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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 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 third and final episode in the series, Andrew shares with us the story of how Julian Eltinge capitalized on his international vaudeville and Broadway fame and became a major movie star in Hollywood, and how that coincided with a golden age of female impersonation in America. We also explore the challenges Eltinge faced during the final years of his career as America became more conservative and began to restrict and censor drag performance.

If you missed the earlier episodes in this series, you may want to catch up with those before listening to this one. 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. If you would like to help support the creation of Broadway Nation, please listen for the information at the end of the episode about how you too can become a patron. Here we go.

[1:31] Andrew Erdman: 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. And because he is such a big national and international star, the movies are very welcoming to him. They are seeking him out. He was having offers to do the movies, which he decides to do. It's not something he had to create himself. Yeah, he was definitely a hot property. He'd even been in a movie called How Molly Made Good. He had a small part in it. He's not the star of it. It's about a reporter who's trying to find out about all these stars and how they live in New York. And he's briefly in a Paramount. Famous players Lasky is happy to have him.

And he signs a multi-picture deal. Bear in mind, at the time, you could make three movies in the course of just as many weeks and probably on the same set. But these are what pass for features. They were a little shorter. They're probably in the nature of 50 to 60 minutes. The first movie he makes, it's initially called Mrs. Raffle's Career in 1917, but it's renamed The Countess Charming. And once again, I sort of get lost in some of the plot points, but he's getting a little older now, but he's a sort of young guy who has to insinuate himself as either a society lady or someone's lost relative. And he's a woman who has to solve a series of problems. They're a little more on the comical spectrum, as you might expect.

But that's what he does. Well, of course, just to state the obvious, these are silent movies. Yes, because we don't have talking movies yet. So he's had to adapt this formula, the same formula that he was using on the stage, but is more like a Keystone Cop movie in a way, because there's only intertitles. There's no dialogue in these movies. In a way, it's sort of the physical comedy of him going from man to woman, I assume, becomes the sort of the main driving force behind it. Yeah. And these early movies don't survive. There is a movie from 1925. It's a little different, but you can see him sort of doing what he's doing. But by that point, it's become much more comical. But yeah, it's the same basic idea.

You obviously take out the music and you have these very similar plots where Guy transforms himself into a woman and a very convincing looking woman, a very non-campy, non-Carnival-esque guy. And I have to imagine also, though, that it's a little less thrilling, even though they're funny and they're fast moving and they fit in well with what audiences like. They're a little less convincing because the movies themselves are a big illusion. You can do anything in a movie. So the fact that you can become a woman instantaneously does not have the same thrill it has on the stage where you understand the difficulty behind it.

[4:01] Andrew Erdman: Exactly. And where you have a felt sense of the presence of a performer right in front of you who's somehow blowing your mind in terms of gender and this woman and there's all these feelings and then the wig comes off and then, wow, it can't quite translate to the screen in the same way. He must know that at some level. But they're successful enough. They do pretty good. And these movies sort of follow the same pattern as the plays did. They repeat the same kind of story. The second one, which I think happens even later that same year, 1917, cover Mrs. Carfax, is very successful. They're all very successful, but start to grow thin in a similar way.

[4:38] Andrew Erdman: Absolutely. I think in terms of his community and being around his people, Hollywood serves Julian Elting really well. He makes friends with Charlie Chaplin and the Mary Pickfords and Douglas Fairbanks, all the people, Edna Perviance, who was Charlie Chaplin's kind of leading lady. He really fits in well with those people. There's a little more freedom, I think, to be himself. If there's a period when he's having sexual relations with men, this would be the time that he's able to engage in it more. He's living in Silver Lake where the early studios are. It's a little bit of a bohemian community. So in that regard, I think it serves him well. But you're right. The movies become very repetitive, very formulaic.

He's just getting older and having to go on these mass diets all the time to fit back into whatever dresses he's putting on. And I think he's realizing this isn't quite the magic door to a real dramatic career that he had wanted. I think you say his movie stardom, which is quite immense, coincides with the very peak of female impersonation in America. Tell us about that.

[5:32] Andrew Erdman: Yeah, I would say between World War I and then up until the early 20s, female impersonation in various different forms, both professional and amateur, has become a huge, widely accepted craze amongst men in a very normative sense. During World War I, you have different units of the American Army putting on these very impressive cross-dress shows, not just making fun in a draggy way, but also with men who are playing these very beautiful ingenue characters. They're beloved in war-torn France. In 1919, even after the war is over, there's a theater in France that's set aside just for cross-dressed American Army theatricals. At the same time, in colleges, these varsity shows, these original musical varsity shows starring and featuring people who become later well-known actors, people like Jimmy Stewart.

I don't know if he played drag roles, but certainly a lot of famous people who go on to become famous people in Hollywood, it's all the rage. Clubs, men are also in all sorts of fraternal orders, the Elks, the Masons, much more minor ones. Then there's an accompanying trend of something called womanless weddings, which I talk about only briefly. Had you heard of that, David?

[6:44] David Armstrong: I have not. I have it here in my notes to ask you about. What is a womanless wedding and why were they so popular?

[6:48] Andrew Erdman: Yeah, this is something that merits more research and more time from me or from somebody else. They were these elaborate rituals mostly put on by amateur clubs, amateur societies and organizations all around the country that featured a wedding with all the guests and the bride and the family and all the relatives in which there were no women. All played by men. All played by men, all depicted by men, all embodied by men. I mean, it's a little hard to imagine. I'm trying to imagine why they were so popular, but the fact is they were. It was sort of a point of honor for a local Elks or a local Knights of Pythias to put on their womanless wedding and for whoever got to play the bride really played it a little like I think Julian Elting might have played the bride in his various bridal embodiment. For real, played it for real.

[7:31] Andrew Erdman: For real, absolutely. Church groups put them on, so this is nothing that's done to make fun of gender in an obvious way. So, just to clarify, as a fundraiser, I'm presuming most of the time. I'm making the quote sign, exactly. You would buy a ticket to go to a wedding that would be then staged like a full wedding ceremony, except all of the participants that you're watching are men playing the roles in the wedding ceremony. Yes, and I have to imagine there might be a little extra room for some entertainment at the wedding. They probably padded it out with something else, but yeah. Once you put people on stage, it's very hard to keep it at bay, but yes, that's exactly right, David. So, you're the psychologist. What is the psychology behind this? What's happening here?

[8:10] Andrew Erdman: It's a great question, and it's something that I'd like to explore and think about more, but there's something, I think, liberating. If you have a society in which people are a little more relaxed about sex and gender because things feel a little more positive, and maybe there's more economic abundance, and there's this feeling of things are going up, things are getting better, people begin to explore deeper curiosities and the excitement that comes along with it. And just like people today are really into live-action role-playing and cosplaying, I think it was that version of it that it's really fun to explore being a bride if you're a man. If people are encouraging you to being a bride, being the bride's mother, these roles that are so other, well, what's the best way to sort of get to know it?

But like, get in the skin, get in the dress, get in the role, and there's just a fundamental pleasure of like being freed from all the constraints that are always on you when you're going about your daily life.

[9:28] David Armstrong: So fascinating. That's another book, but I was happy you included those elements in this book.

[9:32] Andrew Erdman: Yeah, it's a big rabbit hole. I hope some graduate student out there writes a dissertation on it. That would be a great starting place. There's actually a Twitter handle, I don't know what you call it, somebody who's done its photos. They're actually doing tremendous amount of research on college productions, all-male college productions that included female impersonation.

[9:50] David Armstrong: Is that Fluffy Ruffles?

[9:53] Andrew Erdman: No, this is a different one.

[9:55] Andrew Erdman: Well, what's fascinating is from the audience's point of view, the observer's point of view, this ritual culminates in two men being married to one another. Absolutely. Is what's actually happening, and they're delighting in this. Yeah, and if you want to look at it psychoanalytically, it's the playing out of an unconscious or a repressed fantasy, which says this can't happen, this shouldn't happen, but why can't men love each other? And who's to say how love is meant to be? And it sort of presages what eventually becomes political, et cetera, et cetera, but yeah.

[9:55] David Armstrong: Oh, it's a different one. Okay.

[9:58] Andrew Erdman: I'll have to look up Fluffy Ruffles. I can't remember what this one is called.

[10:02] David Armstrong: Yeah, and it creates a great space for digging some of this up and sharing it. It's almost perfect, the social media space.

[10:05] Andrew Erdman: Yeah, because they can find these photos in newspaper archives and things like that. These were reported on. This was the social news of the day, was what the college boys were up to with their latest productions. And related to that, these were points of pride. Much as at Ohio State, the football team is a point of pride. At the University of Wisconsin, the Hairsfoot Club was one of the earliest and most successful original cross-dressed musical clubs. And they were part of the College Musical League. And they did often perform off campus. They do tours during the holidays. Also, the University of Michigan, the Michigan Mimes, these Big Ten schools are great at these cross-dressed musicals. They've maintained very good and searchable visual archives. Other schools, it's interesting, Harvard, not as much. Some other places, not as much, but the Big Ten schools, yeah.

[11:04] David Armstrong: Well, I myself was hired to choreograph the Princeton Triangle show in the early 1980s.

[11:10] Andrew Erdman: Oh, wow. Okay.

[11:15] David Armstrong: And it was the first and perhaps the only year they did a book musical, which was based on a Booth Tarkington story. He had gone to Princeton. But even within that book musical, they made sure to have the drag performance set at Princeton in the period of the time with a big Chorus Girl number, basically. And there was a lot of pressure to make sure that was the highlight of the show.

[11:18] Andrew Erdman: That's a point of pride, you're saying. Totally.

[11:18] Andrew L. Erdman: This had to be the highlight of the show because that's what the Triangle Club does. Even though the show was co-ed by then, that number was not co-ed. That was all the boys in drag. Well, there's such a strong element among both the semi-amateur drag musical clubs, the college clubs of like, no girls, girls out. We want to put on dresses, stay away. Women are an encroachment, you know. Bringing it back to Julian Eltinge, that number was an 1890s bathing beauty number, was the costuming for it. So it was very much in his tradition, whether we knew it or not. He makes the third movie, The Widow's Might. Correct. The Widow's Might, again, one more of these movies that's been lost, but does follow the same basic.

I think in that one, it's like set in the Southwest, you know, and he's the sort of guy who has to fight off the banditos and save the girl who he's had this crush on. I may be confusing that with one of the other ones, but I think that's right. And it brings us to another rabbit hole you explore a little bit in the book, which is the popularity of a widow as a character in movies and plays and drama during this period. Why is a widow so prominent? We don't have that today. We see very few stories about a widow, certainly not in the title as sort of the main hook of a story. What's going on there?

[12:30] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah, it's kind of fascinating that these widow characters recur in literature and in theater, and I think it has to do with a few things. One is I think they were just a lot more common because I think people died younger, men died younger, women were living a little longer. Between public health and the danger of the workplace, there were a lot more women. It's almost as if, the way I see it, as if they'd sort of graduated from marriage. They'd done their time and they were still young, so they kind of had a cultural get-out-of-jail-free card to be flirty, seductive, maybe be with different men. There was this idea like never trust a widow, and that may be in fact one of the songs or one of the routines from Julian Eltinge's career.

But there's also great fascination with the widow, and she shows up in different iterations and different stories and plays as this kind of, I don't know, youthful, mysterious, a little bit more openly sexual. She doesn't have to be a wife, she doesn't have to be a mother. She's not a virgin.

[13:21] Andrew L. Erdman: She's not a virgin, exactly. We assume she's not a virgin. Exactly, exactly, and she's able to kind of get inside, to sort of infiltrate as such. She's in a Pinkerton true crime, quote-unquote true crime story, and she shows up a lot as this widow character. Even The Merry Widow is one of the most popular shows of the same period on Broadway and internationally around the world. Absolutely. I think if you were to do a search of titles of operettas, movies, plays, musicals, short stories with the word widow in it, you'd find a huge number at the time.

[13:52] David Armstrong: Don't go away. Andrew and I will be back with more Broadway Nation right after this quick break.

[14:03] 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 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. 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.

[15:21] Andrew L. Erdman: Parallel to the way he becomes a little bit disenchanted with the theater, he now becomes disenchanted with the movies and goes back to the stage. Yeah, and he's helped along by some events that are a little bit out of his control. In 1918, he starts doing a lot of propaganda work with the U.S. government and the U.S. military to sell war bonds, to support the Red Cross, to support our soldiers. In one publicity stunt, he and a famous boxer beat the hell out of a dummy of the Kaiser. You know, there's all this sort of American jingoism and defeat the Kaiser. So he makes a movie called Over the Rhine, and I guess Over the Rhine is released in 1918. I think he plays a pilot who's able to, through his cross-dressing, get German secrets and help win the war effort.

But what happens is World War I ends somewhat unexpectedly in November of 1918. A lot of people didn't realize it was going to end so quickly. And there's all of a sudden a great dislike for anything having to do with the war. So the movie is shelved. People just don't want to see a movie about the war now that the war is over. And they're also starting to realize that the war was about nothing. And I think sort of the whole Western world has some form of PTSD and, like, just wants to get drunk and forget about it, for better or worse. His war movie is pulled. It's recut then to be a non-war movie. I'm forgetting the name of the filmmaker, but he put a lot of his own money into it. The filmmaker, I talk about this in the book, the filmmaker pulls it and recuts it to be called An Adventurous.

Then, I don't know if it's ever released theatrically. There's still some problems with it. But what happens also at this time is Rudolph Valentino, who was a young, unknown actor, all of a sudden becomes this huge popular sex symbol.

[17:01] Andrew L. Erdman: So then, like a lot of movies at the time, they recut it to make it a Rudolph Valentino movie. Because he was in that movie. Before he's famous, he makes that movie. Yeah, he's like a tape player. And now they recut the movie to focus on him because they have footage of him that is worth millions of dollars now because he's in a movie. Yeah, exactly. So first, it's recut to be a non-war movie, but sort of it generally, like, feel good. We defeated the bad guys. And then it's recut to be a Rudolph Valentino sex symbol project where Julian Elting ends up as this kind of sideline kind of character. It's not a Julian Elting movie at all anymore. It creates a real break, B-R-A-K-E, in his movie career.

And I think he's a little bitter about it. As we were saying, he's getting a little tired of doing the same thing. Does that movie exist? Not that I can tell. Because it's sort of mystifying to figure out how they could find enough footage of Rudolph Valentino to turn it into a movie focused on him. But they did. It's just hard to understand. I'm forgetting the name of the filmmaker, but he just kept re-editing and recutting and was probably a genius with knowing how to recut things to suit the purpose. But yeah, we don't know where that is today. So yes, anyway, to go back to your original question. So he pivots back to vaudeville and he's welcomed. And by now, vaudeville is starting to recede.

It's not as popular as movies, but there still are big time vaudeville chains, the Keith Albee chain and the Orpheum chain. Some of them have come together. There's a lot of consolidation in the industry. He's able to get some major appearances at the Palace in New York and at other places. And sometimes he'll do some vaudeville and then they'll show one of his movies. Basically, he's sort of having to decide. Part of him then says, no, I'm going back to the screen. They're going to get another great picture for me, as a lot of stars say. But then, no, now I'm all for vaudeville. And he keeps going back and forth.

[18:43] Andrew L. Erdman: And it's the beginning of his beginning to descend from being able to do what he's been so famous for. And other people are kind of hot on his heels now. I think 1923 is considered the height of female impersonation in vaudeville. Often you will see more than one impersonator on the same bill. America is rife with female impersonators on vaudeville and in musical comedy. Largely because of Julian Elting. Totally. Yeah. He's now kind of a trailing indicator of the very industry that he's created. And his interests also start to shift. And he wants to create this artist's spa retreat and artist's colony in Southern California. And he begins to devote a lot of time and attention toward creating that. And yet you also mentioned that it's still very lucrative. You say he may have received the largest salary ever paid to a single male act in vaudeville.

[19:24] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah. Again, these numbers are hard to get precisely. And you never know if they're being embellished in the press. But yeah, he has a lot of money coming in. And he's getting certainly between $2,500 and $3,500 a week to play these dates. Now, he's not booking 40-week runs in the high days of vaudeville when star players used to sign on. But he's getting paid nicely. And he starts to also put together reviews, which are starting to become popular, that can play in cabarets, dinner clubs, speakeasies, smaller venues. He's sort of like, why don't I create my own self-contained vaudeville show where I'm the star, but I'm also the producer. He has shows like the Black and White Review, Fads and Fancies of the Fair Sex, Temptations.

That's getting into the 30s. Bear in mind that sort of dinner club, cabaret, speakeasy life, that's also rising in the 20s. You know what he does? That's a venue for it. Vaudeville sort of expands into these speakeasies and cabarets as alternate ways to tour your act to a certain extent.

[20:26] Andrew L. Erdman: Yeah, exactly. As the big vaudeville chains start to decline and as the speakeasy cabaret nightclub culture starts to rise, it just makes sense for the performers, like any performers, to go like, all right, how do I take what I was doing? It's like today, how do I take what I was doing in movies and do it online now? Circling back to the idea that there's more female impersonators than ever at this time. Also, what's happening at this time is that the association of female impersonation with queer identity is starting to become much more prominent than before.

[21:05] Andrew L. Erdman: That's right. And also, queer identity, homosexuality, gender, so-called inversion, is starting to be more closely associated with this nightclub culture, this very urban nightclub culture, both onstage and sort of offstage. Yeah, so initially, there's a sort of openness and welcomingness to it. There's a lot of play going on. Men are putting on womanless weddings. And yeah, you can see great talented drag performers in the nightclubs. And of course, as with every opening, there starts to be the beginnings of a reactionary panic to it, which we'll see later. Part of what I think causes that reactionary panic, and maybe because of this heightened freedom, is performers like Burt Savoy start to be more openly gay, basically, as part of their performance in a way that Julian Elting never would, and this will then create some problems for him.

[22:11] Andrew L. Erdman: Absolutely. Absolutely. A lot of the people who are the Julian Elting rivals at this point, even he's kind of mentored some of them, are a little less concerned with how they are being perceived. They're a little more openly genderqueer or gay or flouting of masculinity. Carol Norman. There's a number of other ones. Jay Brennan. Yeah, you start to let people have a little more freedom. It becomes a little more obvious what's going on. And then there starts to be fears about it in response. So this backlash that happens, we're not quite to the full backlash yet, but it's coming. How do you see that related? Obviously, we're in a time of backlash right now.

[22:16] Andrew L. Erdman: Yes, very much so. I start to detect the first real scent of reactionism in the later 20s with response to some of the crackdown on Mae West's plays, which are about sex and eventually about gay drag subculture and what's going on in the dressing room and sort of these pansy crazed men.

[22:37] Andrew L. Erdman: Queens, and sexuality in general, and sex workers, as being associated with this speakeasy nightclub urban backstage culture. And Julian Eltinge's name, of course, because he's so associated with this, gets bandied about. Not that he wants anything to do with it. Yeah, it's so interesting, because the Pansy craze does start to emerge. It trickles in, but its heyday is the late 1920s and early 1930s, like 29 to 32 or something, and there is sort of the height of it. He's still performing during this. He must have a strong need to distance himself from it, although he's benefiting from it as well. Absolutely. And it's where you start to see him really kind of like rendered apart. He kind of has to choose, and he chooses something that becomes, in a way, untenable.

This is where he's sometimes seen as a betrayer of the cause. He starts to sound like a libertarian. He's like, taxes are too high in California. I'm moving to Arizona. Why are people forming labor unions? So labor and socialism is also associated with so-called inversionism and genderqueerness. So he starts leaning in that direction. He really distances himself from the profession, but at the same time, he's performing in it, and he has friends and associates in it. The work is also starting to dry up, in part because of the Depression, and also because vaudeville has basically fallen apart by the 30s. And the final decade or so of his life is a bit sad. I think you write, the die had been cast for what remained of his career.

Elting wasn't quite right for Hollywood or Broadway. He was an aging oddity and increasingly a denizen of nightclub culture that would continue to fall under social scrutiny. Yeah, exactly. So he's having to kind of make what money he can. He still has a hope that somehow this failing artist's retreat called the Rancho Sierra Vista outside of San Diego is somehow going to take off, but it's clear that it's not. So he keeps performing in these nightclubs and cabarets, a spot here, a spot there. We're talking places like Yuma, Arizona and Laredo, Texas. He's not playing the palace anymore, and he's trying to put together enough money to support himself and his mother and still invest in this ranch retreat.

But there's just fewer and fewer opportunities. His health is starting to fail. There's a notable misogyny in his comments about women, about the way American women dress. He's trying to side, at least outwardly, with the more conservative forces. He can't fully do it because he's a female impersonator and he's an actor, you know. And he's also out of fashion to a certain extent. We've now moved into a modern world that he is having trouble. You call him a legacy performer, which I think is an interesting use of a very modern phrase. He becomes a nostalgic act as opposed to somebody on the cutting edge. Very much. He very much becomes a nostalgic act. And I think the last time that we talked, I mentioned that he appears briefly as himself in the 1940 movie, If I Had My Way.

He's with a bunch of old vaudeville sort of has-beens, Trixie Ferganza, Grace LaRue, very talented people. And it's like he's talking about a museum exhibit of himself. It just feels like a bygone age. They're almost like wax museum figures, he and the other vaudeville stars. They really are. They really are. And I think when he's doing his onstage routines, because he's lost some of his vitality, he's sort of trotted out as like a museum kind of exhibit. There's even one famous instance in which he is forced to go on stage in man's clothing and point at a rack of costumes that he used to wear because there are these anti-drag laws in Los Angeles. It really is a kind of ridiculous commentary on the age.

But yeah, he's a museum-esque figure at this point. He has a little bit of a final act back in New York, back adjacent to Broadway in the Billy Rose nightclub. Talk a little bit about that, which is just months before his death, isn't it? Yeah. In 1940, fall of 1940, Billy Rose has a popular nightclub called the Diamond Horseshoe. He invites Julian Elting for a string of shows from the fall into the late winter of 1941. So Julian Elting ends up relocating to New York. I think he had never really hoped to do that, but he's living on West 57th Street. He does the run of shows. He's on stage for about 10, 15 minutes each night doing some legacy version of his old self. The Diamond Horseshoe was a big deal in its day, and the idea behind it was a very nostalgic venue that sort of hearkened back to the 1890s and things.

And I think because he was smart, Billy Rose, like many people in show business have done over the years, you find older stars who are really cheap now, and you package them together, and you can create something that is very dynamic, which is what I think the Diamond Horseshoe was doing. It's almost like a lesser Vegas venue. You know, you take people who are sort of off there, maybe older audiences who really want to see Earth, Wind & Fire or something, and you get them to play it, you know? Yeah, totally. It's an oldie show, basically. Yeah. So many people never have that opportunity to have even a minor comeback, and at least he was clearly still famous enough that there was some juice there to attract people who wanted to come and see him.

Absolutely. And the review was called Nights of Gladness, and by all accounts, he did great. He might have been in a lot of pain and discomfort, but he did it. He hoofed it like a trooper, which he always had been, and he plays the full run. It would be interesting to know what he had in mind at that point in his career. Does he just sort of go to the old actor's home? What's he going to do? Maybe part of what he's thinking is, the age that I created is done, and I'm kind of done, and this is kind of done, and this is a good note to go out on. By all accounts, Nights of Gladness was a success. And then in March of 1941, he takes ill, takes further ill, I should say, and he dies somewhat suddenly at the age of 59, just short of his 60th birthday in Manhattan.

Both comes as a surprise and not as a surprise. There's some hint that perhaps he committed suicide. We'll never really know. So what is the legacy of Julian Elting? Why are we still talking about him more than 100 years later? Yeah, I think for a while, he and cross-dress performers across the spectrum, as well as the whole amateur widespread acceptance of it, goes down below the radar in the more conservative 40s, 50s, early 60s. And I don't think a lot of people other than queer historians and theater historians really know who he is, but he starts to get rediscovered in the post-Stonewall era as perhaps an early drag icon. Maybe he is. The very fact that he existed seems to be an important statement.

But then as we get into a more nuanced age of queer history and historiography, he starts to be questioned because was he really one of us? Was he an ally? Was he a betrayer? He's always held fascination for people in the theatrical world and in or adjacent to the queer world and the queer worldview as a fascinating figure who was so popular. And as we experience more and more gender anxiety and it becomes more and more, on the one hand, public, popular in social media, on television and in film, and at the same time reactionism against it, it seems like his story has this beautifully resonant quality to it. In a way, you could look at the 1920s like the 1990s. There's an openness. Things are going to be good.

Things are great. Everybody can be themselves. And then the 1930s, 40s, 50s as some version of what we're experiencing now, this gender authoritarianism. I think you're absolutely right. And I know with my students, they're very surprised to hear that there was a time before now when there was these periods of openness that were quite widespread and liberated. There were periods of openness and also periods of like relaxedness. Okay, maybe not everybody was celebrating, you know, men in dresses, but it wasn't such a thing, right? It was just one more thing in the world of things. Absolutely. And then that they're followed by these periods of repression and reaction. I do think the world has gotten progressively more liberal over the century, but it definitely goes up and down.

Yeah, you know, Masha Gessen talks about their social critic and social theorist, the way in which gender just becomes one of those go-tos when bigger cultural and economic systems are falling apart. And rather than address that, you go and you clamp down on gender, you clamp down on nationality, all the usual things. Ethnicity certainly could be seen happening in Julian Elting's day, certainly can be seen happening now, but that's where the anxieties go to perennially. And from your personal point of view, how well did you get to know Julian Elting? What was he like? He's elusive. How close could you get to his personality? Yeah, it's a good question. And I think the paradoxical answer is, I feel like I got close to somebody whose one of his main traits was his illusoriness.

That there's almost a, I wonder what's going on in that guy's head, and maybe I'm wondering about it more than he's wondering about it. Now, this is highly speculative because I never met him. For a person so committed to various kinds of illusionism, in a way, that's what I took away. It felt so important to him, and perhaps from a very early age, to be great at being whatever he was needed to be. And that became the driving way that he might've thought about himself. And that's what I come away with. Julian, what's going on in there? That's sort of the resonant question about his personality, as it were. One of his last stage performances was in a show called The Illusive Lady, so what could be more appropriate?

Andrew Erdman, it's been fantastic to have you on Broadway Nation to talk about Beautiful, the story of Julian Elting, America's greatest female impersonator. It's been my pleasure to be here. Thanks so much, David.

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[33:53] Thank you.