The Devil's Playground_ A Century of Pleasure and Profit in Times Square - James Traub [21]
Ziegfeld created a series of flimsy vehicles designed to exploit Anna’s famous charms, including Mam’selle Napoleon, in 1903, and the more daring Parisian Model of 1906. These were negligible works of theater. One New York reviewer wrote of The Parisian Model: “Real merit the concoction has none, the music being reminiscent, the humor bewhiskered and hoary, and the plot imperceptible.” The same critic described one of Held’s dances as “quite the most disgusting exhibition seen on Broadway this season.” But that was more or less the point. In that number, called “A Gown for Each Hour of the Day,” Anna ducked behind a screen composed of taller chorus girls for each of the many costume changes. Those girls themselves disrobed behind painter’s easels in a number called, with typical Ziegfeldian lubriciousness, “I’d Like to See More of You.” And yet Ziegfeld had a finely calibrated instinct for opening the floodgates of appetite so far, and no further; he was always saved by his sense of taste. In the words of one of his biographers, Marjorie Farnsworth, “Ziegfeld knew the subtle line between desire and lust, between good taste and vulgarity, and never crossed it. He came close a few times, but he never quite crossed it.”
Ziegfeld was not a director, and certainly not a writer. His proper title was “producer,” but this barely does justice to the influence he exercised. Ziegfeld’s own life was a very conscious work of theater, intended to be consumed by the public through the medium of the newspapers, and to keep a gorgeous sense of luxury, romance, and inspired recklessness washing back and forth between the life and the stage. Ziegfeld was a handsome, dark-eyed man who dressed impeccably; and he understood how to stage-manage his serial romances in a way that Donald Trump could only envy. He fell in love with Anna, and then with an endless succession of beauties; these liaisons ensured that both he and they remained in the spotlight. Ziegfeld plied his beloved, whoever she was, with an endless stream of sable coats and diamond pins and hotel suites and private railroad cars; everything in their lives was the best, the biggest, the shiniest. The love was real, but the display was calculated. Ziegfeld was such a shameless promoter that when Anna’s $250,000 jewelry collection was stolen, she suspected he had done it to create a sensation; and when the same thing happened to the actress Billie Burke a decade or so later, she lodged the same accusation.
Ziegfeld was said to be coldhearted and selfish—his principal biographer seems to have loathed him—but he was also a magnificent character. His plays made him fantastically rich, but his recklessness kept him perpetually teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. His insouciance was legendary. P. G. Wodehouse and Guy Bolton, who wrote the book for several of Ziegfeld’s plays, describe him at a casino in Palm Beach: “Ziegfeld was standing by a table with a handful of the costly green chips, dropping them carelessly on the numbers and turning to talk to the woman next to him without watching the wheel. He won, but went on talking, leaving the chips where they lay. . . . Only when his companion squealed excitedly and pointed to the piled-up counters did he motion languidly to the croupier to push them towards him.” An awestruck Bolton says, “You feel that hundred-dollar bills mean no more to him than paper matches to a cigar store”; to which Wodehouse responds, “And half the time he hasn’t enough to buy a waistcoat for a smallish gnat.” This was Ziegfeld’s life; but it was also a myth—or what we would now call a lifestyle—every bit as potent as the dreams of giddy passion Ziegfeld retailed in his plays.
Ziegfeld’s own art was the presentation of female beauty. He sought, he said, “the embodiment of every man