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[0:00] David Armstrong: Welcome to another episode of Broadway Nation, the podcast that tells the remarkable story of how immigrant, Jewish, queer, and black artists invented the Broadway musical and how they changed America in the process. I'm David Armstrong, and my guest today is Andrew Erdman, the author of the new book, Beautiful, the Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator. Way back in the late 19th and early 20th century, more than 100 years ago, long before the fabulous television drag stars of today, a specific style of drag performance known as female impersonation was wildly popular on stage and screen in America and around the world. And no female impersonator was more famous, more successful, or more highly regarded than Julian Eltinge.

Although barely remembered today, in his time, Eltinge was on a par with Al Jolson, Eddie Cantor, and Fanny Brice, and was so popular and renowned that he even had a Broadway theater named after him, which still exists today, by the way, and where you can still go see Julian Eltinge. More on that later. Author Andrew Erdman has immersed himself in this remarkable era of show business history. His previous book was the equally fascinating Queen of Vaudeville, The Story of Eva Tanguay. Today, he shares with us the untold story of Julian Eltinge. As always, before we begin, I have to express my sincere thanks to all of our Patron Club members whose generous support helps to make this podcast possible, with a special shout-out today to members Alan Brody and John Schroeder.

If you would like to help support the creation of Broadway Nation, I'll have information at the end of the episode about how you, too, can become a patron. Here we go. Welcome, Andrew Erdman. It's so great to have you today on Broadway Nation to talk about your new book, Beautiful, The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator.

[2:11] Andrew Erdman: Thanks, David. It's great to be here.

[2:12] David Armstrong: So excited to talk about this. I love that there's this sort of series of books that have come out on figures from this very early period in show business history. I'll say it that way. Broadway history, definitely, but extended show business history. And that we get a chance to meet these people who are fairly obscure. Most people won't know, even though I've done a small episode that included him. Who was Julian Eltinge?

[2:37] Andrew Erdman: Julian Eltinge, and he is often called Julian Eltinge, but he seemed to want to be called Julian Eltinge was a hugely popular female impersonator, which is kind of on the spectrum of if you look at one end being more carnival-esque, campy drag, but on the other end of where Julian Eltinge's art was very precise, illusionistic, very sensual female impressionism. He started to become popular in the very early 1900s on vaudeville. First, he was kind of semi-amateur, but then he went into vaudeville. Then he had musicals written for him that toured the nation, toured the world. He was hugely popular. He was the most popular female impersonation artist at a time when this art form, female impersonation, men dressing up as women, was hugely popular professionally, semi-professionally, amateur, army, college, business groups.

He is really the very top of the heap from 1900. His career starts to decline in the 20s, but other people are kind of following out on his heels. And then in the 30s, there's a kind of reactionary clampdown against all things sex and gender, but that's his time period. He's really both singular and also part of a bigger wave that he helped kind of create.

[3:44] David Armstrong: What I think is so interesting, people do not know just how famous he was. He's on a par with Jolson and Cantor and other figures of this period. Fanny Brice, he's as famous as any of them.

[3:55] Andrew Erdman: No question. And he was cited as, I don't know if it's true, but there's a claim that he was the highest paid male performer in the world for a while. There was a Broadway theater named after him, the Eltinge Theater. It still exists today, although now it's called the AMC Movie Complex on West 42nd Street. He toured the world. Anybody who was a female impersonator of any kind, and we're talking about many, they were always called the Julian Elting of blah, blah, blah, or the Julian Elting from England. He was just the sort of RuPaul of his day, although a different kind of artist.

[4:23] David Armstrong: Talk a little bit about that, which may be part of what this next question is all about. What was it about Julian Elting that led you to write this book? Why him?

[4:31] Andrew Erdman: Yeah, good question. Of course, I've always been interested in this time period. There's something about it and comedy and vaudeville. My brother and I, when we were young, used to write comedy sketches. I grew up watching Carol Burnett. So there's something in me about the popular culture of the period. And when I was in graduate school, I thought I was going to be a professor of theater studies. I wrote a dissertation on vaudeville, and I just started to really uncover and discover both the excitement of the form and a lot of these stars who, to me, when someone's been forgotten, but they were huge, that's just an immediate area of interest. And that's how I came across Eva Tanguay, who my last book was about, through that to Julian.

[5:06] David Armstrong: And as you just said, your last book was about Eva Tanguay, who is another, again, gigantic star that has fallen off the radar. And interestingly, those two, Eva Tanguay and Julian Elting, their careers intersect, at least to a certain extent. So she makes a few more than cameo appearances, but she's like a minor character in this current book as well.

[5:26] Andrew Erdman: Yeah, exactly. I mean, they were part of this sort of subset of vaudevillians who, you know, I think to some extent, did not play by conventional rules. And they concocted this sham engagement in 1908. They were each doing Salome Act. Salome, as you know, was a very popular fad of interpretation in vaudeville, and not just vaudeville, but other theater forms in 1908-1909. And so he was going to wear a bridal gown, and she was going to wear the tuxedo, and neither of them cared very much for marriage. But it got a lot of press, and it was like a big vaudeville act played out in the pages of newspapers and a lot of really hilarious stories. And then they were like, see you later. We're not doing this.

[6:06] David Armstrong: They never did get married.

[6:07] Andrew Erdman: They never did. Eva got married a few times. She never really wanted to, and Julian never got married. Yeah.

[6:12] David Armstrong: We'll get more into that as we go on. And as you mentioned, Salome has come up on this podcast previously, especially with Sonny Salter-Pace's book on Gertrude Hoffman that we did several episodes with her. I'm amazed at the detail that you've been able to put into this book, because people who were primarily stage performers can be incredibly hard to pin down no matter when they lived. But when their main body of work took place more than 100 years ago, the details and facts of their lives can be really elusive. And then on top of that, you had to deal with a man who invented and changed his persona and his backstory repeatedly over time and purposely hid his private life. How did you track down Julian Elting?

[6:57] Andrew Erdman: Yeah. And also it means sifting through a lot of the sort of repeated, self-created fabrications that then sort of get calcified into fact and show up in, you know, authoritative sources, which is always going to happen. You know, we were always learning. The advantage that I had is that so much more is available online now that even just sitting at my computer, I could go into archives that I would have had to travel to. It would have been very difficult, particularly during COVID. And as I was doing a lot of research, I read thousands of newspaper articles and managers reports and other information about Julian and a picture starts to emerge and certain patterns start to emerge. And for example, what he says in the mainstream press is a little different from what he says in, for example, the letters to Variety, where he's talking really to his fellow.

So, for example, in the mainstream press, he's a guy who will punch out anybody who calls him a sissy or a nance or something. And he's like, you know, I clubbed this guy over the head and I picked up the train of my dress and went on stage. And he says in Variety, look, I'm not really doing that. I'm not really that guy. And you can see as he gets more famous and he makes the transition from musicals into Hollywood and he's really part of Hollywood culture, kind of let some of the tough guy stuff down. There's a way to, I guess, read things in its totality so that you begin to see the topographical features of his life. And in a way, there's also a certain advantage to when somebody doesn't leave primary materials about themselves, like a memoir, because that too can be misleading. That has to be read critically as well. It was lots of looking at lots of different places. But there were no letters or very few letters and no memoirs, scrapbooks or things like that.

[8:31] Andrew Erdman: It's amazing, like pretty much nothing. I mean, there's almost always something. I found a will of his, a very short will he put together in the late 30s. And at the same time, he created so much of a public persona. He created so much press material that in a way he told us everything about himself, how he wanted to be known. And he really understood how the culture, I think, wanted to know him. And that's part of the reason why he marketed himself so successfully. And he was incredibly talented.

[8:55] David Armstrong: You talk about him as being equivalent to a sort of a modern media star. Talk just a little bit about that, because he is as famous as anybody has ever been.

[9:03] Andrew Erdman: He's always very canny and clever about how he markets himself, what his own PR and when he's able to really start getting a mass following. And this starts when he forms his partnership with A.H. Woods, who is a Broadway producer who starts creating musical comedies just for him, just for Julian. And the two of them come up with this idea of endorsing products. Like Julian Elting says, women should buy this kind of corset or these kinds of shoes, all without irony. He and Woods launch a line of female beauty products. And this is the time when the female beauty industry is really starting to emerge. There basically are more and more rules, systems and products that help women get it right. And he's essentially saying, I know how to get it right.

I get it perfectly on stage every night. So he's very clever. He has a magazine, Julian Elting's Beauty Hints and also tips. And he's a little bit of Gwyneth Paltrow and a little bit of sort of a patent medicine hawker from the age and a performer, a star. You even mentioned sort of his own version of goop that he's marketing.

[10:04] Andrew Erdman: Yeah. An early part of the way that he presented himself as a brand was to invite journalists into his dressing room as he made up for his act, for his vaudeville act or for his musical comedy. And it would take hours. It would take two to four hours. There was a real fascination, almost a fetish with him putting on cold cream and layers of kind of whitening cream, just transforming from a guy who comes in off the street with his business suit and his hat and he looks like a stockbroker and then turning into a woman. He's like an expert. He's a professional expert. And that's a big part of his appeal.

[10:35] Andrew Erdman: An expert on how to be a woman.

[10:36] David Armstrong: Exactly. And how to be a woman. There's a science to it. It happens to coincide with culturally gender is being studied from a scientific standpoint in a way that it never had been before. As people like Freud and Havelock Ellis and Richard von Kraft Ebbing are talking about sex, sexuality, gender. What is the science of getting it right to be a man or a woman? And that is part of like all great show business history books. Your book is not just about the history of show business, although it covers that really exceptionally and gives us the evolution of show business from variety to vaudeville, to Broadway, to movies, to radio, to nightclubs. So you cover all of that, but it's also the history of America and the history of culture in terms of our perceptions and expressions of gender and sexuality and how that all changed drastically between the time Elting starts his career and when he ends his career in that sort of very challenging final decade.

[11:30] Andrew Erdman: Yes, absolutely. I mean, looking at popular culture because it's so popular, it can't help but tell us about what's going on in the bigger picture. And also it's shaping and affecting that bigger picture. And what's tolerated in the 20s isn't tolerated in the 30s. What's tolerated in the 1990s seems to make a lot of people upset in the 2020s. And it has so much to do with both subjective psychology and bigger global stuff going on. And that's part of my interest in, you know, you pull on this string and it's tied to the whole weave of culture. There's lots of mini histories in here, as there always are in this kind of book, which is part of why I like this thing so much. We get a history of mining. We get a history of this. We get a history of that in little capsules. A lot of rabbit holes.

[12:14] Andrew Erdman: Exactly. And one of the main ones and most germane, I guess, is the history of drag performance over the centuries.

[12:22] Andrew Erdman: What really became clear to me and was really interesting is that, as you know, women were not on the English speaking stage until the 1660s. So men developed and boys developed these very sensual, beautiful, precise significations and characterizations of women. And then once actresses appear, they kind of explode onto the scene after the restoration in the 1660s. For a while, there's competition for naturalistic female impersonation between people like Edward Kiniston and Collie Sibber, and on the other hand, Anne Bracegirdle and Nell Gwynn. You know, who's going to play Lady Macbeth? Who's a better Lady Macbeth? Eventually, the women went out. Male female impersonation starts to become more campy, jokey, dame kind of music hall.

And that's where it resides until it starts to reemerge in the latter half of the 1800s. A little bit in minstrelsy, a little bit in variety, but then boom, Julian Elting and the people who follow after him are like the new Edward Kinistons. He uses this as cultural currency. This is a bit of a tangent, but I talk about this in the book. When Mae West is put on trial for writing plays that have to do with sex and drag and the gay underworld, her attorney defending her says, look, men have always dressed in drag in Shakespeare's day. So Shakespeare means high status, high culture.

[13:37] Andrew L. Erdman: Surely, this couldn't be something that we have to be afraid of. It's all confusing and sort of fascinating at the same time.

[13:43] David Armstrong: Totally. And just to be clear, so people understand, Julian Eltinge's art is that he transforms himself so fully into being a woman that he, in essence, can fool the audience that he is a woman.

[13:55] Andrew L. Erdman: Exactly. And he's drawing on, I think, that American audiences were used to illusionists and being fooled and being humbugged. And P.T. Barnum, they loved that. And then Julian would rip off his wig at the end of the act. And everybody would go, huh.

[14:09] David Armstrong: But of course, some people must have known, and I think some people must have liked feeling fooled and liked having the duality of that's a man, that's a woman, but that's a woman, that's a man. All the stuff that excites us.

[14:19] Andrew L. Erdman: Did that trope of ripping off his wig, did he invent that? Or at least he popularized it, I assume.

[14:24] David Armstrong: He definitely popularized it. I have to think that he must have seen it somewhere or there were some people who came before him, Harry Fortescue and some other impersonators who did that, but not in the way. I mean, it was such a shock, you know, because he so utterly became a woman. And then he tears off his wig and he's a dude again.

[14:42] Andrew L. Erdman: We touched on his name. Where did this name come from? This is not his real name.

[14:46] David Armstrong: He's thinking about what's going to be his style, his brand. What's he going to bring to the world from a very early age? And the story he tells, and I think this is true, that he had a friend who when they lived in Butte, Montana, which is where he spent some formative years in his teenage years, he really started to fall further in love with the theater. He had a bunch of friends who were, they were like the theater kids, I guess you could say, of the time. Butte was this kind of rough and tumble mining town that was in the process of becoming a more sophisticated city. He had a friend named Will Eltinge, who he sometimes said was actually named Julian Eltinge or Elting, I guess, actually.

[15:19] Andrew L. Erdman: He said that's where he got the name Eltinge. Now, there was also a famous actress named Rose Eiting in the 1800s who he might have been inspired by, but he liked the way it sounded. It sounded classy. It was a much less common name than Dalton. William Dalton is a somewhat forgettable name, but Julian Eltinge has a real classy ring to it. Maybe this was a beloved friend. It's pointed out his mother's name was Julia, so he was very close to his mother his whole life. So Julia, it's not far from Julia to Julian. And that becomes his stage. He's kind of experimenting around 1900 when he's making the transition from these semi-professional cross-dressed musicals in Boston to the professional stage. And he finally decides, I am Julian Eltinge. That's my name.

[15:59] David Armstrong: Interesting. So let's get him there. He's born in Boston in 1881.

[16:03] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah, he's born in Newton, Massachusetts, Newtonville, Massachusetts, just outside of Boston in 1881. He later claimed that he was born in 1883, then sometimes 1882. But he was born in 1881. He lives there with his mother and father. The father is from a somewhat lower socioeconomic status than the mother. The father is from Irish Catholic immigrants. When he was a baby, apparently his mother had him compete in pageants where he was dressed up as a little girl. And so there were these juvenile shows. He sort of had it from the beginning. His mother was supportive and saw what his talents were. The father decides he's going to take the family around the Americas. He's going to find gold. He's going to transform himself. And he never does. They end up in Butte, Montana, all along the way. Julian just keeps getting more and more interested in theater and in impersonation.

[16:48] Andrew L. Erdman: And in Montana, he's performing as a woman in these mining camps.

[17:18] David Armstrong: He's doing it somewhat on the sly, but you can tell it's in his blood. It's in his heart. The father is very distressed by this. He beats his son up a bunch of times. The father's also bitter. And he's this failed sort of mining entrepreneur. The father's a drinker. And then in the mid-1890s, mother and son, they basically have had enough of this. And they go back to Boston and I think get to get the hell away from dad and to get back.

[17:40] Andrew L. Erdman: So young Billy Dalton is looking for his kind of place in the world. And he knows he likes show business. And he works in a ladies hat store for a while. That was very popular. And he eventually starts taking dance lessons. He's studying the cakewalk, which was this appropriated from black enslaved persons on plantations and from minstrelsy. But his dancing teacher, who's a very prominent dancing teacher, says, you know, you're really good, actually. I want to teach you how other kinds of dance. And he's just a natural, both the female impersonation and in stage movement.

[18:08] David Armstrong: This dancing teacher notices his ability to perform as a woman and encourages that and points it out.

[18:12] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah. The story is that some other students were leaving and there was one female student who was a little bit awkward or gawky. And he did a sort of like a little spoof of her. And it was funny. But his dancing teacher, Lilla Viles Wyman, said, like, you've really got something. There's something about you that you really understand how a woman moves. And if we put that together with dancing and singing, I think you're going to go places.

[18:38] David Armstrong: He's like, well, where would I go? You know, but but OK, he follows along with it. There's no career path for that. But that's what gets him. That's his incubator. And about what year is this? We're talking about 1898, 99. So that's interesting. Just this thinking that's going on at that time period. And then she is connected to some of the people who put on this show by a group called the Boston Cadets.

[19:00] Andrew L. Erdman: The Boston Cadets are literally a military unit. They were formed in the colonial times. So this is sort of the classic militias that we hear about even today. These are not paid professional soldiers in any way. This is a volunteer organization.

[19:17] David Armstrong: Yeah, it's a volunteer organization that has existed for a long time. Again, originally, I think it was to protect the royal governor of Massachusetts. And then, you know, like a lot of things, it kind of changes with the time. And they basically existed to protect the Boston elite should there be a breakout of anarchy, Bolshevism, riots, the working classes. They don't have a lot to do in that regard. They seem to like getting together, putting on their uniforms, having their, I don't know, military drills. But of course, they want to do theater because you put a bunch of people together and they eventually like they want to do shows. And they do. They start to put on these amazing original musicals where men play all the parts, including women and some fantastic women's parts.

And they start to become very well known by the 1890s. They're beloved. Their yearly show packs theaters. Their original musicals, they're written and directed by this guy, Robert A. Barnett, who never quite makes the leap to the professional stage, although he later works a little bit with Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.

[20:10] Andrew L. Erdman: And these are fundraisers to support their organization and this big armory that you talk about that's sort of falling down.

[20:16] David Armstrong: Yes, they have this big, clumsy kind of armory building that is in constant need of repair. And, well, I guess we just have to put on another really great musical. Fundraising, by the way, is always the kind of excuse for a lot of drag activities. I'm using drag broadly here. Colleges to businessmen's groups. I think it exists because people love doing it so much. People love doing theater and love impersonating women and creating their own worlds.

[20:40] Andrew L. Erdman: They probably could have found an easier way to raise money than the effort of putting on a show.

[20:45] David Armstrong: Yeah, the ROI is pretty low.

[20:47] Andrew L. Erdman: And yet it works because people want to see it, which is also, I think, one of the things that you make this point at this particular time in history. People are fascinated by young men dressing up as women.

[21:01] David Armstrong: Definitely. They are more and more fascinated with it. After kind of like a long drought of it being rather rejected, there's this cultural fascination and you have a lot of people who are doing it very well and creating these whole worlds in which men are playing girls. Women can't be characters, beautiful characters, particularly in colleges, but not just in colleges. This starts to become a phenomenon in the 1890s and just kind of explodes into professional and further amateur realms in the early 1900s.

[21:29] Andrew L. Erdman: So describe these shows that the cadets are putting on in these first shows that Julian Elting becomes the star of, basically. Almost immediately, he is invited to join this organization or participate. I don't know if he was ever a member of it, but he is the star of their shows.

[21:45] David Armstrong: So his big break comes in 1900 when he gets a part in the back chorus initially with a show called Milady and the Musketeers, which is very similar to a lot of shows that were popular in American theater at the time. It's called a burlesque, but it's not a burlesque in the sense of a leg show that many people might think of. It is a spoof of a well-known piece of literature, The Three Musketeers, and it uses a lot of chorus lines and fancy effects and fancy sets. They spare no expense. There's original music and songs, lots of jokes, lots of wordplay. He's eventually promoted from sort of supernumerary in the back of the chorus line to being given a speaking and singing part. He plays Minionette. He's a huge hit, and then he's invited back the following year to do another of these musicals.

[22:30] Andrew L. Erdman: He also comes to the attention of another group called the Bank Officers Association because the bank officers want to have their own cross-dressed musicals, and he becomes a star in their musicals as well, and he's in a show called Baron Humba. They're not really strongly tight narrative book musicals. There are a lot of different scenarios with singing, dancing, men dressed as women, people dressed as animals. That's what the nature of these shows are.

[22:53] David Armstrong: They're almost like a bunch of vaudeville acts strung together with a loose premise of a plot. There's a lot of popular references. There's a lot of making fun of high culture, and they're really amusing and rollicking, and in the case of the Boston Cadets and the Bank Officers, very high production values. All original music, all originally scored.

[23:10] Andrew L. Erdman: We've talked on this podcast about Lydia Thompson quite a bit in the past, and she brings burlesque to America to a great extent. So these are sort of extensions of her kind of show, although hers were all women and these are all men.

[23:40] David Armstrong: It's a plot very loosely based on Faust, so you have that sort of element, lots of spectacle. A lot of that is feeding what end up being these all-male shows that have spectacle jokes, puns, references to popular and classical forms, and throw in everything but the kitchen sink. They're just really amusing. They're a world unto themselves, almost like cartoons. I grew up watching a lot of cartoons, and it's a world you get pulled into.

[24:04] Andrew L. Erdman: Fractured Fairy Tales probably relates to that, yeah, for those people who are old enough to remember Fractured Fairy Tales.

[24:34] David Armstrong: It's a professional musical called Mr. Wicks of Wickham, produced by E.E. Rice in 1904, and it is a major flop. It's a terrible show. It almost kills his career in the beginning, but he's able to make the transition from there to vaudeville, which he's perfectly suited for.

[24:48] Andrew L. Erdman: He's quite successful in that show, even though the show is not successful.

[24:52] David Armstrong: Exactly. He was sort of like the one bright spot of the show. And by the way, it's also important to note that what he really longs for, what he yearns for, is to be a straight, no pun intended or pun intended, straight actor playing non-drag roles in serious dramas or at least some classics.

[25:07] Andrew L. Erdman: He wants to be an actor. He really wants to be that kind of an artist, and he's never quite able to do it. He thinks maybe in this Mr. Wicks of Wickham that he'll get the chance to do it, but it turns out that he's asked to play his usual illusionistic woman role. He does so very well, but the show is just a bummer.

[25:23] David Armstrong: And in that show, his only role is as a woman character.

[25:27] Andrew L. Erdman: That's correct.

[25:28] David Armstrong: We haven't made the jump yet, which will happen on the next show, but before we get there, Mr. Wicks of Wickham sends him into big-time vaudeville.

[25:36] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah, exactly.

[25:37] David Armstrong: Don't go away. Andrew and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[26:06] David Armstrong: Author Jeffrey Bloch says that Broadway Nation is a fascinating, comprehensive and timely gem of a book that more than lives up to its promise of delivering no less than five books in one.

[26:17] David Armstrong: Kudos to David Armstrong.

[26:19] David Armstrong: And Tony Award-winning lyricist David Zippel says that David Armstrong's insightful history of the evolution of the Broadway musical and its creators is captivating and comprehensive as well as indispensable.

[26:33] David Armstrong: The book is, of course, available on Amazon, but I recommend that you go to the publisher's website, bloomsbury.com, where you will currently receive a 10 percent discount.

[26:43] David Armstrong: Again, like the podcast that inspired it, the book is titled Broadway Nation, How Immigrant Jewish Queer and Black Artist Invented the Broadway Musical.

[26:53] David Armstrong: Now back to the show.

[26:55] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah, exactly.

[26:56] David Armstrong: He sort of jumps off the ship and he doesn't really have any other offers.

[27:00] Andrew L. Erdman: But at the time, vaudeville is starting to coalesce as this incredibly popular, very lucrative, centrally organized, kind of the roots of the modern commercially organized entertainment industry in America.

[27:13] Andrew L. Erdman: There are big chains of vaudeville.

[27:16] Andrew L. Erdman: The biggest one is the Keith Albee chain. It's owned by two guys, Benjamin Franklin Keith and E. F. Albee. And they create a huge business. They own or manage, I don't know, hundreds of theaters. They own a booking syndicate. They're very anti-labor. They're like all the other moguls of the era. There are a few other big chains too. Martin Beck owns the Orpheum chain. There are some smaller chains. Alexander Pantages has a small-time vaudeville chain. But it turns out to be a perfect ecosystem and a perfect working platform for what Julian Eltinge does. Because what do they do? They package 12 to 20 performers to go around the country and put on hour, hour and a half vaudeville shows, usually based around a big star, like an Iva Tankway.

And each act is no more than 10, 20 minutes. He's working hard. I mean, he has to do all of these changes and he has to tote all the stuff around with him. But he does it. He's a huge hit. He puts together a 12 to 15 minute act. He does a whole bunch of impersonations on, off, on, off, takes off the wig. People love him. And that saves him and sends him upward. So tell us a little bit more about that act. If we got to sit in the palace theater and see Julian Eltinge appear in that week's vaudeville show, what would we see?

[28:23] Andrew L. Erdman: Probably he would start with a very popular character type of the day. And so he was very good at playing the Gibson girl. The Gibson girl was a stylized female caricature created by a Life magazine artist named Charles Dana Gibson in the 1890s. And it was just a popular type. And he sort of brought her to life with this big pompadour of hair and a long sweeping dress. And she was not Victorian, but she was not a flapper. She was somewhere in between. And so he would sing, "I am the Gibson girl," and he would dance and he would move gracefully around the stage. Then he'd disappear. Then he'd come out, maybe a Southern belle from the antebellum days. And then he'd come out as Salome. He'd later develop his Salome act.

And then he'd come out as any one of a number of other female types that were in his quiver. He played a bathing beauty. He came out in a bathing suit when going to the beach was all the thing. And women had these incredibly revealing bathing suits where you could see their ankles. And sometimes he would do impersonations of Lillian Russell, who was this extremely famous and popular actress of the time and who he really admired. He claimed that she had coached him. Of course, she never had, but that was just one of the many fibs that he told. And so he would do a spate of one impersonation after another with singing, with dancing, with addressing the audience. He was never bawdy. He was never sort of a gender rebel.

He was always cited for his artistry. And then after 12, 13, 14 minutes, he would take off his wig and the audience would go nuts. So he sings, he dances, but it's all very classy and not campy in any way.

[29:54] Andrew L. Erdman: Exactly. There's no sort of satirical comment on women. Exactly. So you may know about Bert Savoy and Jay Brennan, who were two other female impersonators. They were more campy, draggy. They didn't hide the fact that their erotic preference was men and they were sort of treated that way. Julian Eltinge literally and figuratively fits into the form of gender normativity, not just normativity, but like a gender ideal. And so, yeah, he's always praised for his artistry, which he is highly artistically skilled, but there's also something non-threatening about him. If you look at it in a certain way, it's like he understands how to do the perfect enactment of woman on stage and man off stage. That will not be threatening. That will not be threatening, but at the same time, fascinating, right?

[30:38] David Armstrong: Right. Because inherently, and as you say in the book, just by doing it, he is calling into question the gender norms, whether they exist or not. That's the paradox, which is I'm going to totally upend gender norms by showing you perfect gender norms. Who's going to quarrel with that?

[30:54] Andrew L. Erdman: I'm with you. I get it. And I also have an interest in psychoanalysis. I must think there are all kinds of semi-conscious and unconscious fantasies and anxieties around seeing that and thinking, what's the anatomy beneath the dress, the perfect dress? What's going on at depth there? Well, I mean, obviously that has to be part of the thrill, is that when he fools us, and even when we know we're going to see Julian Eltinge, and we know he's a famous female impersonator, female gender illusionist, or whatever the phrase was at the time, we then get fooled knowing that he's a man to begin with. And that psychologically is somehow provocative to us in some way. It's some kind of turn-on or a turn-off or a, I don't know what the exact word is.

[31:38] David Armstrong: Well, it's stimulating. It's somehow stimulating.

[31:44] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah, exactly. For better and for worse, it is. Which is part of the appeal. And in a way, if you think about all the dusty, there are things called dime museums, which were very popular. Some were very expensive, and some had very high production values, like P.T. Barnum's dime museum. But there are places to go see curios and sort of so-called freak acts, and you could also get a little variety show there. But people know that these were basically gimmicks, you know, somehow, the woman who had no body, or a toad that's 13 feet tall. But people go and look at it anyway. I would look at it, because we want to believe, we want to see, I think, at some level, that reality isn't always so real. It's scary and cool at the same time.

[32:17] David Armstrong: Interesting. Fascinating. Which, and I think maybe it's around this place in your book, but certainly throughout the book, the issue of what is Julian Eltinge's sexuality, and how does that play into this, and how much of this is an expression of his sexuality?

[32:32] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah, and also, I would say, the historical questioning, looking back, and why it becomes important at some times. I don't think it's quite as important in his day. There's not as much of a focus on this hetero-homo binary that comes to be formed around his time period and later on. I think in certain realms, men were permitted to have sex with other men if they wanted to. It didn't necessarily mean that there was something wrong with them, or they're permitted to dress in gender non-conventional ways. That starts to change. Not so many questions are asked about his sexuality during his career, and I think that's partly how he's, partly it's a matter of the times in which he lives in, and it's a matter of he really makes this compact with culture at large to sort of leave him alone.

Also, it's really hard to say how much and to what extent he may have had sexual relations with men. There's no real clear evidence of sustained relationships. It is likely that he had erotic encounters with men. Maybe he had a lot of them, but it's all very sub rosa. He had long enduring friendships with men that might have been somewhere on the spectrum from intimate, emotional, sexual, or might not have been.

[33:38] Andrew L. Erdman: And what's interesting is, you know, in the 1940s and 50s, after what George Chauncey, the historian, the writer of Gay New York, says is a heterosexual counter-revolution, clamping down on any kind of gender non-normativity, you get to the Stonewall era, and there's initially a rediscovery of Julian Eltinge as this gay queer icon, this forgotten drag genius. But he's complicated because he never really leans that way, politically and culturally speaking. And so he starts to fall under some criticism as the AIDS era, you know, the 90s, the political activity around queer identity starts to change. He's sort of questioned as like, was he really an ally? And then I think it's important to ask the question, when does it become important to know what somebody's sexual activities are if you're talking about their art?

I don't know that it was so important in Julian Elting's day that historians or writers were thinking about it. It becomes much more important, as you know, later on in the 20th century. When he starts to be criticized for not being more out in his era is puzzling because people could only be as out as they could be at the time that they live. So that's exactly the criticism that is unaware or unwilling to look at the reality of the times that people lived.

[34:49] David Armstrong: Yeah. And maybe given the social pressure, he didn't necessarily want to think of himself as I'm a man who's attracted to men. And I want to make that an important part of my life or it's not worth it. Or maybe he's a person who didn't have a strong connection to his sexual self. I don't know. But I think those are all maybe more fruitful kinds of questions to consider. And in fact, he works very hard to present this opposite picture of that.

[35:15] Andrew L. Erdman: Yes, he surely does. As part of his management of his persona.

[35:21] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah. You know, he was in a movie in 1940. It was right before he died. He played himself a very brief cameo in a movie called If I Had My Way, starring Bing Crosby and Gloria Jean, who's a child actress. They get together all these former vaudeville stars, Hazel Dawn and Blanche Ringer in it and Trixie Ferganza, all these great stars. And Gloria Jean says, gee, Mr. Eldridge, I remember you wearing a red dress, a beautiful red dress. And he says, yeah, but I always had a cigar in my mouth. And it's just I mean, it sort of has this like Freudian beauty to it. But that's that's Julian Eldridge to a T. There are certain tropes he plays. I didn't want to do this, but look how much money I've been making at it.

I'm such a good entrepreneur. I'm such a good businessman. Oh, I went to college and everybody was doing it there. So I kind of fell into it. I stood in for somebody else who couldn't play the role. It turns out I was pretty good at it. But when I get off stage, none of which was true, by the way, he claimed he went to Harvard, he never went to college and everyone played along with it. Nobody pushed back. You know, it's so interesting that they're letting him tell these completely untrue stories about being a Harvard graduate and all that kind of stuff for decades without anybody saying that didn't happen.

[36:21] David Armstrong: Yeah. And I think I have to imagine that because he was so agreeable to the sort of rules of mainstream culture that nobody wanted to uncover that anxiety in themselves, in their readers. And it was like, yeah, let's agree to the illusion. It feels pretty good. It's kind of an extension of his act. He starts to drop some of the fibbing as he gets a little older and he says, all right, I didn't really go to Harvard, but he's never pushed back. His biggest claim, by the way, was that while in England, he did a command performance for King Edward VII and the king loved it so much that he gave him a dog, one of his own dogs. And this is repeated in just about every story about Julian Elting. And I thought, that's fascinating.

So I contacted the Royal Archives in Britain and they looked around, they had a good look and they said, there is no evidence of that whatsoever, that he ever met the king or that he ever got a dog or that he ever did a command performance. And this is before the age of Google, but it wouldn't have been that hard to sort of push back on it. But he got a lot of mileage out of that. I don't know. Maybe it did happen. And somehow the Royal Archives lost all evidence of it. I don't know.

[37:20] David Armstrong: That is so funny. Were they cooperative in that regard? Were they amused by this or was it just very formal about it?

[37:28] Andrew L. Erdman: They were very formal in a way I would expect the Royal Archives at Windsor Castle to be. They were like, dear Dr. Erdman, thank you kindly. We've had a look and these are the different places we've gone to check the king's account books and the clippings, you know, because the king's daily schedule is planned out. You know, at three o'clock you meet with Lord so-and-so. At four o'clock you have drinks with Lady so-and-so. And nothing doing there in 1907 when I think he would have gone. I was shocked. I was expecting them to give me a great trove of information. And in a sense, they did. Just to be clear, he was a giant sensation in London at that time. So the idea that he would have given a command performance was not out of the question.

Not at all. He was beloved in England, in Paris, in Vienna, in Berlin. He later did a tour of Australia and some of the Asian Pacific Rim. So, yeah, he's an international star. That there's no doubt about. And this global stardom comes out of this vaudeville phase.

[38:21] Andrew L. Erdman: Yes, definitely the European fame. He even gets to Russia. He's offered a contract in Russia. And just to touch back on Mr. Wicks of Wickham, that is a show that takes him to Broadway. That show appears on Broadway, but his dream of becoming a Broadway star does not come out of that show yet. Right. But he starts to interact with all of these Broadway creators. And in fact, his next adventure is with George M. Cohan, the father of the musical comedy to a great extent.

[38:52] David Armstrong: Absolutely.

[38:56] Andrew L. Erdman: And that's where we'll pick up the story on the next episode of Broadway Nation, when Andrew Erdman returns to tell us more about his new book, Beautiful, the story of Julian Elting, America's greatest female impersonator.

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