Eva Tanguay is married, maybe

One hundred years ago today … The news was out that Eva Tanguay, the risqué vaudeville icon, was either already married or getting married to fellow entertainer Roscoe Ails. The Daily News report below includes some tit-bits: Tanguay's Upper West Side address, 305 West 72 Street; and the fact that she had recently bought a California house formerly tenanted by Jack Pickford and the recently-deceased Olive Thomas (about whom see our September 10 post.) 

Marriage was a complex notion where Tanguay was concerned. She had publicly vowed not to remarry after her divorce to John Ford two years earlier (Erdman 191). What few historians have looked at Tanguay seem to think she and Ails never actually tied the knot (Erdman 213). But over in Ohio, where the two had been seen together that September 1920, the Dayton Daily News would claim to have evidence they had.

Tanguay had satirized the institution of marriage both as an expression of love and for its gender rigidity. At the Alhambra in 1907 she staged a public engagement ceremony with actor Julian Eltinge, a renowned female impersonator. Tanguay arranged for Eltinge, in women’s dress, to present her with a ring that she, dressed as a man, accepted. The act pilloried notions of masculinity and femininity and gendered sartorial expectations. It was also typical of Tanguay's career-long erasure of the categories of private and public. 

1920 was an odd year for Tanguay. Once the top-paid performer in vaudeville, her star had faded. Her name caused its biggest commotion in 1920 when Dorothy Parker used it in Vanity Fair to slam Billie Burke and got fired for it (as we explained on January 11). Tanguay had made news in June 1920 when she bought property in Manhattan Beach (“Brooklyn-Queens Auction,” The New York Times, 10 June, 1920, p.29) and when her driver kneecapped a pedestrian (“Eva Tanguay’s Auto Fractures Man’s Knee,” Daily News, 24 June 1920, p. 12).

References/further reading:

Brayshaw, Emily. “Ethnographic spectacle and trans-Atlantic performance: Unravelling the costumes of vaudeville's ‘Queen’, Eva Tanguay.” Studies in Costume & Performance, 4 no. 1 (2019).

Casey, Kathleen. “Sex, Savagery, and the Woman Who Made Vaudeville Famous.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 36 (1), 87-112.

Erdman, Andrew. Queen of Vaudeville. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2012.

– JONATHAN GOLDMAN, SEPTEMBER 13, 2020.

TAGS: vaudeville, celebrity, marriage, divorce, gender