Alfred Cheney Johnston: The Photographer Who Glorified the Ziegfeld Girl
Alfred Cheney Johnston photographed the Ziegfeld Follies for a dozen years. His studio method, his letters, his failures, and why his pictures outlived him.
Mary Nolan: Tragic Ziegfeld Beauty
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 Ziegfeld Follies Shimmy Queen and Blonde Darling of the Underworld
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…
Alfred Cheney Johnston: Why the Surprising Nude Photographs?
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: The Ragtime Piano Prodigy Linked to Two Royal Brothers
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…
Ziegfeld Girls: Beauty, Fame, and Life in the Follies
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…
The Ziegfeld Follies: Broadway’s Great Revue, 1907–1931
The Ziegfeld Follies changed American entertainment in a big way. When Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., introduced the Follies of 1907 at the New York Theatre on Broadway, he took spectacle to a whole new level. This article is about the Broadway revue that Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr. produced from 1907 to 1931 — not the 1945 MGM…
Louise Brooks Arrives in New York: Awkwardness Beneath the Bold Beauty
Rereading Louise Brooks’s writing of her early years in New York City, published as Chapter One in Lulu in Hollywood, I’m struck by the unique blend of detail, candor, and lack of pretension or sentiment. She credits her success in the city to a soda jerk who tamed her accent, a waiter who refined her…
