by Karen Abbott
— SOPHIE TUCKER
On the Vaudeville Circuit, 1920–1924
By now Louise was nine and June seven, but Rose Hovick didn’t need the calendar to tell time. She had a private clock, set precisely to her needs and preferences, years tacked on and stripped away within mere moments. Birth certificates were forged and forged again: locations chosen at whim; dates substituted or invented entirely, always younger for train travel and older for evading child welfare. Had she not wished so desperately for her girls to be seen, they might not have existed at all.
Murray Gordon—“Gordon” to Rose, “Uncle Gordon” to June, and still a nonentity to Louise—applied a veneer of order over the chaos, slowing time just enough to establish rules and routines. He would sleep separately and alone; the girls never once caught him trying to enter their mother’s room. “We never saw or heard a thing about them being intimate,” June said. “It was strictly hidden.” And no salary for the boys in the act, an edict Rose found brilliant. “The experience they’ll get,” he told their parents, “is worth more than money.” He discovered the boys in hotel courtyards and small-town alleyways during stops on the circuit, and their parents, for the most part, were happy to be rid of them.
One singer, from Shamokin, Pennsylvania, had never owned a pair of underwear or socks. He sang in clear, pitch-perfect Italian, but was so deformed he couldn’t straighten his legs. Gordon positioned him close to the wings, in near darkness, with a pin spot illuminating only his face. The sight of the audience terrified him, and at the high notes he sometimes wet his pants.
Another boy slept in one room with twelve siblings and had a father who spent more time in jail than at home. Rose named this second boy Sonny Sinclair. Within a week Gordon had taken him to see three doctors, the last of whom determined that Sonny, ten years old, had syphilis.
“The disease is incurable,” Rose told Louise and June, “and there is only one way you can get it—by letting some man enter your room. Most important of all, nearly all men have it.”
Except, she hastened to add, for Gordon.
Gordon also put an end to games of hide-and-seek in between rehearsals and performances. No more wasting their energy or wandering into situations they were too young to understand, such as the time June spied on a fellow vaudeville star, a man with a lioness. The animal was the most regal creature June had ever seen, and she crept backstage at every opportunity to watch them practice their act. One day she noticed the man touching his animal, petting her again and again between her hind legs. She made a strange, unfamiliar sound, somewhere between a purr and a roar, and June ran and told her mother that the lioness was hurt. The following afternoon, Rose hid backstage with June so they could watch together. “He fondled her and fondled her,” June remembered, “and finally he entered her.” She felt her mother stiffen, heard her sharp intake of breath, but Rose said nothing about this man trespassing into a room where he didn’t belong.
Gordon tried to break Rose of her bad habits as well, insisting that she stop chewing the animals’ food before feeding it to them. Impossible, Rose countered. How else could her darling pup Mumshay eat, since all of her teeth were gone? Gordon sighed and gave up, but Rose must start taking better care of Louise and June. Their usual breakfast of rolls and coffee was forbidden—“It’s a wonder their stomachs aren’t ruined,” Gordon scolded—although Rose still sneaked them each a mug if he stepped out. Their teeth, however, were practically beyond repair. “The toothbrush,” June said, “was something we had never considered.” While trouping in Milwaukee, Gordon made appointments with a dentist. “Why, they are only little kids, Rose,” Big Lady protested from Seattle when she heard the news. “That man has them brushing the enamel off their teeth twice a day just like they were sick or something.”
For once a man prevailed against the Hovick clan. June nearly had to be knocked out in order to have eleven cavities filled. Louise had just as many cavities, two fanglike incisors pushing through her top gums, and a severe case of trench mouth. The doctor removed and replaced the offending incisors and instructed Rose to swab her mouth with iodine every day. But the problem persisted, and Louise grew more self-conscious, memorizing the angle of each wayward tooth, noticing a slight lisp that sounded, to her ears, as forceful as a crashing wave. In photos from that era she smiles with her mouth closed, lips gripped and upturned tightly, as if holding hostage a secret not ready to be told.
Louise and June met vaudeville’s characters and learned its rules. They recorded everything, taking mental snapshots and filing them away. Certain memories resonated only later. The kindly stagehands who acted like uncles hung pictures of Klan rallies and lynchings backstage. One of them hoisted June on his lap and presented her with a gold pendant etched with the letters “KKK”—an image that “chilled” her, though she didn’t yet understand why. The sisters noticed that the colored and foreign vaudevillians disappeared after the shows, heading to their own “special” bars and restaurants and hotels. They heard the colored artists talk about a separate vaudeville circuit, as well, an organization known formally as the Theater Owners Booking Association and informally as “Tough on Black Asses.”
Dainty June and Co., top billing on the vaudeville circuit. (photo credit 12.1)
They encountered the strangest hotel mates along each of their stops: the man who sold leeches as a cure for black eyes; a brash, redheaded hooker and her pimp; a man who carried tiny dead babies in glass bottles. “Look at the umbilical cord hanging on this one,” he boasted. They met a performer named Gentle Julia, who one day made a bold proclamation neither girl ever forgot: she was pregnant and saw no reason to tell anyone who the father was, not even the father himself. They learned that proud and true vaudevillians turned to déclassé burlesque only if bookings on the circuit were scarce. And it came to them, piece by broken piece, that they would never be normal, everyday people, and that they had lost their childhoods while they were still children.
The act had steady offers now, just as Gordon had promised, including a booking in Buffalo for $750 per week, about $32,000 today. Rose clutched the contract to her chest and wept. It was unclear whether she was moved by the astonishing sum of money, or the shock that a man had finally kept his word to her. From now on, Gordon said, they would ride to the theaters in taxicabs instead of streetcars. And instead of just one hotel room, they would rent a suite. Still, Rose haggled over prices, once arguing with a hotel manager for an hour when the bill was $7 more than expected. “It’s not the principle of the thing,” she explained. “It’s the money.”
Rose vowed to follow each rule of the contract (no profane language, no intoxication, no impromptu lines or jests interpolated into the dialogue) and began packing the props and costumes and animals, an ever-growing and ever-shifting menagerie that included, at one time or another, Mumshay, her favorite dog, June’s beloved NeeNee, Bootsie the poodle, guinea pigs, rabbits, chameleons, white mice, rats, turtles, a poisonous horned toad, a goose, a lamb, and Louise’s monkey, Gigolo, who kept constant vigil on her shoulder, turning heads wherever she went.
The guinea pigs and rats slept in dressing room drawers or in the girls’ pockets, leaving them wet and filled with droppings—“licorice buttons,” Rose called them. When a pet died on the circuit, Louise and June insisted on great pomp and ceremony, and tiny makeshift graves were scattered across the country. Mumshay was one of the more spectacular casualties, squashed in the crevice of a folding bed in Syracuse, and June’s elderly guinea pig, Samba, perished after a nightlong threesome with a magician’s lady pigs. (June cried for hours, and Rose pressed cold towels onto her eyes to reduce the swelling before her performance.) The animals, more than anything else, gave Louise, June, and the boys a sense that every budget hotel and cramped train car was home, even if windows never offered the same view twice.
Most of their fellow vaudevillians loved Louise and June and the boys, but there were exceptions. Some of the other kiddie acts grew suspicious when, s
eemingly out of nowhere, things began to go wrong: props were destroyed, wigs and wardrobes disappeared, the sheet music got lost. Rose expressed sympathy and joined in the search, and occasionally found the missing item—always too late. “They shouldn’t have left the things lying around so carelessly,” she’d scold. One performer known as “The Darling Devina—Female Adonis” warned others not to breathe too deeply when passing by their room and called Louise and June “imitation children.” Another played on the same bill with them several times and insisted that Dainty June was a midget, since no actual child could dance that well. Rose took a particular dislike to her, and conferred with her daughters over coffee.
“She needs a lesson,” she said. “A good scare, that’s what she needs.”
“She’s mean,” Louise said. “I don’t think you ought to tackle someone so mean.”
Mother smiled, and she spoke her next words in a blunt whisper. “Tackle? Oh, no … I’ll write a letter she won’t forget. I’ll say, ‘Someone is following you, and within two weeks your body will be found floating in the river.’ ”
Louise was the only child who’d spent any time, no matter how brief, in a formal classroom, but Rose believed the circuit taught everything they—and she—needed to know. Consistency was the key to success in vaudeville, polishing an act until it became the prettiest, shiniest version of itself. Consider how many times Chaz Chase, the “Eater of Strange Things,” consumed lit matches in order to make the trick appear effortless, or the practice schedule of Hadji Ali, the master regurgitator, famous for swallowing a gallon of water followed by a pint of kerosene. After his assistant set up a small metal castle a few feet away, Hadji Ali spat the kerosene in a six-foot stream and set the structure ablaze. He then opened his throat and, with the aim and velocity of a fire hose, purged the water and killed every flame.
These sorts of acts dominated the circuit, vaudevillians possessed of talents invented rather than innate. The man who guzzled hot molten lava and belched up coins, the man who swallowed a goldfish and a baby shark and asked the audience which should reappear first, the man who lit gunpowder on his tongue, the man who discovered that his sneeze made audiences laugh and worked it into his routine, honing, over the course of a year, the mechanics of twitching his nostrils and cranking his jaw, the exaggerated intake of breath and sputtering of lips. A performer called “The Human Fish” ate a banana, played a trombone, and read a newspaper while submerged in a tank of water. Another had a “cat piano,” an act featuring live cats in wire cages that meowed Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere when their tails were pulled (in reality the performer yanked on artificial tails and did all the meowing himself). Alonzo the Miracle Man lit and smoked a cigarette, brushed his teeth and combed his hair, and buttoned his shirt—miracles since he had been born without arms. Louise and June were particularly fond of Lady Alice, an old dowager who wore elegant beaded gowns and performed with rats. The runt settled on the crown of her head, a miniature kazoo clenched between teeth like grains of rice. He breathed a tuneless harmony while the rest of the litter began a slow parade across Lady Alice’s outstretched arms, marching from the tip of one middle finger to the other. The girls never understood how Lady Alice controlled the rodents—their own animals weren’t quite so obedient—until one day she revealed her secret: a trail of Cream of Wheat slathered on her neck and shoulders.
Vaudevillians called these signature bits “insurance,” gimmicks they kept tucked away in their repertoire, always close at hand if a new routine failed. (Fred Astaire once learned this lesson the hard way, when he was replaced by a dog act.) Child performers were considered the surest bet of all; “kids,” June said, “were an automatic gimmick.” Her mother sifted through identities for the Baby and added layers to her history, each more impressive and fantastic than the last. Once again Rose renamed the act, settling on “Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters.” They were playing the big time now, the Orpheum Circuit. It meant something when Martin Beck, the Orpheum’s manager, believed in an act; he had discovered Houdini and booked the phenomenal Sarah Bernhardt at the New York Palace for $7,000 per week. No more lodge halls or the indignity of decay, the frayed traditions of worn plush and peeling sequins, the old piano just barely in tune.
June was now the “sophisticated little miss” of the Orpheum Circuit, dubbed “Pavlova’s Own” by the famous diva herself, at least according to Rose; an “infant prodigy”; both “the greatest of all juvenile screen notables” and star of “the greatest juvenile musical comedy on the American stage.” One columnist—aided, perhaps, by suggestions from Rose—could barely contain his exuberance. “I have seen and talked with the Eighth Wonder of the World! She is a tiny creature, weighing about 75 pounds when all dolled up.” Three nuns went blind sewing her $1,000 dress, which blinked with the brilliance of a million rhinestones. When she wasn’t dazzling audiences with her preternatural talent, Dainty June dabbled in politics, advocating on behalf of a proposed bill that would raise wages for postal workers. Carrying the bill to every stop on the Orpheum Circuit, she vowed to collect enough signatures to present the petition to Speaker of the House Frederick Gillett. Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters would soon set sail on the SS Olympic and tour abroad in England, France, Belgium, South Africa, and Australia. When the time came, Rose would know exactly how to doctor the passport applications.
She encouraged Gordon to contribute to June’s persona, as well. “She is the most tender-hearted child you ever saw,” he said. “It distresses her to see anything suffer.” Sometimes June spoke for herself. “I love everybody,” she announced, and the papers assumed she meant her mother most of all, who “taught her virtually everything she knows.” Dainty June, in fact, had become such a hot commodity that she needed a patent: “DAINTY JUNE (Hovick), The Darling of Vaudeville, Reg. U.S. Patent Office.” Even the pronouncement of the patent became part of June’s official persona.
It was the surest advertising paradigm, which Gordon knew by trade and Rose by instinct: discover what could make you famous, and then proclaim that it already has. In Rose’s opinion, her own image was just as crucial to the act, and with that in mind she began inserting herself into the newspaper stories, telling reporters she once taught acting to the members of “Our Gang.” She bought a beaver fur coat and insisted there was no other in the country like it. She had designed it herself, selecting the skins and taking just a few at a time to the furrier. As a further guarantee that the furrier wouldn’t switch skins, each one had Rose’s name written on it, in indelible pencil.
Advertisement for Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters. (photo credit 12.2)
“You know I wouldn’t pay that much money for a coat,” she reasoned, “unless it was to put up a front.” A stack of new diamond baubles adorned one finger, complements to her engagement rings. The rings could be pawned if they ever ran out of money, and besides, she said, “they do impress the managers.” No objections, no arguments—Gordon wouldn’t want her asthma to act up, now, would he? She also took to carrying money in a grouch bag, a gray suede pouch worn around her waist that bulged oddly under her dress, although she often insisted that there wasn’t much hidden inside.
The most crucial change, however, was to her name; the public would know her, from now on, as “Madame Rose.” Still not satisfied, she tagged on a suffix: “The Developer of Children.”
Dainty June and Her Newsboy Songsters traveled for months at a time, performing at theaters across the country, Chicago to Minneapolis, Pittsburgh to Detroit, Indiana to Salt Lake City, three cities a week, two shows per day, more on weekends. Louise and June split the burden of packing a cretonne bedspread, a trunk cover, a coffeepot, and a lampshade for every trip. As soon as they checked into their hotel, Louise said, “We started fixing our room to make it look homey.” Every Christmas, Louise lugged a half-dead, needle-deprived tree aboard the train that dwindled to skeletal by the time they retrimmed it for her January 9 birthday. Musty green curtains enclosed the sleeping c
ars, each one a dank, gloomy cave. June slept alone in the lower bunk, her neck smeared with Vicks VapoRub and sheathed in a stocking, while Louise shared the upper with two of the younger boys. Sometimes she cried at night, uncertain of her age but certain enough to know she should no longer be bunking with the opposite sex. With her heavy rubber boots, tweed cap (which doubled as a bed for her guinea pig), and bluntly cut dark hair, Louise couldn’t blame the porter for thinking she was one of them.
“I just can’t stand it any longer,” she confided to her guinea pig, wiping her tears on his fur. “Not if I never sleep again. I can’t. I can’t.”
She mostly kept to herself during layoffs and lulls, reading and rereading Gordon’s birthday gift, a book titled Dreams: What They Mean. She studied the various interpretations and incorporated her own occult visions. “You can charge a nickel a dream,” Gordon said, but Rose shushed him. “Don’t go putting ideas into her head,” she muttered. “People will think she’s a Gypsy.”
Louise also devoured every book supplied by their tutor, Olive Thompson: Painted Veils, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, Honoré de Balzac’s Droll Stories. Miss Thompson, no relation to the family, had joined the troupe at the reluctant behest of Rose. She hated to spend the money, but frequent inquiries from the police and child welfare agencies didn’t leave much choice. The Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children, called the “Gerry Society” after its founder, Elbridge Gerry, was especially zealous in monitoring child performers under the age of sixteen. “These child slaves of the stage,” Gerry wrote, “[are] subjected to a bondage more terrible and oppressive than the children of Israel ever endured at the hands of Pharaoh or the descendents of Ham have ever experienced in the way of African slavery.”
Officers kept slinking backstage and cornering the girls, asking them all sorts of ridiculous questions: Who was the vice president under Woodrow Wilson? Under Warren G. Harding? Who killed Cain? Louise and June could no sooner answer such inquiries than they could recall, without hesitation, all the years in which they might have been born. Most of the time the officers nodded grimly, scratched some notes on a pad, and warned that they’d be back, but in January 1923, on a bitter Saturday afternoon in Rochester, New York, they kept their word.