On Sunday, April 28 of this past year, Greg Williams published this article on the Facebook page for “The Dick Van Dyke Show” book. The year has ¾ of the way to go and a Toobits Award for 2019 has already been locked in. Greg has secured it for Best Televisiological Research for this article:
Many viewers notice that the display of photos and posters on the office wall in “The Sick Boy and the Sitter” (episode # 1) offer a unique glimpse into the decorating style of the series. Most of what we see here never resurfaces in subsequent episodes. The pictures, which appear to have a common show-business theme, probably came from the prop department at Desilu-Cahuenga, if not from the sets of other shows – such as The Danny Thomas Show – currently filming there. The uncertain status of the new Van Dyke series made it necessary to be careful about budgeting, which naturally influenced the thrown-together look of the actors’ working spaces.
One of the posters features Tony Pastor’s Show. A careful look shows the date on it as Monday, February 5. We only see the poster fleetingly, and it is never used again. Later episodes feature Van Gogh prints and The Dairy Maids music sheet rather than the array of pictures and photos we see in “The Sick Boy and the Sitter”. However, we do hear about Tony Pastor again. In “Hustling the Hustler” (episode # 35), Rob and his co-writers put together a skit involving Diamond Jim Brady attending a show . . . at Tony Pastor’s. The reference is likely obscure to most current viewers.
The poster in “The Sick Boy and the Sitter” includes a large number of names:
- Prof. Heller Outdone
- Pat Rooney
- Scanlon A. Cronin
- Sam Devere
- Clifton A. Forepaugh
- The Empire Children
- Foy Sisters
- Moonlight Shadows
- Great Bennetts
- Tony Pastor
- Miss Kittie O’Neil
- The French Sisters
- The Long Brothers
- Miss Erba Robeson
- The Sankey Family
The names on the poster offer additional clues about the show’s date. The most familiar name on the poster, besides Pastor’s, is Pat Rooney. Notice that it is set out in large, bold letters. At first it is not absolutely clear whether this is Pat Rooney Sr. (1848-1892) or Pat Rooney Jr. (1880-1962). Sam Devere – whose name is also in large type – is a character of some notoriety from the time of the Civil War to the 1880s whose place in the show helps establish that the poster refers to Pat Rooney Sr. According to Trav S. D., the author of No Applause – Just Throw Money, Devere, active on the stage from the time of the Civil War to the 1880s, “was reputed to have beaten a man to death with his banjo during an unwelcome brawl in Texas” (p. 43). Besides his extraordinary banjo playing and his infamy arising from the ruckus in Texas, Devere is best known for composing “The Whistling Coon” (1888), part of “a growing repertoire of pseudo-Negro material of the less respectful type” (Sigmund Spaeth, A History of Popular Music in America, p. 242).
Kittie O’Neill (ca. 1852-93) was a popular singer and dancer in the 1870s and 80s who is best known today as the woman whose name occurs in the title of the song “Kitty O’Neill’s Champion Jig” (whose seventh part is a possible inspiration for The Dick Van Dyke Show’s theme song). She began singing on stage at an early age – hence the use of the word “Miss” on the poster. The date of O’Neill’s death rules out the years 1894, 1900, and 1906, as possible dates for the show advertised on the poster. Erba Robeson (1868-1935) is also called “Miss” on the poster, another good indication that the Pastor’s show took place no later than the 1880s. Her birthdate rules of the years 1866 and, probably, 1872 as the date of the advertised show.
We now come to the Foy Sisters. At first it might be thought that these were Madeline and Mary, two of “The Seven Little Foys” (1910-13), children of the sialoquent Eddie Foy (1856-1928). But Madeline (1906-88) and Mary (1901-87) are clearly too young. It turns out that there was an earlier set of Foy Sisters, dancers in the 1870s, who so charmed a young performer named Edwin Fitzgerald that he decided to assume the stage name Eddie Foy (Arnoud Fields, Eddie Foy: A Biography of the Early Popular Stage Comedian, p. 17). Foy, strangely enough, is buried with six of his seven children at the Holy Sepulchre Cemetery in New Rochelle, about 20 minutes away from the one-time Reiner residence at 48 Bonnie Meadow Road.
From newspaper advertisements from the 1870s it can be shown that the Foy Sisters were members of Tony Pastor’s troupe, “The Largest and Best Company in America,” at least as early as 1875. Most tellingly, an ad from the New York Evening Express, dated February 9, 1877, identifies almost the entire line-up of performers listed on the poster on the writers’ office wall. The date on the poster is, therefore, almost certainly Monday, February 5, 1877.
So who was Tony Pastor anyway? Pastor started out at the age of ten performing as a blackface minstrel, eventually becoming a saloon singer and songwriter before refocusing his entertainment aspirations as a show producer. He invented the family-oriented “variety show” – the kind of programming that The Alan Brady Show represents as a modern incarnation. Tony Pastor’s Opera House and his other theaters served as the principal showcases for many first-rate vaudeville performers, effectively making him one of the seminal figures in the development of the medium.
Vaudeville was a popular light entertainment vehicle in the United States from the mid-1890s to the early 1930s. It is mentioned in “The Boarder Incicent” (episode # 20), when Rob remarks to Buddy, “I’m surprised you still have that cello. I thought you got rid of it when you quit vaudeville”. At each show several unrelated acts would appear on the program together. Among the big-name celebrities appearing in or referred to in The Dick Van Dyke Show who appeared on the vaudeville circuit were Abbott and Costello, Fred Allen, Morey Amsterdam, Jack Benny, Milton Berle, Eddie Cantor, George M. Cohan, Sammy Davis Jr., Jimmy Durante, W.C. Fields, Cary Grant, Bob Hope, George Jessel, Al Jolson, The Marx Brothers, Donald O’Connor, Will Rogers, Mickey Rooney, Rose Marie, Red Skelton, and Sophie Tucker.
How vaudeville came about has taxed historians’ minds for ages. The word itself may come from vaux-de-vire, which refers to 15th-century satirical or drinking songs in Normandy, France, or from voix de ville, which literally means “voice of the city”. The name, whatever its derivation, came to be applied to theatrical shows in the early 18th century and, later, to variety shows on the American frontier and throughout the nascent urban centers in the United States and Canada. Seminal figures in the development of vaudeville, besides Tony Pastor, include Benjamin Franklin Keith (1846-1914), and Edward Franklin Albee (1857-1930). Vaudeville eventually declined, largely as a result of the emergence of motion pictures, especially after the introduction of sound in 1927, and of radio and television. Ironically, television not only dealt vaudeville its final lethal blow but also generated the first wave of nostalgia surrounding it by packing its airwaves with variety shows, including those of Milton Berle, Sid Caesar, Jack Benny, Ed Sullivan, and Jackie Gleason – all of whom are mentioned in episodes of The Dick Van Dyke Show, which of course focuses on the escapades of the head writer of a vaudevillesque variety show – and who, as in “The Sick Boy and the Sitter,” often performs in skits and musical numbers at parties along with his peers.
Vaudeville can be seen as a “democratic art” (LeRoy Ashby, With Amusement for All, p. 119). As an entertainment medium that targeted middle-class audiences, it balanced the gradual emergence of star power against the humble origins of much of the material out of which its shows were constructed. To put it another way, vaudeville mixed celebrity and popular taste in a dialectic of cultural ambiguity. According to Ashby, “it moved, unevenly and crab-like, from the margins of the amusement industry to the center of mass entertainment” (p. 119), but always with democratizing principles close at hand. Not only did it cobble together diversions of all sorts from a wide range of sources but also it united the country as the medium’s network of theaters, including The Palace in New York City, came to be formalized as a national circuit. Reflecting the tastes of the ticket-buying public, it followed a series of strongly entrenched rules about vulgarity and sexual explicitness. Words like “liar,” “son-of-a-gun,” “devil,” “sucker,” “damn,” “hell,” “spit,” and “cockroach,” were forbidden as part of an overall strategy of keeping the shows family friendly (Ashby, p. 120) and consistent with mainstream values.
Vaudeville, for all its democratizing ways, was also a hotbed of racial and ethnic stereotyping. Jews, Italians, the Irish, natives, and blacks, among others, were targets of merciless derogatory humor and condescending depiction, despite the large number of them who found decent work on the circuit. Over time objections to the patronizing and degrading portrayal of such “types” resulted in serious campaigns to downplay them – but not, it seems, out of concern for the affected groups but out of respect for the bottom line. Theaters owners did not want to offend their patrons – so in addition to bad language and suggestive acts, they gradually got rid of grotesque misrepresentation and stereotyping. By the late 1950s and the early 1960s most of the stereotypes had been eradicated from the performing arts (theater, film, radio, television, and popular music) but the memory of the bad old days of hurtful treatments of the more vulnerable targets – blacks, in particular, but also (as evidenced in The Dick Van Dyke Show) native Americans, who are usually shamelessly called “Indians” (see, for example, episodes # 2, 69, 70, 78, 79, 109, 123, and 152) – brought about a production culture of using overcompensating measures to rectify the balance. The Dick Van Dyke Show famously had to struggle to integrate blacks into several episodes because of the obtuse misgivings of networks hacks, whose efforts reflected the continuing sinuous hold of vaudeville on mid-century popular culture. – Greg
Incredible work! From one rather insignificant prop, a whole world has been uncovered.
Congratulations, Sir!
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