Mary Nolan went by several names during her short life. She was a Kentucky orphan, a popular artist’s model, a Ziegfeld Girl, a comedian’s battered mistress, a German film star, a Hollywood leading lady, and a newspaper scandal queen who became a cautionary tale. Her life was one of brief success mixed with drink, drugs,…
Hilda Ferguson was one of the most talked-about showgirls of the 1920s Jazz Age: a Ziegfeld Follies revue star whose fame rested as much on scandal as on her famous shimmy dance—the era’s emblem of the flapper in motion. She kept company with bootleggers and gangsters, was questioned again and again about the unsolved murder…
A scholarly review of Cecily Devereux’s Salomania and the Representation of Race and Gender in Modern Erotic Dance (2023) — a feminist, postcolonial history of the Salome dance craze.
Who was Salome, and why won’t she leave us alone? The full story—from a nameless dancing girl in the Gospels to the femme fatale of Wilde, Strauss, and the modern stage.
Alfred Cheney Johnston, the Ziegfeld Follies photographer, is best known for his glamorous portraits of Ziegfeld Girls. He also made many nude and nearly nude photographs, although these were rarely published during his lifetime. Why did he make the nude photographs? They are quite different from his ordinary publicity photographs of clothed women. Alfred Cheney…
Edythe Baker (1899–1971) was an American pianist and recording artist who rose from a Kansas City music-store counter to London stardom. She was also linked to romance in high places: King Edward VIII, along with his playboy brother the Duke of Kent. And, of all people, Winston Churchill. At 19 the trade press hailed her…
The Ziegfeld Girls were showgirls selected for Florenz Ziegfeld’s Broadway revues and promoted as ideals of American beauty, glamour, and modern womanhood. A century ago, a line of women glided languidly into the glow of the footlights on a Broadway stage. Some nearly nude, they shimmered with feathers, jewels, satin, and sequins. The audience watched…
Phryné Moderne Devant l’Aréopage (Modern Phryne Before the Areopagus) Shocking Dance: About the Book This book (published ca. 1913) is a curated collection of press coverage surrounding Adorée Villany’s controversial nude dance performances in Munich and Paris between 1911 and 1913. Framed by Villany’s declaration—“My unveiled form lays my soul bare”—the volume takes its title…
Adorée Villany: Naked Enigma Adopting the Dance of the Seven Veils Adorée Villany tested the European limits on how much skin a dancer could show on stage during the early 20th century. She also pushed the boundaries of early modern dance choreography. Most of all, she was an enigma. Adorée (or Viola) Villany was either…
In 1922, Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. saw Nyota Inyoka dance in Paris and announced that he would put her in the Ziegfeld Follies. He called her “mighty dark.” On August 5, 1922 , The New York Age, a leading Black newspaper, praised him for casting her without expecting her to “pass for white.” She reached New…