By Jonathan Goldman

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Eva Tanguay" The New York Public Library Digital Collections. — Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Eva Tanguay" *The New York Public Library Digital Collections*.

When Dorothy Parker wanted to dunk on Billie Burke’s performance in the new Somerset Maugham play, she called Burke's acting “an impersonation of Eva Tanguay.”[1] The reference may be obscure now, but it was not then. In January 1920, Tanguay had been a New York fixture and international celebrity for over fifteen years. Crowned “Queen of Vaudeville” by an infatuated press, from 1905 on she commanded her industry's highest salaries.[2] Tanguay's star, at the time of Parker's quip, was still luminous enough for her to headline “the Valhalla of Vaudeville,” B.F. Keith’s Palace Theater, 47th and Broadway.[3]

Tanguay had become famous by violating standards — of the body, of business, and especially of gender and race — and by staging these challenges both in person and in the papers. Eroding the distinction between public and private life, she sold the idea that identity was a matter of performing the self, publicly, and did so with prescient promotional savvy. The tradition of defiance leading to fame is centuries-old;[4] Tanguay amplified trespasses of gender and race within that history. Perhaps as much as anyone, she made self-conscious transgression a stock feature of celebrity in the 20th century and into our time — making it the norm to proclaim that one is defying the norm.

Over the last decade-ish, Tanguay has emerged anew as an object of analysis. Recent critics have scrutinized her in her historical context; Kathleen Casey, for example, argues that “Tanguay provides an important case study of how gender increasingly took on racially specific meanings in the early twentieth century”[5] (laying the groundwork for my approach in this essay.) Others hail Tanguay as a forgotten proto-popstar who paved the way for Madonna and Lady Gaga. Both perspectives work, and work together. While clearly relevant to our own age, in her heyday Tanguay’s commentators called her an embodiment of the zeitgeist; she represented “emergence from the Victorian age,” in the words of Edward Bernays, nephew of Freud and groundbreaking practitioner of public relations.[6] As a teenager, Bernays played hooky from DeWitt Clinton High School to see Tanguay perform, and dwelt for years on her significance. English writer/mystic/crank Aleister Crowley called her “the Soul of America.”[7]

From the private collection of Beth Touchton. Printed in Erdman, Andrew. Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 6. — From the private collection of Beth Touchton. Printed in Erdman, Andrew. *Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay* (Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press, 2012), p. 6.

These men were responding, primarily, to Tanguay's extravagant physicality. In publicity photographs, her hair is an unkempt mane, her poses brash. On stage, she was a maelstrom of gyration and torque, earning sobriquets such as “the Cyclonic Comedienne,” the “Queen of Vivacity.” Her costumes were outlandish (one constructed entirely of feathers, another forged of the newly introduced Lincoln pennies) and skimpy, landing her in occasional legal trouble that she was sure to publicize. She would switch outfits in front of the audience.[8] The onstage clothing changes not only raised the erotic stakes of Tanguay’s act, but also signaled that no matter what was draped over her, Tanguay was enacting herself, insisting on her singularity. Seeing her, being in her physical presence, she appeared to assert, was the only way of apprehending her irreducible, inimitable performance. Inevitably, a cottage industry of Tanguay mimics sprang up.

“Possessed of a decidedly unusual personality is Miss Eva Tanguay.”[9] So began a typical 1909 writeup, from the Brooklyn Citizen. Tanguay’s iconoclasticism was frequently recognized as personality. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle depicted her 1907 show at the Orpheum (587 Fulton, Brooklyn) as “exploiting her singular personality, for it is difficult to describe her otherwise . . . the songs she sings are about herself and her theatrical success.”[10] Personality rendered secondary, or subsumed, all of her other characteristics. A 1911 Printer’s Ink article explained: “She can neither sing, nor dance, nor recite…. Just the same, Eva commands the money. The audience wants her. She has personality.”[11] Tanguay celebrated “personality” in a 1909 song:

Personality eclipses intelligence, class, and geography as the source of desirability and marketability, as surely as it does traditional stage talent. (Crowley: “She cannot sing … or dance.”)

The Moving Picture World, July 1916. Internet Archive. — *The Moving Picture World*, July 1916. *Internet Archive.*

The early 1900s discourse in and about Tanguay reflects Warren J. Susman’s reading of how notions of the individual changed in her era. He writes of a “radical shift” “somewhere in the middle of the first decade of the twentieth century,” in which longstanding veneration of “character” gave way to a captivation with “personality.” While people had once been valued by a set of inherent, interior, qualities (“character”), they now became defined by their ability to demonstrate their singularity, how they are “standing out in a crowd”: their “personality.”[13] Susman's view resonates with the description of the titular character of The Great Gatsby: “If personality is an unbroken series of successful gestures, then there was something gorgeous about him … such as I have never found in any other person and which it is not likely I shall ever find again.”[14] Gatsby’s seamless performance of the self manifests in the apotheosis of personhood: “personality.” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote Gatsby in 1923, with the benefit of hindsight, after four decades during which “personality” sharply increased in use. The word would continue its ascent into the 1930s, decline a bit in the shadows of 1930s dictatorships, resume rising in the 1940s, and peak in the 1960s, shortly after Lloyd Price’s pop hit. Tanguay, no doubt, helped nudge the concept along over a career in which the point of her shows was to generate a distinct identity. She sang, “It’s all been done before but not the way I do it”; marquees announced “Eva Tanguay, performing songs about herself.” When cinema inevitably beckoned, she starred in movies whose titles — Energetic Eva (1916) and The Wild Girl (1917) — trumpeted persona rather than plot.

Tanguay was born in Québec in 1878 and raised in Holyoke, Massachusetts, starting her career there as a teenager. She appeared on stage in New York as early as 1895 and moved to the city in 1901. She found supporting roles in musical comedy — a genre then featuring little or no storyline between numbers, close in risqué spirit and form to burlesque, heavily indebted to 19th-century minstrelsy. In theaters such as the Grand Opera House on Eighth Avenue and 23rd Street, she caught the eyes of audiences, producers, and press with the unorthodox, wild physicality of her demeanor and dancing that seemed ready to spin out of control; the Tribune called her “perspiring and energetic.”[15] She began to make society news, offstage, such as when superfan Frederick Havemeyer gifted her a sealskin coat. In 1904-5, Tanguay played the lead in The Sambo Girl at the American Theater, (260 West 42nd Street) for which librettists Jean Lenox and Harry O’Sullivan composed a song specifically for her, “I Don’t Care.”

"I Don't Care." Jerome H. Remnick and Co., 1905. Wikicommons. — "I Don't Care." Jerome H. Remnick and Co., 1905. *Wikicommons.*

“I Don’t Care” — the number that Bernays remembered for years — set the tone for a career disavowing standards of decorum, and The Sambo Girl made Tanguay “blossom forth as a star.”[17] After The Sambo Girl, Tanguay left musical comedy for the more lucrative vaudeville and (following industry convention) took elements of the play with her — including “I Don’t Care.” Years later, when Tanguay finally got into a music studio, this was the tune she chose to record.

The lyrics of the song, the title of The Sambo Girl, spotlight that Tanguay's “star [...] on the ascendant” relied on racial categories and complicated them. As Emily Brayshaw writes, Tanguay, early in her career, adopted song and dance styles of the 1890s “Coon shouter” fad leading to her “huge success” in 1902's The Chaperons.[18] Casey argues that Tanguay, implying a connection, biological or otherwise, to racial otherness, mobilized early-20th-century ideas of primitivism through costume, hair-style, and sheer physicality. “Tanguay simultaneously evoked and manipulated existing racial ideologies to elicit publicity through the lens of savage primitivism.”[19] To Casey, that is, Tanguay's exploding renown stemmed from her play with racial categories. At the same time, her insistence that her body was a source of singularity emphasized that her rebellions were that of a white woman. Her animalistic costumes evoked a fetishistic association with primitivism and non-white-ness, but changing them on stage showed her overabundance of personhood, reminding that her transgressions were possible, and potent, because they were located in a white, European-descended body — a body that was supposed to behave more conventionally and reap the resulting social advantages.

Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Eva Tanguay as Salome." The New York Public Library Digital Collections. — Billy Rose Theatre Division, The New York Public Library. "Eva Tanguay as Salome." *The New York Public Library Digital Collections*.

Her racial transgressions reached a new level of intensity in 1908. When New York was hit by a fad for productions about Salome, Tanguay mounted her own version, Visions of Salome at the Alhambra (which still stands, at 126th Street and Adam Clayton Powell). When Tanguay removed her (Salome’s) seven veils, only a body stocking and a few strategically placed accessories remained; she “managed to dispense with wearing apparel just within the ban of the law.”[20] Other Salomes in town were similarly pushing boundaries. The Evening World describes them as wearing only “a few yards of gauze and pearls, with legs and bodies bare as the day they got them.”[21] With rivals offering similar near-nudity, Tanguay raised the stakes by incorporating a dangerous racial element into the display; gazing at her on stage was a young Black actor whom she had cast in the role of Iokannan. Tanguay herself explained, “I did something else that no one else had thought of. Instead of dancing around holding the papier maché head I hired a Negro boy with big eyes. I sat him on the side of the stage, all covered up. As I began to dance, I uncovered his head which, to the audience, appeared to be resting on a silver tray. As I moved about the stage his huge eyes also moved, following me.”[22] Her method of distinguishing herself — “no one else had thought of” this — was to infuse racial tension. Within the story, the Black male is eliminated, the Black male body lifeless and fragmented, and the white woman triumphant. But seen as performance transcending the plot, a white woman becomes the object of the Black male gaze. For a Black man, this role, if occurring offstage, would be dangerous to deadly in a time that interracial marriage was illegal and lynching was common, not just in the South. This sexual/racial transgressiveness on stage paralleled Tanguay’s off-stage violations. During the Salome run, word had it that Tanguay was involved with George Walker, a Black vaudeville star who was married to choreographer Overton Ada Walker. The affair, interracial, extramarital, would have been taboo beyond the pale. Casey writes: “Whether or not the rumors were true, they did not damage Tanguay’s career . . . Her alleged dalliances with Walker and her casting of a ‘Negro boy’ seemed to suggest that she had to venture beyond her race in the pursuit of sexual satisfaction.”[23]

Because of Tanguay's evocations of primitivism, as explored by Casey and Brayshaw, her subversion of codes regulating the sexuality of white, middle-class women always imply a racial component. Gender nonconformity, defiance of patriarchal power: Tanguay’s physicality, eroticism, romantic attachments, and business practices, all contributed to these. She was thicker-set and more muscular than her rivals, with whom she made a practice of offstage physical altercations. Onstage, she once angrily jabbed John Phillips Sousa with a pin.[24] Her eroticism was described as undermining male agency; Crowley bemoans: “She absorbs me … She eliminates repose. She has my nerves … She is perpetual irritation without possibility of satisfaction, an Avatar of sex-insomnia.” Tanguay undermined traditional romance with publicly-announced engagements, separations, flirtations, and affairs. In September 1908, she staged an engagement ceremony with actor Julian Eltinge, a renowned female impersonator (who would mount their own Salome production later that year). Tanguay arranged for Eltinge, in women’s dress, to present her with a ring that she, dressed as a man, accepted.[25] The act managed to satirize notions of masculine and feminine power, sartorial expectations, and the institution of marriage as a private, bourgeois expression of love.

Public romances kept her name in the papers and in people's minds, part of Tanguay's erasure of boundaries between private and public. Not content with only forging her persona on stage, Tanguay put her offstage life to use. Long before Bernays piloted public relations, Tanguay hired agents to boost her fame. Her first, in 1907, was journalist C.F. Zittel. In an episode of what might be considered meta-publicity, Tanguay and Zittel embarked on a scandalous love affair. The scandal arose when they were caught in a hotel room tryst. (They put out the story that Zittel’s wife had hired the private detectives who caught them.) Tanguay later enlisted New York Telegraph theater critic Sam McKeen as her publicist. McKeen worked for Tanguay while continuing to write about her for the paper (with or without concern for conflict of interest).

In such arrangements, Tanguay maintained her role as boss. Tanguay disavowed the customary practice of having men direct her career choices; she kept male theatrical agents in advisory roles, preferring to manage herself, and to face down men like the Schuberts in business confrontations. Her negotiation with theater magnate Florenz Ziegfeld is exemplary.

When Tanguay was announcing Visions of Salome she was at peak popularity, currently leading the voting for Queen of the upcoming Coney Island Mardi Gras Festival (held in September, oddly), ahead of the next candidate, sixty-three votes to thirty-five.[26] Vaudeville’s biggest draw, Tanguay found herself being offered an unprecedented salary to take center stage in Ziegfeld Follies of 1909. To the producer’s surprise, she demanded more. At the time she was performing at the Brighton Beach Music Hall, and she allowed Ziegfeld to visit her at work to discuss. Ziegfeld motored across the venerable, several decades-old Brooklyn Bridge and several hours later found himself agreeing to a salary well above his intentions. (In his enthusiasm, he also offered to drive her back across the East River to Manhattan; then his car broke down.) Moreover, as a condition of the contract, Tanguay demanded her name appear along with the revue’s title. It was the first and only time in his career Ziegfeld acceded to such a demand, or perhaps the first and only time anyone had had the temerity to make it.[27]

This history underlies Dorothy Parker's “imitation of Eva Tanguay” quip a decade later. When Parker used Tanguay to diss Billie Burke, she was also (as I have written elsewhere) dissing Ziegfeld, Burke's producer, manager and husband.[28] At the time, Ziegfeld was trying to burnish his and Burke's credentials as purveyors of serious theater, producing the acclaimed Maugham’s latest at the Liberty Theater, 236 West 42nd Street, casting Burke as the young wife of an unfaithful husband. Parker, by associating Burke with Tanguay, pillories the attempt at elite entertainment. Moreover, she pillories Ziegfeld and Burke's marriage (Ziegfeld was well known for his affairs with younger women) and business arrangements that, per tradition, granted disproportionate personal and professional agency to the man. Tanguay's name, code for challenging gender roles, serves to satirize patriarchal power.

Daily News, 15 February 1921, p.1. Chronicling America. — *Daily News,* 15 February 1921, p.1. *Chronicling America.*

The 1910s were flush years for Tanguay. Even rare missteps boosted her fame and reveal her showbiz acumen. In 1914 she was the face, and the bankroll, of a failed scheme to stage cheap and plentiful baseball games that would compete with the major leagues; a sports enthusiast, she predicted (correctly) that playing games at night would increase attendance. Her star burned into the start of the next decade. In 1920, in addition to providing Parker's punchline, she made news when it was rumored that she had gotten married, when her driver clipped a pedestrian with her car, when she bought a plot in Manhattan Beach and a house in Los Angeles formerly owned by Jack Pickford and Olive Thomas. In February 1921 she was back in the headlines for her mysterious marriage, and in March 1921 she was back at the Palace, billed as “the world's greatest Eccentric Comedienne.” The opener was Chaplin’s The Kid.

It did not last. She was not a success on film or record, and she was not able to, or not interested in, incorporating musical elements from the newly popular ragtime and jazz idioms — unlike, say, her contemporary and rival Sophie Tucker, who became much better celebrated. But Tanguay's influence is tangible, and though the 1953 biopic The I Don’t Care Girl seems to have done little to keep her fame alive, the fact that Hollywood felt compelled to make it is telling. Aside from the careers that were clearly indebted to her — Mae West was not shy about it — we need only consider the version of celebrity that was ascendant in Tanguay’s time, and after. Walter Benjamin, an early critic of celebrity self-commodification, wrote of “the artificial build-up of the ‘personality’ outside the studio,” and observed that “the cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person, but the ‘spell of the personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.”[29] Benjamin is among many when he associates renown with Hollywood, yet his 1935 critique evokes Tanguay. In mid-century, when Daniel M. Boorstin would complain that a celebrity is someone “known for his well-knownness” he had people like Tanguay in mind.[30] Boorstin’s famous formulation means to disparage figures from mass entertainment whose signature skill is whipping up attention. Despite his derision, Boorstin’s coinage nails Tanguay’s unabashed enunciation of the self. In a time when US culture was revising its understanding of personhood, Tanguay made her form of transgression an essential component of the individual. By elevating her, society placed repudiation of gender and racial expectations at the forefront of the new personality. That these violations have remained an integral aspect of our cultural consciousness is the star's legacy.

Jonathan Goldman is Professor of English at New York Institute of Technology, author of Modernism is the Literature of Celebrity, editor of Joyce and the Law, and co-editor of Modernist Star Maps: Celebrity, Modernity, Culture. He directs New York 1920s: 100 Years Ago Today, a digital project which highlights archival materials related to the city 100 years ago. He is incoming president of the James Joyce Society.

[1] Parker, Dorothy. “The Oriental Drama.” Vanity Fair, January 1920, 24.

[2] Erdman, Andrew. Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay. Ithaca, New York:

Cornell University Press, 2012, 118. Much of the background information that I rely on comes from Erdman’s brilliant biography.

[3] Lankevich, George J. Postcards from Times Square. United States: Square One Publishers, 2001, 7.

[4] See, for example, Marcus, Sharon. The Drama of Celebrity. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019, 21-44.

[5] Casey, Kathleen B. “Sex, Savagery, and the Woman Who Made Vaudeville Famous.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, 36 no. 1 (2015): 88.

[6] Bernays, Edward L. Biography of an Idea: The Founding Principles of Public Relations. United States: Open Road Media, 2015, 306.

[7] Cited in Seldes, Gilbert. The 7 Lively Arts. United States: Dover Publications, 2001, 375.

[8] Erdman, Queen of Vaudeville, 118–119.

[9] “A Cyclonic Girl.” Brooklyn Citizen, 13 January 1908, 13.

[10] “Vaudeville Houses.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 16 April 1907, 24.

[11] Printers’ Ink 74, January–March 1911, 20.

[12] Spink, George, “Personality.” M. Witmark and Sons, 1909.

[13] Susman, Warren J. Culture as History. New York: Pantheon Books, 1973, 271–285.

[14] Fitzgerald, F. Scott. The Great Gatsby. 1924. New York: Scribner’s, 1996, 6.

[15] “The Chaperons.” New York Tribune, 6 June 1902, 9.

[16] Lenox, Jean, and Harry O’Sullivan. “I Don’t Care.” Jerome H. Remick & Co, 1905.

[17] Buffalo Commercial, 10 September 1904, 5.

[18] Brayshaw, Emily. “Ethnographic spectacle and trans-Atlantic performance: Unravelling the costumes of vaudeville's ‘Queen’, Eva Tanguay.” Studies in Costume & Performance, 4 no. 1 (2019): 25, 8.

[19] Casey, “Sex, Savagery, and the Woman Who Made Vaudeville Famous,” 98.

[20] “Vaudeville Houses.” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 29, 1908, 6.

[21] “All the Salomes in Town Tell the Naked Truth About the Things They Don’t Wear on Stage” Evening World, Aug 19, 1908, 3.

[22] Quoted in Casey, “Sex, Savagery, and the Woman Who Made Vaudeville Famous,” 97.

[23] Casey, “Sex, Savagery, and the Woman Who Made Vaudeville Famous,” 98.

[24] Erdman, Queen of Vaudeville, 147.

[25] Erdman, Queen of Vaudeville, 123.

[26] “How the Vote Stands for King and Queen of Coney Carnival,” Evening World, 5 August 1908, 5.

[27] Erdman, Queen of Vaudeville, 141-2.

[28] Goldman, Jonathan. “When Dorothy Parker Got Fired from Vanity Fair.” Public Domain Review, 6 February 2020.

[29] Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Schocken Books, 1968, 217-51.

[30] Boorstin, Daniel J. The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America. New York: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2012, 57.

Eva Tanguay's Racial and Gender Iconoclasticism and the Making of “Personality”