2018 Passing Show TO PRINT

PassinTgheShow
Newsletter of the Shubert Archive

VOLUME 33 a 2016/2017 b ©2018 The Shubert Archive

Inside

Who Told You to Act?: Justine Johnstone's
Curious Experience as Lee Shubert's
Galatea................Page 2
AStrecphsiIvne.S..h...u..b..e..r..t...T..iPmaeg:eF3r4ed Astaire In The
News from the Archive..............Page 51

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JWuhsotTinoeldJYohonusttoonAe’scCt?u:rious
Experience as Lee Shubert’s Galatea

by Kathleen Vestuto

When meaty roles come through, I’ve been in the room and pretty people get turned away first.
Charlize Theron, actor, 20161

It was one of the oddest romances of the theatre. It may not even have been an actual
romance, despite Lee Shubert’s wishing it so. And however much Justine Johnstone may have
hoped that her relationship with Lee would be a springboard to the acting career she craved, that
would not happen either. It was not because she lacked talent or savvy or smarts or ambition.
Rather it was her looks: She was considered just too pretty to be taken seriously as an actress.

In 1917, Justine Johnstone (not to be confused with the memorable character actress of
the 1960s and 1970s, Justine Johnston; no “e”) was one of the most famous women in New York
theatre. At a statuesque 5’7”, Justine possessed a light Nordic quality considered an ideal at the
time. She was blonde, with large, heavily lidded blue eyes, a generous bow-shaped mouth, a soft
oval face, and a resonant contralto speaking voice sometimes compared to Ethel Barrymore’s.
Songs were written about her, a dance was named for her, and H.L. Mencken and Guy Bolton were
besotted with her. F. Scott Fitzgerald had his fiancée replace her unstylish wardrobe with French
couture, à la Justine. “The thing was to look like Justine Johnstone at the time,” Zelda Fitzgerald
later wrote, “and it still seems like a fine way to have looked.”2 And it was all about how she
looked. Thanks to clever publicists, she was repeatedly dubbed the most beautiful woman in the
Follies,3 on stage,4 on screen,5 in New York,6 in America,7 and even in the world.8 But Justine was
ambivalent about being tagged the most beautiful anything. It was great when it could get her a
job, not so great when it was the only reason she would get a job.

It was an era when dramatic actresses (or “emotional actresses,” in the parlance of the
day) were often given a pass on looks. Maude Adams was referred to as “plain looking.”9 Similarly,
Laura Hope Crews and Laurette Taylor, while certainly not unattractive women, were never
saddled with a “most beautiful” label. They were acknowledged as not being “pretty pets of the
public; they are actresses.”10 Maxine Elliott achieved success as a dramatic actress in 1903 after
years of being told she was “too beautiful” to be taken seriously. Elliott, who would become a noted

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 2016/2017  Justine Johnstone, c. 1911.
(Courtesy of Justin Wanger)

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theater owner and manager, reportedly believed that a homely girl would succeed as an actress
more quickly than a pretty one.11

It seems that the less an actress adhered to a socially accepted definition of prettiness,
the better she could be believed as a real person. After all, a real actress used her face and body to
convey emotion. A beautiful woman’s facial expressions were limited to pleasant smiles or simple
inertia. One simply did not frown. It spoiled the face. “Even if the face is pretty,” wrote fashion
editor Grace Margaret Gould in 1921, “the whole expression may be spoiled by a wrinkled forehead.
The lines give a troubled look, and often an old one…. Beware of the involuntary expression. It
is an enemy that lurks unawares to give you away.”12 Apparently, beauty was anathema to natural
human expression.

In some instances, beauty even seems to have been considered a distraction. In 1913, actress
Evelyn Carter Carrington successfully sued producer Arthur Hammerstein for releasing her from a
leading role in the musical play The Firefly for being “too good looking.” Hammerstein evidently
had a problem with how pretty Carrington looked when she was kissed by her leading man, and
apparently thought the show would be better served with less distracting pulchritude. “I don’t pose as
a great beauty,” Carrington said, “but I don’t propose to let my beauty cause a breach of contract.”13

“Show girls,” or young women who appeared in musical choruses, were another story.
They were required to be beautiful to appeal to those with the most ticket-buying power in a
patriarchal, heterosexual culture: the proverbial “TBM” (tired businessman). At the time, the
term “show girl” did not quite connote our contemporary Las Vegas performers, but rather the
early 20th-century “Floradora Girl”: a beautiful young woman in a small role, or in the chorus, of
a Broadway musical who wore beautiful, but not necessarily scandalous, costumes and who could
sing and dance ― albeit not always well. To best serve the market base, these women were hired
primarily for their looks. Productions with show girls were called “girl shows.” They were extremely
popular and, for the producers, extremely profitable.

Show girls who were particularly tall, statuesque, and able to wear beautiful costumes well
were called “manikins.” A manikin is inhuman; it poses, does not speak, and has no brain. A show
manikin took little to no action, was generally silent (and therefore non-threatening), and how
she looked was more important than who she was.

Justine was beautiful enough to get work as a manikin. She was beautiful enough to be
Lee Shubert’s Galatea. Her face was her fortune, and for the smitten Lee, that was the bottom line.

***
Justine Olive Johnson was born in Englewood, NJ, in 1895 to a Swedish barge captain
and a Norwegian dressmaker. Growing up poor in Hoboken, near the docks and their “forest of
funnels,”14 as she called it, Justine developed a certain reserve that P.G. Wodehouse would attribute
to her Scandinavian “aloofness and slightly haughty carriage.”15 Aside from the cultural stereotype,

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such reserve could also have been a protective device for a young girl who was always being told
by strangers, from an early age, how pretty she was.

If there was another supposedly Nordic trait that Justine possessed, it was a joy of words
and storytelling. She was an avid reader on all sorts of topics: political science, anatomy, philosophy,
plays ― particularly plays. Justine would wrangle her little friends to serve as her supporting casts
in the skits she wrote for herself. She dreamed of appearing in Norwegian dramas such as Ibsen’s
Peer Gynt ― preferably as Peer, but Asa or Solveig would do. She was not picky. She just wanted
a very good role in a very good play.

At about age 14, she began working for a Union Square coat manufacturer as a model ― a
“manikin.” She was not particularly interested in the work; she simply wanted to afford the types
of clothes she was modeling. A salesman at the shop introduced her to a well-connected Broadway
press agent, Walter Kingsley. Considered the “king of Broadway” and the “godfather of struggling
actresses,” Kingsley offered to help Justine build an acting career. He changed her last name from
Johnson to the more British-sounding “Johnstone” and set about finding her theatre work. The
parts were not great, but for Justine this career move was an obvious choice: She was making $7
a week as a coat model, but in 1910 Kingsley got her $18 to portray one of the children in the
Winthrop Ames production of The Blue Bird.16 The mystical drama played at the New Theatre on
Central Park West and was co-produced by Lee and J.J. Shubert.

As she and Kingsley began making decent money, the flack wasted no time in issuing
hyperventilating press releases to promote Justine’s career. “Among the new girls on Broadway,” ran one
such blurb, “none has received more adulation than Justine Johnstone. She is one of the most talked-
about beauties of the season. A dozen prominent artists have pronounced her the ideal American girl.”17

Justine progressed to a lavish 1911 revue at the newly opened Folies-Bergère at 210 West
46th Street. Called either by the sketch names Hell/Temptations/Gaby or simply “the Folies-Bergère
show,” the musical was produced by vaudeville manager Jesse L. Lasky and Boston impresario
Henry B. Harris. Justine’s job: show girl. She was one of six “messenger boys” ― girls dressed in
pseudo-Western Union uniforms gathering “messages” from men in the audience to female cast
members and reading them onstage, apparently with hilarious results.

How well Justine performed in this show is not recorded, but she made an impression.
Even though she was one of reportedly 200 cast members, Lasky would recall later in life (a bit
creepily) that the 16-year-old Justine was “already as luscious as Marilyn Monroe.”18

One requisite aspect of show girl culture was the inevitable “Stage Door Johnny,” a
usually wealthy young swain lining up after the show to introduce himself to girls with the most
unspectacular of roles. Justine had many Johnnies. She got the orchids, the notes backstage, the
lobster dinner invitations, boxes of chocolates (which she said she gave to her father), and became
devastatingly bored. This was not the type of theatre she aspired to.

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When the Folies-Bergère show tanked after two months, Justine quit the business. Eager
to complete her truncated high school education, she entered the Emma Willard School in Troy,
NY. The school’s extensive liberal arts curricula proved a revelation. Justine, the former Broadway
pro, appeared in school recitals, musicals, and Shakespearean productions, and immersed herself
in theatre work several notches above what she was used to doing. She also began reading about
professional theatre women whose careers she admired. After graduating in 1914, she returned
to New York armed with a new agenda. She would get the work she knew she could get ― show
girl jobs ― but follow the examples set by other actresses she admired, such as Elsie Ferguson and
Marguerite Clark, who had leveraged early successes in musical comedy to gain more coveted
dramatic roles. Get the work first, call your own shots later.

Justine reconnected with press agent Kingsley and agreed to a minor role in the Irving
Berlin musical Watch Your Step, produced by Charles Dillingham. It was a typical Dillingham
production, a “girl show” comprised of vaudeville numbers strung together with the thinnest of plots
and the requisite lovelies in the chorus. Dillingham, however, had been influential in developing
the career of one of Justine’s idols, Elsie Ferguson, and he was extremely well connected socially. It
was not unusual for the producer to take players under his wing and bring them to parties hosted
by his prominent friends, such as the Astors and Vanderbilts. In an era of rigidly defined social class

structures, hobnobbing with the elite afforded much
more legitimacy to a working-class actor, particularly
a woman, than lobster dinners with some rich Johnny.
It was almost certainly through Dillingham that
Justine would become acquainted with some of the
most blue-blooded names in society.

During the run of Watch Your Step, Kingsley
hit PR gold, but perhaps not in the way Justine
might have preferred. He learned that a high school
graduation photo taken of her by a Troy photographer
had won a camera company contest that had asked
for photos of “beautiful women.” Kingsley morphed
that into a press-release proclamation that Justine had
been crowned “the world’s most beautiful woman.”
His hyperbole somehow made its way into newspapers
all over the country. Justine’s reputation, and the fate
of her career, were thus sealed.

And then Florenz Ziegfeld came calling. The
great “glorifier of the American girl” offered Justine

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featured spots in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1915. Justine had just been offered $25 a week for a walk-
on from actor-manager John Drew. Ziegfeld, however, was known to be one of the most generous
producers on Broadway. His going rate for newbies was $50 a week. Justine negotiated for $75, and
got it. She was now the ultimate show girl in the ultimate show-girl show. But it was a stepping
stone, a featured role, and the best-paying job that the young woman from the “forest of funnels”
could get at the time. And she was no manikin. She may have been the only Follies girl with the
works of Charles Darwin, Stephen Leacock, and G.K. Chesterton on her dressing-room table.

Kingsley, who was employed by both Ziegfeld and Dillingham, went to work promoting
Justine. Theatre columnists clamored to get a quote from Ziegfeld’s newest star, and invariably
asked what it was like to be the most beautiful girl in the world. Justine always replied that she
did not know. When theatre critic Burns Mantle visited her backstage at the New Amsterdam
to meet the girl who “faced a steadily poised battery of opera glasses that questioned her right to
the reputation she had gained,”19 Justine was characteristically blunt. “As soon as a girl is called a
beauty,” she told Mantle, “it is assumed she has no brains.” The bemused critic asked Justine what
she wanted to achieve, to which she replied, “I want to go into legitimate drama. I may have looks
now, but as soon as I start to get a little old they won’t want me in musical comedy. I have to do
something so that they’ll have to keep wanting me.” When asked why such a beautiful young show
girl would be so concerned about growing older, Justine shot back, “You really shouldn’t be talking
to me. You should be interviewing Mary. She knows more than the rest of us put together.” Mary,
a former musical theatre performer, was the Ziegfeld girls’ dresser.20

Halfway through the 1916 Follies run, Justine quit. Rumor had it that Ziegfeld would
not allow her to have a gentleman caller in her dressing room, and, insulted at the implication
of impropriety, she stormed out. Neither Justine nor Ziegfeld ever commented publicly about the
incident, but Justine very likely was simply tired of being glorified. Ziegfeld took no action except
to replace her with another beauty, and would speak highly of her in later years. She had been one
of his biggest draws, and he never had a problem reminding anyone of that. “I immediately saw
the success she would make,” Ziegfeld boasted in 1921 about his first meeting with Justine. “She
became enormously popular. I do not suppose that anyone else in the Follies was so much talked
about that year as Justine Johnstone.”21

Justine returned to Dillingham for some upgraded featured roles, including one in Stop!
Look! Listen!, a popular Irving Berlin musical. She became good friends with her dressing-room
colleague Marion Douras, who had adopted the stage name of Marion Davies. The two women
could not have been more different: Davies was bubbly, fun-loving, and spoke with a slight
stammer. Justine was cooler and spoke in low-pitched tones. Davies was not averse to dating
wealthy, married men. Justine selected her dates carefully and avoided the attached. They bonded
immediately, and, in fact, their unlikely friendship would become the stuff of Broadway legend,

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thanks in large part to their mutual friend Anita Loos. Reportedly, Justine and Davies were the
inspiration for Loos’ comic novel, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes ― Davies becoming Lorelei Lee, the
charming, scatterbrained gold digger, and Justine becoming Dorothy Shaw, the level-headed friend
whom Lorelei would chide for dating non-wealthy men.22

As the story goes ― and it almost certainly is just a story, as none of the principals
involved apparently ever mentioned it ― during a performance of Stop! Look! Listen!, Justine
received a note backstage that invited her to dinner after the show. It came from a very well-
known, very wealthy, very married gentleman in the audience ― a former politician and a friend
of Dillingham’s. Unsurprisingly, Justine received many similar invitations. She and Davies both
did. She was not interested; this guy seemed more like Davies’ type. So she handed the note to her
friend and said, “Why don’t you go?”23 Davies went. And that is how 19-year-old Marion Davies
met 52-year-old millionaire newspaper kingpin William Randolph Hearst, the father of “yellow
journalism,” who could make headlines out of nothing, and who would make Davies’ career.

Justine accepted enough dates to confess that “I had ― well, several marriage proposals.”24 She
turned them all down, believing that careers and husbands did not “harmonize very well.” If she were
to get married, she said, she would want a husband in the theatre. The problem was that actors did not
interest her, and she was leery of businessmen. She was seeing “many a case of unhappiness between girls
and their businessmen husbands. The girls insisted on remaining on the stage.”25 So did she.

In between musical gigs, Justine made the rounds of producers’ offices looking for more
“legit” work. The managers were glad to have Justine stop by, but no one was remotely interested
in hiring her for a drama. “Everyone was very polite,” she said, “indeed, very kind,” as they told her
no. “I was stamped with an indelible label as a beautiful ‘manikin’…. I was supposed to be averse
to hard work and discipline.”26

In early 1917, Justine and Davies both caught a break when they were cast in Oh, Boy!,
their fourth production together, at the Princess Theatre on 39th Street and Sixth Avenue. It was a
musical, but one with an actual plot, rare for the day, with book and lyrics by P.G. Wodehouse and
Guy Bolton. Justine and Davies were still not leads ― basically, they were “college girls.” However,
it was not a “girl show,” like Dillingham’s and Ziegfeld’s had been, but rather a sophisticated
comedy with music by the up-and-coming Jerome Kern. It proved a huge hit. Justine and Davies
got their usual treatment in the press. “Justine Johnstone, as beautiful as ever, makes a hit just
standing still letting folks look at her,” said the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.27 The Times simply reported
that Justine and Davies were “famed for their beauty from the Battery to Buffalo.”28

Justine shrugged off the notices because she had other things on her mind. She had begun
dating Guy Bolton, the lyricist of Oh, Boy!, and was utterly smitten. It was apparently her first
serious romance, and the relationship was significant enough for the divorced, debonair, pipe-
smoking librettist to have given her expensive gifts such as jewelry. But Bolton was known to be

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generous with a lot of women. He was, according to a Wodehouse Guy Bolton, 1917.
biographer, “sexually confident … a dapper ladies’ man who,
having divorced his first wife, became ensnared in a succession of
romantic entanglements with chorus girls and singers.”29

The theatrical newspaper The Clipper reported that
Justine and Bolton were engaged, but the following week the
newspaper sheepishly ran Justine’s emphatic denial.30 The
couple had broken up. Soon afterward, Bolton married operatic
soprano Marguerite Namara, the mother of his baby daughter.

While nursing a broken heart, and wondering miserably
if she’d ever get off the “show girl” treadmill, Justine received a
message from a gentleman asking her to dinner. He was not just
another wealthy Johnny, but rather a co-manager of the Princess
Theatre and also one of the most powerful men on Broadway.

By the early 1910s, Lee Shubert and his brother Jacob
(J.J.) had expanded their burgeoning theatrical business into
an empire, purchasing or leasing much theatrical real estate
on Broadway and throughout the country. They fought the
notorious and powerful Theatrical Syndicate and won, sweeping
actors out of Syndicate contracts and making them Shubert stars. A particular nemesis was Florenz
Ziegfeld. That Ziegfeld did business with the Syndicate placed him fairly high on the Shuberts’
enemies list. They battled Ziegfeld for stars and moped at defections. The annual, popular Shubert
moneymaker The Passing Show, at the Winter Garden, was a high-end vaudeville/girl show
deliberately designed as a Follies competitor. Having a Ziegfeld girl as a star in a Shubert show
― especially if it were, say, a Ziegfeld-type show ― could be calculatingly sweet for the brothers.

Lee was described in 1921 as being “boyish in figure, with intent dark eyes, and about as
garrulous as the Sphinx.”31 He had an oddly combined reputation for being both “cold, ruthless,
and stingy” and “generous but awkwardly shy.”32 J.J., about four years younger, was plump,
volatile, tyrannical, and reportedly a bully. Both had reputations as notorious womanizers and for
conducting casual affairs with their female performers, usually minor players and chorus girls. Lee
liked tall women, “but not too tall,” he would say, and with “good figures.”33 After all, it had been
the Shuberts who had created the runway for their girl shows at the Winter Garden. Inspired by a
visiting Max Reinhardt production, the runway jutted out from the stage into the center aisle and
allowed audience members a close-up leg show.

Lee may or may not have been aware of Justine when she played a child in the Shubert
production of The Blue Bird six years earlier, but he certainly recognized her as one of the Princess’

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main draws. Now that word was out that Justine was no longer dating Bolton, Lee made his move.
He treated Justine to a meal near his offices above the Shubert Theatre on 44th Street.

Justine proved enchanting, possessing a number of qualities he admired: poise, intelligence, and a
sense of decorum. And, of course, long legs.

Lee immediately launched into shop talk. Justine was more than happy to oblige. When
asked if she had any career aspirations, she frankly laid out her plans to springboard from musicals
to dramatic works. He then offered her a proposal.

First, to heighten her public profile, he would hire her to become the professional hostess
of a dazzling new cabaret to be located in the basement of his 44th Street Theatre, across the street
from the Shubert offices. Ziegfeld, after all, had a cabaret, his Midnight Frolic, on the roof of the
New Amsterdam Theatre. Slightly raunchier than the Follies, Midnight Frolic was the go-to post-
theatre entertainment, with booze and nosh, and show girls encouraging men to pop their balloon
costumes with cigars. But this cabaret, Lee assured Justine, would be strictly class. And unlike
Ziegfeld, Lee would not run the show: Justine would. The name of the cabaret would be none other
than “Justine Johnstone’s Little Club.”

The proposal caught her attention. A professional nightclub hostess was a chic gig for a
woman at the time. It meant commanding a little empire for high rollers, making connections, and
being something of a celebrity among celebrities. Still, Justine did not know any dramatic actresses
who previously had been nightclub hostesses.

But Lee had even more to offer: In the fall, he would star Justine in a new Broadway
spectacular created especially for and around her. She would have top billing, would act, sing, and
dance, be surrounded by the best supporting talent in town, and have as much creative input as
she wished. The unofficial Act III of the show would take place downstairs in the club. And after
that, Lee said, he would do everything he could to accommodate her transition into drama. No
expense would be spared.

Justine was wary. The show sounded like another variation on Ziegfeld’s formula. In
addition, when she received Lee’s contract a few days later, she found that it only mentioned the
club and the musical ― nothing about future dramas. That had only been a verbal assurance. And
hadn't he said she could provide artistic input? That was not in the contract, either.

Nevertheless, this was the first time anyone had offered her the lead in a show. Also, she
knew that, of the two Shubert brothers, Lee was more interested in drama (J.J. preferred musicals).
In the end, she decided to take Lee at his word. In any case, it was a better proposition than
spending two more years at the Princess and having to be around her cad of an ex-boyfriend.

Justine negotiated with Lee as she had with Ziegfeld. She wanted $300 a week, to be
increased to $400 the following year, plus 50% of the club’s profits. She also requested certain perks,
including first-class transportation and a maid. She could not get everything she wanted in writing,

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but she got enough, so she broke her Princess Theatre contract and signed with her new best friend.
“You ought to see my five years’ contract,” she later boasted to Chicago drama critic

Ashton Stevens.34 “There’s everything in it but caviar for the canary. It ought to be a good contract
— I copied it from the contract of the most exacting Jewish star that ever played for the Shuberts.
But you mustn’t tell her name. Of course, nobody can guess it.”35 Actually, one might: Justine was
probably referring to tempermental Russian actress Alla Nazimova, a friend of a friend.

Any additional unwritten elements of her Shubert agreement are certainly up for
speculation. According to at least one source, Lee genuinely loved Justine but never told her
so.36 An easy assumption would be that they had some sort of physical relationship. But in
her letters to him, Justine addresses Lee gratefully, kindly, and professionally, although not
particularly romantically or sexually. This, however, could have been because Justine was aware
that Lee’s letters were often dictated, or even written by others, and that he frequently had his
correspondence read to him. Although a genius with numbers, some speculate that Lee was only
semi-literate, a consequence of a severely truncated childhood education. This claim appears to
be hearsay, though. More likely, vanity about his appearance prevented him from wearing glasses,
which would explain why he often had his correspondence read to him.37 Justine usually began her
letters with “Dear Lee” and ended them with “Sincerely, Justine,” although at least one is signed,
“Love.”38 In some of her later letters, Justine reminds Lee that she’s still waiting for him to come
up with a show for her, and that her financial situation is tenuous. This would indicate that she
had no income except for work, and that — unlike her friend Davies — if she did not work, she
had no other means of support.

Whatever the true nature of the relationship, Lee went to work on his Justine-worshipping
strategy immediately. A spinning, circular, red light flashing “Justine Johnstone’s Little Club” was
mounted on top of the 44th Street Theatre. In the basement, the Shubert designers furnished the
new club in a summery, country house style, with hollyhocks winding around the staircase and
rose-colored lights adorning blue walls.

Justine dropped Walter Kingsley as her publicist. She was now being handled by the
Shuberts’ wily press agent, the aptly named A. Toxen Worm, a large Dane who gleefully made
it his business to plant rumors about Shubert rivals and hint at the immorality of Ziegfeld girls.
To distinguish the Shubert cabaret from Ziegfeld’s, Worm decided that the Little Club should
be a gathering place for the elite. He had Justine leverage her social connections and set the
membership fee at an unheard-of $50.

Newspaper ads, coyly assuming that all the club patrons would obviously have cars,
proclaimed, “Don’t get ‘tied up’ in theatre traffic! Dismiss your car and have it wait for you at
Justine Johnstone’s Little Club,” and noted that the club was a mere two-minute walk from 27
theatres. Most ads featured an ink illustration of a pert Justine.

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The exorbitant membership fee worked according to Worm’s plan: The bulk of initial
club membership was from the Social Register. The first to join was Angier Duke, the scion of the
Duke tobacco dynasty, whose wife was a friend of Justine’s, followed by businessman William Payne
Whitney and merchant John Wanamaker.

Marion Davies joked to friends that she, too, planned to open a club. It would be called “Le
Petit Souper Club” and be located in the lobby of the Princess Theatre. Her membership fee, she
claimed, would be $100, not a mere $50. Worm got wind of the joke and exploited it as fact, resulting
in rumors that Justine and Davies were cat fighting. The gossips may have been disappointed when
Davies happily showed up to entertain at the club’s opening night on April 13, 1917.

Justine Johnstone’s Little Club was a huge success and soon became known as the “gem
of the galaxy of nightclubs”39 and the “in” place for the famous or those who aspired to be. Special
Broadway (that is, Shubert) entertainment was offered, such as “Maytime Night” with Charles
Purcell and the Maytime chorus ladies. Jazz bands played sultry tunes. The menu featured items
like lobster à la Bonnefoy, roasted royal squab au cresson with guava jelly, glacé à la Justine, and
$10 bottles of Pol Roger champagne.

As the weather warmed, the dance floor was converted into a shallow pool where
patrons could wade barefooted (dressing rooms were available for those who wished not to remove
their stockings at the table). The bar welcomed single women, unusual for the time. In F. Scott
Fitzgerald’s 1922 novel, The Beautiful and the Damned, Gloria, a beautiful socialite with dreams of
becoming an actress, confides to her cousin a tale of “the ends of cigarettes left all over New York
in ashtrays marked ‘Midnight Frolic’ and ‘Justine Johnstone’s Little Club.’”40

The club's tacit appeal was that it was a discreet place for married, moneyed men to
meet actresses. “Not a word in the papers, mind you, about who were here,” an unnamed Shubert
associate was quoted as whispering to a reporter one night.41

Justine proved a gracious and welcoming hostess. She would dash from the Princess
to the club every night in a dazzling gown, greeting patrons, table hopping, introducing the
entertainment, conferring with the chef, collecting fees, and endorsing checks, as Lee had opened
the club’s account in her name. She knew where all her regulars liked to sit. She made sure the
lighting was perfect over each table and that the music was not too loud. At closing, she would
climb into the back seat of the sedan Lee had ordered for her and fall asleep on her way to her
apartment. Invariably, her mother Sophia would still be up, waiting for her.

Justine’s relationship with her mother, she would say, was more important than her
success. “My mother is a real mother,” Justine said. “That’s why I could never belong utterly to the
Little Club.” Justine tempered her comments with, “I enjoy entertaining my guests there. But if I
gave myself altogether to Broadway, I would tire of it and it would tire of me.”42

Lee saw to it that Broadway was not nearly tired of Justine yet. A few weeks after the club

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 2016/2017  (top) New York Herald, December 9, 1917;
(bottom) New Year's Eve menu, December
1917.

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opened, he unveiled the second phase of his Justine plan. “Miss Justine Johnstone will be
presented on the roof of the Forty-Fourth Street Theatre early in September in a new musical
revue written for her,” announced the New York Herald.43 Once a hurricane deck, the roof of the
44th Street had been converted to a theatre-above-the-theatre by the Shuberts and vaudevillian
Lew Fields for a musical comedy called All Aboard. Then, after several years of being used as a
cabaret space, the Shuberts refurbished it into a first-class Broadway venue. Rumor had it that it
would be named the Justine Johnstone Theatre, but it was dubbed simply the 44th Street Rooftop
Theatre. The title that Lee had chosen for the opening production, however, was Oh, Justine!

The 44th Street Rooftop
Theatre (a.k.a. The Nora
Bayes Theatre), c1917.

P.G. Wodehouse, not particularly compelled to champion Justine after she quit his Oh,
Boy!, snidely remarked in Vanity Fair, “And there is Oh, Justine!, the revue in which Justine
Johnstone is to star — to be followed, it is hardly possible to doubt, by Wow, Marion! (for Marion
Davies), and Golly, Ollie! in which Olive Thomas is sure to make a hit.”44 The name of the show
was subsequently changed, first to The Nine O’Clock Revue and ultimately to Over the Top.

The final title was in recognition of America’s entry into World War I just days before
the club opened. “Over the top” was a recent slang term referencing a dangerous military
maneuver, climbing out of one’s trench to combat enemy troops. To accommodate the show’s new
name, war-themed numbers and sketches were developed. There would be no chorus of men: The

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Selective Service Act had been passed in May and young men were being drafted in large numbers.
As such, Over the Top was inadvertently afforded an even greater opportunity to become a “girl
show,” unlike the more highly developed Princess Theatre musicals.

The plot, such as it was, concerned Justine appearing as a character named … well,
Justine, a New Jersey girl who longs for life and love in the big city, dozes off, and dreams up an
entire Shubert extravaganza. The dream conceit was Justine’s own, loosely based on Peter Ibbetson,
which the Shuberts were currently producing at the Theatre Republic (now the New Victory) and
featured John and Lionel Barrymore. It was as good an idea as any to frame a show that basically
consisted of vaudeville acts. But true to Lee Shubert’s promise, production values were high.

Writer Philip Bartholomae was lured from the Princess for the book. (The Sun sniped,
“Previously, no one had suspected Mr. Bartholomae of such a thing.”)45 Top Shubert associates
were hired, many from the Shuberts’ The Passing Show revue series, including composer Sigmund
Romberg, director J.C. Huffman, choreographer Allan Foster, and wildly creative costume designer
Homer Conant. Shubert favorites T. Roy Barnes and specialty dancer Mary Eaton were signed.
Eighteen-year-old Fred Astaire and his 21-year-old sister Adele were yanked from a rapidly rising
road career for their Broadway debut.

In a blatant attempt to out-Ziegfeld Ziegfeld, Lee spent $900 on a simulated aircraft effect
for a scene that mirrored a wartime sketch in the previous year’s Follies. He assembled a chorus and
called them “Five Dozen Justine Johnstone Girls,” which outmaneuvered Ziegfeld’s “Fifty Anna
Held Girls.” A dancer/choreographer from Azusa, CA, named Rosa Rolanda was hired to lead
a group called “Rolanda’s Neo-Classical Modern Dancers” in doing a girl-on-girl fight number,
which echoed Ziegfeld’s crowd-pleasing team of female fencers in his 1901 The Little Duchess.

Joseph’s of Fifth Avenue was retained to create some of Justine’s costumes. The Norwegian
dressmaker’s daughter selected her own outfits: a gown of gold sequins, one in black velvet, and
another trimmed in sable, which Justine called “toasting hot.”46 One of Joseph’s bills for the garments
and a red “paradise” hat came to $1,940 (over $36,000 in 2017). Lee evidently had no qualms.

Rehearsals began in August 1917, one of the hottest New York Augusts on record, and
were disorganized, truncated (as vaudevillians took off for gigs), and — as the Shuberts ignored
the young and as-yet-toothless Actors Equity Association — lasted for 12 unpaid weeks. Per Lee’s
promises, Justine eagerly took a hands-on approach, occasionally suggesting costume, song, and
set-piece changes. Sometimes her requests were accommodated, sometimes not. Lee was willing to
consider her requests provided they aligned with his own ideas. It became increasingly apparent
that this show was all about Lee “glorifying” Justine à la Ziegfeld — which would have been the
main selling point for J.J. anyway. Eventually, Justine gave up offering her own ideas.

“What’s the use?” she complained to the critic Ashton Stevens. “I go into the Shubert

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office and suggest a suggestion and they say: ‘A very good idea, but let’s do it this way. We’ll get
you a nice new pink dress and let him sing the song to you.’ Oh, I say, ‘No, it would be cleverer to
give him the pink dress and let me sing the song.’”47

After working all day and into the evening, Justine was still required to hostess at the club
until 1:00 a.m. most nights. A. Toxen Worm sent almost daily notes to Lee with checks endorsed
by Justine the evening prior. He decided to drop the $50 membership fee for certain weeknights to
keep the club “jammed.”48 The schedule was beginning to take a toll on Justine. “I must get some
rest or I may break down,”49 she pleaded in a note to Worm, who ignored it. Kingsley had been a
rather paternal, if reductive, press agent. Worm was known for his love of food, lack of diplomacy,
consorting with prostitutes, and being a company man. To him, Justine was a commodity. “Program
notes” for the playbill, written no doubt by Worm or one of his associates, included the following
overview of Justine’s talents:

Miss Johnstone is a beautiful blonde. Her complexion rivals the rarest ivory, and
sculptors have declared her form to be perfect. World-famed artists have quarreled
over appointments, and her picture has smiled from a dozen different magazines at
the same time. Miss Johnstone has a charming contralto voice of rare quality and
expression, and her step is as light and fleet as the startled dove.50

An out-of-town tryout performance in New Haven gave rowdy Yale undergrads a chance
to hoot and heckle every light-and-fleet step Justine took. It was not encouraging, but it was New
Haven, not Broadway. Over the Top limped bravely onward to Gotham.

Lee had Worm flood the newspapers with publicity pieces. The critics snapped up
Worm’s opening night passes. Two days before opening, Worm knew the producers had a hit. He
boasted in a letter to the Shubert brothers that although he had handled press for such stars as
Sarah Bernhardt, Eleonora Duse, Gabrielle Réjane “and the rest on the list, I am willing to point
to yesterday’s showing as the world’s record for legitimate pictorial publicity for one woman in
twenty-four hours.”51

On opening night, November 28, 1917, some 800 furred, feathered, perfumed, top-hatted,
and eager patrons poured out of taxis and trudged in the light snow to the lobby of the 44th Street
Theatre. They chattered while waiting their turns for the elevator boy to whisk them away to the
top floor. The place was stunning: no longer a smoke-filled, nosh-serving cabaret, but a beautifully
redesigned, ornate, airy, piquant piece of a Broadway theatre.

When the curtain rises, spectators see Justine, a simple girl in a simple Homer Conant-
designed frock, wistfully singing about adventures she wishes she could have in the big city. Her
voice is apparently sleep inducing, as she stretches, places her hands behind her head, and nods off.
Suddenly she awakens and finds herself magically transformed and donning a sparkling red-and-
mauve gown. But she is a mannequin. She cannot move. Wait; yes, she can. She’s a mannequin

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who comes to life in “The Land of Frocks and Frills,” a Manhattan dress shop where all the clothes
are free and the wares are displayed by dancers with names like Mademoiselle Corset, Mademoiselle
Stocking, Mademoiselle Souliers, and so on. Enter shop patrons Fred and Adele Astaire. Everyone
then dances and sings — wait for it — “The Justine Johnstone Rag.”

Then she finds herself suddenly swept onto a billboard in Times Square, where she is
posing in a green gown with gold streamers and a real parrot on her bodice. Again, she’s inert,
even with that psittacine squawking on her abdomen, but again miraculously comes to life, joyfully
dancing with girls dressed as Borax cans, toothbrushes, powder puffs, and cream jars.

The scene changes, and T. Roy Barnes as “Mr. Plot” narrates her waking nightmares with
sassy one-liners. Whoosh, next scene: She’s a sculpture, Galatea, dressed in white gauze girdled
with gold, in a Greenwich Village salon. Her sculptor, who happens to be an operatic tenor, sings
her a song called “Oh, Galatea.” And with that — yes, she comes to life. If the show had a theme,
it was apparently animating an inanimate woman.

More scene changes. Mr. Plot tells jokes; mind-readers Harry and Emma Sharrock guess
what coins are in audience members’ pockets; Mary Eaton pirouettes en pointe; the Oakland Sisters,
Vivian and Dagmar (stolen from Ziegfeld), perform a three-way Apache dance with Ted Lorraine;
and Rolanda’s Neo-Classical Modern Dancers, barefooted and barelegged, battle each other in
short-skirted gladiator costumes.

Then everyone is swept onto a German military base. The soldiers discuss their fears of an
American attack, when suddenly a whirring is heard overhead. Thousands of airplanes fill the sky.
Lights flash. Shells explode. The bombardment is relentless, until finally the orchestra swells, the smoke
clears, and Justine appears, triumphantly waving an American flag “over the top” of the trenches in a
shimmering white leather aviation pantsuit and Sam Browne belt. Curtain: end of Act One.

The following morning, The New York Times reported what time the show went up
(nine o’clock) and came down (midnight). Other than that, the review noted that there were
“an unusual number of acceptable entertainers” and that “the settings are diverse and highly
colored, and they shift with the utmost rapidity.”52 “No high-brow influence is permitted to mar
the entertainment,” said Life magazine. “New York was starving for another girl-and-music show.
Here it is.”53 The society magazine Brooklyn Life called it “a miniature Winter Garden show minus
the famous runway and the privilege of smoking,” but deemed the show “snappy entertainment.”
Particularly notable were the “truly marvelous exhibitions by Fred and Adele Astaire,” and the
fact that one could admire “the beautiful Justine Johnstone in a variety of gorgeous costumes.”54

Almost all the reviews gave Justine points for being beautiful. Theatre Magazine noted that
“it is her good looks and ability to wear magnificent costumes that make her a valued feature of
Over the Top.”55 The New York Sun rather backhandedly complimented Justine in suggesting that
she had performed better than expected: “She speaks with accent and expression now, and sings

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Shubert Rolanda's female gladiators; sheet music;
Homer Conant's costume sketch for the
ARCHIVE Toothbrush Girl in the "Posterland" number.

 VOLUME 33 

Four of Conant's costume sketches for the "Land of
Frocks and Frills" number: (clockwise from top left)
Customer/Morning Dress; Customer 2/Dressmaking;
Manikin/Evening Gown; and Shoe Girl.

Performer Betty Pierce's 20
costume for the "Justine
Johnstone Rag." with less effort than ever noticeable before. It looks
indeed as if J.J. Shubert’s plan to develop the fair
Scandinavian into a dominating figure of musical
farce might be a happy inspiration.” (J.J. may have
laughed when he read this. Most likely he could not
have cared less if she developed into a dominating
figure of anything, as long as the show made money.)
The Sun concluded that “the audience had the
fullest opportunity to observe every talent that Miss
Johnstone possesses in her successive revelations
in Over the Top. Sometimes these chances left the
spectator breathless.”56

It’s probably a good bet that some of the
critics would have known about Lee’s fixation on
Justine, and may have assumed the relationship
was something more than just business. For them,
trashing Justine would have been justified. The New
York Herald critic wrote, “Her naïve efforts to act
… were rather interesting and amiably pretty. One
always watches such a beauty favorably, whether she
be perpetrating parlor elocution on the stage, eating
spaghetti or anything.”57

Music critic Hiram K. Moderwell was rather
more direct. “Justine Johnstone, who was press-agented
out of some chorus or another, rules the roost … in Delsarte poses copied from Roshanara and Mme.
Nazimova.”58 (But then, Moderwell did not even like the Astaires.) Matthew White, Jr., in Munsey’s
Magazine, sniped that Justine “would never have had a chance on any stage were she not pretty.”59
Yet Variety’s “Wynn” topped them all: “With all of its several months of unnecessary
rehearsals, its known star and the prominent vaudevillians engaged regardless of expense, Over
the Top cannot be considered anything but a flop…. Justine Johnstone is the star, pretty, semi-
vivacious, gorgeously gowned, etc., but Oh, Justine, who ever told you to ‘act’?”60 The critic
pointed out that there were audience walk-outs a half-hour into the show. Some stopped at the
elevators long enough to watch the Astaires. Then they left.
It is, of course, impossible to truly gauge the show’s, or Justine’s, merits or awfulness. As melodious as
her speaking voice was, singing seemed not to be her forte (one critic stated rather tepidly that her singing was
“not unpleasant”)61. She was physically fit, and newspaper features had appeared under her byline detailing

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her rigorous exercise regimen. Her movements were reportedly graceful, but Newspaper ad for the
by training and inclination, she could not have been considered a dancer. post-Broadway tour stop in
Philadelphis.
Certainly, the very format that Over the Top employed — a
cursory book stringing together musical numbers and variety acts
— would be a challenge for most of today’s audiences. The Astaires
might hold up, but many of the jokes probably would not. As for
the lady gladiators, who knows? But a female repeatedly depicted as
an inanimate object being “brought to life” by the magic of pretty
clothes or a tenor would become rather insulting to the audience’s
intelligence after a while. In any case, it is probably fair to assume
that Justine could not rise above the material; but maybe nobody
could have. Even though she was the star attraction, she had few
lines. At least for Dillingham and Bolton, she had been given lines
that had resulted in laughs. She had little to do here except be
a reactive character in a fabulous wardrobe, a throwback to her
earliest experiences on Broadway.

For the next few weeks, Lee tried to upgrade the show.
Justine’s fellow Follies performer, comedian Ed Wynn, whom the
Shuberts had plucked from Ziegfeld for The Passing Show, was hired
two days into the run as a second comedian. “You have no right
to knock this show,” Wynn ad-libbed one night. “You got in on
passes.”62 The audience loved him. Lead comic T. Roy Barnes, on
the other hand, was not as well received and left the show. Wynn
replaced him as Mr. Plot.

Lee was still hovering over Justine like a fly buzzing around the headlamp of a Model T, hanging
about her dressing room and dining with her at his club table. In an anecdotal (and unfootnoted) 1968
biography of the Shuberts, author Jerry Stagg recounts that one evening over supper Lee told
the performer, “Justine, you ought to get out of the business because you don’t belong; you were
put together missing things.” When she asked what exactly it was that she lacked, he continued,
“Greed….That’s what makes the world go ’round. Greed. It makes some people successful. It’s
what makes some actors stars, and the rest just actors. Greed makes the difference….You have to
want something more than anyone else wants it. You have to want it so much, you can taste it.
You have to feel greed.”63

Lee probably was not talking about monetary greed — nobody becomes an actor to get
rich — but about ambition. One could argue, however, that Justine was obviously ambitious. She
was willing to be Lee’s Galatea, an erstwhile mannequin he would bring to life in the way she

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wanted (or so he promised). The quotations in Staggs’ account are unattributed. Justine’s name,
though, appears among the author’s long list of acknowledgements, and it is quite possible that the
details could have been provided by Justine herself. We cannot know exactly what Justine thought of
her producer’s advice, but she agreed to toe the company line according to Lee’s dictates. Part of that
meant agreeing to press junkets, as Worm tap-danced a little damage control with the newspapers.

A New York Herald reporter was allowed to follow the star around backstage one evening
in an attempt to boost publicity for both the show and the club. Justine was heard barking orders
via a "tube" in the dressing room hall to Shubert business manager Nat Roth in the club downstairs.
“How’s the soup, Nat? Last night it was too thick. We mustn’t let the boarders leave with anything
that Mr. Hoover wouldn’t.64 Now, listen, Nat! The ambassador of something or other is coming
tonight. Place him where he can reach the celery and have the salt and pepper caster and the
vinegar cruet toward his end. And for heaven’s sake, keep that cat out.”65

When the show ended, she changed into her evening gown and headed down to the
kitchen. She tossed a blue gingham apron over her couture, tasted the soup, and decorated turkey
entrees with little American flags. Curious about her sudden move from “show girl” to Shubert
star, the Herald reporter asked Justine how she had “learned to be an actress since last spring.” She
bluntly responded, “I know I haven’t learned to be an actress in that short a time. But I’m going
to.” She then threw off the apron and swept into the dining room with a gracious, “Good evening,
everybody.” The reporter noted that “a young woman doesn’t need to worry about rivaling Mme.
Bernhardt if she can look — and cook — like this golden beauty.”

The next interviewer was not allowed in the kitchen. Justine pitched the show heavily to the
Sun, saying everything was going great. “I love Over the Top more than anything else in the world,” she
said. “There’s Craig Campbell, the wonderful singer, and the beautiful Oakland sisters, and just dozens
of wonderful things. So much happens up there and happens so fast that it ought to please everybody.”66

Well, maybe not everybody. Following an eight-week run, the show closed shortly after
the interview appeared. Variety made the closing announcement on its Burlesque page with the
headline, “‘Over the Top’ Loses to Date $17,000.” 67

Even with the failure of Over the Top, the Shuberts had no intention of letting Justine
go. Aside from their having a “famous stage beauty” in their stable, they needed to recoup their
losses. In the spring of 1918, they sent Over the Top and its star on the road for a six-city tour.
“After which,” reported the New York Tribune, “she will return to New York to star in another
production.”68 Exactly what that production would be was not mentioned. With no other Shubert
show for her on the horizon, Justine would have been contractually obligated to go.

To compensate for Justine’s absence from her hostessing duties at the club, Lee
commissioned a Justine Johnstone doll named “Justine, Jr.,” made with golden curls, large, heavily
lidded eyes, a pouty mouth, and a flouncy French frock. He placed the doll at Justine’s table at the

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club’s entrance with a sign, “I’ll Be Back!” In a news photo of both Justines, Sr. and Jr., posing together, the
life-sized version gazes dully at the camera with what may be the most lethargic smile ever photographed.

Meanwhile, Worm sent photos of Justine in elegant costumes to newspapers in every city
on the tour’s itinerary, and posted ads screaming, “SEE the great airplane invasion, pulsating with
patriotism!”; “The last word in frills and thrills!”; “Cast of 100, including 50 Justine Johnstone
Girls!”; and “Direct from four months’ run in New York!”69, which was rather a stretch.

The show actually fared better with critics out of town than it had in New York. One
Philadelphia scribe fondly remembered Justine at the Folies-Bergère when she was 16. Another
wryly noted that the Neo-Classical Dancers “apparently didn’t find anything to suit them in the
Land of Frocks and Frills, as they wore neither.”70 Variety noted that the show was a “very big hit”71
in Washington and played to “large audiences”72 in Kansas City.

As long as the show sold tickets, the Shuberts were happy, but the star attraction was
beginning to get a little tetchy. Her frequent letters from the road to both Lee and J.J. Shubert
covered a gamut of complaints, from unprofessional behavior backstage to the sluggish “Justine
Johnstone Girls” to the fact that the maid stipulated in the contract had not shown up and her
own mother was filling in as her volunteer dresser. At the end of one letter to Lee, she added a
gentle little hint about what she expected from him based on their pre-contract discussions. “I still
feel the same about a career as I did last year,” she wrote. “Trust you will understand the spirit in
which this letter was written.”73

He did. “I talked to J.J.,” Lee wrote back, “and he is very anxious to have you go into
the next Winter Garden show.” Shubert Nirvana, the jewel in their crown. So what if the Winter
Garden was J.J.’s bailiwick, rather than Lee’s? If they could put her in a decent sketch and give her
a chance to act, it could be the next step toward a full non-musical play. “The part is a good one,”
Lee told her. “Let me know if you are satisfied to do this so the part can be written up for you.”74

Justine was satisfied indeed. She even suggested that her leading man be Bernard Granville,
a friend and headliner from her Follies days. Lee assured her that J.J. had some great plans in mind.
The truth, though, was that J.J. seemed to have little interest in what Justine did, aside from
fulfilling her contract responsibilities. He gave her a tepid outline of a tepid show with a tepid
part for her, in addition to a brutal schedule that included her club obligations. Justine was deeply
disappointed, but offered a carefully crafted compromise:

Dear J.J.:
Here it is Sunday and I have been thinking of practically nothing else since our talk
on Thursday. Since you have expressed your plans to star me in a play for the season
1918-19, and besides to open ‘the club’ again, I really feel I owe it to myself to rest
this summer so I am in the best possible mental and physical condition in the fall.
From what I have seen of my proposed part in the revue, it has little to offer me, and
the environment and the book is anything but a stepping stone for parts such as Lee

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discussed for planning my career. So if it is all the same to you, I prefer not to play.
However, I want to do anything I can for both you and Lee, as I fully realize you
have been very kind to me, and should you find you must absolutely have me for this
part, I will do my best, providing you do the following:
The book must be made more attractive to me and to fit my personality. I must have
at least three weeks’ rest with pay during September before I start rehearsals for the
new play.
Let me hear from you as to just what you want me to do.
Sincerely,
Justine Johnstone75

If Justine thought that J.J. and Lee were on the same page about her ideas, her plans, or
any verbal agreement, she was mistaken. J.J. shot back:

My dear Miss Johnstone:
I have your letter dated June 26. If this were not a Monday, which is usually a blue
day, it would give me a huge laugh. Your demands are really unique if nothing else. I
do not see anything in your contract wherein you can make any demands whatsoever.
As far as playing the Winter Garden is concerned, you can forget all about it.
Perhaps a rest will do you a lot of good. All other matters with reference to your
option and in the Little Club, I will advise you to see Mr. Lee Shubert, with whom
you have had all arrangements.
Yours very truly,
J.J. Shubert 76

Shortly thereafter, Worm ordered that the flashing, revolving, red lettering announcing
“Justine Johnstone’s Little Club” on top of the 44th Street Theatre be replaced with “Fancy Free at
the Astor.” It was a new Shubert musical starring Marilyn Miller, a Passing Show headliner soon
to become a Ziegfeld star, and Justine’s Over the Top co-star Ed Wynn. The tour had ended, but
the Shuberts kept Justine on the road.

The Shuberts had commitments, Justine was under contract, end of story. J.J. tossed her
into one of the lesser Shubert efforts, Girl o’ Mine, written by Over the Top’s Philip Bartholomae. It
had lasted only a few weeks at the Bijou in New York, and for the road was retitled Victory Girl for
reasons nobody could understand, except for the ads that called it “the first after-the-war musical
comedy.” By January 1919, the show’s title had changed again, to Oh, Mama!. Justine played a
young American girl who has moved to Paris to live with her uncle, only to become stranded,
along with a group of other Americans, and ensnared in madcap shenanigans.

The experience was even less palatable to Justine than Over the Top had been. Company
manager John Slocum sent Lee a red-flag memo that Justine was not getting along well with the
second female lead, Helen Shipman. Shipman had recently starred in the road company of Oh,
Boy! and was possibly unhappy with playing second fiddle to a beauty queen. Another element
that Justine may have found off-putting was lead comic Frank Fay, a vaudevillian who had

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Newspaper ads: (left) Cleveland, OH, November
1918; (right) Philadelphia, PA, January 1919.

originated his role in the ill-fated Broadway run. Among his specialties in the show was “a satire
on the subject of feminism that is a laugh from start to finish,”77 according to one review. Fay is
perhaps best known today as having been the grandfather of standup comedy, Barbara Stanwyck’s
first husband, a notorious anti-Semite, and a generally disagreeable human being.

Lee, however, was not giving up. In early 1919, he commissioned Bartholomae to write a new
play for Justine and eagerly sent it to her. But Justine’s reaction was not what he might have expected:

My dear Mr. Shubert:
I read it thoroughly and I can’t for a moment think that you could have read it. Why,
Lee, it is the most awful, cheap trash I’ve ever read in my life. I’m sure you couldn’t
have read it and approved it. [Bartholomae] has not one idea in his head. He didn’t
even have the sense to put your ideas down correctly. He’s making the cheapest old
wit on the vaudeville stage into a three-dollar show. It simply won’t do. People wouldn’t
stand for it. It’s a shame he should have wasted that perfectly good paper to put those
words on because it could have been put to so much better use in a lavatory.78

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Justine’s exasperation is understandable. She had every reason to feel that she’d been holding
up her end of the bargain, slinging hash and dancing with Borax cans in hopes of getting what she’d
been promised. The Shuberts had produced more than a dozen non-musical plays since Over the
Top had premiered. There’s no indication that Justine was ever seriously considered for any of them.
And nothing that the Shuberts were giving her afforded her an opportunity to prove herself. J.J. was
apparently refusing to take a chance on a star whose primary currency, at that point, was her looks.

Based on Justine’s later interviews, she keenly desired to study serious acting. “If I had the
last three or four years to live over again,” she would say in 1919, “I should begin by going to a good
dramatic school.”79 It’s certainly possible that she expressed such a desire to Lee while discussing
her career tactics. In the spring of 1918, he had launched a somewhat strange plan. He instructed
Worm to announce plans for a Shubert Academy of Dramatic and Musical Art, telling him, rather
incredibly, that “if young actresses have nerve and good looks, they can be taught to act, even in
serious drama.”80 Very possibly, Lee may have reasoned that if J.J. thought Justine needed training
as a serious actress, Lee would give it to her.

Worm thought the school idea was great because it potentially meant additional revenue.
He came up with a promotional idea for the school that “would generate a great deal of interest.”
Apparently in earnest, Worm suggested a special matinee at the 44th Street rooftop featuring one
act from five Ibsen plays, each performed by actresses not known for serious drama.

Worm proposed the following: Alma Tell, a comedic actress, in a scene from Lady from the
Sea; operetta star Julia Bruns in Little Eyolf; Ziegfeld girl Peggy Hopkins Joyce in The Wild Duck;
Marion Davies in A Doll’s House; and Justine in the devastating last act of Hedda Gabler. It sounded
like a joke, and may have been one. In any case, the idea was soon dropped.

At this point, Lee’s priorities took a definite shift. Correspondence in early 1919 between
Justine and him indicates that there was talk of yet another new show, but it seems to have been just
talk as no actual scripts were discussed. Justine may have come to realize that it was entirely possible
that Lee never had any real intention of giving her a chance at drama. That likely had been talk as well.

In February, she sent Lee a terse note:

Will you please send me a line confirming our conversation Friday afternoon, as it
would be only fair to anyone who would want me to sign up with them.
Please don’t delay this as you know better than anyone that I need work as soon as I
can get it.
Sincerely,
Justine81

There is no known response. Two weeks later, and less than two years into her five-year
commitment to the Shuberts, she sent a final note to both Lee and J.J. asking that they cancel her
contract “effective immediately.”82 The Shuberts complied.

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J.J. did not care one way or another. Lee was devastated. Almost 20 years later, in an
unusually confessional moment, Lee confided his great heartbreak over Justine to Bert Lahr. As
quoted by Bert’s son John, in an apparent paraphrase of Lee’s words:

The nights became months. I kept walking, nobody could talk to me, everybody was
concerned. I walked the docks. I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t sleep. Finally, after many
months, one morning I woke up and it was gone. The whole weight, that sadness,
had left me like a bad dream. In later years, when I looked back on it — it seemed so
silly, so laughable. It was puppy love.83

Freed of having to please anyone’s press agent, Justine publicly expressed relief. “It was fine for
a while,” she told a reporter about her musical career. “[But] only a girl without any sense whatsoever
would believe she could survive many stage sessions as a mere professional beauty. Perhaps it would have
been different if I had been given some stage task, but all I was asked to do was look pretty.” 84

She then announced something that she’d hoped Lee would have handled for her: her transition
to dramatic, non-musical theatre. “I have aspirations to be something more than a show girl, however
glorified,” she told the New York Sun. “I have always wanted to act. I have always believed I could act.”85

Tellingly, she never claimed that she expected to become the next Ethel Barrymore or
Laurette Taylor. “I may not become a very great actress,” she conceded. “There’s not a chance in
the world I shall be. But I can and will become a good actress.”86

She never specifically called out the Shuberts, but Worm seems to have dished a little dirt
about her to a New York Sun theatre columnist, who snickered:

Justine Johnstone has retired temporarily from the stage, which she did so much to
adorn. Miss Johnstone is just now resting in her New York apartment preparing to
take the next step in her profession. It will of course be a step upward and onward,
although its direction has not been definitely settled. But it will not be guided by the
Shuberts….
Toxen Worm has suggested that Miss Johnstone go to Stockholm and restore to the
drama of Ibsen some of the pep in which it has been of late sadly lacking. Then there
has been no successor as yet to Ellen Terry as the star of the Shakespearean stage in
England. What really ought Miss Johnstone to do?
So she sits and ponders. Shall it be Paris, London or Stockholm? In the meantime,
the Shuberts, who don’t by gosh, give a red apple where it is, are absolutely certain it
will have nothing to do with them.87

The Shuberts themselves made no public comment. But someone in the Shubert office
clipped and saved a New York Evening Mail interview with Justine about her career change.
Justine stated that it may have been different if she had been “born to luxury. But I wasn’t. I come
from hard-working, self-respecting Scandinavians, people who have some imagination as well as
brains…. But I was ticketed and labeled as a beauty and nobody wanted me to think. In fact, the
people with whom I came in contact actually resented it when I thought out loud.”88 The last

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sentence was underlined in pencil. Someone either felt guilty or wanted to remind themselves
what a pain she had actually been.

As for Lee’s pain, it wasn’t just Justine’s cancellation of her contract. “I found there was
another man,” he said.89 Of course there was, and had been before Lee had even made his first move.

Walter Wanger had been an ambitious 22-year-old producer’s assistant when he showed
up as a Stage Door Johnny while Justine was in the 1916 Follies. She had brushed him off. Their
paths crossed again a year later when she was working at the Princess, and he was managing a
production starring none other than the temperamental Shubert diva Alla Nazimova. This time,
Justine was more impressed. Let’s just say that it was not Lee who had helped heal the wounds
inflicted by Guy Bolton.

During the run of Over the Top, Wanger was an aviator serving with the Army Signal
Corps in Italy, and he and Justine corresponded frequently. He held his own little opening night
party in his barracks in her honor. “It is quite heart-breaking,” he wrote, “not to have been able to
be present at the opening of Over the Top, but I hope that my seat was kept for the performance,
although not occupied.”90 She sent him a photograph, which he would keep for the rest of his life,
of herself in her spiffy Homer Conant aviatrix costume. When he returned from the service in the
spring of 1919, shortly after Justine broke her contract, the couple became engaged.

By then, the resilient Lee was keeping company with former Ziegfeld Girl Peggy Hopkins
Joyce, for whom a Hearst reporter may have coined the term “gold digger.” Lee then moved on to
many others before marrying the pretty show girl Marcella Swanson in 1936. The marriage was
kept secret for more than 10 years until Marcella filed for divorce in 1948. (They remarried the
following year.) During World War II, Lee donated the former Justine Johnstone Little Club space
to the American Theatre Wing for use as the “Stage Door Canteen.”

Justine married Wanger at City Hall in September 1919. For the next several years, she
worked toward her career goal of becoming a reliable actress in serious drama. She played over a
dozen non-musical roles in stock theatre (then considered a training ground for actors), with her
favorite being a decidedly frumpy scullery maid. Wanger became her manager and announced
numerous projects for her. But once Justine introduced her husband to her former employer,
Jesse L. Lasky, now an executive at the film company Famous Players-Lasky (soon to become
Paramount), Wanger signed on as a manager with the studio. As his star in the movie industry
began rising meteorically, he found little time to work on his wife’s behalf.

Justine began managing her own career with only peripheral help from her husband.
She starred in eight or more silent films (all now considered lost), wrangled former beau Bolton
into signing over rights to his hit Polly Preferred for her to play in London, and toured the U.S. in
one-act plays. Almost without exception, her work at this time received positive reviews — along
with, of course, the usual mention of her looks. “Miss Johnstone is one of the rare young women,”

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Wedding portrait of Justine and
Walter Wanger, 1919. (Courtesy
of Justin Wanger)

said the Philadelphia Inquirer of Justine’s appearance in a George Bernard Shaw play, “who combine
gorgeous beauty with mental brilliancy and exceptional dramatic ability.”91

In 1926, she was at long last cast as the leading lady in a Broadway drama. Whether her
personal financial investment in the show was a factor in her being cast is unclear; the timeline
between casting and Justine’s $3,750 outlay is a bit fuzzy. In any event, she finally managed to get
what she’d always wanted: a decent role in a non-musical ensemble production on Broadway. The
play, Hush Money, was not exactly Peer Gynt, but it was a start. Although it received lackluster reviews,
Justine and the rest of the cast fared reasonably well. A tour was planned, and Justine signed on.

A few weeks into the run, the producer, former Ziegfeld gofer Charles K. Gordon, called
Justine into his office. He bluntly informed her that she had been replaced by a younger actress,
Denise Moore (later Dennie Moore, a successful character actress in motion pictures). Moore was
a Broadway newcomer, just a few weeks out of the American Academy of Dramatic Arts. She also

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had a wealthy gentleman friend, Hiram Bloomingdale. The department store magnate had offered
Gordon cash in exchange for casting Moore in Justine’s role.

If producer Gordon thought that Justine was a fool, he was mistaken. She had now been
in the business for 15 years. She had seen plenty of married men hook up with actresses in her
own club. Some women regarded this as “business as usual,” but there was a right way to handle
such matters. She requested two weeks’ pay along with a guarantee on her returns. When Gordon
refused, Justine sued. It was not pretty.

The Associated Press disseminated a full-page hack job, turning Justine’s lawsuit into a
catfight with her replacement. It was “Woman Against Woman,” “An Explosion!”, and a “blonde
vs. brunette battle.” The “two beauties” were clawing at each other when the “peeved” and
“aggrieved” Justine was “superseded by dainty Denise.”92 In the end, Justine withdrew her damages
suit. Then she left the theatre forever.

***
Justine, unlike many former show girls, did not descend into misfortune or tragedy. Now
in her early 30s, she lived contentedly out of public view as Mrs. Walter Wanger, wife of a movie
mogul. It was great, except when it was not: Like many men who wield their positions of power
to obtain sexual favors, Wanger was a serial cheater with wide-eyed ingenues and chorus girls.
Consequently, Justine found a distraction, which would quickly become a passion.
Always a voracious reader, she had developed an interest in medical studies by the
early 1920s. In 1927, she began auditing courses in the Pharmacology Department of Columbia
University’s School of Physicians and Surgeons. The following year, she took a job as an assistant
in the department’s laboratory. A show girl — one of those creatures not expected to think
much — thus entered the male-dominated field of medical research, where she would thrive and
co-author three peer-reviewed, published, scientific papers. Her work as a pathologist at Columbia
University contributed to the pre-penicillin treatment of syphilis.
In 1931, she and Wanger relocated to Los Angeles, where Justine participated in the
development of early cancer treatments at Caltech and joined a group of cancer researchers in
independent studies. After divorcing the long-philandering Wanger in 1938, she adopted two
baby boys in 1940 and raised them as a single mother. Both children would have successful careers
outside of the entertainment industry.
When word got out in 1941 that former Ziegfeld Follies girl, Shubert star, and film actress
Justine Johnstone was now a lady scientist who had contributed to the cure for syphilis, journalists
stumbled over each other for an interview. She politely refused them, not because she was being
coy, but because she simply thought she had nothing interesting to say.
She spent the rest of her long life immersed in work meant to help others: science,
medicine, and social causes. During the Hollywood blacklist of the 1950s, she served as assistant
to literary agent Ingo Preminger, brother of film director Otto, finding employment for blacklisted

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writers. From the 1940s to the 1960s, she held officer positions with the Beverly Hills League of
Women Voters, the California League of Women Voters, and the Women’s Democratic Club of
Beverly Hills. She produced a full-length musical play at UCLA as a fundraiser for the United
Nations. After her divorce, she had a few prominent gentlemen callers, but never remarried. She
also never completely removed herself from the entertainment industry, and counted high-profile
names, including her longtime pal Marion Davies, among her friends for the rest of her life.

Justine Johnstone Wanger died at age 87 at her home in Santa Monica, CA, on September
3, 1982, leaving behind her two sons and five grandchildren. There were no obituaries. She had
not wanted any. She had known what they would say — her work as a researcher, fundraiser, and
single mom would be more or less forgotten. After all, the obituaries reporting Wanger’s death in
1968 referred to Justine, his first wife, as “a Ziegfeld Follies girl billed as ‘The Most Beautiful Blonde
in America.’”93 All of which was “in the past for her,” maintains Justine’s son Justin Wanger, when
asked today.94 And as for whether she ever talked about the past, Justin says, “Yes and no. Not to
any great extent.” He recalls no mention of Lee Shubert.

One aspect of Justine’s life in the theatre does stand out in his mind, although it was a
topic she never publicly discussed: Why did she leave the world of entertainment?

“One of my mother’s biggest gripes,” says Justin, “was that when she tried to do serious
acting, all anyone could say was, ‘There was Justine Johnstone, looking as beautiful as ever.’ That
was her pet peeve. She wanted to be a legitimate actress, but nobody took her seriously.”

Endnotes

1. Jonathan Dean, “Pretty people don’t always get the best movie roles, says Charlize
Theron,” British GQ, May 2016, retrieved 10/7/17: http://www.gq-magazine.co.uk/
article/charlize-theron-interview-british-gq-ageism-sex-appeal-south-africa.
2. Arthur Mizener, The Far Side of Paradise (New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1949), 108.
3. Walter Winchell, “On Broadway.” Buffalo Evening News, 19 March 1931.
4. “Justine Johnstone and Lou Tellegen Here This Week,” Detroit Free Press, 21 April 1918.
5. “Women’s Interests,” The Arizona Republican, Phoenix, AZ, 9 October 1921.
6. “Justine Johnstone and William Farnum Family Attractions,” Daily Times, Davenport, IA, 21 May 1921.
7. “Called World’s Greatest Beauty”, Boston Post, Boston, MA, 19 June 1921.
8. “‘Most Beautiful Woman’ Has Foil for Beauty Jinx; Gives Theories,” Syracuse Journal,
28 January 1921.
9. “Why Is Maude Adams? Ask the Tribune Girl,” Minneapolis Sunday Tribune, 17
April 1910. 10. Walter Prichard Eaton, “The Theatre: Carrying the Torch,” American
Magazine, LXXXVI:4 (October 1913), 50.
11. “Hampered by Her Beauty: Maxine Elliott Finally Receives Recognition for Her
Work,” The Washington Times, Washington, DC, 17 January 1903.
12. Grace Margaret Gould, “Good Looks: Has Your Face the Expression that Gives You
Away?” Women’s Home Companion, Vol. XLVIII, No. II (February 1921), 66.
13. “Actress Too Beautiful,” Belvedere Daily Republican, Belvedere, IL, 4 February 1913.
14. “Ambition to Become a Real Actress Inspires a Chorus Beauty to Start Again in
the Country,” New York Herald, 22 June 1919.

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15. P.G. Wodehouse, The Theatre Omnibus (London: Hutchinson, 1994), 48.
16. Ashton Stevens, “When Justine Johnstone Was Natural” in Actorviews (Chicago: Covici-
McGee, 1923), 238.
17. “Just a Few of the Newest Beauties on Broadway,” Pittsburgh Press, 30 July 1911, Sunday
Magazine section.
18. Jesse Lasky, I Blow My Own Horn (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 85.
19. Burns Mantle, “The Players,” Everybody’s Magazine, XXXIII:5 (November 1915), 572.
20. Ibid., 574.
21. Florenz Ziegfeld, “Astonishing List of Beauties Who Have Risen from Chorus to
Ranks of Stars Almost Over Night,” The Hartford Daily Courant, 21 August 1921.
22. Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life (New York and London: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004), 132.
23. Laurence Bergreen, As Thousands Cheer: The Life of Irving Berlin (New York: DaCapo
Press, 1996), 131.
24. Justine Johnstone (attributed), “Love and Art: Do They Mix?,” Sydney Sunday Times,
7 January 1923 (but possibly taken from an article written in the U.S. years earlier).
25. Ibid.
26. Ibid.
27. “Oh! Boy! You Win Permanent Home,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 22 February 1917.
28. “New Plays,” New York Times, 18 February 1917.
29. Robert McCrum, Wodehouse: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2004), 127.
30. “Guy Bolton to Marry Actress,” The New York Clipper, 7 March 1917. “Miss
Johnstone Not Engaged,” The New York Clipper, 14 March 1917.
31. Keene Sumner, “Sometimes You Fight Better If You’re Driven to the Wall,”
American Magazine, Vol. XCII, No. 4 (October 1921), 72.
32. John Arthur Garraty and Mark Christopher Carnes, American National Biography:
Rousseau-Simmons (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 898.
33. Deborah G. Felder, A Century of Women: The Most Influential Events in Twentieth-
Century Women’s History (New York: Citadel Press, 2003), 112.
34. Stevens would later become the inspiration for the character of Jed Leland in
Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Justine’s friend Marion Davies, of course, would become
forever, if unfairly, associated with the character of Susan Alexander, media mogul
Kane’s untalented wife.
35. Stevens, 240.
36. Jerry Stagg, The Brothers Shubert (New York: Ballantine, 1968), 150.
37. Mark E. Swartz, Shubert Archive, email correspondence with author, 16 January 2018.
38. Justine Johnstone to Lee Shubert, 19 August 1917 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence, 1910-26, File 1496).
39. O.O. MacIntyre, “New York Day by Day,” Reading Eagle, 28 November 1934.
40. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and the Damned (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1922), 82.
41. “Eagerly They Pay $50 to Join Justine Johnstone’s ‘Little Club,’” New York Herald,
14 April 1917.
42. Untitled article, n.d. (The Shubert Archive. E. R. Simmons Papers, 1917-1929,
Over the Top folder).
43. “Messrs. Shubert Have Long List of New Plays,” New York Herald, 9 August 1917.
44. P.G. Wodehouse, “The Coming Theatrical Season, Which Is Likely to Be a Riot of
Musical Comedy,” Vanity Fair, September 1917, 45.
45. “Broadway Dreams,” New York Sun, 16 September 1917.
46. “Life One Frock After Another,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 17 February 1918.

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47. Stevens, 236.
48. A. Toxen Worm to Lee Shubert, 11 April 1917 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence, 1910-26:, File 76).
49. Justine Johnstone to A. Toxen Worm, n.d. (approx. mid-1917) (The Shubert
Archive, General Correspondence 1910-26, File 76).
50. “‘Over the Top’ Gets Over Jersey, Anyhow,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 February 1918.
51. A. Toxen Worm to Lee and J.J. Shubert, 26 November 1917 (The Shubert
Archive. General Correspondence 1910-26, File 76).
52. “‘Over the Top’ a Nine O’Clock Show,” New York Times, 3 December 1917.
53. “Drama,” Life 70: 2 (20 Decemeber 1917), 1011.
54. “Plays and Players,” Brooklyn Life, 8 December 1917.
55. “Justine Johnstone, the Principal Beauty in Over the Top,” Theatre Magazine, XXVII: 204
(January 1918), 89.
56. “Justine Johnstone Opens New Theatre,” New York Sun, 3 December 1917.
57. “‘Over the Top’ at the Top of Triple-Decked Theatre,” New York Herald, 3 December 1917.
58. Hiram K. Moderwell, “Shubert Patriotism in ‘Over the Top’,” Indianapolis News, 15 December 1917.
59. Matthew White, Jr., “The Stage,” Munsey’s Magazine, (February 1918), 124.
60. “Wynn,” “Review: `Over the Top,’ Variety, 5 December 1917: 15.
61. “Over the Top,” Pittsburgh Press, 12 March 1918.
62. “The Theatre,” The American Jewish Press Chronicle, 4: 18 (8 February 1918), 393.
63. Jerry Stagg, The Brothers Shubert (New York: Ballantine, 1968), 151-52.
64. Herbert Hoover was then the head of the FDA.
65. “Miss Justine Johnstone, a Star Above, a Caterer Below,” New York Herald, 9 December 1917.
66. “Eat and Grow Prettier: That is the Rule and Practice of Miss Johnstone,” New York Sun,
9 December 1917.
67. “‘Over the Top’” Loses to Date $17,000,” Variety, 31 January 1918.
68. “Plays and Players,” New York Tribune, 2 February 1918.
69. “Over the Top” (advertisements), Washington Post, 8 February 1918, and Philadelphia Inquirer,
10 February 1918.
70. “Again the Cinderella Motive in Music Show,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 29 April 1918.
71. “Theaters Prosper in Washington,” Variety, Feburary 1918.
72. “Legitimate,” (Out-of-Town; Kansas City). Variety, [n.d.; June?] 1918.
73. Justine Johnstone to Lee Shubert, n.d., (The Shubert Archive, General Correspondence:
1910-26, File 1476).
74. Lee Shubert to Justine Justine Johnstone, 18 May 1918 (The Shubert Archive, ibid.).
75. Justine Johnstone to J. J. Shubert, 2 June 1918 (The Shubert Archive, ibid.).
76. J. J. Shubert to Justine Johnstone, 3 June 1918 (The Shubert Archive, ibid.).
77. “Frank Fay Scores Hit in ‘Victory Girl,’” Buffalo Evening News, 26 November 1918.
78. Justine Johnstone to Lee Shubert, n.d. (The Shubert Archive, ibid.).
79. “Per Aspera,” New York Sun, 22 June 1919.
80. A. Toxen Worm to Lee Shubert, 12 April 1918 (The Shubert Archive, ibid.).
81. Justine Johnstone to Lee Shubert, 4 February 1919 (The Shubert Archive, ibid.).
82. Justine Johnstone to Lee and J.J. Shubert, 18 February 1919 (The Shubert Archive, ibid.).
83. John Lahr, Notes on a Cowardly Lion: The Biography of Bert Lahr (E-book) (New York: Open
Road Media, 2013).
84. New York Evening Mail, n.d. (The Shubert Archive, E. R. Simmons Papers, 1917-1929,
box 4, folder 6).
85. “Per Aspera,” New York Sun, 22 June 1919.

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86. “Justine Johnstone Aspires to Act,” New York Tribune, 22 June 1919.
87. “Justine Johnstone at a Loss Where to Put Her Talents Just Now,” New York Sun,
20 March 1919.
88. New York Evening Mail, n.d. (The Shubert Archive, ibid.).
89. Lahr, ibid.
90. Walter Wanger to Justine Johnstone, reprinted in “Heart on the Rialto,” Dramatic Mirror,
22 December 1917.
91. “Vaudeville Reaches for Stage Stars,” Philadelphia Inquirer, 19 October 1924.
92. Associated Press, “A Blonde, a Brunette, an Angel and Hush Money,” Indianapolis Star,
30 May 1926.
93. Associated Press, “Starmaker Walter Wanger Dies at 74,” The Times (San Mateo),
19 November 1968.
94. All quotes and information from the author’s telephone interviews with Justin
Wanger, 7 January and 27 April 2017.

© Kathleen Vestuto. All illustrations used with permission from The Shubert
Archive, unless otherwise noted.

Kathleen Vestuto is a former theatrical professional who has worked in the non-profit
sector for nearly 20 years. An active social services volunteer, she is a recipient of
the New York Cares Team Leadership Award and Presidential Service Award. She
graduated with honors from Hunter College with a degree in English, concentration
in writing. She is grateful to The Shubert Archive for its assistance in her research for
her first book, The Lives of Justine Johnstone: Follies Star, Research Scientist,
Social Activist, to be published this spring by McFarland and Company, Inc.
.

Steps in Shubert Time:
Fred Astaire in the Archive

by John Ambrose

While Fred Astaire may be best remembered today for his string of motion-picture
musicals with Ginger Rogers in the 1930s, his career in show business spanned more than eight
decades. Before he went to Hollywood in 1933, Fred and his sister, Adele, were the toast of
Manhattan, starring in such theatrical hits as Lady, Be Good! (1924), Funny Face (1927), and The
Band Wagon (1931). Their Broadway careers began with two revues produced by the Shuberts:
Over the Top (1917) and The Passing Show of 1918.

Even though the files in the Shubert Archive contain limited references to the Astaires,
delving into the correspondence, clippings, and playbills reveals some intriguing materials that not only

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shed light on theatre in 1917–19 but also foreshadow several facets of Fred’s later career. Among the
materials are several handwritten notes by the siblings not documented in any published biographies.

Fred Astaire was born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1899, to Fritz and Ann Austerlitz. Adele,
who had been born two years earlier, was the first to display some dancing talent. The owner of
a local dance academy convinced the parents that their children had potential that could best
be nourished in New York City. In January 1905, Ann took the children east to enroll them in
the Claude Alviene School of Stage Arts, while Fritz remained at home in Omaha working in a
brewery and occasionally visiting Manhattan to check on their progress. Within a year, Fred and
Adele had gained a new last name, a novelty dance routine, and their first booking in vaudeville.

During the next 12 years they continued their training, first with Ned Wayburn (a
renowned dance director best known for his work with Florenz Ziegfeld), who developed a slightly
more mature routine for them, and then with the lesser-known Aurelia Coccia, whom Astaire credits
in his autobiography, Steps in Time, as “the most influential, as far as dancing goes, of any man in
my career.”1 Fred and Adele continued on
the various vaudeville circuits until 1917,
crisscrossing the continent with an act
labeled “New Songs and Smart Dances.”
They appeared on programs alongside stars
such as Eddie Cantor, Bill “Bojangles”
Robinson, Sophie Tucker, Nat Wills, and
Nora Bayes, and earned a reputation as
clever dancers with youthful energy.

The next turning point in their
careers, and what may have first brought
them to the Shuberts’ attention, came
with the June 22, 1917, issue of Variety,
in which Fred had purchased a full-page
advertisement touting their success on
vaudeville’s Orpheum Circuit. A week later,
on June 29, Lee Shubert sent a telegram
to the talent agent Rufus LeMaire asking,
“What have you done about the Astaires,
dancers? See me about this.”2 A typed copy
of this telegram is the earliest reference to
the Astaires in the Shubert Archive.

LeMaire, who had previously

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worked for the Shubert offices, started his own booking agency earlier in January 1917 and often
supplied acts for the Sunday night concerts at the Winter Garden, which featured a wide range
of top vaudeville players. The file devoted to LeMaire in the Shubert Archive contains dozens of
notes, letters, and telegrams between him and both Lee and J.J. Shubert regarding potential acts.
According to Astaire’s autobiography, he and Adele received a contract offer from LeMaire for a
Shubert musical show and accepted it immediately.3

LeMaire, acting as the Astaires’ agent, accompanied them to a meeting with Lee Shubert,
where the dancing duo learned that their first show would be a musical the Shuberts were
developing focused on former Ziegfeld star Justine Johnstone. An announcement in Variety on
August 24 indicated that the Astaires were signed for Oh, Justine! and they placed a full-page ad in
The New York Clipper on September 12 indicating that the show would open in October.

There were numerous delays in rehearsals, so the
Astaires took some final turns at vaudeville houses in
New York — such as the Riverside, Royal, and Colonial
— in the late summer and early fall. LeMaire apparently
also booked them for the Shuberts’ Sunday night
concerts, as there is a note dated September 17, from
LeMaire to Lee, stating, “Fred & Adele Astaire would
like to see the Winter Garden tonight if possible.”4 The
Astaires’ precision dancing required special attention to
the stage, and during their vaudeville days and beyond,
Fred was obsessed with the performance space: “Slippery
stages were the terror of my life, and many times the
stage manager would bawl me out as I tried to put
rosin down. I used to sneak in, in the dark before the
show started, and attempt to sprinkle it through a little
arrangement I had invented. That was a thin stocking
with a few small holes in the bottom so the powdered
rosin would filter through. Sometimes I got away with it,
but often I’d hear, ‘Hey, son, you can’t do that.’”5

The next reference to the Astaires in the
Archive is an undated note from LeMaire to Lee: “The following acts will report for rehearsals
Monday. Where are they to report? Joe Laurie & Aileen Bronson, Leo Beers, Fred & Adele Astaire,
Oakland Sisters, Ray Conlin.”6 The rehearsals likely didn’t occur at the 44th Street Roof Theatre,
where the show would run, as the space was being remodeled (which led to even more delays).

By all accounts the preparations for the show were chaotic, and the title changed several

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times. Originally called The Justine Johnstone French Revue7, it was later revised to Oh, Justine!,
and then to The Nine O’Clock Revue, since the plans were to have it start at the novel hour of 9
p.m., with no matinees. By October, it was going by yet another name — Over the Top — which
stuck through previews in New Haven, Connecticut, and the Broadway opening on November
28. The title was probably intended as a triple pun. First, the show had several jingoistic numbers
supporting the American troops going “over the top” in the trenches of World War I. Second, the
name referenced the fact that the venue sat atop the 44th Street Theatre proper. And third, the
title may have been commenting on the “over the top” (i.e., flamboyant and extravagant) nature
of the production. There was, in fact, a song named “Over the Top” on the first night’s program,
but it was dropped by December 1, the first Saturday of the run.

During the show’s two acts and 15 scenes, the Astaires made only three appearances.
They performed together in the “Gown Dance” in the second scene of the first act, which was
titled “Land of Frocks and Frills.” This scene seemed to focus on Justine Johnstone’s wardrobe (as
did much of the whole program) and included characters such as Mlle. Lingerie, Mlle. Corset,
and Mlle. Stocking. The Astaires next appeared in the third scene of the second act, “A Little
Flirtation,” singing and dancing to the song “Where Is the Language to Tell?” They are listed as
“Ted and Adele Astaire” in the December 1 program for this scene, perhaps a sign of their newness
on Broadway — or another indication of the production’s chaos. In their third number, they danced
to “The Justine Johnstone Rag” for the show’s final scene, a “Ragtime Sextette,” which shifted the
action to Justine Johnstone’s Little Club, a small cabaret in the basement of the theatre building.

 2016/2017  Fred and Adele Astaire in a scene
from Over the Top.

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The theatre at 216 West 44th Street first opened in January 1913, as the Weber and Fields
Music Hall. Later that year, after the Weber and Fields comedy team broke up, the Shuberts dubbed
it the 44th Street Theatre. Over the years, the main auditorium saw a wide range of productions:
vaudeville, films, and the Marx Brothers’ Animal Crackers (1928), to name just some. Before its
remodeling in 1917 for Over the Top, the roof had been home to a café called “Castles in the Air,”
after Vernon and Irene Castle, who had also opened the Castle Club in the basement in December
1914. After being re-christened for Johnstone in 1917, the basement space became a speakeasy
during Prohibition, named simply the Little Club. During World War II it became the famous
Stage Door Canteen, providing entertainment for U.S. servicemen. In 1919 the rooftop theatre
was renamed the Nora Bayes Theatre. The New York Times Company purchased the building in
1940 and leased it back to the Shuberts. The Times demolished the building in late 1945 to expand
their printing plant. This edifice still stands, though it no longer houses the printing operation.

In addition to Justine Johnstone, the leading performers in Over the Top were the comedy
team Laurie & Bronson, the Oakland sisters, Craig Campbell, and T. Roy Barnes, the featured
comedian who provided running commentary between the diverse scenes in the revue. Tinkering
with the show continued through its early weeks in December, with Ed Wynn being added to the
show and eventually replacing Barnes in early January. Programs in the Shubert Archive files show
that when the production went on tour, Fred Astaire took over a role originally assigned to Barnes
in the first scene of the second act.

Reviews for Over the Top were mixed, with the daily newspapers giving the show generally
good reviews, while the weekly publications were far more critical. The New York Clipper called it a
“good vaudeville show in disguise,”8 while Variety called it simply a “flop.”9 The Astaires took out a
half-page ad in the very same issue of Variety that panned the whole show, exclaiming, “The New
York Press unanimously declare Fred and Adele Astaire a Hit with ‘Over the Top.’”

The New York run closed on February 2, 1918, followed quickly by a three-month tour to
Washington, DC, Philadelphia, Chicago, and other towns in the Midwest. On the day of the New
York closing, LeMaire sent another note to Lee Shubert: “Fred and Adele Astaire want to know
who they are to notify regarding the railroad fare of their Mother which they claim was agreed to
be paid by the Shubert Theatrical Company. When on tour with any show they never have gone
on the road without their Mother. Will you kindly let me know about this, and oblige.”10

Since coming to Manhattan in 1905, the Astaires had been inseparable from their
mother, who had tutored them, made their costumes, and traveled with them for a dozen years as
they played vaudeville houses from Boston to San Francisco and from Chicago to New Orleans.
Fred was only 19 years old, and Adele just 21, during the Over the Top tour, and their youth was
highlighted in almost every review. LeMaire’s note is the first of many in the Shubert Archive files
that involve monetary issues and disputes with the Astaires.

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The show enjoyed a two-week run in Washington, playing to filled houses at the Belasco
Theatre, perhaps because of the dramatic increase in the population of the District of Columbia
during World War I. In his autobiography, Fred Astaire claims that it was in Washington that
producer Charles Dillingham saw the Astaires’ performance and signed them, even though their
contract with the Shuberts called for them to do another show the following season.

Up next for Fred and Adele was The Passing Show of 1918, the seventh version of the
annual Winter Garden revue produced by J.J. Shubert. Rehearsals began within two weeks of the
conclusion of the Over the Top tour. The Passing Show had a similar structure to Over the Top: two
acts and 13 scenes that mixed music, dance, comedy, lavish costumes, and chorus girls. Unlike
Over the Top, there was no central star, but J.C. Huffman was again the director. Harold Atteridge
wrote the book and lyrics, and Sigmund Romberg wrote the music.

The Astaires were more prominently placed in this revue and contibuted more than just
dancing to the production. Adele opened the show with the song “I Can’t Make My Feet Behave.”
Fred followed in the third scene singing “Squab Farm,” and then Adele joined him in Act I’s
closing song, “Bring on the Girls.” They opened Act II with a pair of songs “Twit, Twit, Twit” and
“Quick Service,” and closed the show in a Spanish ballet led by Isabel Rodriquez. Fred also had a
comic dance number, set in Child’s Restaurant, in which he appeared as a waiter sliding over long
tables while serving pancakes and coffee.

Among the materials from this show in the
Shubert Archive are sketches for the many exotic
costumes credited to Cora MacGeachy, including
one for Adele’s “I Can’t Make My Feet Behave”
number. A costume was the subject of the first of four
handwritten notes, from the Astaires to J.J. Shubert,
in the Archive’s collection. Writing on stationery
from Boston’s Hotel Thorndike, Adele complained
that she had received a letter from Mr. Simmons
stating he could not replace a gown that didn’t fit her,
and that had been taken by Miss E. Miles, with J.J.’s
permission, on the opening night in Philadelphia.
Two days later, J.J. replied that he would see Adele
about the issue the next time he was in Boston.11

No future letters in the correspondence
file indicate how the issue was resolved. The “Mr.
Simmons” mentioned in Adele’s letter would have
been E.R. (“Ma”) Simmons, who served for many

Cora MacGeachy's costume design for Adele's The Passing Show
"I Can't Make My Feet Behave" number.

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years as the Shubert casting and wardrobe director.12 “Miss E. Miles” referred to Emily Miles, who
had been appearing in annual versions of The Passing Show since 1914, and would continue doing
so through the 1922 version, when she married Willie Howard, who had also appeared in the
Passing Shows during this period.13

Nor does the correspondence specify in which scene the disputed costume would have
been used. The playbills for The Passing Show of 1918 in the Archive show that Adele Astaire and
Emily Miles appeared in several scenes together during the New York run, and it’s possible that
the gown was one used during the “Dress, Dress, Dress” number in the second act, which was set
in “The Gold Room” and featured “Winter Garden Models.” During the New York run, Adele and
Miles were both listed as being in this scene, but playbills from the tour included only Miles in
“The Gold Room.”

The Passing Show of 1918 opened at the Winter Garden on July 25 and played through
November 9, for a respectable 142 total performances. Even though the production ran during the
closing days of World War I, there were fewer overt references to the conflict than in Over the Top.
In the Birdland song, the Astaire siblings played bird aviators, and the lyric “Twit, twit, twit …
you’d better do your little bit, bit, bit” was a comic take on the patriotic slogans “Do Your Bit” and
“Knit, Knit, Knit” (part of a campaign to make socks for the troops), both of which had recently
made their way into songs and posters.

Shubert (left) Fred and Adele perform "Twit, Twit, Twit" at the opening of Act II. (right) Cora
MacGeachy's costume for Adele in the "Twit, Twit, Twit" number.
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Years later, Fred complained vociferously about the outfits he and Adele were made to
wear for the song: “We were in bird costumes and had a big chorus of chicks behind us. I hated
that costume but I was stuck with it and had to flit all over the place in the number staged by
the dance director, Jack Mason.”14 It wouldn’t be the only time Astaire was troubled by plumage:
the feather-festooned dress that Ginger Rogers wore in the “Cheek to Cheek” number in Top Hat
(1935) caused serious problems in the first takes when “the feathers started to fly as if a chicken
had been killed by a coyote.”15

The Passing Show of 1918 received generally good reviews, and the Astaires garnered the most glowing
notices among the players, something they highlighted in another full-page ad in Variety on August 9.

During the final month of the show’s Broadway run another issue began affecting the
production. On October 4, New York City’s Board of Health declared an epidemic of the so-called
Spanish Flu. Although the outcome was not as serious as it had been in Philadelphia and Boston,
New York saw more than 21,000 people die due to influenza or pneumonia between September
and November.16

Starting on October 14, a notice began appearing in The Passing Show’s playbills: “To prevent
the spread of Spanish influenza — sneeze, cough or expectorate (if you must) in your handkerchief.
You are in no danger if everyone heeds this warning. By order of the Board of Health. Royal S.
Copeland, President.” While theatres were closing in most of the country, New York’s playhouses

(left) Variety, August 9, 1918. (right) An advertisement in the program of the The Passing Show
Shubert-Garrick Theatre in Chicago for the show's upcoming May 1919 engagement.

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remained open, but fear of crowds cut attendance severely. Some theatres were encouraged to
seat patrons only in alternating rows. During the height of the crisis, the Board of Health began
requiring businesses to stagger their work schedules, and shows to stagger their curtain times, in an
effort to minimize crowds (especially on the city’s subways).

Several references to the flu epidemic appear in handwritten notes from Fred and Adele
to J.J. Shubert, as they disputed cuts in their salary during The Passing Show tour. In a letter (File
3594) dated Thursday, December 12, 1918, again written on Boston’s Hotel Thorndike letterhead,
the Astaires complained that they had agreed to accept half salary during the closing weeks in New
York because of the influenza and now asked “respectfully and confidentially” if they could receive
full salary during Christmas week, since “business here is big.” Most actors’ contracts during this
period had a provision to cut salaries in half during Christmas week and Holy Week. However,
after the Armistice ending the war was signed on November 11, and then the flu outbreak began
to ebb, attendance at most shows skyrocketed.

On December 14, J.J. sent a coldly formal reply:17

Dear Sir & Madame:
I am in receipt of your favor of the 12th inst. I am
very sorry but I cannot make Fish out of one and
fowl of another regarding the Christmas week. I
would rather make it up in some other way, but I
cannot make any exception to this rule. I trust you
will appreciate my position in this matter.

Five days later, J.J. reversed his decision in a note to
Ed L. Bloom, the road manager for The Passing Show of 1918:18

 
My dear Ed:
Next week’s salaries should be paid as follows:

Franklin & Green, Charles, Ruggels [sic], Helen
Carrington, Roy Cummings, Emily Miles, The
Astaires, Will Philbrick, Edward Basse, Violet
Englefield, George Schiller, Dorsha, and all the rest,
are to receive full salaries, with exception of Eugene
and Willie Howard.
Eugene & Willie Howard are to receive half salary
according to the terms of their contract.
Please notify them that we do this voluntarily as a
Christmas gift.
Yours very truly,

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Frank Fay, who had been one of the revue’s lead comedians with appearances in six
different scenes, left the show when it went on tour, and Fred eventually took over some of his
roles, as he had when T. Roy Barnes left Over the Top. J.J. remarked on this in a letter to Bloom on
February 22, 1919, after seeing the show in Philadelphia:

The dramatic scenes which I noticed [in] the first part of the show were played very
badly. Of course, that may have been due to the fact of Fred Astaire being new in the
part.19

Bloom acknowledged the difficulties in a letter of February 25, from the tour’s next stop
in Pittsburgh, adding:

Of course you saw the show under difficult auspices, as Fred Astaire, Frank Hall
and Jack Hall and [Roy] Cummings were all new in their parts. Fred Astaire
improves at each performance and gives a satisfactory interpretation of the part.20

As the tour continued, the half salary issue came up again during the spring in a series of
notes and telegrams involving Bloom, Lee Shubert, and other staff members. On April 10, while
in Cleveland, Bloom sent a handwritten letter to Lee:

Dear Mr. Shubert
Before Mr. J.J. sailed for Europe he gave me a list of people whose contracts called
for ½ salary holy week. Franklin & Cummings were not included in this list he
expected to pay the chorus & small parts full salary and said you would decide
whether to do that [or] not and let me know. I think you had better give the half
salary question serious consideration because all except the Howards worked for
cut salaries during the Flue [sic] and Franklin has let them know that she does not
work for half salary and that has not made it any easier. We have given 9 & 10
performances every week and I do not expect to pay them anything for the third
Sunday night in Detroit....I would like to go into Chicago with a well satisfied
company instead of a disgruntled one.21

On April 12, Bloom received Lee’s reply:

My dear Bloom:
I have yours of the 10th inst., and note what you say.
The Howard Brothers are not to receive more than half salary. The Astairs [sic] have
been working all season and should be more than satisfied to accept half salary….
So far as the chorus is concerned, you can pay them full salary, but the best thing to
do with the others is to wait until Mr. J.J. Shubert returns and get his advice.22

After more back-and-forth exchanges, Bloom sent the following telegram on Easter Sunday (April 20):

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PRINCIPALS SURLY AND MUTINOUS OVER HALF SALARIES [STOP]
HAVE TEMPORARILY PACIFIED THEM WITH PROMISE TO TAKE
MATTER UP WITH JAYJAY ON HIS ARRIVAL23

A month later, the Astaires were still bothered by the October salary cut and wrote
another note to J.J. on stationery from Chicago’s Hotel Sherman.24 They argued that The
Passing Show had done “capacity business” in Cleveland during Holy Week, and since they had
volunteered to take half salary for four weeks in New York during the epidemic, they felt that they
were now being treated unfairly.

The disgruntlement continued unabated. It also encompassed other issues, as reflected in
a lengthy letter from Bloom to J.J., written on May 22, which discussed everything from changes
in ticket prices to the choreography of two new songs (“Baby” and “Blowing Bubbles”) that had
been interpolated during the tour:

My anarchists are behaving fairly well, but, of course, I have to use the iron hand
at all times. About the toughest proposition I have is Freddy Astaire, who would like
to stop the show in every one of his numbers, and stall around for encores, which I
don’t let him do. He is a temperamental kid, and goes to his dressing room, kicks over
chairs, tables, etc., which, of course, hurts nobody but himself.25

While Bloom’s comment about Fred Astaire kicking over chairs in the dressing room
was ostensibly connected to the performer being kept from taking extra bows, it may actually
have been an early sign of the meticulousness that marked Fred’s future career on Broadway and
in Hollywood. More than 40 years later, Rouben Mamoulian, who directed Fred in his last hit
musical, Silk Stockings, commented: “Fred is a terribly complex fellow … constantly filled with
doubts and self-anger about his work — and that’s what makes him so good. He is a perfectionist
who is never sure he is attaining perfection.”26

Later in the same May 22 letter, Bloom brings up another money issue:

I wired you that Rufus LeMaire had offered the Astaires $450.00 a week, beginning
September 1st, for Atteridge and Carroll’s new production, and, of course, you have
no option on their services, so I advise you if you care to retain them, to get busy in
the matter. The Astaires have an idea they are worth $500.00 next season. I had
quite a long talk with [Fred], when he showed me LeMaire’s letter, and asked him
how many weeks LeMaire would guarantee him at that price, and also showed him
where with us he worked 52 weeks a year, most of the time, while with the production
of Atteridge and Carroll, he would probably rehearse eight or ten weeks, and if it was
a failure, he would get four weeks’ work. He is a crazy kid, but can be handled. His
sister has twice as much sense, as he has, and the mother is no fool either, but is a
pretty wise baby.27

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Another letter from Bloom dated May 23, replying to J.J.’s letter of May 20, shows the
debates continuing:

In reference to the Astaires, if you will tell me how far you care to go with them for
next season, I can probably work on them, and get them to listen to reason, and if
not, I will look around for a good dancing couple to replace them, if we have to do,
but I do not apprehend any difficulty in handling this temperamental kid, so that he
will go through with his contract to the end, even if you don’t renew it, because you
have no idea how many times in the past twenty-five weeks I have had to almost beat
the kid’s brains out to make him listen to reason. But when all is said and done, he is
very much afraid of me, and he does, through fear, what he would not do through any
other reason.28
Clearly Bloom was agitated, and he sent yet a third note, on May 23, to J.J.:
I understand there is a very clever singing and dancing juvenile named Paul Rahn
and a clever ingenue named Irene Williams who do two or three minutes together
and made a hit last night in the Review at the Playhouse. They might do to take the
Astaires place [.] will look them over and see what I can do with them.29

The new production referenced in the first letter may have been a musical to be named
Nothing Could Be Sweeter, by Harold Atteridge and Harry Carroll. An article in Variety mentioned
the show and an extended public argument between Carroll and LeMaire.30 This incident may
have been in J.J.’s mind when he responded to Bloom on May 24:

I also note you say that Rufus Le Maire offered the Astaires $450, beginning
September. That is all off now. They are not going to produce the show, and Le
Maire said he didn’t make them any offer. Of course, I do not believe Le Maire.
At the same time you had better be on the lookout to get somebody to take their
places…. In reference to the Astaires, you are absolutely taking the right dope with
them. Tell them they are much better off. They are sure of a long engagement in the
Winter Garden shows, and after all is said and done, that is all they get out of it.31

The controversy continued as Bloom replied on May 26:

Rufus LeMaire lies; you can tell him I said so, for I saw his letter over his own
signature to the Astaires.32

J.J. replied to Bloom on May 27:

I also note what you say regarding Le Maire. If you can pick up the two people at the
Playhouse reasonable enough, we can protect ourselves against the Astaires.33

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And in a second letter of the same date, J.J. wrote:
In reference to the Astaires for next season, I do not see how we can raise their
salaries, because it would be impossible to do anything more for them as they are
getting all they are worth. If you can get the two people from the Playhouse Revue to
take their place, we will have to do so.34

J.J. must have been thumbing through a backlog of letters from Bloom, as he sent yet a
third note on May 27:

I have your favor of the 23rd inst. and note what you say in reference to Rahn &
Williams whom you saw at the Playhouse. Look them over by all means, as we may
want to get rid of the Astaires. We won’t be able to pay them the money they want,
and Rahn & Williams might be able to take their places.35

After that flurry of letters, there was a pause for several weeks before Bloom wrote, on June
14, that he had shifted his focus from Rahn & Williams to another dance team:

The most likely couple that I have seen in this neck of the woods to replace the
Astaires, are Bryan and Broderick. They played this week at the Majestic. Their
vaudeville salary is $400.00, but, of course, they carry scenery, etc., which makes
it expensive. I should imagine they could be got for about $200.00 or $250.00. You
can see them at Henderson’s, Coney Island, week beginning the 23rd, and I think it is
worth your while to run down, and look them over. The girl, Broderick, is particularly
clever. I am going to give her a letter to you, and have her drop in to see you.36

A month later, on July 12, Bloom reported several new issues:
The Astaires are very anxious to get a rest; in fact, they have been wanting to do this
for the past month, but I have jollied them along. Mrs. Astaire, the mother, called
up last night, and said that Freddy’s health was such that he would have to have a
rest very soon. He does not sleep nights, and is getting thinner every day. There is
nobody at this end that I can use to replace them. The only team that looked at all
likely was the one I asked you to go to Henderson’s and see. I asked the girl to call
on you, which no doubt she did. I can get by with the parts that Freddy plays, by
putting Frank Hall in, but, of course, Hall is a monotonous actor; but as he is only
in the first scene, it would not pay us to engage anybody to play that part, and I could
rehearse Hall sufficiently to make him get by.37

Bloom then went on to suggest replacing the Astaires with the Murdock Brothers, who
were playing in the Sunshine company, and then added some additional intriguing comments:

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I told Freddy Astaire that you would be glad to have him next season, but he would
have to modify his ideas of looking for $500 a week, as I did not think you would
pay him any more than you were paying this year. I told him that if he figured it out,
that he was a darn sight better off to get $350.00 from us for 52 weeks a year, than
$500 from somebody else for 15 weeks. I think they are ripe for a new contract, but
remember in making one, Fred is only 19 years old, and his signature is not worth a
damn. In fact, when I had two or three battles with him, he pulled that fact on me,
that he had no contract with us.38

The reference to Fred being a minor (at the time, anyone under 21) who could not sign
a valid contract, and his mentioning this to Bloom during their discussions, surely awakened bad
memories for J.J. In 1918, the Shuberts had to agree to release young Marilyn Miller from her
contract when she received a more advantageous offer from Ziegfeld. The memory may have been
exacerbated if he had read Variety’s review of The Passing Show of 1918, in which the critic noted:
“If the Shuberts kidded themselves that losing Marilyn Miller was of small consequence they have
probably changed their minds by now.”39 Bloom’s letter seems to indicate that Fred might have
been using the fact that he was a minor as a bargaining chip. If that was the case, however, the
strategy failed. On July 14, J.J. closed the door on any further negotiations (and misspelled the
duo’s name to boot):

In reference to the Astairs [sic], that is all they are worth, $350.00. If they want to
sign, will use them in the new show.40

One of the most fascinating exchanges between the Astaires and J.J. began with the last
of the four handwritten Astaire notes, written on Tuesday, June 17, by Fred, on letterhead from
the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago.41 First he complained about not receiving any reply to two
letters he had sent J.J. in May. The second letter contained a piano copy of a song that Fred wrote
and that J.J. said would go in a show named “Bing, Bang.” Fred wrote that if there were no plans to
use the number, he wanted the song returned so he could place it elsewhere. He closed the letter
by again raising the issue of the salary cut during Holy Week.

Two days later, on June 19, J.J. responded with another coldly formal letter:42

My dear Mr. Astaire:-
I have your letter in reference to your song. I have been rehearsing it with the
intention of putting it in the show, but if you want it back I will return it to you.
In reference to the other matter which you wrote me about, I think I have shown
a disposition to be fair in every possible way, by giving you a full week’s salary at
various times, when you were only entitled to half salary, according to the terms of
our contract, so I do not think there is any question about that part of the agreement
whatsoever.
Yours very truly,

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These letters reveal a lesser-known side of Fred Astaire: his desire to be a successful
songwriter. In all, he wrote the music for more than two dozen songs,43 the first being “She’s
Got the War Bride Blues” with lyrics written by Roy Atwell (who appeared in 1919 with Fred
in the Charles Dillingham-produced Apple Blossoms). Later, Fred would collaborate with others,
including Johnny Mercer. Fred’s daughter, Ava, recalled that one of his major goals was to write
a successful song.44 The “Bing, Bang” show mentioned in the letter to J.J. probably refers to Biff,
Bang, Boom!, which was eventually renamed The Shubert Gaieties of 1919.

Considering this exchange of letters, Fred’s later-life memories of his association with the
Shuberts is a little surprising: “Lee and J.J. did not like our signing away from them for the future
years, but Mr. Lee was kind and understanding about it. I never had much contact with J.J.”45

It is ironic that one of the last references to the Astaires in the Archive’s correspondence
files is a letter from Florenz Ziegfeld to Lee Shubert, dated November 28, 1919.46 In it, Ziegfeld
asserts that Rufus LeMaire had tried to entice Frances White, who was then starring in Ziegfeld’s
Midnight Frolic, to defect to the Shuberts for $1,000 per week:

Either you made this offer knowing Miss White was under contract with me, or Le
Maire is up to his old tricks in boosting actors’ salaries by playing you against me….
Le Maire’s idea of justice is well known. He even placed The Astaires with Mr.
Dillingham and then tried to hand them to me for The Roof for the same time, and his
talk with them has got them way up in the air.

Several months earlier, the Astaires had signed with Dillingham for $550 per week. Fred
recalled that when Dillingham asked why he wanted $550 instead of the originally discussed $500,
the performer responded, “Oh, we tacked on the 50 so we could pay [LeMaire] his 10 percent and
keep the whole 500 for ourselves.”47 Fred and Adele would eventually work with Ziegfeld in the ill-
fated musical Smiles (1930), which co-starred Marilyn Miller and proved to be the costliest failure
of Ziegfeld’s career — closing after 63 performances and losing more than $300,000.

After The Passing Show of 1918, the Astaires never worked again with the Shuberts as
producers. Fred’s last Broadway production, The Gay Divorce (1932), ran, however, in two Shubert-
owned theatres: the Ethel Barrymore at 243 West 47th Street and the Sam S. Shubert at 225 West
44th Street, located directly across the street from the 44th Street Theatre where Fred and Adele
had opened in Over the Top in 1917.

By 1932, New York had gone from being the Astaires’ juvenile training ground, and the base
for their cross-country vaudeville tours, to being their metropolitan home, where they became two of
Broadway’s most recognized stars, lived in a swank Park Avenue apartment, and socialized with the
likes of the Vanderbilts and the Whitneys. They may have begun their Broadway careers as clever
young dancers appearing in a few specialty numbers in Shubert revues, but it was not long before

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whole musical comedies by Jerome Kern, George Gershwin, and Vincent Youmans would be built
around them to highlight not only their dancing and singing but also their charismatic personalities.

The Astaire materials in the Shubert Archive provide interesting insights into Fred and
Adele’s first steps toward stardom, reveal seldom-documented elements of their characters, and
foreshadow aspects of Fred’s Hollywood career. The correspondence highlights the importance of
their agent, Rufus LeMaire, during their early Broadway years — not to mention their persistent
focus on salary. Also made clear is their reliance on their mother, who continued to accompany
them through the years in New York, London, and Hollywood. The Archive even includes the
earliest documented reference to Fred Astaire’s songwriting, which he would continue, off and on,
through the 1970s. Especially interesting are the comments from manager Ed Bloom regarding
young Fred’s temperamental streak, presaging the perfectionism of Fred’s film work, which
endeared him to audiences for decades but often blistered the feet of his dance partners, from
Ginger Rogers to Cyd Charisse.

Endnotes
1. Fred Astaire, Steps in Time (New York: Harper Collins, 1987), 42.
2. Lee Shubert to Rufus LeMaire, 29 May 1917 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 759).
3. Astaire, 58.
4. Rufus LeMaire to Lee Shubert, 17 September 1917 (The Shubert Archive, Ibid.).
5. Astaire, 47.
6. Rufus LeMaire to Lee Shubert, n.d. (The Shubert Archive, Ibid.).
7. “Remodel Roof for Review,” Variety, 29 June 1917, 11.
8. “‘Over the Top’ Is Good Vaudeville Show in Disguise,” The New York Clipper, 12
December 1917, 10.
9. Wynn (Johnnie O’Connor), “Over the Top,” Variety, 7 December 1917, 15.
10. Rufus LeMaire to Lee Shubert, n.d. (The Shubert Archive, Ibid.).
11. J.J. Shubert to Adele Astaire, (The Shubert Archive, General Correspondence:
1910-26, File 3594).
12. For more information on Ernest Romayne (E.R.) Simmons, see Helice Koffler,
“More About Ma: The E.R. Simmons Papers,” The Passing Show, 32 (2015/2016):31-
43 and David Baroubr, “E.R. ‘Ma’ Simmons: J.J.’s Right Hand,” The Passing Show, 8-1
(Winter 1984): 3-5. http://www.shubertarchive.org.
13. Jonas Westover, The Shuberts and Their Passing Shows: The Untold Tale of Ziegfeld’s
Rivals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 83.
14. Astaire, 64.
15. Ibid., 209.
16. Francesco Aimone, “The 1918 Influenza Epidemic in New York City: A Review of
the Public Health Response,” Public Health Reports 125: Suppl 3 (2010): 71-79.
17. J.J. Shubert to Fred and Adele Astaire, 19 December 1918 (The Shubert Archive, Ibid.).
18. J.J. Shubert to Ed L. Bloom, 19 December 1918 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
19. J.J. Shubert to Ed L. Bloom, 22 February 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).

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20. Ed L. Bloom to J.J. Shubert, 25 February 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
21. Ed L. Bloom to Lee Shubert, 10 April 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
22. Lee Shubert to Ed L. Bloom, 12 April 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
23. Ed L. Bloom to Lee Shubert, 20 April 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
24. Fred and Adele Astaire to J.J. Shubert, Saturday [17 May 1919], (The Shubert
Archive, General Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
25. Ed L. Bloom to J.J. Shubert, 22 May 1919, (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
26. Bill Davidson, “Fred Astaire: Just Beginning to Live,” Look, 10 November 1959, 38.
27. Ed L. Bloom to J.J. Shubert, 22 May 1919, (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
28. Ed L. Bloom to J.J. Shubert, 23 May 1919, (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
29. Ed L. Bloom to J.J. Shubert, 23 May 1919, (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
30. “Argue Over Dooley,” Variety, 23 May 1919, 7.
31. J.J. Shubert to Ed L. Bloom, 24 May 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
32. Ed L. Bloom to J.J. Shubert, 26 May 1919, (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
33. J.J. Shubert to Ed L. Bloom, 27 May 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
34. J.J. Shubert to Ed L. Bloom, 24 May 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
35. J.J. Shubert to Ed L. Bloom, 24 May 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
36. Ed L. Bloom to J.J. Shubert, 14 June 1919, (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
37. Ed L. Bloom to J.J. Shubert, 12 July 1919, (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
38. Ibid.
39. Ibee (Jack Pulaski), “The Passing Show,” Variety, 2 August 1918, 13.
40. J.J. Shubert to Ed L. Bloom, 14 July 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1910-26, File 1009).
41. Fred Astaire to J.J. Shubert, 17 June 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1919-26, File 3594).
42. J.J. Shubert to Fred Astaire, 19 June 1919 (The Shubert Archive, General
Correspondence: 1919-26, File 3594).
43. Larry Billman, Fred Astaire: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997), 275.
44. Benny Green, The Fred Astaire Story (BBC Radio 2, 7 June 1975).
45. Astaire, 62.
46. Florenz Ziegfeld to Lee Shubert, 28 November 1919 (The Shubert Archive,
General Correspondence: 1910-26, File 452).
47. Astaire, 72.

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