At the Beckford fête, the artist rigged things so that not a single ray of natural light intruded on guests, who knew not the time of day, nor what day it was, for that matter. “Delightful indeed were these romantic wanderings—delightful the straying about this little interior world of exclusive happiness,” Beckford recalled. “The glowing haze investing every object, the mystic look, the vastness, the intricacy of this vaulted labyrinth occasioned so bewildering an effect that it became impossible for anyone to define—at the moment—where he stood, where he had been, or to whither he was wandering.”
When the English king Charles II ended a ban that kept women from the stage in the seventeenth century, he certainly didn’t imagine that they’d soon take on men’s parts—“breeches roles”—too. After the actress Fanny Furnival appeared as Hamlet in 1741, in Dublin, a flurry of imitators followed, with more than a hundred European and American actresses playing Shakespeare’s Prince of Denmark in the nineteenth century. Such roles offered a challenge, but also an opportunity to show a little leg. “Next to wearing trousers themselves, women dote upon seeing the actresses who look well in these forbidden treasures,” a writer explained, musing on the allure of a cross-dressing star. “With eagerness painful in its intensity they watch her or him light the inevitable cigarette and strut across the stage. They turn to each other and say ‘How awfully cute!’ or ‘Did you ever see anything so cunning?’ with a fervency of admiration never bestowed upon a male favorite.” The gender reversal could also affect artistic interpretation. Victorian stagings played up Hamlet’s alleged feminine side, his introspectiveness, indecisiveness, and melancholy. Taking a gutsier approach, actress Charlotte Cushman (1816–1876) borrowed the costume from her chief male rival in 1861 and played Hamlet not as a sensitive, brooding romantic, but as a feisty, full-blooded male.
And yet, none made as strong an impression as French actress Sarah Bernhardt (1844–1923), who suited up in tights and a doublet to play Hamlet in 1899. “No female character has opened up a field so large for the exploration of sensations and human sorrows,” Bernhardt claimed. To her mind, she was perfectly cast. “A boy of twenty cannot understand the philosophy of Hamlet,” the fifty-five-year-old actress huffed. An older male actor “does not look the boy, nor has he the ready adaptability of the woman, who can combine the light carriage of youth with … mature thought.”
Despite her daring career choices, Bernhardt, who kept exotic pets, posed nude for photographer Nadar, befriended famous lesbians, and liked to sleep in a coffin, could be quite conservative in her views. She wore pants while working in her sculpture studio, but scoffed at the idea of sporting fashionable pantaloons or riding a bicycle. “All my feminine instincts plead for the dress, the long dress,” she told a reporter. She hardly needed to convince anyone that she was all woman, la grande séductrice. Artists, poets, feminists, and stuffy politicians alike worshipped her. Once, seeing her act in Sacramento, admiring cowboys went outside during the intermission to shoot off their guns. She was, as a critic explained, “a woman although she has the energy and courage of a man. And it is precisely in this that she is truly unique and incomparable.”
Bernhardt’s performance in Hamlet, in an adaptation that premiered in Paris, was a five-hour marathon that went on past midnight and was controversial from the start. Instead of reprising Cushman’s swagger, Bernhardt’s Hamlet was energetic and boyish. “No male actor ever came near Sarah in this part,” The New York Times raved. “There is precisely a point of femininity in the character which the male full-grown artist has invariably missed, and which is part and parcel of its youthfulness.” Not everyone agreed. Poet Catulle Mendès (1841–1909), for example, told journalist Georges Vanor that Bernhardt, with her whippet-thin figure, was the ideal Hamlet. Vanor, however, countered that the perfect Hamlet was a portly one. Their discussion grew intense. Each man stood his ground. Finally, Mendès slapped Vanor. The two dueled, with Mendès taking a serious hit to the stomach. While he recovered, Bernhardt visited to offer comfort. “Fat!” Mendès cried, still agitated. “What heresy!”
When she took her act on the road, the critics in London were just as divided. Some cheered Bernhardt’s efforts, and just as many dismissed the performance, with one claiming, “There was no more poetry in her Hamlet than there is milk in a male tiger.” Another remarked that “no amount of make-believe will persuade you that Mme. Bernhardt’s Hamlet is any one but Mme. Bernhardt, disguised in flaxen wig and inky cloak and customary suit of solemn black.” A third spent his long hours in the theater desperately holding back his laughter. “One laugh in that dangerous atmosphere, and the whole structure of polite solemnity would have toppled down, burying beneath its ruins the national reputation for good manners. I therefore, like every one else, kept an iron control upon the corners of my lips.”
For Bernhardt, of course, Hamlet was no joke. The next year, the actress sculpted her hair into a pseudo-pompadour to play Napoleon’s nephew in Rostand’s L’Aiglon. She took the male lead in Goethe’s Werther in 1903, and played the Prince in Maeterlinck’s Pelléas et Mélisande the year after. “It is not sufficient to look the man, to move like a man, and to speak like a man,” she told a reporter. “The actress must think and feel like a man, to receive impressions as a man, and to exert that innate something which, for want of a better word, we call magnetism, just as a man unconsciously exerts it.”
Ancient Egypt’s magicians were notoriously crafty, known for their ability to conjure spirits, or at least their ability to project mirrored images onto incense smoke. During the early Christian era, jugglers and sleight-of-hand magicians suffered a bad reputation as quick-handed gamblers and pickpockets. By the reign of England’s Queen Elizabeth I, they were classified officially alongside “ruffians, blasphemers, thieves, vagabonds.” However, writers such as Reginald Scot (1538–1599), author of The Discovery of Witchcraft, attempted to disassociate the unholy supernatural from sleight-of-hand magic, describing various tricks in print. Of secreting a ball in the palm of the hand Scot wrote: “You must take heed that you be close and sly: or else you discredit the art.… These feats are nimbly, cleanly, & swiftly to be concealed, so as the eyes of the beholders may not discern or perceive the drift.” His description evoked the pleasures of what was then known as “hanky-panky,” a phrase some etymologists believe was borrowed from the Romany hakkni panki, for “sleight of hand” or “trickery.”
In the next century, as reason trounced superstition, conjurors entered Europe’s royal courts, wooing the curious at theaters, taverns, and fairs with magic lantern shows, juggling, ventriloquism, automata, and good old hanky-panky. One of the most popular tricks was to make an object appear to leap with the aid of a hidden string. “This feat is the stranger if it be done by night,” suggested the English magician William Vincent, aka Hocus Pocus, “a candle placed between the lookers on & the juggler for by that means their eyesight is hindered from discerning the conceit.”
In the eighteenth century, the gentlemanly English conjuror Isaac Fawkes (ca.1675–1732) performed for the royal family. With his well-loved Egg-Bag trick, he showed his audience an apparently empty sack that, when turned inside out, spat forth eggs, silver, gold, and even live hens. “He was so great a Magician, that either by the Force of his Hocus-Pocus Power, or by the Influence of his Conjuring Wand, he could presently assemble a multitude of People together, to admire the Phantoms he raised before them, viz. Trees to bear Fruit in an instant, Fowls of all sorts, change Cards into Birds, give us Prospects of fine Places out of nothing, and a merry jig without either a Fiddler or a Piper,” an admirer wrote.
The next great conjuror, the Tuscan Giuseppe Pinetti de Wildale, known as Pinetti (1750–1800), afforded magic its fashionable pizzazz. Pinetti crisscrossed Europe in a carriage drawn by four white horses and wore lavish gold-trimmed suits, which he changed several times during his show. He had some talent, too, once causing the shirt of one of the men in his audience to disappear. He was a little clum
sy, however, and his tricks didn’t always succeed.
On the other hand, Frenchman Jean-Eugène Robert-Houdin (1805–1871), one of the most convincing magicians of all time, was both stylish and suave, drawing large crowds to his Soirées Fantastiques in Paris in 1845. Robert-Houdin’s stage was decorated like a smart, Louis XV salon, and the magician, born into a family of clock makers, wore elegant evening dress and carried an ivory-tipped ebony wand, which soon became the staple prop of magicians everywhere. His show included a child-size mechanical acrobat that dangled from a trapeze, did the splits, and danced, and a mechanical pastry chef that passed out treats. Using an elaborate linguistic code and plants in the audience, as well as a secreted telegraphing apparatus, Robert-Houdin performed impressive “mind-reading” tricks, but his most spectacular stunt involved an artificial orange tree. Among its branches pistons turned to reveal real oranges hidden behind faux foliage. Flowers bloomed. Butterflies flitted to the heights. And then, from a fruit that had miraculously split itself into sections, he withdrew a handkerchief borrowed earlier from the audience. It was incredible.
Still, even the magical genius Robert-Houdin had the occasional off day. Once he had borrowed a top hat from an audience member and set out to do his old Omlet-in-the-Hat trick—breaking and beating the eggs into the hat, sprinkling them with salt and pepper—when he found himself in a jam. “I placed a candle on the ground, then, holding the hat sufficiently high above it to escape the flame, I began turning it gently round,” he wrote in his memoirs. The audience roared with laughter. The candle was snuffed—the hat was smoldering. The show went on, the great magician producing with a flourish the “splendidly cooked omelet,” which, he wrote, “I had enough courage left to season with a few jokes.”
THE MAGIC APPLE
Master conjurer Harry Houdini (1874–1926) wrote about this trick in 1861, instructing readers to pass a needle and thread under the skin of an apple, carefully stitching all the way around the circumference of the fruit in a line, and cleverly hiding each stitch by reentering the exit holes. “Then take both ends of the thread in your hands,” he continued, “and carefully pull them, so as to draw the middle portion of the thread through the apple, which will then divide into two parts.” The skin remains intact as the taut thread splits the apple’s flesh underneath. When an unsuspecting friend peels the fruit or takes a bite, he or she will find that the apple has been mysteriously pre-sliced. Magic.
The “gong-man” in any proper English country estate of the nineteenth century sounded the dressing bell at seven o’clock, signaling guests that they had an hour to dress before dinner. But during the Gilded Age, even middle-class Americans took up the habit of changing clothes before sitting down for their evening meal. The women wore low-cut gowns, and the men wore tails. “No one need deprive themselves under any conditions of the pleasure of dressing for dinner,” an American etiquette writer of the era noted. “It is a mistake to think that it is a custom only meant for the wealthy, it is within the reach of all. Let people try it who are not rich. There are all ways of dressing for dinner, and the more elaborate styles can be kept for the more state occasions.” She went on to note the hygienic benefits of changing out of street clothes before a meal, “even if accomplished with tired hands and irritable nerves,” and touted the overall healthful effects of dressing well. “Can it be disputed that nice surroundings keep the temper cool and smooth, calm the dreadfully-strung nerves, and hence help the digestion?”
While women seemed, for the most part, happy enough to do their duty, men questioned the practice. “It does seem rather absurd to compel a man, as at least two wives of hard-working businessmen have compelled their husbands for years, to renew his entire apparel in order to partake of a simple dinner of soup, joint, and dessert (probably pie), and served, as it is in one of these instances, by the cook,” a New York Times writer huffed in 1893, calling those men either idiots or saints. And yet the same writer concluded that ultimately, “it is certainly desirable to make as much of the daily festival of dinner as possible.”
Maneuvering in that strict milieu, it was easy enough for partygoer Griswold Lorillard to stun New Yorkers at 1886’s Autumn Ball in Tuxedo Park by sporting a semiformal scarlet short jacket, like those he’d seen worn by British clubmen. He looked “for all the world like a royal footman,” a gossip columnist hissed, suggesting that perhaps Lorillard should try a straitjacket next time. The trend had been inspired by the casual smoking jackets worn by the Prince of Wales, later King Edward VII (1841–1910), but, when worn to dinner, until 1920 similar jackets were deemed too casual by most. When ladies were present at the dinner table, a tailcoat and white tie were the uniform for the upper echelons. Black tie was acceptable when dining in all-male company.
Between the wars, things got loose, but it was only during World War II that haute New York began dressing down in earnest. “Dressing for dinner has reached its lowest ebb in years among New Yorkers, according to the dry cleaners, who say it must be because of the war,” the Times reported in 1943. “People used to dress for dinner,” sighed Joel Blau, owner of twelve Manhattan dry-cleaning establishments. “We used to get big loads of evening wear in our shops on Mondays. There’s hardly any of that now.”
AMERICAN CHOREOGRAPHER RUTH ST. DENIS (1879–1968) left New York for Asia in August of 1925, leading her edgy dance company—including eight young dancers and her husband, dancer-choreographer Ted Shawn—on a marathon fifteen-month tour that crossed Japan, China, Hong Kong, Rangoon, Burma, Malaysia, and beyond. Inspired by American Indian and Japanese folk dances, by Spanish flamenco, and above all by the dances of India, St. Denis’s mystical yet seductive aesthetic helped pioneer modern dance. For five months the troupe lived in India, which St. Denis considered her spiritual home, putting on more than a hundred shows—but not without an initial sense of trepidation. Performing her Indian dances in India was a bit like “bringing coals to Newcastle,” St. Denis worried. Though she’d looked at pictures and watched a “nautch” dancer at Coney Island, she’d never seen an actual Indian dance before. Truth be told, she’d started her career back in New Jersey as fifteen-year-old Ruthie Dennis, shimmying and shaking in a rinky-dink variety show alongside an albino musician and a trick dog named Lillie.
The break that took her from vaudeville to the upper tiers was her Indian-esque Radha. The dance began with a bare-midriffed St. Denis posing as the Hindu goddess, flowers in her hair, bracelets up her arms, wearing a gauzy skirt, and, most shockingly, barefoot—something polite audience members had never seen onstage in 1906. After she climbed down from a pedestal, she performed a series of flourishes, then gave herself over to a long whirling sequence extolling the “Delirium of the Senses.” She jangled a string of bells. She deeply inhaled the scent of a marigold garland. She drank from a clay bowl and then spun like a dervish, finishing in a deep back bend. She knelt on the floor, hands caressing her body, and ended with her fingertips pressed to her lips.
The New York Times raved about a Jersey girl who could perform Hindu temple dances “with a rather convincingly clear notion of what she is doing,” and she became a society darling instantly. St. Denis produced “a slow, rhythmic succession of graduated movements that never jerk to extremes, that melt into each other by easy transition, and that impress one with an almost listless ease rather than by any suggestion of effort.” Another article trumpeted: “Yes, Society Did Gasp When Radha in Incense-Laden Air ‘Threw Off the Bondage of Earthly Senses.’ ” Performances sold out, with hundreds of would-be spectators turned away at the door. Sure, the sight of her bare feet was titillating, but as one reviewer crowed, St. Denis herself was so seemingly pure that “every lascivious thought flees shy into the farthest corner,” while she “freed our souls from the clutches of everyday life.”
Her performance was met with a similarly enthusiastic response in Calcutta, where, costumed in a black wig, bangle bracelets, and an enormous emerald-green circle skirt, St. Denis danced in fluid ripp
les, spiraling across the stage and concluding with twenty-four spectacular flat-footed turns, anklets jingling as she stamped. Thunderous applause echoed through the Empire Theatre on opening night. “The audience simply yelled,” dancer Jane Sherman (1908–2010) remembered, “especially the upper balconies where the poorer Indians sat.”
In India, the troupe—a bunch of white, middle-class girls as “homogenized as a bottle of milk,” according to Sherman—traveled through the bazaars, into the temples, and down the ghats, marveling at the holy men in loincloths and the women hidden under veils. Along the way, St. Denis invented new dances, like the Nautch Ballet, inspired by the bustle she observed at Bombay’s Bunnia Bazaar, turbaned Punjabi boys, elegant Sikhs, and women in colorful saris. In her piece, the dancers chattered in loud imitation Hindi, with one carrying a cage of live birds for sale as six girls glided in wearing bright nautch costumes.
British rule had eroded the status of traditional Indian dancers, and by the 1920s, when St. Denis visited India, they were seen as prostitutes. Could it have been any wonder that her homage attracted a full house night after night? Yet, as ever, St. Denis’s nautch dance merged the real with the sensual, the earthly with the divine. “In present society in India dancing is not looked upon with too favorable an eye,” wrote a critic at the Lahore Sunday Times. “The Nautch has unfortunately fallen to the accomplishments of a particular class. But this is not to say that dancing in itself is an art to be condemned.… In Bombay last week I saw a remarkable performance by two American dancers, Ruth St. Denis and Ted Shawn. Among the finest of their pieces were the dances of India which deservedly brought down the house.”
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