Bookend
Rendezvous
What
if books could slip under covers and swap stories?
This
book report matches
a pair of unknown
titles,
-- strangers
to each other, until
introduced here:
“No
Applause – Just Throw Money:
The
Book that Made Vaudeville Famous"
by
Travis S. D. (2006) Faber & Faber
“The
Man Who Lit Lady Liberty:
The
Extraordinary Rise and Fall of Actor M.B. Curtis”
by
Richard Schwartz (2017)
Heyday Books
Readers of this blog may take 30% off their order of
The Man Who Lit Lady Liberty.
Simply enter code JJ1MW when you check out
Direct Link:
this code only works on Lady Liberty;
there is no expiration date or maximum number of copies.
* * *
Nervous
Fever?
"Just
Throw Money"
by
Jamie Jobb
"I'd rather have a bottle in front of me, than a frontal lobotomy!"
-- old radio Spoonerism joke, anon.
History
can be most unkind to anyone born ahead of one’s time –
especially someone from the Nineteenth Century who may have suffered
from what my friend Marin County comedian Mike Duvall liked to call a
“chronological order disorder”. That
strange
affliction includes
associated maladies
known as “Nervous
Fever” and “Nervous
Prostration”.
The
latter term needs no introduction as it flat-out defines its ownself.
The more scientific sounding “Nervous Fever” is defined
in Webster’s 1913 Dictionary as: “a low form of fever
characterized by great disturbance of the nervous system, as evinced
by delirium, or stupor, disorderly sensibility, etc.”
Nineteenth
Century medicine needed “hangover” terms like these to
cope with the “disorderly stupor” of alcohol
abuse among bourgeoning populations of immigrants adapting to strange
American cities and customs at a time of Industrial Revolution, but
long before Prohibition, Alcoholics Anonymous or electric lights.
“Liquor had always been an
integral feature of theatergoing, from the wine cult of Dionysus
straight on through. Bibulousness began to reach new highs
(or lows), however, when advances in distillation made cheap whiskey
widely available after the 1820s … In its rough-and-tumble heyday
the Bowery was something like Times Square, Coney Island, Ripley’s
Believe-It-Or-Not Odditoriums and Atlantic City all rolled into one,
full of bars, gambling halls, whorehouses, dime museums, and plain
old theaters.”
– author/playwright
Travis Stewart, aka Trav S.D.
Suffering
from serious chronological disorder is the historic memory of an
“almost totally forgotten” actor and showman M. B. Curtis
who aspired to his strange career during a time of great flux in
theater history. In 1873, the year Curtis made his breakout
appearance in “The Boy Detective” at Chicago’s Woods Theatre,
the City of London began to require “Certificates
of Suitability” for minimum legal, sanitation and
safety standards in British theaters. Two decades later, by 1893,
Oscar Wilde had become the darling of West End stages while Curtis’
career as a public person essentially ended abruptly that same year
when the actor went on trial for murder.
* * *
In
late Nineteenth Century America, the life of any touring actor was a
treadmill of hardscrabble travel, fleabag flophouses, unpaid IOUs and
low-class disrespect. During this transitional period of theater
history, candlelit stages had been abandoned but the limelight and
gaslight that replaced the candles still rendered most theaters
uncomfortable fire traps – particularly for large “crowded
houses” cooking in their own body heat. The legal concept of
“shouting FIRE in a crowded theater” is based on this
sobering fact of theater life – long before electricity or
heating-ventilating-air-conditioning systems.
In those uncool days, nobody experienced radio, television,
telephone, internet, broadcast or social media. Saloons or theaters
with live programs were the primary urban entertainment alternatives
to a grim tenement homelife by candlelight. A large London or New York theater
in 1880 could employ over five hundred people – counting performers,
backstage hands, light crews, riggers, printers, promoters and
front-of-house personnel.
“The
latter half of the Nineteenth Century was a time of great change for
the American theater. It was a time of tremendous growth in
population ... especially in cities on the East Coast. Americans had
more leisure time and better standards of living, and they looked to
the theater to provide entertainment ... The expanding transportation
system in the United States allowed actors ... to tour the country,
bringing professional theater to many towns and cities that had never
before experienced it. As the population of the country grew rapidly,
the number of theaters in large and mid-size cities grew as well.
From the 1850s until the turn of the century, thousands of new
theaters were built.”
–
University of Washington Libraries – Digital Collections
Onto
this chaotic scene burst M.B. Curtis, a trouper whose main claim to
fame was becoming the first Jewish immigrant to perform as Hebrew.
At the time, most immigrants performing in variety theaters were
Irish, as had been the case since George Washington’s time.
Perhaps
if M.B. Curtis had been born two decades later, he could have
assimilated theatrical innovations that would have sustained his
reputation, if not his sober disposition. But Curtis was born too
early for any suitable acting career in bawdy vaudeville houses,
comfortable “legitimate theaters” or motion picture studios. The
actor died in 1920 – when movies were young and vaudeville was in
its heyday. But by then, he was a broken, “fevered” man whose
story had been lost in buried news clippings and mounds of missing
memorabilia.
Theater
history ignored the incredible biography of M.B.
Curtis until Berkeley author/historian/builder Richard Schwartz
unearthed the tragedy during two decades of meticulous research for
his well-paced Heyday Book, “The Man Who Lit Lady Liberty”.
Schwartz is known for his archeologically nuanced books focused on
the many eccentricities of Berkeley, but clearly this oddball East
Bay character needed his own volume.
Maurice
Bertrand Curtis as
“The
Drummer” Sam’l of Posen
Curtis
stood out among actors as an incredible mimic who “could be his
own circus,” according
to Schwartz. “He could imitate animals as well as
human beings.” The
young thespian
came to San Francisco from
Chicago in the mid 1870s as a
supporting dramatic player
in a time of widespread
economic depression. While
theater workers suffered from lack of work, Curtis
became notorious as an
actor/manager running his
own successful
traveling stage company with
his costar wife Marie who toured with him.
And his
notoriety grew,
not necessarily for his
exploits on stage as much as off. This includes ambitious
Berkeley real estate investments – including the ill-fated Peralta
Park Hotel – which never had a chance to live up to promise.
Two
years before London and New York stages were experimenting with the
first electrical theater lighting systems, Curtis settled into his
signature character – Sam’l of Posen – who was always
“drumming” up business as a traveling salesman. Another two
decades would pass before most theaters had switched from gas to
electric lights. But by then, Curtis’ stage career took a turn
toward the “cliffs” from which he’d hang long after his sudden
bout of Nervous Fever in the fateful early hours of September 11,
1891.
* * *
Curtis
was performing at least two decades before vaudeville’s systematic
scheduling and routing of acts on “The Circuit”. Schwartz points
out “Sam’l of Posen” was eventually whittled from a four-act
melodrama into an unsuccessful vaudeville sketch, but Curtis really
never had full advantage and experience of transcontinental
management which drove and sustained vaudeville at the turn of the
Twentieth Century.
One
is left to wonder if Curtis viewed vaudeville as a big belittling of
his dramatic talents. He would have gone from manager/star of his
own touring show into just another cog in constant shifting gears of
back-to-back variety acts playing from dawn to dusk. Curtis would
have fallen from “legit” star to variety bit player. And that
must have taken a heavy toll on the actor’s own impression of
himself in a dressing room mirror.
To
further obscure his acting legacy, Curtis only appeared in one motion
picture and that was not preserved on film, except for three frames
which Schwartz offers in this elegantly illustrated biography.
Indeed, the book is most compelling when it casts its spotlight on
strange details of Curtis’ eventual acquittal of murder charges
brought after the drunken shooting of SFPD Officer Alexander Grant in
front of a police station on Folsom Street on that September morning
of 1891. In a time of jury-tampering and witness-shopping, the actor
suffered through three very public mistrials of the matter, and lost
his real estate investments all after that one bout of Nervous
Delirium.
M.B.
Curtis’ life was so complex, there’s no space in this book report to delve into the story behind Schwartz’ provocative
title – a primary indicator of the actor’s widespread fame in one
century but total lack of it in the next. However, reading “The Man Who
Lit Lady Liberty” is certainly its own reward and Richard Schwartz
deserves every accolade he receives for recalling history’s
attention to this incredible Nineteenth Century trouper and local
misfit.
Who
Put the Devil in Vaudeville?
Our
small town found itself on the vaudeville circuit in the 1920s.
Conveniently for all the acts who tromped through town, the main
vaudeville house was located four blocks from the train station with
a hotel midway between them on the same street. The theater is now a
public defenders office, the rail station abandoned and the hotel
destroyed by fire. People in our town today watch “vaudeville”
offerings 24/7 on laptops and smartphones attuned to video “variety
acts” continuously running back-to-back on social media. In that
regard, vaudeville is not “dead”.
Not
far from our town-- beyond Berkeley – is San Francisco’s Orpheum
Theater which opened in 1887 and became, according
to playwright/author Travis
Stewart “the birthplace of a vast vaudeville circuit that
would dominate the entire country west of Chicago.”
Stewart likewise
believes vaudeville is not “dead”.
Stewart
(aka “Trav S.D.”) leaves no stone unturned to prove that point in
“No Applause – Just Throw Money”, as he sifts the sands of
variety theater from the Greeks to the present. When he’s not
working on plays, Stewart covers culture, arts, politics and theater
for The Village Voice, New York Sun, Time Out and Reason. That
perspective allows him a unique vantage point and his
vaudeville book
stands alone as a
thoroughly informed
study of American theater
history – not just variety
theater. It’s
difficult to find one
reference book offering
such a detailed breakdown of theater forms.
Stewart
draws fine distinctions among places of performance where people
entertained themselves long before broadcast standardization of
Broadway and Hollywood fare on wifi devices. The author examines
every distinct place/style of performance: festival, circus, freak
show, tournament, carnival, fete, Mardi Gras, traveling medicine man,
blackface, minstrel show, chautauqua, music hall, concert saloon,
barrelhouse, burlesque, dime museum, gaiety hall, variety act, super
variety show, comedy team and musical comedy to name some. The shape
of the theater depended on the shape of the show.
But
Stewart’s book takes care to point out vaudeville itself was less
about its smorgasbord of offerings as it was about management and
movement of these various acts around the continent. Long-distance
telephone and railroad lines had enabled actors (and animals) to
efficiently travel from town to town on a variety circuit that could
not have existed otherwise. No internet business models existed
then. Indeed, the only “audience” anyone knew then was a “live
audience”.
While
Travis Stewart makes no mention of M.B. Curtis, Richard Schwartz
likewise does not refer to the vaudeville book. But both titles read
together provide an deep and intensive background in Nineteenth
Century theater history which would be impossible to gather
otherwise.
Further
Rendezvous
“The
Man Who Lit Lady Liberty”
“No
Applause – Just Throw Money”
Also
see
“The
Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre” by Simon Trussler
(1994) Cambridge Univeristy Press:
“American
Vaudeville as Seen by its Contemporaries” by Charles W. Stein
(1984) Knopf.
