Andy Erdman: 0:03

You'd see about 12 to 15 minutes of this very beautiful and precisely made up, very detailed woman. So he'd play like the Gibson girl, he'd play Salome, he'd do the vamp, the vampire girl, the bathing beauty, he'd do the college girl, he'd do the old time Victorian lady. And then at the end you'd see somebody who stepped to the edge of the stage and pulled off his wig and was, you know, maybe stuck a cigar in his mouth and all of a sudden became dude.

David Hunt: 0:36

Welcome to Tell Me, David. Queer Stories Past and Present. This story originally aired on This Way Out, the international LGBTQ radio magazine. Conservatives in the United States have mobilized a knock-down, drag-out fight against, well, drag. They've put cross-dressing in the crosshairs, passing laws aimed at outlawing or at least restricting drag shows in states like Tennessee, Montana, Florida and Texas. But drag hasn't always been a lightning rod for controversy. I'm David Hunt. In the early years of the 20th century, one of the highest-paid entertainers in the United States was a female impersonator, as drag performers were known back then. His name was William Julian Dalton, but he went by the stage name Julian Eltinge. The foremost expert on Eltinge is scholar and historian Andrew L Erdman. His new book, published by Oxford University Press, is titled Beautiful the story of Julian Eltinge, America's greatest female impersonator. Erdman joined me for a conversation about the popular drag artist who got his start in vaudeville.

Andy Erdman: 2:20

Julian Eltinge was a hugely popular female impressionist, female impersonator, from around 1900 through. Really the height of his career was through the 1920s, although he's famous until his death in 1940. Exemplar and celebrity of an age when men were doing a lot of drag of all kinds, some being a little more cartoonish, camp comedic, some being very precise. That was what Julian Eltinge did. Very erotic, very feminine, all very accepted as an art form for mainstream audiences. And he was just a mainstream, conventional, like kind of ordinary kind of guy. That's how he was positioned and that's part of what made him so popular.

David Hunt: 3:12

If I could go back in time and see Julian Eltinge on the bill at the Orpheum Theater, what would I see? What would his performance be like?

Andy Erdman: 3:30

You'd see about 12 to 15 minutes of this very beautiful and precisely made up, very detailed woman, different personizations, or different characterizations, I should say, of women. So he'd play like the Gibson girl, which was an ideal type created by Charles Dana Gibson who was the illustrator. He'd play Salome, which in 1908, 1909 was this really popular biblical character. He'd do the vamp, the vampire girl, the bathing beauty. He'd do the college girl. He'd old-time the Victorian lady, the Lillian Russell, all of these. So he's also a quick change artist right, which audiences love.

Andy Erdman: 4:01

And you'd see one after the other. You'd also see a guy or a woman who really knew how to sing and dance and had great rapport with the audience and just down to his finest details, knew how to hold and carry himself in all of these personifications. And then at the end you'd see somebody who stepped to the edge of the stage and pulled off his wig and was, you know, maybe stuck a cigar in his mouth and all of a sudden became dude, you know, and he would say thank you, and the audience would go crazy and you'd get all of that rush of excitement. I mean, it was, it was, you can tell, it was a real thrill. That was really his, his magic.

David Hunt: 4:37

Did families come to the shows? Would there be children in the audience?

Andy Erdman: 4:41

Vaudeville was just a variety show, all sorts of different acts strung together for an hour or two, usually a pretty reasonable price. There were different flavors of vaudeville but Julian Eltinge was really popular in big-time vaudeville. That was the uh. These were arranged in circuits, much like, you know, movie chains are in circuits. Um, the Keith Albee circuit was really the biggest of them, but there were others the Orpheum circuit, the Pantages circuit, and they were absolutely oriented towards a family audience. There were afternoon shows.

Andy Erdman: 5:13

They really wanted to get women and children in. They would place vaudeville theaters near like shopping districts. It seems that they struggled to get as many women and children in to see shows as they wanted. They struggled to get as many women and children in to see shows as they wanted, but still the appeal was and it was supposed to be very free from suggestion and free from sexuality. The truth was often otherwise, but that's how it kind of presented itself, sort of a very sanitized, in an earlier age, perhaps Disney-fied, sort of entertainment. So absolutely it was meant for all members of the family.

David Hunt: 5:47

Looking back, gender roles were so distinct in the early 1900s and I feel like there may have been some mystery, especially for young men, around the so-called feminine mystique. Was that something that Eltinge was able to play on?

Andy Erdman: 6:01

That's a really good point and I hadn't thought about it that way. But I think for sure you have this notion of the dual spheres. You have the woman's sphere, which is domestic and private and soothing, and then the male sphere, which is ambitious and competitive and public. Julian Eltinge does like you're saying gave people, and men in particular, a way to kind of poke through and somehow deal with that massive and very bewildering apparent difference, this essential difference, and wondering if it was so essential after all. And part of what Julian was able to do is to at the same time say men and women are are very different and I can play them both. You know I can play them both perfectly. I'm not a transgressor here, so it's kind of mind bending.

David Hunt: 6:52

His act worked on one level, because he demonstrated the correct way to, as we would say today, perform female gender roles.

Andy Erdman: 7:00

Well, yeah, I mean, I mean almost nothing says gender more, the performativity of gender, more than Julian Eltinge who, at the very same time, reinforced the essential, the essential, the idea of the essentialness of gender, kind of the illusion of it. It's interesting. What I think he begins to make clear unintentionally is just how performed gender is.

David Hunt: 7:23

Because if the most beautiful woman on the stage is a man, what does that say about gender?

Andy Erdman: 7:30

Yeah, it says kind of that, and this is pretty apparent that being a woman is a job, it's a task one must continually attend to, to kind of rise up to full womanliness. He does it, he does it twice a day and he even sells products for women to help them do it. And there's this idea that women are constantly failing to be women as perfectly as he succeeds at being a woman. I mean, it's pretty, it's pretty funny in a way.

David Hunt: 7:55

How did he present himself when he was not performing, when he was off stage?

Andy Erdman: 8:00

Certainly when in public or around journalists, as a very kind of hetero coated straight man who was when he wasn't in heels. He didn't like being in heels, he liked wearing business suits and riding horses and boxing. There's endless pictures of him boxing and talking about boxing. Um, he liked to. You know some of this is true. I think he did really like to spend time on the land, kind of working the land. He owned various estates. He was a hard drinker, he liked fishing, he liked carousing, gambling. He claimed to know a lot about business I think he did and he didn't, but he was just a sort of like, just an ordinary young man and and the the press and the media wanted to see him that way rather than as this kind of gender rebel, so they were happy to promote that. Some have said that he did. He did male drag as well as he did female drag.

David Hunt: 9:03

You're listening to This Way Out the international LGBTQ radio magazine. I'm David Hunt. Let's listen to a movie trailer from 1929 that features one of Hollywood's biggest stars, Julian Eltinge.

Trailer: 9:18

Pardon me, Miss Eltinge, would you speak a few words over this station? Gladly, thank you. Greetings, ladies and gentlemen. Well, here I am, back in Hollywood making my first talking picture. I have had several ladies on the set and ladies around the different studios ask me this year as to who is making my costumes. I suppose that today Hollywood leads the world in the making of gown creations. You see, we have so many marvelous movie stars who need so many clothes and costumes. That has brought all the finest designers from all parts of the world to Hollywood.

David Hunt: 9:53

Now back to my conversation with scholar and historian Andy Erdman, author of Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator.

Andy Erdman: 10:05

He was a very clever and effective entrepreneur and marketer and he marketed himself as this real professional who took great pride in his work like any other professional man, and he spent hours in the dressing room making up and he came up with all these special emulsions and solutions and preparations to make his skin look ivory white, because of course whiteness is equated with beauty and so he does a great job of quite effectively showing how seriously he takes it.

Andy Erdman: 10:33

And at the same time I think there just wasn't quite the stigma around men putting on dresses and dressing up as women. It just wasn't necessarily thought to be quite the horror show that some would later come to to think of it as, both in the 1930s and 40s and then you know, as we're seeing in our day, he was always very popular with with women. I think part of the mischaracterization of Julian Eltinge is that somehow he was more popular with women than with men, which I don't think was true. I think men, for all different reasons, loved also the kind of freedom and sexuality and performativity and illusionism that he brought to the whole affair. You know, because you always have these men in the audience saying like, well, if you were a lady, I should steal a kiss forthwith, you know, and like there's some free. That's what the theater lets us do. It lets us have some freedom from the confines that we live in.

David Hunt: 11:24

I asked Erdman to tell me more about Eltinge's career in Hollywood, where he got his first starring role in a silent movie, the Countess Charming, in 1917.

Andy Erdman: 11:34

Yeah, so after vaudeville Julian Eltinge goes on to be in these bespoke musical comedies that are written for him, where he plays a young guy who very much is sort of Julian Eltinge character, who likes just smoking and gambling and looking at the ladies. And then all of a sudden he must dress up as a countess or a widow or something, which he does beautifully and perfectly. And then there's all these erotic shenanigans and then he ends up getting the girl and finding the diamonds or whatever, and those are very successful. I think he gets tired of it and becomes formulaic and he wants to go make movies and his movies are actually successful. At first he makes three movies that are very successful. They're sort of like 50, 60 minute comedies. I think that they fit in well enough to what Hollywood is making at the time in sort of mainstream silent movie fare.

Andy Erdman: 12:26

And then he has a movie that has to be pulled with the end of World War One. It's a World War One themed movie and it it has to be pulled because audiences don't want to see war themed stuff anymore. Audiences don't want to see war-themed stuff anymore. And you know, much like today, the vagaries of the market can kind of very quickly. This is what he discovered can destroy a movie actor's career. And now he's getting older too and movies are able to do more in terms of their illusionism. So he kind of goes from being a very singular kind of performer at the top of a trade to just kind of another comic silent film actor, and it's not really what he's built for. You know, he's able, in a way he's more successful than other vaudevillians who make the transition. But his run is a decent one, but it ends kind of abruptly.

David Hunt: 13:13

In the 1920s and 30s, society's views of gender and sexuality began to change. How did that impact Eltinge career?

Andy Erdman: 13:22

gender and sexuality began to change. How did that impact Eltinge's career? In the 20s you start to have the decline of vaudeville popularity and the rise of nightclub and speakeasy culture, lounge culture. Julian Eltinge also starts to become more interested in creating this artist's colony and this kind of spa retreat center down in San Diego County. So he's playing smaller venues, kind of trying to raise money to keep himself afloat. There's not the same money in vaudeville. He's not making movies, he goes into debt. He goes on tour. He makes more money Towards the end of the 20s.

Andy Erdman: 13:54

You know the 20s is an era of relative liberality but of course forces of reaction, kind of like in the 1970s, are starting to kind of stir up. They don't like all this freedom. And then in the late 20s, particularly around the trials of Mae West and she wrote these plays that were very provocative and showed the sexual underworld and the gay underworld and a lot of cross-dressing, and so it starts to fall into disfavor. And then of course in the 30s, with everything that's happening with the economy and politics, there's a real fear cast over America. And you know what happens in times of fear the seeming cultural transgressors are targeted rather than the actual problems.

Andy Erdman: 14:37

This is my view. Problems, this is my view. And so, yeah, Eltinge, and Eltinge is always held in higher regard because he's always more of a gender conformer in his weird way and he doesn't want to raise a stink, he's a little bit libertarian in his views, so he's one of the last ones that's kind of called to the called on the carpet and he eventually has this kind of day in court. But the whole, the whole cultural attitude of liberality and acceptance collapses and turns into a kind of reactionary fist.

David Hunt: 15:07

Finally, why, personally, did you decide to focus on Julian Eltinge?

Andy Erdman: 15:12

I came across Julian when I was writing my last book about another kind of great forgotten artist, eva Tanguay, who was another kind of, in her own way, gender rebel and big star in vaudeville. They knew each other, they had this kind of sham engagement together that played out in the press. And I came across Julian and I thought, both from a psychological, sociological and historical standpoint, here's a fascinating person and it really hits that time period, both from intellectual history and just kind of pop culture history that I love. I'm always drawn back to sort of I don't know New York and kind of the entertainment world of like 1890 to 1930.

Andy Erdman: 15:51

It's just, it's just fascinating to me and I kind of dove in and there's been so much speculation about Julian but there was never a thorough book about him. And boy, there was a lot of good. If you know, I had to dig a lot, but there's a lot of good stuff out there and I just I like to tell stories and so this seemed like a good one to tell, particularly given the time frame that we're in.

David Hunt: 16:12

So I'd like to thank my guest scholar and historian, Andy Erdman, author of Beautiful, the Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator. On this week's feature, we heard music by the Voice of Hollywood, Kyle Cox and the Southside Aces. For This Way Out, I'm David Hunt.