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A companion volume and extension to The Midnight Follies: Cabaret and the Dancing Craze in the Jazz Age. From 1910 - 1930. The dancing craze fuelled the new vogue for supper entertainment or cabaret on both sides of the Atlantic and there were hundreds of brilliant acts, mostly dancing duos but also singers and solo dancers who made their name in this field - these are their untold stories.
Did you know?
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✦The Moonwalk was first demonstrated by the incomparable dancer Hal Sherman.
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✦Maurice Mouvet coined the phrase cabaret to describe modern supper entertainment while performing at Cafe Martin in New York in 1911.
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✦The Hula Hula Hawaian dance was first performed by Ivy Payne in 1911 before she married her dancing partner Douglas Crane and became the toast of society in San Franscico.
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✦The Hawaian dance craze was epitomised by the exotic sounding Doraldina who was allegedly half Native American born in San Francisco and trained in Spain.
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✦Aileen Stanley was one of the most popular female vocalists of the 1920s and sold over 25 million copies of her recordings.
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✦The loud mouthed Texas Guinan worked in vaudeville and western silent films before she became a female M.C. in cabaret and hailed as the Queen of New Yorks night life with the famous phrase ‘Hello Suckers!’
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✦Clifton Webb, the famous film star, first found fame as a dancer in cabaret.
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✦Ben Blue, a ‘cyclone comedy dancer’ worked in the movies during the 30s and 40s and ran his own nightclubs in the 50s.
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✦Irene and Vernon Castle. immortalised by Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in The Story of Irene and Vernon Castle believed they were responsible for the dancing and cabaret craze. They were not.
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✦Irene Castle rather spitefully claimed that her rival Maurice Mouvet killed his first wife during a performance of the rather aggressive dance called the Apache.
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✦Former heavy weight boxer John Jarrott was described as the Fred Astaire of the original dancing craze and in his hayday he earned a fortune. But he became a drug addict, was arrested on several occasions and died a derelict.
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✦Helen Morgan was regarded as New York’s most talented torch singer who became the darling of the more sophisticated nightclub set perched on a piano.
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✦Harry Richman was a singer and dancer who sported a cane, straw hat and a cultivated lisp and became well known for singing Puttin on the Ritz. He became one of the great personalities of New York nightlife in the 20s.
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✦Wallace McCutcheon started off dancing with the queens of cabaret Joan Sawyer and Mae Murray before enlisted in the British army during WW1. He suffered physical and mental injuries from which he never recovered. He married the silent screen star Pearl White but divorced and committed suicide in 1928.
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✦The diminuitive Cockney Marjorie Moss became Britain’s most successful cabaret dancer with Georges Fontana and suffered from TB all her life. She married the film director Edmound Goulding, in what was described as a ‘lavender marriage’ and died four years later in 1935.
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✦French born Odette Myrtil had an unusual act playing the voilin and singing. She became a well-known dress designer in Hollywood and than ran her own cabaret Chez Odette in Pennsylvania.
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✦Annette Mills, sister of Sir Ian Mills, who found fame as a songwriter and actress with Muffin the Mule on Children’s TV, was in fact the partner to Robert Sielle, one of the major comic dancing teams of 1920s London.
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✦The Shimmy was considered lewd when introduced to New York by Bee Palmer and Gilda Gray in 1918.
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✦After failing to snare the Italian Prince Del Drago, the cabaret dancer June Day was cited by the Duchess of Westminster in her divorce from her husband in 1924. June said ‘I was never more than a friend of the Duke.’
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✦Portly British character actor Rex Evans made a name for himself in the mid-1920s as a comic singer in London cabaret before moving to the USA.
