Longhair Outgrosses Baseball
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Classics, Now a $50,000,000 Boxoffice Bonanza As Against
The National Pastime's $40,000,000 Per Annum -- Symph,
Opera and Ballet Big Middlebrow Draw
This a headline for a Arthur Bronson article on page 467 in the January 4, 1956 special 50th anniversary issue of Variety Magazine.
The Variety Anniversary Issue was an annual love letter between the entertainment press embodied by Variety Magazine, the primary trade journal for the entertainment industry, and all the people in the entertainment industry who benefited from the magazine's knowledge and reach. The opening pages of the Golden Jubilee issue are filled with individual full page advertisements taken out by all of the top Hollywood studio executives congratulating the magazine on its longevity. There are hundreds of other sponsored notes of congratulations from entertainers and corporations throughout this 512 page issue.
The entertainment industry for Variety comprises every sort of performing art, with an emphasis on those that make lots of money. But the fine arts did have a place within its pages where it was (one hopes affectionately) known as "longhair." The article below the headline above notes that in 1956 the "boxoffice" for classical music, ballet, opera put together exceeded that of baseball - that certainly gets the reader to stand up and notice. It goes on to note the importance of the arts in cultural diplomacy, the amount of money spent on classical long playing records and role of film, radio and television in popularizing the arts. Variety articles are often full of statistics -- this one notes that in 1940, 1,000 American towns offered concert series. By 1956 the number had risen to 2,600, certainly suggesting a growing interest in classical music.
The Anniversary Issue is full of lists and sidebars. One includes a list of "actors who have played actors." There is another list of "remakes of feature films" (by 1956 there had been 3 major releases of both Anna Karenina and Moby Dick). Gone With The Wind was at the top of the "all-time top money films," but who would have guessed The Robe would come in at number two? (Adjusted for inflation, Gone With The Wind is still the top grosser).
There is also a chronological chart "50 years of U.S. musical comedy and operetta" listing all the major shows that opened between 1905 and 1956. Later in the issue there is a table of "Broadway production statistics." This shows the Broadway peaked in 1927-28 with 264 productions throughout the season. It was only natural that the number of productions would taper off owing to the introduction of sound motion pictures and the Great Depression.
Just a year and a half after the Army-McCarthy hearings, this issue has an article entitled "Were You Ever Blacklisted?" subtitled "Variety was - many times, but found friends and special issues kept it going." This article has a table listing a "chronology of special issues" in Variety magazine over the years.
KRON-TV (the NBC and San Francisco Chronicle affiliate) is among the advertisers, touting a potential 4 million viewer audience and $5,158,223,000 in sales in 1954 (that figure must be for the entire Bay Area). An advertisement for "The Seven Ashtons," an acrobatic act from Australia notes that they were then performing at Bimbos in San Francisco.
Then there is this provocative headline:
Burlesque -- Its Rise and Demise
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Offshoot of Minstrelsy and Extravaganza, Cradle
Of Comedians, Once a Family Amusement, Burlesque
Succumbed to Smut and Strippers
While today there is a resurgence of interest, in 1956 Burlesque was thought to be on its deathbed. The article is written by the then 86 year old Barney Gerard, a long time practitioner of the art. (I cannot find a good biography of Gerard, but he has a number of credits in the Internet Movie Database and a Google Books search brings up myriad articles that show his deep involvement in vaudeville and burlesque). His article traces the "rise and demise in 60 years" of burlesque. He many stories including an explanation of the origin of the "hook" used to pull performers who were bombing off the stage. He even devotes a couple paragraphs to the scene in San Francisco with the Bella Union concert hall in the late 1800s and the Belvedere on O'Farrell Street around the time of the 1906 earthquake. In the end he laments that burlesque was "strip-teased into oblivion."
As far as I can tell these annual issues have not yet been indexed or scanned online, so they remain a little-known but fascinating on entertainment in all of its forms. The Library own issues of this annual from 1956 through 1989.
Variety. Anniversary Edition (Variety, Inc., [1956]-1983).
Variety. Show Business Annual (Variety, Inc., c1984-1989).
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