'A Dress Suit Made of Linoleum'

Douglas Gilbert in his book American Vaudeville: Its Life and Times (McGraw-Hill, 1940) describes an adaptation of Hamlet produced late in the nineteenth century by "Dr. Landis," who played the title role: 

“A Dutch comic by the name of Larry Tooley played the first gravedigger, reciting his lines in dialect and shoveling up in his big scene a lot of tin cans and beer bottles. Alas, indeed, poor Yorick! Jack Murphy played the ghost in a soldier’s coat and a brass-band helmet. One of the wine-room girls played Ophelia. It was a riot and Landis became as notorious as the Cherry Sisters in later years.”

 

Gilbert was a feature writer for the New York World-Telegram, where A.J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell also worked before they joined The New Yorker. With them he shares a taste for what Harold Ross later called “lowlife.” Gilbert revels in the trashy and grotesque, as did vaudeville. His prose is middling but he is an industrious researcher who collects hundreds of stories about performers otherwise long forgotten. Here is Gilbert’s description of a performer named “Blatz,” like the beer, who billed himself as “The Human Fish”:

 

“Completely submerged, he would eat a banana, play the slide trombone, apparently go to sleep after reading a newspaper, and remain under water a remarkable length of time.”

 

And here is “Captain McCrosson,” who had served as a Zouave in the Civil War and performed wearing their uniform on stage:

 

“His was a wild, exuberant act, a good deal on the nut side. He began with a lightning drill in the manual of arms, then went into the bayonet drill—right, left, in the rear, defense against infantry, defense against cavalry. Then he tossed the gun into the air, whirling and spinning it like a drum major’s baton. He balanced it on his chin with bayonet down; spun it, point down, on the palm of his hand; and finished with a volley of shots and a whirl of the gun over his head and around his body.”

 

My favorite act in the book is by a performer known only as “Sparrow,” described by Gilbert as a “burlesque juggler”:

 

“Without doubt his was the sloppiest act ever presented anywhere—a mess from start to finish. Sparrow opened with a couple of melons, or pumpkins, tossed one in the air and looked up to catch it in his face where it burst into slush. Shocked, he crushed the other in his hands. When he attempted to balance a globe of goldfish, it doused him with water and fish; same with eggs and other objects. He used to toss soft oranges to the audience and invite them to throw them back. He intended to catch them upon a fork held in his mouth, but most of the garbage struck him in the face or on the body. Sometimes two or three in the audience, familiar with his act, brought potatoes or turnips to throw at him. These he caught on his fork—had to, they could have knocked him cold. Sparrow carried his own floor cloth and wore a dress suit made of linoleum. His shirt front was rubber.”

 

Some of you may be reminded of a once-popular comedian named Gallagher, who made a living smashing watermelons with an oversized wooden mallet. The juxtaposition of Dr. Landis. Sparrow and Gallagher remind me of Lear on the heath: “The art of our necessities is strange, / That can make vile things precious.”

 

A more recent student of vaudeville than Gilbert, the late Stefan Kanfer, reminds us that it probably shouldn’t always be recalled with a sense of nostalgia:

 

“Performers with bulletproof egos kept going; the others faded away. It was a hard life. Out of some 20,000 choristers, group acts, and soloists performing across America, less than 2 percent would make a good living out of vaudeville. Fewer still would enjoy celebrity.”