There’s good reason why one of Broadway’s finest theatres is named after Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne; no couple has lit up the stage quite like this husband-wife team.
Some say Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor were modern successors, but they only appeared together on Broadway once (a 1983 revival of Noël Coward’sPrivate Lives, at the Lunt-Fontanne Theatre of all places), and they shared a tempestuous, on-and-off relationship that sharply contrasted with Lunt and Fontanne, who were inseparable both on and off the stage during their 55-year marriage. And unlike Burton and Taylor, Lunt and Fontanne appeared in just a handful of films, including a 1931 adaptation of their 1924 Broadway play, The Guardsman. John Mosher filed this review:
* * *
One Giant Leap
Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic without stopping in 1927, but it would take four more years before anyone could accomplish the same feat across the Pacific. Don Moyle and Cecil Allen took up the challenge, hoping to fly their plane, Clasina Madge, 4,400 miles from Japan to Seattle to win a $25,000 prize from a Japanese newspaper. The lads took off from Tokyo in early September, but then went missing. E.B. White wrote:
As it turned out, Moyle and Allen were caught in a storm between Japan and Alaska that forced them to land on a small, uninhabited island in the Aleutian chain. Stranded for more than a week, the flyboys were finally able to make contact through a U.S. Coast Guard patrol and report they were safe.
Moyle and Allen sent word that they would return to Washington and prepare for another attempt. They flew back home by way of Nome, Alaska, where they landed on Sept. 21, 1931. Five days later they reached Fairbanks, and after weather delays finally made it to Tacoma, Washington, on Oct. 6. There they learned that Clyde Pangborn and Hugh Herndon Jr. had already won the $25,000 prize, having arrived from Japan the day before. The Tokyo newspaper did, however, give Moyle and Allen $2,500 for their efforts.
* * *
Thurber Gets Serious
We know James Thurber as a humorist, both for his writings and his cartoons. In the Sept. 19 issue, however, Thurber offered this touching remembrance of a subway newsstand proprietor, who he later learns is killed in the crossfire of a robbery. Here are the opening passages:
* * *
Did You Miss Me?
After a long absence (in Europe, presumably), Alexander Woollcottreturned to his “Shouts and Murmurs,” column, offering this “Triple Warning” that included his observations of H.G. Wells, who wondered if all his musings for the future would fall to swarms of lowly insects…
* * *
From Our Advertisers
With the arrival of fall come new fashions…these “wearables” below are suggested by B. Altman as suitable attire for attending a football game…
…smart fashions for young people weren’t confined to New York…this is how students at the University of Michigan dressed for a 1930 homecoming game against Illinois…
…well, times have changed, but folks still wear fur of a sort…
…wearing a real fur these days will draw the ire of animal rights advocates almost everywhere, but in 1931 few had problems with turning leopards and seals into coats for fashionable young women…
…then as now, folks enjoyed their pork sausage…the Jones Family of Wisconsin apparently saw a market for their products among New Yorker readers…
…after 131 years in business, the Jones Family and their sausages are still going strong…as is their farmhouse logo (the old farmhouse is real and still stands)…
…another back pages ad promoted Helen Hokinson’s first cartoon collection, So You’re Going to Buy a Book!…
…the collection including Hokinson’s beloved dowagers, but it also featured this gem…
…on to our cartoons from the Sept. 19 issue, we begin with William Steig and a couple of would-be renters…
…E. McNerney explored the trials of teenage life…
…Leonard Dove drew a crowd in a packed subway car…
…Otto Soglow displayed the playful side of his Little King…
…and Rea Irvin found an actor upstaged by an unlikely rival…
I wonder what the French or the British thought when, in 1929—just a little over a decade after the Great War—their former enemies were able to fly a 56-ton aircraft, carrying 169 passengers, into the skies above Switzerland.
And I wonder what some Americans thought in 1931 when this same aircraft toured Europe and Africa before breezing across the Atlantic—just four years after Lindbergh’s famous flight—making publicity stops from Brazil to New York.
Why, you might ask, did the WWI Allies allow Germany to build something that could easily be converted into a long-range bomber? The Treaty of Versailles forbade the development of such an aircraft, but the German Transport Ministry circumvented the treaty by building the Dornier Do-X on the Swiss side of Lake Constance. It was above this lake the Do-X made its 1929 record flight with 169 passengers and crew, including nine stowaways.
A New York visit by the Do-X was the event of fall 1931, and Morris Markey was there to file a story for his “Reporter at Large” column. Markey joined 71 other passengers on a flight around the city:
Conceived by German airplane designer Claude Dornier in 1924, the flying ship was launched for its first test flight on July 12, 1929, and later that year Popular Science reported on “The Mightiest Airplane”…
At a time when American and British planes carried no more than 20 or so passengers, the Do-X seemed like something out of a sci-fi-magazine…
Markey described the Do-X’s sumptuous interior, decked out like an ocean liner with plush chairs and mahogany tables. He was also allowed into the plane’s cockpit and chartroom, where tables “were covered with charts of the New York waters.” Behind the chartroom Markey also took in the stunning sight of men moving within the hollow wings, maintaining the plane’s twelve engines while it was in flight:
Markey concluded his column with this lyrical tribute to the Do-X:
In the previous issue of The New Yorker (Sept. 5), E.B. White filed this report about the Do-X and its visiting delegation. I was surprised that Markey, and not White, took the flight around the city, given White’s unbridled enthusiasm for flying machines.
To get some idea of what it was like to fly on the Do-X, here is a short film from YouTube. The first three minutes (with some weird lounge-y background music) feature a 1929 flight during which the DO-X carried 169 passengers—a world record not broken for 20 years. The New York visit is at the 3:00 mark.
* * *
Back to Earth
Our feet firmly back on terra firma, we turn to The New Yorker’s review of the new River House on the East River, where residents once parked the yachts they would use to sail to their Long Island estates. This luxury was short-lived thanks to Robert Moses, who reigned over public works and plowed the East River Drive (now FDR Drive) between River House and the river, effectively ending any practical use of the docks.
* * *
Something’s Fishy
In his “Notes and Comment,” E.B. White reveled in his powers of observation, having spotted the same model, Peggy Fish, in ads for competing cigarette brands:
* * *
From Our Advertisers
We kick off our advertising section with this two-page spread for Lux Toilet Soap. What is curious about this ad is not that Billie Burke (1884 – 1970) looked great at 39, but that she looked great at 47, her actual age when she made this endorsement for Lux. You would think the greater age would be an even better selling point for the soap makers, but either they decided 39 sounded better or maybe she just fooled Lux, and everyone else, about her true age…
…fall fashions abounded, as did ads for hats — these two were from different advertisers on separate pages…apparently hats looked good on women displayed in angled formations…
…Alcoa was expanding its market for aluminum products with a line of chairs it touted as being “in perfect taste” (note the snotty-looking butler at right)…my parents had a set of these, relegated to the basement as knock-about furniture…
…I love these ads by Rex Cole that elevate the lowly icebox to heroic heights (perhaps this is how Ayn Rand viewed her kitchen)…
…and we move on to our cartoons, where famed gold digger Peggy Joyce is the focus of a Peter Arno cartoon (Joyce was married six times, and claimed she was engaged about fifty times). After publishing a ghostwritten “tell-all,” Men, Marriage and Me in 1930, Joyce purportedly wrote a column for a spicy New York rag about various scandals in New York and London. It is possible or even likely these columns were also ghostwritten: after meeting Joyce in the late 1920s, Harpo Marx concluded she was illiterate…
…E. McNerney showed us a girl with little appreciation for her silver spoon…
…Richard Decker found humor in the desert sands…
…Barbara Shermund was back with some juicy gossip…
…and we close with two by William Steig…the awkward suitor…
When Earl Carroll’sVanities hit the Broadway revue scene in 1923, it faced strong competition from George White’sScandals and the long-running Ziegfeld Follies. Carroll’s answer: More of everything.
That included more nudity than the other revues. Critics, including the New Yorker’sRobert Benchley, found the nudity gratuitous, a titillating distraction from what was otherwise a mess of a show. It also landed Carroll in court from time to time on charges of public indecency. All of this, of course, was just more publicity to drive audiences to his theatre at 753 Seventh Avenue, which he built in 1922 and then partially tore down just nine years later to replace it with an even grander venue. This is where Benchley found himself on the evening of August 27 — at the grand opening of the Earl Carroll Theatre and the 1931 edition of the Vanities. Benchley found nothing grand about it:
Carroll’s ambitions were always big, whether it was the size or lavishness of his stage shows or the Art Deco theatre (designed by George W. Keister) he erected in 1931 in answer to Flo Ziegfeld’s 1927 Joseph Urban-designed theatre on Sixth Avenue. With 3,000 seats, Carroll’s theatre was nearly twice the size of Ziegfeld’s.
The show itself left Benchley baffled, a mishmash of lights, colors, and effects including a drooling dinosaur that dropped a naked woman on stage for a dance number…
This wasn’t last word from The New Yorker on the new theatre; the Sept. 12 issue featured these observations by Creighton Peet:
In the end, Carroll’s ambitions were too big for the deepening Depression, and just six months after his theatre’s opening he would lose it to creditors. The property would be snapped up by rival Florenz Ziegfeld and renamed the Casino, but the Ziegfeld connection would be short-lived; Ziegfeld would die a few months later in July 1932. Later that year another rival, George White, would take over the venue to stage his Music Hall Varieties, which ended in 1933 with middling results. The theatre would go through several more tenants—including Billy Rose—until 1940 when the discount “dime store” Woolworth’s would move in, demolishing the lobby and walling off the remaining ceiling and walls. Woolworth’s would close the location in the late 1980s—the store, and the last remnants of the Earl Carroll Theatre, would be demolished in 1990.
* * *
From Our Advertisers
Fall is upon us, and so the social season begins, according to the Hotel St. Regis…
…and what better way to prepare for the season than to acquire a new mink coat…
…maybe politics and world affairs were more your bag, in which case you probably wanted to get a subscription to the Herald Tribune and read the latest from commentator Walter Lippmann…
…the makers of Marlboro cigarettes, an upstart brand that initially targeted women, continued with their prize contests, but now they began courting men as well…
…on the other hand, the more established brand Chesterfield had the resources to run a color back-cover ad with endorsements from the brother-sister dance team Fred and Adele Astaire…
…Fleishmann’s continued to run their full-page ads touting the wonders of daily yeast consumption (“Eat three cakes a day”). The ads were there because Raoul Fleishmann used his wealth from the family baking business to keep the New Yorker afloat during its fledgling years…
…Farrar and Rinehart announced the arrival of Otto Soglow’s first book, Pretty Pictures…
…here is the cover of the book…
…and we move on to the cartoons with the character that would make Soglow rich and famous…The Little King…
…although Fleischmann likely saved The New Yorker with large infusions of cash, its cartoonists, including Gardner Rea, still took an occasional poke at the company’s health claims…
…anticipating his “Small Fry” cartoons, William Steig finds two of them examining the wonders of human physiology…
…Rea Irvin looked in on some stuffy Western Union censors…
…newcomer Robert Day illustrated the challenges of a doorman (Day would be a longtime contributor)…
…Garrett Price found humor abuzz between the bold and the meek…
…Alan Dunn tracked down a clueless hunter…
…and we end with Leonard Dove, who takes flight and anticipates our next installment…
In my last post we visited the Central Park Zoo, circa 1931, and found a collection of animals displayed as curiosities in barren enclosures that in no way resembled natural habitats.
It’s hard to say if those creatures were better or worse off than their cousins at the American Museum of Natural History, a short walk across the park to the northwest. Unlike the zoo, the tigers and rhinos at the museum were displayed in naturalistic, almost dreamlike settings. But then again they were dead; indeed, all that remained of them were their skins, skillfully fitted over skeletons of wood and clay.
E.B. White stopped by the famed museum to take a look at its new Asiatic Hall, and filed this report for “The Talk of the Town.”
The animals pictured below came from a couple of British big game hunters, gathered during expeditions in the 1910s and 1920s…
I am delighted that the AMNH (which I visited in December as an avid fan of diorama art) preserves these exhibits, which not only display animals—many now endangered—but also the artistry of painters, sculptors and taxidermists from a century ago. Sadly, many museums are scrapping these cultural treasures and replacing them with gaudy, interactive displays and video screens. An article in Newsweek (“Museum Dioramas Are as Endangered as the Animals They Contain,” Aug. 2, 2015) notes that around 2008 “the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History in Washington, D.C., closed two diorama halls and reopened them with video screens, interactive features and stand-alone specimens where the dioramas had been.” In other words, the specimens were removed from naturalistic scenes and displayed as stand-alone curiosities, rather like those poor animals in the Central Park Zoo of yesteryear.
* * *
Everyday Icons
Gilbert Seldes profiled industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss (1904–1972), who along with contemporaries Raymond Loewy and Norman Bel Geddes was among celebrity designers of the midcentury. Like Bel Geddes, Dreyfuss was a well-known Broadway set designer who would go on to become an industrial designer in the era of streamlining. But unlike Loewy and Bel Geddes, Dreyfuss went well beyond mere styling, taking a practical, scientific approach to problems that would not only make products better looking, but also safer and more comfortable to use. An excerpt:
* * *
Body-Building Barnum
Another well-known figure of the 1930s was Bernarr Macfadden (1868–1955), an early proponent of physical culture who would prefigure such notables as Charles Atlas, Jack LaLanne, and Arnold Schwarzenegger. But none of them were quite like McFadden, who also created a pulp publishing empire (among his magazines: Liberty, True Detective, True Story, True Romances, Photoplay and the notorious tabloid newspaper The New York Evening Graphic).
Macfadden also established numerous “healthatoriums” across the East and Midwest, including (in 1931) his latest venture, the Physical Culture Hotel near Dansville, New York. E.B. White explained, in his “Notes and Comment”…
* * *
For the Birds
When I came across “Farewell to Birds,” on page 17, I thought for a moment it was one of James Thurber’s animal parodies (there was even a Thurber cartoon at the bottom of the page), but then I noticed our writer was Will Cuppy, (1884-1949) who wrote in the Thurber vein (Cuppy was ten years Thurber’s senior) and like Thurber, was a bit of a curmudgeon. From 1931 until his death Cuppy wrote satirical pieces for The New Yorker that were later collected into books (also like Thurber). Here is an excerpt from “Farewell to Birds.”
* * *
Puttin’ on the Ritz
Lois Long, newly divorced from cartoonist Peter Arno, concluded her fashion column (“On and Off the Avenue”) by telling readers about her “swell new hairdo”…
* * *
Your Majesty
Speaking of new looks, Central Park West was boasting the addition of a new “skyscraper apartment building” called the Majestic. “The Sky Line” reported:
Another building making its mark was the Parc Vendôme on West 57th, offering more than 600 apartments with annual rents ranging from $1,100 to $6,600. Condos in the same building today range from $495,000 to $5,495,000.
From Our Advertisers
Henry Mandel, one of New York City’s most ambitious developers in the 1920s and early 30s, touted the Parc Vendôme in this advertisement…
…I wonder if Lois Long (see above) got one of these “dos” at the Ritz…I love the snob appeal of this ad — “The New Paris Way of Doing Your Hair”…
…which seemed to work…here is a random sample of Hollywood stars in 1931, all wearing the look…
…other ads appealing to the Continental lifestyle…a very understated yet elegant ad for Guerlain lipstick, and Nellie Harrington-Levine gave us a disinterested deb sporting “the wave,” a cigarette and a velvet dress…
…and Pond’s continued its parade of rich society women to sell its cold cream…here we are presented with “Mrs. Morgan Belmont,” aka Margaret Frances Andrews (1894–1945), a Newport socialite and prize-winning show dog breeder…
Andrews didn’t limit herself to cold cream, here appearing in a 1927 ad for Simmons mattresses…
…and we move on to this sad little ad from the back pages, featuring something called “Peeko,” which apparently mimicked the flavors of Rye, Gin and Rum…it must have tasted awful…
…our cartoons feature Perry Barlow, and I can’t quite tell if this guy is drinking a soda or some bootleg gin, which was often sold at select gas stations…
…a two-page sequence from Gardner Rea…
…Otto Soglow went fishing…
…and commiserated with a couple of unemployed guys whose plight is ignored by the celebrity-obsessed media…
…Alan Dunn hit the lecture circuit…
…Kemp Starrett sketched some wink-wink, nudge-nudge at the men’s store…
…and we close with James Thurber, and the trials of our elders…