Andrew L. Erdman
Andrew L. Erdman’s 2024 book, Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America’s Greatest Female Impersonator, examines the remarkable career of this actor Julian Eltinge during a time when new attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and crossdressing were emerging within American culture. Erdman’s book is the first biography of Eltinge, and so NOTCHES wanted to learn more about this interesting performer.
NOTCHES: You open with Eltinge performing in 1910, describing how audiences both were and weren’t fooled by his illusions. What does this simultaneous desire to be deceived and to know the “truth” reveal about early twentieth-century attitudes about gender?
Andrew L. Erdman: Plato famously disliked the theatre. He felt it was a copy of a copy, a thumbprint of the evanescent shadow that is our so-called reality. I don’t disagree about the illusory nature of “reality,” but that’s why I love theatre and performance—which I think this relates closely to the question you pose about Julian Eltinge’s audiences. Because what we call “gender” and “sexuality” are both so constant and at the same time, elusive, I believe it’s strangely reassuring to have someone present, before our very eyes and brains, a visual, aural, and three-dimensional phenomenon that shakes what we thought was the truth and also relieves of us our anxiety to decode reality. In seeing Eltinge and other impersonators, even the campier ones like Bert Savoy, audiences got temporary permission to loosen the nervously-held reins of being a “proper” man or woman, or “gentleman” or “lady,” and relax a little bit knowing the whole thing is a kind game or perhaps conspiracy at some level.
NOTCHES: You call the early twentieth century the “high water mark” of female impersonation, with hundreds of performers working professionally. Why did this art form flourish so spectacularly between 1900 and 1930?
AE: I’m working on Season Two of my podcast, Feel Familiar? Emotionally Intelligent History. It will focus on these drag events called “Womanless Weddings,” which were hugely popular in the American Deep South in the early 1900s. It was a time of relative prosperity, growing American power, and for many white, middle-class, men, a sense that they were on top and the future was hopeful. Feeling relatively safe, comfortable, and undisturbed, many mainstream men welcomed drag, both as amateur participants and also as consumers of amusement. In fact, when drag comes out into the open, as seen in the flourishing of Womanless Weddings or in the popularity of Julian Eltinge and his peers, it usually means conventional masculinity is comfortable with its place and power. When social and cultural conditions change, and those in, or aspiring to, power get nervous, drag become suspect, the ominous “other,” a lurking Fifth Column. No doubt a convenient mirror for the projection of internal anxieties and unprocessed parts of the self. But for the first decades of the 1900s, drag and female impersonation, once prominent on classical and Renaissance stages, again found fertile social soil to go mainstream.
NOTCHES: You argue that Eltinge’s performances both upset the idea that gender was immutable and simultaneously reinforced rigid gender conventions. How do we reconcile this paradox—was his work “undeniably queer” or profoundly conservative?
AE: I think your question points to its own complex webwork of answers. As I mentioned before, I think impersonating gender, like performance in general, allows us to let go of our constant disguise-wearing which we hope we will pull off successfully, either as a “man” or a “leader” or even as a totally individuated ego in a swarm of humanity. Julian Eltinge was so good at a particular kind of—let’s call it illusionistic and seductive—drag that his labor fairly screamed: This is how you do proper womanhood, and Womanhood is something to be “done” rather than lived-in. The paradox, I think, resides not in the artform or the performances but in us, in our affective and perceptive apparatus which so loves, and yet hates, to be fooled. To answer your question, then, by perceiving the totality of Eltinge’s art—his success, his reception, his self-image management, and how the perception of female impersonation changed over his lifetime—we can look at his oeuvre as definitely queer. Were we to locate our focus on his interiority, his subjectivity, I think we’d find strong conservative impulses. However, one might also add, from a queer perspective, that such impulses were in part shaped by the social and political restraints on queerness in Julian Eltinge’s day.
NOTCHES: How did emerging sexological categorizations of “inverts” and “transvestites” shape female impersonation’s commercial viability? Did Eltinge consciously navigate these frameworks or respond intuitively?
AE: Interestingly, Mae West, more so than Julian Eltinge, claimed to be familiar with modern sexological theories, and batted about terms such as “urning” (an antiquated term for same-sex orientation, originated by Karl Heinz Ulrichs), and professed a confused, if heartfelt, concern for “inverts” and crossdressers. Julian Eltinge was a fundamentally conservative character, from his desire to reinforce gender binaries and conventions, to his stances on taxation, war patriotism, and labor organizing. How much of this was a kind of conscious performance for Eltinge, we don’t know. But even if a well-done charade, it is clear that putting on this charade was important to him. My sense is that while others wished to engage with emergent sexology and sexual psychology, either from a standpoint of compassion and curiosity or, conversely, to weaponize it—there is a stunning moment in Nathaniel West’s novella Ms. Lonelyhearts where two homophobes viciously beat an older gay man in a bathroom claiming they are “Havelock Ellis and … Krafft-Ebing”— Eltinge kept his distance from it all. It was hot, potentially dangerous stuff for him, either threatening to open doors he wanted shut, or nodding to others to do so, say, curious journalists. The libertarian-leaning Eltinge maintained an attitude of what-I-don’t-know-can’t-hurt-me when it came to theories of sex and gender. Incidentally, Mae West cited Julian Eltinge as an influence; she liked his panache and sense of personal style, a kind of aesthetic charisma that separates some stars from others in the firmament. (I’m thinking David Bowie, Diane Keaton, and others from my era who seem to have lived on.)
NOTCHES: Eltinge cultivated a hypermasculine offstage persona—boxing, brawling, threatening anyone who called him “Mamie”—which you reveal was largely PR fiction. Why was this performance of masculinity so essential to his success?
AE: It’s definitely true that Julian Eltinge was as good at what’s been termed “masculine drag” offstage as he was at his professed art. I think it’s significant to consider changes in the public-facing personae of actors and entertainers at the time. Film historian Richard deCordova has shown how the early silent movie player became a “picture personality” sometime around the mid-1900s, which was a sort of amalgam of characters they portrayed and the “real person” offscreen. By the early 1910s, with the emergence of the studios, the “movie star,” with their own secretive yet knowable (and enviable) private life had blossomed. I think Julian Eltinge was a brilliant manager of his own “IP” as we might call it today. He was always curating himself as a total project, perhaps because it worked for him psychologically, perhaps because he felt compelled to do so for financial and cultural reasons. He saw himself as a product which did not necessarily clock-out when the curtain fell. Thus, appearing to lead a version of the strenuous or vigorous lifestyle, one that synced-up with Teddy Roosevelt’s own performances of masculinity, fit into what I might call Eltinge’s aesthetic technology. As he aged, I think he was more able to let some of this all-encompassing image control go. It must have been exhausting.
NOTCHES: You contrast Eltinge’s naturalism with Bert Savoy’s camp and Harry Lehr’s burlesque. What determined which drag styles were deemed respectable versus deviant—was it class, venue, aesthetic, or something else?
AE: Savoy and Lehr, popular as they were, I think belonged to an older tradition of “imps” (impersonators) which had been prominent since the rise of the actress on the Anglophone stage in the late 1600s and early 1700s. With women playing women, men pulled back from illusionistic, “feminine” disguise, affect, and gesture and began favoring the obviously “false” (to use Roger Baker’s term), comical—we might say marvelous-grotesque—aesthetic. A new sense of freedom and cultural conditions permitted a renaissance of realistic or illusionistic drag in Julian Eltinge’s day. This artistic flowering had been prefaced in the latter 19th century with white male performers in blackface playing tragic, quasi-operatic “yaller gals” in minstrel shows. But by the early 1900s, white men in whiteface—in Julian Eltinge’s case, ultra-whiteface—could more fully embody and embrace a seductive, semi-erotic femininity without censure. Things would of course change again in the late 1920s and into the 1930s with a renewed sense of doom, fear, and threat from without, at least as the dominant, anxious classes saw it.
NOTCHES: Mae West’s trial and the broader backlash of the late 1920s “forced the artist to do something he had avoided his entire professional life: choose sides.” What made Eltinge’s middle ground suddenly untenable?
AE: When times were good, or good enough, Eltinge could ply his art for mainstream audiences. I think an American feeling of abundance, hope, and dominance in the 1910s and 1920s meant he could slack off on the “manly drag” with its threats to punch-out anyone who questioned his masculinity, as he had so fervently done when he first transitioned to professional work (ca. 1905). With reactionism on the rise, Eltinge nodded toward libertarian values, though I think he was mostly focused on making a go of his health spa/artists’ resort in Southern California. Since it never took off financially, he was forced to keep playing his classic drag act well into the 1930s when state and city authorities were cracking down. Drag artists were made to get licenses and take psychological exams. Maybe at some level, Eltinge realized how hurtful and unnecessary this harassment was to artists like himself and others in the theatre world. But it also directly threatened what was left of his bottom line. He chose to defend himself and his trade, assisted by others. Because of his fame and also because he had long been such a conformer, he was let off relatively lightly. Following a brief scuffle with the law and his day in court, he went back to being largely apolitical.
NOTCHES: Eltinge left almost no diaries, letters, or personal papers. How should historians approach such deliberate erasures when writing queer history?
AE: As with any historiography, the assessment of various artifacts, even self-created ones, must be looked at critically. Julian’s vaudeville contemporary Eva Tanguay (1878-1947), who I’ve written about, for example, did not publish a proper memoir or biography, though a serialized autobiography appeared in Hearst magazines right around the time of her death. A centerpiece of the narrative concerns her having been swindled and deeply hurt by a former lover. One can see Tanguay trying to reveal parts of herself—her pain and frustration with men—and also trying to fit parts of herself into a dominant-culture ecosystem which could not completely normalize unmarried, self-supporting women, particularly in the late 1940s. Julian Eltinge seems not to have been much of a writer or memoirist. I think that tells us something about his personality, in addition to the fact that his surrounding culture would not have accepted a gay or queer self-narrative—not that he would have put that out there. There are one or two small moments where Julian allowed himself to be more self-revelatory: a brief note to the entertainment trades to tell his fellow artists basically, “Look, I don’t really beat people up. I just have to say that I do.” Or in another instance, “I used to pretend I ‘d gone to Harvard, but the pretense doesn’t feel so important now.” (Interestingly, he never disowned the rumor that he gave King Edward VII a private performance, though the Royal Archives say there’s no evidence of his having actually met, much less performed for, the British monarch.) I found that I learned much about Julian Eltinge’s inner life by getting a private tour, almost by chance, of the Moorish/Spanish mansion he helped design and furnish overlooking the Silver Lake Reservoir in Los Angeles. Julian Eltinge expressed himself in material culture—onstage and off, on his person and in his lived environs—profoundly and meaningfully.
NOTCHES: Eltinge’s brand extended beyond performance into beauty products, tips for women, and lifestyle advice. How did this commercial empire both depend on and complicate his careful separation of professional drag from personal identity?
AE: Julian experimented with what we might call “lifestyle brand” merchandizing, plus celebrity endorsements, around the same time he began a close business partnership with producer A. H. Woods. Woods not only helped turn Eltinge into a musical comedy star, but as I explore in my book, I think served as an important parent figure, an older man who accepted and nurtured the performer’s talents and proclivities. On the one hand, Woods was an outsider: a European Jewish immigrant who came up through the lively, rough-edged theatre trade of old New York. He was not trying to emulate a Rockefeller or a Roosevelt by any means. Woods’s love for and stewardship of Julian Eltinge’s career, and acceptance of Eltinge’s skills and wishes, may have allowed Julian to envision and carve out a different space for himself in the public eye: not just an entertainer with yearnings toward artistic respectability (which he’d never really get) but a scrappy entrepreneur, colorful merchant, and winking self-promoter. These were roles Eltinge could and had played. With Woods showing how an outsider could stake their claim in the American Dream, Julian could let go of some of his former pretenses and craft his brand accordingly. Of course, Eltinge was far from the only star of the day to start plugging and endorsing products. Eva Tanguay, for instance, lent her name to five-cent cigars. This crass yet totally mainstream American practice of selling and promotion giddily ignored the image of buttoned-up restraint others in the era, notably vaudeville impresarios B. F. Keith and E. F. Albee, sought to convey, the latter suggesting they were cut from the same Weberian, Protestant cloth as Rockefeller and Carnegie. In time, the flashy, openly commercialistic Florenz Ziegfelds and William Morrises would change the face of “show business.”
NOTCHES: The book hints at Eltinge’s possible relationship with John D. Lawrence in the 1930s, yet acknowledges archival silences. How do you balance historical responsibility with recovering queer intimacies from fragmentary evidence?
AE: I talk in the last chapter of the book, the Epilogue, about the importance that some historians and researchers have placed on arguing whether or not Julian Eltinge “was gay” or perhaps, asexual. By the 1980s, pursuant to both mainstream liberal-humanist discourse and the prominent, Foucauldian notion of sexuality emerging as an important locus of knowledge, scholars seemed to find answering the question definitively to be of paramount importance to understanding the performer. (Correspondingly, the gay press would come to see Eltinge as self-closeted, identity-denying non-ally, though many continued to admire his artistry and regard his very popularity in mainstream culture itself an important vein of queer history.) Some remembrances of Eltinge either skirted the issue; assured readers he evoked “no controversy”; or heteronormatively winked with something like, “It’s his private business if he had sex with men!” What is more important, I feel, is to observe and describe the way the discussion of someone’s “sexuality” is framed by both consumer-facing and specialist writers alike, and how this changes from time period to time period. To me, that is a more valuable undertaking for the queer historian. One might then compare discussions and rhetoric about a suspected gay artist with their straight counterpart. Eva Tanguay, by the way, whose tumultuous romantic life was very much a part of her larger, commercial story, concocted a wonderful, and very queer engagement with Julian Eltinge, claiming they would get married but leaving the press and public wondering which was the bride and which, the groom, in part because Eva had played male roles as a child and teen trouper, which was not uncommon in stock companies of the day.
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