Books about Ziegfeld from Amazon.com

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Price: $19.47 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Despite Prohibition, the '20s was the decade of jazz, flappers and hip flasks. While some took their vote and joined the Woman's Christian Temperance Movement, others, well, took liberties Compiled here for the first time are more than 200 publicity stills and photos of some of America's first "It" girls—the silent film-era starlets who paved the way for the cacophony of Monroes and Madonnas to follow. Accompanying these iconic images are the stories behind them, including accounts from surviving Ziegfeld Girls, as well as ads featuring them that helped perpetuate the allure of It girl glamour. When rare and striking portraits of these women surfaced on the internet in 1995, author Robert Hudovernik began researching their source. What he discovered was the work of one of the first "star makers" identified most with the Ziegfeld Follies, Alfred Cheney Johnston. Johnston, a member of New York's famous Algonquin Round Table who photographed such celebrities as Mary Pickford, Fanny Brice, the Gish Sisters, and Louise Brooks, fell out of the spotlight with the demise of the revue. A sumptuous snapshot of an era, this book is also a look at the work of this "lost" photographer..
Price: $23.80 [Notify me when price goes down.]

At age fourteen, Doris Eaton was the youngest performer in the Ziegfeld Follies, appearing with such legends as Eddie Cantor, Fanny Brice, Will Rogers, and Marilyn Miller. With two sisters and two brothers also appearing in the Follies in the years between 1918 and 1923, the Eatons became a well-known Broadway family.

Beginning their careers in the Washington, D.C., and Baltimore area, the "Seven Little Eatons" became seasoned performers, working the stock-company circuit before arriving in New York City and being caught up in the golden age of Broadway. Doris and her two sisters, Pearl and Mary, became popular dancers, and throughout the twenties they were never out of work. Doris was the first Eaton to go to Hollywood, and there in 1929 she introduced the song "Singing in the Rain" in the Hollywood Music Box Review. Later, Doris left show business and went on to great success building a chain of eighteen Arthur Murray studios in Michigan, which she owned and operated for thirty years.

In a refreshingly wise voice, The Days We Danced introduces readers to the successes and poignant sorrows of the Eaton family, including alcoholism, professional failures, early death, and even a tragic murder.

With memories that span almost a century, Doris recalls the state of the American theater during World War I, the "roaring twenties," the Great Depression--as well as the legendary names of the rich and famous celebrities with whom the Eatons worked and played. Accompanied by scores of unique period photographs, this memoir details the life of a woman who never stopped dancing--even when the curtain fell..
Price: $13.81 [Notify me when price goes down.]

The Ziegfeld Follies, Florenz Ziegfeld's stage spectacular, promised the best performers, the most lavish sets, and the most ravishing girls. At fourteen, Doris Eaton Travis became one of these prized beauties

Over the past century, Doris has performed for presidents and princesses, entertained Gershwin, Lindbergh, and Astaire, starred in silent and talking pictures, bantered with Babe Ruth, offended Henry Ford, outlived six siblings, written a newspaper column, hosted a television show, earned a Phi Beta Kappa degree in history, raised turkeys, and raced horses. Doris has lived through it all with utmost grace and strength of character—and never missed a step.

While Today, The Tonight Show, CNN, Rosie O'Donnell, 20/20 and the New York Times have all showcased Doris, journalist and artist Lauren Redniss tells Doris's singular story in an utterly original way. Weaving archival imagery with compelling prose, Redniss has created a narrative landscape that is as surreal and delightful as it is rich with meaning.

Immensely fun, seductive, inspiring, and wise (much like its star attraction, Doris Eaton Travis), Century Girl is an innovation in storytelling. It can be read as a graphic narrative or a historical tapestry, or simply relished for its stunning visual effect.

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Price: $9.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Anna Held (1870?-1918), the most popular musical comedy star in America during the two decades preceding World War I, epitomized everything that was glamorous, sophisticated, and suggestive about turn-of-the-century Broadway

Famous as the first wife of legendary producer Florenz Ziegfeld, Held is less well-known as the brains and inspiration behind his Follies. Overcoming an impoverished life as an orphan to become a music-hall star in Paris, she rocketed to stardom in the U.S. From 1896-1910 she starred in hit after hit and quickly replaced Lillian Russell as the darling of the theatrical world.

Held’s life was not without turmoil. She concealed her Jewish background and her resentful daughter (tucked away in European convents) and suffered through Ziegfeld’s gambling problems and blatant affairs with showgirls.

After her divorce, Held returned to France. She braved the trenches to bring medical supplies and entertainment to the troops and was once briefly captured by the Germans. She returned to the U.S. to raise funds and star in one last show before dying of bone-marrow cancer one month before the armistice was signed.

With access to previously unseen family records and photographs, and careful research in libraries and archives, Eve Golden has uncovered the details of an extraordinary life. Anna Held and the Birth of Ziegfeld’s Broadway reveals the truth about one of the most remarkable women in the history of theatrical entertainment..
Price: $29.75 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $3.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Broadway teemed with showgirls, but only the Ziegfeld Girl has survived in American popular culture—as a figure of legend, nostalgia, and camp. Featured in Florenz Ziegfeld Jr.’s renowned revues, which ran on Broadway from 1907 to 1931, the Ziegfeld Girl has appeared in her trademark feather headdresses, parading and posing, occasionally singing and dancing, in numerous musicals and musical films paying direct or indirect homage to the intrepid producer and his glorious Girl. Linda Mizejewski analyzes the Ziegfeld Girl as a cultural icon and argues that during a time when American national identity was in flux, Ziegfeld Girls were both products and representations of a white, upscale, heterosexual national ideal.
Mizejewski traces the Ziegfeld Girl’s connections to turn-of-the-century celebrity culture, black Broadway, the fashion industry, and the changing sexual and gender identities evident in mainstream entertainment during the Ziegfeld years. In addition, she emphasizes how crises of immigration and integration made the identity and whiteness of the American Girl an urgent issue on Broadway’s revue stages during that era. Although her focus is on the showgirl as a “type,” the analysis is intermingled with discussions of figures like Anna Held, Fanny Brice, and Bessie McCoy, the Yama Yama girl, as well as Ziegfeld himself. Finally, Mizejewski discusses the classic American films that have most vividly kept this showgirl alive in both popular and camp culture, including The Great Ziegfeld, Ziegfeld Girl, and the Busby Berkeley musicals that cloned Ziegfeld’s showgirls for decades.
Ziegfeld Girl will appeal to scholars and students in American studies, popular culture, theater and performance studies, film history, gender studies, gay and lesbian studies, and social history.

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Price: $4.77 [Notify me when price goes down.]