In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879 1947) was one of the most famous
women in America. Widely known as the "I Don't Care Girl" named
after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen
persona Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical
comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My
Lady and never looked back. Tanguay was, at the height of a long
career that stretched until the early 1930s, a trend-setting
performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual
female entertainer. Whether suggestively singing songs with titles
like "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It" and "Go As
Far As You Like" or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, she was
a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, from Mae West
to Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have been both idolized and condemned
for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of
female sexuality.
In Queen of Vaudeville, Andrew L. Erdman tells Eva Tanguay's
remarkable life story with verve. Born into the family of a country
doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town,
Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. Erdman follows the
course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and
divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press,
declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first
celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the
Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an
obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the
history of American popular culture in the first half of the
twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical
presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new
media of radio and motion pictures. With nineteen rare or
previously unpublished images, Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic
portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business
star."
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