Oh, What a Scandal!

Abstract

Fields believed the Ziegfeld’s attack was not caused by his performances but by personal reasons. He had been on the impresario’s hit list since he joined the show. Fields was back where he started in vaudeville playing the Keith Circuit with his golf act. He viewed vaudeville as a life raft that kept him afloat until a better offer arrived. He suddenly received a request from George White to join his next Scandals, a spectacular revue considered by Broadway critics to be Ziegfeld’s chief rival. Fields could not resist the temptation to join a show that might overthrow the Great Glorifier’s reign as the czar of Broadway revues. With their raw energy, Tin Pan Alley music, avant-garde dancing, racy scenes, and poignant comedy, the Scandals and other new revues made the antiquated Follies appear passé due to Ziegfeld’s headstrong refusal to experiment beyond his money-making formula of fantasy and escapism. The Scandals became noted for introducing the compositions of a US musical legend, George Gershwin, who wrote forty-five songs for five Scandals.At the time he was starting to integrate syncopation, jazz, and blues into his work.

George White, a handsome dancer with slick black hair and alluring brown eyes, was among the most colorful characters frequenting The Great White Way. A self-trained flamboyant hoofer, White was known for his smooth yet rapid improvisational dance movements. A perpetual innovator, he organized a new revue named after the many scandals sensationalized in New York tabloids.

Fields’s desertion to the Scandals must have riled the Great Glorifier. Unlike Ziegfeld, White granted Bill carte blanche to perform any scene he wanted without censorship. On opening night at the Globe Theatre on August 28, Fields performed three original sketches that he authored and his juggling specialty. Among them was “Terrific Traffic” at “A Congested Corner in New York,” which reflects Fields’s continual interest in lampooning the family and its infatuation with the automobile. Fields’s next scene “The Radio Bug,” spoofed the primitiveness of the new medium and its defects. Blinded by his fondness for escapism and fantasy, the Great Glorifier had little interest in Fields’s new form of character comedy that mocked the spurious ideals of US life. Bill’s success in George White’s Scandals was a form of revenge for the way he had been treated by Ziegfeld over the years: his perpetual complaints, threatening letters, and autocratic manner. He could not remember the last time Ziegfeld had said or wrote an encouraging word to him.