The Bride Wielded a Razor: Images of Women on the Blackface Stage of James McIntyre and Thomas Heath

Abstract

A newspaper advertisement for James and Thomas Heaths 1919 musical play Hello, Alexander! describes it as a Gorgeous Musical Extravaganza featuring 50 Talented Singing and Dancing Broadway Beauties The advertisement contains only one, hand-drawn image: a chorine performs a high kick, one lifted arm partially overlapping the name of McIntyre with the tip of her outstretched dancing shoe almost grazing the underside of the e. The chorine's costume exposes long, shapely legs, and apparently bare arms, shoulders, throat and decolletage, topped by diminutive facial features. (1) To look at this image and the descriptive text, one would think that the focal point of Hello, Alexander! was a collection of pretty white girls presenting the slightly risque leg show of early twentieth-century popular theater. This assumption is half correct, for the chorus girls strongly appealed to the predominantly white, male, middle-class audiences of vaudeville. and Heath needed this appeal because the true centerpiece of their decades-old act--blackface minstrelsy--was losing popularity quickly. The of the play's title was the same blackface character who had first appeared, with his partner during the 1870s. and Heaths introduction of white chorus girls to their blackface act was symptomatic of the decline of minstrelsy; it also provides an entry into an interrogation of the blackface duos career-long play on race and gender. and Heaths long career began during the height of blackface minstrelsy, ran through the glory days of Tony Pastor's variety, and survived into the roaring 1920s environment of vaudeville and burlesque, requiring the duo to adapt to changing theatrical conventions. Although the delineations of Henry and Alexander remained the chief attraction of their act, and Heath developed spectacular framing devices for these characters by incorporating supporting players and large female choruses. These dazzling elements layered new objects of humor and desire upon the established racial foundation of minstrelsy. (2) Although their partnership was extremely productive, and Heath have attracted little attention in recent scholarship. Their act is noted in such anecdotal histories as Douglas Gilbert's 1940 volume American Vaudeville, (3) but Henry and Alexander have not figured into theoretical analyses of blackface minstrelsy. In this essay, I will first describe the core elements of the Henry/Alexander stage relationship; then I will explore the addition of feminine elements to the act, and the reflections that gender make upon the central racial impersonations. The changing images of femininity in the work of and Heath--from the grotesque blackface gar to the mechanized white sex object--create a link between the oldest blackface traditions and the commodification of race and sexuality in the twentieth century. In both blackface stereotypes and idealized white dancing choruses, white, male theatrical artists projected an illusion of knowledge, even intimacy, with the bodies of people-African Americans and white women--who held inferior social positions. and Heath used this process to assert and confirm their performative authority, which translated into decades of ticket sales. The Henry and Alexander characters were typical of blackface minstrelsy, representing the urban dandy and the dim-witted stable hand, respectively. The original dynamic between Henry and Alexander--before they began sharing the stage with chorus girls--demonstrates several of the qualities described by Eric Lott: African American masculinity is reduced to a blackface binary; plots revolve around bodily urges such as hunger and lust; much of the humor arises from punning malapropism; and the blackface world they live in also contains grotesque blackface females, who represent a monstrous, devouring sexual power. (4) There is also evidence of a strong homosocial bond between the two actors, which echoes the larger homosocial context Lott ascribes to blackface minstrelsy. …