Male impersonators in the Music Halls and beyond!
by Rosie
Logiudice
The male
impersonators of the music hall performed to the backdrop of Victorian and Edwardian
England with the conservative image of women as ‘beautiful, chaste, domestic
creatures.’ (1) The male impersonators challenged the stereotypical female type
‘who in male guise, assumed the values of the ‘dominant’ sex and undermined them,
with satirical lyrics and a parody of male mannerisms’ (2). Among the better
known of these was Matilda Alice Powles (13 May 1864-16 September 1952), more
commonly known as Vesta Tilley.
Tilley was
considered to be the greatest male impersonator in British music hall. She
first appeared on stage at the age of three and a half and by the age of six performed
her first role in male clothing. Managed by her father, Tilley toured extensively
around the UK and at aged 11 her salary supported her parents and siblings. As
she grew older she continued to act as a male impersonator portraying young men
behaving either embarrassingly or badly; among them was Tilley’s most famous character
‘Burlington Bertie’. Aside from more comical characters such as Bertie she also
had a number of military figures which were most popular during the Boer War
and the First World War. Tilley’s popularity reached its all time high during
the First World War, when she and her husband ran a military recruitment drive.
In the guise of characters such as ‘Tommy in the Trench’ and ‘Jack Tar Home From
Sea’, Tilley performed songs such as The Army of Today’s All Right and Jolly
Good Luck to the Girl who Loves a Soldier.
Although Vesta Tilley spent much of
her working life dressed as a man in her personal life she was married to
Walter de Frece, a music hall entrepreneur and the son of a theatre owner. A
similar story is depicted in Sarah Walter’s novel Tipping the Velvet set in Victorian
England during the 1890s. Although Kitty, a music hall male impersonator,
declares her love for Nan and in fact has a sexual relationship with her, she
eventually conforms to the norms of the era and marries Walter Bliss, her music
hall manager. Kitty is afraid that otherwise she would not be a success in the
music halls.
Interestingly
when Nan takes to the stage with Kitty and they are both dressed in male attire
Nan is too convincing as a boy. The realism doesn't quite work: they need
another male impersonator, a girl in male clothes where the audience can still
tell she is a girl; otherwise they would have used a real boy instead.
Ironically enough, Walter feels obliged to tame Nan’s boyishness and make her
look more girly! (3) It is commendable what Sarah Walters is doing here, toying
with gender in relation to social spaces, showing how gender is shaped based on
the level of social tolerance at the time.
Kitty and
Nan experience a short period of love that does not last because of Kitty’s
fear about her reputation - a fear that is triggered by the power of words and
the articulation of the label ‘Tom’. A Tom, according to Kitty, means a girl
who makes a career out of kissing other girls. (4) Kitty fears the word and
rejects it as a label or identification of herself and her relationship with
Nancy. Kitty’s fear of identification with the word Tom reaches a climax when a
drunken man on stage calls her and Nancy ‘a couple of tomes!’ (5) The incident highlights
the beginning of their failure on stage. It also drives Kitty to make a
decision to hide away her queerness by marrying Walter and dismissing Nancy. It
seems that it was okay to flirt with cross dressing in the context of popular
entertainment if it was obvious still that you were a girl and if you were
known to be heterosexual in your private life.
The
perception that a woman performing on stage as a man was acceptable and often even
‘sexy’ has not been confined to the music hall of the Victorian era or to
modern day novels depicting this time. Later in the 20th Century a number of
Hollywood actresses, including Greta Garbo and Marlene Dietrich, flirted with
dressing in male attire.
In the 1930
film Morocco, Dietrich was cast as a Cabaret singer. The film is best
remembered for the sequence in which she performs a song dressed in a man’s
white tie and kisses another woman, both provocative for the era. However,
Dietrich was a glamorous femme fatale and in fact her role in Morocco led to
her only Oscar nomination.
From the
early 1950s until the mid 1970s Dietrich mainly worked as a highly paid cabaret
artist performing in large theatres in cities across the world. Dietrich would
perform half her show in an extremely feminine figurehugging dress and then the
second part of her show in top hat and tails. This allowed her to sing songs
usually associated with male singers.
However, Dietrich kept her private life
private. Although she married Rudolf Sieber, an assistant director, she was in
fact bisexual and had a string of affairs with women including Mercedes de
Acosta, who was Greta Garbo’s on-off lover. Of course this was not apparent at the
time and only in later years has their relationship been discussed in any great
detail publicly, although Garbo’s family, which controls her estate, has
permitted only 87 letters to be made public that were written between herself
and De Acosta.
In 1960 when
De Acosta was seriously ill she published her memoir. Within the text there was
implied homosexuality which resulted in the severance of several friendships
with women who felt she had betrayed their sexuality. Garbo also ended their 30
year 'friendship' at this time. Again this has similarities to Kitty’s
hastiness to be deemed as 'normal' and respectable in society where she ceases
relations with Nan once she feels her position as a music hall performer is compromised
by suggestions about her private life. Similarly when De Acosta released her memoirs,
Garbo and others even though they had been friends with De Acosta for many years,
chose to distance themselves from her and the rumours about their possible homosexuality
by association with her.
So it seems
that if a woman wanted to flirt with cross dressing in the early to mid-20th century
and maintain social respectability, she still had to look like a woman. In
Hollywood she had to be glamorous and it was better if she were married, even
if this meant at the same time having a string of 'secret' lesbian affairs.
Notes:
1. Cambridge
Journal, May 2012, Aston, E, Male Impersonation in the Music Hall: the Case of
Vesta Tilley, P247
2. Ibid 247.
3. Waters,
S, Tipping the Velvet, 119
4. Ibid, 131
5. Ibid, 140
Miltown Kings are 10+ year troupe that has been entertaining the Mid West with theater style drag kinging ..check us out at www.miltownkings.com or http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC4CWKhLbEM-rweM-ZAhvD5w
ReplyDeleteReaders of this blog might also be interested in the short piece by Jo Dyrlaga, PhD student at the University of Huddersfield
ReplyDeletehttp://blogs.hud.ac.uk/subject-areas/historians-at-work/2015/03/31/getting-to-know-vesta-tilley-by-jo-dyrlaga/