The “I Don’t Care” Girl: How Vaudeville’s Biggest Star Effed All the Standards
Eva Tanguay, the biggest star in vaudeville, was known for her extreme costumes — a dress made of spiky coral, one made of memo pads and pencils, another made of 400 pennies which she would strip off and hurl at the audience. She changed so frequently during her act that she had to hire a man to keep a clear path backstage. One night in February 1910, he accidentally knocked a stagehand down some stairs.
That stagehand rounded up a gang of his friends and grabbed Eva’s helper by the collar. Hearing the ruckus from her dressing room, Eva burst out, punched her way through the ruffians, and brandished a hatpin at the assailant. He let her man go.
Before there was Madonna, Lady Gaga, or Cardi B, there was Eva Tanguay. Explosive onstage and off, she was the highest-paid performer in vaudeville, the biggest show business of the time. Audiences screamed in ecstasy when Eva whirled across the stage like a tornado and belted out her signature tune, “I Don’t Care”. And the thing they loved was that Eva smashed her way through boundaries as if they were a pathetic gang of bullies.
This was the Victorian era, and there were plenty of boundaries. Sexuality and skin were taboo — it was shocking to even glimpse an ankle. Women were expected to be meek and helpless; their only acceptable roles were marriage, domesticity, and motherhood. And E.F. Albee, who ran the biggest vaudeville circuit, promoted it as clean entertainment suitable for demure ladies. A backstage sign in his theaters warned, “Don’t say…’son-of-a-gun’ or ‘hully gee’ on this stage unless you want to be peremptorily dismissed.”
Eva Tanguay probably didn’t say “hully gee”, but she sang “Go As Far As You Like”, poured champagne over her body, and performed a Dance of the Seven Veils in which she stripped down to a flesh-colored bodysuit and kicked a fake John the Baptist head around the stage like a soccer ball. Albee couldn’t argue with the box office she brought in, and not only allowed her on his stages, but in 1908 paid her the shockingly high rate of $3,500 ($80,000 today) a week. She earned a similarly high salary as the star of the Ziegfield Follies. For two decades, her colossal popular success allowed her to ignore the moral critics.
It can seem surprising that she was so massively adored. She wasn’t just assertively sexual; she was weird, wild, and didn’t pay any mind to being pretty. The New York Dramatic Mirror called her “The Man-o-War of Vaudeville”. She flaunted her lumpy figure, sometimes posing with her muscular legs spread, and teased her reddish-blonde hair into a frizzy chunk. Her singing was a strange collage of talking, screeching, and growling, though as she pointed out in a lyric, “My voice may be funny/but it’s getting me money”.
That attitude was the theme of her signature song, “I Don’t Care”. The saccharine barbershop ditty “Sweet Adeline” may have topped the charts in 1904, but that was the same year Eva Tanguay opened her proto-punk rock mouth to belt out: “They say I’m crazy, got no sense/But I don’t care…They say they don’t like me a bit/But I don’t care…” Listen to the only existing (and unfortunately, very poor) recording of Eva: as she hiccups and yowls the song, she seems to poke fun at everything proper.
Eva didn’t dance so much as gyrate madly, earning her the title “The Cyclonic Comedienne”. But that only increased her spectators’ thrills. Aleister Crowley (yes, that Aleister Crowley, The Great Beast 666) wrote that Tanguay:
“is like the hashish dream of a hermit who is possessed of the devil. She cannot sing, as others sing; or dance, as others dance. She simply keeps on vibrating, both limbs and vocal chords without rhythm, tone, melody, or purpose. … I feel as if I were poisoned by strychnine, so far as my body goes; I jerk, I writhe, I twist, I find no ease. … She is perpetual irritation without possibility of satisfaction, an Avatar of sex-insomnia… I could kill myself at this moment for the wild love of her.”
Though she eventually went through some marriages, Eva in her superstar years churned through lovers and boasted that she didn’t need to get married because her salary was so high. She was rumored to have had an affair with star vaudevillian George Walker — shocking not so much because he was married but because he was Black. In her most public taboo-breaking “affair”, Eva staged an engagement with vaudeville’s greatest drag queen, Julian Eltinge. She wore a man’s tux while Eltinge, the James Charles of their day, knelt with the ring — a perfect parody of what we’d now call heteronormative marriage.
Eva maintained a feminine appearance, but her behavior was masculine by the standards of the day (and today as well). As one of the first American celebrities, her stage and personal life blended, and in both, she was strong, loud, and boastful. She beefed with her haters, once responding to criticism of her singing with a rhyming full-page ad in Variety: “Now you who have slandered, you are dirt beneath my feet/For I have beat you at your game, and it’s a hard game to beat.” Her violence was not always as heroic as her defense of her male assistant: she once choked a rival, and brought back the hatpin to jab famed composer John Philip Sousa in the buttocks when he bumped her through a curtain. “Man-o-War of Vaudeville”, indeed.
It is bewildering that Eva Tanguay is mostly forgotten today, in spite of the fame of her best-known impersonator, Mae West, and a 1953 biopic. She died in poverty in 1947, having long before lost $2 million in the stock market crash, and lost her career with the death of vaudeville. Perhaps one of her spiritual great-granddaughters in modern entertainment will pay tribute to her. Meanwhile, whether her name is known or not, her legacy is with us, whenever a female artist just doesn’t care what others think.
Sources used in this story:
Erdman, Andrew L. Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2012.
Slide, Anthony. The Encyclopedia of Vaudeville. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1994.
http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/music_box/2009/12/vanishing_act.html
