The timeline for Gertrude Wilkins – Josephine Howard’s real name – is riddled with frustrating lacunae. She returned from Europe to New York with her new husband Jack Jarrott in the autumn of 1913, but then sometime in early 1914 was back in England, why and exactly when is unclear. Maybe it was to tie up loose ends, maybe she had some commitments, but when she returned to New York on the RMS Olympic in March, she was using the name Josephine Gertrude Howard and put London as her permanent residence; tellingly, she gave her mother’s address in Jersey City as her destination, rather than an apartment in New York she might have been sharing with her husband.[1] Jack meanwhile had just been hired by leading exhibition ballroom dancer Joan Sawyer to partner her at the Persian Garden, the chic establishment set up on the third floor of the Palais de Danse (part of the Winter Garden theatre) at Broadway and 50^th Street. Conceived as a rival to Irene and Vernon Castle’s new dancing palaces Castle House and the Sans Souci, both launched in December 1913, the Persian Garden became an instant success, with Sawyer and Jarrott’s photographs popping up in newspapers and magazines throughout the country.

BESSIE JOSEPHINE MORRISON BECOMES JOAN SAWYER

Of all the people in Jarrott’s life, Sawyer (1880-1966) is the one whose name turns up most frequently, largely because she hired Rudolph Valentino (billed as “Signor Rudolph”) in 1916 as one of her many dance partners. Histories of their professional collaboration invariably devote most space recounting how he named her as co-respondent in the divorce proceedings between Bianca Errázuriz and John de Saulles, yet this was hardly Sawyer’s first – or last – time being named in relationship lawsuits. I’ve uncovered new information that brings into even sharper relief Sawyer’s deliciously transgressive attitudes towards the sexual mores of the day, which is why I’m making a detour here to fill in her story. While her important role in the dance craze of the early to mid-teens is well-known, no one seems to have processed how her strong-minded, sexually unconventional conduct whittles away the unsustainable dividing line between pre- and post-World War I female behavior.

Howard Rye and Tim Brooks, first in their Storyville series and then in Brooks’ fundamental 2004 volume Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 are the only scholars to delve into Sawyer’s early years, yet the information is incomplete.[2] Born Bessie Josephine Morrison in Cincinnati in 1880, she was sent as a child to El Paso to live with another family but at some point returned to Ohio; details are murky though it’s safe to say her childhood was unstable. The trail of documents begins in October 1902 with her marriage to Alvah Hayden Sawyer, a travelling salesman.[3] The relationship, rocky from the start, rapidly disintegrated once they moved to the Inside Inn, an enormous hotel on the grounds of the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition (the World’s Fair of Meet Me in St. Louis). Alvah got a job as the hotel’s private detective, which is ironic given that his wife began staying out very late with officers from the Philippine Constabulary based in the city, as well as an unnamed West Point cadet. Bessie didn’t hide her infidelity very well – Alvah intercepted a note and even punched one of the Filipino officers in the face – but maybe it didn’t really matter since clearly she was through with this marriage, even if she did keep his surname for the rest of her life. In reporting Alvah’s filing for divorce, some newspapers played up the interracial angle as a way of further condemning his wife’s behaviour; they also reported that in July 1904, against her husband’s wishes, she joined the chorus of Bolossy Kiralfy’s World’s Fair musical pageant, the Louisiana Purchase Spectacle – her first theatrical appearance. By the time the divorce was finalized in December 1905, Bessie had assumed the name Joan Sawyer and was in Chicago, “studying for the stage.”[4]

While it’s hard to ascribe character traits when lengthy personal accounts are lacking, I think I’m safe in saying she wasn’t anyone’s best friend. In August 1906 she testified against her fellow chorine Lola Montez Walker (yes, the Walkers of Beardstown, Illinois really named their daughter Lola Montez) in her breach of promise suit, and while Walker would deny on the stand knowing Sawyer, that seems unlikely given they were both in Kiralfy’s show as well as George Sidney’s Busy Izzy (aka Bizzy Izzy) touring company.[5] Perhaps Walker’s suit that summer inspired Joan two years later to file her own claim for a whopping $100,000 against millionaire playboy Byron D. Chandler, who she asserted had promised to marry her before she knew he already had a wife. Sawyer’s desire for compensation proved stronger than any concern about her reputation: she testified that they’d lived as husband and wife in Boston and she had several accounts in major department stores under his name. Three months after bringing the case to court, and without the knowledge of her lawyer, Joan dropped the charges; decades later it was alleged she’d privately wrangled a settlement out of Chandler for $23,765 (equivalent to nearly $706,000 today), an odd sum so precise I’m inclined to think the figure could be genuine.[6]

Sawyer wasn’t famous enough for the negative publicity to hurt her career, which in truth hadn’t taken her much further than some touring companies and a small role in the 1908 Broadway production of The Merry-Go-Round. Apart from a nationwide advertising campaign promoting Parisian Sage Hair Tonic, it’s unclear what she was doing between 1909 and early 1912 – perhaps living off her Chandler settlement. She must also have been perfecting her dance moves, because in February 1912 she stepped in to partner Maurice Mouvet, the most famous exhibition dancer of the period, when his associate Madeleine d’Harville suddenly ran off with Miles Mander’s younger brother Alan. Though their collaboration at Louis Martin’s restaurant was very brief, Mouvet’s cachet offered the break she needed, and later that year she and Lew Quinn were dancing for society’s grandest names in the fashionable summer resort of Narragansett.[7]

Following that gig, Sawyer became the dance instructor for New York’s elite, first at Reisenweber’s and then at the newly instituted Jardin de Danse on the roof of the New York Theatre, earning her the nickname “the dancing pet of the 400.”[8] That fall of 1913 was particularly busy: in addition to daytime dance classes for the ladies who lunch and nightly shows for New York’s sophisticates, she and Wallace McCutcheon made a three-reel dance instruction film for Kalem, Motion Picture Dancing Lessons, released October 29^th, in which they taught viewers how to do the tango, the Turkey Trot, and the Hesitation Waltz. By all accounts it was an innovative film that showed McCutcheon and Sawyer practicing their steps in a studio, with cutaways to just their legs and feet, followed by scenes in a New York cabaret of the instructors and the public performing the dances (the Kalem Kalendar and Moving Picture World give conflicting reports on the order of scenes).[9] Sadly, the film is believed lost.

JEANNETTE LEONARD GILDER

Arthur Williams, “Two Feminists, And Dance Managers,” Vanity Fair, August 1914, p. 45

I’m very much aware of the pitfalls inherent in hypothesizing about sexual behaviour when direct evidence is lacking – if you’re not in their bedroom yourself, how can you know? – but I’m equally tired of commentators denying sexual activity simply because there’s no concrete proof. So I’m going to go out on a reasonably sturdy limb here and state that Sawyer was bisexual.  I say this not just because the clearly besotted literary critic Jeannette L. Gilder suddenly became her manager in January 1914 and set her up in the Persian Garden, but this combined with a 1929 lawsuit in which Sawyer was sued for the alienation of a businessman’s wife’s affections make the signs too obvious to ignore. Gilder (1849-1916) was a fascinating figure, an important voice in the intellectual life of the U.S., and today almost completely forgotten apart from her anti-suffragist stance. Yet she was a literary magazine editor, critic, well-respected author (including The Autobiography of a Tom-boy) and friend to Mark Twain and Walt Whitman. Her carefully cultivated mannish exterior positively screams “queer icon,” so why has she been largely ignored? 

Far more attention has been paid to her friend the literary and theatrical agent Elisabeth Marbury, perhaps because her relationship with Elsie de Wolfe has been extensively discussed in subsequent decades and embraced in LGBTQ histories. I’ve not seen it conjectured, but I do wonder whether Marbury and Gilder were lovers at one time – although the former was in a relationship with de Wolfe by the late 1880s, her friendship with Gilder appears to have been intimate (I’m consciously shielding myself within that word’s ambiguity). This hardly constitutes proof, but it’s impossible not to read between the lines of this 1902 article: “Miss Gilder, whose appearance is most peculiar, as she is very masculine and dresses to accentuate it, is a bosom friend of Miss Marbury, and they take their yearly vacation together.”[10] I find it odd that Marbury doesn’t mention her “bosom friend” in her 1923 autobiography, My Crystal Ball: Reminiscences, which leads me to wonder whether they might have had a falling out, perhaps around the time that Gilder took on the role of theatrical agent to Joan Sawyer, in direct competition with Marbury’s professional sponsorship of Irene and Vernon Castle. I hasten to add this is pure speculation.

Gilder saw Sawyer dancing at the Jardin de Danse sometime in late 1913 and was smitten: “The moment I observed her beauty and wonderful charm as exemplified in her dancing I was thrilled and amazed. I made her acquaintance that evening and told her that I thought her dancing was a revelation. This little talk led to many visits.”[11] Can’t you picture it? A suited Gilder seated at her table in rapt attention, jauntily shooting her cuffs and beckoning Sawyer over, working all her charms on the outwardly graceful but inwardly calculating dancer thirty years her junior. By Gilder’s telling, she went to Lee Shubert, reminding him that she was the one who introduced him to Nazimova, Julia Marlowe and E.H. Sothern, all major stars; now he could have a new one in this rising terpsichorean (in Gavin Lambert’s Nazimova biography, he claims it was Gilder’s brother Richard Watson Gilder who introduced the Shuberts to Nazimova[12]; I hope to sort this out once the Shubert Archives re-open). The result was that Shubert leased the third-floor cabaret space in the Winter Garden to Sawyer, and Gilder took over management of her career from William Morris. In October 1913, Sawyer and McCutcheon were earning $450 a week; in December she was reportedly offered $1,200[13] – a testimony not only to her fast-rising popularity, but to the dance craze in general, ruled by the Castles but with Sawyer close at their heels. Marbury had installed her charges at Castle House and Sans Souci, so now it was time for Gilder to gild her protégée in the Persian Garden, with Jack Jarrott as her partner.

SAWYER AND JARROTT

Joan Sawyer, “The Maxixe. A Slide, a Swing and a Throw away,” Harper’s Bazar, December 1914, pp. 14-15

Sawyer was 34 when she really made it big, rather old for a dancer even if she admitted to being younger by nine, sometimes ten years. Jarrott was around 27 and from what we can glean from newspapers he was quite a different kind of dancer, immersed in ragtime and buck-and-wing rather than Sawyer’s preferred waltz and minuet. She’d capitalized on being society’s pet by maintaining an aristocratic, “exquisitely refined” manner in public, never allowing “the least suggestion of the sensual to enter into any of her dances,” but that could get old pretty quickly, and not everyone appreciated the studied elegance: “Miss Sawyer still holds the medal for iciness and frigidity, and when she happens to permit a smile to illumine her classic features, the whole house gasps. Possibly it’s an accident, but more accidents of a like nature would improve the turn.”[14] Fortunately, Joan was adaptable in public as well as private life, and Jack gave her exactly what she needed: energy, and probably a bit of sass. They still performed the expected society dances, but they mixed it up with more original numbers, like Jack’s “Congo Tango,” and the innovation shot them to the top; just a few weeks into their partnership, they were offered $1,000 a week at the Palace, the mecca of vaudeville theatres.

Several critics noted that Joan had finally loosened up with Jack: “Miss Sawyer is…dancing better with Mr. Jarrott than any other of her several floor partners in the past. Always rather a marbleized dancer, Miss Sawyer now displays evidence of amiability, often smiling while stepping with Mr. Jarrott, who is a trotter by nature and profession, not having been plunged into it through accidental discovery.”[15] I like to think there were two reasons why Joan was becoming a better, less rigid dancer: one was Jack, and the other was the African-American band that played for them. The Persian Garden wasn’t the first place where Sawyer worked with black musicians: we know she and Lew Quinn were backed by black musicians in the summer of 1913 at Narragansett (quite possibly J. Tim Brymn and members of James Reese Europe’s Clef Club orchestra, who were performing in nearby Newport), and it’s likely she appeared with James Escort Lightfoot’s Gardenia Quintette when dancing at Reisenweber’s Restaurant a bit later that year.[16] This means Sawyer was working with African-American musicians before Vernon Castle hired Jim Europe’s band in late 1913. However, this muddles my desire to attribute her collaborations with black bands to Jarrott, who’d performed with African-American musicians back in his Chicago days. Despite this, I do think it’s possible that the reason she hired Dan Kildare, then president of the Clef Club, to form Joan Sawyer’s Persian Garden Orchestra, was both because she and Gilder wanted to rival the Castles, and because Jack had some sway in the decision-making.

The following months were a whirlwind of work accompanied by an avalanche of publicity. The professional team was making between $1,000 and $1,250 a week for their vaudeville engagements at the Palace and other major houses while also dancing at the Persian Garden. Newspapers were full of descriptions of their routines, like the “Three-In-One” featuring the “Jarrott Step,” as well as Jack’s reworkings of the tango, the Maxixe, and other popular dances. Sawyer even claimed they invented the fox trot.[17] However, a frostiness was settling into their personal relationship (never intimate), and on April 13^th he walked out on her at the Colonial Theater, agreeing to honour their vaudeville bookings but severing his ties to the Persian Garden. The reason, on top of what Variety reported as “a coldness having existed between Sawyer and Jarrott for some time,” was that Sawyer had apparently been rehearsing with another dancer – not surprising given how quickly she went through partners. It’s reasonable to hypothesize that Joan’s need to be the star at all times was threatened by Jack’s popularity (the four months they danced together was the longest she stayed with one partner and would be surpassed only by the six months with Valentino, always given much smaller billing). Tellingly, in the books published that year to cash in on the dance craze, all glowed when talking of Sawyer and her “refinement,” but Jarrott was relegated to just the photo captions.[18]

Meanwhile, Jack was having problems at home: Gertrude/Josephine claimed to have “heard things about him” when she returned from London in late March, though as I mentioned above, putting her mother’s address on the passenger manifest doesn’t exactly connote confidence in the marriage. Clearly restless, she went to visit friends in Hot Springs and on her return, “kind friends told her some more,” in the winking words of Variety’s reporter.  Jack denied whatever it was his wife accused him of doing, but the split was permanent.[19] I’ve yet to locate the divorce papers, but they were surely filed around this time.

While he and Sawyer frostily played out their remaining engagements, Gilder negotiated a movie contract for her protégée with the Shubert Film Company. It was to be Joan’s life story, written by Gilder, “from the days she danced in the chorus to the present time, when she is the manager of her own dance place. The culmination of the play will be the scene in her Persian Garden, showing her exhibition dances, together with the dances of the guests.” The mind boggles: which incidents would be covered? Her assignations with Filipino servicemen in St. Louis? Her mercenary affair with Byron Chandler and the subsequent lawsuit? Her relationship with Gilder? Sawyer went into rehearsals, but sadly the film was never made, and Gilder died in January 1916.[20]

Joan and Jack were back together professionally for a few weeks towards the end of 1915 (she insisted he receive smaller billing), and then there was talk they were teaming up in the summer of 1924, but by that time Jarrott was struggling to stay clean and Sawyer was already 44 years old; if the act really was revived, it played very briefly in only small-time houses. From reviews, it does seem that Joan was at her best with Jack – when she duplicated some of their numbers with other dancers, they didn’t go over in the same way. Maybe she just felt more comfortable with more formal dances like the waltz and minuet, though in the fall of 1914 she took lessons from the leading African-American dance master of the time, Charles Anderson, who also taught the Castles.[21]

She remained a major name for several more years, dressed by Lucile, expounding on theories of dance and colour à la Loïe Fuller,[22] and performing in chic cabarets and vaudeville houses. Restauranteur Joseph Pani (who later married Jack’s dance partner Louise Alexander) claimed that Rudolph Valentino was working for him as a busboy at the Woodmansten Inn in 1915 when Sawyer took him on as her dance partner,[23] but the year doesn’t quite fit since her professional partnership with “Signor Rudolph” didn’t begin until 1916. It was while they were dancing together in the summer of 1916, during her affair with John de Saulles, that William Fox signed Joan to star in her only feature, Love’s Law, a gypsy story directed by Tefft Johnson and released in March 1917. It was not a happy production: shortly after the shoot was finished, Fox realized they had a turkey. Johnson claimed Sawyer couldn’t act and he resigned from Fox, suing for breach of contract and damages of $2,975; the film (presumed lost) opened and closed without much notice, and the case was finally settled in Johnson’s favour in late 1918.[24]

With the dance craze fading and her professional engagements on the decline (she briefly performed in Paris at Claridge’s Hotel in late 1919[25]), Joan did what one would expect: she married a wealthy industrialist. As Mrs. George A. Rentschler she kept busy for a bit, moving between their Ohio, New York and Miami Beach homes, but then in 1929 she got hit with a $100,000 alienation of affection suit by a man named Paul Wiegand, who alleged that Sawyer made his wife Martha dissatisfied in her marriage by her “enticements, favors and seductive influence.”  Wiegand appears to have been a thoroughly noxious character, but the stories of Joan taking Martha on long trips and buying her clothes helped his case, which dragged on until the following year and must have been a major source of embarrassment for the Rentschlers.[26] Whatever the state of affairs was between Sawyer and her husband, their union somehow managed to linger on until early 1936 – maybe she just wasn’t willing to give up their yacht – when the divorce was finalized and George remarried at the end of the year (strangely none of the wedding reports even mention that he’d been married previously).

In the ensuing years her name would occasionally pop up in the news, such as in 1944 when she became the bride of J. Gerald Kiley, an adventurer, newspaperman and author who claimed to have written the dialogue for All Quiet on the Western Front (really? Wasn’t that Maxwell Anderson?) and at one time was involved in trafficking monkey glands (no, I’m not making this up). Kiley and Sawyer met years before, probably back in 1919 when she was in Paris and he was known as the “Shimmy King of Paris,” the “Fox Trot King,” and the “Roi de la Danse,” running cabarets after a stint as an ambulance driver during the War. Unsurprisingly, the marriage only lasted four months before Sawyer filed divorce papers.[27]

It’s a great shame Joan never wrote her memoirs, but even if she had, how much truth would she have allowed onto the pages? In later years, while looking at the ocean from the windows of her exclusive Miami Beach apartment, surely she must have thought: “Bessie Josephine Morrison, you’ve done damn well for yourself.” She died at the age of 86, in 1966.

In the next post, I’ll take Jack Jarrott from 1914 until his heart-rending death in 1938.

Jay

Big thanks for help with this post go to Mark Swartz and the Shubert Archive, and Sally Sommer.

[1] Ship manifest accessed from ancestry.com

[2] Howard Rye, Tim Brooks, “Visiting Fireman 16: Dan Kildare,” Storyville 1996-97 (Chigwell, Essex, England: L. Wright, 1997), pp 32-36, 54-55; Tim Brooks, Lost Sounds: Blacks and the Birth of the Recording Industry, 1890-1919 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005), pp. 302-320.

[3] Marriage certificate, October 27, 1902, Toronto, Canada, accessed from ancestry.com

[4] “Says Spouse Met Soldier at Dance,” The St. Louis Republic, November 3, 1905, p. 14; “Filipino Causes Another Divorce,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 18, 1905, p. 13; “Enamored of Filipinos,” Los Angeles Daily Times, December 19, 1905, Part II, p. 1; “Former El Paso Couple Are Divorced in St. Louis,” El Paso Herald, December 23, 1905, Part Two, p. 1.

[5] “Miss Walker a High-Flyer,” Charlotte Daily Observer, July 29, 1906, p. 1; “Lola Walker Makes Denial,” Nashville Banner, August 4, 1906, p. 2; “Chorus Girl Wins,” The Pittsburg Press, August 8, 1906, p. 2.

[6] “Chandler Sued for $100,000,” The Boston Daily Globe, September 1, 1908, p. 1; “Joan Sawyer Wants $100,000,” The Sun [New York], September 1, 1908, p. 10; “‛Boy Millionaire’ Quizzes His Actress,” The Philadelphia Inquirer, November 6, 1908, p. 14; “$100,000 Suit Dismissed,” The Boston Daily Globe, November 28, 1908, p. 1; “End of Playboy Chandler’s $2,000,000 Spree,” The American Weekly, January 31, 1943, p. 9.

[7] “Wealthy Admirer and Tango Dancer Both Missing,” The New York Herald, February 25, 1912, p. 1; “Maurice is Consoled,” The New York Herald, February 28, 1912, p. 20; “Hurry from the Opera to Start for Europe,” The New York Herald, February 28, 1912, p. 6; “All Narragansett Goes to Casino to See Cabaret,” The New York Herald, July 27, 1912, p. 10; J.C.G. “Narragansett Catches the Cabaret Craze,” The New York Press, August 11, 1912, p. 5.

[8] “Everybody Who is Anybody Goes to Reisenweber’s,” The San Francisco Sunday Examiner, December 29, 1912, City Life Section, p. 2; “Dancers are Fashionable; Go from Fad to Craze,” Variety, December 19, 1913, p. 5.

[9] “Motion Picture Dancing Lessons,” Kalem Kalendar, October 15, 1913, pp. 10-11; “Dancing Lessons Pictured,” The Moving Picture World, October 18, 1913, p. 248. The article mistakenly reports that McCutcheon and Sawyer were dancing in the Ziegfeld Follies. Advertisement, The Moving Picture World, October 18, 1913, p. 331; “Moving Pictures to Teach the Tango,” The Times Dispatch [Richmond, VA], October 26, 1913, Feature section, p. 2; “Kalem’s Dancing Lessons in Great Demand,” El Paso Herald, November 9, 1913, Church and Feature Section; Herbert Reynolds, “Aural Gratification with Kalem Films: A Case History of Music, Lectures and Sound Effects, 1907-1917,” Film History, Vol. 12, No. 4 (2000), pp. 427-28; 433; 441-42. Reynolds suggests the film may have been directed by Robert Vignola. Kristina Köhler, “Moving the Spectator, Dancing with the Screen. Early Dance Instruction Films and Reconfigurations of Film Spectatorship in the 1910s,” in Marina Dahlquist, Doron Galili, Jan Olsson, Valentine Robert, eds., Corporeality in Early Cinema: Viscera, Skin, and Physical Form (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018), pp. 276-78.

[10] “International Book Society,” The St. Paul Globe, September 13, 1902, p. 7. See also “Bachelor Girls,” The Boston Sunday Globe, January 7, 1894, p. 29, which heralds, “Jeannette Gilder and Elsie de Wolfe Are Types of a Unique Class”; Anna Marble, “Women are Successful in Business of the Theater,” The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, January 27, 1901, p. 11. For a more recent mention, see Alfred Allan Lewis, Ladies and Not-So-Gentle Women. Elisabeth Marbury, Anne Morgan, Elsie de Wolfe, Anne Vanderbilt and Their Times (New York: Penguin, 2001), pp. 35-36. It’s also worth reading Gilder’s own article about Marbury and de Wolfe: Jeannette L. Gilder, “Elsie de Wolfe’s Art in House Decorating,” Buffalo Sunday Morning News, October 26, 1913, pp. 11, 14.

[11] Miss Sawyer’s Bosworth,” The Washington Post, March 26, 1916, p. 13.

[12] Gavin Lambert, Nazimova: A Biography (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997), p. 129.

[13] “News of the Cabarets,” Variety, October 17, 1913, p. 23; “Chicago Makes High Bid for ‘Society Dancer’,” Variety, December 5, 1913, p. 7.

[14] New York Review, March 7, 1914, quoted in Lewis A. Erenberg, Steppin’ Out. New York Nightlife and the Transformation of American Culture, 1890-1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 162; “Vaudeville News. Keith’s Palace,” The Stage, March 12, 1914, p. 28.

[15] “Cabarets”, Variety, February 13, 1914, p. 20.

[16] Brooks (2005), pp. 270, 329-330; Peter M. Lefferts, “Chronology and Itinerary of the Career of J. Tim Brymn. Materials for a Biography,” Faculty Publications: School of Music. 64, University of Nebraska – Lincoln, 2016.

[17] “Joan Sawyer Tells of Creating Fox Trot,” The Evening Sun [Baltimore], February 16, 1915, p. 5; Joan Sawyer, How to Dance the Fox Trot by Joan Sawyer, Originator of This Season’s Most Popular Dance (New York: Columbia Gramophone Company, 1914).

[18] J.S. Hopkins, The Tango and Other Up-To-Date Dances. A Practical Guide to All the Latest Dances. Tango, One Step, Innovation, Hesitation, etc. Described Step by Step (Chicago: The Saalfield Publishing Company, 1914); Ethel L. Urlin, Dancing. Ancient and Modern (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1914), p. 184.

[19] “Joan Sawyer, Road Attraction,” Variety, April 17, 1914, p. 5.

[20] “Joan Sawyer in Film Play,” New York Tribune, April 26, 1914, section III; “Jeannette Gilder Writes for Joan Sawyer,” The Moving Picture World, May 9, 1914, p. 797.

[21] “Joan Sawyer Comes Back to Broadway,” The New York Press, October 6, 1914, p. 5; “To Hold Dancing Contest at Lafayette Theatre Friday Evening,” The New York Age, October 29, 1914, p. 6;  N. H. Jefferson, “Latest New York News,” The Chicago Defender, December 5, 1914, p. 7. For the most recent scholarly discussion of Anderson’s crucial place in dance history, see Danielle Robinson, Modern Moves: Dancing Race during the Ragtime and Jazz Eras (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015).

[22] “Joan Sawyer’s New Ideas,” The New York Times, July 5, 1914, Section X, p. 7. It seems she never put into practice these ideas.

[23] Lucius Beebe, “Out of the Legendary Past,” The Everyday Magazine in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 24, 1939, p. 5; “Obituary,” The Daily News, March 7, 1942, p. 20.

[24] “Joan Sawyer at Work,” Variety, August 25, 1916, p. 27; “Two Fox Directors Out,” The New York Clipper, November 8, 1916, p. 32; “Suit Against Fox,” The Billboard, December 30, 1916, p. 6; “Fox-Johnson Case Settled,” Variety, November 29, 1918, p. 44; “Johnson’s Claim Against Fox Settled,” Variety, December 6, 1918, p. 42.

[25] “Informations. Au Claridge’s Hôtel,” Le Figaro, December 8, 1919, p. 3.

[26] “Steel Man Loses Wife’s Love, Sues Woman Dancer,” The St. Louis Star, November 27, 1929, p. 3; “The Wiegand Divorce Suit Heard,” Hamilton Daily News, May 14, 1930, p. 3.

[27] “J.G. Kiley, Miamian Wed Today,” Miami Daily News, February 29, 1944, p. 4-A; “Author Predicts Risque Plays,” Miami Daily News, March 24, 1935, Second Section, p. 9; “Kaiser Considering Monkey Gland Operation, Says Report in Paris,” Daily News [New York], October 23, 1922, p. 18; Swing, “Chicago by Day,” Variety, August 15, 1919, p. 17; “Several Thousand Doughboys Seeking Fortunes in France,” The Sun [Baltimore], November 23, 1919, p. 4; “‛Les Deux Masques’, dancing américain,” Paris-Midi, November 30, 1923, p. 1; “Re-Enter Jed Kiley,” Jazz. A Flippant Magazine, January 1, 1925, pp. 10-11; “Mrs. Kiley Sues for Divorce,” The Miami Herald, June 17, 1944, Section B, p. 1. Someone has to look more into this extraordinary man’s life.

L'articolo JOSEPHINE AND HER MEN. Part II proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

“Fashionable Creations by Notable Artists in the World of Dress,” The Tatler, June 25, 1913, p. xvi

The entertainment business is the stomping ground of fabulists, but this is the story of a group of people particularly adept at the art of self-creation. We tend to forget how easy it was in the first few decades of the 20^th century to reinvent oneself at will, with no pesky fact-checkers to lift the covers off rampant fabrications, and of course the press was in on the game, happily shoveling stories constructed out of diamond dust and blarney. What follows could easily have come from the pages of a James Ellroy novel were Ellroy to shift his attention back a few decades, and while there’s no full-out murder here (at least, I haven’t stumbled upon one), there is practically everything else. It’s a convoluted tale that moves from the heights of celebrity in New York and European revues to an emaciated, drug-ravaged corpse in a Broadway flop house; it includes fraudsters, gangsters, gold diggers and desperate chorines as well as three suicides, one of which was accompanied by a note written in a champagne-soaked haze that ranks as the most bizarre farewell letter I’ve ever read. Tying it all together is Josephine Howard, the stage name of Gertrude Wilkins of Jersey City, New Jersey, and while her personality remains frustratingly incomplete in comparison to the men in her life, it’s possible to piece together a psychological profile made more beguiling by the irresistible pull of conjecture.

I’d never heard of Josephine Howard when my eyes fell on the October 1918 Variety notice, “Josephine Howard, formerly of ‘The Follies,’ and who has appeared in London, died in Toronto of influenza.”[1] Being relatively well-versed in the Ziegfeld Follies, I was surprised to find a name I didn’t recognize, and she wasn’t in the index of any Follies book or website, so naturally my curiosity was piqued. It took some time and plenty of creative research to piece her story together, and more remains to be done, but it’s fair to say she packed an awful lot into the final nine years of her life. She was born in 1889, the daughter of a New Jersey fireman, but it’s not until she was 19 and already in London that I’ve found a concrete reference, when she appeared in a small role at the Gaiety Theatre in Our Miss Gibbs, billed as Joe Howard. That was in January 1909, when she made the cover of The Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News, but she was back in New York by the end of that year, and while she’d frequently return to London, I’ve been unable to discover any further British stage credits.[2]

Whether or not Gertrude learned stagecraft at the Gaiety, she clearly developed a keen appreciation of how a tall blonde beauty like herself could get by without any obvious source of income.  How else can we interpret an article from December 1909 reporting she was robbed of diamonds and gold when her bulldog Topsey was snatched during a walk in Central Park? The jewels, the twenty-year-old claimed, were set in Topsey’s teeth, placed there as a gift from her admirer, the Hon. Chester Ashburton, “a distinguished club and society man of London.” Needless to say, there was no Chester among the barons Ashburton, and the journalist obviously took the whole story with a pinch of salt, reporting that the dog-nappers “wore dark slouch hats, and might have been thieves or actors.” He did however mention her “sumptuous apartments” on Central Park West, and quoted Josephine’s explanation for her pooch’s sparkling gnashers: “rather than offend me by sending jewels in the conventional way, he took advantage of my well-known love of dogs and had the gems set in Topsey’s teeth.” The dog was returned, minus his valuable molars.[3]

The article just happened to mention her hopes for a good part in the upcoming Broadway show The Arcadians, an extremely successful musical brought over from London by Charles Frohman (she was not in the English production) which was in tryouts that same month.  She was cast, but it was a small role, like all the roles in her very brief career as Josephine Howard, and if her Follies claims are true, it means she left The Arcadians before the end of the run and joined the Follies of 1910 in a part so tiny she doesn’t get mentioned anywhere. In fact I doubted she ever was under Ziegfeld’s umbrella, but a 1911 article in the New York Times about a lawsuit she won against horse dealers says she was in the 1910 company, and given the proximity of dates there’s every possibility the claim is true. However, the Follies had a rigid caste system in place for its “girls,” with showgirls at the top, then dancers, then the extras, so Wilkins’ self-promotion as a Follies girl was, shall we say, disingenuous.[4]

Gertrude crossed the Atlantic on luxury liners like the Lusitania several times in the next couple of years, her bills no doubt paid by more pragmatic exemplars of the Hon. Chester Ashburton School of Sugar Daddies. Her association with that august and storied institution may have been advanced through her friendship with Mary Jane Cleveland Van Rensimer Barnes Creel, a former waitress from eastern Pennsylvania with no right to use either Barnes or Creel in her name, but Mary Jane was never fussed by legal fine points. In December 1912 she was front page fodder for newspapers worldwide when, in her luxury Parisian flat, she pumped two bullets into her lover Walther de Mumm, of the champagne family, and then disappeared with her cook and maid (of course I plan on returning to Van Rensimer at a future date).[5] Six months later de Mumm was marrying a Kansas beauty and, sensing a publicity opportunity, Gertrude suddenly popped up telling journalists she’d raced from London to Paris because her dear friend Mary Jane was suicidal over her ex’s betrothal. On the same page that the papers reported on the champagne king’s wedding and Josephine Howard’s selfless proof of friendship, were interviews with Van Rensimer herself assuring everyone she was completely over her mad infatuation and never had any intention of harming herself. For both women, notoriety was just a more vulgar word for self-promotion, and no doubt they enjoyed seeing their names back in newsprint.[6] That summer of 1913 was an especially eventful one for Gertrude, not just for the Paris mission of mercy and the photo of her in a fetching turban by Maison Lewis that appeared in The Tatler, reproduced at the top here, but because that’s when she met her first husband, the dancer Jack Jarrott.

JACK JARROTT

Joan Sawyer and Jack Jarrott, 1914

Welcome to my current obsession. If you were someone living in the teens and even only vaguely aware of the dance craze sweeping the U.S. and Europe, you would have been familiar with John W. (Jack) Jarrott. Around the time Vernon Castle was scaling the heights of exhibition ballroom dancing, Jarrott was receiving glowing reviews, popularizing ragtime dancing among white audiences and making the Grizzly Bear, the Turkey Trot, the Maxixe and other permutations all the rage. He performed with African-American bands in Chicago dives and the Palace theatres of New York and London, partnered Joan Sawyer, Vera Maxwell and, very briefly, Mae Murray, and appeared in the 1916 feature The Scarlet Road. Yet when his lifeless malnourished body was found in 1938, consumed by decades of drug addiction, it lay unclaimed at Bellevue Hospital’s morgue for two days before someone from the National Vaudeville Artists Association found out and gave him a decent burial. I can’t begin to fathom the demons Jarrott was struggling with, but I do know his very messy, ultimately tragic life deserves to be told in a more generous manner than was accorded by the moralistic obituaries. He wasn’t the only unstable man Gertrude Wilkins got involved with, but he was the most fascinating.

Jack’s earliest years are a mystery, not helped by his tendency to make things up on official documents. His death certificate says he was born September 2, 1887 (probable), but his draft card lists 1885, with the recruiting officer’s unusual handwritten note: “he could not state with certainty the year of his birth, but claimed he had completed his thirtieth year.” It’s likely he was stoned at the time, so we can’t be sure whether to give credence to the other information, like Macon, Georgia as his birthplace. On a ship manifest he put Dallas, Texas (also mentioned in a 1914 article), and a couple of his obituaries said he was from Jacksonville, Florida; one of them wrote that his father was a gambler killed in a casino and his mother ran a roadhouse, but I’ve been unable to find any corroborating evidence; more digging is needed.[7]

His earliest credited role was as the Bell Boy in George M. Cohan’s show The Yankee Prince, which opened in New York in April 1908, then moved to Chicago later that year and was still touring the U.S. in early 1909.[8] When it was over, it appears he returned to Chicago and there got involved with some very shady characters while also entering into the African-American music and dance scene in that city’s most notorious locales. Details are vague, and in many sources misinformation has been frustratingly perpetuated, but here’s what we can say for certain: around this time Jack began performing in some of the infamous saloons owned or operated by Roy Jones, one of Chicago’s truly sleazy crime kings with hands in white slavery, underage prostitution, narcotics and every kind of criminal activity imaginable. What makes Jones interesting for us is that his establishments hosted mixed groups of blacks and whites, including prostitutes as well as entertainers. Among the latter group were “Bricktop” Smith and Wilbur C. Sweatman, both soon to be major names in jazz and ragtime; “Bricktop” later recalled that Jones’ back room was “one of the best in Chicago.” I can’t say for certain that Jack performed at the same time as these future stars, but Variety reported that he’d been “for a long time the principal attraction at Roy Jones’ Amusement Café.” This would have been sometime between 1909 and summer 1911, so definitely around the same period as Sweatman.[9]

This was the moment when the Grizzly Bear dance became a cultural phenomenon, and whether originated in Chicago’s Levee District or simply popularized there, the “Grizzly” quickly became so much a source of contention for the way the dancers closely held each other that it was banned in the Windy City even while sweeping the country. Some secondary sources claim that Jarrott introduced the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear to the world with Louise Greuning, but the information is suspect and I’ve not found any reference to a Louise Greuning.[10] What’s more, “Dago Frank” Lewis, another crime boss who also ran a brothel-cum-saloon, claimed at the time that his place was where the dance originated.[11] In the end, we should be less concerned with where it started than with how it started, most likely among black entertainers and then disseminated by white dancers like Jarrott who picked it up in Chicago’s dives. Jack took those influences with him when he burst on the cabaret scene billed as “Young Alabama” performing a Grizzly variant, the “Dallas Dip,” at New York’s recently opened Folies Bergere.

The New York Herald, June 25, 1911, section 3, p. 5. Note that future star Olga Petrova was making her U.S. debut at the Folies Bergere.

“Ninety per cent of all the ‘rag’ dancers in New York look foolish, after seeing Young Alabama,” exclaimed Variety’s Sime Silverman, who led a chorus of critics heaping praise on Jarrott’s footwork.  “He is the slickest of the shoulder-and-foot-dancers. An easy grace and a dandy personality make him a certainty” wrote Variety’s “Dash,” mirroring his colleague in praising Jarrott’s dancing: “Alabama makes a pretty rag two-step of his work, moves over the stage quickly, intermingles some neat whirlwind work, and makes a great big hit with the audience.” Almost immediately, photos of Jarrott and his dance partner Bena Hoffman (1883-1921) appeared in syndicated newspaper columns nationwide, furthering the dance’s fashionableness while winking at its hints of impropriety. Ruth St. Denis was doing a vaudeville number at Hammerstein’s at the same time, leading an unconvinced “Dash” to compare the two: “My, Oh, My! you should see ‘Young Alabama’ at the Folies Bergere for a ‘Grizzly.’ That’s the stuff. In a theatre with a stage at either end with Ruth St. Denis on one and Young Alabama on the other you would never look at the exponent of the classical in body contortions and arm movements.”[12]

Why the nickname Young Alabama (or briefly, the Alabama Kid)? Silverman objected to it, saying audiences would think Jarrott was a black performer, suggesting the public assumed dancers from the Deep South would be African-American.[13] I suspect that was exactly what Jack wanted, to draw attention to the ties that linked his moves with ones he would have seen in places like Roy Jones’. In any event he took heed of the advice and soon reverted to his own name in vaudeville and cabaret, but it was mostly small stuff or understudy parts until March 1913 when he was engaged by British actor-producer Seymour Hicks to partner Follies star Vera Maxwell (1891-1950) on a European tour.

I mentioned Maxwell briefly in my previous post, referring to a supposed insurance policy taken out on her feet. She’d been a favourite dancer and then showgirl with Ziegfeld who “burst upon the Broadway scene with what we would call today the force of an explosion measured in megatrons.”[14] It’s unclear whether it was Maxwell herself or Hicks who suggested Jarrott as her partner, but the following month the two were in London dancing the Alabama Glide among other numbers in the musical revue All the Winners at the Empire; the act proved so popular that their engagement was extended through the summer.[15]

“Our Captious Critic at the Empire,” The Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News, June 7, 1913, p. 681.

The show’s success, combined with the public’s continued hunger for all things dance related, led Cecil Hepworth to produce a short film of Jarrott and Maxwell in May called Always Gay, in which they danced the “Evening News Waltz no. 3” with composer Archibald Joyce also on screen conducting his own melody. The short, which appears to be lost, played throughout the British Isles in June,[16] which may have been approximately the time Jack met our friend Gertrude Wilkins in London. Actually, I could be wrong about that – this is pure conjecture, but I have a feeling theirs was a whirlwind courtship, so perhaps they’d known each other for only a very brief period of time when they got hitched sometime in early August. Variety learned the news over a week late,[17] which makes me wonder: Gertrude ate up publicity, so could it be that Jack knew it was a mistake pretty soon after the vows were said, and tried to keep the whole thing quiet? Again, this is complete guesswork on my part, but given how unsuitable they were to each other, it’s not beyond the realm of probability.

When Jarrott and Maxwell travelled to Berlin for a gig at the Wintergarten,[18] Gertrude followed her husband, and in October the three had an adventurous voyage back to New York when their ship, the Großer Kurfürst from Bremen, came to the rescue of the S.S. Volturno, a passenger ship engulfed in flames in the middle of the North Atlantic. Dramatic photographs Jack took from their ship appeared in North American newspapers; the trio assisted the rescued women and children as much as possible through the night, so much so that Wilkins was hospitalized once back in port for scarlet fever, believed to have been contracted from a child who was ill. Though hardly a noted personality and with barely any credits to her name, Gertrude (as “musical comedy actress Josephine Howard”) managed to get articles placed in the papers about her selflessness in the face of tragedy and her subsequent hospitalization.[19]

The following month Jack got a surprise when Maxwell announced she was partnering with another dancer – if there was any bad blood between the two, it disappeared in 1915 when they reteamed – and he started talks with Mae Murray to do a vaudeville act together, but that didn’t pan out for another year. Instead he joined the Chicago company of the musical The Doll Girl and was welcomed back to his old stomping grounds: “Mr. Jarrott, it is said, has his dancing source in the cabarets of this vicinity, and he returns graced with the wreaths of victory won in conquests on the dancing fields of Europe. At any rate, he is quite the most easily observed of the tangoists I have encountered…”. Jack’s temper, however, got him into trouble for the first time publicly when a spat with the valet of the show’s star, Richard Carle, led him to resign. Perhaps it wasn’t such a bad thing, because 1914 turned out to be the best year of his professional life.[20]

In Part II, I’ll be tracing Jarrott’s continued rise, together with a significant detour into the life of Joan Sawyer, containing quite a bit of new information.

Jay

Big thanks for help with this post go to Laurie Sanderson and the Ziegfeld Club, Sally Sommer, Bryony Dixon, Oliver Hanley and Frank Dabell.

[1] “Epidemic Casualties,” Variety, Oct. 18, 1918, p. 5.

[2] J.P. Wearing, The London Stage 1900-1909: A Calendar of Productions, Performers and Personnel (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014), p. 48; The Illustrated Sporting & Dramatic News, January 16, 1909.

[3] “Actors or Thieves?,” Los Angeles Daily Times, December 13, 1909, p. 2.

[4] “News of Plays and Players,” The Sun, December 8, 1909, p. 9; “American Premiere of The Arcadians,” The Billboard, January 8, 1910, p. 5; “The Liberty Theatre. ‘The Arcadians’,” New-York Daily Tribune, January 18, 1910, p. 7; “Durland Company Loses,” The New York Times, April 26, 1911, p. 7.

[5] Practically every newspaper in France, the UK and the US between December 14 and 16, 1912 carried news of the de Mumm shooting. For the essentials, see: Jean Lévèque, “Le drame du jour. C’étaient deux amants…,” Gil Blas, December 14, 1912, p. 1; “Le drame de la rue des Belles-Feuilles,” Le Petit Journal, December 15, 1912, p. 1; “Le drame de Passy. Qui a tiré le premier ?,” L’Intransigeant, December 16, 1912, p. 1; “De Mumm Puts Blame on Woman, The Sun [New York], December 15, 1912, pp. 1-2; “De Mumm Shot by American Woman After He Had Kicked Her,” The New-York Tribune, December 15, 1912, pp. 1, 4.

[6] “Mumm Fears to Wed After Suicide Hint,” St. Louis Star, June 3, 1913, p. 3; “De Mumm, Shot by Mrs. Barnes, Wed in London,” The World [Evening Edition, New York], June 3, 1913, p. 1; “Mrs. Barnes Threatens Suicide,” The Sun [Baltimore], June 4, 1913, p. 2; “Widow Has Forgotten DeMumm,” Lincoln Daily News, June 3, 1913, p. 6.

[7] Information from the death certificate was viewed at https://search.ancestry.com/cgi-bin/sse.dll?indiv=1&dbid=61778&h=248375&tid=&pid=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=fUb816&_phstart=successSource;
Draft Registration Card for John W. Jarrott, June 8, 1917, https://www.ancestry.com/interactive/6482/005264778_03841?pid=1503493&treeid=&personid=&rc=&usePUB=true&_phsrc=fUb814&_phstart=successSource; Ship manifest, Großer Kurfürst departing October 4, 1913 from Bremen to New York: https://www.libertyellisfoundation.org/passenger-details/czoxMjoiMTAwNzcwMDEwMDQxIjs=/czo4OiJtYW5pZmVzdCI7; “Attractions at the Theaters,” The Boston Sunday Globe, May 17, 1914, p. 44; Annie Oakley, “The Theatre and Its People,” The Windsor Daily Star, June 25, 1938, section 3, p. 4.

[8] “New Play at Hartford,” The New York Daily Tribune, April 3, 1908, p. 7; Chicago Public Library Digital Collections, Chicago Theater Collection-Historic Programs, Colonial Theatre, Yankee Prince (October 4, 1908), https://cdm16818.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/CPB01/id/5850/rec/1; “Plays for This Week,” The Illustrated Buffalo Express, January 17, 1909, p. 29.

[9] “Chicago,” Variety, April 27, 1912, p. 20. Jones’ name appears frequently in Chicago papers of the era and forms part of nearly every book about the city’s crime bosses of the era. For examples, see “Wayman Promises to Reveal Workings of Giant ‘Vice’ Trust,” The Inter Ocean, April 27, 1909, p. 1; “Raid Levee and Cabarets for Witnesses,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, April 12, 1913, p. 1. Also, Cynthia M. Blair, I’ve Got to Make My Livin’: Black Women’s Sex Work in Turn-of-the-Century Chicago (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), pp. 141, 271; Mark Berresford, That’s got ’em!: The Life and Music of Wilbur C. Sweatman (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), pp. 61-62; Jan Voogd, “‛A Case of Peculiar and Unusual Interest.’ The Egg Inspectors Union, the AFL, and the British Ministry of Food Confront ‘Negro Girl’ Egg Candlers,” in Jennifer Helgren, Colleen A. Vasconcellos, ed., Girlhood: A Global History (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2010), p. 128. However, significantly more work needs to be done on the dancers who appeared in the saloons.

[10] The two main secondary sources for information on Jarrott are riddled with errors. Both Barbara Naomi Cohen-Stratyner, Biographical Dictionary of Dance (New York: Schirmer Books, 1982), pp. 457-459 and Julie Malnig, Dancing Till Dawn: A Century of Exhibition Ballroom Dance (New York: Greenwood Press, 1992), p. 27, give incorrect dates for Jarrott and claim that he began his career performing in theatricalized boxing matches before dancing in clubs owned by August Reilley (or Reiley), including the “Ray Jones Café,” where he and Louise Greuning originated the Turkey Trot and the Grizzly Bear. To begin with, the so-called owner was August Riley, and it was Roy Jones, not Ray; what’s more, Jones seems to have owned his own establishments. (“Roy Jones Sells His Resort,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, April 24, 1914, p. 11.) In addition, I can’t find any Louise Greuning. Frustratingly Wikipedia and other websites have perpetuated these mistakes and complicated them further by spelling the latter’s name Gruenning.

[11] “Dago” remains an offensive if old-fashioned word in the U.S. connoting people of Italian origin. “‛Dago Frank’ is Defying Police,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, April 29, 1911, p. 3; “‛Grizzly Bear’ Danced in Cafes, Says Report; Closed,” The Inter Ocean [Chicago], May 1, 1911; “Levee Opens Up; Spotters Watch,” The Chicago Daily Tribune, November 30, 1911, p. 2.

[12] Sime, “‛Folies Bergere Dancers,’ with Young Alabama and Rena [Bena] Hoffman,” Variety, August 5, 1911, p. 20, in which Silverman says that Jarrott was discovered in Chicago by theatre producer Henry B. Harris. Dash, “American Roof,” Variety, September 16, 1911, p. 20; “Have you Danced the Daring ‘Dallas Dip’?”, San Francisco Chronicle, July 16, 1911, Sunday Magazine; Dash, “Hammerstein’s,” Variety, August 5, 1911, p. 22. See also “News of the Theatres,” The Sun [New York], June 25, 1911, section 3, p. 5.

[13] Sime, op. cit., p. 20.

[14] Marjorie Farnsworth, The Ziegfeld Follies (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1956), p. 52. Farnsworth discusses Maxwell in several evocative pages that truly bring her to life.

[15] “Vera Maxwell for London,” March 21, 1913, Variety, p. 10; “‛All the Winners’ – the Winning Revue at the Empire Theatre,” The Tatler, April 23, 1913, p. 101; “Hicks Picked Good Ones,” Variety, April 25, 1913, p. 4.

[16] “Kinematograph Notes,” The Stage, May 29, 1913, p. 28; Advertisement, The Express, June 7, 1913; Stephen Bottomore, “Selsior Dancing Films, 1912-1917,” in Julie Brown, Annette Davison, eds., The Sounds of the Silents in Britain (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 169.

[17] “London,” Variety, August 15, 1913, p. 17.

[18] “Die neue Spielzeit im Wintergarten,” Berliner Börsen-Zeitung (Morning Edition), September 5, 1913, p. 6; “Vergnügungschronik. Wintergarten,” Berliner Volkszeitung (Morning Edition), September 14, 1913, p. 3.

[19] “Remarkable Photographs Picturing Volturno Horrors,” The Evening World [New York], October 15, 1913, p. 3; “Volturno Afire, Survivors Arriving at Rescue Ship and Passengers Who Cared for Them,” The Edmonton Journal, October 25, 1913, p. 9. The latter has a photo of Maxwell and Wilkins (with the latter’s dog) on the Großer Kurfürst deck, but it’s too blurry to reproduce. Jarrott’s photos also made it into Popular Mechanics, December 1913, pp. 808-811, but without his credit and copyrighted to Underwood & Underwood. “Actress, Heroine of Volturno, Ill,” The Thrice-A-Week World [New York], October 29, 1913, p. 3; “Sea Waifs Gave Actress Scarlet Fever,” The Kansas City Star, October 29, 1913, p. 6A.

[20] “A Pair of Dancers,” Variety, November 7, 1913, p. 3; Percy Hammond, “Refreshing Musical Show at the Studebaker,” The Chicago Tribune, December 15, 1913, p. 14; “Jarrott Quits ‘The Doll Girl’,” The New York Clipper, January 17, 1914, p. 19.

L'articolo JOSEPHINE AND HER MEN. Part I proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

Wid’s Daily, November 16, 1918, back page.

“He was fine clear through.” We don’t use the word “fine” very much in that way anymore, which is a pity since it has something direct and clean about it, something large-scale in only four letters. Each time I say the line in my head, it comes out the same way Katharine Hepburn says “My, she was yar” in The Philadelphia Story, full of wistfulness, promise and a yearning for something lost: Ray was fine. Don’t worry if you’ve never heard of Ray Bagley; I stumbled upon him when looking at some now-forgotten victims of the 1918 flu pandemic, and the notice in Wid’s Daily struck me by its spare emotional candor. If research brings people back to life, I’m especially happy to resurrect Ray, who deserves to be at least a footnote in film history, though frankly returning him to the spotlight fills me with pleasure simply because he was someone good. Someone special.

I’ll get back to Ray in a moment. Flipping through film journals from October and November 1918 is a sobering experience, especially when you scan the obituary notes, shortened to their essence because so many names needed to be crammed onto the pages. The Giornate have done much to return John Collins to his well-deserved place among the leading young directors of the period, and many of us can name several other prominent people in the entertainment field who died during the pandemic. Myrtle Gonzalez, regarded as the first Latina film star in the U.S., died the same day as Julian L’Estrange, an important actor in his own right but now chiefly remembered as the husband of Constance Collier. Three days earlier, thirty-one-year-old star Harold Lockwood succumbed to the virus, a loss movingly noted in La Cinématographie française: “…dont la carrière s’annonçait des plus belle, des plus brillante [sic], et que nous revoyons toujours avec un nouveau plaisir dans les nombreux films qu’il avait tournés avant d’être emporté en quelques jours par cette grippe mondiale”.[1]

What of those so quickly forgotten? What of Italian actor Leo Ragusi, who began working for Ambrosio in 1909 and soon developed into the kind of on-screen personality consistently welcomed by the critics? In 1913 he moved to Pasquali, followed by Jupiter, Aquila and Milano Film before serving in the War first in the artillery and then in a management role at an airplane factory. He died of the flu, his memory, like so many, rapidly sinking with barely a trace.[2]

The Moving Picture Weekly, September 29, 1917, p. 4.

Or Donna Drew, female lead of Ruth Ann Baldwin’s ’49-’17, whose place in public memory was already whittled away to simply “Mrs. Arthur Moon” when she died a mere nine months after her last released feature, the cross-dressing (male-to-female courtesy of Jack Mulhall) espionage drama Madame Spy? Born Donna Anderson in 1897, she was 18 when she married vaudeville performer and fellow Salt Lake City resident Arthur Morse Moon, who was making a name for himself in Margaret Whitney’s musical comedy The Wrong Bird (with future star Betty Compson in the chorus and playing the violin). One year later she appeared in a locally produced three-reeler called A Twentieth Century Courtship (1916) before joining her husband in California and signing a contract in 1917 with Universal to appear under their Butterfly banner. As usual, the studio invented a backstory, claiming she was a member of the Willard Mack-Marjorie Rambeau stock company (which was true of Arthur, not Donna), and telling the press she was born Donna Moon but changed it to Donna Drew because it better suited her personality.[3]

At the start the publicity machine seemed to do a good job promoting their new actress, yet after Madame Spy it’s hard to know exactly what happened. In ’49-’17, her only known surviving feature, she has an appealing quality reminiscent of Dorothy Gish, but either Universal felt she wasn’t distinctive enough, or for unknown reasons she chose to step away from the cameras – she completed her last screen role in September 1917, a five-reeler called The Ghost Girl directed by Jack Wells, which however wasn’t released until after her death in January 1919 when it had been cut down to two reels.[4] Whatever the reason for stopping film work, she shifted to vaudeville and joined Arthur, who’d been working steadily for the Vogue Motion Picture Company, Keystone and Triangle, on the Pantages circuit with a revival of The Wrong Bird beginning in June 1918.[5]

That September they’d been playing in central Canada, moving down to Montana the following month just when the flu pandemic was gaining strength. Myrna Loy recalled what it was like in her home city of Helena: “It devastated the town. You couldn’t get nurses. You couldn’t get doctors; I mean, you got them to stop in and then they would disappear into the night. People walked the streets with makeshift surgical masks over their mouths.”[6] Loy, her mother and brother all became sick and recovered; her father wasn’t so lucky, dying in the weeks after nursing his family back to health. It was here in Helena that Arthur Moon and Donna Drew both became ill while staying at the Placer Hotel (located, I need to add, on Last Chance Gulch) – Arthur was one of the first flu deaths in the city, succumbing on October 17^th, at the age of 30 or 31.[7]

Donna, too sick to leave town, was joined by her parents and brother while Arthur’s body was taken to Salt Lake City for the funeral. She seemed to rally, but then just one day after Arthur’s burial she too expired, aged 21. Her death was covered by the newspapers and trade publications, though in many cases she was described as little more than an adjunct to her husband: “Mrs. Arthur Moon Dies of Influenza” was the headline in The Helena Daily Independent. For her family, the losses didn’t end there: Donna’s father Walter Anderson caught the virus when he was looking after her in Helena. He made it back to Salt Lake City but, too ill to attend her funeral, was dead two days later.[8]

THE CLEVEREST KID IN THE GAME

Ray Bagley and Ralph R. Ruffner, The Moving Picture World, February 12, 1916, p. 942.

Detroit, Minnesota was a small community of about 1,500 when Raymond Bagley was born in 1891, before the town was rechristened Detroit Lakes and became a seasonal vacation destination. Lying 72 kilometres east of Fargo, North Dakota, it had a significant population of first- and second-generation immigrants from northern Europe, like Ray’s mother Lena, whose Norwegian background can be traced in her son’s boyish Nordic features. Ray wasn’t quite ten when his father Frank, a saloon keeper, died; Lena appears to have remained in town, eventually working as a housekeeper in the Hotel Minnesota, but by 1910 Ray had travelled west to Missoula, Montana, near the Idaho border, where he got a job as a window dresser and advertising manager for a clothing store. What struck me while looking into his life is how personal newspaper reports got about Ray from early on, how he clearly charmed everyone he met. In Missoula he became known for entertaining at fraternal functions with quick cartoon sketches, one of which made its way into the local newspaper in 1914; its inside jokes about poultry fairs fall flat now, and the drawing is derivative, but he clearly became a favourite of the local community almost immediately, and the energy he displayed as a “a lightning crayon artist” was a characteristic remarked upon by all who mentioned him.[9]

He moved into the entertainment business in the summer of 1914, succeeding the future Academy Award winning animator Fred Quimby as manager of the Empress Theater, opened one year earlier. “Mr. Bagley is popular in Missoula and the best wishes of his friends go out to him in his new venture,” wrote the local paper. What comes through powerfully in the otherwise impersonal reportage of most newspapers is Ray’s dynamism: he was a go-getter, the kind of guy who’d enter contests in the papers and win them, too.  “Mr. Bagley took charge as manager of the Empress theater a few months ago and has rapidly developed into one of the live wires in the business.” He was an innovator in Missoula who understood that the way to develop a loyal audience is to treat them with the warmth and respect of friends, as can be seen in the advertisement he took out in March 1915 apologizing for a mishap during the projection of the Lillian Russell film Wildfire.[10]

Empress Theater, Missoula, Montana, April 1913. Courtesy: Historical Museum at Fort Missoula

The Missoulian, March 8, 1915, p. 2.

He knew his game, and he knew how to work it well enough to capture the attention of the national trade publications, where he’s first mentioned in April 1915 thanks to a crafty little stunt where he nicely played off World Pictures and Paramount. The Empress was screening films from Fox, World, and Paramount each week, so like the shrewd marketing man he was, Ray wrote to at least the latter two, saying what a pleasure it was to work with them: “You’ve got a great organization” he told Lewis Selznick at World, after alerting the studio to his innovative “Midnight Matinee” screening of Old Dutch. Naturally Selznick jumped at the chance of tooting his own horn and took out a full-page advertisement in Motion Picture News hyping Bagley and his clever marketing of World’s releases. What he didn’t know is that Ray had also written to Jane Stannard Johnson at Paramount, laying on the compliments with an even thicker brush: “You are making EXHIBITORS out of men who have started a FLICKER SHOP. If an exhibitor can’t make good with Paramount Pictures and the power behind them, he is letting the office boy open his mail.” Not to be outdone by Selznick’s self-promotion, Stannard Johnson took out a full-page ad one week later with a headline shouting “Misstatement,” taking her rival to task for pushing his special relationship with Ray when the truth was that the Empress screened World films but once a week, whereas Paramount features were on the programme four times a week. Ray couldn’t have paid for better self-publicity.[11]

Eight months after drawing national attention to the Empress’ marketing campaigns, Ray was recruited by exhibitor Ralph R. Ruffner to become advertising manager at the 1,000-seat Liberty theatre in Spokane, Washington. “His friends regret to see Mr. Bagley leave Missoula, but they feel confident that he will make good in his chosen profession,” wrote the local paper as he set out further west. It was while in Spokane that Ray was first mentioned by the grandiosely-named Epes Winthrop Sargent in his influential “Advertising for Exhibitors” column of The Moving Picture World. Sargent was the doyen of film publicity mavens, author of Picture Theatre Advertising (1915) and a tireless stumper for sharing new ways of film promotion by soliciting ideas and encouraging his readers to write in with their ad campaigns (he was also a critic and screenwriter deserving of a biography of his own). Through the pages of the magazine, Sargent became Ray’s mentor and promotor, touting his creative salesmanship fourteen times in his column and often reproducing parts of Ray’s letters, even publicly scolding the eager Minnesotan when he didn’t hear from him for a while.[12]

Ray Bagley and Ralph R. Ruffner, The Moving Picture World, June 10, 1916, p. 1875.

Not quite a year after arriving in Spokane, Ray’s former boss in Missoula, Otis Hoyt, hired him as publicity manager for the new 900-seat theatre he was having constructed in Long Beach, California, also called the Liberty (future star Cullen Landis was an usher). Sargent published a cute photo in his column of Ray before departure, handing an oversized key for the advertising department to Ruffner, who calls his now ex-employee “The cleverest kid in the game.” The photo is blurry but Ray’s waggish grin, turned towards Ruffner’s more posed smile, significantly contributes to my sense of him as a delightfully impish young man with a bright future and plenty of gumption. Several months later, Sargent admiringly called him “one of the natural born hustlers,” a designation usually guaranteed to raise my hackles, but in light of all the affectionate language used about him by colleagues, it’s impossible not to be charmed. Ray’s mother Lena joined him in California, where he rented a bungalow for the two of them just a couple of blocks from the beach – it was a long way from the inland plains of eastern Minnesota, and I imagine it was the first time either of them ever saw the ocean, which they could probably now hear from their home on quiet nights.[13]

KEYSTONE-TRIANGLE AND AN INSURED ADAM’S APPLE

Clearly not one to let opportunity pass, Ray moved jobs once again a year after arriving in Long Beach, taking charge of the publicity department at Keystone-Triangle in April 1917: “while Manager Hoyt regrets exceedingly to lose Bagley, nevertheless he, as well as his many other friends in Long Beach, rejoice over the young man’s good fortune.” Given that one of their stunts was to put the Triangle logo, in the correct colours, on candy handed out in the cinema, it shouldn’t be surprising that the studio realized this was a man for them.[14] I’ve not studied how Triangle advertising evolved in this period, so I can’t weigh in on what changes Ray instituted, but I did uncover one publicity stunt which deserves at least a minor place in film history lore. If you do a short internet search on insurance policies for actors’ body parts, you usually get sites saying that Ben Turpin’s was the first of the gimmick policies – his crossed eyes are said to have been insured by Lloyds of London in 1921, in case they should ever straighten themselves out. As usual, this kind of murky received wisdom is itself the product of a publicity man’s regurgitation of another publicity man’s stunt. Whether Turpin actually had a policy out is open to question, but he certainly wasn’t the first performer to have a body part insured. That honour appears to belong to the violinist Jan Kubelik, whose fingers were reported to be insured by Lloyds in 1901 for $100,000 – unsurprisingly the policy, if it ever existed, was taken out by showman extraordinaire Daniel Frohman. Once the news got out, Frohman’s gimmick was embraced by other publicity gurus eager to get their clients in the papers: Adelina Patti was said to have her vocal chords insured for £1,000 per performance, while Lina Cavalieri had a $50,000 policy just in case she came down with a sore throat. It was reported that each of La Belle Otero’s toes was protected by a $16,000 policy, Paderewski’s hands were insured for £10,000, and Ruth St. Denis’ arms were indemnified for $50,000, all before 1910 (the amounts vary according to the source).[15]

Ziegfeld Follies showgirl and professional dancer Vera Maxwell supposedly had her feet insured in 1913 for $100,000 – or was it francs? – with a special clause added in case a pedicure went awry (there’ll be more on Ms. Maxwell in my next post). Better known are the flurry of articles that came out in 1915 when it was reported that each of Chaplin’s feet were insured for $50,000, rising to $150,000 should they both be injured.  David Robinson believes this to be an invention of Essanay’s publicity department, which makes complete sense – after all, as Harry Reichenbach, the man who claimed to have invented film publicity, wrote, “I could fool a hundred editors into accepting bits of fancy as front-page news and get a hundred thousand columns in headlines and news stories for things that had never happened.” Why all this background? Because in September 1917, Ray claimed to have engineered a policy to insure against any damages to Keystone comedian George H. Binn’s Adam’s Apple, apparently used by Binns to make his bowtie perform to comic affect. Not just the Adam’s Apple, covered up to $10,000, but each eyebrow had a $5,000 policy. Naturally the newspapers covered the announcement, but the story and the comedian were both soon forgotten (British-born Binns [1886-1918] moved to L-KO before becoming a victim of the flu pandemic himself).[16]

I’ve gone into all this because I believe there’s a case to be made for Ray being the originator of the truly superfluous gimmick insurance policy. A dancer’s feet have value, a violinist needs his or her fingers, the loss of a singer’s voice means the end of a career. But an Adam’s Apple? Could Ray have initiated the trend supposedly begun with Ben Turpin’s eyes and continued as late as 2007 when America Ferrara’s smile was reportedly insured for $10 million?

LOIS WEBER BREAKS THE NEWS

Five jobs in four years doesn’t sound like a good way to pursue a career, but this was the entertainment business, where things moved quickly and opportunities for a bright go-getter like Ray were there for the taking. One year after joining Triangle, in the spring of 1918, he packed up his things again and moved across the country from Culver City to New York for an exciting new job as Wid Gunning’s assistant on the trade paper Wid’s Daily.[17] It was a further reinvention in which he took on the roles of editor and critic, and once again Ray won over his colleagues to such a degree that after a few months, Gunning was planning on putting him in charge of the New York bureau. That’s when tragedy struck. Sometime in early November, Ray contracted the flu, resulting in a chain reaction of grave infections: pneumonia, pleurisy and then a heart attack. Like Donna Drew one month earlier, it appeared he was recovering, but his body gave out and he died at the age of 27. “Our Ray is gone.”

We know a surprising amount about his end thanks to a detailed obituary in the Long Beach Daily Telegram[18] which reproduces the telegram (incorrectly dated) that a clearly distressed Gunning sent to Otis Hoyt at the Liberty theatre, included here:

I assume Gunning was a good friend of both Lois Weber and Ernest Shipman (husband of Nell, herself brought perilously low by the flu), which is why he telegrammed asking that they break the news personally to Lena Bagley. I also imagine Gunning knew that Weber was the kind of sensitive person who’d be as gentle and supportive as possible in such an agonizing moment. Ray was all Lena had: her sister died in 1913, and he received a draft deferral because he was his mother’s sole support. Gunning handled all the funeral expenses, which may have included Lena’s unimaginably sad train journey from her home in Los Angeles to Detroit, Minnesota, where she buried her son in a grave next to her husband’s. Alone with nothing to keep her in California (I presume she would eventually have gone to New York with Ray had he lived), she moved back to Minnesota by 1920, living as a boarder and working as a seamstress; ten years later she was living with a cousin. Lena died in 1939, at 71.[19]

I can’t quite explain why Ray’s story touches me so deeply. His youth, no doubt, and the way he won friends so easily. The headline of the Long Beach Daily Telegram obituary ran “Popular Publicity Man Dies in New York City,” itself a testimony to the affection felt by the men and women he met. Forty-nine years after his death, a gentleman in Missoula wrote to the local paper recalling that Ray aspired to being the best-dressed man in town[20] (another reason for me to like him), but I wonder whether anyone has mentioned him since. It’s time for him to be remembered. Ray was fine clear through.

Jay

Big thanks for help with this post go to Ted Hughes and the Historical Museum at Fort Missoula; Brian N. Chavez and the Historical Society of Long Beach; and David Robinson.

[1] “whose career promised to be one of the best and brightest, and who we always see with new-found pleasure in the many films he made before being carried off in a matter of days by this pandemic”: Arlecchino, “Fantômes Aimés?,” La Cinématographie Française, March 6, 1920, p. 36. For a personal tribute to Lockwood, see Adèle Howells, “Harold Lockwood,” La Cinématographie Française, June 7, 1919, p. 9.

[2] “La morte dell’attore Leo Ragusi,” La vita cinematografica, October 7-15, 1918, p. 92.

[3] “Society,” The Herald-Republican [Salt Lake City], April 15, 1915, p. 5; “Thanksgiving Show Treat,” The Logan Republican, November 24, 1914, p. 7; “Pretty Salt Lake Girl Who Stars in Three Reel Film Produced in This City,” The Salt Lake Telegram, August 13, 1916, p. 9; Steve Massa, Slapstick Divas: The Women of Silent Comedy (Albany, GA: BearManor Media, 2017), p. 149; G.P. Harleman, “News of Los Angeles and Vicinity,” The Moving Picture World, May 19, 1917, p. 1134; “Donna Drew Chooses Her New Name,” The Moving Picture Weekly, August 11, 1917, p. 9. She also graces the cover of that issue.

[4] The Moving Picture World, September 15, 1917, p. 1681; The Moving Picture Weekly, January 11, 1919, p. 31.

[5] “Arthur Morse Moon Coming to Pantages in Local Play,” The Herald-Republican-Telegram, June 9, 1918, p. 11.

[6] James Kotsilibas-Davis and Myrna Loy, Myrna Loy. Being and Becoming (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987), p. 21.

[7] “Another Death in Helena,” Great Falls Daily Tribune, October 19, 1918, p. 4; “Arthur Morse Moon Dies of Influenza,” Deseret Evening News, October 18, 1918, p. 2.

[8] “Mrs. Arthur Moon Dies of Influenza,” The Helena Daily Independent, October 25, 1918, p. 5; A.H. Giebler, “News of Los Angeles and Vicinity, The Moving Picture World, November 16, 1918, p. 727; “W.S. Anderson Dies,” The Helena Daily Independent, November 1, 1918, p. 5.

[9] Information on Bagley’s family comes from the 1900 census: U.S. Census Bureau (1900), Detroit, Minnesota; “How to Get Rich on Apples and a Side Line of Poultry,” The Missoulian, February 1, 1914, p. 4; “’Best People on Earth’ Give Greatest Show in the World Tonight,” The Missoulian, April 28, 1913, p. 2.

[10] “Ray Bagley is Now Manager of Empress,” The Missoulian, August 11, 1914, p. 10; “By Observant Eyes Ray Bagley Enriched,” The Missoulian, December 11, 1914, p. 7; The Missoulian, March 8, 1915, p. 2.

[11] Motion Picture News, April 10, 1915, p. 4; “Live Wire Exhibitors. Midnight Matinee is a Success,” Motion Picture News, April 10, 1915, p. 41; Motion Picture News, April 17, 1915, p. 19.

[12] “Bagley Advances in His Chosen Profession,” The Daily Missoulian, May 17, 1915, p. 8; Epes Winthrop Sargent, “Advertising for Exhibitors,” The Moving Picture World, July 24, 1915, p. 641; Sargent, “Advertising for Exhibitors,” The Moving Picture World, December 16, 1916, p. 1636.

[13] “Opening of New Theater Tonight Realizes Dreams,” The Long Beach Press, June 15, 1916, p. 10; Sargent, “Advertising for Exhibitors,” The Moving Picture World, June 10, 1916, p. 1875; Sargent, “Advertising for Exhibitors,” The Moving Picture World, December 16, 1916, p. 1637; “Personal Mention,” The Long Beach Press, April 25, 1916, p. 4.

[14] “Ray Bagley Leaves Liberty to Accept Triangle Position,” The Long Beach Press, April 30, 1917, p. 2; Sargent, “Advertising for Exhibitors,” The Moving Picture World, February 12, 1916, p. 942.

[15]  “Behind the Scenes. Taking Risks in Hollywood!,” Hollywood, February 1937, p. 45; “Kubelik’s Arm Insured,” The Sun [Baltimore], December 21, 1901; “Eyes Worth $50,000 and Hands $5,000 Per Day,” Saint Mary’s Beacon [Leonard Town, MD], June 12, 1902, p. 4; “$16,000 For a Sore Toe!”, The San Francisco Examiner, December 2, 1906, p. 64; “Her Arms Valuable,” The Salt Lake Tribune, February 6, 1910, p. 11.

[16] “Two Feet Valued at $100,000 Insured By Chicago Firm,” The Inter Ocean [Chicago], December 30, 1913, p. 7; “Des Pieds de 100,000 francs,” Le Journal, January 17, 1914, p. 6; “Charles Chaplin Insures His Feet for $150,000,” Motion Picture News, April 24, 1915, p. 50; Harry Reichenbach, in collaboration with David Freedman, Phantom Fame, or, The Anatomy of Ballyhoo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1931), p. 8; Charles Fuir, “Hollywood Hookum,” Motion Picture News, September 1, 1917, p. 1487; “Deaths,” Variety, November 15, 1918, p. 45.

[17] Guy Price, “Coast Picture News,” Variety, May 3, 1918, p. 41.

[18] “Death Came Suddenly,” Wid’s Daily, November 16, 1918, p. 2; “Popular Publicity Man Dies in New York City,” Long Beach Daily Telegram, November 15, 1918, p. 12.

[19] Draft registration card for Ray Bagley, June 5, 1917; U.S. Census Bureau (1920), Detroit, Minnesota; U.S. Census Bureau (1930), Edina Village, Minnesota; Lena Hanson Bagley, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/70786766/lena-bagley.

[20] “Odds and Ends,” The Missoulian, December 22, 1967, page 1.

L'articolo RAY BAGLEY proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.

Given current preoccupations, it seems appropriate to launch this blog with a post about coughing in the cinema. I’m not talking about movies with people coughing on screen, although I’ll mention a few of those; I mean the sounds and occasional inadvertent sprays of audience members whose coughs tend to generate infectious responses that travel around an auditorium like calls between tree-dwelling animals. We’ve all done it, we’ve all occasionally been bothered by it; during the Giornate, a combination of exhaustion and change-of-season temperatures inevitably lead to an uptick in coughs which, pre-COVID, would have been considered relatively innocuous but now could potentially cause a creeping feeling of paranoia, if not worse. So I thought I’d take a wide-ranging, occasionally humorous look at how coughing in the cinema was viewed internationally in the silent era, including potential causes and methods of alleviation, while also indulging myself by meandering into issues that will sound awfully familiar, like wearing masks, instituting an every-other-seat, every-other-row policy, and disinfecting cinemas. Unsurprisingly, we’ve been here before.

Even without the medical component, coughing during a play or movie has a way of getting on some peoples’ nerves, such as the theatre critic of The Washington Post in October 1918, during the height of that year’s flu pandemic:

A careful record, covering a period of a dozen or more years, will show that exactly 37 percent of every audience have schooled themselves to sneeze or cough at precisely the psychologically wrong moment. These public pests held back their paroxysms until the exact moment selected by the playwright for a phrase or a sentence of paramount importance. Since the Spanish-American war no Washington audience has been permitted to hear all the lines of an important play. If the existing, temporary ban on amusements will bring about a reform of the coughing and sneezing portion of the audience addicted to respiratory demonstration, then, indeed, may it be said that “sweet are the uses of adversity.”[1]

He was definitely overly optimistic. In 1909, Variety’s Paris correspondent reported that a French scientist – I’ve been unable to pinpoint who – claimed the reason people cough more in the theatre than elsewhere is that “when the ear is extended, as it were, in order to better catch the words, the throat becomes irritated and thus provokes the cough.”[2] I’ve located only one commentator who makes a distinction between theatre coughing and cinema coughing, and that’s the prolific Spanish humorist Joaquín Belda (1883-1935), best known today for his erotic novels. Rosa Cardona Arnau at the Filmoteca de Catalunya suggested to me that the “I. Belda” who signed an article in La rivista cinematografica, translated into Italian from Spanish, could be Joaquín Belda, which makes sense given how the letters “i” and “j” are often interchangeable in Italian. We’ve not found where the original-language text was published, but Belda’s playful piece implies that since there’s no live performer on-stage to be perturbed by a fit of coughing, no one in the cinema bothers to cough – he calls it “immunità dal catarro”, or “phlegm immunity,”[3] which sounds to me about as plausible a theory as “herd immunity,” though less dangerous.

Notwithstanding the French scientist’s convictions, most medical experts of the era ascribed coughing fits in the cinema to unsanitary conditions prevalent in down-market establishments likened to the Black Hole of Calcutta.[4] In 1909, Dr. Howard D. King of New Orleans was deeply disturbed by many moving picture halls, where “an ever-moving stream of humanity, constantly passing in and out, stirs up dust and dirt that verily reeks with tubercle bacilli…breathing in air which has become befouled and disease-laden through lack of sufficient air capacity.”[5] The concern was, of course, international: “Il cinematografo ormai è entrato nelle abitudini di ogni ceto di persone; gli spettacoli perciò devono esser dati in ambienti sani, puliti, spaziosi, dove lo spettatore potrà avere la certezza che non si attenti alla sua salute e non corra il rischio di morire abbrustolito o schiacciato da un momento all’altro.”[6]

“Abbrustolito” (grilled) and “schiacciato” (crushed) weren’t the usual concerns – germs were far more worrisome. I’d like to get a hold of a copy of the Bulletin of the Chicago School of Sanitary Instruction from September 20, 1913, which The Lancet speaks of admiringly for an article showing two petri dishes, one taken from an unventilated theatre, revealing 250 “bacterial colonies,” and the other, with just five, from a ventilated one.[7] I suspect both were underestimates, and to be honest, how many such colonies would be found in most cinemas today? This month Lawrence Napper’s always enjoyable and informative At the Pictures blog explores the debate in Britain surrounding ventilation in light of the 1918 flu pandemic (https://atthepictures.photo.blog/2020/05/06/have-you-had-the-new-influenza-yet-the-bioscope-the-cinema-and-the-epidemic-1918-19/), and it’s a must read.

Ventilation was a major preoccupation of the trade papers of the early teens, when municipalities were enforcing regulations that didn’t always align with exhibitors’ budgets. That’s why the editor of Motography was so happy to repurpose Charles-Edward Amory Winslow’s “The Scientific Basis for Ventilation,” published in August 1911 in the School Board Journal, printing a slightly shorter version three months later as “Some Facts About Ventilation” and crediting the Journal but not the author.  Winslow’s argument was that “rebreathed air” wasn’t dangerous – there were no health risks in crowding people into a cinema and denying them a certain amount of new air between performances. The real catalysts for breeding pathogens, he wrote, was heat and humidity, so air conditioning and the occasional fresh breeze are what’s needed, not government-enforced ventilation standards: “The mouth spray is a local rain which drops quickly to the ground, not a general pollution of the atmosphere. It could not be detected by any analytical standards, and could not be remedied by ventilation. It is a kind of direct contact rather than a problem of air pollution.”[8] I don’t know if Winslow, who became a major public health figure, changed his views on how some viruses, unlike rain, really can stay in the air, but Motography was so happy with what he wrote – or with how they interpreted what he wrote – that they plagiarized that article two years later in an editorial entitled “Give ‘Em Air,” which basically says adequate ventilation in the cinema is more of a luxury than a necessity, so why waste all that money re-fitting your theatres? My guess is the editorial was written by associate editor John B. Rathbun, whose book Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting was serialized in the magazine between 1913 and 1914 before being published in volume form; Rathbun brazenly lifts entire passages of Winslow’s text, uncredited, to reassure exhibitors that their poorly ventilated establishments won’t do any harm.[9]

PREGNANT WITH DISEASE GERMS

That may have been a good line in 1914 (though I have my doubts), but once the flu pandemic hit, ventilation was back in the news in a big way. Richard Koszarski wrote the first major scholarly article on how the pandemic was discussed in the press, specifically in Moving Picture World; then two years ago, Ben Strassfeld published an excellent study on how Detroit movie theatres negotiated the virus and its effects (he’s reproduced some original articles these past weeks in his Twitter feed, https://twitter.com/bstrassfeld?lang=en).[10] Another extraordinary source is the University of Michigan’s digital Influenza Encylopedia, whose search engine reveals a wealth of sources: https://www.influenzaarchive.org/index.html. It was there I discovered a letter to the editor regarding the state of affairs in Rochester, New York in December 1918:

I made a round of the motion picture houses on Saturday, to note the hygienic conditions, and from my observation and experience I would say that there is not the slightest possibility of stamping out the epidemic of influenza in Rochester, as long as the managers and proprietors overlook the elementary conditions of sanitation, ventilation, and the ordinary antiseptic preventives. In several of these breeding pens half the audience was coughing and sneezing, spitting and hawking. The muggy warm atmosphere, odorous with the emanations of bodies packed together like sardines in a can, pregnant with disease germs, was an abomination to a health-respecting city.

There is not a motion picture house in any European town that does not have to obey stringent regulations regarding ventilation.

It should be added that the writer identifies himself as a frequent cinema goer, so he’s not one of those moral reformers using the pandemic as an excuse to attack the industry.[11]

As cinemas were forced to shut down, many exhibitors decried the double-standards of municipalities that allowed crowded department stores to remain open while their own establishments were made to close for varying periods of time (and then close again with each new wave of the virus).[12] Every region and city worldwide instituted regulations for remaining open or for re-opening, none of which were embraced by either the cinema owners or the public; now in 2020 as we hear of festivals and theatres trying to work out ways to come back to life, it’s sobering to discover that the masks and alternate seating plans being discussed are hardly fresh ideas, nor, I must add, are they conducive to an enjoyable cinema-going experience.

MUZZLE HIM IN SKIPPED ROWS

My favorite article on the subject reports on the citizens of Alberta, Canada, who despite fines for not wearing masks, did their best to avoid them: “Apparently the approved method of wearing a mask is to keep it suspended under the chin until a policeman appears in sight when it is hastily pulled over the nose and mouth.” Those Albertans who did acquiesce to regulations aimed to give the face coverings an air of mondanité, decreeing that fashionable female theatre-goers were to wear black masks, while their male companions should wear white.[13] In Des Moines, Iowa, the mask regulation was so unpopular that it was made optional, though the city’s influenza committee strongly recommended they be worn, and masks were on sale in cinemas and theatres.[14] With the second influenza wave in early 1919, San Francisco returned to mandatory masks in theatres and other public-gathering spaces, notwithstanding objections from religious groups (ring any bells?).[15] In Portland, where by late February face coverings were optional, the manager of the Oregon Theater went to great lengths to ensure his customers felt safe: “Theatre attendants are required to have a supply of flu masks with them all the time and when a patron coughs or sneezes or shows any evidence of so doing, the attendants are empowered to fit him with a mask – muzzle him, so to speak. We presume it is optional with the patron to submit to muzzling or to leave the theatre.”[16]

A greater debate raged over whether instituting an every-other-seat and/or every-other-row policy was an effective means of staving off infection. A flu resurgence in Iowa was so bad that the threat of cinema closures forced exhibitors to rethink their policies:

After a lull the epidemic broke out badly in Des Moines and immediately the usual agitation of “close the theatres” was started. First the use of influenza masks as a compulsory measure was tried out, with poor results, as patrons either regarded the use of the mask as an imposition or a joke. The measure fell through after one day’s trial, and then the agitation for a closed town started. Special committees were appointed for and against closing by the respective parties interested and a merry battle followed.

Finally it was decided to permit the theatres to remain open by using half capacity, spreading the seating arrangements through alternate rows. This is working out with fair results and managers say is far better than closing altogether. Programs have been considerably curtailed and less expensive features offered for the time being.[17]

Cinema owners in Omaha, Nebraska were even less open to such regulations, leading to a Christmas Eve revolt after the Health Commissioner Dr. Ernest T. Manning continued to enforce the every-other-row rule. Perhaps their argument that the policy exacerbated crowding in the lobbies finally swayed Dr. Manning, though it’s more likely that decreasing infection numbers led him to lift the decree.[18] At least as late as March 1919, some cities returned to the alternate rows regulation, such as one in Madison, Wisconsin where policemen were positioned inside the theatres to ensure both cinema managers and audiences followed the rules.[19]

Ciné-Journal, January 21, 1922, p. 16

DISINFECTION

I’ve been unable to find whether an alternate row policy was instituted in Europe during the pandemic, though I assume it must have been in some places. What does come through quite clearly is the frustration of cinema owners angered by regulations they found onerous. This irritation is especially apparent in an editorial from November 1918 in the Rome-based trade publication Cine-gazzetta, after legitimate theatres were allowed to reopen but cinemas were kept closed until a proper disinfection plan could be worked out. The city prefect declared that cinemas must close for one hour between screenings in order to disinfect the premises:

Un’ora? E come è possibile disinfettare un locale in un’ora? Evidentemente alla Prefettura non si son resi esatto conto di ciò che importa una disinfezione accurata ed efficace. Perchè le cose: o si fanno o non si fanno ! O disinfettare efficacemente, o nulla ! Infatti per disinfettare un locale a regola… d’igiene, stavo per dire a regola d’arte, bisogna prima di tutto attendere che il pubblico sia tutto completamente uscito, poi bisogna aprire tutte le porte, per la opportuna ventilazione. Occorre, per un completo cambiamento d’aria, tenere le porte aperte per lo meno tre quarti d’ora. Quindi si debbon spazzare i pavimenti, avendo cura di averli prima bagnati, spolverare i mobili, le sedie, le poltrone, cambiare possibilmente alle medesime il cuoio, il velluto o la paglia, a seconda di come sono confezionate, dare una passatina di bianco alle pareti, ecc. ecc. Dopo, usciti questi primi, debbono entrare altri disinfettatori con l’incarico di fare delle polverizzazioni di acido fenico o di altro sterilizzante nell’aria ambiente allo scopo di distruggere ogni possibilità di germi lasciati dai precendenti disinfettatori, poichè non è detto che sol perchè un tale esercita il nobile mestiere del disinfettatore non possa essere egli stesso infetto. Dopo di che, uscita questa seconda schiera, si devono riaprire le porte, e mettere in moto i ventilatori per scacciare il puzzo dei disinfettanti, e per far asciugare i pavimenti irrorati.

A occhio e croce si vede che per tutte queste operazioni, che debbono essere eseguite sotto lo scrupoloso controllo di uno o più ispettori, occorreranno per lo meno tre giorni, onde, i «cinematografari» hanno chiesto alla Prefettura, in omaggio ai sani precetti dell’igiene, che il decreto sia modificato in questo senso: Si permette la riapertura delle sale cinematografiche a patto però, che in esse si dia uno spettacolo ogni quattro giorni, affinchè i proprietari possano avere il tempo di far eseguire le opportune disinfezioni dei locali fra uno spettacolo e l’altro.[20]

This battle between city health officials and cinema owners was unsurprisingly fought worldwide, the lines drawn between economics on one side and vigilant safety on the other – something we’re facing in the present crisis. The briefly-lived French review La Pomme cuite was more cautious than most, expressing concern that the cinemas in Lyon had opened too quickly and thus exposed the city to a potential resurgence, as was happening in Switzerland: “Ces mesures on été levées, peut-être prématurément, devant les instances pressantes des « marchands de spectacles ». Et puis la forte dîme prélevée sur les recettes alimente nombre d’œuvres municipales ou préfectorales. Cette considération n’a pas été étrangère à la réouverture demandée. Espérons que cette mesure ne nous vaudra pas – comme en Suisse – une recrudescence du redoutable fléau!”[21]

But by late December 1918 in Milan, tempers exploded when the city prefect, Count Filiberto Olgiati, ordered the movie houses closed after another wave of infections, leading to a boisterous meeting among cinema owners that was reported in outraged detail by the trade publication Film, which pointed out the financial difficulties not just for upper management, but all workers in the sector, including musicians:

In consequenza di un improvviso e draconiano ordine del Prefetto, diramato ieri sera a tarda ora, che imponeva a tutti i locali cinematografici la chiusura da oggi, giorno di festa, e fino a nuovo avviso, per misura d’igiene, dato il ritorno dell’epidemia, fu indetta d’urgenza per stamane una riunione di tutti i cinematografisti per discuter circa il contegno da tenere di fronte a questa misura prefettizia, la quale, per quanto giustificata da motivi di salute pubblica, pure per esser limitata esclusivamente alla cinematografia, e per non esser la prima che contro di questa è stata presa da un pò di tempo in qua, rivestiva tutti i caratteri di un’angheria. La riunione è riuscita affollata e movimentissima; e i più calmi ed equilibrati si son dovuti adoperare per ridurre alla ragione i più esaltati, tra i quali c’era chi voleva aprir i locali in barba al decreto, e chi costringer con dimostrazioni e chiassate i teatri e gli altri luoghi pubblici a interromper e a chiudere….

Dopo lunga discussione, durante la quale il Cav. Corti ha lucidamente esposto la condizione nella quale si sarebbe venuta a trovare tutta la classe per la chiusura, anche breve, dei locali, e il pericolo di disordini nella massa se il decreto dovesse esser mantenuto, il Prefetto ha consentito a revocar il decreto stesso, e ha concesso che i locali aprissero per quattro spettacoli tra diurni e serali, purchè rigorosamente rispettate tutte le altre disposizioni igieniche già emanate, compreso un lungo intervallo tra uno spettacolo e l’altro, e il divieto d’ingresso a i bambini.[22]

By this point, Winslow’s theories about air-borne germs and ventilation had been superseded by recommendations more reassuring to nervous audiences concerned their movie-going experience might put them in danger.[23] Good air circulation became a priority, along with wetting floors to prevent dust from rising (though surely the dampness created further problems) and regular disinfections with products like that marketed by the Vienna-based company Perolin (their production facilities on Feldmühlgasse were just a few doors down from Gustav Klimt’s studio, who himself was a victim of the epidemic), which promised to keep flu at bay: “l’ingénieux petit appareil vraiment pratique et dont le produit disinfectant agréable à l’odorat et ne tâchant pas est le moyen le plus efficace pour combattre l’épidémie de grippe.”[24] Given that Perolin, used in cinemas into the 1960s, manufactured “ethereal oils and essences for deodorizing and purifying the air,”[25], I doubt it was especially effective warding off viruses, but presumably it helped to calm a tense public, and theatre managers overall were reporting a marked decline in coughing and sneezing thanks to all these prophylactic measures.[26]

WARNING! TO COUGHERS AND SNEEZERS!

Another strategy for keeping the flu at bay was education through film itself, via public service spots like the opening of Universal’s “Current Events, No. 73,” declaring, Warning!! To Coughers and Sneezers! and showing how not to cough and sneeze when around others.[27] Shorts like this were also produced on the local level, such as one made by B. W. Reuben in cooperation with Cleveland’s Health Commissioner Dr. Harry L. Rockwood: “Evil effects of coughing or sneezing in crowds are shown, and persons who feel they must cough in a crowd are shown how to do it without endangering the health of others. Model sanitary homes and factories and proper means of ventilating both are pictured.”[28] A great and rare example from the UK, Dr. Wise on Influenza (1919), is available online through Tony Fletcher’s Celluloid Tapestry YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rzQNKEpNciI. Insightful commentary can be found from both Bryony Dixon, https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/news-bfi/features/silent-film-great-pandemic-1918 and Lawrence Napper, https://atthepictures.photo.blog/2020/05/19/mr-wise-on-influenza-public-information-films-and-the-flu-epidemic-of-1918/.

When I began looking into all of this, I assumed that comedy shorts involving uncontrollable coughs would be a pre-1918 theme, such as Pathé’s amusing La peur des microbes (1907) [29], released in the U.S. as Afraid of Microbes and fortuitously available on the Library of Congress’ website, https://www.loc.gov/item/2006640756/. Or Ambrosio’s La paura dei microbi (1911) also known as Robinet ha paura dei microbi, starring Marcel Perez. But clearly later audiences were still happy to laugh at the flu and hypochondria, as witnessed by Universal’s Star Comedy entry Up the Flue (1919), a Lyons and Moran short “which deals with the recent influenza epidemic” and involves quarantine as well as a wedding ceremony with everyone wearing gas masks.[30] Stéphanie Salmon also alerted me to the 1921 short Fritzigli a la grippe, directed by Amédée Rastrelli and starring the Max Linder imitator André Séchan in his character role of Fritzigli, told by a doctor he has the Spanish flu and must buy a pair of castanets and go to Spain. Unlike the Lyons-Moran film, it doesn’t appear to have been especially well-received.[31]

I think I’ve gone on long enough – future posts will rarely be so long, so if you’ve reached this point, thanks for indulging me. There’s no better way of ending this discussion than a Moving Picture World article from December 1918:

The great epidemic is now passing, but it will not be quickly forgotten. And there is of course the danger of its return at some future time, perhaps next spring. That at any rate has been the experience in other afflicted countries. For this reason we believe the proprietor of a moving picture house will have every excuse for keeping close watch upon the health of his patrons at all times in the future. Just how rigid his regulations may be made is something he must determine for himself, but we think he will make a general gain in the confidence of his clientele if he announces careful supervision of some sort in the future.[32]

Stay safe everybody,
Jay

Big thanks for help with this post go to Rosa Cardona Arnau, Mariona Bruzzo i Llaberia, Stéphanie Salmon, Elif Rongen-Kaynakçi and Frank Dabell.

[1] “Gossip of the Theater,” The Washington Post, October 6, 1918, p. E3.

[2] Edward G. Kendrew, “Paris Notes,” Variety, May 29, 1909 p. 10.

[3] I. Belda [transl. E. Dettori], “Il cine,” La rivista cinematografica, August 10, 1920, p. VI. For a French take, suggesting theatre audiences cough primarily when bored, see Alex Madis, “La Toux du Spectateur,” La Rampe, April 16, 1922, p. 9.

[4] “Some Insanitary Features of the Extemporised Picture Theatre,” The Lancet, April 5, 1913, p. 976.

[5] Howard D. King, “The Moving Picture Show. A New Factor in Health Conditions,” The Journal of the American Medical Association, August 14, 1909, pp. 519-20. The article was referenced approvingly one month later in “The Control of Kinematograph Shows,” The Lancet, September 11, 1909, p. 839.

[6] “Every class of person is now accustomed to the cinema. Accordingly, screenings must be given in premises that are healthy, clean and spacious, where spectators can be certain that their hygiene is not in peril, and that they do not run the risk of being grilled or crushed to death.” A[lfonoso]. A. Cavallaro, “Igiene e Sicurezza nei Cinematografi,” La Vita cinematografica, May 30-June 5, 1911, pp. 1-2.

[7] “The Sanitary Conditions of Cinematograph Theatres,” The Lancet, October 18, 1913, p. 1135.

[8] C.E.A. Winslow, “The Scientific Basis for Ventilation,” School Board Journal, August 1911, pp. 13-14; 34-35; “Some Facts About Ventilation”, Motography November 1911, pp. 221-223.

[9] “Give ‘Em Air,” Motography, November 1, 1913, pp. 303-304; John B. Rathbun, “Motion Picture Making and Exhibiting. Chapter VII,” Motography, February 7, 1914, pp. 95-96.

[10] Richard Koszarski, “Flu season: Moving Picture World reports on pandemic influenza, 1918-19,” Film History 17, no. 4 (2005), pp. 466-485; Ben Strassfeld, “Infectious Media: Debating the Role of Movie Theaters in Detroit During the Spanish Influenza of 1918,” Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 38, no. 2 (2018), pp. 227-245.

[11] J.C., “Influenza Perils of Motion Picture Houses,” Rochester Times-Union, December 31, 1918, p. 6.

[12] See “Fighting the Influenza Epidemic,” The Moving Picture World, November 2, 1918, p. 602; “Facts and Comments,” The Moving Picture World, January 4, 1919, pp. 74-75.

[13] “Albertans Will Not Wear Masks,” The Bismarck Daily Tribune, Nov. 29, 1918, p. 5.

[14] “Influenza Masks Optional,” Evening Times-Republican [Marshalltown, Iowa], December 4, 1918, p. 2.

[15] “Second Influenza Wave Hits Coast,” The Moving Picture World, February 1, 1919, p. 601; “San Francisco Goes Back to Masks,” The Moving Picture World, February 8, 1919, p. 734.

[16] Abraham Nelson, “Portland News Letter,” The Moving Picture World, February 22, 1919, p. 1062.

[17] “Some States Experience Setbacks,” The Moving Picture World, December 21, 1918, p. 1353; see also “Iowa ‘Flu’ Ruling,” Wid’s Daily, December 14, 1918, p. 1.

[18] “Manning Turns Down Theater Men’s Request,” The Bee: Omaha, December 25, 1918, p. 12; “Dr. Manning to Remove Skip Row Rule on Monday,” The Bee: Omaha, December 28, 1918, p. 7; “Omaha Picture Fans Violate the Alternate Row Ruling,” The Moving Picture World, January 11, 1919, pp. 184-185. See also the digital Influenza Encyclopedia’s page on Omaha: www.influenzaarchive.org/cities/city-omaha.html.

[19] “Madison’s ‘Every Other Row’,” Variety, March 28, 1919, p. 34.

[20] “One hour? And how can premises be disinfected in an hour? Evidently the Prefect’s Office hasn’t completely understood what careful and effective disinfecting consists of. Either things are done effectively, or not at all! To disinfect premises according to state of… hygiene (I was going to say state of the art) standards, you first have to wait for every member of the audience to leave, and then open every door for proper ventilation. For a complete change of air, doors must remain open for at least three quarters of an hour. Then you have to sweep the floors, having first washed them, dust the furniture, chairs and seats, and possibly replace their leather, velvet or straw, depending on how they’re made, give the walls a coat of whitewash, etc., etc. When the cleaning staff has left, the disinfecting people have to come in and spray the air with carbolic acid or some other sterilizing agent so they can destroy any possible germs left by the cleaning crew before them, since just because someone has the noble role of disinfettatore it doesn’t mean they’re immune from infection. Then, when this second crew has left, you must reopen the doors and turn on ventilators to get rid of the stink of disinfectants, and dry the soaked floors.
Roughly speaking, these operations – having taken place under the strict supervision of one or more inspectors – will take at least three days. That is why the “cinematografari” have asked the Prefect’s Office, paying tribute to the healthy rules of hygiene, for the decree to be modified as follows: cinemas should be allowed to reopen, but only if a screening is held every four days, so proprietors have time to carry out suitable disinfection between one show and another.” “Arte muta,” Cine-gazzetta, November 10, 1918, p. 3.

[21] “These measures were lifted, perhaps prematurely, under pressure from the ‘spectacle peddlers’. And then the heavy tithe levied on revenues provides for numerous municipal or prefectural projects; this consideration was not unrelated to the current reopening. Let us hope this measure does not bring – as it has in Switzerland – a fresh outbreak of this formidable scourge!” “Perrache-Brotteaux-Fourvières,” La Pomme cuite, November-December 1918, p. 193.

[22] “Following a sudden, draconian order from the Prefect issued late last night, requiring all cinemas to close from today, a holiday, until further notice, for health reasons, and given the return of the epidemic, a meeting of all cinematografisti was urgently called for this morning to discuss the attitude to be adopted toward this measure. Although justified by reasons of public hygiene and exclusively limited to cinemas, and though it is not the first measure taken against them for some time, the decree had all the characteristics of a kangaroo court. The meeting was crowded and very lively; and the calmer, more balanced participants had to work hard to calm the hotheads, some of whom wanted to open their premises in defiance of the decree, while others hoped demonstrations and ruckus would force theatres and other public places to interrupt their events and close….
After a long debate, during which Cavaliere Corti lucidly explained what the general consequences would be, even with a brief closure of premises, and the danger of mass disturbances if the decree were maintained, the Prefect agreed to revoke it. He granted openings for four screenings, daytime and evening, as long as all other existing health regulations were strictly respected, including a long intermission between one show and another, and a ban on children.” “La Cinematografia Milanese, e la spada del conte Damocle Olgiati,” Film, January 12, 1919. p. 8. The article is dated December 29th.

[23] See for example J.P. Walker, M.D., D.P.H., “The Public Health (Influenza) Regulations, 1918,” Public Health, January 1920, p. 62; and Herman N. Bundesen, M.D., “Theatre Ventilation and Its Relation to the Public’s Health,” Exhibitors Herald, November 8, 1924, pp. VII, XXXI.

[24] “this ingenious little device is truly practical, and its pleasant-smelling, non-staining disinfectant is the most effective way to combat the flu epidemic.” Dr. Tanmieux, “La grippe et les Cinémas,” Ciné-journal, February 4, 1922, p. 20. Just by the author’s pseudonymous name, it’s clear the article is an advertisement disguised as a news item.

[25] See https://www.1133.at/document/view/id/55; Official Gazette of the United States Patent Office, Volume 312, 1923, p. 235.

[26] Robert C. McElravy, “Permanent Health Rules,” The Moving Picture World, December 14, 1918, pp. 1203-1204; see also “Digest of Pictures of the Week,” Exhibitors Herald, February 7, 1920, p. 52, for how the warnings occasionally backfired.

[27] The Moving Picture Weekly, October 12, 1918, p. 37.

[28] “Cleveland Fights Influenza by Means of the Moving Picture Screen,” Reel and Slide, December 1918, p. 10.

[29] http://filmographie.fondation-jeromeseydoux-pathe.com/1053-peur-des-microbes-la

[30] The Moving Picture World, February 15, 1919, p. 947; The Moving Picture Weekly, February 15, 1918, p. 32.

[31] http://filmographie.fondation-jeromeseydoux-pathe.com/18635-fritzigli-a-la-grippe?depuisindex=titres; “Les Films de la Semaine,” Le journal du Ciné-Club, January 28, 1921, p. 11; “Export-Union Film,” La Cinématographie française, June 26, 1920, p. 65.

[32]  McElravy, op. cit., pp. 1203-1204.

L'articolo COUGHING IN THE SILENT CINEMA proviene da Le Giornate del Cinema Muto.