Ziegfeld Follies Quotes

Besides having baseball and success in common they also had Claire Merritt Hodgson, a Georgia native and a Ziegfeld Follies girl who was Ruth’s second wife. In her autobiography, The Babe and I, Mrs. Ruth said she had known Cobb “very well” as a teenager back in Athens, before he married Charlie, and for what it may be worth, Al Stump, in his second book on Cobb, suggests they were young lovers.

The Rockettes have been around for ages, starting back in the 1920s when Russell had the idea of doing a Ziegfeld Follies–style show featuring sixteen girls. It became a smash hit, traveling all around the country.” Bunny spoke quickly as the elevator rose. “Eventually, the impresario S. L. Rothafel, a.k.a. Roxy, brought the troupe to his Roxy Theatre in New York and changed the name to the Roxyettes.” “That’s a mouthful.

She won an amateur night at Keeney’s Theater in Brooklyn, singing When You Know You’re Not Forgotten by the Girl You Can’t Forget. Her prize was $10, and she gathered $23 in coins from the floor of the stage. She worked for George M. Cohan but was fired when Cohan learned that she couldn’t dance. After singing with a road show, she appeared in New York musical revues. A struggling young songwriter, Irving Berlin, gave her a musical piece called Sadie Salome and suggested she sing it in Yiddish dialect at the Columbia Burlesque House, where she was working. In the audience that night was Florenz Ziegfeld, whose Follies were at the pinnacle of Broadway entertainment.

For example, Joseph Urban designed the Bath & Tennis Club, referred to as the B&T, in 1926. A talented architect, he was also a set designer for various operas and the Ziegfeld Follies. The socialite Marjorie Merriweather Post, heir to the Postum Cereal Company fortune, the country’s wealthiest woman of her day and the wife of stockbroker E. F. Hutton, also hired Urban to finish her gargantuan home, Mar-a-Lago, a stone's throw from the B&T.

Miss Brooks had a devilish streak of witty sarcasm. Her dialogue was wonderfully “feline,” as critic John Crosby would note: her snappy comeback to the stuffy assertions of her boss, principal Osgood Conklin, bristled with intelligence and fun. She complained about her low pay (and how teachers identified with that!), got her boss in no end of trouble, pursued biologist Philip Boynton to no avail, and became the favorite schoolmarm of her pupils, and of all America. The role was perfect for Eve Arden, a refugee of B movies and the musical comedy stage. Arden was born Eunice Quedens in Mill Valley, Calif., in 1912. In her youth she joined a theatrical touring group and traveled the country in an old Ford. She was cast in Ziegfeld’s Follies revivals in 1934 and 1936, working in the latter with Fanny Brice. She became Eve Arden when producer Lee Shubert suggested a name change: she was reading a novel with a heroine named Eve, and combined this name with the Elizabeth Arden cosmetics on her dressing room table.

Fanny’s “gift,” her talent for “being herself,” becomes apparent in the film when Keeney finally relents and allows her to perform with the chorus in a roller-skating number (“I’d Rather Be Blue”). Woefully incapable of roller skating, Fanny utterly destroys the integrity of the number, but sends the audience into hysterics. She comes out on top in the end, as the stage manager pushes her on to the stage to sing “I’d Rather Be Blue,” still on roller skates. Alone on the stage, she comes alive, demonstrating the star talent she had promised them. Florenz Ziegfeld decides to hire her for his famous Follies and gives her a song, “His Love Makes Me Beautiful,” which Fanny is supposed to sing, dressed as a beautiful bride, against a backdrop of stunning women, all taller, more elegant, and less ethnic-looking than herself. Fanny protests that this will never work, that the audience will laugh at her. He insists that she do it anyway. She agrees, but at the last moment, stuffs a pillow under her dress, pretending she is pregnant and turning the number into a hugely successful comic turn.