Category Archives: Musicals

JUST BEFORE JAZZ

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Thomas Riis's fascinating book Just Before Jazz examines the influence of black composers and performers on American musical theater between 1890 and 1915 — that is, just before the era in which the modern book musical began to take shape.

The songs of black composers were very similar in many ways to the popular songs written by white composers, even the white composers of operettas.  A number of black composers in this period (like Will Marion Cook, below) were highly sophisticated, classically trained musicians, capable of writing and performing in any style.  (Many of them were “slumming” in popular theater because of barriers to their involvement in more refined areas of practice.)

What distinguished their work was the incorporation of the sort of syncopations found in ragtime, which became a popular sensation around the turn of the century.  Their work didn't emphasize such syncopations to the degree that ragtime did — they were more like stylistic inflections — but they thrilled audiences of the time.

Among the most popular songs in this period, an astonishing percentage were written by black composers, and they included not only minstrel-type songs but ethnically neutral ones.  It was the purely rhythmic lilt that made the difference.

Almost all of these songs were first done for musical shows originating in New York City, often in Broadway productions, leading Riis to argue that black composers bear the primary credit for introducing black musical strains into the American musical.  Berlin and Kern and Gershwin weren't “reaching down” into an exotic black musical culture for inspiration — they were responding, artistically and commercially, to developments in the world of musical theater all around them.

You have to wonder why these black composers aren't better known today.  Partly it's because the lyrics of many of their songs are offensive to modern ears — the “coon song” was a typical genre, with its caricatures derived from minstrel shows.  As black songwriters became more powerful, however, they toned down the uglier aspects of these caricatures, leaving stereotypes comparable to those attached to other ethnic groups like the Irish and the “Dutch” (as Germans were once called.)  These stereotypes aren't congenial to our present tastes, perhaps, but they aren't exactly vicious, either.

More importantly, these black composers failed to achieve wider celebrity, and failed to enter our cultural memory, because they could not participate fully in the flowering of musical comedy in the later decades of the 20th Century.  Their songs were bought and performed by white performers in vaudeville, were sometimes interpolated into shows with white casts and were disseminated nationally via sheet music, but in the theater, they wrote primarily for all-black shows.  Broadway had a place for such shows, but it was a limited place.

Black composers were very rarely hired to provide complete musical programs for shows with white casts — they never became part of the mainstream of producers, musicians and writers who created the ordinary run of Broadway musicals.  White composers adapted the style of their black peers within an establishment that stayed predominantly white.

So today, when we hear Judy Garland and Margaret O'Brien singing “Under the Bamboo Tree” in the movie musical Meet Me In St. Louis, we likely have no idea that this song, a monster hit in 1903, with a tune that is still familiar and still infectious, melodically and rhythmically, was written by three black men, James Weldon Johnson, his brother Rosamond Johnson and Bob Cole.  Below, a portrait of Cole and Rosamond Johnson:

But the past, of course, as an old Russian saying has it, is always unpredictable.

A ROOM SOMEWHERE

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I'm a child of rock and roll.  The first song I remember hearing on the radio, when I was seven years-old, was Elvis Presley's “All Shook Up”.  I don't have a distinct memory of hearing “Hound Dog”, which came out a year earlier, on the radio but I remember some of the cultural fall-out it caused.  I lived in a tiny town in rural North Carolina at the time, and a kid in my first-grade class who lived on a nearby farm brought his guitar to school one day and played the song for us.  I guess it was the first time it dawned on him that knowing how to play the guitar might be seen as a cool thing by his peers.

I remember seeing Elvis perform the song on the Ed Sullivan show, later that year.  A year after that, Jailhouse Rock was the first movie I was ever allowed to go see at night.

I can't say, though, that any of Elvis's songs got to me at that age.  They were just part of the landscape — part of the soundtrack of everyday life.  I didn't really start to appreciate Elvis until I was in my twenties, and didn't own recordings of any of those early hits until then.

The first popular music that got to me came on an LP record.  It was the first LP record my family ever owned, bought to play on our first record player, which my dad brought home as a surprise one day in 1956 and which looked something like this:

It's possible that the LP came with the set, but more likely that my dad bought the player so he could listen to the LP.  It was the Broadway cast recording of My Fair Lady.

This LP was even more popular than Elvis's LPs back then — the My Fair Lady cast recording still holds the record for the most weeks on Billboard's top forty charts.  If my dad bought our first record player just so he could hear it, I'm sure he was doing what tens of thousands of other Americans were doing at the same time.

The extended-play LP — which could fit 26 minutes of music on a side — was only four years old in 1956.  It was developed primarily to fit all the songs from a typical musical on one record, and it was the cast recordings of popular musicals like Kiss Me Kate and My Fair Lady that really established the format.

My dad loved the recording of My Fair Lady and played it over and over.  The song I remember him liking the most was “A Hymn To Him”, with the refrain “Why can't a woman be more like a man?”  The song that got to me was “Wouldn't It Be Loverly?” with its sweet melody and its air of longing:

All I want is a room somewhere,
Far away from the cold night air,
With one enormous chair —
Oh, wouldn't it be loverly?

I'm not sure what I might have been longing for back in those happy times, but the feeling of it struck a chord.

My family always bought the recordings of the big hit Broadway shows — The King and I, Flower Drum Song, Camelot, The Sound Of Music, Funny Girl.  I always loved them, played them over and over, found myself touched by the ballads in particular.  For all that, I never thought of Broadway show tunes as “my music” — when I got to the age when I could choose my own records to buy, they were records of folk and then rock music.  The show tunes were just hidden away somewhere in my heart . . .

. . . until one day, very late in life, I realized what they'd meant to me, what good companions they'd been, what good companions they are and always will be.

“Wouldn't It Be Loverly?” from that 1956 LP still takes me back with uncanny efficiency to the den in my family's house in Belhaven, North Carolina where I first heard it at the age of six.  No other version of the song does this.

Julie Andrews, by the way, was only twenty years-old when she recorded it:


SHOW BOAT WITH MUSIC

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You could make a case that Kern and Hammerstein's theatrical adaptation of Show Boat has been given too much credit for its influence on the form of the American musical and not enough credit for its contribution to the American dialogue about race.

If you think about it, the so-called “integrated book musical”, with songs that arose naturally out of the story and served to advance the drama and delineate character, already existed on the world's stages in the form of operettas.  Operettas in the early 20th Century were often semi-serious, romantic dramas — not all that different from Show Boat — and by the time Hammerstein wrote the book and lyrics for Show Boat he had already written the books and lyrics for several operettas.  Kern had gotten his start in theater supplying additional songs for Continental operettas in their British and American incarnations.

The radical innovations of Show Boat were not so much formal as tonal and stylistic.  It eschewed the European atmosphere of traditional operettas and their farce-like plots, often involving a romance between two people who belong (or more commonly think they belong) to different classes.  And it added to the operatic style of music evoked in operettas distinctly American strains, derived from an African-American musical tradition.

More than this, it created a kind of dialogue between the European operatic tradition and the African-American musical tradition — a dialogue which is incorporated into the interactions between black and white characters in the story itself.  The African-American music used in the play is pre-ragtime, pre-jazz, although those innovations are alluded to in the play's concluding scenes.  Mostly, however, Kern's score deals with spirituals and the kind of lightly syncopated music associated with the minstrel stage — the cakewalk and the shuffle.

The African strain, of course, is what makes American music American.  It's the American quality of the Show Boat score that makes it so distinctive, so unlike anything which had gone before — and it's the explicit recognition and dramatization of the African cultural influence that makes Show Boat such a resonant meditation on American culture.

When the curtain opened at he premiere of the show in 1927, the first word that came from the stage was “Niggers”.  It came from the mouths of black laborers loading cargo onto boats at the dock where the Cotton Blossom Floating Palace Theater was tied up.  “Niggers all work on the Mississippi,” they sang.  “Niggers all work while the white folks play.”  That first-night audience saw the white folks' playhouse, the show boat, where blacks couldn't play — a fact soon to be made explicit in the text when a member of the Cotton Blossom troupe (Julie LaVerne, played by Helen Morgan, above, in the stage production and in the 1936 film) is exposed as a woman of mixed race and expelled from the show boat community.  All the while, the music of black America pervades the playhouse, shapes the entertainment offered there.

This was bold stuff in 1927, and when Show Boat became a beloved American classic, even Hammerstein retreated from it.  In subsequent revivals, the word “nigger” was done away with.  The first line of “Ole Man River” was changed to “Darkies all work on the Mississippi” and then to “Colored folks work on the Mississippi” and then to “Here we all work on the Mississippi”.

Something of the deep and transgressive irony of Hammerstein's original inspiration was lost in the process — just as something of Twain's deep and transgressive irony in Huckleberry Finn would be lost if the word “nigger” were to be removed from that book.  Certainly removing it from Show Boat makes us feel better — but it was there precisely to make us feel uneasy.

The troublesome themes of Show Boat remain, however, even when its language is prettied up — and its themes, far more than its supposed formal innovations, are what make it perennially radical and important.

SHOW BOAT

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Edna Ferber's Show Boat isn't a great novel but it's great fun — a good story told in a lively way.

It's easy to see, too, why it appealed to Oscar Hammerstein II and Jerome Kern as material for a musical play.  It's a book infused with a sentimental love for theater and nostalgia for the romance of its bygone days.

The era of the show boat, coming to an end when Ferber published the book in 1926, is presented as a kind of lost Eden of American show business, somehow magically recovered by modern performers who remember the old ways.

It also deals quite explicitly with the most crucial but often disguised conversation at the heart of American popular entertainment — that between whites and blacks.  (Above is a portrait of Jules Bledsoe, the stage musical's original Joe.)  Ferber is sensitive to the dynamic quality of this conversation and also to the injustice and hypocrisy that inform it.  Julie Dozier, the actress of mixed race expelled from the Eden of Captain Andy's Cotton Blossom, is both an emotional and theatrical inspiration to the novel's (white) female protagonist, Magnolia Hawks.  It is only race that condemns Julie, along with all African-American performers, to a life on the margins of show business, and Ferber's book bristles with outrage over this.  (The poster below features Helen Morgan, the stage musical's original Julie, who reprised her role in the 1929 part-talkie film version.)

Hammerstein and Kern, like most show folk, were clearly sentimental about “the business”, and like most lovers of American music, they were both inspired and instructed by black musical culture.  It remains astonishing, some eighty years on, that they had the ambition to deal with these themes in such a mature and serious way in their stage production of Show Boat.  It was ahead of its time in 1927, and in some ways it remains ahead of our time, too.

Kern's music, of course, exists outside of time, and would have been a miracle in any age.

THE SUBTERRANEANS, PART 2

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In my earlier post on the film version of The Subterraneans, I suggested that its producer Arthur Freed was probably attracted to Kerouac's novel because it offered him a chance to do a modern-day version of La Bohème, with modern-day music, specifically the be-bop jazz that so inspired Kerouac and the people he wrote about in the book.  I can't imagine that Freed himself was much inspired by be-bop, but he had a collaborator at MGM who was, in the person of André Previn.  Previn had recently been the musical supervisor on Gigi, Freed's last great conventional musical, but also performed progressive jazz as a pianist with small combos in clubs.  He was someone who could bridge the gap, musically at least, between the Freed unit at MGM and the world of the beats.



On one level it was a canny commercial calculation.  Twenty-eight years later playwright Billy Aronson had the idea of doing a contemporary musical based on La Bohème and began collaborating with composer Jonathan Larson on what became Rent, one of the most successful musicals in Broadway history.

The difference between the The Subterraneans and Rent was that Rent was written, eventually almost entirely by Larson, from inside a modern Bohemia, as Kerouac's novel was.  Larson was employed as a waiter in a diner in downtown Manhattan while he worked on the play and Kerouac was pretty much perennially beat, even when he became famous, mostly due to his heavy drinking.

The film version of The Subterraneans, by contrast, was written from the outside looking in — it simply reeked of inauthenticity.



This is a bit surprising, since the script's credited author was Robert Thom (above), who went on to achieve a kind of immortality as the writer of several cult-movie classics, including Roger Corman's Crazy Mama and Death Race 2000.  He had a wild, transgressive vision, much like Kerouac's, and it's odd that he was so tone-deaf to Kerouac's voice and milieu.

Perhaps Thom was heavily rewritten, but in any case the result was dreadful.  Kerouac's (and Puccini's) tragedy was given a happy ending, and Kerouac's interracial couple was transformed into an international couple, the Mardou Fox of the novel, half black and half American-Indian, becoming the exotically French Leslie Caron.

Those changes alone wouldn't have been necessarily fatal — the real disgrace was that the actors were given preposterous cornball pseudo-beat poetic lines to spout — lines that would have made Kerouac gag, and that branded the film as irredeemably square . . . irredeemable even by the music, which is quite wonderful.

Sarah Vaugn and Gerry Mulligan and Previn himself appear as performers on-screen, and Previn's underscoring has a plausible jazz feel, fresh and original.  (A soundtrack album, below, was released on LP and is now available, with additional material, on CD.)

The rest of the film is just an embarrassing reminder of what might have been.

You have to give Freed some credit, though, for ambition and intuition, if nothing else.  He knew a good idea when he saw it — a radical one for its time — even if, in this case, he didn't quite know how to pull it off.

IF IT WASN'T FOR THE IRISH AND THE JEWS

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On Patrick's Day I wrote about Mick Moloney's wonderful album of Harrigan and Braham songs, McNally's Row of Flats.  (You can buy it here, and you should.)

I hear from the artist that a follow-up album is due out in October, called If It Wasn't For the Irish and the Jews, covering songs from later in Edward Harrigan's extraordinary career as a creator of musical shows.

I can't wait!

THE SUBTERRANEANS, PART 1

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As a producer, Arthur Freed worked to strike a balance between old-fashioned show-business values, which he revered, and formal innovations which would keep those values alive and accessible to contemporary audiences.  When he swung too far towards innovation he produced what might be called “interesting failures” — like Yolanda and the Thief, for example.

One of his most interesting, and most reviled, failures was The Subterraneans, from 1960 — the first Hollywood film ever made from a Jack Kerouac novel.

Kerouac wrote the novel in three days in the early Fifties and couldn't get it published for several years.  It eventually emerged above-ground as a 35-cent Avon paperback original.  It got a drubbing from critics but apparently sold well enough.   We think of Kerouac as an avant-garde artist today, forgetting that On the Road was a national best-seller.  In the Fifties he wasn't necessarily thought of as an “uncommercial” artist.

Still, it's easy to see why The Subterraneans scared off publishers and annoyed critics — it reads like a novel written in three days, which has its advantages and disadvantages.  On the one hand it has the hurtling energy of a great jazz improvisation.  On the other hand it's messy, uneven and often self-indulgent.  Even Charlie Parker never tried to improvise a solo for three days running.

You might well ask what Freed, a producer of MGM musicals, the creator of Meet Me In St. Louis, saw in this material, but the answers are actually fairly obvious.  For one thing, he saw La Bohème.  The story and setting of Kerouac's novel, consciously or unconsciously, mirror the story and setting of Puccini's opera, a show-biz perennial.  Kerouac wrote an obliquely romantic tale of doomed loved among modern Bohemians — the “subterraneans” of Frisco in the Fifties, a particular clique of beats.

For another thing, Kerouac's book, like the subterraneans he wrote about, was obsessed with be-bop jazz, which suggested musical possibilities for the film.  It was never planned as a musical, per se, but it featured on-screen performances by some high-powered West-Coast jazz musicians and a jazz-inflected score by André Previn.

A genuine wunderkind, Previn was part of the Freed unit at MGM.  He could do conventional arranging and composing for musicals in the MGM house style, but was also attracted to contemporary jazz.  As a pianist he performed progressive jazz himself, quite respectably, in club settings very like the ones depicted in The Subterraneans.  (Previn actually appears in the film leading a jazz trio.)

A contemporary La Bohème with contemporary music was clearly what Freed was after, and it wasn't a bad or uncommercial idea at all, as Rent was to prove several decades later — even if Freed failed to pull it off in the case of The Subterraneans.

In an upcoming post I'll discuss what went wrong, so dreadfully, dreadfully wrong, with the film, and why it didn't become the Rent of its day.  In that post you'll meet, perhaps for the first time, Robert Thom, who wrote the very bad script for The Subterraneans but later went on to a kind of immortality as the author of several cult-movie classics, including Roger Corman's Crazy Mama and Death Race 2000.

PATRICK'S DAY PARADE

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Before George M. Cohan, before Jerome Kern, there was Edward Harrigan.  He wrote comedy sketches about immigrant life in New York City at the end of the 19th Century, later expanding them into full-length musical shows which became wildly popular.  He and his partner from an earlier career in minstrelsy, Tony Hart, performed in the shows, for which Harrigan wrote the songs, with music by David Braham, sometimes called the American Offenbach.

The songs on their own were just as popular as the shows but aren't widely known today, which is a shame, since they're wonderful — sweet, tuneful evocations of working-class life in Manhattan when folks from all over the world crowded into urban ghettos and tried to figure out a way to live together, to be Americans together.

Mick Moloney has recorded a delightful collection of Harrigan and Braham songs, including their wonderfully cheerful “Patrick's Day Parade”.  (You can buy Maloney's album here.)

“Patrick's Day Parade” moves me because it records the joy of people who were in their time so proud to be Irish and so proud to be Americans, and somehow saw no difference between the two kinds of pride.  “We'll shout hurrah for Erin go bragh and all the Yankee nation!”  We're unspeakably lucky to live in a country where such a paradox makes sense — where all of us can be proud to be Irish, even if our ancestors never set foot in the Emerald Isle.  It's the kind of cultural
appropriation that's part of the miracle of America.

People have likened America to a melting pot, but it was never that — more like an Irish stew.  The beef stayed beef and the potatoes stayed potatoes . . . it was the combination of disparate things that made the dish so satisfying, and still does.

So as one American to another — Erin go bragh!  (Or, as Michael O'Donohue used to say, in the true spirit of Harrigan and Hart — Erin go bragh and panties!)

A SHOW BUSINESS CIRCLE

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Nate Salsbury (above) started out in show business just after the Civil War as a singer, eventually forming a vocal group called The Troubadours, who performed in variety shows.  Later he started writing full-length plays to feature his troupe.  In 1879 he wrote a play called The Brook, a story of ordinary people at a picnic who entertain each other with songs and comic turns.  It's considered to be a forerunner of the American musical comedy.

In 1882 he suggested to William F. (Buffalo Bill) Cody that they create an arena show about the wild west, an idea that wasn't new and that Buffalo Bill himself had been thinking about.  When Salsbury said he wasn't ready to plunge into the venture immediately, Bill put together a show anyway.  Its first season wasn't a flop but wasn't a big hit, either, and Bill convinced Salsbury to sign on as manager.

Together they created Buffalo Bill's Wild West, one of the great success stories of American show business and a cultural influence of almost immeasurable proportions.  To Bill and Nate, however, it was just a show.  Bill saw nothing odd about asking a theatrical impresario with stage experience to run it, Nate saw nothing odd about applying skills learned in playhouses to an outdoor spectacle involving horses and buffaloes.

In 1893 Buffalo Bill's Wild West had a wildly successful run at an arena set up just outside the grounds of the world's fair in Chicago.  A sixteen year-old kid named Florenz Ziegfeld (above) went to see it and was so enchanted that he ran off with the show when it left town, staying with it for six months until his father tracked him down and dragged him back home.

After years as a traveling impresario managing variety acts, Ziegfeld became a Broadway producer, inventing the Ziegfeld Follies, a kind of super-sized vaudeville show that featured headliners only, with more than a little burlesque thrown in for good measure, in the shapely and barely clad forms of the “Ziegfeld Girls”, chorines who did little more that parade around the stage looking beautiful.

The Wild West which had lured Salsbury away from Broadway set Ziegfeld off on a road that led him to prominence there — and eventually right back to a rendezvous with the destiny of the American musical, which Salsbury had helped inaugurate.

In 1927, Ziegfeld produced Kern and Hammerstein's Show Boat (above), perhaps the most important and influential production in the history of the American musical stage.  Just about twenty years later, Irving Berlin, as part of the tradition of integrated book musicals that Show Boat inspired, collaborated on Annie Get Your Gun, a Broadway musical about Annie Oakley and her career with Buffalo Bill's Wild West.

Ziegfeld wouldn't have seen anything odd about this, any more than Salsbury, Cody, Kern, Hammerstein or Berlin would have.  In Annie Get Your Gun, Buffalo Bill addresses a song to Annie that has become a show business anthem — “There's no business,” he sings to her, “like show business”.

Today, under the influence of academic specialization and the division of art into high-brow and low-brow categories, we see a great difference between “the Broadway stage” and, say, a circus, but earlier ages weren't bothered with such distinctions.  They knew that — to paraphrase Rudyard Kipling — “All show business is one, man!  One!”

HONOLULU

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Jack Cummings was MGM's third-string producer of musicals from the late Thirties to the mid Fifties (after Arthur Freed and Joe Pasternak.)  He was unimaginative but reliable, able to churn out respectable product with occasional passages of sublime magic.  One such bit of product from 1939 was Honolulu, an Eleanor Powell vehicle.

The film has an amiable but uninspired sit-com plot, centering on a Hawaiian pineapple grower and a big movie star who look exactly alike and decide, for various preposterous reasons, to switch places for a few weeks.  Robert Young plays the dual role.  As the movie star seeking a respite from hysterical fans he falls in love with Powell, a dancer with a gig at a Honolulu night spot.

In the dialogue scenes, Powell is every bit as bland and pleasant as Young — they're acceptable company for a bit of romantic comedy fluff.  So far so good.  When the Hawaiian drums start to throb, however, and Powell starts dancing, she sizzles with an intense sexuality that leaves Young wailing on the margin of non-entity, both dramatically and as a cinematic presence.  After Powell's first big number, the film no longer makes any sense as a love story.

Powell's three big numbers in the film, all solos, two with a corps of other dancers behind her, are stunning, though — they make the film worth watching, and revisiting.  In the first, she partners with a jump-rope, and makes it look sexier than Young.  In the last she does a fierce hula in a grass skirt, first barefoot then in tap shoes.  It has to be seen to be believed — her hip movements are simply indecent.

Another of the film's delights is Gracie Allen, who plays Powell's partner in her nightclub act.  She flits in and out of the plot delivering some first-rate vaudeville gags with her usual brilliance.  If you think of Honolulu as a program of vaudeville turns, rather than as a book musical, it's much easier to enjoy.  Powell, like Allen, was a product of the variety stage, so it's really not that much of a leap.  (George Burns is also in the film, but has no scenes with Allen, and flounders a bit with the less-than-amusing material he has to work with here.)

The film has some problematic racial stereotypes.  Eddie Anderson is made to do a gibbering “I'se just seen a ghost!” turn, which is doubly offensive because it clashes so markedly with Anderson's wry and skeptical comic persona, which Jack Benny exploited so well in his radio and TV shows.  Using Anderson as he's used in Honolulu is just an example of the mindless demeaning of blacks.  Willie Fung does a more amusing stock Chinaman turn, in which he gets to engage in a bit of one-upsmanship over his patronizing boss.

Then there's Powell's blackface number, in which she dances an imitation of Bill “Bojangles” Robinson.  This cannot be simply dismissed, however disturbing the very idea of blackface has become.  There is no trace of condescension in Powell's tribute to Robinson — it's more an act of admiration, even envy.  Powell took lessons from the great black tapper and she imitates him convincingly — though her version of his tapping up and down stairs is just a faint echo of Robinson's signature routine.  She would probably have enjoyed dancing a romantic tapping pas de deux with Robinson — he's one of the few dancers who could have held his own with her, and then some — but that would have been inconceivable in 1939, probably even in 1969 in any mainstream showcase.

So Powell became Robinson for a few minutes.  It's hard to see the impersonation as anything but an act of tenderness and love.

The film was directed by journeyman Edward Buzzell.  Bobby Connelly did the simple but effective choreography — he did the simple but effective choreography for The Wizard Of Oz that same year.  Sadly, Honolulu is not yet available on DVD, though it's shown from time to time on TCM.

PLUS ÇA CHANGE . . .

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Next year most of us will be following the jalapeño crops in Mexico, sleeping rough and singing the songs of the land, so tonight it's only right to party like it's 1929.

Don't bring a frown to old Broadway,
You've got to clown on Broadway . . .

STUDIO SNOW

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Next to real snow, there's nothing quite as lovely as studio snow in black-and-white films from Hollywood's Golden age.

shahn, at the ever-magical six martinis and the seventh art, is an aficionada of bogus blizzards on film and has posted some screen shots of my favorite ersatz snowfall in movies, from Swing Time.

If you live someplace warm, like the middle of the Mojave Desert, fix yourself some egg nog, light a fake fire, gaze through the window of your computer screen and enjoy the prop flakes in cozy comfort.  Better still, give Swing Time another spin on your DVD player and watch the imaginary snowflakes fall on Fred and Ginger as they sing and dance their way into your heart one more time.

AN IMAGE FOR TODAY: TWO COHANS

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George M. and his sister Josie, when they were, with their parents, part of The Four Cohans, a family vaudeville act, before George became the King Of Broadway.

Josie later married the silent film director Fred Niblo.  Josie died of heart disease at a relatively young age, in 1916, the year Niblo entered movies as an actor and director.  He's best known for directing the silent version of Ben-Hur, but a film he made a year later with Garbo, The Temptress, is probably his best work.