New Bio Looks at America's First Drag Superstar Julian Eltinge
Julian Eltinge was, biographer Andrew L. Erdman writes in "Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator," a superstar of the drag world, a man whose portrayal of all-American femininity dazzled and (at least, in the theatrical sense) seduced audiences across the country. He was celebrated, adored, and quite well paid; he had to be, to maintain the trunks full of extravagant costumes he needed for his shows.
If the story sounds familiar, but the name does not, maybe that's because all of this was more than a hundred years ago.
Eltinge was born William Dalton in 1881 in Newtonville, Massachusetts. He specialized in embodying what Americans thought of as femininity at the time. His milky skin, wardrobe, posture, and gestures communicated commonplace ideals of womanhood like the so-called "Gibson Girl," whose silhouette Eltinge perfectly replicated by stuffing himself into a corset that turned his frame into what back then was seen as a beauteously slim — impossibly slim might be a better word for it — shape.
"In a time when politicians weaponize gender and sexuality," Erdman's website explains, "Eltinge's story offers complex insight into cultural ideas about masculinity and femininity, reminding us that humans have always contained multitudes."
Eltinge wasn't alone in his art. He was one of a multitude of artists who made a living dressing, walking, and gesticulating not necessarily the way actual women did, but as the audience expected they should. Like any great showman, Eltinge took what the spectators brought into the theater and sold it back to them, honed and polished to perfection.
His onstage mastery of gender illusion notwithstanding, Eltinge sought to project an image of rough-and-ready manhood, and boasted (though perhaps with questionable basis) of serving up the occasional knuckle sandwich to any theater worker who might throw a casual insult his way based on his drag routine. But his sexuality remains murky and his private life nebulous; there's reason to think he might have been queer, but no real evidence. To assemble this biography, Erdman had to rely on interviews and second-hand accounts. Not much, if anything, in the way of letters or journals seem to exist.
Still, Erdman follows the breadcrumbs that mark the trail of Eltinge's life through his childhood, his youthful fascination with theater and the adoption of his childhood best friend's surname as his own stage name, his stunt engagement to fellow vaudevillian Eva Tanguay, and his close working relationship — and possibly more — with producer Albert "A.H." Woods.
EDGE caught up with Andrew L. Erdman to learn more about the "gender illusionist" who took the country by storm decades before the "RuPaul" revolution restored drag to mainstream entertainment.
EDGE: Did you get an intuition, in the course of your research, about what was going on with Julian Eltinge?
Andrew L. Erdman: My sense is that Julian Eltinge probably had some erotic feelings for men, which may have taken the form of some very quiet sexual affairs. He doesn't seem to have had any enduring, obviously romantic relationships with men. He did have long, intimate friendships with both men and women, and there are certain other tropes about his life which people have pointed to, suggesting that perhaps he was gay because of his interest in design. He was a brilliant designer and curator on his own terms.
EDGE: You write that it was because Julian Eltinge "reinforced" gender roles and presentations so faithfully that he was admired as an artist and not dismissed — or even prosecuted — as an "invert" or a "pervert."
Andrew L. Erdman: I think he precisely understood what was meant by the normative definitions at the time of masculine and feminine. And he presented it, for the most part, so faithfully that he signaled to the public, "Look, I get what these roles are supposed to be. I'm going to do it perfectly. I'm going to do it even more perfectly than a lot of women do it."
He presented himself as a professional and as an artisan, and as somebody who spent many hours developing his technique and performances. When he's off stage he's, in a way, equally playing a perfect masculine drag. He's claiming to have been a Harvard athlete; he smokes cigars; he claims to know a lot about the stock market. All this kind of bro stuff, in the early part of the century. What he believes in his heart, we don't know, but he definitely is able to say, "Look, I get what the perfect archetypes are."
EDGE: Drag performers became huge celebrities in Eltinge's time, but there was a huge pushback that gathered force against men portraying women. Are we seeing the same script today, with slightly different makeup and costuming?
Andrew L. Erdman: Very much. As you know, The [Great] Depression, the rise of the Soviet Union, and the rise of fascism in the '30s created fear, and so there was a clampdown: "We have to, rather than deal with the economic and political problems, stop men from putting on dresses."
I think there's a couple of other things that are fanning the flames these days — the much more widespread acceptance of gender fluidity, non-binary, transgender in people's lived experiences, which is making the right insane. In terms of the art of drag, you also have women, generally, a lot more empowered in the arts as performers. Some of the ground conditions are different these days, but we live in a post-Stonewall era. There's more of a threat of normalization of what used to be tolerated in some ways, but were considered to be marginal.
Those are some of the differences, but there absolutely are marked similarities. When Mae West began depicting the underworld of gay men who were engaged in the pansy craze of the late '20s, that stirred up the hornet's nest. She was put on trial, and Julian Eltinge's name came up, and that was the beginning of things getting stirred up in a way that feels familiar now.
EDGE: You kind of credit Mae West with triggering the blame that was leveled at female impersonators like Julian Eltinge.
Andrew L. Erdman: Mae West is a complicated character. On the one hand, she clearly is very fascinated with the world of gay male performers and sex workers and the sexual and gender "other" in the eyes of mainstream white America. At the same time, she's also somewhat homophobic. She's like, "They're not criminals, they're just sick. But they're my friends." It's kind of a hot mess, but she starts to put homosexuality on stage, and I think it freaked people out.
EDGE: It's an ironic twist that Mae West's stage mother insisted she study the work of Eva Tanguay, who was the same woman that made a show of being engaged to Julian Eltinge before they broke it off.
Andrew L. Erdman: Totally. My last book, "Queen of Vaudeville," was about Eva Tanguary, who is another really interesting character. For her own reasons, she never particularly dug the idea of heteronormative marriage. I don't think she particularly liked men, other than as sexual partners. She got to know Julian just because they were both part of the same vaudeville royalty.
Julian and Eva Tanguay concocted a scheme to become engaged in the late summer of 1908. I think the theater trade journalists knew that this was a gag; it was like a vaudeville sketch playing out in the headlines for a month. She was going to wear the tuxedo, and he was going to wear the gown, and this led to a lot of very humorous journalism: Who's going to take whose last name, who's the "he," who's the "she," who's the bride, who's the groom. They got a lot of mileage out of it, and then they were sort of like, "Oh, you know, turns out we're both going on vacation, see you later!"
EDGE: Was it that you were researching Eva Tanguay, and you said: "This guy sounds interesting," that you decided to write this book? Or was it more that Julian Eltinge is the perfect historical figure to write about in order to examine the parallels between then and now?
Andrew L. Erdman: It's a kind of combination of those things. I did come across him when I wrote about Eva, and I consider myself deeply interested and invested in that time period — the late 1800s, early 1900s in North America, particularly the East Coast. It's really the roots of our modern culture. At the same time, it's a time when authority over a lot of things has transferred from the church to the sciences — the experts, the professors, the doctors, including on sexuality and gender. Then you have vaudeville entertainment, and I'm always interested in people who were once hugely famous, and somehow nobody knows them anymore.
I started looking around [to find out more about Julian Eltinge], and there wasn't much written on him — certainly no in-depth biography — so, foolishly, enthusiastically, I set out to put all of it together. It is... troublingly timely, shall we say?
"Beautiful: The Story of Julian Eltinge, America's Greatest Female Impersonator" is available now.