Enlightened scholars have doubtless written learned treatises on the relation of burlesque to the satyr choruses, to The Frogs and The Birds, to Roman comedy, to Punchinello and Brighella, to the “afterpieces” of the minstrel show, to the whole fundamental structure of uncivilized and civilized theatre from prehistoric Then to scientific Now; if they haven’t, they ought to be ashamed of themselves. As for your shameless correspondent, he’s never even looked up “burlesque” in an encyclopedia and he never intends to. I’ve seen, in the past thirty years of my proletarian life, a lot of burlesque shows (and I hope to see a lot more) but for no other reason than that burlesque appeals to me. If it doesn’t appeal to you, by all means don’t read any farther.
Boston’s Howard Athenaeum emanated, about 1912, a filth which may never again be equalled—a filth which bore somewhat the same relationship to mere “dirt” that a sunset does to a lighted match. The unparalleled intensity of this filth was due, I imagine, to suppression: that quaintly exaggerated sense of civic virtue which produced a certain Mr. Sumner and a certain Watch and Ward Society, and, in particular, a day when Gertrude Hoffman and her young dancers were ordered to disport themselves in nothing less than wrist-and-ankle-length underwear. Even so, she was called Dirty Gertie.
Less extraordinary than the Howard’s filth was the ugliness of its girls—but not much less. Your correspondent used to sit up in the Non Si Fuma and even there they’d make your eyes wince. Yet so differently were these harpies deformed, I swear that in all my experience with the Old Howard (as it was affectionately called) I never saw one member of a chorus who in any way, shape, or manner resembled another member. The era of interchangeable parts had not put in its standardizing appearance. Those were indeed Ye Goode Olde Days.
Most significantly, the filth and ugliness of the Howard performed a very definite function. This function consisted in the framing of a mammoth collective picture of Mother with a capital M. Never have I seen and heard the maternal instinct glorified with such boundless, not to say delirious, enthusiasm, as in that unholy of unholies. The very bozo who had just distorted a harmless popular ditty to include all known forms of human perversion would, without any warning whatever—that, of course, was the whole trick—plunge himself and us into a monologue whose reeking sentimentality made the Christmas Carol seem positively cynical. Immediately and to a man, those selfsame muckers who had roared themselves hoarse over sin, shame and sorrow would swell and bloat, and then snivel and finally even sob with unfeigned adoration of maternity. A better instance of the emotional versatility of the proletariat would be difficult to conceive.
Burlesque-lovers are faithful; and it took a world-war-to-end-world-wars to blast me out of the Howard and into the National Winter Garden. This gaudy and tawdry institution was located at the very end of Second Avenue, New York City. Having reached the very end, you rose heavenward in something never quite approximating a freight elevator. Alighting in heaven, you passed through a mistranslation of Dante—or did that come later?—and you found Jack Shargel. Shargel was a Jew comedian, sandwiched between oversize derby and oversize shoes, who combined unlimited lasciviousness with a velocity so inscrutable as to suggest only the incomparable Con Colleano of Ringling’s. To say that Shargel was a great artist is to put it mildly.
Around Aristophanes Jack (and later, his myth) there hung very loosely some authentic commedia dell’arte, ranging from subtle sketches of the Face on the Bar Room Floor type, to mammillary and abdominal calisthenics by a Juno called Cleo. When I say commedia I mean commedia. Ray, the straight, used to boast to his devoted and enraptured proletariat that the whole show was “hokum by which I mean that we make it up as we go along.” And what a proletariat that proletariat was!
Burlesque audiences are more demanding than most people can realize. Unlike your average theatregoer, your proletarian knows what he wants and won’t be happy till he gets it. What he wants (and what he gets) is a show. To give him that show has been, at one time or another, the aim of David Warfield, Lillian Russell, Marie Dressler, Fanny Brice, Willie and Eugene Howard, Bert Lahr, Jack Pearl, Jim Barton, Eddie Cantor, Joe Cook, Mae West and W. C. Fields. But I wouldn’t swop any of them for Shargel, whom I never saw except on a burlesque stage. And as for Shargel’s audience—it was not only peculiarly demanding, it was extraordinarily well mannered. I have not sat, and I never hope to sit, with tougher or more courteous people.
After being pinched over and over again, the National Winter Garden folded. Its devotees were, very naturally, disconsolate. But every cloud has a silver lining to those who love burlesque. One fine day, John Dos Passos advised me to doff my mourning and pay a visit to the Irving Place Theatre. And lo! here, in its full flower, was strip-teasing.
What would have happened (even to the most seasoned proletarian) if any of the Old Howard’s corps de ballet had ever even partially disrobed, heaven alone knows. At the National Winter Garden, whose females bore more than a slight resemblance to females, I seem to recall a glittering runway which now and again served as an auction block and on which more or less living statues were deprived of “lan-joo-ray” for the proletariat’s benefit. But Irving Place was a phenomenon of another color. Gone was the plaster nymph of yesteryear and banished to oblivion were the hideous harpies of Ye Goode Olde Days. Pulchritude had entered burlesque. And, with the advent of pulchritude, the focus of burlesque had shifted.
Whereas, formerly, sketches and comedians had constituted a pièce de résistance for which soi-disant sex appeal served as trimming, sketches and comedians now served as trimming for Sex with a capital S. Sentimentality had diminished. Humor, filth, slapstick and satire were all present, but they functioned primarily to enhance the Eternal Feminine. And when you saw that Feminine you understood why. It was no static concept, that pulchritude. It moved, and in moving it revealed itself, and in revealing itself it performed such prodigies of innuendo as made the best belly dancer of the Folies Bergère entr’acte look like a statue of liberty.
The essence of the Old Howard epoch had been subhuman, neuter, and collective. The essence of the National Winter Garden era had been human, masculine, and Jack Shargel. The essence of the Irving Place burlesque was, is, and I hope will continue to be, Das Ewigweibliche—alias Miss June St. Clare. And I beg to state that I speak as a poet and a painter, neither of whom is a press agent.
To see June St. Clare walk the length of the Irving Place stage, or the Apollo stage, or any other stage, is to rejoice that a lost art has been revived. There have been epidemics of women who swam when they walked and of women who floated when they walked. When Miss St. Clare walks, she walks. But when she does something else, she very easily becomes all the animals who ever came out of the ark, rolled into one. Most people move by not keeping still; a very few move by moving; she does neither. She propagates—that is perhaps the word for it—a literally miraculous synthesis of flying and swimming and floating and rising and darting and gliding and pouncing and falling and creeping and every other conceivable way of moving; and all these merely conceivable ways are mysteriously controlled by an inconceivable way which is hers alone. The personality of a Gypsy Rose Lee is where personalities generally are, in the present. The personality of a June St. Clare wanders from prehistoric Then to posthistoric When, but is most at home in timelessness; and if you think I exaggerate, one of two things is a fact. Either you haven’t seen her, or you didn’t deserve to.
From Stage, March 1936.