EVE ARDEN

ARDEN, EVE (Eunice Quendens) (ca. 1908–1990) Actress

Best known for playing caustic, worldly wise career women, Eve Arden was a popular actress of stage, film, radio, and television for nearly 50 years. She was born Eunice Quendens in Mill Valley, California, on April 30 in either 1908 or 1912 (sources vary on her birth year). Her mother, Lucille, who divorced her husband when Eunice was two, made her living as a milliner, the source of Arden’s later taste for extravagant hats.

A grammar school recital made Eunice desperate for a career in show business. With the support of her mother, she started working in local theatrical companies at age 16. After being discovered by producer Lee Schubert, she was invited to join the Ziegfeld Follies as a chorus girl in 1934. While at the Follies, Quendens was asked to adopt a shorter, simpler stage name. She later claimed she took the name “Eve Arden” as a tribute to her favorite perfume (Evening in Paris) and favorite cosmetics brand (Elizabeth Arden). By the mid-1930s, Arden was appearing regularly in small film roles, while periodically returning to her first love, the theater. She was a standout as a wisecracking starlet in Stage Door (1937), but her greatest movie role came in 1945’s Mildred Pierce, in which she played the quick-witted best friend of the long-suffering title character. For her work, Arden earned an Academy Award nomination. The part also helped establish her most enduring screen persona. Throughout the late 1940s, wise and witty female characters were regarded as “Eve Arden roles.”

Arden also began working in radio in 1947. The following year, she enjoyed tremendous success with Our Miss Brooks, a radio comedy about a high school English teacher. A favorite with audiences, the show was brought to television in 1951, where it ran for three years. In 1953 Arden won an Emmy for performance. She later returned to television in two short-lived series, The Eve Arden Show (1957–58) and The Mothers-in-Law (1967–69).

Arden continued to make occasional appearances in film and on stage until 1983, when her husband, actor Brooks West, fell ill and died. After a brief marriage to an insurance agent in the late 1940s, Arden had wed West in 1951 and together they had raised four children, three of whom were adopted. She greatly valued family life and her long, successful marriage. To a reporter she once confessed that she sometimes envied more glamorous actresses, but added that she knew “if they only had what I’ve had—a family, real love, and an anchor—they would have been happier.” After West’s death in 1983, Arden retired from public life. She herself died of cancer on November 12, 1990, in Beverly Hills.


Further Reading
Arden, Eve. Three Phases of Eve: An Autobiography. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1985.
Van Dyck Card, James. “Arden, Eve.” In American National Biography, edited by John Arthur Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, vol. 1, pp. 580–581. New York:Oxford University Press, 1999.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
Mildred Pierce (1945). Warner Home Video, VHS, 2000.
Our Miss Brooks (1956). Warner Home Video, VHS, 1995.

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MARIAN ANDERSON

ANDERSON, MARIAN (1897–1993) Singer

Celebrated as one of the greatest singers of her time, Marian Anderson used her prodigious talents to break racial barriers in American art and culture. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, she was born on February 17, 1897, the first of three daughters. Her father, a deliveryman, died of a brain tumor when Marian was 12. Five years later, her mother became seriously ill, leaving Marian with the burden of her family’s financial support.

Anderson’s musical talents emerged early. As a child, she taught herself to play the family piano and did odd jobs to buy a violin from a pawnshop. At six, she joined the choir at the Union Baptist Church, and at eight, she performed her first solo. She awed the congregation with both her rich voice and extraordinary range. As a teenager, Anderson tried to attend a local music school, but was turned away because she was African American. The members of her church then raised funds to pay for the services of Giuseppe Boghetti, a professional vocal coach. Boghetti introduced her to classical music and became the most important of Anderson’s many teachers. Well-established on the African-American church circuit, Anderson made her New York debut at Town Hall in 1924. The recital was a profound disappointment: The turnout was modest, and the reviews were unenthusiastic. Anderson was so devastated that she considered giving up her singing career. The next year, however, she triumphed at a National Music League competition, beating out more than 300 other aspiring classical singers. As her prize, Anderson performed a solo at the New York Philharmonic. Her success, however, did little to advance her career. Anderson’s race continued to keep her from finding bookings in theaters catering to white audiences.

In 1931, Anderson was awarded a grant from the Julius Rosenwald Fund to study in Europe. There, she found whites much more receptive to her singing. From 1933 to 1935, Anderson toured widely, visiting Scandinavia, France, England, Italy, Austria, and Spain. Her enormous repertoire included 200 songs in nine languages. In each performance, she combined classical works with spirituals she had first learned in church. Anderson soon emerged as a star, earning accolades wherever she performed. Most memorably, composer Arturo Toscanini, on hearing Anderson sing in Austria, told her that “Yours is a voice such as one hears once in a hundred years.”Equally impressed was American impresario Sol Hurok. After seeing Anderson in concert in Paris, he asked to manage her on a tour through the United States. Although so far her talents had been given their due only in Europe, Anderson welcomed the chance to return home.

In 1935, Anderson again performed at New York’s Town Hall, this time to great acclaim. Her extensive tours were equally successful. Booked two years in advance, her concerts were sold out across the United States. In 1936, she became the first African American to perform at the White House. Two years later, Hurok attempted to book a concert at Washington, D.C.’s Constitution Hall, which was owned by the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR). The organization toldHurok the dates he wanted were not available. However, the real reason for DAR’s refusal was clear: It did not want to allow an African American to perform in the hall. Expressing the outrage of many, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the DAR in protest.

Secretary of the Interior Harold Ickes offered Anderson an alternate location for her Washington concert: the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. On April 9, 1939, Anderson performed for a crowd of 75,000, while another 2 million listened to the concert on the radio. The performance finally made Anderson a star in her native country. It also made her into icon in the fight against racism. A mural commemorating the event was unveiled at Department of the Interior headquarters in 1943. Now a celebrity, Anderson was more in demand than ever as a concert singer. A year after marrying Orpheus H. Fisher, an architect, she broke the attendance record at Los Angeles’s Hollywood Bowl in 1944. In 1952, she made her television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show.

Fulfilling a lifelong dream, Anderson became the first African American to sing at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House in 1949. Although, at 52, Anderson was past her prime, the performance inspired eight curtain calls. Her foray into opera would open doors for LEONTYNE PRICE and many other young African-American opera singers. Anderson sang at the inaugurations of presidents Dwight D. Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy before her retirement in 1965. Throughout her long career, she was given an array of honors. In addition to 24 honorary doctorates, Anderson was presented with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and a Kennedy Center Honor in 1978.

She also received a Grammy Award for lifetime achievement in 1991. Respected both for her prodigious talent and her grace under pressure, Marian Anderson died two years later, on April 8, at the age of 97.

Further Reading
Anderson, Marian. My Lord, What a Morning. New York:Viking, 1956.
Keiler, Allan. Marian Anderson: A Singer’s Journey. New York: Scribner, 2000.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
Marian Anderson: Bach, Brahms, Schubert. RCA, CD, 1989.
Schubert and Schumann Lieder. RCA, CD, 2000.
Spirituals. RCA, CD, 1999.

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LAURIE ANDERSON

ANDERSON, LAURIE (1947– ) Performance Artist

The first performance artist to find a mainstream audience, Laurie Anderson was born on June 5, 1947, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois, an affiuent suburb of Chicago. After studying violin in high school, Anderson attended Barnard College in New York City, majoring in art history. She continued her education at Columbia University, where she earned a master’s degree in fine arts. As part of New York’s conceptual art scene, Anderson began producing performance pieces in the early 1970s. In Duets on Ice (1974), she played the violin, accompanied by a taped instrumental track hidden inside the violin. While playing, she wore ice skates encased in ice. When the ice melted, the performance was over. In other early works, including Songs and Stories for the Insomniac (1975) and Refried Beans for Instants (1976). Anderson combined music, sound, and the spoken word. Using references to popular culture to produce social and political satire, the stories she told in performance were anthologized in two collections, Airwaves (1977) and Music for Electronic and Recorded Material (1977).

In 1980, Anderson began performing United States II. A section of the piece called “O Superman” featured Anderson’s voice electronically distorted by a Vocoder. Released as a single in England, “O Superman” became a surprise popular hit, reaching number two on the British charts. In addition to marking Anderson’s first financial success, the single led to a long-term record deal in the United States with Warner Brothers.
In 1982, her label released Big Science, which included excerpts of an expanded performance piece titled United States I–IV. Premiering at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in February 1983, United States was a multimedia concert that ran for eight hours over two evenings. Anderson described the piece as a “big portrait of the country” and divided it into four sections on transportation, politics, money, and love. The extravaganza brought together monologues, music, sounds, light shows, and photographs to create a witty commentary on modern American life. As Anderson attracted sold-out crowds while touring with the piece through the United States and Europe, Time magazine declared that United States was “the biggest, most ambitious and most successful example to date of the avant-garde hybrid known as performance art.”

Anderson brought United States to an even larger audience in 1984, when a live album and book chronicling the performance were released. The same year, she brought out Mister Heartbreak. The album included a piece titled “Sharkey’s Day” that featured the voice of novelist William Burroughs. Two years later, Anderson released the album Home of the Brave and a concert film with the same title. On the heels of Natural History—a 1986 greatest hits tour—Anderson moved in a new direction. Of this period, she later explained, “I was tired of being Laurie Anderson. I wanted to start over.”Responding to criticism that her performances were becoming overproduced, she began creating simpler pieces, such as Empty Places (1989) and Voices from Beyond (1991). She also performed excerpts of Stories from the Nerve Bible, a collection of writings and pictures published in 1994. In Anderson’s solo show, The Speed of Darkness (1996), she returned to familiar themes of art and technology while approaching them through her own personal stories.

After taking voice lessons, Anderson sang for the first time on the album Strange Angels (1990).Her other recordings included Bright Red (1994), an album produced by Brian Eno and featuring a duet with rock star Lou Reed, with whom Anderson has been romantically linked. Anderson alsoexperimented with an interactive CD-ROM titledPuppet Motel (1995).

In 1999, Anderson returned to the stage with the ambitious Songs and Stories from Moby Dick. A postmodern reworking of Herman Melville’s classic novel, the performance piece marked the first time Anderson performed with a sizable cast. In Moby Dick, Anderson also employed the “talking stick,” an inventive instrument that translates movement into sound. Calling the piece “10% Melville, 90% Laurie,” Anderson in Moby Dick grappled with larger, eternal themes, such as thesearch for the meaning of life, suggesting a new direction for her future work.

In 2001, Anderson wrote an impressionistic essay on New York City for Encyclopedia Britannica, to be included next to the scholarly entry.

Further Reading
Anderson, Laurie. Stories from the Nerve Bible: 1972–1992,
A Retrospective. New York: HarperPerennial, 1991.
Goldberg, Roselee. Laurie Anderson. New York: Abrams, 2000.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances
Talk Normal: The Anthology. . . . Rhino, CD, 2000.
United States Live (1984). Warner Brothers, CD, 1991.

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GRACIE ALLEN

ALLEN,GRACIE (Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen) (1895–1964) Comic, Actress

One of the most popular comedians of radio and television, Grace Ethel Cecile Rosalie Allen was born on July 16, 1895, in San Francisco. As a child, she learned traditional Irish dancing from her father, and at 14 she made her vaudeville debut. With her three sisters in an act called “The Four Colleens,” she was soon touring the vaudeville circuit throughout the United States. By the time they reached New York City, all the “colleens” but Grace had dropped out. As an emerging star, she asked for better billing and quit when her demands were ignored.

Unable to find good bookings on her own, Allen contemplated quitting show business and enrolled in secretarial school. But she changed her mind in 1923 after meeting George Burns, then an unsuccessful vaudevillian. The two decided to perform as a comedy team in an act crafted by Burns. Initially, Allen was the “straight man,” but after seeing audiences respond to her comic timing, Burns reversed their roles. As they refined the act, the character of Gracie emerged as a genial scatterbrain, whose non sequiturs and malapropisms tested the patience of her reasonable boyfriend, George. Although other female comics played it dumb, Allen’s Gracie was unique. The act eschewed outrageous costumes and pratfalls, instead relying almost exclusively on verbal humor. The laughs also were prompted less by Gracie’s stupidity than by her bizarre perspective on the world. As Burns once explained, the humor in her “logical illogic” grew out of that fact that “Grace played her as if she were totally sane, as if her answers actually made sense. ”Soon after marrying in 1926, Allen and Burns became one of vaudeville’ s hottest acts. In addition to headlining at the United States’ s best vaudeville theaters, they became stars in England during 1928 and 1929. There they made their radio debut on the BBC, an engagement that was extended for 20 weeks. Despite their success abroad, Allen’s high voice was deemed too squeaky for American radio until fellow vaudeville star Eddie Cantor invited her to be a guest on his radio show. As a team, Allen and Burns became the regular comedy act on bandleader Guy Lombardo’s program. In 1932, they received their own show, The Adventures of Gracie (later renamed The George Burns and Gracie Allen Show), which became a favorite with listeners throughout the 1930s.

Although their radio work was more popular, Allen and Burns also appeared in 15 short films and features during this period. Allen starred in three other films, including The Gracie Allen Murder Case (1939), which made her the first American actress to have her name appear in a movie title. Throughout Allen’s life, Burns was the driving force behind her career. Working with a team of writers, he produced their radio scripts, giving them to Allen on the day of the show. The system allowed her to maintain a fresh take on their material, giving her performance an improvisational feel that contributed to her appeal. Still, for all his work behind-the-scenes, Burns always attributed their popularity to Allen’s comic talents. “Gracie was the whole show,” he once bluntly explained. Alarmed by a dip in ratings, Burns retooled the show in 1945, abandoning his and Allen’s old routines and reworking the program into a situation comedy. In 1950 he also insisted that they adapt the show to the new medium of television despite Allen’s discomfort performing before a camera. Their show was a hit and was later credited with many innovations, including having the characters break the “fourth wall” by talking directly to the camera. For Allen, however, the show became increasingly taxing. She was plagued by migraine headaches and other health problems, which Burns felt were the result of the “chronic strain of making like someone [she wasn’t].” At her insistence, the show ended in 1958 after 299 episodes. Allen spent her remaining years entertaining and spending time with her and Burns’s two adopted children and their grandchildren. An often reluctant performer who nevertheless conquered vaudeville, radio, and television, Allen died of a heart attack in Hollywood on August 26, 1964. In 1997 American Women in Radio and Television acknowledged her trailblazing contribution to American popular culture by naming its highest honor the Gracie Allen Award.


Further Reading
Blythe, Cheryl, and Susan Sackett. Say Good Night, Gracie!: The Story of Burns and Allen. New York: Dutton, 1986.
Burns, George. Gracie: A Love Story. New York: Putnam, 1988.
Clements, Cynthia, and Sandra Weber. George Burns and Gracie Allen: A Bio-Bibliography. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1996.

Recommended Recorded and Videotaped Performances:
The Burns and Allen Show (1950). Columbia/Tristar, VHS, 1996.

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