But even if the habits Omaha Commerce taught him stuck, Lyle did not make a great success of his tenure there. His report cards, which, naturally, he saved, show mostly B’s, with a smattering of C’s and D’s. And though the school did put on plays, Lyle didn’t manage to win a single part. The teachers favored a kind of oratory that was not his forte. They liked commanding elocution in the style of Nebraska’s own William Jennings Bryan, or the mighty brayers of the Chautauqua circuit. Interviewed in his seventies, Lyle remembered a plum role that had gone, instead of to him, to a boy who had auditioned by reciting from Horatius at the Bridge. I looked it up—it’s a very long poem by the nineteenth-century Briton Thomas Babington Macaulay, and it has lines like “Shame on the false Etruscan / Who lingers in his home / When Porsena of Clusium / Is on the march for Rome.” My father was not a big poetry reader, but there was one poem he liked to say, and it was short and sweet: “If of thy mortal goods thou art bereft, / And from thy slender store two loaves alone to thee are left, / Sell one, and with the dole / Buy hyacinths to feed thy soul.” The poem is attributed to the medieval Persian poet Saadi, but Lyle had learned it for a play and didn’t know where it came from. He just liked the sentiment. He was one of life’s hyacinth buyers—not especially good with money, respectful of fleeting joys, tenderly susceptible to beauty. And though his grandmother disapproved, his father, it turned out, shared the hyacinth principle.
It was his father, the man he’d been allowed to discover when he was a teenager, who had gotten him the job with the Walter Savidge Amusement Co. Ed Henderson and his second wife, Anna, had just joined the Savidge company as performers and were paid $50 a week to appear in the plays that accompanied the carnival amusements. Ed was a “general business” actor, meaning he played assorted character roles; and Anna was “second business,” meaning that she played the maids and the old maids and the mothers. Because traveling tent shows valued actors who could flaunt at least one other vaudeville-style talent—this was known as “doubling in brass,” since often the second talent was playing a brass instrument—Ed honed the extras. In between acts, he’d tell jokes, juggle, manipulate marionettes he made himself, and sometimes mug with Anna in a plywood mock-up of an automobile labeled “Safety First” (they were meant to be country bumpkins trying and failing to control their first car).
How they had gotten themselves launched in show business was a bit of a tale, and Lyle loved to hear his father and stepmother tell it. Ed had been working as a barber again in Omaha, and as Anna would say, decades later, “We were just two, ordinary, small-town people.” Ed, she recalled, “thought there was nothing in this world like barbering.” Ed and Anna had taken rooms on the top floor of an apartment building, whose landlady was a garrulous older woman named Lucy Hayes, with a daughter also named Lucy. At night, the four of them would play charades and sing at an upright piano in the parlor. As Ed put it, “The two Lucys sort of adopted us, and we adopted them.” In years past, the older Lucy had been the wardrobe mistress at a downtown theater called the Boyd, and those, for her, had been glory years. The greatest actors and actresses of the American and European stage had performed at the Boyd—Madame Modjeska, Lillie Langtry, Edwin Booth, even Sarah Bernhardt on her American tours. Young Lucy, who had grown up in the wings, had been as stagestruck as her mother, and she begged and pleaded with the management till they cast her in some bit parts. Now she was a grown woman and wanted to start her own stock company, of which she, naturally, would be the leading lady. And she wanted to recruit Anna and Ed as her first players.
It wasn’t only her fondness for her mother’s tenants that made Lucy Hayes think she could suddenly transform them into professional entertainers. Ed may have been a farm boy turned barber, but everyone who met him remarked on his flair for storytelling. One of his customers at the barbershop was the mayor of Omaha, Jim Dahlman, and he had a long-standing bet with Ed that the young man would end up on the stage someday. Ed’s own father had been an upright Presbyterian farmer who “didn’t think acting was exactly respectable for any decent man,” as Ed recalled. But his maternal grandfather had been a circus tumbler whose specialty was a somersault performed atop an elephant. At eighty-four, he’d tried to replicate the feat for a rapt audience of family members at the Hendersons’ farmhouse, though presumably there was no elephant on hand, and maybe that was a problem, for the old man sustained injuries of which he would die a few days later. Still, Ed figured that dying in your eighties from an excess of high-spirited show-offiness wasn’t such a bad way to go, and he fervently admired his grandfather.
And Anna, well, Anna was a surprise. Though she was modest and mild-looking, a quietly devoted follower of Christian Science, she had spent her adolescence in Grand Island, Nebraska, turning up for every show that ever came to town and always “going home imagining I was that girl on the stage.” She loved Ed, and if he’d woken up one day and announced he wanted to be a sea captain, she would have been as doughty a companion shipboard as she was on the road. But the fact was, show people pleased her, and if she was mostly along for the ride, she was game. She could play a dignified straight woman to Ed’s goggle-eyed rubes (I always picture Margaret Dumont in the Marx Brothers movies). She could talk with equal ease to porters, bellmen, puritanical landladies, attitudinous artistes, dangerously sentimental drunks, and fretful parents in search of their stage-bent daughters. And when need be—the locals had taken offense to a show or one of its performers; a blizzard, tornado, or flu outbreak threatened—she could pack in a hurry.
The night Ed and Anna made their debut, they opened at an opera house in Council Bluffs, Iowa. A lot of small midwestern cities and towns had “opera houses,” though nobody was planning to stage Carmen or Rigoletto in them. It was just that the term “theater” still had a disreputable taint when small towns started erecting permanent entertainment venues in the late nineteenth century. Some of the opera houses were fairly grand-looking edifices, with facades trimmed like wedding cakes and heavy velvet curtains for the stage. But in many cases, “playing the opera house” just meant performing on the second floor of a stolid clapboard building with a dry goods or grocery store on the first floor. For Anna, whose personal ambitions were modest, opening night at the Council Bluffs opera house went off quite well. “I had never played a part in my life,” Anna recalled. “But in that first play, I had three parts, a young girl, an unhappy old maid, and an old sot.”
For Ed, it was a different story. Mayor Dahlman had come from Omaha, and brought a contingent of his friends, all of whom were seated in the front rows. “As soon as I came out of the wings, they started hollering up at me, things like ‘Gimme a haircut,’ or ‘Gimme a shave,’ or ‘Who’s next, Ed?’” Poor Ed was so rattled that his brain instantly purged itself of all the lines he had memorized. Then the good-time Charlies in the front row began hollering, “Ed, it’s your turn, now! Why don’t you say something?” Ed’s role called for him to stand by the fireplace a lot, so the next time he came out onstage, he put the script on the mantel as a prompt, but he kept forgetting to turn the pages and was soon lost again.
By the early twentieth century, audiences were beginning to settle down into the respectful comportment we’re used to in the theater today. But there were still holdouts, audiences as unruly and participatory as they had been in the early nineteenth century and indeed in Shakespeare’s time. Sure, small-town audiences loved it when a traveling show came around, but that didn’t prevent them from getting rowdy. Whole families turned out, and if the mood struck them, kids in the front row blew raspberries, while their older brothers whistled and catcalled. For some unfortunate performers, audiences prepared special hazings. Perhaps the most notorious of these targets were the Cherry Sisters, who were known as the worst act in vaudeville. Addie, Jessie, Lizzie, and Effie Cherry grew up on a farm near Marion, Iowa, and took to the stage to support themselves when their parents died. (They had a fifth sister, Ella, who stayed home on t
he farm.) Since their recognizable talents were few, they mostly pranced around the stage in black tights and bloomers, recited essays and poems, and banged on a drum. The signature poem one of the sisters recited—“Cherries red and cherries ripe, / The cherries they are out of sight, / Cherries ripe and cherries red, / Cherry Sisters still ahead”—might actually have played as titillation, except that, alas, the sisters’ looks did not seem to have met with much male approval. Rumor had it that theater managers spread nets across the stage when they performed, to catch all the rotten fruit and other homemade missiles lobbed from the audience (though the sisters always insisted that this was an exaggeration). Still, three of them—Addie, Effie, and Jessie—had the gumption, or the desperation, to keep performing well into their forties. In 1896, Oscar Hammerstein, the theater impresario and grandfather of the librettist, brought them to New York, where their performances drew so many (undoubtedly jeering) spectators that they were credited with saving his organization from bankruptcy. It’s not at all clear that the Cherry Sisters were in on the joke.
Indeed, two years later, they lent their name to an influential libel case when they sued The Des Moines Leader over an especially nasty review the paper had run of one of their performances. In 1901, the Iowa Supreme Court—after asking for a description of the performance—ruled in favor of the newspaper, and the decision became a precedent for protecting a critic’s license to sneer. “Surely,” the court opined, “if one makes himself ridiculous in his public performances, he may be ridiculed by those whose duty or right it is to inform the public regarding the character of the performance.”
After that first night of heckling, Ed suffered nothing as ignominious as the poor Cherry Sisters did. For the next twenty years, he and Anna would tour throughout the Midwest with a half-dozen theater companies. They did short stints, too, as vaudeville-style entertainers on showboats that plied the Mississippi River. Ed never forgot his lines again, or if he did, he learned to cover for it without looking like an idiot. And every once in a while, just for the reassuring pleasure of messing up in a controlled way, he’d ad-lib some rascally bit of business onstage. In one role, playing a villain opposite an arrogant actor he didn’t much like, he was supposed to be decked by the guy. But one night, Ed refused to fall down. “My attacker kept going through the motions of flooring me,” he recalled many years later. “Finally, the guy exploded, ‘Lay down, you damn fool!’”
Along the way, Ed also developed a line of skits based on the idea of a country bumpkin confounded by city ways and modern inventions. Since his audiences were predominantly rural, and living in an era that saw the introduction of an astonishing array of new technologies, they seemed to enjoy the spectacle of characters who were like them but more clueless, and they were comforted by the simultaneous suspicion that however clueless those rubes onstage might be, they were essentially good people, which was more than you could say about a lot of city folk. Ed’s characters were flummoxed by automobiles, phonographs, and especially electricity. His audiences were busy mastering those things but not always with ease. One of his most popular skits involved a country lad who goes to stay in a hotel where he sees an electric light for the first time. To him, the object looks like a milk bottle hanging from the ceiling with red wires mysteriously sprouting from it. “When it came time to go to sleep,” he confides to the audience, “I took my knife and cut it down. You never saw such hell come out of two wires in your life.” Some humor translates across the decades, and some doesn’t. But Ed knew his audiences, and you can see how a joke like that might have been cathartic for them.
Ed wanted to take his son along with him on the road as soon as school let out for the summer, and Lyle was beyond eager. He wanted to be near his father and stepmother, whom he could see right away were more jovial, playful people than his grandmother had ever been. Their obvious devotion to each other was something else Lyle had not encountered up close before and was drawn to, particularly since they had a way of warming other people with the glow of it. When Ed and Anna bought a small apartment building in Omaha a few years later, for instance, a local reporter dubbed it a “haven for newlyweds.” It seemed that the Hendersons, wanting to encourage young married couples to live as happily as they did together, charged them below the going rate for starter apartments. Anna baked Danish pastries for Lyle when he came to visit, and encouraged him to call her “Mother.” Ed was a joker who started a tradition of giving his son the same hideous tie on Christmas and getting it back from Lyle the next; it went back and forth between father and son year after year, elaborately wrapped each time.
Ed and Anna Henderson doing their country-bumpkins-with-their-first-automobile act.
Joshing aside, Lyle took his new filial duties seriously. In his scrapbook is an undated newspaper clipping, probably from 1919, that offers some advice to modern sons: “Of course, you are much older now, than when you learned to call him father. . . . Your clothes fit better, your hat has a more modern shape and your hair is combed in a different style. In short, you are more ‘fly’ than you were then. Your father has a last year’s coat and a two year old hat, and a vest of still older pattern. He can’t write such an elegant note as you can (but how about his checks?) and all that—but don’t call him the ‘old man.’ Call him ‘father.’”
Ed and Anna with two of the puppets he made himself.
In those first two decades of the twentieth century, small-town America was not the entertainment desert we might imagine. But neither was entertainment in constant supply, available at the flick of a switch. Much of it was homemade—town hall dances with polkas and waltzes provided by Bohemian or Polish orchestras, sing-alongs, wedding celebrations. And what was not—the circuses, carnivals, itinerant theater troupes, Wild West shows, Chautauquas—enjoyed a relationship with its audiences that was at once more enchanted and more familiar. More enchanted because this was razzle-dazzle that came to town, visited upon you at intervals over which you had no control, like freak weather. More familiar because the performers stayed at a boardinghouse in your town for a week at a time; you saw their laundry hanging out to dry, heard the bareback rider grousing at the clown as they dragged their trunks to the train station. Disapproval of performers required a close policing of the boundaries between them and their audiences, and that in itself was a kind of intimacy. A landlady would have to tell a person to his face that she wouldn’t take actors in her respectable establishment, as landladies would tell my father in Portland, Maine, and in Boston. And on the day a troupe came to town, its leading man and lady would sometimes promenade down main street in their finery—derby hats and diamond stickpins for the men, whispering taffeta and glinting ear bobs for the women—nodding coolly to passersby, advertising their glamorous separateness but so close up that you could smell their perfume and their sweat.
Ed Henderson with two fresh-faced fans clutching glamour shots of him and Anna.
Of all the visiting entertainments of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the splashiest and most redolent of freedom was the circus. Circuses were then experiencing their golden age, testing out ever greater feats of derring-do: the first human projectile fired from a cannon (1880, Rosa M. Richter, aka Mademoiselle Zazel); the first three-ring circus (1881, Barnum & Bailey); the first successful triple somersault on a flying trapeze (1897, Lena Jordan); the first record set for the number of times a rider could leap on and off a running horse (1915, Poodles Hanneford). High-wire stunts and other aerial acts exerted a powerful hold on the imagination in those last decades before the airplane permanently extended our reach into the skies. And they were not the only feats of ascension that transfixed audiences. Like the Wizard of Oz in Emerald City, hot-air balloonists were mythic sensations at the turn of the century and just before, especially in the flat and windy Midwest. One of the most remarkable was Thomas Scott Baldwin, an orphaned young aerialist—his parents were murdered by ruffians in front of him when he w
as twelve—who went to work as a brakeman on the railroad. His talents were discovered by a circus manager who saw him performing acrobatics atop the train cars. Baldwin became a star ascensionist, working the county fair circuit with his brothers in the 1880s. With them he also invented a primitive parachute but never bothered to patent it, because as he said, “We never thought anyone else would care to try it.” (Given that it consisted of a balloon from which Baldwin would rip a panel, allowing hot air to escape as he fell from heights of up to two thousand feet, he probably had a point.)
The day the circus came to town. Running away to join the circus. Those were the classic tropes of early-twentieth-century rebellion. As expressions, they’re still with us. But when my father was growing up, there was more of a reality behind them. It actually happened, not infrequently, that the circus came to town and scooped up an errant boy or (less often) girl, and it meant more then because there were fewer means of escape from small-town life. Circuses were about daring and pleasure for their own sake. Their feats were entirely innocent of practical purpose and produced nothing of value, only oohs and aahs. For most rural audiences, nothing one did in spangles and face paint could be considered labor. It had no worldly relation to the hard lives most of them led. It belonged instead to some loopy land of Cockaigne, to the rock-candy mountain where people preened and played instead of toiling and praying. That circus training in fact involved a prodigious amount of work was not the point. The object of the circus performance was to annihilate, in one adrenalized burst of admiration after another, the labor behind the feat. To make what was strenuously effortful look effortless, to soar through the air with insouciant grace, was to offer audiences a glimpse of liberation. In his memoir, an early-twentieth-century circus manager named Bert Chipman has a passage that captures the fizzy sense of freedom circus people sometimes felt, and sometimes transmitted to their audiences: “Four walls get awfully small when the circus comes to town. What’s that? Flag’s up, come and get it! Boy, smell the java! Spuds with the jackets on! Give ’em all they want! Where do we go from here? Who knows? Who cares? Only the ever-changing panorama each day and each night, the chug-chug and rumble underneath, with the shrill midnight shriek of the engine. Then you nestle back in sweet contentment. It’s a hard life. So they say. Undoubtedly so, but don’t it kind of tug at your heartstrings—lure you, so to speak?”
The Entertainer Page 5
