• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 631 0

the day felt called upon to anatomize the Ziegfeld revue; it was, like the Berlin ragtime song, a central piece of cultural property. Edmund Wilson found its air of mechanical perfection frigid. On the other hand, it was just this air of polish that delighted the essayist Gilbert Seldes, who took the position that mechanical perfection was our destiny whether we liked it or not. The revue, Seldes wrote in The Seven Lively Arts, was the foremost expression of the “great American dislike of bungling, the real pleasure in a thing perfectly done.” And Ziegfeld was its foremost exponent. “He makes everything appear perfect by a consummate smoothness of expression,” Seldes wrote. “It is not the smoothness of a connecting rod running in oil, but of a batter where all the ingredients are so promptly introduced and so thoroughly integrated that in the end a man may stand up and say, This is a Show.” Ziegfeld didn’t aim at greatness; he aimed at delight. He was, in this and so many other respects, the very incarnation of Broadway.

THE LIGHTNESS, THE SPEED, the wit that Ziegfeld infused into his shows, and that his rivals supplied to their own revues and that sparkled in the roof gardens along Broadway, began to alter the climate of Times Square. The lobster palace came to seem increasingly formalistic, even dull. Julius Keller, the owner of Café Maxim, wrote in his memoirs that he realized some time around 1909 that customers would no longer be satisfied with lobster thermidor served on gilded platters. They needed action. Keller recalled the waiters who used to bawl out tunes at the German dive in the West Twenties where he had worked as a young man. And so, he says, one evening he planted two male and two female performers, dressed in evening clothes, like the rest of the clientele, at a table near the Hungarian orchestra. “At a prearranged signal,” Keller writes, “they broke into song.” Keller knew that he was onto something when his customers burst into applause. From that moment, he says, “Maxim’s never suffered from ennui”—the one fatal ailment of all Broadway establishments. When the customers tired of popular tunes, Keller hired “dark-eyed señoritas with their castanets and Spanish dances,” Russians with “their quaint native costumes,” Hawaiians with ukuleles, and “beautiful girls who wove their way among the tables and with adoring eyes poured forth their ballads of love.”

Thus was born—or by some other means was born—the cabaret. Soon almost all the great restaurants of Broadway had cleared out space for performances. The Folies Bergère opened its doors in 1911 as New York’s first full-time cabaret, a theater with strolling orchestra, circulating waiters, a balcony promenade, and a series of shows mounted on a stage. But the Folies didn’t last out the year, for the whole power of cabaret lay in its intimacy. Keller’s innovation, if it was his, of stationing the performer among the diners was essential, because in erasing the footlights that had traditionally separated entertainer from audience it engaged the fantasy that the diner was part of the intoxicating and risqué world of the entertainers. The most desirable tables were right on the edge of the cabaret floor, where you could see and touch and talk to the performers. The cultural historian Lewis A. Erenberg has described the sense of liberation brought on by the “action environment” of the cabaret and the café: “Seated among the fast crowd, women of the town, ethnic entertainers, and guests from out of town, respectable urbanites were open to the flux of public life that the city offered. . . . Instead of letting gentility define the limits of their public lives, respectable urbanites were realizing they could enter a wider world of spontaneous cosmopolitan gaiety and experience ‘the whirl of life’ itself.”

A passage in Rupert Hughes’s 1914 novel What Will People Say? summarizes the astounding velocity with which the habits and mores of Broadway changed in the years after 1909 or so. A party has gone to the upstairs room of the fictitious Café de Ninive, and a middle-aged