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Speaker 1: We know most of what we know about vaudeville because

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Speaker 1: of the existence of Variety. Variety was the first to

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Speaker 1: actually review shows and talk about what was being performed

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Speaker 1: on the stages.

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Speaker 2: Welcome to Daily Variety, your daily dose of news and

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Speaker 2: analysis for entertainment industry insiders. It's December sixteenth, nineteen oh five.

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Speaker 2: I'm your host, Cynthia Littleton. I am co editor in

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Speaker 2: chief of Arriety alongside Ramin Setuda. I'm in La He's

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Speaker 2: in New York, and Riety has reporters around the world

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Speaker 2: covering the business of entertainment. On today's episode, as teased

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Speaker 2: in that opening, we'll go back in time to nineteen

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Speaker 2: oh five. Fiety is marking its one hundred and twentieth

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Speaker 2: anniversary one two zero. We'll hear all about the business

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Speaker 2: of vaudeville and variety show entertainment, which was the focus

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Speaker 2: of the marketplace when we began. We'll hear from David Monno,

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Speaker 2: professor of American social and cultural history at Wilfrid Laurier

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Speaker 2: University in Waterloo, Ontario. He's an expert on the vaudeville business.

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Speaker 2: And we'll hear from author and screenwriter Peter Rader about

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Speaker 2: how new technology in the form of the gramophone and

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Speaker 2: one very savvy French actress created the star system that

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Speaker 2: now rules our world. But before we get to that,

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Speaker 2: here are a few facts and headlines about Variety that

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Speaker 2: you need to know. Our first issue hit New York's

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Speaker 2: newsstands on December sixteenth, nineteen oh five. As we promised

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Speaker 2: on our front cover, Variety in those days covered vaudeville circuses, parks,

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Speaker 2: ur lesque fairs, and more. The booking of entertainment for

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Speaker 2: summer parks and fairs that was a big beat. Each

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Speaker 2: issue a Variety cost five cents two dollars for a

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Speaker 2: year's subscription, three dollars for foreign subscribers. On the mast

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Speaker 2: head we declared a Variety paper for Variety people. Variety

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Speaker 2: was published on Saturdays out of the Knickerbocker Theater building

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Speaker 2: in Manhattan at thirty eighth and Broadway. The first issue

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Speaker 2: had a long and somewhat snarky essay about the vaudeville

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Speaker 2: business from famous theater critic Acton Davies. Those days, Variety

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Speaker 2: ran information on new acts, We ran reviews, and we

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Speaker 2: ran a lot of ads for new acts. Within ten years,

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Speaker 2: Variety would be such a trusted institution that many vaudeville

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Speaker 2: artists declared Variety in New York to be their permanent address.

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Speaker 2: They'd get mail and packages sent there. We'd hold it

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Speaker 2: for them and they'd pick it up when they got

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Speaker 2: back into town. Variety was founded by Sime Silverman. He

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Speaker 2: was a journalist from upstate New York who wrote about

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Speaker 2: entertainment and vaudeville for numerous New York newspapers. He was

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Speaker 2: working for the Morning Telegraph when he got fired after

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Speaker 2: panning a vaudeville show. The theater pulled its advertising and

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Speaker 2: he got the boot. He got mad, he got inspired,

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Speaker 2: and he borrowed twenty five hundred dollars from his father

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Speaker 2: in law to launch Variety. As you'll hear from Professor

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Speaker 2: David Mono in a Moment, variety was a catch all

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Speaker 2: term to describe a type of stage show with a

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Speaker 2: multitude of acts. Vaudeville was a specific form of variety show,

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Speaker 2: but the concept of the variety show goes back to

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Speaker 2: the mid eighteen hundreds, so the word variety, in all

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Speaker 2: of its v tastic glory, was a spot on choice

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Speaker 2: for the name of Silverman's paper. Silverman Ran Variety, with

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Speaker 2: a firm hand out of Midtown Offices on forty sixth

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Speaker 2: Street in New York for nearly thirty years. He died

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Speaker 2: on September twenty second, nineteen thirty three, in Los Angeles.

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Speaker 2: He was out there because just a few weeks earlier,

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Speaker 2: we launched the Daily Variety Edition published out of Hollywood

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Speaker 2: on September sixth, nineteen thirty three. If all of this

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Speaker 2: history is as interesting to you as it is to me,

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Speaker 2: please go find our precious December tenth print edition. It

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Speaker 2: has a very big section that celebrates Varieties one hundred

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Speaker 2: and twentieth anniversary by looking at the history of the

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Speaker 2: business that we cover. It's a terrific issue which also

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Speaker 2: has the Netflix Warner Brothers paramount Brawl on the cover.

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Speaker 2: You can, of course, also find it online at Variety

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Speaker 2: dot com. My colleague Dan do Proolski built out a

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Speaker 2: nifty Variety one twenty digital hub on Variety dot com.

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Speaker 2: It also has a slanguage dictionary that explains the zany

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Speaker 2: words that we made up in a way that really

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Speaker 2: helped knit the community together. As Sime said, a Variety

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Speaker 2: paper for Variety people. And now we turn to a

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Speaker 2: conversation with Professor David Monno. He's the author of Vaudeville

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Speaker 2: and the Making of Modern Entertainment eighteen ninety to nineteen

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Speaker 2: twenty five. He has so much insight for us about

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Speaker 2: what the entertainment marketplace was like when Variety was born.

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Speaker 2: Professor David Mono, thank you so much for joining me.

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Speaker 1: Well, thank you for your having to hear.

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Speaker 2: I went looking for somebody who was an expert on

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Speaker 2: the business of vaudeville, and your book Vaudeville and the

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Speaker 2: Making of Modern Entertainment popped up. I was so excited

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Speaker 2: that you said yes very quickly. As we celebrate Varieties

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Speaker 2: one hundred and twentieth anniversary, I thought it would be

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Speaker 2: instructive to talk about what was the entertainment marketplace like

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Speaker 2: at that time, particularly in New York where we were born.

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Speaker 2: And of course, if you look through our first bunch

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Speaker 2: of issues, you can just see the coalescing of this

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Speaker 2: entertainment infrastructure, so much of it around New York. Professor,

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Speaker 2: can you sketch the scene if somebody had a dime

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Speaker 2: or two in their pocket and they wanted to go

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Speaker 2: out and have a show, and they happened to live

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Speaker 2: in New York or Boston or a big city where

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Speaker 2: you could find that. What kind of a marketplace was

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Speaker 2: it in nineteen oh five.

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Speaker 1: It's a transforming one. So there's a fairly wide variety

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Speaker 1: of new entertainments and there are lingering older entertainments. You

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Speaker 1: could still go out to see a melodrama if you

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Speaker 1: were to New York, possibly go out to see a

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Speaker 1: tent show or a traveling show. If you had a dime.

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Speaker 1: You'd probably end up going to a pretty cheap, lot

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Speaker 1: built theater. You wouldn't get into the legitimate in terms

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Speaker 1: of the conventional theater. Or you go to a burlesque

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Speaker 1: if you wanted to see a burlets show, or you

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Speaker 1: could go out and get a drink in a saloon.

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Speaker 1: But vaudeville was certainly the growing entertainment, and its relationship

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Speaker 1: with variety was organic. We know most of what we

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Speaker 1: know about vaudeville because of the existence of variety, and

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Speaker 1: a variety hadn't been there, it would be a much

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Speaker 1: darker entertainment for us. It was covered in the newspapers,

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Speaker 1: but sporadically and usually very briefly. A variety was the

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Speaker 1: first to actually review shows and talk about what was

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Speaker 1: being performed. On the stages. But it was also the

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Speaker 1: first to carry entertainment business news, so we know a

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Speaker 1: lot about what was happening on the business side from

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Speaker 1: the page of the Variety. Variety, not the magazine, but Variety,

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Speaker 1: which is what's really performed in vaudeville, and one has

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Speaker 1: to distinguish those two. Is a much older entertainment, dates

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Speaker 1: back to the eighteen thirties and eighteen forties, and it

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Speaker 1: was performed in a number of different venues, and it

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Speaker 1: would survive long after vaudeville disappeared. I think the two

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Speaker 1: golden ages of variety were probably about nineteen oh five

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Speaker 1: to nineteen twenty, and then again in the nineteen sixties

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Speaker 1: and seventies when TV was full of variety shows, and

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Speaker 1: so variety is much longer lasting. Vaudeville was really a

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Speaker 1: business form that organized the variety show and presented in

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Speaker 1: a different format, and so it is a diverse entertainment market.

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Speaker 1: Vaudeville it still starts up in the eighteen eighties because

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Speaker 1: there is an effort across America cities to separate the

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Speaker 1: barrooms from the theaters. It's considered immoral to sit and

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Speaker 1: drink and look at a show and so municipal legislation

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Speaker 1: has passed, and then state legislation has passed across the

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Speaker 1: northeast and gradually spreads its way west, which prohibits drinking

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Speaker 1: and watching a show. And as that happens, and owners

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Speaker 1: have to make a decision are they going to run

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Speaker 1: a theater and get rid of the drinking or are

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Speaker 1: they going to stay with a barroom and get rid

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Speaker 1: of the show. And those who made the decision to

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Speaker 1: get rid of the barroom and keep the show needed

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Speaker 1: a new name for what they were doing, and they

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Speaker 1: latched on the name of vaudeville, which was a French

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Speaker 1: name that had been used since the seventeen nineties for

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Speaker 1: a higher class a variety. And that's where Vaudeville came from.

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Speaker 2: A give us a sense of what it was like

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Speaker 2: to go to a vaudeville show at say a big

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Speaker 2: house in New York.

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Speaker 1: Sure, peanuts not popcorn. Tina was with the thing of choice,

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Speaker 1: and people would spit out the shells. One of the

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Speaker 1: reasons vodola is so transformative is that it was the

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Speaker 1: first effort to democratize commercial leisure by making it accessible

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Speaker 1: and by making it inexpensive. So early in the century

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Speaker 1: of a vaudevill show, depending on if it was a

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Speaker 1: small theater or a more prestigious theater. A more prestigious

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Speaker 1: theater may cost you fifty cents that a less prestigious

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Speaker 1: theory are dying. By nineteen ten, the more prestigious theaters

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Speaker 1: are charging up to two dollars and they have reserve seating.

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Speaker 1: The less prestigious have gone up to above thirty five cents,

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Speaker 1: so there is inflation in prices.

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Speaker 3: House lights were.

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Speaker 1: Left on so that the people on stage could see

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Speaker 1: the audience very clearly. There was a tradition of getting

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Speaker 1: up and moving around during the show. You didn't sit

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Speaker 1: quietly through the show. So a vaudeville show was made

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Speaker 1: up of somewhere between ten or fifteen short acts that

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Speaker 1: would last, some of them ten minutes, some of them

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Speaker 1: twenty minutes, and an act was on that you didn't like,

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Speaker 1: you could actually get up and leave and come back

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Speaker 1: twenty minutes later. Reserve seating was quite a new thing.

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Speaker 1: The best houses introduced the reserve seating in the eighteen nineties.

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Speaker 1: It was pretty common among the better class of vaudeville theaters.

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Speaker 1: By nineteen ten, the theater was quite segregated. If you

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Speaker 1: were an African American, you could only sit up in

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Speaker 1: the gallery, the top layer of the balcony. Children also

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Speaker 1: sat there. Vadna was a place where parents would tell

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Speaker 1: their kids to go after school if they were working late,

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Speaker 1: and they would give them a dime to go and

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Speaker 1: sit up in the balcony and stay in the theater

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Speaker 1: for a couple of hours until they got There was

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Speaker 1: a board next to the stage which announced the next

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Speaker 1: act that would come out. It was all carefully timed

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Speaker 1: because if you wanted to go out to the theater,

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Speaker 1: you needed to know that at eight ten the act

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Speaker 1: you wanted to see was coming. On the business of

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Speaker 1: organizing a Volvoll show it was quite complicated because different

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Speaker 1: acts used more or less of the stage, and so

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Speaker 1: theater managers had to organize the show in such a

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Speaker 1: way that they could close the curtains and put performance

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Speaker 1: at the front of the stage while they were setting

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Speaker 1: up the stage behind for the next act. And so

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Speaker 1: singers and comics were always very popular because you could

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Speaker 1: close the curtain behind them while you set up the

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Speaker 1: stage for acrobats or for an animal act, or for

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Speaker 1: a short play.

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Speaker 2: Can you talk about the booking processes. I know that

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Speaker 2: in time that gets developed, But in that nineteen oh five,

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Speaker 2: in that right turn of the century, was it a

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Speaker 2: very organized business.

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Speaker 3: Yes.

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Speaker 1: It started in the earliest days of Vautville, individual theaters

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Speaker 1: booking their own and performers would correspond with theater managers

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Speaker 1: to say, I'm going to be in your area in

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Speaker 1: two weeks time, have you got anything for me? And

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Speaker 1: so it was a very complicated and hard to work

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Speaker 1: on my business. Already by the eighteen eighties, various theaters

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Speaker 1: are beginning to collaborate together because it doesn't take much

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Speaker 1: to realize that if you can book somebody for three

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Speaker 1: weeks and then put them on a circuit so that

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Speaker 1: they would perform one week in one theater, then moved

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Speaker 1: to the next theater, and then moved to a third theater,

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Speaker 1: and if they were all close together, the performers would

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Speaker 1: be more inclined to accept that than they would if

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Speaker 1: you were just doing an individual booking. And so that's

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Speaker 1: how the circuits started up.

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Speaker 2: If you're a vaudeville performer in these days, will you

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Speaker 2: have multiple shows a day or is it pretty much

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Speaker 2: one show a night?

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Speaker 1: Most theaters ran between two and four shows a day,

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Speaker 1: depending on how long those shows are. Some of the

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Speaker 1: smaller theaters would run four shows a day because they

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Speaker 1: didn't have enough material, and after nineteen hundred, with short movies,

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Speaker 1: so that you might have five or six acts, and

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Speaker 1: in between those five or six acts, you'd show a

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Speaker 1: couple of films.

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Speaker 2: What would say a star, maybe not a megastar, but

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Speaker 2: an established vaudeville performer, what could they expect to make

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Speaker 2: a week or a show?

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Speaker 1: Widely divergent. Now, this is a time when if you

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Speaker 1: were a a bank clerk, you'd probably be earning about

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Speaker 1: fifteen hundred to two thousand a year. If you're a

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Speaker 1: factory laborer, you'd probably be earning about one thousand dollars

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Speaker 1: a year. A big vaudeville star, the Annette Kellermans, the

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Speaker 1: Tang Gays, they would be pulling in about two thousand

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Speaker 1: to three thousand a week, and so it was huge

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Speaker 1: salaries for the biggest stars. If you were starting out

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Speaker 1: in pop Vaudville, a small time performing in between movies,

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Speaker 1: you would probably get fifteen to twenty five dollars a week.

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Speaker 1: Most vaudvillians would perform maybe twenty weeks a year, so

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Speaker 1: but it's still meant that if you were a big

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Speaker 1: vaudeville star, you were forty fifty thousand dollars a year

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Speaker 1: in income at a time when a bank manager might

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Speaker 1: be rinning five.

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Speaker 2: Who were some of the biggest vaudeville stars of the

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Speaker 2: nineteen oh five nineteen tens.

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Speaker 1: The biggest names around nineteen hundred were men. George Froller Golden,

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Speaker 1: who was really the first stand up comic, was the

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Speaker 1: highest paid vaudeville performer. Over the course of the first

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Speaker 1: decade of the twentieth century, they increasingly become women, and

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Speaker 1: it's the women who were in the highest salaries, people

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Speaker 1: like Gavatanga, who was for four or five years the

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Speaker 1: highest paid performer in vaudeville. And at Kellerman she was

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Speaker 1: a swimmer, an Australian who came and did a diving act.

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Speaker 1: Harry Houdini was always a big draw, the young Buster

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Speaker 1: Keaton was with the Keaton family on vaudeville.

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Speaker 2: Let me wrap up by asking you, I think I

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Speaker 2: can guess what may have hastened the end of vaudeville

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Speaker 2: as a dominant entertainment format. I'm guessing movies had something

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Speaker 2: to do with it. Radio had something to do, but tell.

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Speaker 1: Me basically competition. Vaudeville always operated on fairly tight margins,

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Speaker 1: so that you needed to fill your house to about

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Speaker 1: half full in order to make any money. And as

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Speaker 1: competition grew in the early twentieth century, not just from movies,

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Speaker 1: but also from cabaret that are growing up clubs that

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Speaker 1: are growing up reviews and roof gardens like Sigfeld's Roof

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Speaker 1: Garden Burlesque, which is also cutting into the law film market.

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Speaker 1: So all of these different entertainments are starting to chip

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Speaker 1: away at the money that you can make in entertainment

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Speaker 1: and buds. In order to respond, they moved towards consolidation

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Speaker 1: by shutting down less profitable vaudell houses and then investing

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Speaker 1: heavily in building huge places like the Palace in New York,

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Speaker 1: which we're going to be opulent, and which were very

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Speaker 1: expensive to build, and there's a stock market crash which

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Speaker 1: wipes a lot of them out.

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Speaker 2: Professor Monell, thank you for helping shed some light on

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Speaker 2: this and what the industry was like when we were born.

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Speaker 2: Really appreciate your time and your expertise.

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Speaker 1: Thank you, simpieving.

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Speaker 2: And now we'll hear from Peter Rader, the author and screenwriter.

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Speaker 2: He wrote a terrific book a few years ago, Playing

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Speaker 2: to the Gods, Sarah Bernhardt, Eleanora duss and the rivalry

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Speaker 2: that changed acting. This great book is about to be

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Speaker 2: made into a movie directed by Michael Sussi. Here, Rader

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Speaker 2: talks about the entertainment marketplace in nineteen oh five and

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Speaker 2: how Sarah Bernhardt was the Taylor Swift of her day.

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Speaker 2: Peter Rader, author and screenwriter, Thank you so much for

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Speaker 2: joining me.

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Speaker 4: You're so welcome. I'm thrilled to talk about this, Peter.

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Speaker 2: People seeking entertainment, what kind of options would have been

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Speaker 2: available to people in New York circa nineteen oh five?

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Speaker 2: That era when Variety got started.

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Speaker 4: Nineteen oh five is a really interesting year because it's

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Speaker 4: a year in which emergent technologies are about to revolutionize

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Speaker 4: the world of entertainment. You have, on the one hand,

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Speaker 4: from the emergence of Nickelodeon's and cities across America that

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Speaker 4: were not quite movies yet but sure but novelty shorts

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Speaker 4: that people would go in and see for five cents,

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Speaker 4: things like magic tricks or a train coming into a station,

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Speaker 4: or foreign capitals like Paris and London or Vaudeville. It

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Speaker 4: would be a series of shorts, your in and out

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Speaker 4: in twenty minutes, and that was your movie experience of

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Speaker 4: the day. And then even more revolutionary was that entertainment

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Speaker 4: had come into the home in the form of gramophone recordings.

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Speaker 4: The gramophone is that big trumpet record player that you

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Speaker 4: see on the RCA Victor logo where you'd get your

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Speaker 4: seventy eight RPM record. It wasn't vinyl quite yet, and

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Speaker 4: you would crank up your thing. There was no electricity involved.

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Speaker 4: It was all mechanical. Rank up your thing, it loads

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Speaker 4: the spring and this record spins for about three minutes,

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Speaker 4: and suddenly opera is in your home. Certainly, the most

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Speaker 4: famous opera singer of the day was Enrico Caruso from Naples, Italy,

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Speaker 4: who was like the Elvis Sinatra of his day. He

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Speaker 4: was super popular. He was selling records at the time

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Speaker 4: in the hundreds of thousands, soon to be millions. So

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Speaker 4: he's on his way to become a platinum recording artist.

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Speaker 4: And that's the technology that was about to disrupt the industry.

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Speaker 4: But the legit theater, that's where you went out and

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Speaker 4: saw things. En mass the Grand Dame of the theater

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Speaker 4: at the time was Sarah Bernhardt. She was arguably and

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Speaker 4: to this day, the most famous actress that ever lived.

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Speaker 4: Everyone knew Sarah Barnhart, whether you had seen her in

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Speaker 4: person or not, you had read about her in the newspaper,

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Speaker 4: because she invented the culture of celebrity, which was very canny.

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Speaker 4: She was her own producer, she ran her own company,

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Speaker 4: and she knew that the performance didn't end when the

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Speaker 4: curtain went down. It continued after hours, the after party,

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Speaker 4: the dinner party, and in the morning papers.

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Speaker 2: What put her on the path to becoming really the

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Speaker 2: first entertainment star.

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Speaker 4: Sarah Bernhardt has such a fascinating biography. She was the

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Speaker 4: illegitimate daughter of a courtisan who was essentially an escort

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Speaker 4: and a high end courtisan who would be with kings

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Speaker 4: and princes and very wealthy patrons. But she came into

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Speaker 4: the world in Paris, France. She was French, and she

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Speaker 4: absolutely became determined to seize her own destiny, and she

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Speaker 4: did it relentlessly. She had so much charisma. The way

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Speaker 4: she died on stage is legendary. She would take two

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Speaker 4: minutes to fall, spiral down to the floor, shrieking and

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Speaker 4: in most of her plays, she did die. She often

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Speaker 4: played tragic heroines who had die. But what really drove

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Speaker 4: her success was that she realized at some point that

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Speaker 4: she had so much fame she actually could seize her

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Speaker 4: own destiny by running her own company. That was unprecedented

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Speaker 4: for a woman to be running her own company, but

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Speaker 4: Sarah did it, and she did it brilliantly. She spent

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Speaker 4: exorbitant amounts of money on costume ums and the staging

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Speaker 4: and the sets. I mean, she was always on the

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Speaker 4: verge of bankruptcy and she would always rebound.

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Speaker 2: How big of a troop would she have typically traveled

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Speaker 2: with in her heyday?

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Speaker 4: Sarah famously owned a train car, so she had the

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Speaker 4: Sarah Bernard Express that she would hook on to, you know,

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Speaker 4: various trains and travel across the country, and it was

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Speaker 4: pretty much full. So I would say her entourage was

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Speaker 4: in the thirty to fifty maybe a half dozen to

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Speaker 4: a dozen of those would be actor. She also created

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Speaker 4: this idea of merch, so one thing that she did

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Speaker 4: was sell these souvenir collectibles called cabinet cards, which were

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Speaker 4: photographs of Sarah Bernhard doing eccentric, exotic things like sleeping

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Speaker 4: in her signature coffin, which she liked to do, or

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Speaker 4: wearing a bat hat, which was a hat with literally

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Speaker 4: a taxidermied bat sitting on it, and various other things.

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Speaker 4: She liked to dabble in the occult and do things

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Speaker 4: like Ouiji boards and stuff that was very popular in

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Speaker 4: the time. So she played with all aspects of her

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Speaker 4: personality to sort of magnetize and draw people in.

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Speaker 2: As you've said, this woman was so ahead of her time.

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Speaker 2: She would have taken social media and she would just

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Speaker 2: own the world today.

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Speaker 4: She was a prototype for people like you know, Liberaci

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Speaker 4: and Lady Gaga and David Bowie. The idea of be

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Speaker 4: eccentric and out there and that actually is fascinating to

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Speaker 4: the public.

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Speaker 2: Peter, thank you for coming on and help being a

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Speaker 2: little part of Variety celebrating are pretty awesome one hundred

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Speaker 2: and twentieth anniversary.

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Speaker 4: You're so welcome. Happy birthday, Variety. This was a lot

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Speaker 4: of fun.

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Speaker 2: As we close out today's episode, we'll give the last

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Speaker 2: word to Sime Silverman. This is an excerpt from the

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Speaker 2: editorial that ran in the first issue under the Masthead.

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Speaker 3: Variety in its initial issue, desires to announce the policy

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Speaker 3: governing the paper. We want you to read it. It

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Speaker 3: will be interesting, if for no other reason than that

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Speaker 3: it will be conducted on original lines for a theatrical newspaper.

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Speaker 3: The first, foremost and extraordinary feature of it will be fairness.

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Speaker 3: Whatever there is to be printed of interest to the

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Speaker 3: professional world will be printed without regard to whose name

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Speaker 3: is mentioned or the advertising columns. All the news, all

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Speaker 3: the time, and absolutely fair are the watchwords. The news

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Speaker 3: part of the paper will be given over to such

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Speaker 3: items as may be obtained, and nothing will be suppressed

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Speaker 3: which is considered of interest. We promise you this and

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Speaker 3: shall not deviate.

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Speaker 2: Thanks for listening. This episode was written and reported by

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Speaker 2: me Cynthia Littleton, with contributions from Clayton Davis, Sime Silverman,

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Speaker 2: and generations of Variety reporters who have labored for the

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Speaker 2: Mighty be What a history. I love the interviews with

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Speaker 2: David Mono and Peter Rader so much that longer versions

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Speaker 2: of both will run on Friday on Daily Variety sibling

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Speaker 2: podcast Strictly Business Stick Snicks Hick Picks. Please leave us

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Speaker 2: a review at the podcast platform of your choice, and

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Speaker 2: please tune in tomorrow for another episode of Daily Variety,

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Speaker 2: and don't forget to tell us what you think at

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Speaker 2: podcasts at Variety dot com.

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Speaker 4: Thanks, I'm just fascinated that Variety is one hundred and

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Speaker 4: twenty years old. That really rocked my world.