"The Sorrows of a Show Girl: A Story of the Great "White Way"" by Kenneth McGaffey takes readers to the glitz and glamor of Broadway in the early 20th century. Following Sabrina, as she attempts to ride the wave of being a showgirl to stardom, the book showcases just how difficult and tricky a life in show business was. Money-struggles, learning to stand up for oneself, and looking out for fellow performers are all experiences that Sabrina has to tackle.
Greasepaint Puritan details the life and work of Bradford Ropes, author of the bawdy 1932 novel 42nd Street, on which the classic film and its stage adaptation are based. Inspired by Ropes’s own experiences as a performer, 42nd Street “reads less like a novel than like a documentary about the lives of New York’s theatre people and, above all, about the practicalities, the personalities, and the sexual politics that go into the making of a show,” according to Richard Brody in The New Yorker. Why did Ropes’s body of work--which included a trilogy of backstage novels--and consequently his biographical footsteps, disappear into obscurity? Descended from Mayflower Pilgrims, Ropes rebelled against the “Proper Bostonian” life, in a career that touched upon the Jazz Age, American vaudeville, and theater censorship. Greasepaint Puritan follows Ropes’s successful career as both a performer and the author of the backstage novels 42nd Street, Stage Mother, and Go Into Your Dance. Populated by scheming stage mothers, precocious stage children, grandiose bit players, and tart-tongued chorines, these novels centered on the lives and relationships of gay men on Broadway during the Jazz Age and Prohibition era. Rigorously researched, Greasepaint Puritan chronicles Ropes’s career as a successful screenwriter in 1930s and ’40s Hollywood, where he continued to be a part of a dynamic gay subculture within the movie industry before returning to obscurity in the 1950s. His legacy lives on in the Hollywood and Broadway incarnations of 42nd Street—but Greasepaint Puritan restores the “forgotten melody” of the man who first envisioned its colorful characters.
Anna Held was America's most popular musical comedy star during the two decades preceding World War I. In the colorful world of New York theater during La Belle Époque, she epitomized everything that was glamorous and provocative about turn-of-the-century Broadway. Overcoming an impoverished life as an orphan to become a music hall star in Paris, Held rocketed to fame in America. From 1896 to 1910, she starred in hit after hit and quickly replaced Lillian Russell as the darling of the theatrical world. The first wife of legendary producer Florenz Ziegfeld Jr., Held was the brains and inspiration behind his Follies. Together, they brought the Paris scene to New York, complete with lavish costumes and sets and a chorus of stunningly beautiful women, dubbed "The Anna Held Girls." While Held was known for a champagne giggle as well as for her million-dollar bank account, there was a darker side to her life. She concealed her Jewish background and her daughter from a previous marriage. She suffered through her two husbands' gambling problems and Ziegfeld's conspicuous affairs with showgirls. With the outbreak of fighting in Europe, Held returned to France to support the war effort. She entertained troops and delivered medical supplies, and was once briefly captured by the German army. Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld's Broadway reveals one of the most remarkable women in the history of theater. With access to previously unseen family records and photographs, Eve Golden has uncovered the details of an extraordinary woman's life in 1900s New York.
(Applause Books). This startling, intimate biography of James Stewart frankly reveals with new facts and discovers a fully dimensional view of this revered figure and consummate American icon. Shrewd, self-protective, financially astute, the James Stewart that Mr. Quirk uncovers was no bumbling naive Mr. Smith, but a Man of the World.
