show was called Dancing Around - in which a lady knocks at the door of a house. From within comes the voice of Jolson singing, "You made me love you, I didn't wanna do it, I didn't wanna do it"--the voice approaches, dwindles away, resumes -- it is a swift characterization of the lazy servant coming to open the door and ready to insult callers, since the master is out. Suddenly the black face leaps through the doorway and cries out, "We don' want no ice," and is gone. Or Jolson as the black slave of Columbus, reproached by his master for a long absence. His lips begin to quiver, his chin to tremble; the tears are approaching, when his human independence softly asserts itself and he wails, "We all have our moments." It is quite true, for Jolson's technique is the exploitation of these moments; he has himself said that he is the greatest master of hokum in the business, and in the theatre the art of hokum is to make each second count for itself, to save any moment from dulness by the happy intervention of a slap on the back, or by jumping out of character and back again, or any other trick. For there is no question of legitimacy here-everything is right if it makes 'em laugh.

He does more than make 'em laugh; he gives them what I am convinced is a genuine emotional effect ranging from the thrill to the shock. I remember coming home after eighteen months in Europe, during the war, and stepping from the boat to one of the first nights of Sinbad. The spectacle of Jolson's vitality had the same quality as the impression I got from the New York sky line-one had forgotten that there still existed in the world a force so boundless, an exaltation so high, and that anyone could still storm Heaven with laughter and cheers. He sang on that occasion 'N Everything and Swanee. I have suggested elsewhere that hearing him sing Swanee is what book reviewers and young girls loosely call an experience. I know what Jolson does with false sentiment; here he was dealing with something which by the grace of George Gershwin came true, and there was no necessity for putting anything over. In the absurd black-face which is so little negroid that it goes well with diversions in Yiddish accents, Jolson created image after image of longing, and his existence through the song was wholly in its rhythm.

Five years later I heard Jolson in a second-rate show, before an audience listless or hostile, sing this out dated and forgotten song, and create again, for each of us seated before him, the same image-and saw also the tremendous leap in vitality and happiness which took possession of the audience as he sang it. It was marvelous. In the first weeks of Sinbad he sang the words of 'N Everything as they are printed. Gradually (I saw the show in many phases) he interpolated, improvised, always with his absolute sense of rhythmic effect; until at the end it was a series of amorous cries and shouts of triumph to Eros. I have heard him sing also the absurd song about "It isn't raining rain, It's raining violets" and remarked him modulating that from sentimentality into a conscious bathos, with his gloved fingers flittering together and his voice rising to absurd fortissimi and the general air of kidding the piece.

He does not generally kid his Mammy songs-as why should he who sings them better than anyone else? He cannot underplay anything, he lacks restraint, and he leans on the second-rate sentiment of these songs until they are forced to render up the little that is real in them. I dislike them and dislike his doing them-as I dislike Belle Baker singing Elie, Elie! But it is quite possible that my discomfort at these exhibitions is proof of their quality. They and a few very cheap jokes and a few sly remarks about sexual perversions are Jolson's only faults. They are few. For a man who has, year after year, established an intimate relation with no less than a million people, every twelvemonth, he is singularly uncorrupted. That relation is the thing which sets him so far above all the other one-manshow stars. Eddie Cantor gives at times the effect of being as energetic; Wynn is always and Tinney sometimes funnier. But no one else, except Miss Brice, so holds an audience in the hollow of the hand. The hand is steady; the audience never moves. And on the great nights when everything is right, Jolson is driven by a power beyond himself. One sees that he knows what he is doing, but one sees that he doesn't half realize the power and intensity with which he is doing it. In those moments I cannot help thinking of him as a genius.

Quite to that point Fanny Brice hasn't reached. She hasn't, to begin with, the physical vitality of Jolson. But she has a more delicate mind and a richer humour--qualities which generally destroy vitality altogether, and which only enrich hers. She is first a great farceur; and in her songs she is exactly in the tradition of Yvette Guilbert, without the range, so far as we know, which enabled Mme Guilbert to create the whole of mediaeval France for us in ten lines of a song. The quality, however, is the same, and Fanny's evocations are as vivid and as poignant as Yvette's-they require from us exactly the same tribute of admiration. She has grown in power since she sang and made immortal, I Should Worry. Hear her now creating the tragedy of SecondHand Rose or of the one Florodora baby who-- "five little dumbells got married for money, And I got married for love . . .." These things are done with two-thirds of Yvette Guilbert's material missing, for there are no accessories and, although the words (some of the best are by Blanche Merrill) are good, the music isn't always distinguished. And the effects are irreproachable. Give Fanny a song she can get her teeth into, Mon Homme, and the result is less certain, but not less interesting. This was one of a series of realistic songs for Mistinguett, who sang it very much as Yvonne George did when she appeared in America. Miss Brice took it lento affetuoso; since the precise character of the song had changed a bit from its rather more outspoken French original. Miss Brice suppressed Fanny altogether in this song-she was being, I fear, "a serious artist"; but she is of such an extraordinary talent that she can do even this. Yvonne . George sang it better simply because the figure she evoked as Mon Homme was exactly the fake apache about whom it was written, and not the "my feller" who lurked behind Miss Brice. It was amusing to learn that without a Yiddish accent and without those immense rushes of drollery, without the enormous gawkishness of her other impersonations, Miss Brice could put a song over. But I am for Fanny against Miss Brice and to Fanny I return.

Fanny is one of the few people who "Make fun." She creates that peculiar quality of entertainment which is wholly light-hearted and everything else is added unto her. Of this special quality nothing can be said; one either sees it or doesn't, savours it or not. Fanny arrives on the scene with an indescribable gesture--after seeing it twenty times I believe that it consists of a feminine salute, touching the forehead and then flinging out her arm to the topmost gallery. There is magic in it, establishing her character at once -the magic must reside in her incredible elbow. She hasn't so much to give as Jolson, but she gives it with the same generosity, there are no reserves, and it is all for fun. Her Yiddish Squow (how else can I spell that amazing effect?) and her Heiland Lassie are examples-there isn't an arriere-pensee in them.

"The Chiff is after me . . . he says I appil to him . . . he likes my type - - " It is the complete give away of herself and she doesn't care.

And this carelessness goes through her other exceptional qualities of caricature and satire. For the first there is the famous Vamp, in which she plays the crucial scene of all the vampire stories, preluding it with the first four lines of the poem Mr Kipling failed to throw into the wastepaper basket, and fatuously adding, "I can't get over it"--after which point everything is flung into another plane-the hollow laughter, the haughty gesture, the pretended compassion, that famous defense of the vampire which here, however, ends with the magnificent line, "I may be a bad woman, but I'm awful good company." In this brief episode she does three things at once: recites a parody, imitates the moving-picture vamp, and creates through these another, truly comic character. For satire it is Fanny's special quality that with the utmost economy of means she always creates the original in the very process of destroying it, as in two numbers which are exquisite, her present opening song in vaudeville with its reiterations of Victor Hebert's Kiss Me Again, and her Spring Dance. The first is pressed far into burlesque, but before she gets there it has fatally destroyed the whole tedious business of polite and sentimental concert-room vocalism; and the second (Fanny in ballet, with her amazingly angular parody of five-position dancing) puts an end forever to that great obsession of ours, classical interpretative dancing.

Fanny's refinement of technique is far beyond Jolson's; her effects are broad enough, but her methods are all delicate. The frenzy which takes hold of her is as real as his. With him she has the supreme pleasure of knowing that she can do no wrong-and her spirits mount and intensify with every moment on the stage. She creates rapidly and her characterizations have an exceptional roundness and fulness; when the daemon attends she is superb.

It is noteworthy that these two stars bring something to America which America lacks and lovesthey are, I suppose, two of our most popular entertainers--and that both are racially out of the dominant caste. Possibly this accounts for their fine carelessness about our superstitions of politeness and gentility. The medium in which they work requires more decency and less frankness than usually exist in our private lives; but within these bounds Jolson and Brice go farther, go with more contempt for artificial notions of propriety, than anyone else. Jolson has re-created an ancient type, the scalawag servant with his surface dulness and hidden cleverness, a creation as real as Sganarelle. And Fanny has torn through all the conventions and cried out that gaiety still exists. They are parallel lines surcharged with vital energy. I should like to see that fourth-dimensional show in which they will meet.

You can read The Seven Lively Arts by Gilbert Seldes online here; or, if you should, like I, prefer paper to cozy up with, here's the paperback at Amazon -- which, you can get a deal on if you purchase it with The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States by Michael Kammen.

I mention the latter as the blurbs about that book have some of the best, clearest, most concise information on Gilbert Seldes himself.

From Publishers Weekly:

In his 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts, Seldes (1893-1970) made the then-controversial claim that popular entertainment and culture should be treated just as seriously, and as rigorously, as the so-called high arts. Krazy Kat and Irving Berlin were worthy of critical attention, he said; and arts criticism in America hasn't been the same since. Kammen, a historian, stresses the "hands-on" aspect of Seldes's long and versatile career. He was a historian, novelist, playwright, filmmaker, scriptwriter, journalism school dean, newspaper and magazine columnist and CBS's first director of television. Although at times Kammen seems curiously defensive, his balanced and insightful account of Seldes's professional life?from the early '20s at the Dial magazine (and the beginning of long-running feuds with both Hemingway and the Algonquin Round Table set) to the 1950s debates on the role of "mass culture"?is a story of a life as well as a history of pop culture on the rise. Seldes, Kammen says, thought of himself as "a highbrow populist" and was a "compulsively candid critic." Kammen weights Seldes's contributions fairly but can be equally candid.

Mary Carroll of Booklist:

Cornell University's Kammen is an astute student of U.S. cultural history; People of Paradox (1972), A Machine That Would Go of Itself (1986), and Mystic Chords of Memory (1991) suggest his scope. It's hardly surprising that he would find Seldes a fascinating biographical subject. Seldes was a major contributor to arts criticism and magazine journalism from the 1920s to the 1960s: edited The Dial when it published T. S. Eliot's The Wasteland; wrote a classic defense of popular art, The Seven Lively Arts (1924), hundreds of magazine articles, a successful Broadway treatment of Lysistrata, and programs for radio and TV; and was founding dean of the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of Communications. Seldes fought with Hemingway, George Jean Nathan, and Edward R. Murrow and wrestled with issues of current relevance, including "dumbing down" vs. "leveling up" in the mass media and government's role in supporting (or restraining) artistic expression. Seldes shed light rather than heat on significant artistic issues American society has faced.

Also, related, is this piece on The Seven Lively Arts and The Freemasons.

For more on Jolson, the International Al Jolson Society.

Putting On The Ritz, Again

Read about the old, long-running Broadway play, The Ritz -- and the new re-do -- at Fabulon.