Vaudeville
by Geoffrey Hilsabeck
We are left with the word vaudeville and little more than that. Vaudeville. We are left with traces: a few flat descriptions in books, some scratchy studio recordings, and what survives in early Hollywood, the anarchic Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, Buster’s great stone face, learned on vaudeville where deadpan was king. Pan was slang for face: the comic puts on a dead face, like a death mask, that plaster cast made soon after someone died in the days before photography, and walks among the living. He learned as a kid that there is something hilarious about this. He wears a mask, like the actors in Greek theater, Noh theater, Commedia dell’arte, where the clown was born. It is rather an archaic thing to do. It lets silence back into life.
*
A story is buried in that face—but whose? Is it the story of a boy born on the road and raised on stage? He came at the butt end Thoreau’s “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial nineteenth century.” What did he inherit of it, of the woody and brutal mystery of that century? That face: is it me? is it you? What word can I use to describe it, impassive, stoic, not unfeeling, somehow playful, strangely happy? I need as many words as it takes to tell a story. Doubt. Wonder. Anxiety. Such common feelings, so everyday—our monotonous sublime—we find written across Buster’s blank face, written on stone: one of the many miracles Buster, christened Buster by Harry Houdini, performed.
*
The Playhouse. Buster’s 37th film. An animal act, a military number, a minstrel show—and in an opera house. I turn to it for laughter, for black and white, a simple story, something American. I turn to it for my childhood. After my grandfather’s funeral we watched Laurel and Hardy and later I looked through his books for the marks he left, stars and arrows and years—WJB 1896!; L-D Debates; Mann vs Illinois 1877!! What does the reader seek? And why?
*
In The Playhouse, the performer performs the part of the spectator. He buys a ticket and walks inside and finds himself watching himself. Conducting and consulting and telling jokes to himself. It is an old story, set now in a vaudeville theater, but, as Buster playing an audience member says to himself playing the wife of that audience member after scanning the program, this fellow Keaton seems to be the whole show.
*
So much has changed. Too much is lost: the movie is silent, the man is alone. Where is Piqua, Kansas, and the vaudeville boardinghouse where Buster was born? And the boardinghouses at 8 Oxford St., Mrs. Scully’s at 311 East 14th St., Mrs. Tobin’s where Canal Boat Sal stayed, the Smith and Bussey Houses on Great Jones St., and the theaters at 104-106 Bowery, 210 Bowery, 585 Broadway, Waldman’s Newark Opera House, Howard’s Athenaeum in Boston, on and on across the country, along the vaudeville circuit, with barns, warehouses, factories, markets, and stables all converted into vaudeville theaters? Churches too, pews removed to make room for tables and chairs, balconies become private boxes, pulpit and choirloft stage and proscenium? Strip the church. Fill it with stars, cigar smoke, musicians, technicians, and animals, bass drums and backdrops, song-and-dance acts, jugglers, contortionists, comic monologists. Lancaster. Carson City. Harpo Marx. The Harolds and Arthurs are uptown. Railroad tracks slick with action catch the moon.
*
Somewhere amid that buzz and hum is my life.
*
Clown and Pantaloon enter and steal fruit from a fruit-stand. Then they go into the tailor’s shop but the tailor chases them out, brandishing a hot iron, or goose. Harlequin and Columbine, a couple, enter, both in patchwork outfits to show their station and moral character. Columbine goes into a dance. Both exit and then quickly reappear in a boat that seems to float downriver upstage. Clown and Pantaloon come back. Pantaloon indicates that he has an idea, and the two tiptoe into the undertaker’s shop and steal a coffin, which they place in the water, such as it is. They pull the wheel from a spinning wheel and split it in two, making two wheels that they then attach to each side of the coffin. They take a keg from the fruit stand and lay it in the middle of the coffin for a boiler and stick on top of it a length of stovepipe. Breaking up the rest of the spinning wheel for firewood, they toss the wreckage under the keg and soon smoke starts to issue from the stovepipe. Clown and Pantaloon get into the coffin-turned-steamboat. The wheels turn and off they go in the direction of Harlequin and Columbine.
*
Vaudeville. Irrelevant, unpredictable, an ad-hoc hodgepodge, rude, stretching its long arms across the wide country, sounding its barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world, what was once so popular, so present, now roped in mystery, its origins unclear. From the French voix de ville, voice of the city, or from songs sung in Normandy—chanson du Vau de Vire, song of the valley of the Vire. Some—like Tony Pastor—just say variety. It’s less French.
It’s a mongrel feeling.
*
You carry with you a description of vaudeville, a score without the means to make it into music. You hold onto little more than the fact that something along these lines once existed and doesn’t anymore.
*
And so you turn on Buster Keaton and are quiet.
*
Buster is two civil-war soldiers, veterans each missing an arm who come together to applaud the sending-up of war and its absurd uniforms. Buster is two. Two comics in blackface trade jokes, and Buster is both of them, Tambo and Bones.
*
In 1829 Jim Crow came on stage, a white man with a black face. First on de heel tap, den on de toe, eberty time I wheel about I jump Jim Crow. And that—where did that come from? People talk about a crippled stableboy once seen in Louisville or Cincinnati or Pittsburgh. Then the Ethiopian Opera at the Bowery Theater. Then the first true minstrel show, in New York and then on the road.
*
A white man smears burnt cork on his face to mimic one of two types of black men, neither of whom exist: the lazy field hand and the foolish dandy with a watermelon grin. A white dance troop performs a cakewalk—“Walking for Dat Cake, An Exquisite Picture of Negro Life and Customs”—an eyewitness account of the lives of black people, those strange, dark neighbors who live in shacks out back, their customs and habits originating somewhere deep in the dark continent.
But the cakewalk started not in Africa but on plantations in America, a burlesque of the ballroom dances performed by white bosses at the big house. Whites came down to watch blacks do their funny dance, not realizing that the black dance lampooned the white, and then they started doing it on stage for an audience: whites spoofing blacks spoofing whites. Forms of popular entertainment based on stereotypes and misconceptions, mistaken identities, fantasies based on fantasies, acts that can only be traced back to other acts. A match is a fire to start another fire.
*
Along with the minstrel show were concert saloons, music halls, burlesque, dime museums, freak shows, medicine shows, boat shows, legitimate theater: all added up to make vaudeville. What took place in improvised theaters all over the country—Sandusky, Galesburg, a barn, the back of a butcher shop—but that had its epicenter on the Bowery. 104-106 Bowery, 298 Bowery, Miner’s Bowery. Hamlet on the Bowery: morbid, self-conscious, mad, parodic. There were snare drums and banjos, banjos to animate sand jigs and clog dancing, a gold banjo set with jewels, banjos for comics. After a few bars on the banjo, John Carl would stop suddenly and recite Shakespeare, Shakespeare both straight and in burlesque, what were called “Bughouse Hamlets.” Carl was always associated with a song called “The Lively Flea”:
Feeding where no life may be,
a dainty old chap is the lively flea.
Feeding where no life may be,
a dainty old chap is the lively flea.
*
An improvisatory, vernacular spirit ran like a current through vaudeville, kept alive by interruption. Acts were interrupted by other acts, performers falling on stage from the wings or shouting from the audience, giving the show its air of improvisation, instability, even menace, the menace of things breaking down, finally, for good, breaking down never to be picked up again. But of course they always were, picked up and put in a new form. From elegy to energy—from something that was to something that is.
*
From Carl to a bone-soloist mimicking the sounds of cobblers and horses
A full-stage military number
A dancer called Fleury in a long cape, tossing the cape up so that it settles on his head like a turban, revealing nipples painted to resemble large eyes, a painted nose over his stomach, and a belly-button done up like puckered lips
A musical in full-stage with effects
“The Man Who Grows”
The famous monologist Clifton Crawford with his rapid changes in style and tone talking politics and then reciting “Gunga Din”
To witness these acts, strung together by time, organized on a single bill as a constellation is drawn on a map of the night sky!
*
October, Chicago, a bus-stop downtown. The streets of the city seem staged. A woman in a lacy, ankle-length dress from another era, a crazy-colored headwrap, and sneakers talks to a baby in a stroller beside her. The baby is her straight man. For some reason she clutches a large panel that looks like it came from a cockpit. Strange. Behind her a sign reads: “Hunger too rides the bus.” Then a man comes on stage, and she leaves, but without the stroller. He tosses the baby off-stage and starts loading bottles from a row of trashcans into the stroller. It becomes a song-and-dance act, with the trashcans and their contents becoming drums and rattles. Gene Kelly would later turn this act into a feature-length film: a dreamy working stiff falls in love with an uptown heiress. Before Gene Kelly got to it, though, it had a more tragic, sinister aspect. Bottles broke, interrupting the melody and changing the mood. The act trailed off. The audience turned away. Cigar smoke, the scrape of chairs.
*
Arnold walks on stage. He wears a cardigan sweater and track pants and seems concerned. What’s the matter, Arnold? No money in my wallet. No shoes on my feet. Sure enough, there are no shoes on Arnold’s feet. How did this happen? He pulls a box of matches from a pocket of his track pants. What’s with the matches Arnold? No heat in my apartment. Arnold lights a match and watches it burn.
This is played for laughs.
*
A vaudevillean monologue: I am so wild, furious, rabid, savage, and violent right now about the miserable state of interior decorating and the soil generally I could scream. I did, in the shower, the whole time. Bristol Palin is not Bristol Palin! But you knew that. This world is a world not of the old weapons—lance, arbalest, and spontoon—but the new—pistol, wire, and drone. Not of the old words—Antipathy and Revulsion, Animus—but the new—Nail. Gut. Rabbit. And so and thus I screamed and screamed and I soaped up my hairy ass and armpits and between the fingers and all those toes, all those areas are really clean right now, pal. So don’t even think about shouting out the answers because I’m super at-home in the questions.
*
Rivers and creeks should run through the essay. Lafayette and Pharaoh. Wandering scholars, discharged soldiers. And ponds in places for swimming. Make it more Huck Finn than Tom Sawyer. Pick up today’s racing and theatrical sheet. Wilder is a gag thief: give him four golden horseshoes and a glass cane. Sappho in Chinatown. It’s good luck to touch a hunchback.
*
Itinerant preachers perch on makeshift platforms in the crook where two fallen trees meet. One is named Finley, formerly a journalist, who converted one night in the woods beyond the tents of a camp meeting in Arkansas. After the camp meetings came to a close, did Finley find his way onto the vaudeville stage? Shirtless, shoeless, sometimes more poor Tom, sometimes more Lear, he would pace the stage, saying:
My mouth too is full of fraud; under my tongue are anger and disappointment and envy. I sing others’ songs to fill my mouth with sorrow, which is sweeter.
And then he would sing a ditty, saccharine but lovely, almost a lullaby. And then end with something like:
So let sorrow be stirred up on the long empty street at night, let it gather and go brown and wet with days
and then stuff a bunch of leaves in his mouth or consider some dirt. Delight in the law of the Lord! His billing: Finley Brings the Psalms to Life
*
Just what was vaudeville?
*
Then in walks Eva Tanguay. The Evangelist of Joy, Tanguay was once the most popular performer on vaudeville. She made $3500 a week with an act combining song, dance, sexual innuendo, and a feverish, childish abandon. Her boundless energy was a source of awe: she was a tornado, a hurricane, a lightning bolt. Everyone says so. She moved, constantly. She had wild, unruly hair and wore weird costumes, like a skimpy dress with pennies glued to it, a chandelier-like hat, and a thing with feathers. She bughoused and burlesqued. She delivered a short monologue on the subject of a chicken that was pulled from the show by authorities in Pittsburgh. She mocked marriage. She sang a popular drinking song while dousing herself in champagne. She sang, “I Want Someone to Go Wild with Me,” “I’m Crazy about that Kind of Love,” “I Don’t Care,” and “There Goes Crazy Eva.”
She herself admitted to having no actual stage skills, was not beautiful, could not sing or dance. Reviewers described her voice as “a hairshirt to the nerves” and compared her dancing to “a mad dog fleeing a mob of small boys.” What then made her all that money? That raw, boundless energy? Did people go to see her the way they went to Niagara Falls? Was she, like the Falls, an expression of the natural world, of those ancient, sprawling rivers and towering mountains? A “symbol of infinity,” as Henry Adams might say?
Did people worship, in their churches-turned-theaters, this skipping and shouting jolie-laide, the simultaneous expression and realization of energy—energy becoming conscious of itself?
Who knows. Eva Tanguay, an enchanting and electric performer, has been reduced to a few paragraphs in scholarly books that tell the story of how Americans have entertained themselves over the years. All we are left with are facts. She lost her money in the 1929 crash. She died in relative anonymity. They say she was writing an autobiography.
*
I flip on the TV. See. See Buster run. See him walk across the tops of train cars. See him walk like a short person in pants, always in that same suit and hat, and somehow the walking is so endlessly interesting, mesmerizing, it must be beauty. See beauty. And wonder. Deadpan wonder Buster. Doubt and wonder Buster. Anxiety. See doubt. Deadpan Buster. See Buster run.
*
See Buster run across the stage and up a ladder into the rafters and back down and through a door and out another onto the stage and into the orchestra pit full of water swimming to safety in a boat made of a bass drum with a violin for a paddle. See him run and run and run, the great American novel, forward motion, still in that same suit and hat, away from everything, his bosses, his creditors, his past, towards everything, reconfigured, and his running itself achieves this reconfiguration, is an engine of metamorphosis. Across the blood-soaked American landscape, as the blood-soaked American landscape, not an American soul, for there is no American soul, but a soul in the American landscape.
*
He is black and white on a long and empty road. What are we becoming? What have we lost? Buses idle. Hospitals closing. Men in worn hats clutch cardboard and walk—this one performs modest, unschooled stretches before starting another lap.
*
I use my grandfather’s books. They stretch deep into the 19th century: American Vaudeville; The Strange Career of Jim Crow; Common Landscape of America, 1580 to 1845; books on the Indian in America with titles like The Great Father and The Long Death; a book on water. The rotten voice of my memoir is America, and so is the sweet mystery of its face. It won’t sell. It begins and ends in Iowa, Iowa from the French word for the Bah Kho Je tribe. It begins with the wild canary and the wild rose and the geode and ends with the guttural muttery grunt of a hog. Each chapter has its color—brick, sand, daisy, wax. After green comes black, a black scarf we tie around the mailbox. And we long for the open piano. The grass grows stranger. Some creeks, some rivers—a weedy affability inhabits the edges, but we cannot bury our dead there: it is too close to the water. I pass them on foot, only myself, I drink from them and know only a fraction of what I taste and become.
Essay first published as an electronic chapbook by Song Cave.
About the Author:
Geoffrey Hilsabeck is the author of Riddles & Co, forthcoming from the Song Cave. His work has appeared in BOMB, the Chronicle of Higher Education, Seneca Review, and elsewhere.
