As a novel, Glorified is nothing special. Molly Robbins narrates her story from childhood on the upper West Side of Manhattan through her working life starting at the age of 14 to finding the man with whom it’s clear she will live happily ever after somewhere in her early twenties. There is nothing in the way of narrative tension and virtually no character development. The book only becomes interesting when you know that it’s the lightly fictionalized autobiography of a woman who was one of the best-known beauties of Florenz Ziegfeld’s Follies revues of the 1920s, and you can read it as a rare first-hand account of a legendary entertainment phenomenon from a backstage perspective.
Molly/Dorothy left school and began working full time at the age of fourteen after the death of her father. Her artistic talents landed her a job with a ladies’ wear manufacturer, but her precocious beauty and pressure from a classic showbiz mother soon had her auditioning for a place in one of the dozens of choruses that were a staple of Broadway and vaudeville shows. A quick learner and light on her feet, she managed to get hired for a road company, a traveling troupe operated by a New York-based syndicate that performed at theatres around the U.S..
These were the bottom rung of the showbiz ladder, and Molly’s helicopter mother prods her into trying out for a spot on the chorus of a Broadway-based show so she can make it home every night. Wegman leads us step by step through the process of auditioning, rehearsing, and then appearing in over a dozen performances each week — in shows that could run for years if successful. There is little glamorous about life in the dressing room:
Snowy necks, arms and backs. Air thick with the odor of many kinds of powders. Throats dry from lack of fresh air. Naked bodies. Long, slim arms winding varicolored veils about hips. Wiping perspiration off noses and brows, patting more powder on faces. One girl, already dress in a veil and breast plates, sitting in a corner, absorbed in a motion picture magazine.
Although chorus girls had a reputation for loose morals and adding machine minds, as Wegman portrays them, they were mostly chaste, modest, and with peerless work ethics. Ironically, many considered themselves lucky to have a relatively poorly paid job in the chorus, based mostly on their looks, dancing skills, and reliability, since there weren’t many other jobs — secretary, beautician, teacher — they were qualified for.
Like war, much of show biz involved a lot of sitting around and waiting. Well, not sitting:
One hour later. Sixteen young ladies in smart white satin costumes, with high, shiny black hats tilted at various saucy angles, were standing wearily in the wings, waiting — still waiting to go through the Strut.
Argument and discussion about lights, music, scenery and costumes had held up the rehearsal. Any minutes, for the past hour, the Strut would be called. So we waited. We couldn’t sit down and we couldn’t lean against the wall — (might soil the costumes). We didn’t dare go back to our dressing rooms, undress and wait comfortably. We just stood, nervous and tired, our feet aching in our stiff new slippers with the very high heels, dodging shifting scenes, talking in whispers, waiting.
Despite the fact that it was the primary plot line of something like half the Hollywood musicals of the 1930s and 1940s, it was uncommon for a performer to leap from chorus line to stardom. Instead, there were two routes up (aside from landing a rich Stage Door Johnny, which Wegman says were extinct by the early 1920s): featured dancer or showgirl. The first required exceptional skills like machine gun fast tap dancing, which was out of Wegman’s league. The second, however, sounds even better than stardom:
The work was very simple. Just walking across the stage, or standing on the stage till the curtain was lowered — that was all. No dancing, no marching in and out of doorways, no quick changes. Work was distributed. None of the girls had more than five numbers. Rehearsals were a leisurely, social affair. I actually rehearsed no more than ten or fifteen minutes an afternoon. The rest of the time I spent sitting with groups of girls listening to their gossip….
If you’ve ever seen one of the stage-bound early musicals such as Puttin’ On the Ritz, you’ve seen showgirls. They wore elaborate, often ridiculously ornate costumes and descended stairs or walked across the stage in a sort of slow, elegant strut.
That was it. And yet, as Wegman puts it, “These were the cream of Broadway’s beauties. Shapely creatures, all of them — and beautifully dressed. Each one was an individual, totally different from the other, and yet each one was unmistakably a ‘Zander [Ziegfeld] girl.'”
Wegman herself achieved this status when Ziegfeld promoted her from chorus to showgirl in his 1924 Follies, and she held the role until she retired in 1928, shortly after marrying playwright (and later screenwriter) Samson Raphaelson. She may have asked the same question as Molly: “What would I be like at thirty, at forty, at fifty?” In any case, both women opt for domestic tranquility — sustained tranquility for Wegman: she and Raphaelson were married for fifty-six years.
She began writing Glorified when she was put on bed rest with her second child, and she claims that the nurses had to pry the manuscript away from her when they came to wheel her into the delivery room. She also said that she wrote it as a novel because “There are enough writers to record their experiences which are infinitely more interesting than mine.” In a 1935 series on the lives of former Follies girls, she pronounced that her goal was “to manage her husband’s household well, rear their children properly, and express herself through his success without craving personal fame for herself.” She also reported that she grouped her friends by periods: pre-Follies friends called her Dolly; Follies friends called her Dorothy; and post-nuptial friends called her Dorshka.
It was as Dorshka that Leon Kroll painted her portrait in 1929, and it was as Dorshka Raphaelson that she took up her pen again in 1948, writing a sentimental and somewhat autobiographical novel called Morning Glory. Samson Raphaelson was among director Ernst Lubitsch’s favorite collaborators, and Dorshka grew into a position among Southern California’s community of German and Austrian expats rivalling that of Salka Viertel. Dorshka’s name pops up frequently in places like the letters of Kurt Weill and Lotte Lenya and accounts of leftist politics and culture in Hollywood.
The Raphaelsons returned to New York in the 1960s when Samson began teaching a course at Columbia University on screenwriting. He died in 1983. Dorothy (Dorshka) Wegman Raphaelson died in 2005 at the age of 100, reputedly the next-to-last surviving Follies showgirl.
Thirty-five years ago, I worked as a secretary for Joel Raphaelson, Dorothy Wegman’s son. I had no clue as to his parents’ connection to Hollywood or Broadway, until one day he mentioned that his widowed mom would be visiting from New York….and that, given my interest in all things 1920s, I might like to know she was once a Ziegfeld Girl. To say the least, I was gobsmacked, as I didn’t know any of those lovely ladies were still around!
The day Mrs. Raphaelson visited, the first thing I noticed was how petite she was. I always thought Ziegfeld Girls were tall, but this lady, even wearing heels, was tiny. Unfortunately, she was also having a bit of a dental emergency, as one of her crowns had fallen out while she was on the plane; luckily, I was able to make an appointment for her to visit her son’s dentist the same morning.
With her problem taken care of, she came back to take Joel to lunch. That’s when I got to see a different, humorous side of her as she described her dental treatment. Though she complimented the dentist highly, she was amazed at how much it cost just to re-cement her crown, saying “If I knew how expensive it was going to be to keep my natural teeth, I’d would’ve just had them all pulled as a young woman, and gotten myself a nice set of choppers!” Of course, I laughed, delighted at her down-to-earth sense of humor.
At the time, Mrs. Raphaelson was 88, and looked about 60; she would yet live another 13 years, passing away just three weeks before her 101st birthday. She was the second-to-last surviving Ziegfeld showgirl; Doris Eaton Travis, the very last Glorified Girl would live to 106.
What a wonderful memory. Thanks for sharing this.