While I thoroughly enjoyed researching the life of a Ziegfeld show girl and all the details that go into the rehearsals and performances, I did take some liberties with show dates. Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s renowned Follies revues, inspired by the Folies Bergère of Paris, ran on Broadway from 1907 to 1931, with a break when his shows Betsy, Rio Rita and Rosalie ran 1928–1929. The Midnight Frolic ran from 1915 to 1922 and again from 1928 to 1929. For the purposes of this story I kept the Ziegfeld Follies and the Midnight Frolic running all the way through to 1929. The majority of the songs that were performed were taken from the 1927 Follies and 1928 Frolic, though I added in a few numbers from earlier shows, such as the The Follies Salad from 1919, when they were a good fit for Olive. The Pines, the fictionalized Adirondacks retreat where Olive and Archie spend time, was loosely based on a real-life retreat called White Pine Camp, where I stayed twice during the research for this novel and which I found to be a wonderful source of inspiration. In 1926 White Pine Camp was also where President Calvin Coolidge spent his summer and set up his “Summer White House.” I first learned about the Great Camps of the Adirondacks when I wrote an article for a luxury travel magazine about a fancy seventy-five-acre estate and hotel called The Point that was originally the creation of William Avery Rockefeller II and used as his family’s summer compound. Today it’s a five-star resort that promises guests a taste of times gone by while “roughing it” in extreme luxury. Through my research for this article I learned about several other Great Camps built by Guided Age magnates along the rugged lakeshores of Upstate New York. Many of these camps were built in a similar design and construction, which became known as Adirondack Style, characterized by the use of local timber, Adirondack granite and rocks from the rivers. Families such as the Vanderbilts, Astors, Guggenheims and Rockefellers commissioned the building of these vast estates as an escape from the city. In learning about these camps I knew I had to set part of my story there and that Olive would fall in love with the wilderness in the end.
I referred to many invaluable sources in the research of this book, in particular:
The Ziegfeld Touch: The Life and Times of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. by Richard and Paulette Ziegfeld
The Days We Danced: The Story of My Theatrical Family from Florenz Ziegfeld to Arthur Murray and Beyond by Doris Eaton Travis with Joseph and Charles Eaton, as told to J. R. Morris
Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema by Linda Mizejewski
Ziegfeld and His Follies: A Biography of Broadway’s Greatest Producer by Cynthia Brideson and Sara Brideson
The Village: 400 Years of Beats and Bohemians, Radicals and Rogues by John Strausbaugh
Capital of the World: A Portrait of New York City in the Roaring Twenties by David Wallace
Great Camps of the Adirondacks by Harvey H. Kaiser
White Pine Camp: The Saga of an Adirondack Great Camp and Summer White House by Howard Kirschenbaum