Queen of Vaudeville - by Andrew L Erdman (Hardcover)

About the Book

Queen of Vaudeville is the first-ever biography of Eva Tanguay, the most famous star of the American vaudeville theater and perhaps the most popular live entertainer in the United States from about 1910 to 1920.

Book Synopsis

In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879-1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the "I Don't Care Girl"--named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen persona--Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady--and never looked back. Tanguay was, at the height of a long career that stretched until the early 1930s, a trend-setting performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual female entertainer. Whether suggestively singing songs with titles like "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It" and "Go As Far As You Like" or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, she was a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, from Mae West to Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have been both idolized and condemned for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of female sexuality.

In Queen of Vaudeville, Andrew L. Erdman tells Eva Tanguay's remarkable life story with verve. Born into the family of a country doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town, Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. Erdman follows the course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press, declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the history of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new media of radio and motion pictures. With nineteen rare or previously unpublished images, Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star.

Review Quotes

Queen of Vaudeville is a treasure house of material.... Erdman writes in this meticulously researched study of Tanguay and her times that at the zenith of vaudeville's popularity just before the First World War there were 5,000 music halls in the United States and 700,000 people attended shows every week in New York alone. Tanguay followed in a line of female performers who were pushing the boundaries of what was decent in a form of entertainment that had only recently become respectable enough for a middle-class, mixed-gender audience. Arrested for lewdness and frequently in the gossip columns, she enthralled both women and men, managing to combine energetic sexality with a mirthful wholesomeness.

Andrew Erdman tells us that everyday life for Tanguay was filled with its own vaudevillian adventures, and shows it through wild anecdotes of her antics, like the time she defended her handler from thugs with a hatpin.... Featuring a likely illegitimate daughter, a gender-bending show-biz marriage, a dog's heart in a jar, violent relationships, and the phasing out of a successful performer's career as vaudeville receded along with her health, this biography is tremendous.

Erdman convincingly places Tanguay's stardom in historical perspective while still summoning the physicality that made her so popular in vaudeville (she was arrested in New York in 1909 for indecent dancing on a Sunday) but never quite translated to radio or movies.

Erdman has captured the radiant essence of a woman from a bygone era--wholly of her time, yet curiously modern--and her complex personality jumps from the page. Combining detailed historical research with a deftly entertaining writing style, this book will be of interest to anyone in theater history, women in entertainment, and cultural history.

In his loving new biography of this long-forgotten celebrity, Andrew Erdman brings Tanguay back to life warmly.... You can almost feel the same electricity audiences of the early 20th century felt at just the mention of her name.

About the Author

Andrew L. Erdman is the author of Blue Vaudeville: Sex, Morals, and the Mass Marketing of Entertainment, 1895-1915. He lives in New York City.