This transcript was automatically generated and might contain errors.

[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 again today is author Andrew Erdman, whose captivating new book is titled Beautiful, The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator. In this episode, Andrew continues sharing the story of Julian Elting's rise to the absolute highest realms of show business, and we especially focus on three musicals that were created especially for him by top Broadway talents such as Otto Harbach, Jerome Kern, and Irving Berlin. Along the way, you'll have a chance to hear some of the songs that they created for Eltinge, as performed by friend of the pod, David Sabella, including the one you're listening to right now, which is called Those Come Hither Eyes, and it's from the musical Cousin Lucy, with lyrics by Shuler Green and music by Jerome Kern.

[1:47] ♪ Musical number: "Those Come Hither Eyes" — performed by David Sabella ♪

[2:31] David Armstrong: If you missed the first episode in this series, you may want to catch up with that before listening to this one. As always, before we begin, I need to express my sincere thanks to all of our patron club members, whose generous support helps to make this podcast possible, especially our newest member, who joined at the patron level, Alan Teasley. If you would like to help support the creation of Broadway Nation, please listen for information at the end of the podcast about how you too can become a patron.

[3:00] David Armstrong: By the end of the last episode, Julian Elting had become so popular and so famous that no one less than George M. Cohan sought him out to be one of the stars of his next big, if by our standards today, very problematic new show.

[3:17] Andrew Erdman: Yeah, George M. Cohan is, he's really an impresario. He's a producer, writer, director, creative, and he puts together a show called The Honey Boy Minstrel Show, starring George Evans, who is a minstrel star, a blackface minstrel star known as The Honey Boy. And Julian Elting is going to be a big part of this kind of rambling revue that's going to tour the country. It's kind of like a traveling vaudeville show, but Julian Elting has a very prominent place and he's a huge hit. It looks like the show initially is not going to be a big success, but it actually is a big success. And it gets Julian a few more rungs up the ladder of fame.

[3:49] David Armstrong: And this is a show that Cohan produces and creates, but does not appear in.

[3:53] Andrew Erdman: Correct. Correct. He might've made one, you know, guest appearance, but he's not really in it. No, but it's a Cohan brand.

[3:58] David Armstrong: And this is in the final days, I guess, of the minstrel show. The heyday of the minstrel show is long before this, but this is sort of like a revival of what is seen at the time as a great tradition that we're going to nostalgically revisit.

[4:14] Andrew Erdman: Absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah. It totally had this nostalgic kind of retro appeal as a complete entity unto itself.

[4:23] David Armstrong: And Elting appears in blackface in the show or both in blackface and in his whiteface?

[4:30] Andrew Erdman: Yeah.

[4:31] David Armstrong: I guess he did really do whiteface in a way, sort of.

[4:33] Andrew Erdman: Absolutely. He did this porcelain whiteface. Yeah. He appears in his kind of classic whiteface. He does some of the Salome interpretation. So he does some of his vaudeville stuff, but he also comes up with a minstrel blackface character and he does like a blackface Juliet to a Romeo. It's the first time and really the only time that he ever puts on makeup that darkens his appearance as opposed to ultra whitens his appearance. But this show is a giant hit all across the country for months at a time. It runs for a substantial amount of time.

[5:05] David Armstrong: Yeah, it does. And it only elevates his status and his asking price and his star brand. And this is allowing him to sort of jump to the next level from famous guy to top echelon. And two people come into his life during this period who will be very important to him. Talk a little bit about Koshima.

[5:20] Andrew Erdman: Koshima becomes so many performers had valets, dressers, assistants and someone like Julian Elting, who is carrying so much garb and wardrobe and has to make such quick changes and really needs the assistance of someone, hires Koshima to be that person. Koshima is a Japanese immigrant. Many Japanese immigrants and Asian immigrants worked in this profession because other professions were closed off to them. And he becomes a confidant and a friend and maybe one of the few people Julian Elting can be a little more honest with and a little more himself with. And he definitely makes it possible for Julian Elting to do what he does, to go backstage, to change into that next incredible impersonation, get back on stage.

Everything's in order. And Koshima, you know, I wish I knew more about it. But Koshima and he have what seems to be a very close friendship. They're working together to make Julian's art. Is there more between them emotionally, sexually? I don't know. It's possible.

[6:15] Andrew Erdman: Eventually, when Koshima leaves, they're together for about 10 years. Koshima says, I'm leaving to start my own business and to get married, which I think is a way of sort of doing the heteronormative coding of like, that's my exit line. It's like when the politician says I'm going to go spend more time with my family. And that's probably the exact opposite of what they're going to do.

[6:32] David Armstrong: I thought it was fascinating. The illustration you include in the book, there's a cartoon of Julian preparing for a performance with Koshima helping him get in and strapping him into his corset, which apparently was a major undertaking.

[6:47] Andrew Erdman: Was a major undertaking. And he liked to eat and he liked to drink. Julian and his weight fluctuated a lot, but he had to get into a 23 inch corset. And I don't know when my waist was 23 inches, but junior high school, I'm thinking. And yeah, Koshima was essential. And it was really depicted very openly. And it was kind of part of his broader act that there was this guy who was strapping him into his corsets and supposedly had a knife to cut him out of the corsets and was an important part of the overall mechanism.

[7:11] David Armstrong: Yeah. And the backstage story is so clearly something that they're publicizing and making part of his hook. And those cartoons are so funny because Koshima is sweating as he's got his foot on Julian's butt and strapping him into the thing.

[7:27] Andrew Erdman: And it has a very interesting, you know, you can do really interesting queer readings of it. And it's allowing a certain closeness between men and then there's a racialized aspect to it. So it's very rich in any number of ways.

[7:38] David Armstrong: And again, one of the little histories you provide is so helpful because we get the stereotype of the Japanese assistant or Japanese housekeeper. We think about Auntie Mame and the Ito character, and people often criticize that as being this racial stereotype and this demeaning stereotype. But the reality behind it, which is what you point out, is that this was a job that actually was available to Japanese men and that they could make something of themselves by doing when everything else is closed down to them.

[8:10] Andrew Erdman: Exactly. A lot of industry is closed down to them. And this is a realm where, like a lot of immigrant groups, they get a foothold, they get a toehold, and then there gets to be a pipeline for other people to do the labor. Koshima seems to be particularly talented at it.

[8:24] Andrew Erdman: What I think was important to get across was this idea that he's not portrayed, and certainly Julian Elting never spoke of him as a kind of servile caricature, perhaps the way in later similar persons and characters would be portrayed. He's really his partner in crime. And Koshima definitely has a story of his own. Again, I wish I knew more about it, but he's as much part of the art as Julian is. A crucial partner, indispensable to making the act happen.

[8:49] David Armstrong: Yeah, I always say that when talking about Ito and Auntie Mame or Mame as well, because he has to whip up these giant cocktail parties and dinner parties in half an hour out of nowhere. He's the smartest person on the stage.

[9:00] Andrew Erdman: That's exactly right.

[9:02] David Armstrong: Yeah, yeah.

[9:02] Andrew Erdman: He's a genius.

[9:03] David Armstrong: He's a genius, yeah. And Koshima used to say, this is where the Japanese Navy gets its work done. I think he was trying to say, like, it takes a lot of muscle literally and figuratively to keep this act going.

[9:13] Andrew Erdman: And as I say, there was something of a trope of the Japanese valet servant. There was even a vaudeville performer named Carter de Haven who started his act with his Japanese valet dresser, helping him prepare. Like that was part of his act was you would see that it was like a faux backstage. But Julian Elting clearly was, you know, indebted to Koshima. The public aspect of it, I thought, was what was so interesting is that Julian Elting makes Koshima part of his persona, part of his public performance.

[9:41] David Armstrong: Yeah. Although he's not on the stage, but in all the publicity, he's a major part of it.

[9:45] Andrew Erdman: Yeah. And his labor's on the stage. I think it's also important to remember that there's a rising fascination with Japan that's starting to come out of isolation. Japan has also just won a war against the Russian empire. So there's plenty of racism to go around in racial exclusionary acts. And Japanese and also Chinese immigrants are barred from dressing certain ways. But at the same time, there's fascination and a certain kind of curiosity and respect.

[10:07] David Armstrong: Before we get to Al Woods, who, like Koshima, is a long lasting partner of Julian Elting, we have Harry Lauder, who is a legendary vaudeville figure who ends up with a very prickly partnership with Elting for at least a brief amount of time.

[10:23] Andrew Erdman: Yeah. If Lord willing, this book is ever adapted into a movie, I think this would be such a great sequence. Harry Lauder came from a very poor Scottish coal mining area and he became a raconteur. He told jokes. He told stories. He sang songs. He made recordings. He was one of the first recording stars.

[10:42] ♪ Musical number: "Roamin' in the Gloamin'" — performed by Harry Lauder ♪

[11:44] Andrew Erdman: And he was hugely popular in England, but he does make the transition to America. He's very popular, even though audiences can't always necessarily get all the references or even understand all the time what he's saying. But he has a lot of charisma and he's a caricature and he tells a story. So they decide to send him on tour with Julian Elting. And this is his first appearance in America.

[12:05] David Armstrong: It's his first major tour.

[12:07] Andrew Erdman: Yeah, I believe that's right. He recounts it in one of his memoirs, his tour with Elting. And it's a big success. I think that Harry Lauder is a little overwhelmed with the size and scope and scale of America. I think he's sort of freaked out by it. And to some extent, he takes that on Julian Elting. He's also pretty conservative and traditional and homophobic. It doesn't help that Julian Elting is really, really popular and is getting sometimes more applause than he is. And Julian Elting's name starts to get bigger on the marquee because he's supposed to be the opener. They're not equals. It's supposed to be Elting opens for the big star, Harry Lauder.

[12:40] Andrew Erdman: That's exactly right. And what starts to happen along the way is that insecure Harry Lauder starts to realize that people quite like the opening act and ask for a lot of encores. Also, Harry Lauder is this kind of thrifty kind of like, I'm just a simple man with simple tastes, even though it's not really true. But he's going down that whole thing. And Julian Elting likes to buy nice antiques and likes to dress well. And at one point, he influences Lauder's wife to buy like a three thousand dollar Japanese artwork in San Francisco. He's not liking Julian Elting and Julian Elting for his part, who's much more politic, probably doesn't care for Harry Lauder. But he's very composed, Julian Elting.

He's not going to get into the muck. And Harry Lauder starts to make comments like, well, maybe I'll call you Julia Nelting. That's like a dumb old joke that Julia Nelting has heard before. And Julian Elting denies that there was ever any animosity. But it's pretty clear that they did not get along well.

[13:38] Andrew Erdman: There is a moment when Julian Elting says, hey, Harry, can you zip me up? And Harry Lauder comes and zips him up. And there's a moment of sort of, I don't know, queer homosocial energy between the two of them that probably freaked Harry Lauder out even further. They basically had nothing to do with each other after the.

[13:54] Andrew L. Erdman: If you read Harry Lauder's memoirs of this time, he does not even mention Julian Eltinge.

[13:59] David Armstrong: And you said he has two memoirs that he writes.

[14:01] Andrew L. Erdman: A number of them, but there are two of them that really cover this time period, and Julian Eltinge's name is not to be found.

[14:06] David Armstrong: That's so interesting.

[14:07] Andrew L. Erdman: So Julian Eltinge survives and actually kind of comes out the winner.

[14:10] David Armstrong: And a bigger star.

[14:11] Andrew L. Erdman: Exactly. So he has that middle period. So it's Vaudeville to Minstrel Show, Cohan, Minstrel Show to the tour with Lauder, and now he's ready for his next big thing.

[14:21] ♪ Musical number: "Don't Take Your Beau to the Seashore" — performed by David Sabella ♪

[15:01] David Armstrong: Don't go away. Andrew and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[15:10] David Armstrong: Hi, this is David Armstrong, and if you're enjoying this episode, I strongly suspect that you will want to read my new book, Broadway Nation, How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. On sale now wherever books are sold, and I'm very happy to report that the early reviews have been terrific. The esteemed author Jeffrey Block 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. Kudos to 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.

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% discount. Again, like the podcast that inspired it, the book is titled Broadway Nation, How Immigrant, Jewish, Queer, and Black Artists Invented the Broadway Musical. Now, back to the show.

[16:19] Andrew L. Erdman: Every place that I go, every bachelor or beau, pays me the greatest attention.

[16:36] Andrew L. Erdman: If it's just sympathy makes them pleasant to me, the fact they don't seem to mention.

[16:44] Andrew L. Erdman: My life has a widow to me, it shows. All Romeos want the girl who knows.

[16:56] Andrew L. Erdman: The widow sings through experience to gain love's confidence.

[17:10] Andrew L. Erdman: Which brings us to Al Woods, which is not a name, and I pride myself on knowing this history pretty well, is not a name I was at all familiar with, and yet he's a major Broadway producer and more.

[17:23] David Armstrong: Yeah, just one of these people who produced so many shows. Very popular. He was a real kind of cigar-chomping, self-taught immigrant. He was one of these Jewish immigrants who was going to make a name for himself. He had a lot of gut instinct. He didn't really care for high art. He wasn't going to do the Ibsens and the Shaws, but he really knew what audiences liked, and he had a whole run of very successful shows. The story is that Julian, who's performing at Hammerstein's Theater, one of the Hammerstein theaters, A.H. Woods, Al Woods, says, "Who's that beautiful girl on stage?" And someone says, "That's Julian Elting." The two form a friendship, and Woods takes very kindly towards Julian, and the two come together as sort of friends, as sort of a confidant.

Woods is kind of the father figure that Julian never had, and he took very, very positively to Julian Elting. I think both personally, artistically, on a business level, I think he said, "I can get you a little closer to what you want, and you can get me a little closer to what I want." And he knows, kid, if you're going to make the next leap, we're going to have to find vehicles just for you, musicals written for you in your own special art form, your own metier. So what ends up happening is A.H. Woods says, "We're going to do these shows in which you're just a regular guy. You're like a college kid. And circumstances are going to be such that you have to drag up in the way that audiences already know you do so well.

And you're going to appear as a widow or an heiress, and you're engaging in that female impersonation. We'll move the plot forward. We'll get some jokes, some laughs, some songs, and you'll get the girl and get the lost diamonds, whatever the plot point was." And he does three musicals with A.H. Woods that, again, they're not hits in New York. They're hits touring around North America.

[19:10] Andrew L. Erdman: So this is sort of the Charlie's Aunt model.

[19:10] David Armstrong: Totally. Except when he appears in drag, he's playing the glamorous heroine of the story, not the old biddy.

[19:17] Andrew L. Erdman: Yes, absolutely. He's playing someone usually exotic, interesting, a sort of fascinating outsider. The first one that he does is The Fascinating Widow in 1910. And as people may know, widow characters were a real subject of fascination, sexual fascination. They're glamorous. These were not old widows. These were sort of young women still in the prime who were kind of sexually viable.

[20:00] Andrew L. Erdman: And it debuts in New York, but it becomes clear that Julian Elting is going to become successful by touring all over the U.S., North America, even doing some tours overseas. In a sense, he's this musical comedy or comedy cross-dressing star. He's not really a Broadway star in the way that we might think of it or would come to think of it. He does become enormously successful. These are hugely popular shows. He does three plays with A.H. Woods. As I said, there's The Fascinating Widow in 1910, which is written by Otto Harbach, if I'm not mistaken.

[20:58] David Armstrong: Yeah, I think that's right. Who you've talked about on the show, who becomes a very well-known composer and writer or lyricist. And then there is The Crinoline Girl in 1914, same basic formula. Then there is Cousin Lucy in 1915, 1916. Each of these run for a few years, and they are very demanding on Julie. And there's a lot of traveling and costume changes and carrying costumes and getting himself into corsets and working with Koshima. And he's a consummate professional. So tell us about the plots of these shows. The Fascinating Widow, what was the story?

[21:29] Andrew L. Erdman: In The Fascinating Widow, Elting is playing a college guy who likes drinking and cursing and smoking cigars, all this stuff that's associated with men. And he ends up punching somebody in the face. He punches this sort of feminine coded, sort of sissy coded, I'm making quotes, guy in the face who's wearing glasses, in which he is told, like, "You better beat it," because it's an especially grievous offense for some reason to punch a guy in the face who has glasses. He's also pursuing a woman who's at college. And there are a lot of scenes of these college girls kind of experiencing freedom and going to the beach. He eventually has to reappear as Mrs. Monte, who is this alluring widow who sort of seduces and flirts her way back into the situation to clear his own name and to get back with the woman who he's infatuated with.

There are all these kind of stock characters from vaudeville and from melodramas. They are detective characters and sort of bookworms and then his kind of tough guy friends. And that's basically the plot of it. I go into it at some greater length in the book, but that's basically what happens. But one of the things that Cohan is credited with is combining melodrama with comedy to create musical comedy in a way. And this is very much in that same world, it seems to me.

[22:45] David Armstrong: If you look at the script, there was an archival copy in the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts. It's like a play that every, I don't know, so often people just sort of break out into song in a very lively way. So it has a bit of a vaudeville feel to it and that you have some comedy, some routines, a little bit of slapstick, some cross-dressing, and then boom, there's a nice song for everyone. Song's about, isn't it lovely to go bathing and everyone loves a college girl and keep your eyes on the widow. Again, it's a kind of evolution from a more strictly variety show or a kind of patchwork musical into something semi-book, lightweight, and that's also pointing at what we'll think of more as a musical comedy, although you'd probably be more of an expert on that than I would be.

[23:36] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah, it sounds very similar to 45 Minutes from Broadway, which is very weird because one act will have like four songs and then another act will only have one song in it.

[23:40] David Armstrong: Yeah. And so in terms of the way we think of a musical's form today is, you know, it doesn't line up, but it was evolving to that. They were just figuring it out and discovering it at the time.

[23:45] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah. And David, I think too also, and again, you know, please feel free to correct or add that these are very much group efforts. The ensemble has a lot to do with it. The producers have a lot to do with it. And so, yeah, it has a bit of a patchy kind of wonderfully motley quality to it. You don't need such a tight narrative through line, you know. That's what audiences liked. And the gimmick, and I don't mean that in a pejorative way, is that Elting is going to transform himself sometimes quite magically or at least very quickly from man to woman in the course of the story.

[24:30] David Armstrong: Yeah. And I think at the end of The Fascinating Widow, there's a scene in which he, in like a minute, goes off stage and he comes back in like full bridal attire. And he could not have done that without his confidant and valet, Koshima, who's also kind of his master logician. But yeah, so he's doing a lot of that. It's also the first time that Julian Elting steps on stage as a male character, which is how he starts. His name is Hal. So he's a guy. But then, of course, he's a man forced through circumstances to do all these amazing transformations. Bear in mind, he's also a good singer, a good dancer. He's a pretty good comic actor. So yeah, it's a good combination. It's a winning recipe. And this brings him rave reviews all across the country, brings him an incredibly hefty salary.

He's making something like $2,500 a week, or at least I think at this point they're saying that he's making more than the president, which would be about $1,700 a week. But yeah, that's putting him up into that sort of top stratosphere. If you think about it, at the time, top, top, top, top vaudeville actresses and actors are making could maybe get $2,500, $3,000 a week. But to be making over $1,500 a week is pretty extraordinary.

[25:20] Andrew L. Erdman: And you mentioned the Julian Elting Theatre. I was interested to note his is one of the first that is named for a specific artist. It ends up being sort of lost in a crowd of names after a while there. I think there's a 20 to 25 that are named after artists.

[25:31] David Armstrong: So many.

[25:31] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think it's a sign of A.H. Woods is kind of fondness for Julian and also his appreciation of how much money he's bringing into the woods organization. And Julian also starts becoming a profit sharer, right? He's not just making a salary. He also has what would be the equivalent of points.

[25:46] David Armstrong: Yeah. So he gets a theater named after him on West 42nd Street. And though he never performs in that theater, he never actually performed in it. There is a story later in his life when he's kind of down and out that he goes up to the theater and says, "Can you let me in for free? I don't have 35 cents. I only have a $20 bill. But I'm Julian Elting. The theater was named after me." And he's told no. Who knows if it's true, but it might as well be true. And by this time, it's turned into a 42nd Street sort of grindhouse, not in the way we think of it from the 70s, but showing B movies are not showing first run movies anymore.

[26:17] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah. Showing a lot of shorts. It actually is called I know we're jumping ahead, but it's called the laugh movie, L.A.F.F. movie. Then it eventually becomes the empire after the old empire goes away and it kind of becomes a burlesque house. But it's yeah, it's kind of in its descent and still jumping ahead. It's still there. We can actually go to the Julian Elting Theater and see Julian Elting.

[26:36] David Armstrong: Do you know, David, what happened to the structure itself in, I think, 1990 or 91?

[26:40] Andrew L. Erdman: They moved it down 42nd Street. That's something I think Julian Elting would have really appreciated. They picked up the entire theater and moved it west on 42nd Street. And now it's the AMC movie complex from one end of the block to the other end of the block.

[26:55] David Armstrong: Almost talk about a transformation. And I actually was there not too long ago, maybe two or three years ago. Knew enough to look up when I was there. Did you see these sort of muses, these kind of frescoed muses?

[27:06] Andrew L. Erdman: Absolutely. There's a ceiling mural in the which is now the lobby of the theater, which I think was the auditorium at the time. I'm not really sure what the logistics of that were.

[27:17] David Armstrong: Yeah. When I took a tour of Julian's home in Silver Lake, the mansion that he built, the Villa Capistrano, there are some beautiful, much smaller frescoes in the entryway on a vaulted ceiling. They've been obscured with sort of dust and time. They need to be cleaned, but they're supposed to be by the same artist who painted those frescoes. I don't know the artist's name, but it's interesting. I got a kind of mini version of that. So those frescoes on the ceiling of the AMC theater are the three muses, I guess, from Greek myth.

[27:48] Andrew Erdman: Launched Julian Eltinge Magazine and Beauty Tips, which is a combination of little ditties and funny little articles about Julian's life, some things that are a bit more from the sentimental era of American history, like here's how you should treat your mother, and here's how a wife should treat her husband. Also little jokes, funny little tidbits he picked up, but also pushing his line of cold creams and beauty products, diet regimens for women, some of his experiences on the road, occasionally pictures of him boxing, because that had to be in there. Yeah, it's published for a couple of years. There are extant copies of it around, you can find them. He also, he and Woods have in one of their theaters, and I don't know if it's a theater on the road or the Julian Eltinge Theater, but they do have a beauty counter where women coming in can see him perform and then buy his beauty products, his cold cream, his facial regimen, and he's pretty serious about it.

And as I think I mentioned before, he promotes R&G corsets and department stores start using his name and they say, these are the shoes worn by Julian Eltinge. He also, of course, like a lot of other stars, he promotes sheet music, he promotes pianos, but he really does promote women's beauty and fashion products, all without irony. So it's fascinating that he is, because he's an icon of beauty at the time. He is the... Absolutely. So women want to look like Julian Eltinge. Yes, and women are instructed to look like Julian Eltinge, and there's even a strain of kind of notably misogynistic theater criticism, which in theater reviews, which point out that he keeps doing these women's roles better than women.

He does Salome better than the women playing Salome. He looks more like a woman than your average American woman, et cetera, et cetera. He's benefiting off it, and it's kind of a double-edged sword. And then, as you just mentioned, counter to that or side by side with that, he's very adamant to make sure he is seen offstage as a man. Yes, as a very butch kind of middle-class white, hitting all the marks of... He says that he went to Harvard. He played on the football team. He was a rower. He's a boxer. He's friends with all these boxers. He knows about boxing. He also knows about the stock market. He likes cigars. There's even a Julian Eltinge line of cigars with his, or at least with his visage on it.

He definitely leans into that pretty hard. And again, there is that constant idea of this real binary between his offstage life and his onstage life. He's working pretty hard at both kinds of drag, if you will. And he's managing it very, very carefully, managing his image.

[30:36] Andrew Erdman: He is. And Woods is helping him, and he has his handlers and his press people. He obviously has a whole team because somebody's writing this magazine. He's not doing all of that work himself. Yeah, absolutely. He has publicists, and he has Woods, and Woods has a staff. So yeah, he has a lot of people in the Julian Eltinge brand, and they're doing a pretty good job of that tightrope walk. As you just alluded to, and I want to dig into this a little bit, offstage, he's presenting himself as a manly man whose job is to play a woman. What's his justification for that? He just happens to be so good at it, he can't not do it?

[31:10] Andrew Erdman: Yeah, that's the sort of trope, which is he kind of fell into it. One very easy way to convey that is to say that I couldn't turn down the money, I'm kind of an entrepreneur, and this was a great opportunity, which happens to be true, by the way. He is very entrepreneurial and knows how to make money. He also knows how to spend it and lose it. It seems to fit him very well, all of these stories. They're kind of true, and the stories work. And then the stories they create for the plots of his shows parallel that, a very manly man, sort of usually a rake, sort of, I don't know what the word is we think of today, but who is then forced to, or required to, imitate a woman in order to achieve some goal.

Yes, absolutely. His plays and movies somewhat tend to kind of blend together in my mind, but yeah, he's like in The Crinoline Girl and in Cousin Lucy, he plays these kind of young guys who have to somehow recover, usually a fortune or solve a mystery, and also in so doing, secure a young woman's affections and somehow fight off the bad guys, and also the sort of effeminately coded men, and all by way of taking on the role of a woman. He says, I think it's in Cousin Lucy, he plays a character named, I think, Tom Hale, and he says, today, I mean, there's so much mind-bending self-referencing of gender, he says, these days, a woman is 10% nature, 90% artifice, and I'm going to prove it to you.

And so he does it by impersonating a woman in order to keep the plot going and to solve it. But yes, that's the recurring trope in all of these. He's a guy forced to dress up. He saves the day by becoming a woman. Yes, and impressively so. Well, that's the thing, and he does it so well. I think in Cousin Lucy, you tell us that he had no fewer than 16 costume changes.

[33:03] Andrew Erdman: Yeah, right. It's this amazing mechanism he's put together. And I think that just to reflect on that as an artist, as a human being, as a working actor, he's doing that night after night after night, maybe two shows a day. It's pretty brutal. And he is a really consummate, really devoted professional. I think at some level, he wonders, please let me graduate to something else. But this is what he does, and no one does it as well as he does. It's a bit of a trap, I guess. Like anybody who does something extremely well, that's what you get known for doing and expected to do.

[33:27] Andrew Erdman: That's exactly right. That's exactly right. Eva Tang Wei, who we talked about, had a similar kind of albatross around her neck as this zany, crazy, I don't care girl. And so there was nowhere really left for her to go. And after 20 years of doing that, you either make peace with it or it drives you nuts.

[33:41] David Armstrong: Yeah, that's very challenging. The stars who can reinvent themselves, you have to give a lot of credit to because that's very hard to do once you've established something you're expected to do.

[34:01] Andrew Erdman: Absolutely. Absolutely. One other note about The Crinoline Girl, which was the third of these three musical comedies following this formula. It was the second, not that it really matters. Well, they were a bit indistinguishable. Although one of the things about Cousin Lucy is that Jerome Kern is writing music for this show.

[34:11] David Armstrong: Yeah. You know, Julian Elting's career kind of dovetails sort of before they were hugely famous, either Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern. I think Jerome Kern was brought in as a tune doctor, you know, to kind of perk up some of the music. And again, this would be maybe more of your area of expertise before he's really the famous and legendary Jerome Kern. But yeah, Jerome Kern kind of comes in there as one of the fixers. I think a lot of these shows are made by committee. Again, you know, they bring in as many Hollywood stars today.

[34:38] Andrew Erdman: Absolutely. But it's just interesting that he's surrounded by these top talents, whether they're still on their way up or not. They're still the top talents of Broadway, who are right there wanting to and participating in creating shows for him.

[34:48] David Armstrong: So Charles Kline wrote Cousin Lucy. Do you know about Charles Kline?

[34:52] Andrew Erdman: I don't know. That's not a name I'm familiar with.

[34:54] David Armstrong: Yeah. He was a hugely popular playwright and librettist of the time, and he specialized in writing pieces very specifically for specific performers. And Charles Kline was one of the people who tragically who died aboard the Lusitania, along with, I think, Charles Froman died along.

[35:10] Andrew Erdman: That's right.

[35:10] David Armstrong: On the Lusitania. And it was deemed that Charles Kline, who had written Cousin Lucy, that his library of work was virtually worthless in terms of being assessed as part of his estate because they were just written for very specific actors and performers. Again, this is who was working on the Julian Elting brand and URV, you know.

[35:30] Andrew Erdman: But that's very true. I remember you mentioning that now in the book, even though he had written all these top money making vehicles, they were so specifically star vehicles, they couldn't be used by anybody else. So his estate was worthless.

[35:42] David Armstrong: Right. It's fascinating. Tragic. It's kind of a sad, you know, it's a sad thing. I do talk about it in the book. By the way, another thing to consider is that when somebody is doing vaudeville impersonations, you're just seeing them in drag and this beautiful drag and they're singing and dancing. It's easier to tour abroad just as silent movies will eventually be easier to tour abroad. It's very hard to make these plays with so much language. And Julian Elting does not speak. He speaks English. It's very hard to make them play, to take them to France, to Germany, to Vienna, to Japan. It's very hard. That's also just an interesting and in some ways limiting factor, despite the fact that he's hugely popular in North America and in England.

[36:21] David Armstrong: Absolutely. And he did do some touring of these shows abroad, but it was not as easy to do as the vaudeville act.

[36:27] Andrew Erdman: Yeah. And I think if you had audiences in Paris who could speak English or who could appreciate it, not that, you know, we're not talking about Shakespeare here. He certainly could have, you know, in bigger cities, you had a more sophisticated audience. But yeah.

[36:37] David Armstrong: By the time we get to Cousin Lucy, it's clear that this formula is starting to wear thin.

[36:43] Andrew Erdman: Yeah. I mean, sort of. How could it not? The other thing that's happening, the other part of the formula is that they want him displaying as many sumptuous gowns and stylish gowns as he can. American women are becoming consumers of fashion at a greater rate. And so he's kind of this living mannequin. That's another thing that's heaped on him. And you do see headlines like new Julian Elting musical is 40 different gowns and some songs and jokes. And I think he's getting particularly tired of being this living mannequin. I think it feels degrading to him. So he decides in 1916, 1917 that he's going to make a transition. It's time to go west. It's time to go to Hollywood and take a stab at the movies.

You think he's right about it? He doesn't want to keep doing it. His plays are sort of diminishing returns. He doesn't want to do it forever. It's very telling that he's able to step out of his place and then other lesser female impersonators step right in and they become popular regional theater pieces. But yes, he goes and he signs a deal with famous players Lasky, which is the Paramount Studio, to start making movies with them in 1917.

[37:44] Andrew Erdman: So it's fascinating that those plays go on. The fascinating widow continues to be performed by other people. Yes, other people who had been sort of lesser Julian Eltings. I mean, that's sort of the way that the female impersonation business is looking at this point. Julian Elting is at the top. And then you have a couple of other people like Bothwell Brown and Carol Norman, who were superb, not quite up to Julian's level. And then lesser ones who are now getting work in this industry that Julian Elting has created. It's kind of like the Charlie's Ant revival again and again and again. You find the person who can do the role. But yet this phase of his career is over. 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.

[38:48] David Armstrong: Beautiful, the story of Julian Elting, America's greatest female impersonator.

[39:18] David Armstrong: Beautiful, the story of Julian Elting, America's greatest female impersonator.

[39:48] David Armstrong: Beautiful, the story of Julian Elting, America's greatest female impersonator.

[40:18] David Armstrong: Beautiful, the story of Julian Elting, America's greatest female impersonator.

[40:31] David Armstrong: Now here's the information about how you too can become a patron of Broadway Nation. A donation of just seven dollars a week will not only keep Broadway Nation up and running, it will also provide you with exclusive access to the complete unedited versions of many of the interviews that you hear on this podcast. And all patrons will receive special shoutouts and acknowledgments of your vital support for Broadway Nation. To join, simply go to broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. That's broadwaynationpodcast.supercast.tech. Or simply click the link in the show notes to this episode. Broadway Nation is written and produced by me, David Armstrong. Special thanks to Pals Mox for his help with editing this episode, and to the entire team at the Broadway Podcast Network.