In this section: Intro Vaudeville and Music Hall The First Stars The Challenge of the Air The Picture Palace |
4 Rolling Shows, Great Stars
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By the 1830's some thirty rolling shows were regularly touring the country. Buckley and Wick had eight wagons, forty horses, thirty-five performers, and a tent holding eight hundred people. Soon the Zoölogical Institute advertised forty-seven carriages and wagons, one hundred and twenty matched gray horses, fourteen musicians, and sixty performers. The parade had by now been introduced; the performers came to town to the blare of a brass band. Still it was not the real circus. There was no ring; there were no riding acts.
The Mammoth Circus of Howe and Mabie -- "Greatest Establishment of its Kind in the World" -- ventured as far west as Chicago in the 1850's, and there faced the unexpected competition of the Grand Olympic Arena and United States Circus. Van Amburg and Company's Menagerie-still advertising itself as "the only moral and instructive exhibition in America" -- carried east and west its African ostriches nine feet high, its polar bears, and Hannibal, the world's largest elephant. Dan Rice, King of American Clowns, was earning $1,000 a week with his acrobatic nonsense; the famous Herr Driesbach was nonchalantly having his supper "at a table set in the den of his animals." Finally, in 1856, the Spaulding and Roger's Circus announced it would travel by railroad, nine special cars: "team horses and wagons won't do in this age of steam."
Nothing could have been more democratic than the circus. Traveling what was still pioneer country, Edmund Flagg found the little village of Carkinsville, Illinois, "absolutely reeling under the excitement of the 'Grand Menagerie.' From all points of the compass men, women and children, emerging from the forest, came pouring into the place, some upon horses, some in farm wagons, and troops of others on foot." 28 Seeing a performance at Newport, Belle Brittan wrote: "Everybody went -- all classes, ages, colors and conditions. There were as many as five thousand people there, all mixed up with the most democratic indiscrimination -- Fifth Avenue belles sitting on narrow boards with their dresses under their arms, alongside of Irish chambermaids and colored persons of all sizes and sexes."
Barnum now entered the circus field. It was not yet the Greatest Show on Earth, only a Grand Colossal Museum and Menagerie, but nothing in the 1850's could rival it. General Tom Thumb was a first drawing-card; there was choice of all the freaks and curiosities of the American Museum, and a menagerie drawn from the four quarters of the earth. Barnum had chartered a ship, sent abroad for his own animals. It was an epochal day in circus history when his ten elephants, fresh from Ceylon, paraded up Broadway harnessed in pairs to a gilded chariot and amid the cheers of an immense crowd were reviewed by Jenny Lind from the balcony of tfie Irving House. From the early 1910s, going to the movies became an event in itself. As Adolph Zukor explained, middle-class audiences demanded better facilities: "The nickelodeon had to go, theaters replaced shooting galleries, temples replaced theaters, and cathedrals replaced temples". By 1925, the United States had nearly a thousand picture palaces.
The cathedrals of the movies were to be found in the business and shopping centers of large cities. Their elaborate exteriors, featuring exotic motifs from ancient, oriental or European culture, were massive outdoor advertising displays.
At night they were lit by multicolored electric signs, sometimes three storeys high. Inside, the foyers were large enough to hold the audience waiting for the next show. There might even be a small orchestra playing to keep them entertained. The two-hour show included a live orchestral overture and stage show, a comedy short and newsreels as well as the feature film.
Miss Rhodes entered films with the Kalem Company in 1913 as a dramatic actress. She was spotted singing in a nightclub by Al Christie, who, in 1915, put her under longterm contract. In a 1920 pamphlet on The Elements of Screen Comedy, Christie explained the philosophy of the structuring of his one-reel comedies, a philosophy which was responsible for the success of many of the Billie Rhodes comedies: "While there may be a little exaggeration and a little stretching of plausibility, the situations and incidents must in a general way be of the sort that might happen in real life to real persons." After leaving Christie in the late 'teens, Billie Rhodes appeared in a number of comedy shorts for other producers, together with a half-dozen or so secondrate features. She retired from the screen in 1924, and presently lives in Los Angeles.
Despite their grandeur, the American picture palaces were insistently egalitarian, places where the architectural and decorative styles of the wealthiest estates and hotels were made available to all. "Movies", declared William Fox, ''breathe the spirit in which the country was founded, freedom and equality. In the motion picture theaters there are no separations of classes ... the rich rub elbows with the poor and that's the way it should be. The motion picture is a distinctly American institution." Indeed, the picture palace was perhaps the only legitimate arena in which the classes and sexes mingled.
Dorothy Devore became Christie's most popular star in the early Twenties, until she left to go under contract to Warner Bros.; she had made her feature debut in Charles Ray 's Forty-Five Minutes from Broadway in 1920. In 1924, she appeared in Hold Your Breath, a feminist version of Harold Lloyd's Safety Last, and I have often wondered if Lloyd was perpetrating a small, private joke by naming the department store in the latter film, De Vore.
Fay Tincher began her screen career as a dramatic actress in 1914, with D. W. Griffith's The Battle of the Sexes, but soon progressed to comedies and became one of the Triangle Company's most popular comediennes in the midteens. She was famous for her black-and-white checkered costumes, which she wore because she considered herself too ordinary-looking, and as Griffith had pointed out, "She's just a plain black-and-white type, always photographs just as you see her, requires nothing but straight photography and is never guilty of producing strange effects on the screen. Actually, Fay Tincher was a fairly attractive woman, who might easily have starred in dramatic features. Miss Tincher came to Al Christie in 1919 to be his first star of two-reel comedies, with titles such as Dangerous Nan McGrew, Go West Young Woman and Rowdy Ann. Of the last, The Moving Picture World ( June 7, 1919) wrote, "There isn't a dull moment in all its wild burlesque which develops from the fact that Fay Tincher is a wild Western Damsel, whom father sends to a fashionable Eastern seminary with a note saying, 'Inclosed find $1,000 and my daughter. Keep the $1,000, and return my daughter a lady.'" A fair indication of the subject matter of these comedies.
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