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The Great Ziegfeld And His Ziegfeld Girls
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by Robert Laurence
The most famous of American theatrical
producers, Chicago-born Florenz Ziegfeld first found fame in 1893 as the
manager of Eugene Sandow, the "World's Strongest Man." But within three
years he was producing a Broadway series of light musical farces featuring
his first wife, wasp-waisted Anna Held, America's aphrodisiac at the time.
In these seven early plays - vehicles like A
 Parlor Match (1896) and A
Parisian Model (1906) - Ziegfeld Follies. Though there were to be many
other plays, the Follies became the best and longest lasting series of
musical revues ever produced, running from 1907 to 1925. The Ziegfeld
Follies featured beautiful chorines in scanty but dazzling costumes
designed by Joseph Urban (among the greatest of set designers) who were
ballyhooed as "the glorification of the American girl." The opulent costly
productions starred such acts as Fanny Brice (Ziegfeld's second wife),
banjo-eyed Eddie Cantor, W.C. Fields, Will Rogers, Bert Williams, and
Marilyn Miller, many of whom Ziegfeld discovered. "Unfailing Urban"
designed elaborate sets for them, and the perennial song favorites
introduced in the revues included "A Pretty Girl Is Like A Melody," "By
The Light Of The Silvery Moon," 'shine On Harvest Moon," "Row, Row, Row
Your Boat," and 'second Hand Rose," to name just a few.
"Out of the regular leg show," wrote eminent critic George Jean Nathan,
"Ziegeld has fashioned a thing of grace and beauty, of loveliness and
charm; he knows quality and mood. He has lifted, with sensitive skill, a
thing that was mere food for smirking baldheads and downy college boys,
out of low estate and into a thing of symmetry and bloom."
Ziegfeld, a legend in his own time, was also hailed for his Ziegfeld
Theatre, one of Broadway's most beautiful. Designed by Urban, the
egg-shaped boxless auditorium had a gilt proscenium and stage, its walls
and ceiling was covered with richly colored murals. Opened in 1927, it was
the home of the Ziegfeld Follies of 1931, but all other Follies produced
by Ziegfeld himself were played at the legendary New Amsterdam Theatre on
42nd Street. After Ziegfeld died in 1932, age sixty-five, the Ziegfeld
Theatre housed a few more Follies staged there by the Shuberts, but they
never matched the magnificent originals. Despite many protests, the
theater itself was demolished in 1966 to make room for an office building.
Ziegfeld's last words were said to be "Curtain! Fast music! Lights! Ready
for the last finale! Great! The show looks good! The show looks good!.
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