• • •
The dinner show at the Strand Roof began at eight. The girls checked in at seven. The dressing rooms were large and took up the whole space on top of the theater. Ruby and Mae would dress for the show before they left the apartment, go to dinner, and then leave for the theater in time. At the theater someone would check to see if they had arrived. “If you weren’t there, look out,” Mae said. “But the final was ‘half-hour, half-hour.’ And you’d have to answer back so he knew you were there.”
After the last show, Earl Lindsay wanted the dancers “in bed immediately following a little something to eat,” said Mae. “He wanted us healthy. And not only that, but in each of his productions he had at least three who were under age. And they had to be protected.”
When the run ended at the Strand, Mae and Ruby were out of work and didn’t think another job would be coming their way. Finally, because of Lindsay’s connections as a producer and choreographer, Mae got a part in a show called Sitting Pretty, a musical comedy by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse with music by Jerome Kern.
For the new part Mae had a new name: Mae Clarke. “I only changed it because they laughed at Klotz. They laughed publicly, in a nightclub called the Silver Slipper across the street from the Everglades Cafe. Nils T. Granlund . . . worked as a dirty comic [there] under the name ‘N.T.G.’ ”
Granlund invited girls from a show to his nightclub for free. He got up on the stage as the master of ceremonies. A spotlight was directed to the girls sitting at the table while Granlund commented on how beautiful they were and mentioned the show they were appearing in. Mae was there one night with some of the girls from the show when NTG put the spotlight on her and walked over to her table. “I was thrilled to death,” she said. When Granlund asked her name, she answered, “Mae Klotz.” “Here she is! Folks, I’ve found her. We’ve been looking everywhere for you.” Mae thought she had been discovered. Granlund said, “Here she is, Minnie Klutz!” The audience roared. Mae didn’t know what to do, where to look. “I didn’t have a comeback,” she said. “I couldn’t get up and leave . . . [W]e went through the rest of the evening and went back to do our own show.”
Afterward, Mae said to her friends who were trying to console her, “That’s my father’s name and I love it. I love him. And I don’t like people laughing at him. Or me.” One friend suggested she change her name to Mae Hughes; another to Mae Gray. “It’s too—it’s like a burlesque queen,” Mae said. She wanted it to be as close to her father’s name as possible. She thought of Klotz and then Clarke. “And right there, I saw the ‘e’ . . . [W]hen I don’t get the ‘e,’ I take it as a personal insult.”
Sitting Pretty opened at the Fulton Theatre on Forty-Sixth Street, west of Broadway, and then moved to the Imperial Theatre.
In the program notes Mae Klotz was listed as May Clark; no e was at the end of either name.
• • •
Earl Lindsay was staging a new show and gave Ruby a part in it, as he did Dorothy Van Alst. It was a musical revue in two acts called Keep Kool; the title was inspired by the presidential campaign slogan making its way across the country, “Keep Cool with Coolidge.” (“The business of America is business,” Coolidge said.) The show was scheduled to run during the summer months, traveling around the Northeast in early May, coming to the Montauk Theatre in Brooklyn before it opened in New York at the Morosco Theatre on May 22, 1924.
Ruby appeared in two numbers and was one of sixteen in the chorus. The curtain went up on the Keep Kool Cuties in the opening number called “The Broadway Battle Cry.” One critic described the dancers as “the hoofiest chorus seen in ages,” the audience applauding them throughout. Hazel Dawn’s first number was a monologue parody of “Gunga Din”; Bill Frawley, of vaudeville’s Frawley and Louise, sang a duet with Jessie Maker. Frawley did a fast-talking back-and-forth comedy routine with Hazel Dawn in a prop taxi.
Ruby’s number, “With Apologies To,” was a sketch satirizing the work of George M. Cohan; the new heroic playwright of realism, Eugene O’Neill; William Squibes and Avery Hopwood, or, as Alexander Woollcott described him, the “inexhaustible Avery.” Hopwood said he “wrote for Broadway to please Broadway,” and he did. Hopwood (“the Playboy Playwright”) wrote a new hit play on Broadway every year and had for the past ten years, including 1920 when five of his plays were running on Broadway simultaneously, among them The Bat. His plays such as Fair and Warmer and Nobody’s Widow Americanized French farce. It was Hopwood’s play The Gold Diggers that made the term part of the American language.
• • •
Reviewers singled out Ruby’s sketch and described it as the centerpiece of the show. Variety said it was the “high spot” of the evening.
Ruby appeared onstage when the curtain went up on act 2, with the Keep Kool Cuties accompanying Hazel Dawn and Charles King in a number called “Gypsy Ann,” and was back again in a song called “Beautiful but Dumb” as a mannequin wearing an evening gown who comes to life modeling in a window.
Keep Kool was more than three hours long. The final curtain came down at 11:25.
The New York Times called the show “excellent”; Alexander Woollcott said in the Sun that it was “gay and good looking and reasonably bright”; Arthur Hornblow in his column “Mr. Hornblow goes to the play” declared it “too good to be missed.”
A block south of the Morosco Theatre at the Broadhurst was Beggar on Horseback with Roland Young; the Marx Brothers were at the Casino Theatre on Thirty-Ninth Street in a musical called I’ll Say She Is; Mary Boland was in a farce called Meet the Wife; John Barrymore’s picture Beau Brummel was running at the Strand Theatre on Broadway, and three blocks away was D. W. Griffith’s America.
Once Keep Kool opened, Ruby arranged for Maud and Mabel and Gene to see a matinee. It was Gene’s first musical and the first time Maud and Mabel had seen Ruby perform on a Broadway stage. In one number Gene proudly spotted his aunt Ruby dancing at the far right of the chorus line. After the show Ruby’s sisters and nephew went backstage to her dressing room upstairs.
During the summer Keep Kool moved to the Globe Theatre; by the fall it had moved again to the Earl Carroll Theatre on Seventh Avenue and Fiftieth Street.
• • •
Ruby and Ed Kennedy were still seeing each other; they would argue and make up and argue again.
When the show moved to the Earl Carroll Theatre, some of the Keep Kool Cuties left and five new dancers were brought in to replace them. Among them was Dorothy Sheppard, who in high school had modeled hats and shoes (“I didn’t take it seriously”) and was now a dancer in the chorus line (“I didn’t go to dancing school. I never learned to dance. I just followed whatever they did”). After finishing high school, she was hired for a show called Battling Buttler and at seventeen went into Keep Kool.
Dorothy—her stage name was Dotty—liked Ruby immediately; they were both from Flatbush. Ruby had confidence, “a lot more than I had,” said Dorothy.
During the summer, through Granlund’s intervention, Ruby appeared on the cover of The National Police Gazette as “one of the famous kuties in ‘Keep Kool.’ ”
He also helped Lucille LeSueur (known in Kansas City, Missouri, as Billie Cassin) get a job earning extra money at Harry Richman’s club in between her appearing in the chorus at the Winter Garden in the Shuberts’ new musical revival, The Passing Show of 1924. For all of LeSueur’s shyness and lack of confidence, she was winning dance contests up in Harlem clubs, cutting loose with wild abandon, stomping her way through the Charleston, spanking herself through the black bottom. LeSueur was becoming synonymous with “man killer” and was walked in on by a Ziegfeld dancer late one night in the bedroom at a party making love to a well-known actress. Nothing surprised people about Billie.
• • •
Florenz Ziegfeld agreed with the assessment of The Billboard’s critic Gordon Whyte, who, when Keep Kool opened, called it “smart and dashing and thoroughly entertaining . . . the only revue I remember which has the ‘Follies
manner’ . . . it has the color and the speed and what the Follies generally lacks, a number of humorous scenes. In fact, its comedy . . . is incomparably higher than that.”
In October 1924, Ziegfeld incorporated Keep Kool into the eighteenth edition of the 1923 Follies, the same edition Ruby had appeared in two years before. It had been such a success it was still on the road.
Ruby Stevens (cover), The National Police Gazette, August 30, 1924. The caption reads: “Judging by her gravely meditative expression, Miss Ruby Stevens, one of the famous kuties in ‘Keep Kool,’ current revue at the Globe Theater, possesses fine qualities of mind in addition to her exceptional physical loveliness.”
Ruby was a principal in the show, earning a salary of $100 a week; the girls in the chorus were receiving a weekly salary of $50. Hazel Dawn was paid $1,000 per week; the Mosconi family, $1,250.
The Follies road show with Keep Kool in it opened in Chicago at the Illinois Theatre and in the Motor City at the New Detroit on October 13, 1924. Dorothy Sheppard didn’t want to leave New York and decided not to travel with the show; Dorothy Van Alst did.
One of Van Alst’s big numbers, “The Shadowgraph,” followed Ruby’s sketch “With Apologies To.” For “The Shadowgraph” each member of the audience was given a pair of Follies-Scope cardboard glasses to wear. The right lens was a red filter; the left, blue.
Three-D audience glasses for the Shadowgraph Number from Keep Kool.
The number opened with the silhouette of two women onstage (Dorothy Van Alst and Hilda Ferguson) behind a thick screen. When looked at through the Follies-Scope glasses, the women onstage seemed to be throwing snowballs directly out at the audience and then gathering them up from the tops of the heads of people in their seats. The number builds to Van Alst (still behind a screen, on a ladder) undressing (she is wearing a bathing suit), tossing out each garment, it seems, into the face of the theatergoers.
The number was a sensation. Audiences loved the effect of the three-dimensional optical illusion.
After opening in Detroit, the show toured for eight months to Cleveland, Buffalo, Boston, and Newark, traveling from city to city by train with the Ziegfeld office reserving three Pullman cars for the company.
Nancy Bernard, one of the dancers in the chorus, became good friends with Ruby, and they shared a room. Ruby called her Billy for no reason other than she had liked the name. While on the road, the two were having a few drinks one night when Ruby confided that she had been raised in a convent. She also told “Billy” that her mother was Jewish and her father gentile. “But I’m a Christian,” said Ruby. “I believe in Christianity.” Nancy was Jewish, as was Maud’s friend Mabel Cohen, with whom Ruby had lived. For a short time Ruby had been placed in a Catholic home. Nancy didn’t question what Ruby was telling her; she was a great girl, and whatever her religion or background may have been, it was fine with Nancy, though she kept Ruby’s confidence a secret.
After months of working together and long hours on the train and in between shows, Ruby told Nancy that she couldn’t have children. A couple of years before, Ruby said, she was seeing the son of a man who owned a chain of famous restaurants. Ruby had a “problem” and had it “fixed.” It was a bad abortion with complications, and she would never be able to get pregnant again.
• • •
Ruby returned to New York and was sharing a hotel suite with Mae Clarke. Earl Lindsay was working on another show, this time with J. J. Shubert as director and producer.
Gay Paree opened in Atlantic City early in August at Nixon’s Apollo Theatre. It starred Billy B. Van, Chic Sale, George LeMaire, Jack Haley, and the singer comedian Winnie Lightner, who had just finished a six-month run in the 1924 edition of George White’s Scandals. Earl Lindsay hired Ruby and Mae, as he usually did, after the show opened so they could avoid the dead time of rehearsals. Ruby, Mae, and Dorothy Sheppard of the Keep Kool chorus became part of the “Ladies of the Ensemble.”
SIX
The Prevailing Sizzle
Gay Paree was conceived in the style of George White’s Scandals, with the dancers wearing fewer clothes. It was billed as a “continental revue filled with Greenwich Village’s most dazzling models, snappy music and sparkling wit and the spirit of Paris,” with music by Alfred Goodman, Maurie Rubens, and J. Fred Coots and lyrics by Clifford Grey.
Winnie Lightner sang; Chic Sale told jokes, performed monologues, and told stories from an imaginary place called Hicksville. There were spectacular numbers such as “A Vision of Hassan” and “Baby’s Baby Grand” with Jack Haley and Alice Boulden. The show was fast paced with minute-long scenes and thirty-two quick blackouts.
The women of the Gay Paree chorus wore beaded or spangled bras and pants. Many were bare breasted. The Paris of Gay Paree was nowhere evident in the show, but Venice, Florida, Times Square, and Sheba were. Burns Mantle of the Daily News called Gay Paree “a naked show” and compared it to Artists and Models, then the most successful show along with the Follies, the Vanities, and the Scandals. The chorus of Gay Paree danced the American crawl and the South Seas wiggle. “There are girls and girls and still more girls, duly assembled in graduated sizes,” said Gilbert Gabriel of the New York Sun, “drilled to the last damp vestment, all of them cheerfully, many of them handsomely energized against the prevailing sizzle . . . There are seven times seven variations on the theme of the seventh commandment.”
Artists and Models had caused a sensation when it opened on Broadway in the late summer of 1923. It was the first time in the history of the American revue that a chorus of twenty models paraded from the back wings to center stage nude from the waist up. The audience was stunned but was soon swept up by the cleverness of the show’s writing and performances. There were burlesque satires by James Montgomery Flagg on the mindlessness of the Critic; skits by Winsor McCay and Rube Goldberg; a raucous satire about Henry Ford and his presidential cabinet; and a savage takeoff of Rain. Marie Dressler appeared as Queen Tut-ti and danced across the stage from one tomb to the next.
From the J. J. Shubert revue Gay Paree, a giant fan hung with curling feathers and “beautiful maidens,” circa 1925.
The master of ceremonies of the evening was the actor turned singer and dancer Frank Fay, considered for years a Broadway institution. Fay was a former headliner on the Keith and Orpheum Circuits who was discovered there by Elisabeth Marbury, the grande dame of producers, and J. J. Shubert. Fay’s rare timing, control, and amiability made him a whirlwind of laughter without him ever telling a joke.
Artists and Models was instantly sold out with lines half a block long extending past the Hotel Astor. The Shuberts opened four additional box offices to cope with the demand for tickets. George Jean Nathan in Judge described the revue as “the most original; the brightest show of its kind,” containing “more fresh humor, sound burlesque and genuine observant comedy than any other music show in town at the moment.”
Despite the efforts of the churches and the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Crime to shut down Artists and Models, the production was a great success, and many other revues and shows followed its style and content.
• • •
Gay Paree opened at the Shubert Theatre on August 18, 1925.
Michael Arlen’s play The Green Hat, starring Katharine Cornell, Leslie Howard, and Margalo Gillmore, was next door at the Broadhurst; Al Jolson was east of Broadway, performing in Big Boy, another Shubert show; Laurette Taylor, who the season before had starred in a pantomime called Pierrot the Prodigal, was now starring—and speaking—in Philip Barry’s In a Garden with Frank Conroy and Louis Calhern; Ann Harding was in Stolen Fruit; down a few blocks at the Maxine Elliott Theatre was Noël Coward’s play Hay Fever with Laura Hope Crews. In mid-September Coward’s play The Vortex, starring the playwright, opened at Henry Miller’s Theatre. Its caricature of well-mannered, light-headed moderns, “flowers of evil” nourished on a civilization that made rottenness so easy, amused audiences until the third act, when playgoers were stunned
by mother and son—Lilian Braithwaite and Coward—and revelations of sexual excess and drug addiction.
Ruby Stevens (third from left) in a scene from the Gay Paree revue.
Gay Paree ran for 181 performances to much fanfare and publicity. Nils Granlund put together the “First Annual Outing of the Ziegfeld Chorus Girls” at the Schencks’ Palisades Amusement Park and a month later organized an event publicizing Gay Paree. Sixty girls from the show, wearing bathing suits, sat in open limousines and traveled up Broadway like a caravan with a circus calliope leading the parade. As they crossed Times Square, the lead car broke down; the procession came to a halt. Noontime traffic from both directions stopped. Cars honked, and drivers shouted; photographers captured the bedlam, and Granlund made sure they photographed Ruby and Mae, whom he’d placed on the front fenders of the first car.
• • •
During the run of Gay Paree, Dorothy Sheppard was living in Astoria with the family of Ruby’s friend Claire Taishoff.
After the show late one night Dorothy took the train back to Astoria. The streets were still. Dorothy became aware that someone was walking behind her. She quickened her pace and began to run. The footsteps behind her quickened. Dorothy made it to the house. She was safe but frightened. The next day she told Ruby and Mae what had happened, and they suggested that she come and live with them. They were near the Shubert Theatre at the Knickerbocker Hotel and had a two-bedroom suite. Dorothy, whose mother was living in Florida, was happy to make the move.
The suite at the Knickerbocker had an extra room across the hall, a maid’s room. The three drew lots to see who would get the small room. It was Mae, and she was just as happy about it. She liked the idea of having her own room.
Ruby, Mae, and Dorothy were together most of the time. They looked after one another. When the girls thought one of the three was being hoitytoity, the other two would look at each other and say, “Oh, dear, pardon my forty-button-glove.”
A Life of Barbara Stanwyck: Steel-True 1907-1940 Page 6
