Rediscovering the Ziegfeld Club and Its Showgirls
By TONY PERROTTET
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The mysterious business card was tucked into one of the vitrines at the Ziegfeld Theater in Midtown Manhattan, where rare costume pieces from the “Follies,” the revue staged by the impresario Florenz Ziegfeld Jr. from 1913 to 1927, are on display. Bent and coated with dust, it bore the words “The Ziegfeld Club, Inc.” and offered several telephone numbers and an address on Park Avenue.
“We thought it was some sort of seedy gentleman’s club,” said Syrie Moskowitz, who had gone to the theater to research her role as a Jazz Age showgirl in “Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic,” an immersive theater production that recently opened at the Liberty Theater. “But when we called, this woman with a very sweet voice picked up. It was totally not what we expected. I asked: ‘What exactly are you?’ ”
On the line was Laurie Sanderson, a former actress and playwright who is the current executive director of the Ziegfeld Club — which, far from being a naughty gent’s resort, is one of New York’s pioneering feminist institutions. She explained that the club was founded in 1936 by Ziegfeld’s widow , Billie Burke, to help support the Ziegfeld Girls who had fallen on hard times. Although the last of the Girls, Doris Eaton Travis, died in 2010, at 106, the club has lingered, with a memorabilia-filled office on the Upper East Side. By coincidence, the club was also on the point of remaking itself with a new mission to support creative women on Broadway.
“It was kismet,” said Haleigh Ciel, who with Ms. Moskowitz had rushed to the club office to examine its archive (and who is playing Billie Burke at the Liberty). “Nobody we knew had ever heard of the club. But we spent hours there, going through the archives and talking to Laurie.”
“We’re Broadway’s best kept secret,” Ms. Sanderson said ruefully. “But that’s a situation we are hoping to remedy.”
The club could not be in a more unlikely location. After knocking on a side door of the neo-Gothic Central Presbyterian Church on East 64th Street, visitors are ushered onto a hand-operated, wood-paneled elevator that lurches to the fifth floor. But inside the compact office, memories of the flamboyant past suddenly come alive. The walls are lined with portraits of starlets in alluring poses. On a shelf sits Ziegfeld’s favorite model elephant made of bluish porcelain. (The beast, with trunk raised, was the personal mascot of the impresario, who fell in love with many of his showgirls.)
Several filing cabinets overflow with memoirs and letters, many from aged “Follies” veterans pleading for financial assistance. (“I’m living in desperation and the Ziegfeld Club is the only place I can turn,” goes one note from a cold-water flat in Hell’s Kitchen. Another elderly woman pleads on powder-blue stationery for money for aspirin, rent and cat food.) “The letters offer a snapshot of women’s lives,” Ms. Sanderson said. “Many started young on the stage and had no other job training or savings. A lot ended up in pretty bad shape.” She says she is often contacted by descendants of Ziegfeld Girls trying to find out about their grandmothers’ “secret” lives on the New York stage.
Of the roughly 3,000 dancers who strutted across Ziegfeld’s stages, some
The club’s early years with Burke as president were its golden age, well funded and filled with glamorous social events. (Burke is mostly remembered today as Glinda the Good Witch in “The Wizard of Oz.”) The annual gala ball in the Waldorf-Astoria featured song and dance acts, tableaux vivants and a “Pageant of Lace” fashion show, all attended by high-society figures and power brokers like Mayor Fiorello H. La Guardia. From 1956 to 1997, top actresses on Broadway were honored at the gala, including Barbra Streisand, who played the Ziegfeld Girl turned film star Fanny Brice in “Funny Girl.”
But by the late 1990s, as the last surviving Girls were entering or leaving their 90s, meetings became mellow gatherings at the church, where in the 1970s the club was given an office for its charitable work for nominal rent.
Ms. Sanderson’s grandmother had been a Ziegfeld Girl and a club member, and Ms. Sanderson, who took over as director of the club in 2013, spent her adolescence meeting the last “Follies” performers, listening to them play piano, sing and reminisce about the days when they would perform in three “Follies” shows a night and then the exclusive “Midnight Frolic.”
“You had to call a special telephone number, BRyant 9-3549, to get in, and entry was based on whether Ziegfeld liked you,” Ms. Sanderson said. “It was like getting into Studio 54 — it depended on your fabulousness .” They also loved to tell stories of larger-than-life characters, starting with Ziegfeld, a perfectionist who would often interview 15,000 women a year for his revue, then rank them by height and weight in four groups from A to D.
When Mrs. Travis died in 2010, there was talk of shutting the club down, but Ms. Sanderson pushed to keep it going, to preserve the archive and embark in a new, contemporary direction.
The party to reintroduce the club was held in late April at the New Amsterdam Theater on West 42nd Street, where the “Ziegfeld Follies” were staged from 1907 to 1927. In a fresco-lined Art Nouveau chamber that was once the Gentlemen’s Smoking Room, donors and theatrical figures gathered to hear classic old show tunes like “Look for the Silver Lining” while two actresses strutted in original dresses in a blur of feathers and glitter.
Ms. Sanderson announced that for the club’s 80th anniversary next year, it would revive the Ziegfeld Ball and start an annual $10,000 prize to be given to a woman creating new work in musical theater. “The club can’t just be nostalgic,” she said. “Our aim is now to look to the future. We’ll still give financial assistance to women at the end of their careers, but now we want to pay more attention to the start of their careers.”
“I feel embarrassed that I didn’t know about this club,” said the keynote speaker, Jeanine Tesori, the composer of “Fun Home,” now on Broadway, before she explained the need to combat the sexism ingrained in musical theater.
“Women are invisible,” Ms. Tesori said. “We are not present.” Despite buying the majority of tickets in New York, women made up only 14 percent of composers, 9 percent of lyricists and 7 percent of music directors and conductors in the 2013-14 Broadway season, according to the club figures.
Naturally, the actresses from “Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic” were also attending in vintage dress, along with the show’s creator, Cynthia von Buhler. The play depicts the tragic fate of Olive Thomas, a former Ziegfeld Girl who died in Paris in 1920 after drinking mercury, an event that gripped New York newspaper readers for months. “I was really drawn to depicting what women were up against then,” Ms. von Buhler said. “So many of the Girls ended up broke or died young.”
As the evening wound down, Ms. Sanderson said she hoped the club would attract the support of New Yorkers.
“New Yorkers aren’t always clear about who Ziegfeld was,” she said. “But they do love to discover things. If there is something old and cool, they will seek it out.”
Correction: May 17, 2015
An article last Sunday about the Ziegfeld Club, a charity for former Ziegfeld Follies performers, changing its mission to support creative women on Broadway misstated the first year the “Follies” were staged at the New Amsterdam Theater. The show began in 1913, not 1907, and ran to 1927.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/05/10/nyregion/rediscovering-the-ziegfeld-club-and-its-showgirls.html
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