Tattered posters: The still-visible remains of the Bijou's first seasons
by Jack Neely
"You are not my wife," says the man named Mallory, standing in a domestic living room. "I duped you." The woman he's talking to, Jennie, responds in distress and disbelief: "Then I am but your —"
She cannot bring herself to pronounce that terrible word. The people who made this poster could not bring themselves to print it. The provocative dash remains to suggest the unthinkable.
This lurid poster advertises a play, but don't make plans to catch it. It closed some time ago. Unfortunately for the curious, the title of that play is unknown, and probably will be forever; it has fallen off the poster. But the rest of it still clings to the brick wall in the loftiest portions of Knoxville's oldest theater.
It's the remains of an old show-biz habit. Prowl the backstage of any lively theater, and chances are you'll see posters and souvenirs of shows of the past. They tend to be the recognizable ones, the ones the stagehands expect to boast about in the future. The Civic Coliseum has scores of them, some dating back to the '60s. None of them are half as old as the Bijou's souvenirs.
Knoxville's old vaudeville house opened in early 1909, showing musicals, minstrel shows, variety shows, melodramas, religious pageants, mysteries, novelty shows, and the occasional motion picture. Most of the folks who performed here are forgotten. We remember mainly the famous ones: the pre-Hollywood Marx Brothers, bandleader/composer John Philip Sousa, the great violinist Fritz Kreisler, Ziegfeld star Billie Burke (in 1912, over 25 years before she became Glynda, the Good Witch of the North), Russian dancer Anna Pavlova, Tallulah Bankhead, the magician Blackstone. These posters on the wall tell us about a few of the others.
You won't see them in the part of backstage the actors know. By some accounts there used to be old posters back there, but some overzealous renovator in the '80s scraped them off. I'd heard that some remained in a part of the theater I'd never seen; technical director Scott Segar pointed me in the right direction and loaned me a flashlight.
Up a ladder, through a trap door about 30 feet above the stage, is the fly loft, a treehouse where the sandbags rest. The stagehands who worked up here, called flymen, would wait for cues to send props sailing over the stage. Above the fly loft is another ladder that rises to a simpler crow's nest at the top of the theater. Along that upper ladder are shreds of paper with colorful lettering and vivid illustrations.
Not one of the posters is wholly intact; there are no Antiques Roadshow treasures here. But they're plenty interesting: colorful pictures of cavaliers and sultans and butterfly women with antennae sprouting from their foreheads. They give us just a hint of how Knoxvillians before World War I entertained themselves.
One of the first ones you can discern advertises a show called School Days: "A Fun Feast for Young and Old," with "55 Singers and Dancers." It features a cartoon dialogue between two young toughs, Biff and Izzy; Biff's claiming he "can lick any kid in"—well, the next word's rotted away, but we're left to assume Biff could lick any kid in school.
Its star was HERMAN TIMBERG. It's printed as if it was expected to be a draw. Today, the name wouldn't mean much even to the oldest old-timers. But it's one of the few names legible on these glued scraps that's recognizable to students of vaudeville. The versatile performer was a sometime songwriter, sometime comedian. In 1916, probably after his appearance at the Bijou, Timberg wrote the music for the Broadway sensation, The Great Show of Wonders. Later on, he was a comic MC at the Palace in New York; Milton Berle, who bridged the late days of vaudeville with the early days of television, remembered Timberg's Palace gigs in a memoir.
Few of the shows featured on the wall are readily recognizable, but one is Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. It opened to some success in New York in 1904 and was a sentimental favorite around the country for years afterward. W.C. Fields starred in a movie based on the play in the 1930s. "Your Invitation" the poster seems to say. "Don't miss the wedding." The play was mounted here by Liebler and Co., a New York company known for mounting more serious productions.
One poster advertises a musical called A Knight For a Day; that one you can look up, too. It was a modest success on Broadway during the 1907-08 period, as they were breaking ground for the Bijou. "New York's Sensation," the poster reminds us, as if we could have forgotten. "Company of 60 / Unsurpassed Beauty, Singing, and Dancing."
One, way over to the right, proclaims, "From the New York Hippodrome: Mr. Henry Elsworth's Authorized Pictorial Reproduction of...Oberammergau Passion Play." Oberammergau, Germany, is still known for its elaborate pageant of the life of Jesus. But the "pictorial reproduction" was apparently a motion picture of the passion play, which records indicate was shown at the Bijou on March 11, 1912. The poster advertises "chimes," which apparently accompanied the silent movie.
A couple of scraps here and there have copyright dates of 1910. All these posters appear to be from about that time, the Bijou's first three years or so.
One, I thought, was called The Stamp, by Cecil—somebody. The last name's gone. I wasn't sure that was the whole title, either, but I figured it was possible that a postage stamp could be a dramatic device, perhaps evidence in a murder mystery. I did some research into a show called The Stamp and didn't find much.
I later learned, through research done by Robert Ellis for a 1976 masters thesis about the Bijou, that a play called The Stampede appeared here on Nov. 6, 1911. The play was notable for two reasons: one in that it's a cowboys-and-Indians drama in which the Indians were the good guys and the cheating U.S. government was the villain: That was a rare motif in the first half of the 20th century. The other distinction is the rest of the author's name: what came after Cecil, when the poster was whole, was B. DeMille. It's unlikely that Mr. DeMille came to the Bijou to witness this production, but maybe it's worth noting that Knoxvillians were watching his plays long before the director's extravagant Hollywood career. A 1911 poster prominently featuring the name Cecil B. DeMille is likely one of those rarities that, if it were saved, might have helped pay for one of the Bijou's renovations.
One poster depicting a young beauty is advertised as "TESS OF THE ST—— [again, part of the word's missing] COUNTRY." The star, whose name is on top of the title as if she was a very big deal, is EMMA BUNTING. She's depicted on the poster, a gorgeous young woman with light brown hair, arranged in a late-Victorian bouffant.
However, in reference books, Mlle. Bunting seems to have been utterly forgotten. I couldn't find her name anywhere: not in any of several books about the vaudeville era, not in indexes to well-known American plays of the 20th century. But her name was featured so prominently on the poster, I persevered on the Internet.
There's not much there, either. The first thing I learned from the Internet's promiscuous combinations is that Emma Bunting is the real name of Baby Spice of the now-defunct Spice Girls. Most of the "Emma Bunting" citations on Google are all about the little blonde Brit. But the lady on the poster didn't look much like Baby Spice, so I did some further research.
I did find a query about the earlier actress Emma Bunting from a lady in Northern California. I wrote her with questions of my own. A retired concert violinist, Robin Kernan already knew a lot more than I did. She also directed me to Mlle. Bunting's nephew, Edward Bunting, who lives in South Florida; he's a former professional artist and college instructor in set design, but he seems prouder of his title as Faithful Navigator his district's Knights of Columbus. From the two of them, I patched together a thumbnail bio.
Hardly known today except in her hometown of Wellsville, Ohio, (which celebrated Ms. Bunting's centennial birthday in 1990), Mrs. Bunting got her start playing showboats and was a regionally popular actress at the time of the Bijou's opening. She was a rare beauty, and several men fell for her; she was married at least five times. Early in her career, she was friendly with other young actresses like Agnes Moorehead and Ruth Gordon.
Though she was later associated with New York, as an actress Bunting was most popular in the vaudeville houses of the South. Mrs. Kernan confirmed that one of Bunting's plays was Tess Of the Storm Country. Based on a 1909 novel by Grace Miller White, it's a racy melodrama about an embattled young country woman taking charge of a baby born out of wedlock.
As it happens, Mrs. Kernan knew both Bunting and White. She says Bunting was in line to get the fame that came to a slightly younger actress, Mary Pickford; Bunting had been offered the role of Tess that she'd made famous in theaters across the Southeast and Midwest. But Kernan says Bunting reneged on a contract and maybe lost a rare opportunity.
Pickford's title role in Tess Of the Storm Country in 1914 propelled her to stardom. It was so successful that she remade it in 1922. By then, as "America's Sweetheart," the most popular star of her era, was secure.
Emma Bunting's fate is more shadowy. She may never have appeared in a film. On the Internet, I found a stray reference to an Emma Bunting Stock Co. in New York, ca. World War I; the troupe's claim to fame is that it gave Dame Judith Anderson her American debut. Kernan confirms that that was indeed the same lady. Edward Bunting says his Aunt Emma did some acting on Broadway, performing in Shakespeare's As You Like It.
Mrs. Kernan lost track of the actress around 1945. Her nephew, Edward, doesn't know what became of her, either.
The weirdest poster on the wall is called HANLON'S FANTASY. It features two women cavorting, perhaps on another planet, in butterfly wings. One sports attractive antennae on her forehead. In my research I found absolutely nothing about it anywhere. If I had my pick of seeing one of these shows, I'd try to get a front-row seat at that one.
Some years ago, a former Bijou stagehand named Dean Novelli wrote a comprehensive history of this building. He has scrambled all over the complicated old place and offers some insights about the remnants. He concurs that all the posters belong to the Bijou's very earliest era. He says a whole section of the back of stage right used to be covered with Edwardian show posters, but that many fell victim to a hamfisted renovation effort in the 1980s. Workmen installing a safety ladder scraped off the antiquities, making no effort to save them. Frustrated, Novelli successfully removed one whole poster before it could be damaged, one advertising an obscure but sensible-sounding show called Don't Lie To Your Wife.
Up and down that surviving poster wall, over 30 feet above the stage, the soot-covered show posters are slowly yielding to the brick, slightly less noticeable with each season on the stage far below. Theater people, whether they're backstage or center stage, don't like to be forgotten, and some of the Bijou's old thespians haven't been. Not quite yet, anyway.
February 20, 2003 * Vol. 13, No. 8
© 2003 Metro Pulse
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