First of the Red Hot Mamas: "Coon Shouting" and the Jewish Ziegfeld Girl.

LAVITT, PAMELA BROWN

Jewish women vaudevillians at the turn of the century popularized what is now a little-discussed and misunderstood performance venue, known as "coon shouting." These once well-known, now obscure popular entertainers were crossing and breaking racial and gender boundaries, enacting narratives of immigration and Americanization on the Jewish female body. Coon shouting, the last descendent of the nineteenth-century minstrel show, represented not only popular theatre's transition from blackface minstrelsy to American vaudeville, but found currency in and capitalized on the suppressed identities of these Jewish performers. Provocative ambiguity fueled the racial uncertainty, meaningful messages and theatrical success of a popular fad lasting nearly 40 years, from 1880 to 1920.(1) This study, part of a larger project on Jewish minstrelsy, reflects an interdisciplinary move to merge performance studies with Jewish and cultural studies in order to understand the deeper meanings of performance in historical context.(2)

"Last of the Red Hot Mamas"

In an often-cited passage of Sophie Tucker's autobiography, Some of These Days, the comedienne recounts her first theatrical triumph in 1906. She claims to have begrudgingly donned blackface at the insistence of a Harlem manager who thought Tucker could not get a sexy song across. He jeered, "This one's so big and ugly the crowd out front will razz her. Better get some cork and black her up."(3) Rebelling onstage, Tucker reportedly lifted a smidgen of glove to reveal plump, pink skin bulging underneath. Tucker, like many popular entertainers who preceded her, outwardly performed blackness while attempting to efface its influence personally.(4) In her autobiography, she made sure to self-consciously foreclose any doubts about her coloration: "[I'd] wave to the crowd to show I was a white girl," she writes.(5)

For an extra "kick," Russian-born Sonya Abuza eventually interpolated shund or common Yiddish into her repertoire.(6) The unique mix of racial disguise and dialect humor performed by a female comedienne- three "low other" associations in comic collusion-shocked and dismayed audiences into side-ripping gasps and howls. Like the exposed wrist, injected schmaltz was discordant with Tucker's swarthy sound and spectacle. Yet the combination endeared Tucker to audiences weaned on minstrel mirth and Hebrew impersonation. Furthermore her novel infractions of the blackface form did more than confirm Tucker's "bona-fide" whiteness; they laid bare her white Jewishness at a crucial time in American Jewish history when Jews-still tallied as "black" and "Oriental" by the US Census-were casting themselves increasingly as ethnic variations of the Caucasian race to describe their contributions to American society as distinct from that of African Americans.(7) Tucker's performance reflects these aspirations, but it also captures the conscious transition.

From 1906 to 1912, Tucker was billed on the minor vaudeville circuit as the "world-renowned Coon Shouter," a singer of "coon" songs. Coon songs emerged from the ashes of the Civil War when minstrel shows supposedly fell from comedic grace.(8) Otherwise known as Negro dialect songs, they were first introduced in the late 1870s in "primadonna" acts, when minstrel men known as female impersonators wore "high yellow" makeup and portrayed romantic leading octoroons and comic wenches. Though lynching was on the rise and the unspeakable crimes of rape and miscegenation gripped the white imagination, as Eric Lott has shown, theatre audiences were fascinated by doomed portrayals of interracial love featuring cross-dressed men playing mulatto women-the object of both white and black male desire. Female audiences, especially, were bewitched by the up-to-date fashions primadonnas sported as white minstrels preached conservative sexual, racial and social mores.(9) When women began playing a greater role on the popular stage in the Gay Nineties, primadonna acts soon diminished but its song lyrics, fashionable agenda and stereotypes fed right into vaudeville as it garnered a more respectable middle-class female audience. As a result shouters, far from being opera stars, were often called primadonnas. The epithet established both their middle-class aspirations and the indelible connection to minstrel performance.

Unlike standard sentimental ballads written by minstrel men E.B. Christy and Stephen Foster, still much beloved to this day, coon songs were recklessly antisentimental tunes written by emerging and prolific black and Jewish composers such as Earnest Hogan, Irving Berlin, Harry von Tilzer (Harry Gumm) and Monroe Rosenfeld. Trying to break into the entertainment business, their aesthetics were circumscribed in a vehemently antiblack and xenophobic milieu. By the mid-1890s they had formed a tight-knit Tin Pan Alley industry that came to dominate vaudeville and early black musicals. They latched onto popular minstrel imagery and combined it with "Negro" dialect, bits of upbeat ragtime syncopation and references to the forlorn plantation (e.g., Dixie or the Swanee River [sic] after Stephen Foster's beloved ditty, "Way Down Upon the Swanee River").(10) Intended as comedy, coon songs ranged from jocular and dismissive to cruel and sadistic:(11)

 Oh, dar's gwine to be a cakewalk in de town.
 Tomorrow night, if all goes right.
 And de colored folks will do the thing up brown,.
 All de wenches are delight and the darkies are excited.
 Colored aristocracy will shine.
 But those coons will quit their bluffin',
 'caze I'll make them feel like nuffin'.
 When my gal and I fall into line.(12)

Redolent with stereotypes of blacks as cakewalking, cocksure, razor-toting, chicken-stealing, alcohol-fond idles who aspire to aristocracy but can't "fall into line," coon song sheet music and illustrated covers proliferated defamatory images of blacks in barely coded slanderous lyrics. For example, the "N" word and associated inferences were dispatched in words like "mammy," "honey boy," "pickinniny," "chocolate," "watermelon," "possum" and the most prevalent "coon."(13)

The word "coon" shoulders its own dislocated history. In the early 1800s it referred to working-class whites who "had not internalized [the] capitalist work" ethic of new industrialism. By 1848 "coon" had evolved into a racial slur on the minstrel stage and increasingly became displaced onto blacks by the 1880s and '90s as white anxieties flared in the face of rising unemployment, swelling immigration, and economic depression.(14) Tin Pan Alley "specialized in mixed messages" and endowed the word coon with a variety of contrary meanings.(15) Thus, coon songs, however cruel, were also romantic symbols of America's preindustrial, prewar stability and pecking order--a way of simplifying, or "plantationing" if you will, the contemporary urban jungle. Jewish composers recast their immigrant brethren into America's symbolic, lowest-common-denominator past. They also assimilated black and immigrant foibles into bucolic settings, patriotic pageantry and familiar minstrel business. Their efforts paralleled and reflected the concurrent goals of Jewish-American nativism, the period when German Jews founded numerous patriotic historical institutions, such as the American Jewish Historical Foundation (1892) and Hebrew Veterans of the Civil War (1897), to quash rising anti-Semitism, battle disputes over Jewish wartime service, and lay claim to colonial Jewry.(16)

Eventually, rougher coon songs gave way to gentler, neater ones as established composers introduced softened, gentler images of blacks and immigrants customarily blamed for the many social evils plaguing America's beleaguered cities at the turn of the century.(17) By the 1910s references to the word "coon" would become even more discreet. Sheet music of the immensely popular "If the Man on the Moon Were a Coon" (1905) by Fred Fischer sold some three-million copies, and "moon" became a popular sendoff of "coon." Nora Bayes' "Mr. Moon-man" (Ziegfeld Follies of 1910) and Fanny Brice's coon song "Row, Row, Row" (Follies of 1912) contain no mentions of the word "coon." Instead, rhyming word "spoon" in the latter portrays the salacious trysts between Johnnie Jones, called "a Weisenheimer" (Yiddish slang for "wise ass"), and his girl Flo.(18) These shifts in terminology reveal the insidious, latent and rhetorical ways diffused minstrel stereotypes traveled in turn-of-the-century popular culture when coon songs no longer addressed issues of race per se but deployed some residual racial or sexual charge through various extractions of the word "coon."

"Coon shouting" referred to the distinct performances delivered by female soubrettes to get "rough" and "neat" coon songs across. Coon shouters employed a bricolage of vocal styles and physical gestures, including eccentric costumes, character impersonation, "black" dialect and cakewalking. Madge Fox's 1942 obituary suggests how shouting may have even placed considerable stress on the female body:

 Madge Fox, the "coon shouter" ... is not an acrobat, the picture to the
 contrary notwithstanding. Whether she became a coon song singer because of
 her ability to contort her body or whether the contortion is the sad result
 of "shouting" is a mystery which only Miss Fox and a jury of medical
 experts can decide. If the latter is the case, let it be a warning to other
 rag-time enthusiasts.(19)

By contrast, Stella Mayhew (born Sadie Saddler of Pittsburgh), a blackface soubrette who performed with Nora Bayes and Fanny Brice in "The Jolly Bachelors" (Broadway Theatre, 1910) as well as with Al Jolson in "Whirl of Society" (The Winter Garden, 1912), lamented how coon shouting was once primarily a vocal art:

 It is a queer thing how fashion in songs change [sic]. Only a few years ago
 coon songs were sung standing still, now you have to do a contortion act or
 give an imitation of a patient with the St. Vitus twitch to get a coon song
 over. But this sort of thing will not last. We shall go back to the old
 style of singing I think, some day. After all, that was more artistic; one
 had to have more talent, voice expression, and dialect than is necessary
 now.(20)

Mayhew reminds us that performance conventions were never conventional nor static in the mercurial world of vaudeville entertainment. Her sentiments are reflected by a reviewer who said of Mayhew, "She is a genuine artist ... Her exaggerated quaintness ... subtlety of idioms ... years of experience and well-trained past ... [are] now an almost lost art to the stage."(21)

Corroborating Mayhew's observations, John Niles-a self-described "vagabond musician" and coon song accompanist-argues that coon shouting by 1920 was a forgotten art and that the belting, torch-song sound associated with Sophie Tucker was a "modern invention"--not the manner in which a traditional shout was delivered. Rather than push from the diaphragm, the trick was to transpose the music upwards a fifth, from C to G, causing "the shouter to use the upper ranges" of her voice. Instead "of being sad and rather tearful," coon songs were "as thrilling as a Comanche war cry," Niles wrote in Musical Quarterly (1930). In the early days, this eerie vocal stretch is what was meant by "gettin' hot," a phrase commonly used to describe coon shouters and the scorching sexual heat of a shout.(22)

May Irwin, a musical comedienne of Irish decent and impressive girth, was "the first of the red hot mamas" and Sophie Tucker one of the last. Irwin initiated the coon song trend in the late 1870s and ushered the popular genre well into the '90s.(23) But by the 1890s during Tin Pan Alley's heyday coon shouting was chiefly considered a Jewish composer's and Jewish women's performance venue-with Tucker and Fanny Brice being the last and most famous.(24) By 1916 The Cincinnati Tribune reported that Tucker was dropping the "rough stuff" despite audience and manager demands. She had reached a modicum of success and wanted out. Her transition to ballads, torch songs and ribald comedy prompted The New York Telegraph to declare coon shouting a "virtually extinct form of singing" in 1917.(25) Tucker was thus nicknamed "The Last of the Red Hot Mamas," even if, as Niles asserts, her innovations had considerably transformed the venue.

In her recent book, Rank Women, M. Alison Kibler explains how minstrelsy's mammy figure-corpulent, amusing and uppity-was a useful image for "big and ugly" coon shouters from May Irwin to Stella Mayhew and Sophie Tucker. With respect to Irwin, who never wore blackface, Kibler argues that her voluptuous physiognomy and tough "bully" act placed Irwin at the "nexus of authority and subservience," and the mammy character lent her an uninhibited "masculine" comic style framed in a nonthreatening maternal package.(26) For example, Irwin's hit coon song "Lookin' for a Bully" and "The Bully Song" from "The Swell Miss Fitzwell" (1896) farcically depicts the vengeful rage of a black woman railing against her adulterous spouse. Song sheet covers depict both the sweet-faced mammy character and her dandy Zip Coon husband, illustrating the mammy as both disciplinarian and disempowered female. For the "rotund and unctuous" Mayhew the mammy image was limiting. For r 5 years she was relegated to playing colored mammies and bullies in vaudeville. In fact, Mayhew was so successful singing coon songs "River" and "Hallelujah" in blackface that managers, as was often the case, refused to accept her in any other role despite her tremendous talents.(27) Supposedly Mayhew appeared in burnt cork so frequently that interviewers deplored the damage done to her fine complexion. Whether figuratively or literally blackface considerably darkened Mayhew's image. The stain of performing in blackface-making visible what coon shouters only sang about-was often an irretrievable blot on her career. According to Joyce Antler, blackface may have denied the round and throaty Tucker her femaleness (she was often confused with male impersonators or primadonnas) but it did not deny her Jewish ethnicity.(28) Corpulent and assertive, Tucker's persona hearkened to both the black mammy and the overbearing Jewish mother figures. Later in her career, the "Last of the Red Hot Mamas" also became affectionately known as "The Yiddishe Mama" after celebrated recordings of "My Yiddishe Momme" (1928) in Yiddish and English--a sobriquet that testifies to Tucker's successful transition from coon to swoon songs but retains the inherent minstrel mammy connection. "By putting on the mask of a group that must remain immobile, unassimilable, and fixed at the bottom," argues Michael Rogin, "blackface links Jews and blacks in order to separate them."(29) By the bye, it appears that Tucker conjoined the black mammy ("Red Hot Mama") and the Jewish mother ("Yiddishe Mama") figures only to separate them. Her Yiddishe Mama was a "masculine" and maternal comic outlet somewhat analogous to the black mammy figure sans burnt cork and coon songs.(30) But in essence that minstrel content remains, only stripped of its outward forms.

Fanny Brice's memoirs and biographers similarly refer to her coon song days in terms of dues paid. Supposedly Brice circumvented blackface from the get-go and only performed in it once. Unlike Tucker, an immigrant and native Yiddish speaker, Brice learned her mother tongue (marne loshn) af der gas (in the streets) in order to distinguish her vaudeville act. Her most famous coon song, "Sadie Salome Go Home," written by Irving Berlin, registers as Jewish by virtue of Brice's punctuated "Oye's!" throughout.(31) Though it is difficult to say just how the nimble comedienne delivered these heymish (familiar) exclamations, biographer Barbara W. Grossman claims that Brice's coon song innovations involved imitating "black" speech patterns while retaining Jewish physical behavior (e.g., "Hebrew dialect," "Yiddish grimaces" and "grotesque Yiddish steps").(32) Writes Grossman: "Instead of wearing blackface and singing raucously, as coon shouters commonly did, [Brice] relied on the eccentric movements and facial expressions associated with Yiddish dialect comedy."(33) Using the word "instead," Grossman implies that Brice's Yiddish antics were perceived as equivalent to the blackface mask she eschewed. Grossman's comparison suggests that vaudeville audiences knew how to read Brice's physical cues to the extent that her "Jewish" comedy registered as a kindred if not commensurate comic device.

Tucker and Brice provide rare insight into the way Jewish women in the early twentieth century made use of and transmogrified male-dominated minstrel formulas-blackface and popular song-in order to introduce their slighted Jewish identities and "elements of unruly womanhood" on the popular stage.(34) Their distinctive, exuberant and unapologetic Yiddish breaches of established and transfigured minstrel forms impressed critics and won the affections of an expanding Jewish audience, who probably felt hailed and validated by popular theatre at last. For this reason Tucker and Brice are viewed lovingly as Jewish foremothers and construed to be archetypal coon shouters by scholars to this day. But the Jewishness Tucker and Brice enjoyed and built their comic careers on was exactly what their Jewish coon shouting predecessors had to sublimate. Moreover, their accounts have led most theatre, Jewish and cultural historians, such as Brice biographer Grossman, Ann Douglas, Irving Howe, Michael Rogin, Alexander Saxton, and, recently, Alison Kibler, to assume that coon shouting was customarily a blackface art.(35) Such assumptions are inkeeping with recent scholarly fascination with the visual trope of blackface-an arresting and unmistakable metaphor for racial anxieties, ethnic dissimulation, and class and urban tensions fomenting at the turn of the century.(36) But studying blackface not only limits performance scholars and historians to the realm of the visual, but chronologically speaking like Yiddish was an add-on that more or less overtly stated what Jewish coon shouters had been expressing by other means for quite some time.

Brice and Tucker's Yiddish coon shouting was quite novel when first introduced in the teens, and their use of blackface-applied or implied--can be viewed as an unorthodox platform for strong female, ethnic self-expression. But little attention has been paid to their Jewish vaudeville foremothers-svelte chorus girls who obscured their ethnic roots, did not black up, and could definitely get a sexy song across. Without blackface these coon shouters may have aimed for the theatrical "high" ground but "Americanized themselves by crossing and recrossing the racial line" just the same.(37) They performed a doubly coded racial masquerade whereby acknowledgements of the "Jewish race" and outward signs of the "black race" (blackface) were mutually suppressed but registered nonetheless by audiences who consciously and unconsciously enjoyed the heightened subterfuge and ethnic bating. Such intrigue made their personal histories, performances and celebrity a matter of great public fascination and considerable debate.

First of the Red Hot Ziegfeld Girls: Anna Held

More than a decade of Jewish women entered vaudeville in the fashionable performance nook known as coon shouting. Many were managed by Florenz Ziegfeld of the Ziegfeld Follies, known as "The Great Glorifier of the American Girl" for elevating the burlesque-house chorus girl to new heights as a glamorous showgirl. Ziegfeld is attributed with "destroying the very word vulgarity in relation to the American stage."(38) Thus his Ziegfeld Girls tended to be slender elegant beauties, not the hefty, maternal bodies in blackface historians have documented and deemed representative of coon shouters. By virtue of their hyped glamour and assimilation efforts, the early Jewish Ziegfeld Girls generally refrained from "low," overt forms of racial disguise, namely blackface. Most concealed their Jewish roots. Race and ethnicity doubly disavowed were twin open secrets that audiences and the press playfully exhumed. Whether embraced, fervently denied or teasingly implied, the shrouded identities of Ziegfeld Girls who sang coon songs became irretrievably intertwined with familiar racialized cues, sounds and images, inevitably both Jewish and black.

As Linda Mizejewski beautifully chronicles in Ziegfeld Girl, Florenz Ziegfeld employed "teasing strategies of concealment and revelation" to sensationalize America's first sex goddess and Ziegfeld girl.(39) Coon shouter Anna Held was a French chanteuse and Polish Jew. Ziegfeld forged his new headliner's exotic appeal by staging elaborate stunts that publicized her delicate spunk and imported beauty secrets while repressing her ethnic underside.(40) Held's naughty French persona was the product of coon shouting and suggestive stage maneuvers fostered by Ziegfeld's risque venue. Her popularity boomed as Victorian old-world moralism struggled with race consciousness, anti-Semitism, and women's suffrage, thus Held's desirability was built on two marginal and doubly discredited associations in performative dialectic: Jewish exoticism and black sexuality.

To create a genteel sex kitten out of a Polish Jewess and singer of lowly coon songs, Ziegfeld knew that enticing but unpalatable messages had to be securely coated to be cued up in Held's racy act. Her performances were what I call "encrypted," to borrow from computer parlance to best describe how sensitive information is embedded, encoded and hidden securely from view though intended to express itself in program execution or performance nonetheless.(41) By way of explanation, in today's hitech milieu, valuable intellectual property liable to be stolen is often protected or fire walled by encryption programs. Microsoft's Kerberos, for example, has so far proved uncrackable by password-sniffing hackers armed with decoding programs freely available on the Web.(42) In Held's case, encryption was more manager Ziegfeld's thinly veiled attempt to attract code sniffers and make hackers out of engrossed fans. The master showman greatly admired circus impresario P.T. Barnum who wanted audiences to become, in the words of Leo Braudy, "cryptographic detectives," acutely attuned to signs of fakery and disguise in performance. Barnum enticed freak-show audiences, for example, with the amusing and compelling task of distinguishing "the humbug from the real." Audience enjoyment stemmed from the rush of being "in the know" rather than duped by splendor. Similarly, Ziegfeld ensnared audiences with more than Held's flamboyant albeit mediocre talents. Her shrouded identity and racial masquerade heightened the singer's intrigue considerably. Jewish audiences especially were caught up in sniffing for signs, breaking the codes, and subsequently testifying gleefully to their insider status. Debates as to who could tell the humbug from the real Anna Held spanned some 75 years, continuing 50 years after her death in 1918.(43)

Held was born Hannaline Held in Warsaw, Poland, though she routinely claimed to have been born in Paris: "I was born in Paris. Voila! That is settled," she wrote in 1907. "For they have had me born everywhere else, even in Indiana ... They have had me from Poland, but that was not I but my mother."(44) Held's beginnings were no doubt dimly recorded, but vanity likely prompted her to lie about her age. Yiddish sources date her birth to 1865. English language sources record a considerably younger Held, born between 1871 and 1873.(45) Her father Maurice (Shimmle) was a Jewish glovemaker. Held claimed he was Parisian like herself, though she wrote in "My Beginnings," a Theatre magazine expose, "his forgotten ancestors may have been German, but never known by me."(46) In 1884, when Held's father died, her mother, Yvonne Pierre--a French or Polish Jew who may have converted to Catholicism--took young Anna to London, where the revered Yiddish actor Jacob Adler introduced her to the "liveliest Yiddish theatre city in the world."(47) Held lasted only three weeks as a choristke in Adler's troupe. With a perfect hourglass figure at 12 looking 16, she claims to have been encouraged by male patrons to try her luck in the London concert halls. Ziegfeld biographer Charles Higham and Yiddish theatre historian Nahma Sandrow tell a slightly different version of the story, with Held quickly moving from chorus girl to leading roles under Adler's tutelage, making her legitimate Yiddish theatre debut in Abraham Goldfaden's Shulamith.(48) In a rare statement some years later, Held remotely alluded to her training on the Jewish stage: "The vaudeville stage as I first knew it in Europe is a splendid school for a comedienne of the Judic type. You learn self-confidence, assurance, and above all you instinctively discover how to amuse an audience."(49) Held went on to amuse audiences quite successfully, even if at the expense of mentors and family friends.

For the most part Held denied her associations with Yiddish theatre and spurned those who knew her then. Supposedly she refused to give audience in the United States to Adler when he tried to congratulate her backstage after attending her performance(50) In 1908 Held similarly rebuffed a couple who knew her parents in Paris. When the Kutzens were denied entrance to Held's performance because they were Jewish, the couple sent word entreating the star in her dressing room. Held's retort was swift and cavalier: "No. I do not know them. Tell them I am not a Jew."(51) The spurned Mrs. Kurzen would later upbraid Held in a letter to the editor of the News Tribune (1908): "Anna Held--a Parisienne? A French Woman? Never! Anna is a Russian. Her father was a what-you-call-'em-oh, a janitor in a synagogue in Paris when we lived there." Lashing back, Mrs. Kutzen "outs" Held not only as a Jew but also as a subordinate member of Europe's immigrant underclass.

To Broadway, however, Held was a genteel lady and upstanding French Catholic. Year after year the forlorn actress made her religious sentiments known, especially around Christmastime. She was profusely baleful about missing the holiday in Paris: "I thought of my loved ones far across the sea. It seemed as ii I was absolutely alone in the world," she told a Pittsburgh reporter.(52) In the U.S. Held raved about Christmas in Paris in December interviews, promoted Christmas toys in The American Standard, and appeared in their holiday ads, one such with the likes of Joe Weber of Weber and Fields fame, whose father by the way was a rabbi.(53) "Two Christmas Smiles That Won't Come Off," Standard's 1904 Christmas poster reads. Held spent tremendous energy making sure fans like Adler and the Kutzens wouldn't wipe her Christmas smile off. Her rebuffs were indicative of the way Held always took the moral high ground during her short, illustrious career (1895-1918) even though she was a Jewish immigrant and performer of sexy, "low" material. The public duly noted the contradiction: "The secret of Anna Held's birthplace is locked safely in her own bosom," reads her smug entry in Famous Actresses.(54) News sources claimed that even on her deathbed in 1918 Held took one last histrionic gasp and called out to Paris and Christian values: "Come lead your France to victory, Joan of Arc, we are calling you."(55) Even with her passing, Held's birthplace and bosom weighed heavily on public consciousness for some time. Both were deemed quite remarkable by fans, biographers and critics alike.

In 1895 Ziegfeld first spotted the ravishing Held in a London revue singing what would become her first American hit, "Won't You Come and Play with Me," an adaptation of a German tune sung in broken English ("vil you kum and blay wiz me").(56) Her exquisite eye wriggles (in America, she would be touted as "the girl who couldn't make her eyes behave") and erotic laughs adorned each stanza. Ziegfeld, whose wallet was fat from exhibiting strongman The Great Sandow at the Chicago World's Fair, was charmed, not to mention looking to boost his earnings. He courted Held aggressively even though she was then married to 50-year-old South American businessman Maximo Carrera, the father of her daughter Liane and for whom she had converted to Catholicism. Within a year Held divorced Carrera, left her daughter tended by an aunt and sailed to New York on Ziegfeld's dollar for her American theatre debut in "A Parlor Match" (Herald Square Theatre, September 21, 1896). Soon after the two married in a civil ceremony and lived as common-law husband and wife until they estranged in 1908 and finally divorced in 1913(57)

Before Held even stepped off the boat, Ziegfeld's publicity blitz machine had churned out what the New York World (1897) described as "the best advertised actress" in America:

 From the minute her name was affixed to the contract that was to make her
 one of the stars of "A Parlor Match" every possible method of giving
 publicity ... was resorted to. The cables were liberally worked, her
 photographs in every conceivable pose were scattered [and] broadcast,
 columns were written about her voice, her eyes, her complexion, her mouth,
 her methods and her songs, until by sheer persistence the public began to
 think ... a phenomenon was surely about to appear.(58)

When this phenomenon did appear the rapid-fire deluge escalated. Blame it on Ziegfeld's "true lies" campaign and Held's penchant for self-promotion, fostered by Victorian culture's fascination with secrecy and confession. Masterminding Held's very public private life, Ziegfeld concocted outrageous stories that brought his wife to national attention. The most famous involved Held's elaborate bathing rituals in milk and champagne--an exorbitant rendering of the trendy European "water cure," costing some $500 per week according to press agents.(59) Ziegfeld timed milk delivery to coincide with press arrival. The wagons stood outside Mlle. Held's hotel hauling can after can of the chalky fluid up to her abode. Hotel maids told reporters "amazingly ingenious stories of [how] ablutions in the infantile nourishment accounted for Held's remarkable complexion."(60) Photographers snapped picture after picture of the bathing beauty with soft alabaster knees and shoulders bobbing above the foamy brew.(61) In 1896 a nation stood fixated, peering into Held's toilette.(62) To pun, her "beauty secrets," like her body parts, were regularly exhibited and constantly in danger of being exposed. Exposing Held's secrets was Ziegfeld's signature strategy. Like his role model Barnum, Ziegfeld staged fantastic events and circulated fraudulent stories that didn't undermine but only enhanced Held's allure. His publicity campaigns instigated playful scrutiny of her public and private life. A titillated press enjoyed the ruse and wove pretty fictions of their own, such as this spoiled goose chase: "News man finds the dealer who supplied the fluid and he reveals the culpitude of the wily [press] agent. But the latter went too far when he claimed the milk was sour."(63) Popular culture's first bubble bath was the known invention of Ziegfeld press agents. These stunts helped Ziegfeld define America's burgeoning cult of celebrity at the turn of the century, of which Held was an early icon. But much to her regret, playful scrutiny was a mixed blessing. Held's obscured heritage and ivory complexion factored extensively into the press coverage that made her a star and questioned her integrity.

The heroine of the milk baths with the much ballyhooed figure and luminous skin tone became a featured spokesperson for not only corsets but face powders and whitening agents.(64) In these ads a facetious subtext emerges: Held's concealed ethnic transformation from comely Polish girl to professional American beauty.(65) One publicity shot in particular with Held in "whiteface" makeup and tousled, bleached hair surfaces repeatedly. According to Kathy Peiss, eastern or southern European immigrant women and their American-born daughters aspiring to middle-class respectability and social acceptability at the turn of the 19th century looked to beauty pioneers, advertisers and advice columnists such as Held for skin care counsel, especially the use of face powder and bleach.(66) The "whiteface" image first appears under the banner "Anna Held as a Face Powder Attraction." The advertisement prompts consumers with "many different kinds of beauty" to purchase their peerless product. Held proudly offers them a powder puff. The ad's utopian promise is to beautify--as well as whiten and homogenize--different, dark, rejected or ordinary looks.(67) To this end some advertisers even slyly implied that Held's "beautifully tinted skin"--like that of potential patrons--required lightening, even if for Held, their spokesperson, it was solely to thwart intense scrutiny under glaring footlights. "Fight the light with powder," one urged.(68)

Reviewers spoke guilefully of the cafe singer's chestnut beauty. One reviewer called the siren of questionable heritage "absolutely unartificial," describing her as "Frenchy," which, according to him, "means much or little according to the [deceitful] lips from which it comes." The author does little to hide his contempt for the Jewish beauty whose "parents were Poles":

 She is a strange combination of the joys of youth, the natural frank
 abandon of the Parisian, the airs and graces of her kind of life, and of
 the shrewdness from the clever race of schemers from which she sprang ...
 which is the racial characteristic of her people.(69)

In a similar vein the New York World's "Anna Held Ten Years Ago and To-Day: The Development of a Stage Beauty" chronicled "the metamorphosis of a duckling." "Neither French nor German, but French Polish," the author claims, Held has "grown decidedly less German" and become "altogether Frenchier."(70) Her "metamorphosis" is illustrated in snapshots picturing Held at 15 years old looking greenhorn at the bottom of the page and culminating with the recurring "whiteface" publicity shot on top. Marking Held's penultimate transformation, this ivory image is aptly captioned, "As She Is Today."(71) Held's open secret placed her smack at "the ambiguous intersection of stardom and social contempt."(72) In both articles her unseemly transformation is likened to ethnic dissimulation which is both exposed and lauded.

Held's many whitening agents--milk baths and powder puffs--can be viewed as metaphors for what Mary Antin, author of The Promised Land (1912), calls her protagonist's "rebirth as American." Held's enterprising glamour was marketed by Ziegfeld as that of genteel European elegance personified; however, the unlimited advertising that brought Held into prominence better reflects America's and American immigrants' love affair with cortspicuous consumption.(73) A Chicago reporter practically described Held when she observed, "perhaps no immigrant [was] as eager to become Americanized as the Jewish woman."(74) Jewish women could read about Held in the popular American press. In addition to regular appearances in Vogue, Green Book, The Ladies Home Journal and Vanity Fair, Held garnered women's readership in her syndicated newspaper columns, such as "My Own Beauty Secrets," published in the Atlanta Georgian (September 1914). She instructed women how to prepare a bath, apply makeup, keep a swanlike complexion, flirt, and tie "corset laces without doing yourself harm." The popular press ceremonialized Held's beauty rituals and wardrobe choices, as they were wont to do with theatre actresses. Much ink was spilled describing to the letter "the chic little French woman's" opulent headdresses, sumptuous fabrics, Parisian tailor-made gowns studded with wreaths of gold and precious stones (costing upwards of $10,000), size three shoes and jewel-hooked corsets that molded Held's 13-inch waist and exaggerated her full bosom.(75) (It was falsely rumored in 1918 that Held's constricting undergarments caused her untimely death at age 53.(76)) Like Marilyn Monroe, whose tailors supposedly altered clothes on her body for a tighter fit, fans speculated that Held was "melted and poured into her garments."(77)

So much extravagance for a woman who professed in The Pittsburgh Leader that elegant European women "never overdress" or wear abundant jewels. In stark contrast, Held's tastes broke the bank. Ziegfeld played up the exorbitant costs (e.g., a $25,000 fur coat, diamondstudded stockings, and a $280,000 fortune in finger rings). Lavishness defined Held's iconic Europearmess for American consumers.(78) In a provocative albeit polite way, excess stood less for foreign sophistication than the social and economic aspirations of Held's audience and fashion adherents. "Mlle. Anna Held's gorgeous Parisian gowns and hats and wraps, a full year ahead of the American styles, awakened feminine admiration in theatres and public places," chimed the New York World in 1898. Her trend-setting taught immigrant and Victorian women like herself how to be not only American consumers but less priggish, self-stylers. Caught at the crossroads between Victorian old-world moralism, immigrant traditionalism, and The New Woman, the press was equally awed by Held's constricted femininity and her financial independence. Middle-class moralists complained about the finery, but most were beguiled by her earnings. In the same breath reporters documented the outrageous sums Held paid for notable items and the celebrity's salary, upwards of $3,000 to $10,000 per week.(79) "Saucy, chic and rich is Anna Held," observed the Cleveland Times in 1908.(80) She was portrayed as both slave to fashion and the master of her domain.

Held's public "white" face made her chic and rich, but it contrasted sharply with the saucy, racial content of her coon songs. Only a little black on her lashes was what the New York Herald felt Held needed in order "to wink in harmony with the music of the orchestra or keep time with the vices of the negroes."(81) This fashion columnist's seemingly innocuous reference to mascara refers to what Held's daughter and biographer Liane Carrera claims was her mother's first "Negro song" onstage.(82) On the heels of Held's "Parlor Match" American debut, Ziegfeld supposedly journeyed to London to convince Oscar Hammerstein to feature the rising star in "La Poupee" ("The Doll"), a burlesque of "Hurly Burly," at the Hammerstein Lyric Theatre. After just one week the show was failing, so Ziegfeld moved it to Koster & Bial's, inserting a coon number to spice it up. Anna sang French songs and her usual "Won't You Come and Play Wiz Me" in the revamped musical but now appeared in a novelty act as well singing "I Want Dem Presents Back." This coon number, like so many others, underscores the bungled romances of African-Americans and is sung by a female vocalist from the perspective of the cuckolded male:

 My gal Tilly she's gone shook me.
 Shock me good and smart.
 She done say she'd be mah wife.
 But she give me de marble heart.
 She skipped out wif a low down nigger.
 Ain't got half mah stack.
 She kin go whar she's mind to.
 Fer I don't care what she gwine ter.
 But I want my presents back.(83)

According to the New York Telegraph, the dainty Held sang these words strutting a cakewalk down a life-size, dialect-laden vocal score:

 When she had sung the chorus once through, the curtain at the back was
 raised and there was seen a huge reproduction of the vocal score ... But
 where each note should have been there protruded a woolly head of a negro
 chorister-thirty-three in all.(84)

The New York Clipper called "The Human Music Sheet" "electrical" and Held's negro song the "unquestionable cream of the evening's plaudits."(85) According to Carerra the audience ate it up with Held singing coon songs in broken English, so "Flo had [the act] copyrighted at once."(86) Held's success secured her in the starring role singing "I Want Dem Presents Back" for seven weeks.

Carerra's rosy portrait of her mother's pickinniny act implies that Held's first coon shout registered more in terms of naughty French sexuality than the cross-racial intrigue enumerated in the song's edgy lyrics or the Negro choristers relegated to stage props. Reviewers adored and criticized Held's French-twanged coon songs. Most thought her "difficult to follow" (hence the vocal score as aid), and purists claimed Held was "not very successful on account of her inability to reproduce the negro dialect."(87) In spite of Held's poor command of the English language, the intelligibility of her seduction was never in question. The press emphasized Held's "mastery of significant posture, gesture and facial expression [that] serves to some degree as interpreter."(88) It was said that Held's eyes alone could spell out the erotic promise of a song even while her body maintained a rigid stance. She was touted as "the girl who just couldn't make her eyes behave," captured in the catchy "I Can't Make My Eyes Behave" ("The Parisian Model," 1906).(89) Reports of Held's physical innuendo affirm that she was an extremely versatile comedienne. Some reviewers denounced the admixture of piquant lyrics and licentious delivery as "diabolical insidiousness."(90) She was a "dream of feminine pulchritude," wrote another. Most agreed that Held's "million dollar `orbs'" lured and ensnared theatergoers:(91) "Those wriggly jocular organs which made her fame. Her English speech, like her singing is still incomprehensible but ... it helps her along her merry way."(92) This writer's coy use of synecdoche-the substitution of eyes for breasts-is revealing. There is a delicious dose of irony here. Ziegfeld, "The Barnum of Bosom," could not conceal Held's mediocre singing talents, but her French naughtiness and voluptuous figure wriggled their way into the popular imaginary nevertheless.(93)

The frank abandon of Held's physical comedy is noticeably due in part to the cakewalk-a suggestive dance that also helped her along her merry way. The cakewalk was a slave plantation dance that, due to its theatricality, thrived on the minstrel stage and was relaunched in the late 1890s during the ballroom fever popular in middle-class circles.(94) The cakewalk's syncopated steps easily joined (in Held's case "winked in time with") the ragtime beat widespread in coon songs. In 1898 a fashion magazine featured a series of photos captioned "Anna Held in a Cakewalk Pose and Some Others" that illustrate the potent punch the cakewalk packed. Throughout the article are smattered small snapshots of Held in modest costumes playing legitimate roles. In the larger featured photos she wears extravagant outfits to demonstrate three agile cakewalk maneuvers. Each pose is more astounding than the next. Compounded, the wellspring of Held's physical comedy is revealed in the overwrought tension between high and low played out on the body: the undignified cakewalk does veritable battle with genteel, "white" Victorian femininity. Gyrating an off-kilter cakewalk in the first glossy, Held leans back while exerting herself. One leg kicked high in the air is exposed and the other is bent underneath for support. Held's tiny waist and heaving chest are barely kept in check by her vestimentary constraints-diminutive heels, beaded costume, corset and foot-high feathered headdress. Holding the weighty crown, Held laughs as if breaking decorum. In the second pose Held's ability to communicate subtle gestures and wink knowingly at the audience is poignantly rendered. Leaning forward with arms akimbo, she quotes coon shouter May Irwin's trademark "bully pose," made famous singing "Looking for a Bully," the coon song about an uppity black woman threatening to knock her cheating man into the ground.(95) The "Bully Song" as mentioned earlier simultaneously asserts and contains the menacing figure of the unruly black woman but Held's bully pose and cakewalk map unruly behavior unto white women.(96) Held appears in the photo as if struggling to right and tuck herself, managing to keep the disorderly, racial subtext in check by upholding dominant codes of acceptable white, middle-class femininity. Furthermore, the photo caption, "Anna Held in a Jolly Frame of Mind," renders the bully pose safely funny and risque at the same time. In context, the word "jolly" refers directly to a line from the song "It's Delightful to Be Married" performed by Held in "The French Maid" (1898) and refers indirectly to Held's sexual appetite. In the corresponding article, Held addresses what it takes to have a jolly "married" life. The double entendre is underscored by the bully pose-a physical allusion to unshackled black and female sexuality, independence, and aggression. But once again Held rehearses the emerging discourses on women's sexuality and pleasure from the safe and acceptable standpoint of a "white" married women, in stark contrast to the black female she mimics.(97)

The cakewalk and bully pose suggest how Held embodied rather than performed in blackface insofar as blackness and black stereotypes were made manifest in discrete physical, comic, aural, linguistic, and sexual cues associated with coon shouters and coon song delivery.(98) Held did not so much countenance the black mask but wore what in music parlance is termed a "facial mask," that which describes a singer's complete vocal and physical expressivity. As discussed, coon shouters sang in a distinct style and discernible register, and though there are no recordings of Held to verify this, she was probably no exception. According to Roland Barthes, the materiality of a singer's body, her signifying efforts, are heard through what he calls "the grain of the voice." "Music has an image-repertoire," he writes, "whose function is to reassure, to constitute the subject who hears it."(99) Barthe's theory suggests that coon shouters dispatched an "image-repertoire" associated with blackface minstrelsy that reassured immigrant and Victorian ladies struggling to make sense of emerging discourses on race and female independence. Put another way, Held's immigrant body may have relayed negative assumptions about black sexuality but in whiteface and finery assiduously converted these into white women's empowerment and self-fashioning. A theory of embodied performance helps us understand how this working-class Polish girl of Jewish descent became an ideal beauty advisor. Immigrant women and more so their daughters, such as those depicted in Anzia Yezierska's The Breadgivers (1925), seesawed between rebellion and submission.(100) Held's personal views mirror this tension. For example, she expressed libertarian views on marital relations but conservative views on fashion, abolition and women's rights: "We cannot break the laws or outrage the conventions," the woman who claimed she wore her corset 24 hours a day said of women's fashions.(101) As a spokesperson Held found an ideal forum for not only her own contradictory and ambiguous persona but that of immigrant, Victorian New Women more generally.

From 1900 on Held matured as an artist appearing in higher-rent Ziegfeld venues with narrative plots such as "Papa's Wife" (1900), "The Little Duchess" (1902), "Mlle. Napoleon" (1903) and "The Parisian Model" (1906). Still, the coon song and cakewalk combination remained Anna Held staples.(102) A publicity photo of Held from "Higgeldy Piggeldy" (Weber's Music Hall, 1904) reveals how the pairing contributed to the machinery of her stardom.(103) In Ziegfeld and Joe Weber's "Higgeldy Piggeldy," Held wore many costumes. She dressed as a gamine newsboy, with a "Swiss" chorus, in luxurious furs and more. But one costume stands alone. More so than any other image of Held I've seen, this costume suggests just how libidinally suggestive it probably was for a "white" chorus girl to repeatedly deploy "black" messages-vocally and physically-in whiteface. The studio shot from "Higgeldy Piggeldy" depicts a sleeveless Held encircled by a round wicker basket supported by suspenders [see Fig. 1]. The basket also supports the torso of a life-size, legless ebony mannequin attached to Held at the waist. The dummy is clothed in cakewalk garb (what we associate nowadays with Uncle Sam-striped bolero jacket and a marching crop). Held wears a flimsy, nymphlike frock and striped cakewalk pants. The caption reads: "This one's `the charcoal seller,'" stressing the novelty and highlighting the burnt cork makeup noticeably absent on Held.

[Figure 1 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

This disturbing image evokes what Judith Walkowitz calls "popular narratives of sexuality and danger" in late-Victorian culture.(104) Held maps these narratives unto her performance while avoiding the taint socially. "Golly, I'se so wicked," she liked to say, quoting Topsy from Uncle Tom's Cabin.(105) The "charcoal seller" is a lynch mob's nightmare: a "white" woman and "bestial" black man coupled in a carnal embrace, conjuring images of interracial rape well depicted in minstrelsy's dastardly love triangles and primadonna farces. But even of her most suggestive acts, reporters claimed Held "entertained without any boisterous effect. She was the personification of dainty grace."(106) Here, dainty Held primps and poses in typical fleshy fashion, disregarding the ebony appendage tugging at her waist as if fleshy indifference could defuse and mollify the off-color insinuations. The production of white beauty eclipses the minstrel spectacle. This is Held's best cheesecake shot.

In performance Held's fetishized chubby shoulders probably bobbed behind the

dummy in a ventriloquized cakewalk and coon shout. Like Tucker's exposed wrist, she interrupted the swarthy spectacle with comic pinkness. Both coon shouters relied on a striking economy of racial disruption and ambiguity rather than certainty. In so doing, both rejected the ethnographic impulses of nineteenth-century minstrelsy, dating back to its beginnings with Thomas D. ("Daddy") Rice who spied and imitated a crippled black stable hand named "Jim Crow" (ca. 1840) and dating through to black minstrels Williams and Walker, touted as "The Two Real Coons" (ca. 1898).(107) By the turn of the century vaudeville's "increasingly routinized familiarity with black culture" lent itself to performers such as Held and Tucker among others who constantly marked the inauthenticity of performed "blackness." Call it ethnographic burlesque. With increasing representation of immigrants, free blacks and ethnics onstage and off, references to the bygone minstrel era became more a series of complex, joking displacements, an "affair of copies."(108)

Held's "charcoal seller" sets off a series of complex, joking displacements that allow certain elements of performance to be exhibited and others eclipsed. As black subjectivity is exhibited it is obsessively erased, so too one could argue is Held's Jewish ethnicity. Wearing the pants and running the show, Held undergoes what Susan Gubar calls "racechange," whereby the aesthetic boundaries of black and white are so blurred that the performer and spectators resignify elements of a constrictive social script.(109) The mutability of color coupled with the changeability of gender further promote the theatricality of Held's mimicry. She is almost, but not quite black or white, masculine or feminine. As the cakewalk puppeteer Held symbolically castrates the "black man"-a menacing prop but limp prosthetic-usurping his mythic sexual prowess for herself. She is both seductress and stand-in for both black man and white minstrel man. Racial order is less a matter of black and white hierarchies than racial mixing by proxy; that proxy being a Jewish woman and the cakewalk is wrenched one further from its antebellum roots. Held imitates a white minstrel man imitating cakewalking blacks on the plantation imitating uppity white folks in the Big House.(110) "The charcoal seller" is an affair of copies whereby Jewishness is rendered an extension of white difference from blackness. For Held, who obsessively eclipsed her Jewish identity (her ethnic underbelly, if you will), "the charcoal seller" exhibits her Jewishness as a variation of whiteness (albeit from the waist up).

Coon songs and cakewalking were Held's beauty secrets. Subtending references to "blackness" did not stain her complexion nor taint her celebrity; rather, undeclared "black" images prettied and anglicized both. To borrow a term from Franz Fanon, coon shouting was something of a racial "lactifier."(111) Held "milked" these performance conventions, and in return they bathed her in champagne. She prevailed a jolly, saucy, rich, chic, independent, modern woman in the public eye.

"How Can They Tell That Oi'm Irish?": Ziegfeld Comedienne Nora Bayes

Almost like a big sister who struggled for every allowance, Held paved the way for fellow Jewish women comediennes and coon shouters in the Ziegfeld Follies. By contrast, ensuing headliner Nora Bayes spent far less energy keeping up appearances and instead found humor in her predicament. Bayes milked coon song material differently than Held. She downplayed the lewd, racially charged insinuations, favoring instead nondialect, romantic, sentimental ballads.(112) A reviewer in 1908 compared her performance style to Held's:

 [Bayes'] voice is ... expressive, something that the Parisian woman of the
 revues does not seem ... to regard as of essential value ... leaving to the
 arms, the shoulders, and the body the work of shaping the meaning of a
 song. Her gestures are experienced enough ... a charisma and energy that
 puts her so in rapport with her audience that a buoyant sympathy follows
 her.(113)

On this rapport Bayes built a "girl next door" image. Her stage tableaux relied heavily on coon songs redolent with patriotic iconography. George M. Cohan personally asked Bayes to record his "Beautiful Coon" (1912) and wartime anthem "Over There" (1918). Throughout her long career Bayes sang what one writer called "foolish songs" with her husky voice and a dainty little lisp that critics considered charming.

Beginning in 1901 Broadway first noticed Bayes singing the coon number "Watermelon Party" at the Knickerbocker Theatre. But, as the story goes, this was not her first shout. She was challenged by the Chicago Opera House manager to sing longer than anyone else or forfeit her $25 per week salary. She accepted, scoring "an instantaneous hit on her original method of chanting `coon' songs,"(114) wrote the Indianapolis Star. This specialty number won Bayes subsequent engagements with the Rogers Brothers at a salary of $40 per week. By 1909 she was making a whopping $3,200 per month, according to Variety.(115) Bayes started singing her most famous song "Down Where the Wurzberger Flows" in 1902. "Wurzberger" is a coon song written by Harry von Tilzer, a sendoff of his own "Down Where the Swanee River Flows." But instead of superficial references to the antebellum South, "Wurzberger" waxes nostalgic about sentimental German locales.(116) Von Tilzer, a prolific coon song composer who became the featured composer when WRKO premiered the "Jewish Radio Hour" in the mid-1920s, was a life-long friend of Bayes. Born Harry Gumm, sources say he changed his name to von Tilzer to "cash in on the current vogue in Austrian and German music," but in so doing arguably distinguished himself, a Tin Pan Alley composer, as an assimilated as opposed to immigrant Jew in the public eye.(117) Von Tilzer was one of the most prolific Jewish composers following Irving Berlin's lead. His songs suited Bayes because they were considerably diffused coon material. Bayes often spliced in catchy bits of rag that read coon, but she did not perform in blackface or sing in black dialect, nor did she indicate "blackness" physically to the extent that Held did. There are few records of Bayes' comic genius to evidence the racial dynamics of performance, and newspaper reviewers rarely elaborated on such things. However, one thing is certain: Bayes further wrenched coon songs from their minstrel roots by singing in a trademark "Irish" accent. Irish stereotypes and popular song beginning in the 1840s stressed themes of family life, past sweethearts and romantic childhood in a pure, long lost homeland that legitimately belonged to the Irish-American experience, but the rhetoric of nostalgia was easily mapped unto the minstrel plantation and the tragedy of enforced emigration writ large.(118) Taking on an outsider status different than her own, Bayes seems able to comment upon it.

Theatre historians loosely refer to late vaudeville as a period of "open ethnicity" when entertainers negotiated cultural differences by pirating each other's material and burlesquing each other. This false universality of the entertainment market made ethnic stereotypes the currency of ethnic representation. "To a new immigrant it was time to get-together, all barriers down and stew in the broth of each other's failings and oddities," notes Alistair Cook.(119) Bayes was hailed as a good mimic and interpolator "with lapses into what may be the Gaelic," wrote a Follies reviewer in 1908. Encore ditties such as "You'll Have to Sing an Irish Song" (words by Jack Norworth, music by Albert von Tilzer) and "Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?" made her Irish brogue famous. Nearly all the words of "Kelly" were written by Bayes, who with third husband, singer/songwriter Jack Norworth, wrote some of her best-known songs, including "Shine on Harvest Moon" (Follies of 1909). This was one way Bayes retained artistic control of her image. Listening to a recording of "How Can They Tell That Oi'm Irish?" (ca. 1908-1913), one clearly hears Bayes insert Jewish names amid the Mulligans, Kellys and Flannigans. "How do you know my name's not ... Levi or Cohen?" she asks rhetorically.(120) Debunking ethnic boundaries and pretexts was unprecedented in Held's career, but expected of Bayes. "His hair is blue and his eyes are pink/And he is German, I don't think," she sings in "Kelly."(121) Bayes' musings poke fun at her own dissimulation and Jewish background as well as vaudeville's unquenchable thirst for ethnic caricature. Bayes delivered knowing winks for her audiences to enjoy both onstage and off.

Born Leonora or Dora Goldberg to Elias and Rachel Goldberg in either Los Angeles, Illinois or Milwaukee, Bayes took her stage name from laurels she wore around her head.(122) In addition to wearing bay leaves she later became famous for donning outrageous wigs and colossal hats. Bayes' public image was considerably softer than her temperament as detailed by her tumultuous career. She was a fiery, unpredictable woman. One reviewer claimed she had "more nerve than a battleship."(123) Sophie Tucker reportedly chafed against the Ziegfeld headliner in the Follies of 1909, so Bayes had Tucker fired for upstaging her. According to Variety, Tucker never again "appeared under the Ziegfeld banner."(124) Bayes regularly bucked the authority of theatre managers, especially Ziegfeld, who brought her to stardom in his first Follies of (1907). His press agents floated stories that Bayes ate a lollipop every few hours, before and after meals. As a result the chic candy won the affection of women everywhere, even from those who formerly considered the practice infantile. Soon afterwards Bayes rebelled against such marketing strategies. According to The New York Sun, Bayes refused to wear tights, perch on a manufactured elephant and sing jungle songs in the Follies of 1909.(125) When the comedienne showed up at Follies rehearsals in black trousers, The New York Telegraph headline "Nora Bayes Wears the Pants" referred slyly to Bayes' offstage clashes with Ziegfeld for theatrical control of her career.(126) Ziegfeld legally enjoined Bayes to perform the jungle skit but soon after had to procure a court injunction to keep her and Norworth from defecting the Follies entirely, which they eventually did in 1910. Soon thereafter, Bayes and Norworth won reinstatement after Ziegfeld obtained a court order restraining them from appearing under any other management. The legal wrangling continued until Bayes and Norworth appeared in their last Ziegfeld production, "The Jolly Bachelors" (Follies of 1910). A huge success, the show featured Bayes singing "Young America" with a flock of tattered-looking East Side school children and alongside another Jewish coon shouter, Stella Mayhew, who played "a brown colored `wench.'" Mayhew was, according to Variety, "almost ruthlessly hidden before the seeming importance of Bayes," yet she stole the show as Tucker did years prior. Critics thought Bayes' Irish-inflected coon number, "Come Along Mandy," didn't go over well at the Palace Theatre. Variety concluded, "Everything `coon' in the production rightfully belongs to Miss Mayhew ... It would have been better for `Mandy' to have been ... left out" altogether.(127)

After leaving Ziegfeld management in 1910 Bayes and Norworth wrote their own songs and produced their own shows, performing on the Keith's more legitimate vaudeville circuit until 1913 when they ended their partnership in divorce upon which Bayes married fellow actor Harry Clarke. Bayes continued performing at Keith's until 1917, producing "Two Hours of Song by Nora Bayes" on her own. The show was pure minstrel nostalgia: "In the first scene I will take you down South to an old plantation," the playbill reads. "We will close the first part with a glimpse of what the cakewalk once meant to us."(128) Even though Bayes was less captive to the requisite performance forms associated with coon songs, the playbill captures how minstrel leftovers travel and grow distorted as sentimental nostalgia. Publicity shots in Vanity Fair confirm that Bayes wore typical cakewalk garb and, in the plantation scene, an exaggerated mammy getup. These costumes were tasteful, even attractive, extractions of minstrel types. They functioned to both highlight Bayes' beauty and convey vestigial clues that holdover minstrel comedy was being performed. But Bayes wore her outfits as only a former Ziegfeld beauty could. She appears statuesque, thin, glamorous and lilywhite. She avoids blackface and bears no excess adipose as the mammy character. The checkered scarf tied in her hair with outstretched bow on top and oversized gauzy apron secure the familiar imagery nonetheless. Bayes' coon songs in "Two Hours" also downplayed rough, overt racial messages. She did not sing in black dialect, and she favored ballads over ragtime. In photos Bayes offered viewers some physical business as comedic compensation [see Fig. 2]. As the mammy, she stands with her paunch out, arms akimbo, hunched forward, head tilted and lips puckered and pursed in an angry sneer as if to say, "You are gonna get a whoopin'!" Bayes is also arguably quoting Irwin's identifiable "bully pose," but hers is not the saucy rendering Held delivered nearly two decades prior.(129) This is a playful, toned-down, transmogrified version. It is no accident that Bayes' small bosom, slender hips, thin lips and covered hair emphasize her European traits. Her pose amounts to little more than a parodic display of features commonly associated with black otherness.

[Figure 2 ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

Bayes frequently parodied her own otherness as well. In 1914 the comedienne's jocular memoirs promised "no secrets in her `confessions.'" She promoted her tell-all biography in a Denver Times excerpt, "Confessions of Nora Bayes," which captured the comedienne's sense of irony about her secreted past:

 My first engagement was under a contract written in Yiddish. It was a legal
 contract. Yiddish is just as binding on an actress as United States. I
 think all theatrical contracts should be written in Yiddish, or at least
 signed in Yiddish. They make nice wall ornaments.(130)

To my knowledge Bayes never performed in Yiddish, as Held did. For this reason I believe she is being cagey, blending-intentionally or not-stories of her first theatre contract with that of her first marriage or Jewish wedding contract (ketubah) traditionally display at home on the wall. Bayes was notoriously self-mocking about her many failed marriages. She was married five times: to Otto Gressing at 18, Jack Norworth (1908-13), comedian Harry Clarke (1913-5), actor Arthur Gordon (1920-2), and finally wealthy businessman Benjamin Friedland (1925-8).(131) In her memoirs the thrice-divorced Bayes quips about her failure to remain married or Jewish:

 After my first marriage, I became nee Goldberg, then nay nay Goldberg.
 Aided and abetted by attorneys at law and clergymen at peace I have changed
 my name three times, growing further and further away from Goldberg on each
 occasion.(132)

Bayes' puzzling "confessions" poke fun at her two desultory habits: intermarriage and divorce. She claims her Yiddish past like her exhusbands amount to little more than obsolete "wall ornaments"-cultural relics from a previous, now defunct life dating back to her roots in Joliet, Illinois, as the nice Jewish girl next door formerly named Dora Goldberg. Bayes both admits and dismisses her heritage and marital history in one fell swoop. Curiously, Bayes admits that being Jewish was "still binding on an actress," unlike a nullified marriage. According to The New York Telegraph Bayes considered herself "bound" by a sense of charitable duty to the Jewish people:

 Jewish benevolences have long appealed to [Bayes'] gracious nature and she
 has never turned a deaf ear ... Miss Bayes ancestors were from the other
 side and she knows pretty well the conditions which are driving thousands
 of immigrants from the countries of the czar to the hospitable shores of
 America.(133)

Privately, Bayes gave considerable sums to Jewish charities throughout her career and upon her death in her will. In 1928 at the age of 47, Bayes died of cancer at the Jewish Hospital in Brooklyn tended by a Christian Scientist minister and a rabbi. She left most of her money to charity and three adopted children.

Nora Bayes' and Anna Held's obituaries both mention their Jewishness in candid language unprecedented during their lifetimes. Bayes was more forthcoming and was spared the ire Jewish fans regularly aimed at Held. Unlike Bayes, Held defied public scrutiny and her public's will to gain a confession. Making her beauty secrets public and keeping the open secret of her Jewish identity under wraps became an obsessive life practice for Held-which Janet Burstein might attribute to the "emotional turbulence of self-creation" experienced by Jewish immigrant women and their daughters at the turn of the century.(134) But let's make no mistake, Held and Bayes were self-conscious celebrities who reaped tremendous financial reward from harnessing public scrutiny of their so-called private lives. Held's denial served as catalyst for public fascination that lasted a lifetime and then some. Fans, especially Jewish fans, heatedly debated her ethnicity throughout her life and for another 65 years after her death also from cancer in 1918.

As late as 1983, when daughter Liane Carrera, at 88, installed the Anna Held exhibit in a tiny room off Lexington Avenue in New York City, age-old rumors as to Held's birthplace resurfaced. A New York Times editor hoped to categorically answer numerous "letters to the editor" inquiring as to Held's nativity, when he stated that her "very effective publicity touted the talented actress as foreign born ... But the honors ... belong to Indiana."(135) (Ironically, Bayes and Held were both taken for Hoosier.(136)) This instigated a spate of passionate correctives. One man claimed to have known Held's father Shimmle in Warsaw. Another, Jacob Shatzky of the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research, confirmed Held's Polish Jewish heritage. With both barbs and reverences fans, reporters and researchers alike tried to, in the words of another fan, "brush aside the accumulating cobwebs of public error."(137)

Though she snubbed American Jewry, Jewish fans were ultimately proud of "Hannaline's" great successes. The Yiddish Forward carried word of every performance. Even the slighted Mrs. Kutzen embraced Held in the end- "It seems like a fairy story ... even if she does not admit that she is from Poland and a Jewess," she wrote.(138) For fans like Mrs. Kutzen, Held's life exemplified how a poor Eastern European Jewish girl could sidestep anti-Semitism and even coon shouting to achieve success. Her achievements were viewed foremost as expressions of immigrant aspirations, Jewish national character, and middle-class sensibilities. In 1939 her life was portrayed in a loosely biographical Yiddish operetta at the Brooklyn Hopkinson Theatre entitled "The Queen of Broadway." The title alone says much about the ways Yiddish theatre and Jewish fans recast Held's denial into a laudatory, recursive history. They wanted to claim her and her success as their own. To this day Held's proud profile in The Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre (1931) bears no mention of her relentless denunciations nor the coon shouting that brought her fame.(139) In a sense Held's life began and ended on the Yiddish stage.(140)

Conclusion: Joined at the Hip

Vaudeville was a hodgepodge of performance styles distorted by comedy's penchant for what I can only describe as "open ethnicity," which in many ways was closed in Held's time. Held's risque performances and fashionable celebrity seemed wildly discordant, even bewilderingly so. This Polish glovemaker's daughter strutted suggestive cakewalks in costly fabrics and sang Negro songs with a French accent. Bayes enjoyed some of that openness, cultivating an incongruous Irish persona: the All-American Girl Next Door with Yiddish wall ornaments and lots of ex-husbands who interpolated Jewish names into Emerald Isle melodies sung in an Irish brogue. Competing vernaculars (black, Irish and Yiddish) were housed together in the coon shouting venue. But their association inaugurated Jewish ethnicity onstage and in popular culture.

How easily coon shouting now astounds and offends us, but at the turn of the century this star vehicle was a pliant platform for Jewish female performers to communicate meaningful messages-mainstream and disruptive-about beauty, female sexuality, marriage and intermarriage, race and ethnic adaptation. Jewish and female audiences enjoyed reading between the lines. Both Held and Bayes deployed an armory of expressive, denotative bodily performances-dialect, accents, popular dances, vocal styles, character costumes, comic poses and physical humor-that uttered encrypted racial and ethnic cues without blackface makeup. Hayden White explains the phenomenon of encrypted performance quite well in The Content of the Form when he argues that absented content (here, blackface and Jewish identity) often speaks through the form (here, coon shouting). Content operates in the domain of memory but unfolds under the sign of the "real" as if it were being performed. Absented content enlivens the form because it is here that it does its ideologically significant work.(141) In other words, "blackness" and "Jewishness" were not always outwardly performed in Held's or Bayes' performances per se, but they were signified in performance nevertheless, the outcome a racechange. By the time Tucker and Brice sang Yiddish-inflected coon songs, coon shouting was considered a white Jewish women's venue. Their foremothers, Held and Bayes, instantiated "blackness" as the social unconscious of Jewish acceptability and visibility. By performing coon songs in Yiddish and blackface-an affiliation that in the past went expressively unmade-Tucker and Brice further amplified rather than established that difference in popular culture.

In conclusion, I am reminded of something Anna Held once said when asked by a reporter how she was feeling. "I feel very yellow," she responded, mistaking an English expression for low spirits. In a sense, Held and Bayes were yellow, high yellow-that lightened makeup used to color minstrel primadonnas, octoroons and comic wenches. They represent the transition period in both Jewish and popular entertainment history when Eastern European Jews crossed and blurred racial and gender lines, crossing from "black" to "white" from race to ethnicity. Coon shouting did not so much separate Jews from blacks, as Rogin argues, but joined them at the hip in performance history. It wasn't until the 10s and 20s-think early film and musicals-when Jews rediscovered blackface, using it as a nostalgic instrument of Jewish and comedic assertiveness that allowed the likes of Jolson and Tucker to simultaneously espouse nativistic zeal and a Jewish self.(142) Rather than superseding one performance convention with another, coon shouting is part of what I call a minstrel continuum deeply informed by Jewish women. The first of the red hot Yiddishe mamas, Held and Bayes, established a performative dialectic between blackness and Jewishness and audiences strained to become cryptographic detectives of racial masquerade and ethnic dissimulation. Their strategic efforts to conceal their identities in effect made encrypted associations routinely familiar to turn-of-the-century audiences and Jewish fans. They paved the way for Tucker, Brice, Cantor and Jolson who even in the most hackneyed of minstrel devices, blackface, could lay bare and claim a white Jewish ethnicity.

(1.) Charles Hamm, Yesterdays: Popular Song in America (New York and London, 1983), 310, 321.

(2.) I would like to thank Kathy Peiss, Professor of History at the University of Massachusetts, and Joyce Antler, Professor of American Jewish History and Chair of American Studies at Brandeis University, for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper presented at the Berkshire Women's History Conference, Pittsburgh, Pa., June 1999.

(3.) Sophie Tucker, Some of These Days: The Autobiography of Sophie Tucker (Garden City, N.Y., 1945), 33.

(4) By "blackness" I mean stereotyped, counterfeit portrayals of blacks onstage by performers who sought to establish the physical and visual immediacy difference, whereby "blackness" amounts to little more than ethnographic burlesque. For Eric Lott minstrelsy "increasingly routinized white familiarity with black culture" thereby reproducing and instantiating race as a cultural invention. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York and Oxford, 1995), 47-9.

(5.) Tucker, Some of These Days, 35.

(6.) Uriel Weinreich, Modern English. Yiddish Yiddish-English Dictionary (New York, 1990), 398.

(7.) Eric Goldstein, "`Different Blood Flows in Our Veins': Race and Jewish Self-Definition in Late Nineteenth Century America," American Jewish History 85:1 (March 1997):52-3. According to Goldstein the term "ethnic" was not coined until the 1920s. It did not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary until 1933. See Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan, eds., Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), 1.

(8.) "Burnt Cork Performers Who Made Happy the Days When Life Was Young. Minstrels No Longer Amuse," The Brooklyn Times (February 28, 1903). Also see Robert Toll, Blacking Up: The Minstrel Show in Nineteenth-Century America (London and New York, 1974).

(9.) See Annemarie Bean, "Transgressing the Gender Divide: The Female Impersonator in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy," in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy, ed. Annemarie Bean, James Hatch and Brooks McNamara (Hanover, Pa. and London, 1996), 245-56. For an example of female impersonators as arbiters of fashion, see corset advertisement featuring Julian Eltinge in Robert Toll, On with the Show: The First Century of American Show Business (New York, 1976). See also Robert Toll, Blacking Up, 139-44, Eric Lott, Love and Theft, and W. Fitzhugh Brundage, Lynching in the New South: Georgia and Virginia, 1880-1930 (Chicago, 1993).

(10.) According to Ann Douglas the Negro dialect used in vaudeville by both whites and blacks should not be equated with the Black English spoken in postslavery days. Negro dialect was not linguistic impersonation of black speech; it exaggerated stereotypical misuse of Standard English. See Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York, 1995), 369.

(11.) Delaney's Song Book (New York, 1892-3) published new coon song lyrics in every issue; for a complex taxonomy of coon song imagery and their vicissitudes, see Sam Dennison, Scandalize My Name: Black Imagery in American Popular Music (New York and London, 1982), 345-424, and W. K. McNeil, "Syncopated Slander: The `Coon Song,' 1890-1900," Keystone Folklore Quarterly (Summer 1972), 63-82. On coon song development in American musical history see Thomas L. Morgan and William Barlow, From Cakewalk to Concert Halls: An Illustrated History of African-American Popular Music from 1895 to 1930 (Washington, D.C., 1992).

(12.) "De Coonville Grand Cakewalk," words and music by Dave Reed, Jr., Delaney's Song Book No. 15 (1892), 19.

(13.) Historic American sheet music covers, 1850-1920, Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University. Morgan and Barlow, From Cakewalk to Concert Halls, contains numerous illustrations of song sheet covers used to sell ragtime and coon songs.

(14.) David R. Roediger, Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London, 1991), 97-100.

(15.) Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 369-72.

(16.) Arthur Hertzberg, The Jews in America: Four Centuries of an Uneasy Encounter: A History (New York, 1989). By Jewish nativism I am referring to the effort by German Jews to create institutions and organizations to deal with rising anti-Semitism and disputes over wartime service. In 1892 the American Jewish Historical Foundation was formed; in 1895 Simon Wolf published The American Jew as Patriot and Soldier, which traces Jewish wartime service back to the Revolutionary era; and in 1897 the Hebrew Veterans of the Civil War was founded to "defend against those who continue to declare that Jews have not served in the U.S. Armed Forces."

(17.) The lyrics were often cross-racial and cross-gendered (see Nora Bayes' song sheet "I Wonder If They Are All True to Me.") There is little to suggest, however, that coon shouters were doing male impersonation or cross-dressing like the minstrel primadonnas who portrayed mulatto women in high-yellow makeup and in drag. Still, the fact that fair women were crooning about black men and/or black women probably lent coon shouting a doubly forbidden charge. Of minstrel primadonnas, Eric Lott argues that interracial and homoerotic desire drove the minstrel show. I would suggest that singing cross-racial and cross-gender songs elicited a different response when the performers were women. See Lott, Love and Theft; Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-Century America (New York and London, 1990), and Robert C. Toll, Blacking Up.

(18.) Elizabeth Brice introduced "Row, Row, Row" (words by William Jerome and music by Jimmie V. Monaco) into the Ziegfeld Follies (1912). Musical song sheet in Follies of 1912 clippings file, Museum of the City of New York Theatre Collection (MCNY).

(19.) Stella Mayhew scrapbook, Robinson-Locke Collection (RLC), Billy Rose Theatre Collection, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts (BRTC).

(20.) Stella Mayhew scrapbook, RLC, BRTC.

(21.) Ed E. Pidgeon, "Stella Mayhew and Her Big Hit," Harvard Theatre Collection.

(22.) John J. Niles, "Shout, Coon, Shout!" Musical Quarterly 16 (October 1930), 517, 529, 518, 527.

(23.) Robert Toll, "Sophie Tucker," in Notable American Women: The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman, Carol Hurd Green, Ilene Katrov and Harriette Walker (Cambridge, Mass., 1980); M. Alison Kibler, Rank Ladies: Gender and Cultural Hierarchy in American Vaudeville (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1999), 129.

(24.) African-American coon singers such as Aida Overton Walker, a member of Black Pattie's Troupe and choreographer of many early black musicals, were better known as cakewalkers than coon shouters.

(25.) "Why Sophie Tucker Dropped `Coon Shouting,'" Cincinnati Tribune (February 5, 1916), and The Telegraph (April 30, 1917), RLC Envelope #2391, BRTC.

(26.) Kibler, Rank Women, 125-6. For a study of the ways blackface functioned similarly for (Jewish) men as an instrument of comedic assertiveness, see Michael Rogin's Blackface/ White Noise. With Al Jolson in The Jazz' Singer (1927) as his case study, Rogin argues that blackface enabled the (male) parvenu to embody nativistic zeal while espousing a Jewish self.

(27.) "Stella Mayhew, Stage Favorite Dies Penniless" (May 3, 1934), Harvard Theatre Collection.

(28.) Joyce Antler, "So Big and Ugly," Lilith 22:1 (Spring 1997):32.

(29.) Michael Rogin, "Blackface, White Noise: The Jewish Jazz Singer Finds His Voice," Critical Inquiry 18 (Spring 1992):431, and "Making America Home: Racial Masquerade in the Transition to Talking Pictures," The Journal of American History 79 (December 3, 1992):1061.

(30.) Irving Howe lends insight into how the connection between the black mammy character and the mythic Jewish mother riveted audiences: "Mapping `black' sexuality to the frigid, domineering Jewish mother, vaudeville let loose sexual curiosities beyond the clamp of Jewish shame ... A long-contained vulgarity, which had already come to form a vital portion of Yiddish culture in Eastera Europe, ... now broke through the skin of immigrant life." World of Our Fathers (New York, 1976), 558. See also Sarah Blacher Cohen's introduction to From Hester Street to Hollywood: The Jewish-American Stage and Screen (Bloomington, Ind., 1983).

(31.) Brice first sang "Sadie Salome, Go Home" in 1909 as one of The College Girls, a burlesque troupe. Barbara W. Grossman, Funny Woman: The Life and Times of Fanny Brice (Bloomington, Ind., 1991), 28.

(32.) Grossman, Funny Woman, 46.

(33.) Grossman. Funny Woman, 32-3, 42, 45, 46, 56.

(34.) Kibler, Rank Women, 134. According to Monarchs of Minstrelsy (1905), most women who blacked up in vaudeville did so playing Topsy as children in Uncle Tom's Cabin, not as adults. Sister and pickinniny acts, such as the Nichols sisters, amused audiences in the 1890s. But it wasn't until the 1920s that a spate of amateur skits and guidebooks instructed women how to apply burnt cork. See "For the Ladies" in Frank Dumont's The Witmark Amateur Minstrel Guide and Burnt Cork Encyclopedia (London, 1899). See Jeffrey T. Branen, How to Stage a Minstrel Show: A Manual for the Amateur Burnt Cork Director (Chicago, 1921); Frederick Green Johnson, The Minstrelettes, a Ready Made First-Part for Ladies' Minstrels (New York, 1931); Arthur Leroy Kaser, They're in Again: Blackface Talking Act for Two Females (Chicago, 1924).

(35) Most, with the exception of Kibler, focus on male minstrels and figures such as Al Jolson. See Howe, World of Our Fathers; Kibler, Rank Women; Rogin, Blackface/White Noise; Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic; Toll, Blacking Up; also Lott, Love and Theft.

(36.) Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic, 109.

(37.) Rogin, "Making America Home," 1053.

(38.) Charles Higham, Ziegfeld (Chicago, 1972), 235.

(39.) Held was not a Ziegfeld Girl per se but the impetus behind Ziegfeld's 30-year enterprise known as the Ziegfeld Follies (1907 to 1935). In 1901 Held supposedly asked Ziegfeld for "slathers of pretty girls to appear about her" in "The Little Duchess." These chorus girls were then called Anna Held Girls. Publicity photo caption (ca. 1901), Anna Held personality file, MCNY. See Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl: Image and Icon in Culture and Cinema (Durham, N.C., 1999).

(40.) Linda Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl, 43-4. One publicity stunt involved Held jumping off a bicycle to save a runaway horse. This, reported the New York World, made "the young woman ... as well known in this country as the name of the President," RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(41.) "Microsoft Can't Seem to Stop Misbehaving," Seattle Post-Intelligencer (April 2, 2000): E2. Op-ed reprinted from The Economist.

(42). In his forthcoming dissertation Henry Biale calls this same phenomenon "double-coding," when at least two coexisting sign systems function in a single performance. He argues that decoding fosters in-group identification and concretizes culturally specific positions (e.g., "Jewish readers" and "non-Jewish readers").

(43.) Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl, 13-4; Leo Braudy, The Frenzy of the Renown: Fame and Its History (New York, 1986), 501.

(44.) Anna Held, "My Beginnings," Theatre (July 1907), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 2), 57-8, BRTC.

(45.) Zalmen Zylbercwaig, ed., Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre (New York, 1931), 62930; Nahma Sandrow, Vagabond Stars: A World History of Yiddish Theater (Syracuse, N.Y., 1977), 70; Oliver B. Pollak, "Anna Held," in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, ed. Paula E. Hyman and Deborah Dash Moore (New York and London, 1997), 614-5.

(46.) Held, "My Beginnings," 57.

(47.) Sandrow, Vagabond Stars, 70.

(48.) Higham, Ziegfeld, 23-5; Sandrow, Vagabond Stars, 70.

(49.) Anna Held, "How to Act in Vaudeville" (March 1, 1900), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(50.) Lulla Adler Rosenfeld, The Yiddish Theatre and Jacob P. Adler (New York, 1988), 185-6.

(51.) Kutzen, Mrs., letter to the editor, News Tribune (ca. 1908), BRTC.

(52.) "The French Comedienne Tells of Her First Christmas in America" (Pittsburgh), RLC, Vol. 265 (Anna Held Vol. 2), BRTC.

(53.) Standard's Christmas Poster (1904), RLC, Vol. 265 (Anna Held Vol. 2), BRTC.

(54.) "Anna Held" entry in Famous Actresses, RLC, Vol. 265 (Anna Held Vol. 2), BRTC.

(55.) Unmarked clipping, Anna Held clipping file, BRTC.

(56.) In Montgomery Phister, "People of the Stage," Cincinnati Journal Tribune (February 3, 1908), RLC, Vol. 265 (Anna Held Vol. 2), BRTC.

(57.) Higham, Ziegfeld, 26. Ziegfeld had a penchant for hiring leading ladies who won his affections. In 1908 Lillian Lorraine replaced Held onstage and off, followed by Billie Burke in 1913 (87-92).

(58.) New York World, May 9, 1897, RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(59.) "Water the Best Cosmetic," Boston Herald (Aug. 23, 1903) which carried numerous images of Held bathing, RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(60.) Phister, "People of the Stage."

(61.) Linda Mizejewski refers to this as American popular culture's first bubble bath in Ziegfeld Girl, 41.

(62). Almost a century later, in 1983, Held's daughter Liane Carrera reiterated this gesture at the Anna Held Museum she created in San Jacinto, California. The tour's final piece de resistance was a final glimpse into her mother's reconfigured boudoir. Press release from The Anna Held Museum, San Jacinto (ca. 1983), Anna Held Papers, BRTC.

(63.) "Anna Held's Milk Bath: An Invention of Miss Held's Own Press Agent," October 18, 1986, RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(64.) "Beautiful Smart Set Corsets," advertisement in The Ziegfeld Musical Revue Follies of 1907 program (Colonial Theatre, September 30, 1907), Harvard Theatre Collection; "Freeman's Face Powder," advertisement in The Ladies Home Journal 31:4 (April 1910), 74.

(65.) By the 1920s Florenz Ziegfeld would take on Held's role as beauty advisor. The "Great Glorifier of the American Girl," as he came to be known, wrote syndicated beauty and advice features that appeared in major newspapers, such as The Boston Sunday Post, The Evening World and American Weekly. Much of Ziegfeld's preconceptions about beauty standards reflect the eugenics movement popular at the time. "When Is a Woman's Figure Beautiful ... Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. Tells How" details the three distinct types of women Ziegfeld considers acceptable by height, weight, foot size. "The height should be about 7 1/ 2 times the length of the head ... The head should be 4 times the length of the nose," writes Ziegfeld. For a fuller discussion of how the eugenics movement and race influenced Ziegfeld, see Linda Mizejewski, "Racialized Glorified American Girls" in Ziegfeld Girl, 109-35.

(66.) Kathy Peiss, Hope in a Jar: The Making of America's Beauty Culture (New York, 1998), 85, 145-6.

(67.) "Girls: Anna Held as a Face Powder Attraction" (ca. 1899), unmarked advertisement in RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(68.) Unmarked advertisement in RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC. "The youngest and prettiest of actresses with exquisite roseleaf complexions look pale and blurred behind the strong stage lights," wrote advice columnist Annie Russell in The Ladies Home Journal (February 1910), 23.

(69.) "Miss Anna Held" (ca. 1895), Anna Held clipping file, BRTC.

(70.) "Anna Held Ten Years Ago and Today: The Milliner and the Maid in the Development of a Stage Beauty," New York World (November 24, 1901); unmarked advertisement in RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(71.) In 1899 the great Italian sculptor, Barcome, memorialized Held's charms in white marble. The bust was destined for the Paris Exposition of 1901, but Held, who was loath to part with it, kept it in her own collection and brought it on tour during "The French Maid." A year later in 1900 Ziegfeld commissioned sculptor W.M. Mullius to cast Held in solid gold. The life-size statue, worth $31,500 ("her weight in gold"), was likewise destined for the 1901 Paris Exposition. See "Charms of Anna Held in Chiseled Marble" (1899) and "Anna Held in Solid Gold" (January 29, 1900), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(72.) Mizejewski, Ziegfeld Girl, 133.

(73.) Thorstein Veblen, Theory of the Leisure Class (New York, 1899). American consumerism allowed newcomers to articulate a dual identity as Jewish and American expressed in material goods and fashion. Clothes especially were a marker of cultural assimilation, exemplifying an immigrant's ritualized change in appearance. Abraham Cahan's Yekh A Tale of the New York Ghetto (1896) and The Rise of David Levinsky (1882) illustrate that psychological change. See Elizabeth Ewen, Immigrant Women in the Land of Dollars (New York, 1985), 66-71; Andrew R. Heinze, Adapting to Abundance: Jewish Immigrants, Mass Consumption and the Search for American Identity (New York, 1990), 67, 89, 91; Jenna Weissman Joselit, The Wonders of America: Reinventing Jewish Culture, 1880-1950 (New York, 1994).

(74.) In Heinze, Adapting to Abundance, 93-4.

(75.) "Anna Held's Prettiest Gowns Are Inspected," St. Paul Globe (February 28, 1904), "Anna Held's Wardrobe in Fetching Fancies in Paris Fashions" (October 27, 1902), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(76.) "Anna Held Death Due to Tight Lacing" (August 13, 1918), Harvard Theatre Collection.

(77.) Unmarked clipping (ca. 1899), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(78.) Anna Held, "Editorial: The Parisian Woman" in the Women's Page of The Pittsurgh Leader (December 12, 1907), RLC, Vol. 265 (Anna Held Vol. 2), BRTC.

(79.) "Anna Held Sets a New Fashion," New York World (September 16, 1898), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC. (80.) "Saucy, Chic and Rich is Anna Held," Cleveland News (October 19, 1908), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(81). New York Herald (ca. 1897), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(82.) Daughter Liane Carrera published Held's biography Anna Held and Flo Ziegfeld (New York, 1954) under the pseudonym Anna Held, Jr. as if a direct "translation" of her mother's memoirs. The original manuscript, entitled "Anna Held-One Woman" or "Anna Held--The Woman, Her Intimate Life," is largely Carerra's personal recollections and writings, leading one to conclude that the published biography is a far less reliable source and depiction of Held's life and career; Anna Held Papers, BRTC.

(83.) Paul West, words and music, "I Want Dem Presents Back" (New York, 1896), Rare Book, Manuscript and Special Collections Library, Duke University.

(84.) The Telegraph (December 5, 1987), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(85.) New York Clipper (December 4, 1897), 660; New York Clipper (December 25, 1897), 710.

(86.) Koster & Bial's ads hyped Ziegfeld's managerial bravado as sole proprietor of the novelty act. "Miss Anna Held has the exclusive right to the use of the animated score sheet ... [under] penalty of legal prosecution." New York Clipper (December 11, 1897), 684.

(87.) The Telegraph (December 5, 1987); Detroit Journal (ca. 1899), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(88.) "Too Warm for Detroit," Detroit News (February 4, 1899), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC.

(89.) Higham, Ziegfeld, 56.

(90.) Michael Lasser, "The Glorifier: Florenz Ziegfeld and the Creation of the American Showgirl," American Scholar 63 (Summer 1994):441-8.

(91.) Madame Qui Vive, "Eyes that Made a Million" (1909); "Eyes That Just Would Not Behave: Anna Held's Million Dollar Orbs" (1909), RLC, Vol. 266 (Anna Held Vol. 3), BRTC.

(92.) Unmarked clipping (c. 1902), RLC, Vol. 266 (Anna Held Vol. 3), BRTC.

(93.) In "Mlle. Napoleon" (1903) and again in "The Parisian Model" (1906) Held appeared in gossamer-thin costumes that created the unseemly illusion that she was nude onstage. After leaving Ziegfeld's management Held's show-stopping innovation became a Follies trademark, synonymous with the Ziegfeld Girl who with the help of elaborate props and stagecraft was expected to narrowly avert exposure on a nightly basis. See Marjorie Farnsworth, The Ziegfeld Follies: A History in Text and Pictures (New York, 1956), 24.

(94.) Interracial couple and cakewalk strutters Johnson and Dean claimed responsibility for teaching new steps at society dances starting in 1891. See International Encyclopedia of Dance (New York, 1998), 2:25-6; Albert and Josephine Butler, eds., Encyclopedia of Social Dance (New York, 1975), 309; W.G. Raffe, Dictionary of Dance (New York, 1964), 84. In a series of cakewalk cartoons, Vanity Fair lampooned the cakewalk craze in 1892. By 1952 cakewalking was a favorite of elite college fraternities, illustrated by Life magazine's coverage of cakewalk competitions with white students competing in blackface. See cakewalk clippings file, BRTC.

(95) According to James J. Geller, May Irwin supposedly asked sports journalist Charles E. Trevathan to put words to a rhythm he garnered from "colored people in his native state" of Tennessee. The song was perfect coon material because it "differed from the spirituals inasmuch as it concerned itself with the comic characteristics of blacks." Irwin first performed "The Bully Song" in "The Widow Jones" premiering in Brockton, Mass., before moving to New York. It became Irwin's most popular song-a requisite footlight encore throughout her career. In Famous Songs and Their Stories (New York, 1931). A later version of "The Bully Song" has, instead of a women threatening to kill her cheating man, a black man pursuing another around the levee, trying to kill him. See Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks' An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York, 1989).

(96.) See Annemarie Bean, "Transgressing the Gender Divide," in Inside the Minstrel Mask, 245-56, and "`Miss Lucy's Teeths Is Grinning': Wench Songs of Blackface Minstrelsy," paper presented at Modern Language Association, Toronto, Canada, December 1997.

(97.) Harley Erdman argues that "jolly," a word commonly used at the turn of the century to describe a "jolly good fellow" as in the song, rarely referred to Jews in a gentile society. See Staging the Jew- The Creation of an American Ethnicity (Princeton, N.J., 1998).

(98.) For a nuanced understanding of what I mean by "embodiment" in relationship to vocal performance, see Embodied Voices: Representing Female Vocality in Western Culture, ed. Leslie C. Dunn and Nancy A. Jones (New York, 1994).

(99.) Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice," in The Responsibility of Forms, trans. Richard Howard (New York, 1985), 2.67-77.

(100.) See Janet Burstein, "Translating Immigrant Women: Surfacing the Manifold Self," in Talking Back: Images of Jewish Women in American Popular Culture, Joyce Antler, ed. (Hanover, Pa. and London, 1998), 15-2.9.

(101.) Anna Held, "Women Do Not Know How to Dress" (May 1912), pamphlet, Harvard Theatre Collection.

(102.) It is interesting to note the many press disclaimers following Held's "La Poupee" appearance, probably dispatched by Ziegfeld headquarters, that avowed how Held would soon "get a proper vehicle ... and show herself to be a great actress" as soon as she learned proper English. Held also felt misunderstood as a lowly coon shouter: "It is a style of entertainment that is very much misunderstood," she complained in 1900, "because it often misleads public opinion as to the true character of the singer." Ironically, her statement appeared alongside a splendid illustration of Held performing a cakewalk. Anna Held, "How to Act in Vaudeville" (March 1, 1900), RLC, Vol. 264 (Anna Held Vol. 1), BRTC. Also see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, Mass., 1986).

(103.) "This One's a Charcoal Seller," black and white photo, Anna Held Papers, BRTC. This publicity photograph appeared in The Morning Telegraph (October 10, 1904) when the show first toured before arriving in New York City on October 13, RLC, Vol. 265 (Anna Held Vol. 2), BRTC.

(104.) See Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, 1992).

(105.) Charles Darnton, "Anna Held and Joe Weber" (ca. November 1904), RLC, Vol. 265 (Anna Held Vol. 2), BRTC.

(106.) "Broadway Weekly: Some Very Effective Poses of Anna Held in `Higgeldy Piggeldy' at the Weber-Ziegfeld Theatre" (ca. Oct/Nov. (1904), RLC, Vol. 265 (Anna Held Vol. 2), BRTC.

(107.) See Hans Nathan, Dan Emmett and the Rise of Early Negro Minstrelsy (Norman, O.K., (1962); Dailey Paskman, Gentemen, Be Seated! A Parade of the American Minstrels (New York, 1976).

(108.) See Lott, Love and Theft, 40, 47, 48.

(109.) See Susan Gubar, Racechanges: White Skin, Black Face in American Culture (New York and Oxford, 1997), 41, 43, 44.

(110.) Lott, Love and Theft, 57. The cakewalk was supposedly a slave plantation dance that satirized whites in the Big House during Grand March festivities. Slaves would compete with the prize a cake. See Katherine Flowers, taped interview with Marian Horosko (28 minutes, 1963), New York Public Library for the Performing Arts Dance Collection (NYPL-DC); James Berry, "The Cakewalk and Strut" (ca. 1960), archives and manuscripts folder 17, NYPL-DC.

(111.) See Franz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks: The Experience of a Black Man in a White World (New York, 1967).

(112.) Anna Held's and Nora Bayes' differing musical repertoires and performance styles can be easily chalked up to the attenuated cult of personality in vaudeville, but these distinctions further reflect a significant shift in coon songs content from 1880 to 1920. When the fad first hit coon songs were unequivocally antisentimental and racially bigoted. Held, who began her career in the 1890s, sang coarse and unapologetic "Negro songs" in black dialect. By 1910 sentimental yearning for the bygone antebellum era translated into utopian depictions of the forlorn plantation and lost immigrant homelands. Bayes' Irish "novelty songs" exemplify this nostalgic period. Regardless, coon songs exorcised racial ghosts while upholding the status quo, white femininity, which effectively sublimated Held and Baye's Jewish ethnicity. The vicissitudes of coon song material reflect not only changes in mainstream public opinion about racial and social upheaval but also how performance forms in general cycle in and out of popular culture, first bucking conventions, fizzling out, then years later resuscitating in waves of sentimental nostalgia that often define the form in perpetuity. Ironically, Al Jolson became the penultimate artist of sentimental coon songs, recording many of Held's and Bayes' famous hits and in a sense absolving them from associations with the form's raucous beginnings.

(113.) Unmarked clipping (November 7, 1908), RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(114.) Indianapolis Star (January 5, 1908), RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(115.) Variety (June 1, 1909), RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(116.) Bayes' satire of "Down Where the Swanee River Flows" substitutes Bavaria's Wurzberger River, home to a large Jewish community.

(117.) Douglas, Terrible Honesty, 370.

(118.) For a detailed history of changing Irish iconography in popular song, see William H.A. Williams, 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream: The Image of Ireland and the Irish in American Popular Song Lyrics, 1800-1920 (Urbana, Ill., 1996).

(119.) See Laurence Senelick, "Variety into Vaudeville, the Process Observed in Two Manuscript Gagbooks," Theatre-Survey: The American Journal of Theatre History 19 (1978), 7; Paul Antonie Distler, "The Rise and Fall of Racial Comics in American Vaudeville," Ph.D. dissertation, Tulane University, 1963; Williams, 'Twas Only an Irishman's Dream also discusses the cross-cultural cache of ethnic stereotyping.

(120.) Nora Bayes, "How Can They Tell That Oi'm Irish?" Music from the New York stage, 1908-1913, sound recording, CD Vol. 2 (Sussex, England, 1993).

(121.) "She Made `Kelly' Famous," Rochester Times (April 19, 1910), RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(122.) "Band Box Girl," Follies 1908 (November 7, 1908), Ziegfeld Follies clipping file, BRTC.

(123.) "Nora Bayes Shakes the Dust of Frisco From Her Buskins" (May 5, 1906), RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(124.) Robert Baral, "Ziegfeld and His Follies," Variety (Wed., January 9, 1957), 293.

(125.) "Cut Out Tights and Pachydermy," New York Sun (April 27, 1910), RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(126.) "Nora Bayes Wears the Pants," New York Telegraph (May 22, 1909), RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(127.) Variety (January 15, 1910). Unmarked clipping in RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(128.) Playbill from "Two Hours of Song with Nora Bayes" (1910), MCNY.

(129.) Vanity Fair (February 1917) and publicity shots (ca. May 1917). Unmarked clippings in RLC, Volume 47 (Nora Bayes, Vol. 2), BRTC. For a history of the mammy figure, see Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks and Diane Roberts The Myth of Aunt Jemima: Representations of Race and Region (New York and London, 1994).

(130.) "Confessions of Nora Bayes," Denver Times (June 15, 1913); Archie Bell, "Nora Bayes in Snappy Memoirs Recounts Thrice-Wedded Career," Cleveland Leader (September 25, 1914), RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(131.) M. Alison Kibler, "Bayes, Nora (c. 1880-1928)," in Jewish Women in America: An Historical Encyclopedia, 130-1.

(132.) "Confessions of Nora Bayes," RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(133.) New York Telegraph (November 20, 1906), RLC, Vol. 46 (Nora Bayes Vol. 1), BRTC.

(134.) Burstein, "Translating Immigrant Women," 21.

(135.) See DeWitt C. Cooper, letter to the editor, New York Times (April n.d.), Anna Held clippings file, BRTC.

(136.) "Nora Bayes Shakes the Dust of Frisco from Her Buskins."

(137.) Unmarked clipping, Anna Held clippings file, BRTC.

(138.) Mrs. Kutzen, letter to the editor, News Tribune (ca. 1908), Anna Held clippings file, BRTC.

(139.) Zylbercwaig, ed. Lexicon of the Yiddish Theatre, Vol. I, 629-30.

(140.) "Held's Life is Musical Plot," Anna Held personality file, MCNY.

(141.) Hayden White, The Content in the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore, Md., 1987).

(142.) See Rogin, "Blackface, White Noise" and "Making America Home."

Pamela Brown Lavitt is a doctoral candidate studying Jewish folklore and theatre history at New York University's Department of Performance Studies, where she is completing a dissertation on Jewish minstrelsy and ethnic performance in popular culture. Living in Seattle, Pamela coordinates the Seattle Jewish Film Festival and is currently a Research Fellow with the Jewish Women's Archive.