Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld's Broadway

Sources

§oare£S First, a general note on the text and on the major sources: None of the quotes or conversations in this book has been invented; all are taken directly from published interviews, autobiographies, or private correspondence. As mentioned in the text, Anna Held was not conversant in English until about 1898, and any previous interviews were probably paraphrased or translated. If I feel an interview was not in Anna s words but simply a press release, I note this in the book, The main source used was the Billy Rose Theater Collection at the New York Public Library at Lincoln Center, The rare books, newspaper and magazine clippings files, and extensive scrapbooks are a national treasure and without them (and the library's hardworking, helpful staff), this book would not have been possible. From these sources, I was able to trace Anna s life and career, the dates of her shows and her ocean voyages, the routes of her theatrical tours. Most of the interviews and critics' reviews quoted in this book were found in this collection. I also used as sources Liane Carrera s two memoirs: her unpublished notes from the late 1930s and her 1979 book Anna Held and Flo Ziegfeld. Both of these books had to be approached with extreme caution, as Lianes stories changed from year to year and often contradicted themselves. When these books were used, I was sure to note that they consisted of Liane s personal opinions and may have only a passing relationship with reality, Throughout the book, I mention other shows and stars who appeared onstage during Annas career. These details were culled from American Musical Theater and The Oxford Companion to American Theater (both Bordman), A Pictorial SOURCES 223 History of the American Theater (Blum and Willis), Great Stars of the American Theater (Blum), and Broadway (Bloom). I also discuss the various New York theaters in which Anna performed; details on them were available in From the Bowery to Broadway (Fields), Lost New York (Silver), New York Then and Now (Watson), and especially Lost Broadway Theaters (Van Hoogstraten). prologue; The quote "The ballroom was filled with fashions throng; / It shone with a thousand lights" is taken from the opening lines of "Bird in a Gilded Cage" (1899). 1. tieavjzn Will Protect the Working Girl Anna covered her tracks well, and her childhood was extremely difficult to trace. Her Warsaw birthplace was finally proved during World War I (see chapter 8), but her birthdate remains something of a mystery. When researching his book The Ziegfeld Touch, Richard Ziegfeld was unable to find any record of Annas birth in either Warsaw or Paris. Though her generally acknowledged birthdate was March 18, 1873, there were other stories as well: Her tombstone says 1872; one book (GreatJews on Stage and Screen, Lyman) says 1865, as does a 1956 letter to the New York Times. Her early career and published interviews with her childhood neighbors and London coworkers led me to estimate her birthdate as 1870. It may actually have been two or three years earlier or later. Details of Annas childhood also came from those interviews with early neighbors and coworkers, all of whom were very eager to "tell on her" after she became famous . Some stories were taken from a lengthy article, "My Beginnings," which appeared in The Theatre magazine in July 1907. While this article was certainly ghostwritten, it contains so many phrases and stories often repeated by Anna that it was probably based on first-hand interviews with her. But again, just because Anna told these stories does not mean they were true. Facts on nineteenthcentury Poland and its Jews come from the books TheJews in Poland (Abramsky, Jachimczyk, and Polonsky), The Jews in Polish Culture (Hertz), and Bright Star of Exile (Rosenfeld), as well as stories from my own family, who fled Eastern Europe about the same time (and for the same reasons) as did Annas family. The plight of Jewish refugees in nineteenth-century Paris was detailed in The Jews in Modern France (Malino and Wasserstein) and Fin de Siecle Paris (Weber); and the Victorian Jewish community in London in the books London's East End (Berment) and Living London (Sims). Anna s early career in the Yiddish theater was discussed in newspaper interviews with her coworkers and with Anna herself , and in the Jacob Adler biography Bright Star of Exile (Rosenfeld). The world 224 SOURCES...