Vaughan was busy in her kitchen. She wore an apron, and with spoon in hand she bent over to sample the roast in her oven. This image appeared in a 1949 profile titled “Sarah Vaughan at Home,” accompanied by the caption “The 23-year-old singer can bake a cake or whip up a tasty dish if she wants to. She’s shown in her sunny kitchen.” In other photos from the same profile Vaughan, who was actually twenty-four, almost twenty-five, roughhoused with Baron, her boxer; sat in quiet contemplation on the couch reading a book; worked out musical ideas at the piano; and reviewed a score with her husband George Treadwell before a recording session.1 It was a charming tableau, a glimpse into her private life, and a striking contrast to the professional side of Vaughan seen by most of her fans. And it was an increasingly important part of her public image and brand.
As Vaughan’s popularity grew in the late 1940s and early 1950s, she appeared in more and more profiles celebrating both her successes as a vocalist and her role as a devoted homemaker, hostess, and wife. A profile from 1950 featured more photos of Vaughan at home, some of them surprisingly intimate. Readers saw Vaughan and Treadwell together in bed; he slept as she perused “funny books.” And they saw the couple again the next morning, this time sitting at their breakfast table, where Treadwell read Variety as an apron-clad Vaughan looked on. “Her schedule doesn’t allow much time for housework, but she does enjoy cooking for her George,” the caption explained.2 In 1952, Ebony portrayed Vaughan as the perfect hostess. In the photo piece, “Date with a Dish,” Vaughan wore an evening gown, her hair and makeup perfect, as she presented an elaborate platter of three-cornered sandwiches, egg baskets with crab meat, cocktail crackers, and a cheese ball. “Velvet-voiced Sarah Vaughan, charming chanteuse, is an attractive hostess who knows how to provide an equally attractive hors d’oeuvres tray,” began the caption for the photo piece.3 Other profiles extoled her love of cooking (chili was her specialty), comic books, her dogs (her surrogate children), golf, horseback riding, and Dodgers baseball games. The message was clear: despite Vaughan’s status as an innovative artist, working woman, and primary breadwinner for her household, at home she was just another doting housewife. And she longed to have children: a boy and a girl. When asked if she planned to retire after becoming a mother, Vaughan said, “I have not given that a thought.”4
The media’s treatment of Vaughan was not unusual. During the 1950s, when writing about women that excelled in male-dominated professions, the press, both black and white, emphasized their roles as wives and mothers. They depicted professional women as extremely feminine and interested in fashion and the domestic arts. It became a way to legitimate a woman’s public achievements while reassuring readers that conventional gender roles and heterosexuality remained intact.5 It reestablished the status quo, the same status quo that Vaughan disrupted every day.
Treadwell possessed a savvy understanding of how audiences needed to see Vaughan and became a master of honing her image. Almost everything in her life, whether public or personal, became fodder for the press. He constantly orchestrated publicity events. Photos of the happy couple out on the town socializing, usually with other celebrities, regularly graced the pages of black newspapers and lifestyle magazines. In 1949, the press greeted Vaughan and her growing entourage of support staff at LaGuardia the first time she flew across the country from Los Angeles to New York. An elaborate, champagne-fueled bon voyage party kicked off her first tour of Europe in 1953. Her birthday parties at Birdland became an annual event. Similar parties marked wedding anniversaries, club openings, and record releases. Society reporters dutifully detailed her wardrobe and jewelry, the gourmet meal she had catered, the celebrities in attendance, and the expensive gifts Treadwell gave Vaughan: diamond rings, mink coats, or new cars, usually Cadillacs. It was all an effort to portray Vaughan as increasingly successful and affluent, as a happily married woman living the American dream.
Sometimes Treadwell manufactured controversy. In the summer of 1948, Vaughan returned to Chicago for seven weeks of engagements. She’d won a local DJ poll, organized by her advocate and friend Dave Garroway, to headline for two of those weeks at the Chicago Theatre, the town’s largest, most elaborate movie palace. But her performances were not going well, and her box office draw was lackluster. “She’s dying in there,” Johnnie Garry, Vaughan’s road manager, remembered telling Treadwell. So Treadwell organized for a gang of six hoodlums to throw tomatoes at Vaughan from the balconies. The “attack” sparked outrage. The Chicago Defender condemned the “disgraceful episode,” reporting that it was the result of petty jealousies over Vaughan’s success and Garroway’s blatant favoritism. Booking agents were frustrated by the strong hold that Treadwell had on Vaughan’s contract. And personal managers of what the Defender termed “ofay” singers, a derogatory slang for whites, were bitter because Vaughan crowded out their vocalists during an already sluggish time of year. After the episode, the press covered Vaughan’s triumphant return to the stage the next night and the outpouring of support she received from the city’s DJs and now-sold-out audiences.6 And the story of Vaughan’s attack had legs, becoming fodder for future profiles. “Headlines!” Garry explained.7
Sometimes, however, Treadwell overreached, and his zeal for publicity backfired. Two months before the incident in Chicago, in June 1948, both Down Beat and black newspapers reported that two men tried to hold Vaughan and Treadwell up as they walked to their hotel after a gig in Washington, D.C. Fortunately, Vaughan’s dog was with them. “Get ’em, Baron!” yelled Treadwell. The boxer leapt at one of the men, Treadwell at the other. Vaughan screamed, alerting the police, who took the two men into custody. Baron’s reward? A new diet of steak dinners.8 It was a cute, catchy story, which Down Beat ran on its first page, complete with a photo of Vaughan, Baron, and her latest Musicraft release. But it was also untrue. Down Beat discovered that the Washington, D.C., metropolitan police department had no record of an attempted robbery of Vaughan or Treadwell on the date provided by her press agent, Jim McCarthy. The editors of Down Beat were furious, decrying phony stories and the press agents and managers who disseminated them.9
Vaughan disapproved too. According to friends, she disliked Treadwell’s enthusiasm, verging on obsession, for sensational publicity. She was an unassuming woman, shy and reserved. In essence, a very private woman leading a public life. While she needed a boisterous, more extroverted counterpart to interface with the press and industry at large, it must have been difficult for her to have more and more details of her personal life, especially her marriage, put on display.
Unfortunately, as her national profile increased, Treadwell’s prominence in her personal narrative increased too.10 He frequently became the story, the focal point. It began with the occasional profile, like 1948’s “The Man Behind the Gal: George Treadwell Quit Band to Pilot Singer-Wife. It Paid Off,” and soon escalated. Confessionals, supposedly penned by Vaughan, appeared in African American lifestyle magazines. In 1949, “My Biggest Break” outlined the two most important moments of her career: the first was meeting and marrying George Treadwell, and the second was her appearances at the Chicago Theatre. In this retelling, Treadwell was responsible for landing Vaughan the gig. When crushed by the onslaught of tomatoes, she ran offstage, overwhelmed and terrified, into the protective arms of her loving, always supportive husband. Unconvinced that show business was for her, she cried out, “I’ll never sing again!” Treadwell set her right and persuaded her that she must continue. In 1950, Tan Confessions published “How He Proposed,” and the following year, in “The Man Behind Me,” Vaughan outlined everything that Treadwell did for her. He booked her gigs, briefed the press, chose (and sometimes designed) her gowns, had power of attorney, and managed all of her finances. “George almost never rests,” she wrote in Our World. “George is really a vital part of me. More important than an arm or a leg. He’s been behind me since the beginning and I hate to think what things would be like without him.”11
Despite appearances of a happy marriage and business partnership, their relationship was beginning to crumble. She didn’t need Treadwell as much as she had earlier. In 1952, after almost ten years in the business, Vaughan, now twenty-eight, had matured and become more independent and comfortable in her role as a star, and her career was still gaining momentum. Whereas Treadwell once served as her sole companion, she now traveled with an entourage, including her pianist Jimmy Jones, road manager Johnnie Garry, and personal secretary Annette Wilson, later replaced by Modina Davis. That summer, she assembled her first trio, hiring the bassist Israel Crosby, drummer Buzz Freeman, and pianist John Malachi, who sat in for an ailing Jones during a two-year medical leave. She now had a large support network.
Those close to the couple noticed a growing volatility between Vaughan and Treadwell too. Like Vaughan, Treadwell loved being in control. According to friends, he dictated what she wore (as often celebrated in the black press); where she performed; what she did after hours, when not onstage; how she spoke; and who she spoke to. Prone to possessiveness and jealousy, Treadwell didn’t want Vaughan socializing with other men at bars, as the after-hours incident following her birthday appearance at Birdland in 1953 so clearly demonstrated. In addition to managing all of her finances, he had her on a strict weekly allowance (although, according to Davis, Vaughan preferred this arrangement). But as her success increased, Vaughan didn’t want to be told what to do all of the time. She wanted the freedom to live her life on her own terms. Vaughan was outgrowing the relationship and started to push back. The couple argued more and more. Sometimes she threatened not to go onstage, and sometimes their arguments became physical. Drummer Jimmy Cobb, who joined Vaughan’s trio in 1970, remembered staying at the Watkins Hotel in Los Angeles in 1950 at the same time as Vaughan and Treadwell. “The rap was that [they were] fighting all day up in the room,” he said. “George used to put her in the closet and kind of smack her around a little, so no one would hear that.”12
The couple traveled together less frequently. “With George in the office and Sassy on the road, their love affair cooled,” explained road manager Johnnie Garry.13 But Treadwell did make surprise visits to check up on Vaughan as she toured. He’d arrive in town, and when he couldn’t find her at her hotel, he’d become jealous, track her down, and, according to Davis, “[sneak] up on her, to see if he would catch her” cheating with another man. Usually, she was just hanging out, relaxing after a long night onstage.14
Vaughan and Treadwell likely separated for the first time in the spring or summer of 1952. By the end of the summer, gossip columns in the African American press speculated that all was not well between the couple. Vaughan and Treadwell responded with a strategic photo op together after Vaughan’s successful appearance with the New York Symphony at the Yale Bowl in August. “This friendly scene should put at rest the numerous rumors of a rift in the Vaughan-Treadwell association,” read one caption, and another proclaimed that Vaughan and Treadwell “are a picture of contentment as they contemplate a rosy future.”15 They would do this time and again. Vaughan stayed in the duplex above her parents’ home in Newark and Treadwell moved to an apartment in Greenwich Village. They continued to work together all while maintaining their public façade as the happily married couple. They did this for years.
It’s unclear why the couple didn’t divorce in 1952. Perhaps they both harbored optimism that the relationship could be saved. Perhaps Vaughan had an emotional investment in remaining married and wanted to avoid the inevitable pain that would come with finalizing her divorce. Perhaps she also understood the value of maintaining a public narrative of a happy marriage and domesticity. It afforded her a certain privacy and freedom to live her life on her own terms. After all, her lifestyle was unconventional. As an entertainer, she worked evenings and weekends. After work, fueled by a post-performance adrenaline high, she went to after-hours clubs to unwind and usually stayed until morning. She smoked, drank, and did drugs. Sometimes she stayed out for days at a time, repeating a cycle of working and partying. The public image of Vaughan as a happy homemaker and homebody, a June Cleaver of sorts, provided a valuable counternarrative to aspects of her life that many in society deemed less acceptable. This was especially important when her world bumped up against the establishment. In 1951, she was arrested during a raid of a private home in Detroit. “We were just having a party last night and we were having a ball when all of a sudden we heard some glass break,” Vaughan told reporters. “The door came down and the police came in.” The police, concerned that the home was an illegal after-hours club, took her fingerprints and held her for ten hours, during which time she serenaded her fellow inmates.16 In 1952, Vaughan and Treadwell testified before a Washington, D.C., grand jury investigating the whereabouts of ninety-nine pounds of marijuana that disappeared during a big drug bust the previous year. According to the U.S. attorney Charles M. Irelan, Vaughan was not under investigation, but he believed that she might have information about the missing drugs. She was one of several musicians who appeared before the grand jury that day. In the end, Irelan conceded that her testimony was not helpful. Vaughan and Treadwell shielded their faces from photographers as they left the courthouse, and when asked by the press what she had been questioned about, she said, “They wanted to know whether the sun was shining outside.”17
In 1953, gossip columnists reported that Vaughan had a new beau, a wealthy businessman from Atlantic City.18 And in 1957, rumors spread that she and boxing champion Joe Louis were having an affair. After months of speculation, the press finally confronted Vaughan. “This is all very silly,” she told the Baltimore Afro-American. “I happen to be a married woman!”19 Vaughan and Louis were not romantically involved, but her status as a married woman did deflect attention from the affairs that she likely had during her separation from Treadwell.
As Vaughan continued to assert her independence and freedom while using her marriage as cover, Treadwell worked to increase his presence in her public narrative. In January 1952, just months before the couple separated, with their relationship deteriorating and his control of Vaughan waning, he launched his most ambitious and enduring publicity campaign.20 He rewrote her origin story, placing himself at the center. He became the mastermind behind her many successes and the man responsible for quite literally creating the Sarah Vaughan audiences knew and loved.
In his retelling, Vaughan’s story began late one night in 1946, near the end of her run at Café Society. Treadwell knocked on her dressing room door, came in, and announced: “Look, Sassy, I got $8,000, here all in cash. It’s all the money I’ve got in the world. Know what I’m going to do with it? I’m taking two dollars of it to buy a marriage license with. The other is going to be put behind Mrs. Sarah Vaughan Treadwell. When I get through with you, I’ll bet you won’t know yourself. You up for it?”21
“I still cannot see what interested George in me at the time, but he later told me he had missed his trumpet parts and had fouled up notes behind me because he ‘just fell hard’ for me,” Vaughan confessed in a March 1953 feature for Tan Confessions magazine titled “Dark Girls Can Make It Too!” Even though her name appeared on the byline, it’s unlikely that she penned the piece. The profile outlined the key details and plot points for the new publicity campaign, many of which had already appeared, nearly verbatim, in earlier press coverage. “I was still the unglamorous little black girl from Newark in a strange world where people applauded me and considered me not great but odd for the manner in which I did things musically.”
“There was also the fact that I was considered nothing much to look at,” she added. Early on, a reviewer in the New York Herald-Tribune concluded: “She is not exactly handsome to look at, having a toothy face with a flattened ski-jump nose, almost oriental eyes and a low forehead oppressed by a pile of black hair.”
“Brother, that hurt!” wrote Vaughan, remembering her reaction to the review. “It was unkind and not calculated to increase my self-assurance. If he had added that I was black, his picture might have been complete. But by now, I am hardened in such things, even though they do not really intend to be cruel when they say them.”
Treadwell soon implemented his plan to “fix” Vaughan. “George spent the remaining $7,998 of his life’s saving on gowns, special arrangements and a voice coach for me,” Vaughan wrote. “One day later on, he came home and told me to get ready to go out. I had stopped asking him where he was taking me or the reason why. We went to a dentist. From there we went to a beauty specialist.”
“I looked in my mirror again several months later,” she wrote. “I was startled. I hardly knew the person staring wide-eyed back at me. The buck teeth were gone. My face had undergone an unbelievable transformation. Nowhere in that image could I see the little black girl of yesterday whose fear of her color and homeliness had almost turned her into an introvert.”
“My figure was streamlined as a result of massaging and beauty treatments. My hair had been trained, finger-waved and done up in such a manner that I could hardly recognize it.”
“The elocution lessons George had paid for completed the metamorphosis,” she wrote. “I was a changed person. Completely. Financially and mentally I was divorced from the original Sarah Vaughan, and George had done it all for me.”22
Treadwell called the new publicity campaign “Sarah Vaughan and Her Pygmalion,” and his story of Vaughan’s transformation didn’t stray far from its inspiration: Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In Ovid’s original Latin, crafted almost two thousand years earlier, Pygmalion is a young sculptor in search of a wife. But he can’t find one. After rejecting all of the women in his homeland, he sculpts his ideal woman from ivory and names her Galatea. He falls in love with his creation, prays to Venus to bring his sculpture to life, and then marries her. The story was told and retold for centuries. In 1914, English playwright George Bernard Shaw adapted the myth in Pygmalion. Here, phonetics professor Henry Higgins civilized a street urchin named Eliza Doolittle by giving her daily elocution lessons and teaching her how to dress and present herself to the upper crust of British society.
Yet the similarities between Vaughan’s new Pygmalion-inspired narrative and its source are uncanny, almost too neat and perfect, especially given Treadwell’s tendency toward embellishment and sometimes downright fabrication. Vaughan’s “look” did evolve and, by most accounts, improve as she became a more seasoned and sophisticated entertainer in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Friends close to the couple early on, however, doubted that Treadwell had any savings to invest in Vaughan’s development and certainly not $8,000, a sizeable sum in the 1940s. When the couple met, Treadwell was a salaried section musician in a band. It was a solid but not particularly lucrative job. Treadwell did not hire a voice coach for Vaughan. “I never took vocal lessons,” said Vaughan time and again throughout her career.23 Nor did she receive elocution lessons, although those close to the couple remembered Treadwell regularly correcting Vaughan’s grammar and other aspects of how she spoke, which she found increasingly tiresome. And it’s an exaggeration to suggest that Treadwell commissioned special musical arrangements for Vaughan. She developed much of her early repertoire in the trenches with her bebop contemporaries. She often described how she pumped the hand organ as Tad Dameron, a pianist and composer favored by the beboppers, wrote “If You Could See Me Now” in 1946, a tune that she then popularized. And she didn’t have a “book” in the traditional sense; instead, she and her longtime pianist and musical director Jimmy Jones played everything by ear, working through their arrangements on the fly.
Other aspects of her transformation story did have a kernel of truth. Vaughan’s wardrobe did improve. Her gowns became more sophisticated and stylish, and Treadwell, a very stylish man himself, played a central role in deciding what she wore. He favored bright colors—whites, pinks, yellows, and light greens—that popped against Vaughan’s darker skin tone. Treadwell’s mother was a seamstress, and early on she likely made or at least tailored many of Vaughan’s gowns. Only later, as her fame grew and earnings increased, did she invest in substantial wardrobe improvements. In 1948, the Chicago Defender reported that Vaughan recently spent $2,500 on fifteen fashionable “New Look” gowns.24
In December 1948, weeks before signing with Columbia, Vaughan visited a dentist to remove the gap between her front teeth. Dental crowns, caps on her teeth, resulted in an even, perfect smile.25 (But it’s unlikely that she underwent “nose-slimming plastic surgery” as reported in later incarnations of the transformation story.)
Vaughan did undergo “beauty salon streamlinings,” but they didn’t necessarily happen in a salon or spa. Instead, she simply fine-tuned her look as she toured. In the early days, according to road manager Johnnie Garry, Vaughan carried a sponge and a small bottle of Max Factor in her pocketbook. “And that’s how we got through those one-night stands, with four gowns and a little makeup in her pocketbook,” said Garry.26 Along the way, Vaughan learned the most flattering ways to apply makeup. And Modina Davis, Vaughan’s traveling hairstylist and personal secretary, who joined the team in 1950, remembered trimming and paring down the bulky, often unflattering wigs Vaughan wore, and how these evolved into the short, very hip (and easy to maintain) pixie cut Vaughan sported for much of the 1950s.
Makeovers were (and still are) very common in the entertainment industry. Far too often, they were a prerequisite for commercial success, as was the case for Vaughan. The media regularly commented on the evolving looks and physical appearances of musicians, and they could be terribly blunt and unkind in their assessments. Down Beat’s John Wilson took note of Vaughan’s improving stage presence and appearance, and cited 1949 as the year that she finally transformed herself from looking “somewhat in the neighborhood of a mess” to being a more glamorous and poised performer.27 Two weeks later, Wilson wrote a nearly identical review of the blond, blue-eyed Patti Page, describing her stunning transformation from an awkward, chubby kid into a slimmer, more elegant and becomingly gowned woman. He predicted that she would hit it big in 1950, which she did.28 Helen Forrest, a popular Jewish big band singer, had a highly publicized nose job and dyed her hair blond shortly before leaving Harry James’s band to become a solo act in the mid-1940s. In her autobiography, Forrest confessed that she wanted to be more conventionally desirable, especially to James, her charming and often philandering fiancé. The trade press celebrated Peggy Lee’s bold new platinum blond look in the late 1940s and fretted about the weight gains of Ella Fitzgerald, Rosemary Clooney, and Dinah Washington. A decade later, Motown’s “charm school” taught artists social graces, grooming, and self-presentation, in addition to carefully orchestrating their wardrobes. Makeovers were a normal part of doing business, especially for women, in the music industry.
Vaughan’s makeover, however, stands apart. It is unusual in the level of detail revealed (even if much of it is untrue), but more so for the elaborate narrative crafted to tell the story of her transformation and the extent to which the “Sarah Vaughan and Her Pygmalion” story was disseminated. It became a focal point of her press kits that was reproduced nearly verbatim for the next fifteen years, long after Vaughan and Treadwell finally divorced in 1957. It forever changed the way that listeners and many critics thought about Vaughan and her career, and still informs how her story is told today.
While there is value in separating fact from fiction, it is equally valuable to understand what the “Sarah Vaughan and Her Pygmalion” narrative accomplished. The story resonated with mid-century audiences and can provide valuable insights into postwar America’s understanding of race and gender.
During the 1950s, the tale of Pygmalion was familiar and compelling, a part of the ethos and larger cultural lexicon. Shaw’s Pygmalion inspired the Broadway musical My Fair Lady. The tale of Professor Henry Higgins’s transformation of the street urchin Eliza Doolittle into a high society lady debuted in 1956 with Julie Andrews as its breakout star and was later revived by ingénue Audrey Hepburn in the movie adaptation. And in 1954, the famed plastic surgeon Maxwell Maltz published his autobiography, Doctor Pygmalion. Much like Treadwell, Maltz described himself as an artist, a magician of sorts, capable of performing miracles on the visages of his patients. He was a self-styled Pygmalion carving, grinding, and chiseling away the ivory, finally revealing his masterpieces, models of ideal beauty and objects of desire.
George Treadwell was a self-styled Pygmalion too. Vaughan was his Galatea, his creation and ideal woman, an expression of his desires. But his vision was informed by a larger culturally accepted notion of who and what was considered beautiful. After all, makeover stories, by definition, strive toward an ideal beauty, and at this historical moment beauty was defined very narrowly. It was (and still is) the domain of white women. In particular, blond, blue-eyed, slender, and youthful women, who embodied the mores of upper-class, Western femininity.29 Of course, this ideal cannot exist without its opposite: the “other.” The black woman, with her classical African features: dark skin, broad nose, full lips, gapped teeth, and kinky hair.30 The same markers of racial identity that Treadwell, in his role as Vaughan’s Pygmalion, “fixed.”
“At first, it still did not make sense for he was asking me to make myself believe I am not black and that I was attractive,” Vaughan supposedly wrote in “Dark Girls Can Make It Too!” as she described her transformation and Treadwell’s faith in her. “Color hasn’t a thing to do with talent,” Treadwell told Vaughan. “Just you forget all about it and go out there and make them like you. I think you’re good looking. I’m color blind and it doesn’t mean a thing to me.”
“Dark Girls Can Make It Too!” was a complex tale of race and beauty that explored the emotional trauma of racism while condemning the hierarchy of skin color, a hierarchy that privileged lighter skin tones within the black community. Even though it’s likely that Vaughan didn’t write the piece, she became a surrogate for all dark-skinned black girls and an embodiment of Tan Confessions’ assertion that color doesn’t matter—talent does. Yet the editors of Tan Confessions unwittingly suggested that blackness and beauty were not compatible. It was an unsettling contradiction. By celebrating Treadwell’s transformation of Vaughan, they suggested that the best way for a talented black woman like Vaughan to feel confident and succeed was to downplay markers of her racial identity and embrace white ideals of beauty. The publication reinforced this message by flanking the profile with ads for hair straighteners and skin-tone lighteners.
On the surface, Vaughan’s makeover reads as an attempt to assimilate, to imitate whiteness by erasing markers of her physical African American identity. This is unsettling, especially seen through our twenty-first-century lens, informed by the “black is beautiful” campaigns of the 1960s and 1970s. There is, however, another way to interpret the publicity-fueled tales of Vaughan’s makeover, one that does not rely on discrete definitions of blackness and whiteness, jazz and pop. What if, instead, Vaughan started to reimagine contemporary understandings of race—what it meant to be black, and white, in postwar America, in much the same way as she did with her singing?
Art historian Kobena Mercer addresses similar issues in his study of black hairstyles, in particular those that involve straightening and curling. Instead of viewing them as a “wretched imitation of white people’s hair,” he suggests that they in fact represent black Americans working in and against existing cultural codes. Black Americans engaged with the dominant white culture while simultaneously expressing a “neo-African” approach to beauty and everyday life, much like Duke Ellington did with his conch hairstyle.31 It was but one part in a larger process of mastering the modern, cosmopolitan world.
In other words, Vaughan and Treadwell worked within the system. By “mastering” her body, a process magnified by the Pygmalion narrative, Vaughan challenged those critics, like the reviewer for the New York Herald Tribune from early in Vaughan’s career, who insisted on stereotypical readings of her physical appearance. She overturned these norms and their tendency to pair blackness with the unattractive and ugly, what Mercer refers to as the “distinctions of aesthetic value, ‘beautiful/ugly,’ [which] have always been central to the way racism divides the world into binary oppositions in its adjudication of human worth.”32 Through her transformation, then, Vaughan acquired a more familiar appearance. She crafted a physical body that better matched the humanity and beauty long perceived in her voice.
Importantly, the storytelling surrounding Vaughan’s makeover also changed the way that her voice was heard and understood by linking it to a larger collection of symbols. In addition to the myth of Pygmalion, press coverage of her makeover also included allusions to fairy tales. There were the expected stories of transformation, like the ugly duckling becoming a swan, but also tales of princes rescuing their princesses, including the story of Cinderella, which incorporated both a transformation and rescue narrative. These and other fairy tales celebrate the triumph of beauty over ugliness, good over evil, and lightness over darkness—the same binary oppositions discussed by Mercer. Here, the new and improved Vaughan triumphed over the ugly Vaughan of the past, and in the process moved toward not only greater humanity and familiarity but also an innate, more widely acceptable beauty.
While fairy tales are usually dismissed as harmless stories for children, they have a darker side. They play an important role in defining a community’s expectations, mores, and values. They define its social code. According to feminist literary critics, these social codes enforce the more conservative interests of the dominant social group. In other words, fairy tales express patriarchal values. They are stories about marriage and family used to socialize and civilize women while outlining a community’s ideals of femininity, sexuality, and womanhood. They are used to control women and undermine their individuality and accomplishments.33 In the fairy-tale-inspired retellings of Vaughan’s origin story, George Treadwell became her knight in shining armor, the dashing prince who saved her from obscurity and the cruelties of racism. And her marriage to Treadwell became the defining moment of her career—on par with and often surpassing her win at the Apollo Theater’s amateur night and years on the road with the Hines and Eckstine bands. Marriage was the ultimate act of domestication, and it also reestablished Treadwell as the hero of Vaughan’s story.
Yet there is another dark, unsettling side to these fairy tales and the story of “Sarah Vaughan and her Pygmalion,” a side that provides insights into the personal dynamics between Vaughan and her husband. Friends described Treadwell as a macho “man’s man,” and this likely created problems as Vaughan’s fame grew and she became more confident and powerful. Perhaps Treadwell was tired of playing a supporting role, always being the man behind the scenes: Mr. Sarah Vaughan. And perhaps the appearance of the Pygmalion-inspired publicity campaign in 1952 reflected an internal power struggle, the tensions building between Treadwell and Vaughan. The story of Pygmalion placed him at the center of Vaughan’s success. It boosted his ego, stature, and importance. It helped him reassert his dominance in their relationship, at least publicly, while reestablishing traditional gender roles.
At its core, the story of Pygmalion presents women as controlled, trapped, rescued, idealized, defined, and owned by the men in their lives.34 Women are tamed and sculpted, in a sense, made to order according the preferences and whims of men. For feminist scholars, the Pygmalion myth and its many retellings are stories about male subjects who, threatened by a woman’s independent spirit, vitality, and sexuality, replace her with statues, pictures, and other silent objects.35 This tale has been used time and again to silence and contain women.
With his Pygmalion-inspired rewriting of her origin story, Treadwell publicly silenced Vaughan and took away her agency too. He accomplished this not by challenging her brilliance as a musician but by honing in on her looks and physical appearance, her body, a point of insecurity for many women, including Vaughan. It was a deeply personal and ultimately hurtful blow. In this light, the story of Treadwell and his “Galatea with a $1,000,000 larynx” is not a romantic story of self-sacrifice and self-improvement.36 Instead, it is an unsettling story of domestic violence and a crumbling marriage dressed up in the story of Pygmalion, an age-old, socially acceptable narrative that celebrated men controlling, silencing, and dominating the women in their lives. It was a story that condoned violence against women.
While it’s easy to portray Treadwell as a villain, he did have a savvy understanding of what American audiences wanted to see, hear, and believe, particularly from black women in pop music. Postwar American audiences, black and especially white, needed Vaughan to be tamed and domesticated by her husband. White listeners needed her, a black woman, to appear civilized and more conventionally beautiful. They needed Vaughan to seem silent, submissive, powerless, and not disruptive so that, ironically enough, they could hear her voice, with its vitality, humanity, beauty, and ability to challenge racial boundaries. By aligning Vaughan’s origin story with fairy tales and the Pygmalion myth, Treadwell helped make this happen. And when the story of “Sarah Vaughan and Her Pygmalion” made its way into the white mainstream press in 1954, Vaughan emerged as a pop star, experiencing the biggest crossover success of her career.