Seven thousand mourners attended her funeral. ‘We gave Aunt Bessie a big send-off. Everything was done properly,’ her nephew Buster Smith told The Philadelphia Enquirer,26 although her estranged husband refused to foot the bill for a headstone: ‘After paying funeral expenses, we had nothing left,’ Fred Gee claimed.27 Presumably the budget had been eaten up by the gold and velvet trimmed coffin her body rested in. The grave of Lucille Bogan, who passed away on 10 August 1948, also went unmarked. Ma Rainey died of heart disease in December 1939, but the scene was already over – destroyed by the Depression, the repeal of prohibition, increased persecution and the new conservatism sweeping the country. Soon McCarthyism would herald a new witch-hunt, with LGBT entertainers – and even those simply suspected of being homosexual – targeted. The hunt for ‘perverts’, who were presumed to be subversive by nature, resulted in thousands of innocent men and women being harassed and denied employment. In 1948, some of Bessie’s friends held a memorial concert in New York to raise funds for a headstone. The concert was a success, but it seems that Jack Gee pocketed the proceeds and promptly disappeared. He resurfaced in 1952, when it was reported that he had sold 42 recently discovered and previously unrecorded songs written by his late wife.
Referred to in the press as ‘the masculine-garbed, smut-singing entertainer,’28 in her later years Gladys Bentley attempted to clean up her act and straighten herself out – in more ways than one. In the space of three years, she claimed to have been married to three different men. In 1952 Bentley penned an article for Ebony magazine titled ‘I am a Woman Again’ in which she wrote that she had ‘violated the accepted code of morals that our world observes but yet the world has tramped to the doors of the places where I have performed to applaud’. She called her life ‘a living hell as terrible as dope addiction’.29 Two years later, Jet magazine reported, ‘The lives of some strange women, however, have happy endings. Gladys Bentley, entertainer, says injections of female sex hormones three times a week hastened her return to womanhood.’30 Her self-pinned memoir, If This Be Sin, remains unpublished: Gladys died during a flu epidemic in Los Angeles in January 1960. Ethel Waters also ended up marrying three times and renouncing her once-flaunted sexuality. Born in 1900, the product of a knifepoint rape when her mother was just 13, she turned from singing to acting, and in 1929 appeared in On With The Show! the first all-talking, all-colour feature length movie. Waters died in near-poverty in 1977.
Despite being cited as an influence by artists including Billie Holiday (who began her recording career in the same week that Bessie had her final studio session) and Frank Sinatra, interest in Bessie, Ma and the rest of the original blues singers waned until its resurgence in the 1950s with the birth of the electric blues, and later still in to the following decade, when folk singers and pop acts began to cite them as influences. In 1970, Bessie’s grave in Sharon Hill, PA, finally got a headstone thanks to contributions from long-time fan Janis Joplin, Juanita Green (president of the North Philadelphia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People [NAACP] who, as a child, had done housework for Smith) and Columbia’s John Hammond. Smith had been a huge influence on Joplin, who saw her as something of a role model and had even told friends that she felt she was Bessie Smith reincarnated. Sadly the marker, engraved with the legend ‘the greatest blues singer in the world will never stop singing,’ got the date of her birth wrong. Joplin, herself bisexual, died from a heroin overdose a few months later, but her influence is still being felt today.
Gladys Bentley
CHAPTER 4
The Pansy Craze
‘PANSY PLACES ON BROADWAY: Reports are around that Broadway during the new season will have nite places with “pansies” as the prime draw. Paris and Berlin have similar night resorts, with the queers attracting the lays. Greenwich Village in New York had a number of the funny spots when the Village was a phoney night sight seeing collection of joints, The Village spots died away, as only the queers eventually remained the customers and they were broke. The best entertainer In the Village joints along the pansy lines was Jean Malin’
Variety, 10 September 1930
The 1920s saw an explosion of bohemian enclaves. In cities around the world – especially in dilapidated but formerly upmarket areas like New York’s Greenwich Village – artists, writers, poets and musicians were lured by cheap rents and an increasingly wild and lawless lifestyle. A gay migration was taking place, with LGBT people flocking to New York and other cities, attracted as much by the nightlife as by the promise of being able to connect with others in areas of the city ‘now filled with smart little shops, bachelor apartments, residential studios and fashionable speakeasies’.1
New York has a history of gay-friendly bars stretching back to at least the 1870s, when Pfaff’s Beer Cellar was staffed with effeminate men, making it popular with both gay men and straight writers and artists, including Walt Whitman. Another basement bar, Frank Stevenson’s infamous Slide on Bleecker Street, was New York’s most notorious, flamboyant and dangerous watering-hole: in 1890 a (presumably off-duty) policeman, Edward Sweeney, shot a waiter named George Rankin, who ‘used to entertain people by singing songs in a falsetto voice,’2 during a drunken rampage. ‘It is an alleged boast of its owner that it is the “wickedest place in a wicked town”.’3 Described as ‘the most notorious of all dens of iniquity in the city … where vice reigns in such a hideous mien that it is impossible to describe,’4 it was said that ‘neither Paris nor London can boast of a resort so openly run and yet so unspeakable in its viciousness’.
When The Slide was closed after a campaign orchestrated by the New York Herald,5 Stevenson and many of his staff moved to a new – and even tougher – bar, the Metropolitan on Bond Street – a place that was ‘crowded with the most depraved people of both sexes,’ where ‘waiters amuse the patrons with ribald songs’ and where ‘the orgies continue until dawn’.6 Bathhouses were popular, too, although often raided by the authorities: in February 1903, New York police conducted the first recorded vice raid on a gay bathhouse, in the basement of the Ariston apartments. Twenty-six men were arrested and twelve of them were brought to trial on sodomy charges; seven of those received sentences ranging from four to twenty years in prison.7 Still, when you consider hospitals were allowed to sterilise or lobotomise men convicted of sodomy, twenty years in prison doesn’t sound too bad.8
During the jazz era, it was not unusual to hear male singers performing (and recording) songs more usually associated with female vocalists whilst keeping the pronouns intact: music publishers kept a tight grip on their copyrights and would not allow singers to alter a word. LGBT historian and music collector JD Doyle calls these records ‘cross-vocals’: examples include the fiercely heterosexual Bing Crosby recording the songs ‘Ain’t No Sweet Man Worth the Salt of My Tears’ (1928) and ‘Gay Love’ (1929), male vocal trio The Rollickers singing lines such as ‘I would let him pet me’ and ‘he drives me wild’ on the record ‘He’s So Unusual’ (issued by Fred Rich and His Orchestra on Columbia in 1929) and many, many more examples. It was around this time that homosexual men started to refer to themselves as ‘gay’ in preference to the usual ‘fairy’, ‘queer’ or (in America especially) ‘faggot’ – the word had already had connotations of immorality (a ‘gay dog’ or a ‘gay blade’, for example, was a man who enjoyed a less than monastic life).
Centred around the clubs of Harlem, Times Square and Greenwich Village, the Pansy Craze grew out of a fondness for female impersonators. Men in dresses became hugely popular in the early years of the twentieth century – even Brigham Morris Young, the son of the polygamist Mormon leader Brigham Young, performed publicly under the pseudonym Madam Pattirini from 1885 into the early 1900s – but none were more famous than the massively influential Julian Eltinge.
Before Eltinge, the men who played vaudeville and the British music halls dressed as women had mostly performed as comedic stereotypes: harridans, crones and pantomime dames; Julian’s ‘illus
ions’ were much more feminine, and he was feted for his characterisations, which often took hours to prepare. ‘On make-up alone I usually spend three-quarters of an hour,’ he told Variety. ‘I envy some of those other artists who are able to prepare for the stage in fifteen minutes’.9 Even though he had his own women’s magazine and line of make-up, he did his utmost to cover up his own sexuality, famously saying ‘I am not gay, I just like pearls,’ and his manliness was unquestioned: ‘He has the entire approval of his own sex and the admiration of the women. No one suggests that he couldn’t go out into the back yard and saw a cord of wood if he wanted to’;10 ‘Eltinge was rather noisily a he-man off stage. In his younger days he engaged in enough saloon brawls to keep any longshoremen happy, mostly in resentment against slurs on his manliness.’11
Born William Julian Dalton in Newtonville, Massachusetts in 1881, dressing as a woman made Harvard graduate Eltinge a wealthy man and famous worldwide: he made his London debut in 1906 and was commanded to give a performance for King Edward VII at Windsor Castle. The king later presented him with a white bulldog.12 He built his own house, Villa Capistrano, one of the most lavish villas in Hollywood, where the confirmed bachelor lived with his mother and entertained extravagantly. He appeared in several silent comedies, including The Widow’s Might, The Countess Charming and Madame Behave, and even had a Broadway theatre named after him. For a 1908 publicity stunt, it was announced that Julian was to marry Eva Tanguay, the Canadian singer who billed herself as ‘the girl who made vaudeville famous’. The pair had a mock ceremony, with Eva dressed in traditional male formal attire and Julian as the blushing bride, but although a ring was exchanged, they never wed officially.
Eltinge also appeared on the big screen with Rudolph Valentino (in Over the Rhine, in 1916, later recut and reissued as An Adventuress and later still – after Valentino had broken big with The Sheik, Blood and Sand and The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse – as Isle of Love) and cut several sides for Victor – ‘In My Dream of You’ in 1913 (an unreleased test recording, with Eltinge performing unaccompanied) and ‘Eat And Grow Thin’ (with lyrics written by Eltinge) and the Jerome Kern composition ‘Two Heads Are Better Than One’ in 1916; both of the latter two songs were featured in the musical comedy Cousin Lucy.
Julian Eltinge as Salome, 1909
But times were changing, and the outrageous performances of female impersonators like Bert Savoy, and the drag balls and gay speakeasies of the Pansy Craze made Eltinge seem old-fashioned. He began to drink heavily, lost his money and his luxurious house and, despite a couple of attempts at a comeback (including appearing in a brace of sound movies – Maid to Order in 1932 and a brief cameo as himself in the Bing Crosby film If I Had My Way in 1940), his career was over. He died in 1941, 10 days after being diagnosed with kidney disease:13 Hollywood Babylon author Kenneth Anger claimed he committed suicide by taking an overdose of sleeping pills.
Eltinge outlived his principal rival, and the one man who did more than most to popularise the type of drag act that has lasted until this day. Bert Savoy’s candle burned bright for a few years at the beginning of the 1920s, and his style was diametrically opposed to the more demure style of Julian Eltinge. Savoy died when he was struck by lightning on Long Island on June 26 1923, killing him and his companion Jack Vincent (aka Jack Grossman) instantly. His last words were reported to be ‘Mercy, ain’t Miss God cutting up something awful?’
His body remained unclaimed by relatives; he had been brought up in an orphanage. Perhaps unsurprisingly, former wife Anna Clamper, who had sued Bert – real name Everett Mackenzie – after he allegedly ‘socked her on the skull’ and ‘presented her with a pair of black eyes’14 was uninterested, and it was left to his stage partner Jay Brennan to organise the burial. More than 1,500 people attended the funeral, and police had to be deployed to manage the crowd. Writing in his syndicated column New York Day By Day, O. O. McIntyre called Savoy ‘the gayest of female impersonators,’ and claimed that his death so affected Broadway that ‘it was as though the same electric bolt that killed Savoy had stunned the street’.15 McIntyre recalled that ‘he told me once with rather pathetic melancholy that he had no friends. “Nobody likes a female impersonator”,’ he added. Brennan and Savoy had what McIntyre called ‘a strong attachment. Several weeks before the tragedy each planned to take out a $50,000 insurance policy in favor of the other, but neglected the matter. They had a contract binding them together for life.’ Jay Brennan was said to have ‘aged many years’ following the loss of his partner. Savoy’s mother later surfaced in Chicago, and immediately employed a lawyer to look into what she claimed was her son’s missing money.
Savoy and Brennan’s entire recorded output consists of two sides for Vocalion in early 1923: ‘You Must Come Over’ and ‘You Don’t Know the Half of It’. The recordings were issued on a double-sided 78 in September 1923, three months after Savoy died. Savoy was the first of what we now accept as traditional drag: the brassy, gossipy harridan who is quite clearly a man in a dress, and a direct influence on the stage persona of Mae West; Mae’s oft-misquoted ‘Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?’ is reputed to have been based on Savoy’s catchphrase ‘you must come over’. Savoy’s stage persona would have an enormous influence of the cross-dressing stars of the Pansy Craze, a short period when gay men and lesbians were feted by royalty, courted by Hollywood (before the Hays Code, which effectively banned Hollywood from portraying homosexual characters or movies having positive LGBT storylines) and celebrated nationally for their work. The Pansy Craze was a by-product of the open defiance of America’s recently enacted prohibition laws, and the moral crusaders of the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and their allies would have been furious had they realised that their success in banning alcohol sales across the United States would create a thriving black market for bootleg booze, a bustling underground club scene and a vicious criminal underworld. Broadway Brevities, an early monthly gossip magazine, ran a series of news items and columns loosely bound together under the title Nights in Fairyland, spreading licentious tittle-tattle about the stars and venues, and asking ‘when are the local constabulary going to confer a little attention on the rouged youths who have made this place a laughing stock?’16
One of the most famous female impersonators of the day, Karyl Norman (occasionally billed as Karol), was a prolific songwriter. Although he never released a record (a story appeared in the New York Morning Telegraph in 1922 which stated that he was ‘making records for the various phonograph companies,’ but to date no recordings have surfaced), several of his songs were committed to shellac by other artists. Born George Francis Peduzzi in Baltimore in 1897, he billed himself as The Creole Fashion Plate (although he was mocked by those less kind as The Queer Old Fashion Plate) and was known for his lavish gowns, most of which were made for him by his devoted mother, who travelled with him throughout his career, and which (in 1935) were valued at $20,000.17
Norman began his showbiz career in 1911 and made his debut appearance as a female impersonator in New York City in May 1919. He was an immediate sensation, noted for being able to switch between a natural baritone and his falsetto voice, and for his quick costume changes; in his show Types he performed as five different female stereotypes, including the co-ed, the flapper and the debutante. ‘Off stage he is a wholesome American youth, who avers he detests femininity in a man,’ The Stage reported. ‘Karyl considers himself thoroughly masculine.’18 Like Eltinge, Norman was keen to quell rumours about his sexuality, becoming engaged to male impersonator Ruth Budd in 1922. The engagement did not last long: a newspaper report claimed that it was because Ruth Budd’s mother wanted to accompany the pair on their honeymoon,19 and after a breach of promise court case Norman was forced to pay Budd $10,000.20 As well as performing in vaudeville, Norman appeared in stage plays and musical comedies and toured the world. The actress Fifi D’Orsay, who played with him in the Greenwich Village Follies in 1924, said that Norman was ‘marvellous. He was a great p
erformer and I loved him. Karyl Norman was a wonderful guy, beloved and respected by everybody, although he was a gay boy, and for the gay boys in those days it was harder for them than it is today. He did an act with two pianos and those gorgeous clothes. He had such class and he was so divine.’21
Norman was known for his stroppy attitude towards uninterested audiences. In Cleveland he admonished his two-thirds full house, telling them, ‘we actors expect applause. You people ought to applaud an act whether you like it or not. I’ve only done half my act and that’s all you get!’22 By the start of the 1930s, his popularity had begun to wane, but he continued to perform and, in January 1931, he was caught up in a police raid on The Pansy Club at 204 West 48th Street, Manhattan. New York, of course, was still in the grip of prohibition, and New York’s police commissioner Edward P. Mulrooney planned to impose a 1 a.m. curfew on the city’s nightspots. On the night the Pansy Club was raided, the police also shut down the Calais Club, another venue that promoted female impersonators.23 Norman was also arrested in Detroit on a morals charge, but apparently was let off with a caution at the behest of Eleanor Roosevelt.24 He continued to tour and perform throughout the States during the 1930s, but retired after his mother’s death and died in Hollywood, Florida, in 1947.
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