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Ziegfeld and His Follies A
Biography of Broadway’s Greatest Producer
Cynthia
Brideson and Sara Brideson
Screen
Classics Series Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2015 Hardcover.
vi+515 pages. ISBN 978-0813160887. $40
Reviewed
by Linda Mizejewski Ohio State
University
The dust-cover photo of a biographical
book usually features the subject of the biography, but Ziegfeld and His Follies : A Biography of Broadway’s Greatest
Producer instead features a woman posed and dressed like a topless haute
couture model, a long string of pearls hanging between her breasts toward her
sheathed lower torso. It takes a second to realize she’s not nude but has been
elegantly transformed, by the photography and the costuming, into an art deco
figurine or classical statue. The dust cover credits the Library of Congress
photo collection but nowhere identifies the woman herself. In the logic of
commodity branding, her anonymity is appropriate, because for fans or
historians of musical theater, she is instantly recognizable as a Ziegfeld
Girl, a brand and a type more than an individual woman. Her status as an art
object or statuette points back to the Pygmalion-like subject of this
biography, who prided himself on the transformations of young white American
women into what he called the Glorified American Girl. Florenz Ziegfeld
(1867-1932) rose from obscurity to become the most powerful Broadway producer
of his time, and he died almost penniless as a result of spendthrift ways and
bad business decisions. Ziegfeld didn’t exactly invent the showgirl as we know
her in her Las Vegas feathers, but he was the one who thoroughly saturated
American culture with a specific showgirl ideal. Like the later Playboy Bunny,
the Ziegfeld Girl was above all the American girl next door; in the Ziegfeld
version, her nudity was stylishly accessorized with real jewels or was glimpsed
teasingly through sheer curtains. In Ziegfeld’s spectacular Broadway revue
shows, she was “glorified” in stunning costumes designed by British couturier
Lucile, Lady Duff Gordon. Onstage, platoons of Ziegfeld Girls materialized in
complicated tableaux of The Arabian Nights or battlefield victories, or they
glided down staircases balancing enormous feathered headdresses. The kitschy details of the revues
and the rise-and-fall melodrama of Ziegfeld’s life have been recounted in five
previous Ziegfeld biographies, most recently Ethan Mordden’s Ziegfeld : The Man Who Invented Show
Business, published just seven years ago.* So why another biography? The
Bridesons’ is the first scholarly one, offering to theater historians a responsibly
documented narrative of a highly influential Broadway producer. The grand
theatrical Follies revues that were
his trademark eventually lumbered off the cultural stage, but Ziegfeld was also
a pioneer in the development of the Broadway musical as we know it today. In
addition, scores of entertainers such as Maurice Chevalier, Fred Astaire, and
Louise Brooks got their start on the Ziegfeld stage, and though he’s best known
for his showgirls, Ziegfeld launched the careers of comedians Fanny Brice, W.C.
Fields, Eddie Cantor and Will Rogers. Ziegfeld
and his Follies carefully documents the Follies,
the other musical productions, and the host of talent, both onstage and behind
the scenes, that Ziegfeld marshaled from his first Broadway shows in the late
1890s through the Follies and Frolics, 1907 to 1931. In addition, Ziegfeld and His Follies includes four
chapters on the Ziegfeld legacy as a style and reference in theatrical
productions and cinema. The book’s title is a
double entendre about the excessive shows that made Ziegfeld famous and
Ziegfeld’s excessive behavior with women and money. In the introduction, the
authors state that their book is “primarily the story of Ziegfeld’s personal
follies, but because his work was so much a part of him, we intertwine the
follies and triumphs of his private life with those of his professional life” [5].
Indeed, the showman’s personal life and
Broadway shows intersected across the bodies of his female stars. Ziegfeld’s
personal life was messy and often destructive. He promoted and then abandoned
his first wife, the European chanteuse Anna Held, whose gay-90s hourglass
figure and coy style became increasingly outdated in the new century. Movie
buffs will remember Luise Reiner’s touching portrayal of Held in The Great Ziegfeld (1936) which won her
an Academy Award. More widely known today is Ziegfeld’s second wife, Billie
Burke, beloved to generations as Good Witch Glinda in The Wizard of Oz (1939). Ziegfeld repeatedly broke her heart with
his widely-known affairs with his stars. The Bridesons are not
interested in the implications of a womanizing entrepreneur producing “girls”
during the era of suffragism and the women’s rights movements; even their
comment that he was always interested in strong women is without irony. However,
they write clearly about both the shows and the personal follies, often with
dramatically imagined quarrels and conversations: “Billie had no patience for
his dismissive attitude and flew into a rage, throwing china and crying over
her foundering career” [28]. The payoff for imagining the broken china is that
more so than the earlier biographies, Ziegfeld
and His Follies foregrounds the centrality of Burke in keeping Ziegfeld at
least partially grounded and gives her credit for the intelligence and
resourcefulness that made her a successful survivor. The jacket cover of Ziegfeld and His Follies promises new
material from previously unpublished personal letters between the showman and
his family. Unfortunately, these letters cover only the period 1920-1924, so
they’re cited in just two chapters. The footnotes show that for the rest of the
historical material, the Bridesons have meticulously cherry-picked details from
the five previous Ziegfeld biographies as well as books on his family, his
stars, and the theatrical era. That is, roughly 90% of the research comes from
secondary sources, so it would be difficult to say there is much new here. However,
Ziegfeld and His Follies serves as an
index to material in the other biographies and includes footnotes, a
bibliography, and an appendix of shows produced and coproduced by Ziegfeld,
making it a useful tool for scholars of theater history. ______________________ * The
previous biographies are Eddie Cantor & David Freedman, The Great Glorifier (New York: Alfred H.
King, 1934); Charles Higham, Ziegfeld
(Chicago, Regnery, 1972); Randolph Carter, The
World of Flo Ziegfeld (New York: Praeger, 1974); Richard Ziegfeld &
Paulette Ziegfeld, The Ziegfeld Touch :
The Life and Times of Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. (New York: Henry Abrams, 1993),
and Ethan Mordden, Ziegfeld : The
Man Who Invented Show Business (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2008).
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