Family Archive

A Theatrical Photograph

From the very first time I saw this shot of Harry and Juliet it was always one of my favorites. For reasons unknown to me at the time it struck me differently than the others. It somehow felt more resonant and personal despite the fact that I knew very little about it.

Most photographs capture a moment in time. They are utilitarian. But on the rare occasion when everything is just so... the light is perfect, the photographer on his game, the composition organic and all the planets are perfectly aligned; a photograph can be so much more. It can be a narrative. It can be a novel. It can jostle your imagination and tell you a story. This photo was like that for me. It made my mind race to look at it and always made me smile. I created stories based on what I knew about it. But I wanted the true story, the details, the context. How do I make that happen?  

I created my own "punch list" of questions that helped me gather information and develop clues to learn more about it. My list included questions about the photo itself (the actual piece of paper): Where did I find it? What was it next to? What else was near it? Was there anything written on the back? And questions about the photographs content. Who is it of? Are there other people in it? Is there anything I recognize or that stands out (Location, objects, subject matter)? Does it remind me of other photos? Is anything unusual or out of the ordinary happening? Who might have taken it? When was it taken? Where are they? What are they wearing? 

Here are some interesting clues and deductions I made from my list of questions.

1.There was nothing written on the photograph but I found it in a box of family photos not with Harry or Juliet's photo collections, press books or scrap books even though it was definitely stage related.

2.They were both in full costume in the picture which meant they were performing together. This was very unusual. Harry wrote some of Juliet's material but they were both solo performers. I hadn't remembered ever reading or hearing of them working together in the same show or even on the same billing.

3.The costumes they are wearing were not from their Vaudeville routines. They were more like theater or movie costumes. He wore what looked like an Old Military costume (maybe Cavalry) and she looked like a mannequin of a Gypsy Princess.

5.I had seen enough photographs of my Grandfather to tell he was in his early 20s here. He was born in 1892 so that would put this picture somewhere between 1913-1917 (he went into the Navy during WWI in 1918.)

6.From the shadows you can tell that it was taken outside but there are no distinguishing landmarks or way of telling where it might be.

7.There were some interesting props and wardrobe pieces. He had a sword and wore riding boots and she had a long bead necklace and wore an unusually shaped tiara on her head.

Was this enough to figure it out? I went to the internet and started to search. Juliet had changed her name a few times and I wasn't exactly sure when she had changed it or how to search "Miss Juliet" or "Juliet?" so I thought a good place to start would be to search Harry Delf on the IBDB, the Internet Broadway Data Base, a fairly comprehensive collection of Theater and the people connected to the Theater through history. This search yielded 14 item but only 3 of them fell in the years from 1913-1917 so this was a starting point. I recognized all the different titles. The first 2 were from 1914 and the third from 1916. The third was The Cohan Revue of 1916. I clicked on it. I remembered seeing material from this show when putting together the archive. I remembered that Juliet had played a leading role but I had never known my Grandfather was in the show as well. On the site I learned Harry played a character named Billie Holliday. I looked down the cast and sure enough listed as Miss Juliet there she was. http://www.ibdb.com/production.php?id=8268. The George M Cohan Revue was one of the biggest Theater Productions of that year. It played at the Astor Theater in NYC. I went back to my archive and found what I had from the show. 

I found a few different Program/Playbills and a bunch of newspaper articles about the show. I knew I was on the right trail. I started leafing through the program and found this and I instantly knew that I had nailed it.

Look at it next to  the photo from above. Juliet is on the left side in the front. Her headpiece and the long string of beads were the important clues that this was the show where the photo was taken.The dress sealed it.

 

The Great White Way.

Here is a card from my collection for the 7th Ed. (light) Postcard Festival on A Canadian Family at http://wp.me/pp92w-850 . It shows New York's Theater district during the late 1920's. This was the time and the place where the entertainment world all came together. Theater, Vaudeville and Movies all shared this midtown neighborhood. The stretch of Broadway from 42nd street up to around 53rd street became known as "The Great White Way." On a site called Big Apple Corner I discovered how this phrase came into being and changed over time to become the defining title for the area.

"The Great White Way" was originally the title of a 1901 book about the South Pole. The term was applied to Broadway by Shep Friedman of the New York Morning Telegraph, after a snowstorm on Broadway in 1902 had turned the street into a "white way." Later, "white way" referred to the lights of Broadway. The term was used to describe the multitude of lights that were used to illuminate the NYC Theater district every evening during these formative years for entertainment.

Jeanne

My Grandfather Harry and Great Aunt Juliet were not the only Vaudeville performers in the family. Jeanne Densen (born in 1902 in New York City) was a stage actress who performed in Musical Theater and  Operettas in the early to mid-1920's. Harry and Jeanne were married on June 19, 1927. They had 2 children my Aunt Enid and my Father Harry Jr. After my Grandparents were married Jeanne left the Theater. I've uncovered only a few items from her stage legacy in my archive and found very little about her career on the internet, but I'm still hunting.

Above is an article from the Seattle Sun from the year 1926. My Grandmother, Jeanne is on the bottom right(5). She starred in an adaptation of Franz Schubert's "Blossom Time". I've done my best to protect the clipping using archival materials but the newspaper is disintegrating away. The article on the left below was from an issue of Variety, 1927. The article on the right I'm not certain which newspaper it came from.

  

 

Palace Vaudeville Lineup.

Normally I wouldn't post a newspaper article of this length to a blog for fear that my readers would get totally bored and turned off by it and just skip on to the next post in their reader. I know I would. But to me, this review written by Sam M'kee and taken from the March 31,1925 New York Telegraph, did such a remarkable job capturing a representative image of a Vaudeville lineup both from the perspective of the shows content and 1920's era journalism I wanted to include it and see what others thought.

From what I could extract from the article, the show proceeded as follows:

I Opening Act:  "Study in Nonsense" The Duponts

II "The Lovable Pup With his Gang"(Dog)

 1.Hector The lovable pup

 2.Hector's 19 year old Grandfather

 3.The Gang (15 others)

III Olgamayra and the Bittel Sisters (Dance)

  1."Black and Gold" Staged by Alan K Foster

  2.Olgamayra solo numbers

  3.Bittel Sisters Duet numbers

  4.Climax A rustic Russian flirtation number (all three)

IV "Ourselves" Dougie Leavitt and Mary Ruth Lockwood joined by Charles Bates (Comedy)

  They illustrate the sappy politeness preceding marriage and the nervous irascibility after the ceremony

V Nate Leipsig (Card Tricks)

VI Clifton Webb and Mary Hay (Dance Team) with Club Ciro (9 man Orchestra) conducted by Dave Bernie who splits time on the Piano. Featuring Dillon Ober and his Marimba Solo. BTW Yes it is the same Clifton Webb with 3 Academy Award Nominations and a Golden Globe Award for Razors Edge

    Dances  

   1.Rendevous

   2.Strolling

   3.Allez Up

   4.Charleston.

VII Miss Juliet AKA My Great Aunt (Impersonations and Characterizations)

VIII James Barton (Comedy/Dance)

   1."The Pest" assisted by Lew Christy and Charlot Allen

IX Charles King (Singer)

X Closing Act: Rose Irene Kress and her associate whirlers (Dancing Acrobatics on Roller Skates)

Searching Vaudeville

Discovered a Program/Playbill circa 1921 in my archive from another stop on the Orpheum Circuit, the Hennepin Theater in Minneapolis. On this bill, Harry Delf not only performed his notable comedy and dance routines but also wrote the headlining number, a "Dramatic Incident in Five Parts" titled "The Joker" featuring Silent Film star Ethel Clayton.

At the suggestion of a "Family Archive" reader in a comment to my post Continuous Vaudeville http://cityvoice.typepad.com/family_archive/2009/11/continuous-vaudeville.html I've made it my standard practice to search (Google, IMDB, IBDB and Wikipedia) the performers listed on these Program/Playbills that shared the stage with my Vaudeville relatives. As well as yielding many fascinating and unique stories, what I've learned from these searches has helped me put the Era into a broader historical context. While some of these performers haven't been household names for close to a Century, I would argue, they were the first generation pioneers and the origin of what we think of today as the Modern Entertainment Industry. Take Ethel Clayton for example from a quick search I learned: she was born in 1882 in Champaign Illinois. She started out as a stage actress eventually landing starring roles. She made her first film "Justified" a silent short in early 1909 and had 3 other credited roles that year. She was in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1911. The IMDB mentions her as having 189 credited and uncredited film appearances roughly 2/3 were in Silents. She made her last film appearance in 1947 in "The Perils of Pauline".

When you consider that Edison's "The Great Train Robbery", generally recognized as the first narrative film, came out in 1903 and Clayton's film career started in 1909 and lasted 38 years and that during this period she was performing on a stage with Fanny Brice and Bert Williams in the Ziegfeld Follies a few years after it was founded; for my money these seem like ample credentials to justify the status Pioneer of the Modern Entertainment Industry. 

 

Continuous Vaudeville

The Vaudeville Era was a quirky period of America's history. For many it was their big chance to break into the new and rapidly emerging entertainment industry. Several of the great performers from  Hollywood's Golden Age cut their teeth on the Vaudeville stage. Shortly before the turn of the century, Vaudeville Theaters started popping up all over the United States. Circuits or chains of inter-state Theaters owned by an individual or group were formed to insure both the maximum exposure of the entertainers and that they played only the venues that were owned by the individual/group they were under contract with. The performers traveled the Circuits by train, sometimes playing a venue for only a single day then moving on to the next Theater in the chain. The managers of these Theaters were a shifty but resourceful bunch. They answered directly to the owners and were under constant pressure to keep revenues increasing. Sometimes to realize these financial expectations they were forced to develop new marketing schemes designed to increase profitability. Out of this came ideas like starting the shows in the morning and running them consecutively deep into the night, a practice that became known as "Continuous Vaudeville." The managers designed the shows to bring an audience in, keep them entertained for a couple of hours and then move them out of there. What emerged from this plan looked somewhat like a baseball lineup. Each act was given a position on the bill with a particular purpose to it. The first acts got the audience warmed up while the crowd came in and found their seats. Then came the headlining acts, which were the heart of the lineup. These were followed by the finishing acts which were arranged to help facilitate the crowd's exit from the Theater. These last acts were often so distasteful or just plain bad they would efferctively clear the hall enabling the managers to refill the vacated seats with a whole new crop of paying customers for the next show.

My Grandfather Harry and Great Aunt Juliet were both headliners and "top billers" on the Orpheum Circuit. They spent part of the year performing from Theater to Theater in the Midwestern United States eventually winding up at the end of the circuit in California.

The Family Upstairs

Harry Delf wrote The Family Upstairs during the early part of the 1920's. It was produced and staged at the Gaiety Theater on 46th and Broadway in the year 1925. The play was a comic exploration of the dynamics of middle class family life in New York City.

He wrote about what he knew, which was not the New York of high society and parties that comes to mind when we envision the roaring Twenties. It wasn't the wealthy and powerful New York of Riverside Drive, Park or Fifth Avenues; nor was it the down and out street New York of Chaplin's little tramp or Keaton's lovable drifter characters. He wrote about the New York of the Bronx, Harlem, West End and the pockets of the city where families of moderate middle class means lived. In 1925 writing about a middle class family was a novel concept to the entertainment world both because it was about the middle class and because it was about the family.

He wrote several plays about this subject matter that all had the word Family in their titles and became known as the "Family Series." Besides The Family Upstairs he wrote Too Much Family, The Family Picnic, The Family Wedding and a few others.

Sheet Music

Just a strange coincidence? It's eerily similar to the title of my blog.....

Various parts of the collection from my family archive still remain unexplored. One segment that I find a bit intimidating and haven't fully delved into yet are the reams of hand written sheet music I found in an antique hand painted chest hidden under my parent's piano. Even though I can visually appreciate this collection I lack the musical skills needed to read or play it. My Grandfather Harry wrote both music and lyrics for the Vaudeville stage, Musical Revue and Broadway. Certain pieces he wrote to be performed by himself, some he wrote for his sister Juliet and others he wrote for top performers of the era. I've been starting to familiarize myself with the sheet music and lyrics but haven't made much of a dent yet. The Family Album was a piece he performed as part of a Vaudeville routine. He wrote the lyrics for this piece but not the music. When I searched the title I found this article from a periodical called the New York Clipper dated May 23, 1917 under the header Fifth Avenue Vaudeville.

Harry Delf presents a single, in which he presents songs and patter of his own writing. After a song and some talk, he introduced a series of old-time characters from the family album.This is followed by another song and some more patter. He followed each song with soft shoe dancing which ranks with the best. For an encore he rendered another song. He is a capital all 'round entertainer and fully deserved the recognition accorded him.

Getting this opportunity to learn about my family history and the relatives I never got to meet through this unexpected discovery has been a gift. An additional benefit has been derived from getting the chance to explore and exhibit the personal collection of early 20th Century media using 21st Century tools and technology. It has been both enriching and rewarding getting to learn from the knowledge and experience of the various communities I've discovered around the Web. This wasn't my goal or interest when I first started Family Archive but as I become more familiar with the material and the technology the possibilities seem open ended .

I've been thinking about my Grandfather's Sheet Music. How can I use technology to showcase his music as I use JPG's to display photos? One suggestion that came from my downstairs neighbor was to put an ad on this site for a pianist, record some of these old tunes like The Family Album and play them with each post.