In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879-1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the "I Don't Care Girl"-named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen persona-Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1904 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady-and never looked back. Tanguay was, at the height of a long career that stretched until the early 1930s, a trend-setting performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual female entertainer. Whether suggestively singing songs with titles like "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It" and "Go As Far As You Like" or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, she was a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, from Mae West to Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have been both idolized and condemned for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of female sexuality. In Queen of Vaudeville, Andrew L. Erdman tells Eva Tanguay's remarkable life story with verve. Born into the family of a country doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town, Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. Erdman follows the course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press, declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the history of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new media of radio and motion pictures. With nineteen rare or previously unpublished images, Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star.

In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879–1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the "I Don't Care Girl"—named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen persona—Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady—and never looked back. Tanguay was, at the height of a long career that stretched until the early 1930s, a trend-setting performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual female entertainer. Whether suggestively singing songs with titles like "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It" and "Go As Far As You Like" or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, she was a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, from Mae West to Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have been both idolized and condemned for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of female sexuality. In Queen of Vaudeville, Andrew L. Erdman tells Eva Tanguay's remarkable life story with verve. Born into the family of a country doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town, Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. Erdman follows the course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press, declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the history of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new media of radio and motion pictures. With nineteen rare or previously unpublished images, Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star.

This work reveals the often racy, ribald, and sexually charged nature of the vaudeville stage, looking at a broad array of provocative performers from disrobing dancers to nude posers to skimpily dressed athletes. Examining the ways in which big-time vaudeville nonetheless managed to market itself as pure, safe, and morally acceptable, this work compares the industry's marketing and promotional practices to those of other emergent mass-marketers of the vaudeville era in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Included are in-depth examinations of important figures from the vaudeville stage such as Annette Kellerman and Eva Tanguay. The work attempts to address historical context as one means of understanding these performers with an appreciation for their rebelliousness. It discusses censorship and content control in the vaudeville era, and concludes with an analysis of film's part in the fall of vaudeville. Many photographs, cartoons, and other illustrations are included.

Bert Williams—a Black man forced to perform in blackface who challenged the stereotypes of minstrelsy. Eva Tanguay—an entertainer with the signature song “I Don’t Care” who flouted the rules of propriety to redefine womanhood for the modern age. Julian Eltinge—a female impersonator who entranced and unnerved audiences by embodying the feminine ideal Tanguay rejected. At the turn of the twentieth century, they became three of the most provocative and popular performers in vaudeville, the form in which American mass entertainment first took shape. A Revolution in Three Acts explores how these vaudeville stars defied the standards of their time to change how their audiences thought about what it meant to be American, to be Black, to be a woman or a man. The writer David Hajdu and the artist John Carey collaborate in this work of graphic nonfiction, crafting powerful portrayals of Williams, Tanguay, and Eltinge to show how they transformed American culture. Hand-drawn images give vivid visual form to the lives and work of the book’s subjects and their world. This book is at once a deft telling of three intricately entwined stories, a lush evocation of a performance milieu with unabashed entertainment value, and an eye-opening account of a key moment in American cultural history with striking parallels to present-day questions of race, gender, and sexual identity.

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1909 edition. Excerpt: ...girlies laughed over their lobsters and wine, and the sporting theatrical world of Broadway at first generally treated it as a joke. This was all as it should be, and naturally to be expected, as its appeal was made directly and solely to the Artists of Vaudeville: to those who "deliver the goods," so to speak; to those that the public pays its money to see, to enjoy, and whose services are therefore indispensable in the amusement world. These people are not manufactured by press agents in a night. Their lives are spent in learning how to entertain the public. They are known as the Standard Acts of Vaudeville, and are not to be classed or confused with Salome dancers, coucheewigglers, and other lures that middlemen discover to gull the public. They are what might be called the staple goods of the amusement world. They have learned their business, and have become successful. Oftentimes, after many years of obscurity, wherein they continued to grind out the laugh-essence and heart-interest for the amusement of audiences, who accepted them as a matter of course. They are the people who belong on the stage, and who came there because they had something to give. Usually, they are versatile. They can sing, dance, mimic and act. Yes, they can act. Whenever they appear in socalled legitimate productions, they immediately become famous, and carry all before them, and in a short time their Vaudeville origin is almost forgotten. So, the first members of the White Rats were these standard acts of Vaudeville; the class that gives the legitimate stage its greatest and most versatile stars. Still, they were Vaudevillains then, and the possibility of any organization among them tending towards their uplift and protection was considered foolish...