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This chapter is about the relationships that emerged between vaudeville performers and managers, and explores how their different experiences of popular entertainment. The focus is primarily on the structure and realities of the emerging national vaudeville circuits, which eventually came to dominate every aspect of the performing arts. The chapter examines how the circuits affected performers’ view of vaudeville and their place within it, especially insofar as they began to conceive of themselves and relate to each other as artists whose primary medium was the hit song or dance tune. It also shows how performers came to see show business as a a form of life unlike any other, with its own laws of existence and accompanying set of beliefs about the value of entertainment and the life of the entertainer.

The pages of Billboard, Variety, the New York Clipper, and the other trade magazines are full of news items about rivalries and feuds between vaudeville performers, reports of well-known acts breaking apart, followed by announcements of little-known acts coming together. Stories of celebrity gossip, social club news, fundraising efforts, and performer obituaries fill in the remaining print space between the lists of performances, feature articles, show reviews, and pages of advertising. Likewise, interviews with or autobiographies by performers are frequently preoccupied with backstage friendships, partnerships, love affairs, and (in some cases, life-long) feuds with other artists. This chapter concentrates on how performers accounted for their relationships with each other, and how their backstage world was connected to and shaped their performances.

This chapter tells the story of how Marlo Thomas phoned the author, told him about her idea for a children's record, and asked him to take part. They had worked together on a movie, Jenny, and had become good friends. The author knew that this wasn't just an idea—it was something that would actually happen, and in a very classy way. Marlo is one of those extraordinary people who decides to do something, gets on the phone, gets people organized, and makes it happen. The author knew it was a great idea. It combined show business with a deeper purpose they both cared about. The author learned at an early age how powerful theater can be. His father started in burlesque, was later in vaudeville, and then moved on to movies, television, and the Broadway stage.

This chapter analyzes and discusses the performance of Chicago, which opened in 1975. Here were the key elements of Fosse’s art, the carnal act on one hand and, on the other, the indefinable American something that toys with our imaginations and infuriates the authorities. Sex and jazz worked as a set, like crime and show business in the early talkie. The chapter argues that in his faithful adaptation of Maurine Watkins’ play, Fosse brought out all the bawdy chaos that “Chicago” meant in American mythology. To close, the chapter discusses the reception of the musical as well as the inevitable changes in the cast after the first several hundred performances of Chicago’s initial run.

This chapter explains what Jo Jones colloquially refers to as “show business” and especially black show business—the raison d’être of his wildly colorful musical, theatrical, and entertainment career. Jo Jones says it all with a verve like no other, skillfully interweaving the varied vignettes of his life into an unruly tale of travel, music, and entertainment. That last part’s important—Jones claims that he’s never been a “sad musician,” despite the misfortunes that had plagued his life during the early years before and after World War II. He’d even flown to Puerto Rico and France and straight into television and past the language barrier. There is nothing that can compare to his experiences; but, Jones maintains, arguing about who’s the best in show business isn’t the point, because nobody can tell him about show business.

This chapter examines Blonde Venus (1932), Sternberg and Dietrich’s characteristically atypical take on the fallen woman film genre. Dietrich’s character is as much liberated as cast out from the family home when she resumes her earlier career in show business and is condemned by her husband for prostitution. Yet the downward trajectory of the fallen woman genre never really exerts its grip on Dietrich, for she remains a mythical being. The chapter interprets the film as a critique of the patriarchal institution of marriage in which standards are expected of the woman that are not expected of the man: Dietrich’s character’s husband shuns her for selling her body, even though he attempts to sell his own (to a medical researcher). The question of the film that the chapter explores is the reconcilability of fairy-tale romance and everyday marriage: Blonde Venus does not take for granted the transition from the one to the other.

This chapter opens with renowned jazz musician Papa Jo Jones’s assertion of his legacy as immortalized by jazz historian Albert Murray. In the grand American tradition of the exaggerated vernacular, Jones smoothly details the varied adventures of his life, while at the same time he admonishes his listener that nothing in his life is sensational enough for a book. Jones describes the people who’ve made an impression on him, in particular maintaining that “Everybody understands how I play: I play free.” That statement encapsulates his convictions on life and religion—by addressing his fear of God but of little else; and in general it captures his boisterous, gung-ho attitude on life with “fifty-six years in show business.” Does that cover everything? He’s covered a “whole lot of shit,” indeed, because he has, in his own words, had “a varied life.”

This chapter discusses the revival of Chicago as well as its movie adaptation. At the same time, the chapter refers to the infamous O. J. Simpson trial in describing Watkins’ own feeling that the press was shaping public reaction to murder trials to exculpate the guilty. Considering the show-biz aspect of the whole Simpson chronicle, the lesson everyone took from this case was that high-profit justice is show business by other means: the very message of Chicago. With the nation more or less transfixed by this staged miscarriage of due process, the musical’s lesson was at last learned. Finally, the chapter examines further themes and lessons from the film, as well as the national art of the musical as a whole.

This chapter focuses on George Cukor’s attempt to land his first job in show business before he became one of Hollywood’s consummate filmmakers. At the age of eighteen, Cukor began to do what he really wanted—scouting talent agencies and stage doors. He was hired as a backstage man and to play a bit part for the Chicago company’s The Better ’Ole, a droll musical entertainment which opened its tour at the Illinois Theatre in Chicago in late February 1919. One Better ’Ole actor Cukor unabashedly admired was the veteran comedian De Wolf Hopper, who enjoyed top billing as the soldier Old Bill. The stint with The Better ’Ole was followed by another assistant stage managership with a company performing Mark Swan’s A Regular Feller, after which Cukor was dispatched by Klaw & Erlanger to Baltimore to participate in a lighthearted doughboy musical called Dere Mable. In New York City, he was appointed stage manager of the Empire Theatre. In Rochester, Cukor was as beloved for his extroverted personality as for his plays.

This chapter identifies the emergence of ‘light entertainment’ in the West End. Linked to music hall, this was a form of performance that was aspirational and less vulgar. It led to the construction of large variety houses such as the London Coliseum. The chapter moves from musical comedy to variety, vaudeville, and the exotic ballets at the Alhambra. These were entertainments that offered sophistication but rarely pretended to be high culture. The chapter examines theatres such as the Alhambra and the Empire variety houses who were attacked because of the sexual nature of their ballets as well as their toleration of prostitutes. The figure who dominates the chapter is the impresario George Edwardes who turned the Gaiety Girl into an icon of the age. Light entertainment was conservative but had its utopian dimensions.

This chapter discusses the history of the second Chicago movie, Roxie Hart (1942). This film is a notable deviation from how the various Chicagos look at Roxie’s character, because here, for the first and only time, she is not a sociopath. True, she is still brusque and insolent, and especially contemptuous of Amos. But she is not a walking con job. Previously, Roxies wanted to get off even though they were guilty. This Roxie wants to get off because she is innocent; she has agreed to let the press and the law paint her as a murderess only to become notorious and thus break into show business. And there lies Roxie Hart’s most significant deviation, the first linking of crime and show biz that will prove so potent in the musical Chicago.