Father of the Follies

By Carolyn See,
who can be reached at www.carolynsee.com
Friday, November 14, 2008

ZIEGFELD

The Man Who Invented Show Business

By Ethan Mordden

St. Martin's. 335 pp. $32.95

"Flo liked his erotica neat and fulfilled, not coy and gibbering," Ethan Mordden writes close to the beginning of this engaging, often gnomic, information-packed biography of Florenz Ziegfeld. Further on, describing the Broadway that the flamboyant manager-producer set out to conquer, the author writes that "fancy restaurants catering to those oathed to leisure and the breaking of sumptuary laws were already in place, as infrastructure of the late-night carousing that theatregoing encouraged." And later in the narrative, as Mordden disparages the arriviste competition that Ziegfeld's "Follies" engendered, he disses rival showman Earl Carroll thus: "In fact, [Carroll's] Vanities really was the nearest of all revues to the Follies -- as near as a rubber tire is to the Colosseum in Rome."

These are strange sentences! If they don't drive you away from the page, they will, at the very least, induce you to ponder: What the heck is this man talking about? But, in his defense, Mordden has set himself an almost impossibly daunting task. As a scholar of theater and film history, and also the author of several tenderhearted pieces of gay fiction, he has to at least take a shot at getting inside the mind of a theatrical impresario who was, in addition, one of the great heterosexual philanderers of all time. So one of the basic questions the author must address is not just: How did Ziegfeld get from here to there? How did he dream up the idea of creating entertainment out of zillions of almost-naked ladies dressed up in nothing but peacock feathers? But rather, what miracle propelled him into the perfect vocation for his temperament, with almost infinite access to a steady stream of the most beautiful, most readily compliant women in the Western world?

Put another way, what was Flo Ziegfeld, the man who, the author claims, changed the face of New York show business in the early 20th century, thinking? The author takes the position that nobody knows, that Ziegfeld was at pains to keep his feelings, if he had any, to himself -- that he was friends, for instance, with the two principal comics of his "Follies," Will Rogers Jr. and Eddie Cantor, but that they were merely drinking buddies, nothing like confidants. And twice Mordden tells us that "The man had no sense of humor whatsoever. Eventually, he learned to trust the public to tell him by their laughter who was funny."

Without having a clue about what a man thinks or what (if anything) makes him laugh, the biographer must rely upon a slew of external details, together with theories of his own, about the man we are to think of as the creator of modern show business. Ziegfeld, we are told, was born in Chicago of German immigrant parents who ran a music school. Thus, he grew up with a knowledge of classical music, but also with a certain Chicago style that derived from the 1893 World's Fair, an emphasis on commerce and Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. He was well acquainted with the midway and vaudeville, but disdained them. (To be honest, I don't understand what this "Chicagoness" means, but perhaps we can imagine it to embody a certain hardboiled, grounded way of looking at things that armed Ziegfeld adequately to take on Broadway in the 1890s.)

First, Ziegfeld managed a weight-lifting strong man, inviting female theatergoers backstage to feel his muscles. (Sexy? I guess so, in the 1890s.) He then traveled to Europe and brought back the Polish-born Anna Held, an hourglass-figured beauty who was darling and beguiling and starred in many of his first variety shows; she later remarked, "I speak English so well I am no longer cute." They married, sort of; he made her a queen of Broadway, then left her for a stunning floozy named Lillian Lorraine. As Mordden tells us again and again, Ziegfeld was dead-set against the folksy vulgarity of vaudeville and invented a series of revues as he went along-- the Ziegfeld "Follies" -- that combined parades of dizzyingly beautiful, very scantily costumed girls with sophisticated spoofs on the events of the day. Very much like the material we see in Vegas clubs now, except that the tunes, though risque, were sweetly innocent: "Shine On, Harvest Moon"! He was a king of special effects: airplanes gliding over the heads of the audience, automobiles and live horses milling about onstage. Surprise and delight were what he was aiming for -- achieved by hard negotiation and the art of the deal.

This book is as much history as biography. Ziegfeld's personal life is consistently blank, but Mordden fills his pages with cast lists of every single "Follies," with mini-biographies of every star and comic, an extensive history of "Show Boat," which Ziegfeld produced, as well as a detailed account of the managers' wars, an extended theatrical feud that bedeviled Manhattan for decades. There is no lack of material here.

After years and years of spectacle and peacock feathers, and a marriage to actress Billie Burke, who adored him, the crash came in 1929 and wiped him out. He soldiered on for 2 1/2 more years, fell ill, was taken across the country by Billie on the train. They took him off at Barstow, in the heart of the Mojave Desert, still one of the most desolate places on Earth. And thence to Los Angeles, where he died. His life is almost incomprehensible in its breadth and quality of experience, but Mordden's voice, so impenetrable at times, is perfectly suited to this vast, embossed, embellished material.

Sunday in Book World

· Wally Lamb's Columbine novel.

· Emma Donoghue's Victorian melodrama.

· "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire."

· Looted ancient treasures.

· And a roundup of noir mysteries.