December 4, 1928: “Makin' Whoopee!” On Broadway

December 4, 1928: Whoopee! premieres on Broadway, a musical based on the play The Nervous Wreck by Owen Davis. The story was written by William Anthony McGuire, with music by Walter Donaldson and lyrics by Gus Kahn. The producer is the man then in the process of taking over from George M. Cohan as the King of Broadway, Florenz Ziegfeld.

The show itself is forgettable, but 2 of its songs are remembered: "Makin' Whoopee," sung by the show's male lead, Eddie Cantor, for whom it would become his biggest hit song; and "Love Me Or Leave Me," by the show's female lead, Ruth Etting, and brought back as a hit in 1955 by Doris Day, who starred as Etting in a film of the same title. The show also features a pair of up-and-comers in its chorus: Buddy Ebsen and Paulette Goddard.

The venue is the New Amsterdam Theatre at 214 West 42nd Street. After many years as a derelict, it was bought and renovated by the Walt Disney Company, and reopened in 1997. Currently, it is showing a live-action version of Disney’s "Aladdin."

The show was filmed in 1930, as a musical with mostly different songs, but still starring Cantor.

In the years to come, "making whoopee" became code for "having sex," and in the 1970s would be used as a euphemism on TV games shows like Match Game and The Newlywed Game.

*

December 4, 1928 was a Tuesday. Baseball was out of season. Football was in midweek. The NBA hadn't been founded yet.

There were 2 games in the NHL. The Boston Bruins beat the New York Rangers, 2-0 at the brand-new Boston Garden. And the Toronto Maple Leafs beat the Montreal Canadiens, 3-1 at the Montreal Forum.

October 29, 1923: The Birth of the Charleston

October 29, 1923: The musical Runnin' Wild premieres at the Colonial Theatre in New York, with a tune by James P. Johnson: "Charleston." It inspires the dance of the same name, which becomes every bit as synonymous with "The Roaring Twenties" as the jazz music that inspired it.

Runnin’ Wild was a two-act musical comedy taking place in Jimtown and St. Paul, Minnesota, about the adventures of two likable scamps played by F.E. Miller and Aubrey Lyles. The feature tune of the show was "Old Fashioned Love." But what would now be called the "breakout" song was "Charleston," along with its accompanying dance. The show ran through June 28, 1924, but the dance outlived it.

The kicks, and the crossing of the hands on the knees, became an absolute craze. Josephine Baker, the black American entertainer who was even bigger in Europe than at home, became identified with it.

Josephine Baker

The dance caught on with white American audiences when Bessie Love did it in the 1925 film The King on Main Street, and got another boost in 1926 in when she did it in The Song and Dance Man. The 1946 film It's a Wonderful Life, with a scene set in 1929, featured a Charleston contest. In the 1980s, when impersonating the film's star, James Stewart, on Saturday Night Live, Dana Carvey would do the Charleston.

The 1952 musical Singin' in the Rain, set in 1927, includes a demonstration of the dance. So does the 1974 adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, set in the Summer of 1922 -- an anachronism, because that was over a year before the dance's Broadway debut. But that film, and It's a Wonderful Life and Singin' in the Rain, helped to cement the Charleston in the public memory as the dance of the Jazz Age.

The Colonial Theatre was on Broadway at 62nd Street. It hosted black-produced, black-starring entertainment from 1905 to 1925. It was bought, renamed Hampden's Theatre, and became a whites-only theater. In 1932, it became the RKO Colonial Theatre, and a movie house only. In 1951, NBC bought it, and used it as a TV studio until 1971. It became the Harkness Theatre in 1974, showing live entertainment again, but closed in 1977, and was then torn down. A new movie theatre, Lincoln Plaza, opened on the site.

*

October 29, 1923 was a Monday. The baseball season had ended 13 days earlier, when the New York Yankees beat the New York Giants in the World Series. Football was in midweek. Professional basketball barely existed. And the NHL season was several weeks away. So there were no scores on this historic day.

October 2, 1927: Josephine Baker: Siren of Paris

October 2, 1927: The silent film Siren of the Tropics premieres in Paris. It will take 2 more years for it to be released in America, despite the fact that its star is an American.

You don't need to know about the film's plot. You only need to know about its star, the 1st black woman to star in a major motion picture, anywhere in the world: Josephine Baker.

She was born as Freda Josephine McDonald on June 3, 1906 in St. Louis. She grew up in what would once have been quaintly called "a broken home," and by the age of 13, she was homeless, making money by dancing on street corners. By 15, she had been married and divorced. At 15, she married William Baker, and began using the stage name Josephine Baker. In 1925, she got a job with a New York vaudeville troupe, and divorced William.

Like a few black American entertainers before her, and many after her -- some specifically because of her example -- she went to France to take the stage in Paris. She became a feature of a famed nightclub, the Folies Bergère. Her performance in its 1927 revue Un vent de folie (A Wind of Madness) caused a sensation in the city: Her costume consisted only of a short skirt of artificial bananas and a beaded necklace. She became known as the Black Venus, the Bronze Venus, the Black Pearl and the Creole Goddess. Film of her doing the decade's defining dance, the Charleston, has made her an icon of "The Roaring Twenties."

She renounced her U.S. citizenship and became a French national after her marriage to French industrialist Jean Lion in 1937. Following the example of dancer Isadora Duncan, and presaging the later actress (of French descent) Angelina Jolie, she adopted 12 children of various nationalities, which she referred to as the Rainbow Tribe, and raised them in France.

During World War II, Baker aided the French Resistance, and worked with the U.S. Secret Service and the British Secret Intelligence Service. After the war, President Charles de Gaulle named her a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and the French Army awarded her its highest honor, the Croix de Guerre (Cross of War).

She did occasionally return to America, but refused to perform for segregated audiences in the United States. In 1951, Grace Kelly walked out of New York's famed Stork Club, hand-in-hand with Baker, vowing never to return, since it would let her perform there, but not dine there. (She broke the vow only once, because her eventual husband, Prince Rainier III of Monaco, wanted to visit.) In 1963, she was one of the speakers at the Lincoln Memorial during the March On Washington for Jobs and Freedom.

When, despite being an international star in the 1920s, a heroine of the French Resistance in the 1940s, and a major figure in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s, she lost her French castle due to unpaid debts. Rainier and Grace took her in.

On April 8, 1975, she had a triumphal concert in Monte Carlo, attended by Rainier and Grace, Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Sophia Loren, Mick Jagger, Shirley Bassey, Diana Ross, and Liza Minnelli. Four days later, at the age of 68, she died of a cerebral hemorrhage in Paris. She was 68. The Monaco royals paid for her funeral and burial in Monte Carlo.

Ross often emulated her onstage, and wanted to make a movie about her life, but couldn't get the funding. Eventually, in 1991, The Josephine Baker Story aired on HBO, starring Lynn Whitfield. The film closes with her finale in Monte Carlo, with Whitfield singing Bob Dylan's "The Times, They Are a-Changin'."

A country not interested in honoring her during her lifetime did so afterward. Her hometown inducted her into its St. Louis Walk of Fame, and the U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp with her image. Despite having married and divorced 4 men, and being known to have had an affair with the fame Swiss architect Le Corbusier, she has also been rumored to have had affairs with women, including French writer Colette and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, and gay-rights displays in Chicago and San Francisco have honored her.

*

October 2, 1927 was a Sunday. Baseball was between the regular season and the World Series. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. The NHL started its season a few weeks later. But these games were played in the NFL:

* The New York Giants and the Cleveland Bulldogs played to a tie, 0-0 at Luna Park in Cleveland.

* There was a team named the New York Yankees playing in the NFL, and, on this day, 2 days after the baseball Yankees' Babe Ruth hit his 60th home run of the season, the football Yankees beat the Dayton Triangles, 6-3 at Triangle Park in Dayton, Ohio.

* The Chicago Cardinals beat the Pottsville Maroons, 19-7 at Normal Park on the South Side of Chicago. The "Roaring Twenties" were the football version of baseball's "Dead Ball Era," and the Cards scored 36 percent of the points in the League that day, all by themselves.

* The Providence Steam Roller (no S on the end) beat the Buffalo Bisons, 5-0 at the Cycledrome in Providence, Rhode Island.

* And the Chicago Bears beat the Green Bay Packers, 7-6 at City Stadium in Green Bay, Wisconsin. With the Cardinals still being in Chicago, it would take many years before the Bears and their fans began to consider the Packers their arch-rivals.

April 19, 1927: Mae West Is Jailed for "Sex"

April 19, 1927: Mae West goes to jail, for sex. Well, not for sex. For Sex.

Mary Jane West was born on August 17, 1893 in Brooklyn. She was appearing in amateur stage shows by age 7, under the name Baby Mae, and was in a Broadway show at 18. She began writing plays under the name Jane Mast, and on April 26, 1926, her play Sex premiered at Daly's 63rd Street Theatre.

Mae played Margy LaMont, a prostitute, who gets mixed up with both the police and society swells. The New York Times' reviewer called it a "crude and inept play, cheaply produced and poorly acted." Billboard magazine called it "the cheapest most vulgar low show to have dared to open in New York this year." And those were 2 of the more flattering reviews.

And yet, Sex played to full audiences, and turned out to be the only play on Broadway that season to stay open through the Summer and into the following year. There were 375 performances before the police raided West and her company on February 15, 1927.

They were charged with obscenity, after 325,000 people had watched it, including members of the police department and their wives, judges of the criminal courts, and 7 members of the District Attorney's staff.

On April 19, 1927, at the Jefferson Market Courthouse in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, Mae was convicted, and sentenced to 10 days in a workhouse on Welfare Island (renamed Roosevelt Island in 1973), for "corrupting the morals of youth." She could have avoided the jail term by paying a fine. She certainly had the money. She chose the jail sentence, for the publicity it would garner. She was one of the people who made "The Roaring Twenties" roar.

She dined with the warden and his wife, and was released after 8 days -- for "good behavior." As she later put it, in her aptly-titled 1933 film I'm No Angel, "When I'm good, I'm very, very good. But when I'm bad, I'm better."

Her next play, The Drag, was about homosexuality, and the City's self-appointed moral arbiters prevented it from being staged on Broadway. Her next play after that was Diamond Lil, and it was a smash. "I wrote the story myself," she said. "It's all about a girl who lost her reputation, but never missed it."

Although nearly 40, and thus too old to play an ingénue, she made her film debut in Night After Night. In that film, a hatcheck girl said, "Goodness! What beautiful diamonds!" and Mae said, "Goodness had nothing to do with it, dearie."

Again playing Diamond Lil, she starred in She Done Him Wrong in 1933, in which she gave Cary Grant his big break. That film led to her most-quoted line, which everyone seemed to get wrong: "Come up and see me some time." It was, "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?"

She became the biggest box-office draw in the country. The Hays Code getting serious in 1934 didn't seem to stop her: In 1935, despite the Code, and the Great Depression continuing, between her films and wise real-estate investments, she made more money than any person in the country except newspaper baron William Randolph Hearst. As she put it, "Virtue has its own reward, but has no sale at the box office."

And her quotes, often laced with double entendres, never seemed to stop -- to the point where, like Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Winston Churchill, Mohandas Gandhi and Yogi Berra, she got credited with thing she didn't really say.

Apparently, she never said to a man, "Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?" In a 1944 stage play she wrote, Catherine Was Great, she played the randy Russian Empress Catherine the Great, embraced Gene Barry, playing Lieutenant Bunin, and she said, "Lieutenant, is that your sword, or are you just glad to see me?" But variations on the line go all the way back to the plays of ancient Greece.

But she did say:

* I believe in censorship. I made a fortune out of it. 

* It's better to be looked over than overlooked.

* A hard man is good to find. (A takeoff on "A good man is hard to find.")

* When caught between two evils, I generally pick the one I've never tried before.

* When women go wrong, men go right after them!

* It's not the man in your life that counts. It's the life in your man.

* I only like two kinds of men: Foreign and Domestic.

* Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go everywhere else.

* I used to be Snow White, but I drifted.

* (Told there were ten men waiting for her at the door) Send one of them home, I'm tired.

* I do all my writing in bed. Everybody knows I do my best work there.

* A dame that knows the ropes isn't likely to get tied up.

* Men are like linoleum floors: Lay 'em right, and you can walk all over 'em for years.

* Don't keep a man guessing too long. He's sure to find the answer somewhere else.

* (Comparing sex to a card game) Good sex is like good bridge: If you don't have a good partner, you'd better have a good hand.

* You only live once, but if you do it right, once is enough.

* I never said it would be easy. I only said it would be worth it.

* Marriage is a great institution. I'm not ready for an institution.

In fact, she had been married, almost all along. In 1911, still only 17, she married actor Frank Wallace, but they were hardly ever together. They finally got a legal end to their marriage in 1943, by which point Mae's career was already in decline.

In 1914, she had an affair with Italian vaudeville musician Guido Deiro. It has been alleged that she got pregnant, and, on her mother's advice, had an abortion, which left her unable to have children thereafter. Whether this was true or not, it is known that she had no children.

She had a longstanding affair with her manager, James Timony; a brief one with New York gangster Owney Madden, owner of Harlem's famed Cotton Club; and a brief one with William "Gorilla" Jones, a black boxer who was Middleweight Champion of the World for a few months in 1932. From 1930 until her death, Mae lived at the Ravenswood apartment building in the Hancock Park section of Los Angeles. The building's manager refused to let Jones in. Mae responded by buying the building, firing the manager, and letting Jones into her building, among other things.

In 1950, director Billy Wilder offered her the part of aging actress Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard. She turned it down, leading to a career revival for Gloria Swanson. Mae didn't need the part: She had a successful Las Vegas revue. She was offered a part in the 1964 Elvis Presley movie Roustabout. She turned that down, too, and it went to Barbara Stanwyck. (She wouldn't have played Elvis' love interest, as much as she might have liked that. That part went to Joan Freeman. She would have played their common boss at a carnival. From Elvis' perspective, it was just as well: A mama's boy, he had a problem with older women.)

Many actresses -- either intentionally, or prodded to do so by their film studios -- would try to match Mae West for overt appeal to sex. But as Mae herself said, "The only gal who came near to me in the sex appeal department was pretty little Marilyn Monroe. All the others had were big boobs." Marilyn had starred in the 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. This led Mae to say, "Gentlemen may prefer blondes, but who says blondes prefer gentlemen?"

In 1967, The Beatles' manager, Brian Epstein, asked her for permission to use a photograph of her for the cover of their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. She refused, asking, "What would I be doing in a Lonely Hearts' Club?" The bandmembers wrote her a personal letter, declaring themselves great fans of her. Flattery got them where they needed to go, and she changed her mind.

In 1970, after 27 years away from films, she was cast in the film version of Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge. But while the Hays Code had been struck down, and the times would seem to have changed in favor of the kind of dialogue she would prefer, the film had a lot of problems, and she didn't help with her diva behavior, not getting along with the film's star, Raquel Welch. The film bombed. So did her last film, Sextette, based on a play she wrote, premiering in 1978. At 84, she was still "playing Mae West."

Mae West, 1973

She died on November 22, 1980, from the effects of a stroke and an ensuing fall 3 months earlier. Although she had been close to her family, she had survived them all, and was survived only by her lover of 25 years, Paul Novak, who had been one of the young "muscle men" in her Vegas stage act.

In 1982, Ann Jillian starred in the ABC TV-movie Mae West. The public's memory of Mae was still strong enough that it was the 3rd-most-watched TV show of that week.

Daly's 63rd Street Theatre, where Sex was staged in 1926 and '27, was at 22 East 63rd Street, between 5th and Madison Avenues. It was torn down in 1957, and a rather ordinary-looking apartment building is on the site today.

The Jefferson Market Courthouse, built in 1877 at 425 Avenue of the Americas (6th Avenue) at West 10th Street, was converted into the Jefferson Market Library in 1967, and is still open as such. I hope Mae knew about that: She probably would have appreciated it.

*

April 19, 1927 was a Tuesday. These baseball games were played that day:

* The New York Yankees lost to the Boston Red Sox, 6-3 at Yankee Stadium. Hal Wiltse outpitched Bob Shawkey, the 1st great pitcher obtained by Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert. Shawkey was pretty much done, and this would be his last season.

Babe Ruth went 0-for-4, but Lou Gehrig went 2-for-4 with an RBI. It was the Yankees' 1st loss of the season, after starting with 6 wins. Gehrig would finish the season with 47 home runs. Ruth would finish with 60.

* It wasn't a good day for New York's National League teams, either. The New York Giants were swept in a doubleheader by the Boston Braves, 9-5 and 5-4 at Braves Field in Boston. Over the 2 games, Rogers Hornsby went 4-for-7 with a walk and an RBI, Bill Terry went 4-for-8 with 3 RBIs, and 18-year-old rookie Mel Ott appeared as a pinch-hitter in each game, without reaching base either time. He was still 3 months away from the 1st of his 511 career home runs.

* The Brooklyn Robins (as the Dodgers were known while Wilbert Robinson managed them from 1914 to 1931) lost to the Philadelphia Phillies, 4-0 at Baker Bowl in Philadelphia. Jack Scott pitched a 4-hit shutout. So, on the day, New York's teams in what would later be named Major League Baseball went 0-4.

* The Detroit Tigers beat the Cleveland Indians, 8-5 at League Park in Cleveland.

* The Philadelphia Athletics beat the Washington Senators, 3-1 at Griffith Stadium in Washington. Playing out the strings of their great careers, former Tigers star Ty Cobb went 0-for-3 with a walk for the A's, and former Red Sox and Indians star Tris Speaker went 0-for-4 for the Senators. The next season, Speaker would join Cobb on the A's, and it would be the last season and players for each of them.

* The St. Louis Cardinals beat the Cincinnati Reds, 9-1 at Redland Field (later renamed Crosley Field) in Cincinnati.

* The St. Louis Browns beat the Chicago White Sox, 7-5 at Sportsman's Park in St. Louis.

* And the Chicago Cubs and the Pittsburgh Pirates were rained out at Wrigley Field in Chicago. It took until September 25 to make the game up as part of a doubleheader, which was necessary, as the Pirates had yet to clinch the National League Pennant. The Pirates swept, 2-1 and 6-1, but still didn't clinch until October 1.

March 12, 1926: The Savoy Ballroom Opens

March 12, 1926: The Savoy Ballroom opens at 596 Lenox Avenue, between 140th and 141st Streets in Harlem, in Upper Manhattan. More than any other place, including Preservation Hall in New Orleans, it became the capital of jazz music.

The Savoy Ballroom was named after the Savoy Hotel in London as those who named the ballroom felt this gave the ballroom a classy, upscale feeling, as the hotel, which opened in 1889, is a very elite, upscale hotel. The hotel was named for the House of Savoy, once one of the ruling houses of Europe, including in Italy from 1713 to 1946.

It was owned by a white man, Jay Faggen, who modeled it after a Midtown Manhattan facility he owned, Roseland, which also became a legendary music venue. It was managed by African-American businessman and civic leader Charles Buchanan. He sought to run a "luxury ballroom to accommodate the many thousands who wished to dance in an atmosphere of tasteful refinement, rather than in the small stuffy halls and the foul smelling, smoke laden cellar nightclubs."

Like Roseland, the Savoy became known as a venue not just the "swing" bands that played there, but the people dancing to the music. It popularized the dance known as the Lindy Hop. Unlike the nearby Cotton Club, there were no "white nights" and "colored nights." The usual ratio was about 85 percent black and 15 percent white.

Frankie Manning, who became a dance star, was interviewed for Ken Burns' 2001 documentary Jazz, and lived until 2009 as a living link to the Savoy and its era, remembered: "One night somebody came over and said, 'Hey man, Clark Gable just walked in the house.' Somebody else said, 'Oh, yeah, can he dance?' All they wanted to know when you came into the Savoy was, do you dance?"

(Could Clark Gable dance? In 1939, he starred in the film Idiot's Delight. Wearing top hat, white tie and tails, and carrying a dancer's cane, he sang "Puttin' On the Ritz" and did a swing dance. Let's just say he was no Fred Astaire.)

That became the standard for every New York dance club to come, including the Peppermint Lounge with The Twist in the early 1960s, and Studio 54 with disco in the late 1970s: It didn't matter who you were, what you did, or how famous you were, all that matters was, could you dance?

There was a double bandstand, which allowed for an occasional "battle of the bands." It was useless, as the house band, led by a dwarf drummer, William "Chick" Webb, would take the opposing band -- even Count Basie's in 1938 -- and, in the parlance of the era, "cut them to ribbons." Only Duke Ellington's band, in 1937, was ever said to have beaten Webb's band.

Langston Hughes, the leading poet of "The Harlem Renaissance," called the Savoy "The Heartbeat of Harlem." But times change, as they always do, and it was closed on July 10, 1958. The Delano Village housing complex is on the site today.

From 1927 to 1948, Chicago also had a Savoy Ballroom, at 4733 South Parkway (now Martin Luther King Drive) on the South Side. Promoter Abe Saperstein sponsored a basketball team that played on its stage, called the Savoy Hot Five. The name was soon changed to the Harlem Globetrotters. Chicago's Savoy was renamed the Regal Theatre, demolished in 1973, and replaced by a venue named for a native son of the neighborhood, the Lou Rawls Theater Cultural Center.

*

March 12, 1926 was a Tuesday. George Ariyoshi was born that day. He was the 1st Asian-American elected Governor of any State, elected in Hawaii in 1974, 1978 and 1982. He remains his State's longest-serving Governor. (UPDATE: On March 12, 2026, he turned 100.)

Baseball was in Spring Training. Football was out of season. Professional basketball barely existed. One game was played in the NHL: The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Bruins, 2-1 at the Duquesne Gardens in Pittsburgh. Harold Darragh scored the winning goal at 11:51 of overtime.

At the time, the NHL had a 10-minute overtime period for regular-season games, and potentially unlimited overtime for Playoff games. For the 1942-43 season, the League eliminated regular-season overtime, as a nod to World War II travel restrictions. For the 1982-83 season, it brought back 5-minute overtime.

Named for the city's baseball team, the Pirates were a first-year expansion team. They lasted until 1930, moved to become the Philadelphia Quakers, had a horrible season, and went out of business due to the Great Depression.

February 26, 1926: Louis Armstrong Gets the Heebie Jeebies

Left to right: Johnny Dodds, Louis Armstrong,

Johnny St. Cyr, Kid Ory and Lil Hardin Armstrong.

February 26, 1926: Louis Armstrong gets the heebie jeebies.

His band was billed as "Louis Armstrong and His Hot Five." His wife, Lil Hardin Armstrong, played piano. It was she who "took the country out of him" and convinced him to assert himself, both on the bandstand and with money. This would end up working against her: Within a few years, he divorced her for spending too much of his money.

The others were musicians he'd previously worked with in his hometown of New Orleans: Edward "Kid" Ory on trombone, Johnny Dodds on clarinet, and Johnny St. Cyr on guitar, and sometimes banjo.

Although all of the Hot Five got their professional starts in New Orleans, their initial recording, on November 12, 1925, was in Chicago, at the studio of Okeh Records. He had previously recorded as the trumpet player in the jazz band of Joe "King" Oliver, but this was his 1st time recording a band he led. They recorded Louis' compositions "Yes! I'm in the Barrel" and "Gut Bucket Blues," and Lil's composition "My Heart."

Their next session was on February 26, 1926. Among the songs they recorded was "Heebie Jeebies," written by saxophone player Boyd Atkins. The term "heebie jeebies" was coined by Billy DeBeck, the cartoonist who wrote the Barney Google strip. It means a feeling of anxiety or apprehension.

In addition to playing trumpet like nobody's business, Louis, known as "Satchelmouth" for his big mouth, eventually shortened to "Satchmo" or "Satch," tried scat singing, and this made the record his first real hit.

Armstrong, Ory and St. Cyr would all later admit that the reason Armstrong was scatting -- something already well-known in jazz circles, but not on record -- is that he didn't know the words, and was reading them off a sheet of paper, and he dropped it, and had to improvise. His scatting was the defining "roar" of the Roaring Twenties.

(There's an old joke: "Why does a hummingbird hum? Because he doesn't know the words." And another: Musicians are playing in an apartment, and a woman in the apartment building next door opens her window and yells across the alley, "Don't you know people are trying to sleep?" And the bandleader, acting as if "People Are Trying to Sleep" is a song title, says, "No, but if you hum a few bars of it, we'll catch on!")

In 1928, Armstrong formed a new Hot Five, replacing everyone but himself with members of the Carroll Dickerson Orchestra: Fred Robinson on trombone, Jimmy Strong on clarinet and tenor saxophone, Earl Hines (later nicknamed "Fatha," short for "Father") on piano, Mancy Carr on banjo, and Arthur "Zutty" Singleton on drums. So now it really was Louis Armstrong and a Hot Five. It was this group that recorded the landmark instrumental "West End Blues" in 1928.

Louis Armstrong died on July 6, 1971, of heart trouble, in New York, a few days short of his 70th birthday. Lil Hardin Armstrong died a few weeks after that. Johnny Dodds, the greatest jazz clarinetist of the 1920s, was an alcoholic, and it gave him a fatal heart attack in 1940. Mancy Carr followed in 1946, Johnny St. Cyr in 1966, Kid Ory in 1973, Zutty Singleton in 1975, Jimmy Strong in 1977, Earl Hines in 1983, and Fred Robinson in 1984.

In 1956, rock and roll pioneer Little Richard recorded a different song titled "Heebie Jeebies." It was not a hit.

*

February 26, 1926 was a Friday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There was 1 game played in the NHL: The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Montreal Maroons, 1-0 at the Duquesne Gardens in Pittsburgh. The Pirates moved in 1930, becoming the Philadelphia Quakers, and folded after 1 more season. The Maroons won the Stanley Cup in 1926 and 1935, but lost money, and folded in 1938.

February 19, 1927: Clara Bow, "The It Girl"

February 19, 1927: The film It is released. This film has no resemblance but title to the later Stephen King story about a killer clown.

Clara Gordon Bow was born on July 29, 1905 in Brooklyn. She was abused by both parents, and turned to the movies, all silent and black & white then, for comfort. She appeared in her 1st film in 1923, Down to the Sea in Ships, filmed on location in New Bedford, Massachusetts. She was taken west to Hollywood, and became a star with Grit in 1924. She played flappers, the modern women of the 1920s, and Alma Whitaker of the Los Angeles Times observed on September 7, 1924:

She radiates sex appeal tempered with an impish sense of humor... She hennas her blond hair so that it will photograph dark in the pictures... Takes a joyous delight in accepting a challenge to vamp any selected male -- the more unpromising specimen the better. When the hapless victim is scared into speechlessness, she gurgles with naughty delight and tries another.

She moved to Paramount Pictures in 1926, and Mantrap raised her to bigger stardom. On February 19, 1927, the film It premiered, and it made Bow the biggest female star in movie history to that point, ahead of Pearl White and Mary Pickford.

She plays shopgirl Betty Lou Spence, who works in the "world's largest store" (implied to be the Herald Square Macy's in New York), where she has a crush on Cyrus Waltham Jr. (played by Spanish actor Antonio Moreno), the new manager of the store and the overall boss' son. But they belong to different social classes, and he's already dating socialite Adela Van Norman (Jacqueline Gadsden).

When Betty finally gets Cyrus's attention, she convinces him to take her on a date to Coney Island in Brooklyn, where he is introduced to the proletarian pleasures of roller coasters and hot dogs, and has a wonderful time. At the end of the evening, he tries to kiss her. She slaps his face and hurries out of his car and into her flat, but then peeks out her window at him as he is leaving.

The next day, meddling welfare workers are trying to take away the baby of Betty's sickly roommate Molly (Priscilla Bonner). To protect her friend, Betty bravely claims that the baby is in fact hers. Unfortunately, this is overheard by Monty, a friend of Cyrus', who tells him. Although he is in love with her, Cyrus offers her an "arrangement" that includes everything but marriage. Shocked and humiliated, Betty Lou refuses. She soon strives to forget the whole ordeal ever occurred, forgetting Cyrus for the time being.

When she learns from Monty about Cyrus's misunderstanding, she fumes and vows to teach her former beau a lesson. When Cyrus hosts a yachting excursion, with Adela on board, Betty Lou makes Monty take her along, masquerading as "Miss Van Cortland". Cyrus at first wants to remove her from the ship, but he cannot long resist Betty Lou's "It Factor. He proposes marriage, but she tells him that she'd "rather marry his office boy," which accomplishes her goal, but breaks her heart.

Cyrus then learns the truth about the baby, and leaves Monty at the yacht's helm to find her. Monty crashes the yacht into a fishing boat, tossing both Betty Lou and Adela into the water. Betty Lou saves Adela, punching her in the face when she panics and threatens to drown them both. At the end of the film, she and Cyrus reconcile on the anchor of the yacht, with the first two letters of the ship's name, Itola, between them: "IT." Monty and Adela are upset at losing their friends, but it is implied they pursue a relationship with each other as the film ends.

The invention of the concept It is generally attributed to British novelist Elinor Glyn, but in 1904, an even bigger British writer, Rudyard Kipling, in the short story "Mrs. Bathurst," introduced the idea: "It isn't beauty, so to speak, nor good talk necessarily. It's just 'It.' Some women will stay in a man's memory if they once walk down the street."

For the rest of her career, Bow was promoted as "The It Girl." She admitted she wasn't sure what the term meant, but later said that both Lana Turner and Marilyn Monroe both qualified.

However, it has to be natural: You can't "become an It Girl" -- or, if such a thing exists, an "It Guy." Film studios tried to find the next Marilyn, and never did. In the late 20th Century, both Madonna and Anna Nicole Smith tried to get people to think of themselves as the present-day version of Marilyn. In the early 21st Century, Kim Kardashian tried. None of them ever got there, only reaching the level of being "famous for being famous," as Elizabeth Taylor, a genuine It Girl, had once been.

In her 1990 song "Vogue," Madonna mentioned Monroe (who certainly was an It Girl), Turner (yes), Greta Garbo (yes), Marlene Dietrich (yes), Grace Kelly (no), Jean Harlow (yes), Ginger Rogers (not quite), Rita Hayworth (yes), Lauren Bacall (yes), Katherine Hepburn (not really) and Bette Davis (not even close). She didn't mention Clara Bow, the It Girl who was one of the people who made the Roaring Twenties roar.

Bow's personal life fell into the spotlight, and rumors of her romantic conquests abounded, including the ridiculous one that she had slept with every member of the football team at the University of Southern California. It was easily disproven, since, at the time, the team included a tackle named Marion Morrison, who became the actor John Wayne. And none of Wayne's biographers have alleged a tryst with Bow, at any time.

But her lifestyle and "dreadful" manners were considered reminders of the Hollywood elite's uneasy position in high society. She said, "They yell at me to be dignified. But what are the dignified people like? The people who are held up as examples for me? They are snobs. Frightful snobs... I'm a curiosity in Hollywood. I'm a big freak, because I'm myself!"

Later in 1927, Bow filmed Wings, which was awarded the 1st Academy Award for Best Picture. But talking pictures arrived late that year. Legend has it that Bow's Brooklyn accent doomed her career, but that wasn't it. In 1929 alone, Paramount released 3 the sound films with her: The Wild Party, Dangerous Curves and the Saturday Night Kid. They helped her keep her position as Hollywood's top box-office actress. In 1930, she made 4 films, and finished 2nd among box-office actresses to Joan Crawford.

The problem wasn't her voice, it was her: She said, "I hate talkies... They're stiff and limiting. You lose a lot of your cuteness, because there's no chance for action, and action is the most important thing to me." By the time of the stock market crash in October 1929, she described her nerves as "all shot," saying that she had reached "the breaking point." Photoplay, the most popular film-themed magazine of the era, cited reports of "rows of bottles of sedatives" by her bed. Her manager, B.P. Schulberg, began calling her "Crisis-a-Day Clara."

In 1930, she appeared in True to the Navy, with Rex Bell, usually a Western actor, as the male lead. In 1931, they were married. In 1933, she retired from show business, and she and Bell moved to the Walking Box Ranch outside Searchlight, Nevada, near Las Vegas.

Her final film, Hoopla, was released that year. Despite the Great Depression being at its depth, and Bow's style of film being woefully out of fashion, it was successful. In spite of her mental health difficulties, Clara Bow didn't lose her career to sound, or to substance abuse. Like Garbo a few years later, and Shirley Temple a few years after that, she left Hollywood on her own terms, at the age of 28.

Bow and Bell, whose real name was George Francis Beldam, had 2 sons: Tony and George Jr. Tony later became an actor, calling himself Rex Bell Jr. Their father was elected Lieutenant Governor of Nevada in 1954 and 1958, as a Republican.

The Bells in 1960, a brief reunion.

This may be the last known photo of Clara Bow, who was 55.

In 1960, Lieutenant Governor Bell allowed his ranch to be used as a filming location for The Misfits, and it was his final film role. It was also the final film for Clark Gable. It was also the final film for Marilyn Monroe. (Montgomery Clift was in it, too, but, contrary tol popular belief, it wasn't his last: He made 2 more before his death.) But Bow did not appear in it: After Hoopla in 1933, she had only one more acting credit, appearing as herself on the radio version of the game show Truth Or Consequences in 1947.

Bell began a campaign for Governor of Nevada in 1962, but on the 4th of July, after giving a campaign speech at the El Rancho Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, he suffered a heart attack, and died at the age of 58.

Clara Bow was not there for most of his political career. In 1944, during his 1st run for office, a defeat for the U.S. House of Representatives, she attempted suicide. In 1949, she checked herself into a Connecticut psychiatric hospital, but its staff couldn't agree on what was wrong with her. She left, and, instead of returning to the ranch, moved into a bungalow in Culver City, near the Hollywood studios, under the care of a nurse, and rarely left, living off the money she made from acting.

She died of a heart attack on September 27, 1965. She was only 60. She was buried next to Rex Bell at Forest Lawn Memorial Park Cemetery, in the Los Angeles suburb of Glendale, California. Among her pallbearers were 1920s Heavyweight Champion Jack Dempsey and her Wings co-star, Buddy Rogers.

Her son, Rex Bell Jr., served as District Attorney of Clark County, Nevada, which includes Las Vegas, from 1987 to 1995. He died in 2011. As of February 19, 2022, George Beldam Jr. is still alive. Rex Jr. had children and grandchildren, so Clara Bow has living descendants.

*

February 19, 1927 was a Saturday. Baseball and football were out of season. The NBA hadn't been founded yet. There were 4 games in the NHL:

* The New York Americans lost to the Montreal Canadiens, 3-0 at the Montreal Forum.

* The Ottawa Senators beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 1-0 at the Ottawa Auditorium.

* The Chicago Black Hawks beat the Detroit Cougars, 4-1 at the Border Cities Arena in Windsor, Ontario. Both teams were in their 1st season in the NHL.

None of these names is still in place. The Cougars became the Falcons in 1930, and the Red Wings in 1932. In 1986, someone found the Chicago team's original NHL charter, and found that it was officially entered as one word: "Blackhawks." The NHL office was notified, and it's been published as one word ever since. Built in 1924, the Border Cities Arena became the Windsor Arena, and, unlike the Wings' next 2 homes, the Olympia and the Joe Louis Arena, still stands.

* The Montreal Maroons beat the Toronto Maple Leafs, 2-1 at the Mutual Street Arena in Toronto. Duncan Munro scored the winning goal, 12 minutes into overtime. Conn Smythe had just bought the team formerly known as the Toronto St. Patricks 5 days earlier, and, being proudly English and dismissive of the Irish, changed the team's name, and its solid color from green to blue. This was only their 2nd name under the Maple Leafs name. Their 1st was on February 17, a 4-1 home win over the Americans.

* And the New York Rangers and the Boston Bruins were not scheduled.

February 12, 1924: "Rhapsody In Blue" Premieres

George (left) & Ira Gershwin

February 12, 1924: "An Experiment in Modern Music" is held at Aeolian Hall, at 29 West 42nd Street between 5th and 6th Avenues in Midtown Manhattan. It was intended as an educational demonstration on how far American music had progressed since the Civil War, and on how the relatively new form of jazz could be performed in a concert hall.

The Paul Whiteman Orchestra, led by the man with perhaps the most unfortunate name in jazz (Whiteman was then the best-selling practitioner of an art form invented by black men) played each piece. They began with a suite by Victor Herbert, and closed with Pomp and Circumstance (a.k.a. "The Graduation Song") by Edward Elgar.

In between, they played Rhapsody In Blue, with the piano part played by its composer: George Gershwin, by this point the biggest name in Broadway musicals. Gershwin, known for light, airy tunes written with his brother Ira as lyricist, wanted to show he was a serious musical composer. Part of this was sitting for an interview with Isaac Goldberg, who had written a biography of the late 19th Century British composing team of William S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, and would publish the interview again as he wrote Gershwin's 1st authorized biography, in 1931:

It was on the train, with its steely rhythms, its rattle-ty bang, that is so often so stimulating to a composer.... I frequently hear music in the very heart of the noise. And there I suddenly heard -- and even saw on paper -- the complete construction of the rhapsody, from beginning to end. No new themes came to me, but I worked on the thematic material already in my mind and tried to conceive the composition as a whole. I heard it as a sort of musical kaleidoscope of America, of our vast melting pot, of our unduplicated national pep, of our metropolitan madness. By the time I reached Boston I had a definite plot of the piece, as distinguished from its actual substance.

The piece was a smashing success. To this day, its premiere is considered a defining event, not just of the "Roaring Twenties," also known as the "Jazz Age," but in the cultural history of New York City. In 2003, Orrin Howard, a Los Angeles-based music critic, wrote:

Beginning with that incomparable, flamboyant clarinet solo, Rhapsody is irresistible still, with its syncopated rhythmic vibrancy, its abandoned, impudent flair that tells more about the Roaring Twenties than could a thousand words, and its genuine melodic beauty colored a deep, jazzy blue by the flatted sevenths and thirds that had their origins in the African-American slave songs.

Lang Lang, the great Chinese concert pianist, has said, "When I hear Rhapsody in Blue, I see the Empire State Building somehow. I see the New York skyline in Midtown Manhattan, and I already see the coffee shops of Times Square." The fact that the Empire State Building wouldn't open until 7 years after the piece premiered does nothing to detract from Lang's perception.

Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys has called Rhapsody In Blue one of his favorite pieces. In 1979, Woody Allen used the piece to open his film Manhattan. In the 1980s, it became the backing music for United Airlines' TV commercials. When Ken Burns made his Baseball miniseries in the early 1990s, he used it as the soundtrack for the story of the building of the original Yankee Stadium, although that had happened a year earlier, in 1923. Gershwin's piano playing seemed a perfect complement to old silent film of Babe Ruth trotting around the bases. In the 1920s, Gershwin was nearly as big a figure as Ruth.

F. Scott Fitzgerald had praised the piece in 1925, the year he published The Great Gatsby, which is often considered the defining American novel of the decade. In 2013, the piece was used as a theme for a new film version of the novel.

There is a surviving recording with George himself tickling the ivories. It's not quite the same as having a recording of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart conducting his own orchestra, but unlike Mozart (who died of a fever in 1791, not quite age 36) and Gershwin (who died of a brain tumor in 1937, not quite 39), it does survive.

The Aeolian Building still stands, although it has been retrofitted, so that Aeolian Hall no longer exists.

*

February 12, 1924 was a Tuesday. Baseball and football were out of season. Professional basketball was not yet major league. And while the hockey season was underway, there were no games scheduled in either the National Hockey League or the Pacific Coast Hockey Association. So there were no scores on this historic day.