Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith-Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the Big-Time and its Performers (review)

The title may seem tendentious, but Arthur Frank Wertheim's massive research underpinning this book supports its accuracy. The wars for dominance in America's most lucrative popular entertainment industry at the turn of the century were real and ruthless. They were also very complicated, with constantly shifting alliances and endless tactical forays. The difficulty of discerning an overarching narrative amid the alphabet soup of business entities and unions—WCVT, AVM, WVMA, IARC, UBO, USAC, CVBA, TOBA, WRAU, VMPA, NVA, KVE, and others—may account for the fact that this is the first major work to tackle the subject so ambitiously. If you can't identify more than two or three of those acronyms, you need this book! Fortunately, Wertheim makes it all accessible by breaking the saga into manageable chunks with lots of subheadings and thirty-eight illustrations.

Wertheim also zeros in on the biographies and personalities of the businessmen who exercised powerful influence, for better or worse, over the lives of the singers, comedians, dancers, animal trainers, and other artists who just wanted to make a living with their talents. Given the portrayals of so many of the men behind the desks as driven only to accumulate money and power to the extent that their promises were never intended to be kept and that betrayals were endemic to doing business, the latter part of Wertheim's dedication seems generous: "In tribute to the tens of thousands of versatile vaudevillians who brought joy and merriment to millions and to the ingenious impresarios who, despite personal flaws, also made the big-time happen. This is their story" (vii).

The story begins with B. F. Keith and the dime museum he opened in Boston in 1883. This opening chapter is, unfortunately, the rockiest in the book, with its muddled chronology, inexplicable gaps, and confusing pronouns without antecedents, but the persevering reader is rewarded with chapter 2, introducing E. F. Albee, who becomes the dominant presence over the decades when vaudeville flourished—1890 to 1920—and even during its decade of decline until Albee's death in 1930. Albee's actions throughout the rest of the book leave no doubt about his character, and yet one comes to admire his unswerving loyalty to Keith during his many years as general manager of the enterprises over which Keith presided. Even fourteen years after Keith's death, Albee named the last theatre he built the "B. F. Keith Memorial Theatre" (Boston, 1928).

Chapters 3 and 4 shift the focus to the West Coast and the creation of the Orpheum circuit. The colorful personalities in this segment are Gustav Walter, Morris Meyerfield, Jr., and Martin Beck; inexplicably, Martin Lehman, who played a crucial role in the development of that circuit, is omitted. The Keith–Albee side of the story is picked up again with treatment of Tony Pastor and the Union Square Theatre, followed by the opening of Keith's elegant new theatre in Boston in 1894. And then the wars begin in earnest.

Albee initiated conflict by centralizing the booking process in vaudeville just as the Theatrical Syndicate had done in legitimate theatre. The linking of the Keith and Orpheum circuits in the Association of Vaudeville Managers was achieved in 1900 (a year that I am hereby providing, since one searches the book in vain for it, although the actual day is supplied twice: "Friday, May 18" [102–103]). Not only was the booking association now able to regulate the spiraling salaries of performers, but it imposed a 5 percent commission fee. The vaudevillians who responded by unionizing as the "White Rats" undertook two major campaigns to contain Albee's power: first during 1900–1901 under the leadership of George Fuller Golden, and then during 1909–1911 under Harry Mountford (who led, less successfully, one further attempt during 1916–1917). These efforts are compellingly recounted—though the artists were destined to lose...