Gays on Broadway Ethan Mordden

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Gays on Broadway
Gays on Broadway
ETHAN MORDDEN
 Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the
University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing
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Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
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© Ethan Mordden 2023
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Mordden, Ethan, 1947- author.
Title: Gays on Broadway / Ethan Mordden.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2023. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2022040741 (print) | LCCN 2022040742 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190063108 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190063115 |
ISBN 9780190063122 (epub) | ISBN 9780190063139
Subjects: LCSH: Gay theater—United States—History. | American drama—20th
century—History and criticism. | Gay men in literature. |
Theater—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century.
Classification: LCC PN2270. G39 M67 2023 (print) | LCC PN2270. G39 (ebook) |
DDC 792.086/640973—dc23/eng/20221121
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040741
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022040742
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190063108.001.0001
Portions of the section on Company in Chapter Seven first appeared in the author’s blog,
Cultural Advantages, on August 22, 2015.
Illustrations courtesy of the Billy Rose Theatre Collection, the New York Public Library For
the Performing Arts, Astor, Lennox, and Tilden Foundations; and private collections.
 Contents

INTRODUCTION: You Mussst Come Over!

1. THE 1910s AND 1920s: Shadowland
2. THE 1930s: The Gays Who Came To Dinner
3. THE 1940s: The Poet Of Big Characters
4. THE 1950s: The Body Beautiful
5. THE 1960s: You Shouldn’t Wear Heels When You Do Chin-Ups
6. THE 1970s: Did You Go To Oberlin?
7. THE 1980s: Well, Yes, Actually, Yes, I Have
8. THE 1990s AND 2000s: They’re Taking Over
9. THE PRESENT: Mr. Albee Never Changes His Mind

For Further Reading

Index
 Introduction
You Mussst Come Over!

This is a chronological review of both the plays and the people that
brought the world of homosexuals, bisexuals, transsexuals,
metrosexuals, and the sexually fluid to the American stage.
The plays—which take in a few foreign imports—treat strong gay
content (e.g., The Boys In the Band or The Killing Of Sister George),
or minor gay content (Season In the Sun, The Nervous Set), or even
a phrase in passing (as in New Faces Of 1956’s joke about Rome’s
Piazza Di Spagna, so niche that perhaps fifty people got it during the
show’s six-month run).
I have included as well plays that portray gay through dog
whistles (such as Bell, Book and Candle, in which the witches are
really gay people) and even plays whose sense of parody or outright
camp (such as Little Mary Sunshine or Johnny Guitar) are at least
gay-adjacent.
As for the people in the book—writers, actors, creatives—I have
included profiles of some who, though gay, had little interest in
portraying gay lives—Edward Albee, for example, even as his
influence not as a writer about gay but rather as a writer who is gay
was extremely broad, so conclusive that he takes pride of place at
the end of this volume. These so-to-say pre-Stonewall eminences—
actor-manager Eva Le Gallienne is another one—are as much a part
of the chronicle as such overtly gay-in-content writers as Terrence
McNally.
Consider the case of lyricist-librettist John Latouche, whose work
ranged from black folklore (in Cabin In the Sky) to Greek myth (in
The Golden Apple) to silent-era Hollywood (in The Vamp), all “sexy”
topics that never even glance at gay culture yet resound with the
colorful doings that gays in particular respond to. One could argue
that Latouche’s chromosomes enabled his very agile imagination and
love of the picturesque.
I make no attempt to include every relevant reference. Rather, I
have tried to cover every type of gay activity, even if with but one or
two examples. There isn’t room for it all. Readers who feel important
titles or people have been slighted should consider writing their own
books, as the field is still wide open and could use some company.
Live and let live.
 1
The 1910s and 1920s
Shadowland

Like many great events, it all starts with drag queens. This may
seem an implausible concept for early in the twentieth century, given
the antagonism that gay men and women* have faced in their fight
for visibility and civil rights. However, the many single-gender private
schools of the day and their robust dramatic societies habituated
Americans to men playing women and women playing men. Further,
there was a popular genre of plays specifically calling for a male
character forced against his will to disguise himself as a woman.
There was even a classic in this line, a British comedy constantly
performed here especially by amateur groups, Brandon Thomas’
Charley’s Aunt (first seen on Broadway in 1893), which proved hardy
enough to turn into a hit musical, Frank Loesser’s Where’s Charley?
(1948), starring Ray Bolger and running for two years.
No, it isn’t quite Drag Queen Planet. Still, that same “man
pretends to be a woman despite himself” premise was the standard
plot for America’s most prominent (of several) drag actor—or, as
they were styled then, “female impersonator”: Julian Eltinge. His
form was musical comedy (or plays with a handful of songs, a
common format around 1900), and his approach to drag delineated
the impersonation so deftly in both grooming and behavior that
some in the audience took him for a biological woman and were
startled when, in his curtain call in drag, he would tear off his wig
with a grin.
Eltinge was equally persuasive when playing male characters as
well, which is what made him so successful: his shtick, really, was
how totally he transformed from man to woman and back and forth
thus all evening, because his men were virile and his women tender.
In Charley’s Aunt, the joke is that the female impersonation is
deliberately grotesque yet fools the other characters completely.
But Julian Eltinge emphasized the illusion, even when he sang.
Starting in vaudeville, he reached Broadway in 1904, in a British
import, Mr. Wix Of Wickham. This was a major production, put on by
Edward E. Rice, one of the founding fathers of the American musical,
as composer and impresario. In fact, Rice cowrote and produced the
first American show with a full-scale and largely integrated score,
Evangeline (1874).†
Eltinge always moved in grand company. He was close with
George M. Cohan and other Broadway bigwigs, and A. H. Woods,
Eltinge’s manager (the old term for “producer,” though “agent” was
sometimes part of the job as well), was one of the powers of the
theatre industry. The original of the brash hondler who calls
everyone “sweetheart,” Woods actually built a playhouse in his star’s
honor, the Eltinge Forty-Second Street Theatre, in 1912. ‡ And after
his years as a boldface stage name, Eltinge moved to California to
go Hollywood, starring in silent films in his usual gender-bending
approach and building as Villa Capistrano a mad showplace on
Baxter Street in Silver Lake. A cross between Spanish Mission and a
fortress, it was four stories high and perched on a hill with a
CinemaScope view of the lake. Here was a very tower of fame,
though the surrounding greenery made the structure nearly invisible
from the street.
So Eltinge was big, supposedly the highest-paid actor of his
generation—yes, a drag queen. True, his public profile accented
cigars, boxing, and such. And his offstage photos revealed a chunky,
amiable, middle-class guy, perhaps an insurance broker: nothing like
the slithery, sarcastic performers famed in drag today. Open Daniel
Blum’s Great Stars Of the American Stage (1952), devoting two
pages to each subject, with a kind of yearbook precis and stills in
and out of costume, and there’s Eltinge rowing a canoe, flanked on
either side by beauties of the day in elaborate costume—belle
epoque, schoolgirl, pour le sport, matronly . . . and they’re all
Eltinge, too! (The shot was made through double exposure, the CGI
of its time.)
Ironically, none of Eltinge’s four Broadway shows ran very long on
The Street, though they did fine business on the road, making
Eltinge a truly national celebrity. After Mr. Wix Of Wickham came The
Fascinating Widow (1911), The Crinoline Girl (1914), and Cousin
Lucy (1915). The major title in the set, the Widow, found Eltinge as
two-fisted Hal Blake, forced to masquerade as a certain Mrs. Monte
in order to expose a Society Cad and win the heroine. The score
favored Eltinge’s drag ID, complete with entrance number (“The
Fascinating Widow”), a beach ditty with the chorus girls in swimming
togs (“Don’t Take Your Beau To the Seashore”), and the de rigueur
rhythm piece (“The Rag Time College Girl”), among other numbers.
Note, again, a collaboration with a theatre hot shot: though the
music was by the unimportant Frederick W. Mills, the book and lyrics
were the work of Otto Hauerbach (later Harbach), mentor of Oscar
Hammerstein II and a major writing partner of Jerome Kern.
Now for the $64,000 question: was Eltinge gay? Of course, there
were rumors, based for all we know on nothing—but Eltinge was a
lifelong bachelor, then as now a curiosity. Straight men tend to
marry.
Meanwhile, there was an openly gay drag artist, one who—unlike
Eltinge—reveled in the campy rebellion of the male who is a queen
and wants the world to know: Bert Savoy. Also unlike Eltinge, Savoy
did not fit easily into story shows, having too much distracting gay
baggage for the boy-meets-girl tales of the day. Rather, Savoy
specialized in the “sophisticated” Broadway revue—the spectacular
Miss 1917 (coproduced by Florenz Ziegfeld) and the modest but
chichi Greenwich Village Follies, in 1918, 1920, and 1922.
These variety shows allowed Savoy to work within a self-
contained act. Using a “feeder”—in this case “straight man” Jay
Brennan—Savoy would flounce about in fifi getups, so drag in the
modern “flaming” sense that if gay hadn’t already existed, Bert
Savoy would have had to invent it.
 Savoy had two catchphrases that gained a national presence,
quoted even by folks who had no idea who Bert Savoy was or why
anyone would address someone as “Dearie.” One was “You don’t
know the half of it, dearie, you don’t know the half of it.” The words
moved into popular song in George and Ira Gershwin’s Lady, Be
Good!, in “The ‘Half Of It, Dearie’ Blues,” conjured up for Fred
Astaire with rampageous tap breaks between the lines.
Savoy’s other catchphrase achieved even larger circulation, as it
offered Mae West the matrix for her famous “Come up and see me.”
The original version, Bert Savoy’s, was “You must come over!,”
pronounced with a louche lilt of delight, hand on hip and eyes afire
with mischief: “You mussst come over!” This line, too, found its way
into song, as Lewis E. Gensler, B. G. De Sylva, and Ira Gershwin
again seized on the fad in a semi-hit musical of 1925, Captain Jinks,
with “You Must Come Over Blues.”
Central to Savoy’s act was his recounting of the adventures of his
forever unseen gal pal Margie. A typical episode might take off with
a blatant double entendre, thus:

SAVOY: I’ve a new recipe for homemade candy. Oh, it’s all the rage—
all-day suckers! You mussst come over!
BRENNAN: You were telling me about your friend Margie.
SAVOY: Oh, that Margie! Always some new calamity! Why, just last
week she and her beau went to the movies to spark in the
balcony. All the kids do now, you know. Oh, they all go sparking
—the peppy ones. Yes, but even before Margie and her cavalier
take their seats, he gets into a conversation with a handsome
usher, and my dear he simply cannot tear himself away! Oh,
he’s so unusual!

As the public laughs, Savoy moves downstage, Surveys the House,

and sasses out, “You mussst come over!”
People who were around back then always said, in recalling men
and women who were obviously gay, “You never spoke about it.”
Really never? Even with all the information coming from the popular
arts? The bohemian life in Greenwich Village—a mixture of artists,
political agitators, gays, prostitutes, and nonconformists of all kinds,
not to mention a conservative Italian-American community—was a
standing joke among New Yorkers. Once again, there was a song
about it, in Jerome Kern’s Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918), to lyrics by P. G.
Wodehouse, “[For there’s something in the air of little] Greenwich
Village.” The second verse tells of “my favorite aunt Matilda,” who
left Oshkosh at the age of eighty-three to try life among the Village
savages:

She learned the ukalele [sic],

She breakfasted at Polly’s,
And what is worse,
She wrote free verse,
And now she’s in the Follies!

Note that Polly’s, on MacDougal Street, was under police surveillance

for its lawless habitués, both sex workers and gays. Wodehouse
might have been referencing the restaurant simply as a Village
landmark—but it had a Reputation. Just to mention it was to
disseminate information about the thing You Never Spoke About.
Cole Porter, too, flirted with taboo, one year later, in Hitchy Koo
1919, in “My Cozy Little Corner In the Ritz,” “’cause I like to watch
the kings and let the queens see me,”—and he didn’t mean the royal
kind, as he was always sneaking Allusions into his lyrics. Ironically,
one of the most potent such Porterisms is by Noël Coward, who
wrote his own wicked verses to Porter’s “Let’s Do It (Let’s Fall In
Love).” There we learn that “Belgians and Greeks do it” and then
“Nice young men who sell antiques do it.” And Porter sang his
version in his very successful Las Vegas cabaret turn, at the Desert
Inn in 1955, before a mass audience, not a niche of sophisticates.
Not everyone clued into gay style was of the clan or clan-friendly,
though. A New York tabloid of the 1920s and 1930s, Broadway
Brevities, devoted to the doings of the famed and reckless, covered
as well “pansies” and “dykes,” emphasizing the popular stereotypes.
Sample headline: fag balls exposed. Sample cartoon: a haughty,
lipsticked gentleman enters the ladies’ room as an aghast woman
asks, “Oh, isn’t there some mistake?” “Sez you,” the man retorts.
Sample newsbreak: Noël Coward supposedly has “discovered” a
“lad” dancing “in a Bombay honky tonk” and “has kept him ever
since.”
Broadway Brevities was available on newsstands, its flashy covers
right next to New York’s dailies. Even more widely known was Anita
Loos’ Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, a satirical novella on the lovely
blond gold digger Lorelei Lee and her worldly sidekick, Dorothy.
When Lorelei encounters a French father and son who are always
kissing each other (in the Gallic manner, bien sûr), Dorothy says
“people would think that [they] painted batiks.” Further, one of the
heroine’s wealthy boy friends has a sister who “always likes to spend
every evening in the garage taking their Ford farm truck apart and
putting it back together again.”
At the same time, gay characters were cropping up in serious
drama in the late 1920s, so they were not only speaking about it but
portraying it. In Machinal (1928), expressionism based loosely on the
decade’s infamous Ruth Snyder–Judd Gray murder case that ended
with their execution, playwright Sophie Treadwell doesn’t tiptoe
about: in a scene in a bar, she describes two minor players, billed as
“a Man” and “a Boy,” as, respectively, “a middle-aged fairy” and
“young, untouched.” The Man invites the Boy to his home to show
him “a first edition of Verlaine that will simply make your mouth
water.”
More prominently, Eugene O’Neill’s nine-act Strange Interlude
(1928), which took so long to play because characters interspersed
into their dialogue the content of their thoughts, included a closeted
man in its storyline, one Charles Marsden. He’s a major principal,
with both the play’s opening and closing lines, and while he neither
does nor says (nor even “thinks” aloud) anything overtly gay, O’Neill
tells us he has “an indefinable feminine quality about him,” with
“long, fragile hands” and “a quiet charm.”
Well, that’s a step up from a middle-aged fairy. But the key title in
this era is The Captive (1926). A French play, Édouard Bourdet’s La
Prisonnière, it tells of a young woman who defies convention in her
liaison with another woman. But is she truly a captive or a willing
partner?
 The American production, staged by Gilbert Miller in the
translation of Arthur Hornblow Jr., respected the original rather than
adapt it, though the Parisian setting and the French names were a
tad exotic and though Bourdet’s form was the old-fashioned “well-
made” work in three acts, with exposition, complication, and
disposition. To wit:

ACT ONE: Irène is evasive in her reluctance to marry her sweetheart.

ACT TWO: That sweetheart’s old friend reveals that Irène is intimately
involved with his wife in “the kingdom of shadows,” from which
there is no escape. “One can never overtake them!” he cries.
And this wife is the ultimate femme fatale, with charm that
turns the world upside down in a prison of love. “[I] hate her,”
he says. “I worship her.”

Now, the well-made play habitually climaxes with the so-called scène
à faire, the “obligatory scene” in which the play confronts its devils.
The prodigal son shows up when his lover is marrying his brother.
The villain unknowingly sips from the poisoned chalice. The treasure
map is found: X marks the spot.
So, Bourdet has to produce Irène’s amour, so we can see for
ourselves this fascinating jailer of souls:

ACT THREE: The lesbian captor appears. She is insolent, sly, sure of
herself. She is the Queen of Shadows!

No, wait. That’s too obvious. Instead:

ACT THREE: She will be modest, attractive, pleasant, and she will give
Irène up.

But Bourdet cleverly omits the scène à faire altogether. The captor
never appears! And really, could any actress encompass the allure
and terror that Bourdet had built up—Jezebel, Circe, and Mata Hari
in one vessel? “She dominates three acts,” John Mason Brown wrote
in Theatre Arts magazine, “a hundred times more vividly than if she
had ever appeared.”
 And who knows if this phantom really is a captor? Because just as
matters seem to smooth themselves out, Irène ditches her fiancé
after all and leaves to rejoin her lesbian lover. Is Irène truly the
prisoner . . . or a willing participant in the imprisonment? Even . . . a
captor herself?
The Captive was a classy production, not an indie affair but Big
Broadway. Gilbert Miller was the son of Henry Miller, a major actor-
manager who erected his own playhouse, rebuilt as the Stephen
Sondheim Theatre. And Junior opened The Captive at the Empire,
Broadway’s most prestigious house, built by Broadway’s most
prestigious producer, Charles Frohman.§ Further, The Captive’s cast
was very presentable, led by Helen Menken as Irène and Basil
Rathbone as her fiancé. In all, this was an imposing attraction, not
to be mistaken for an exploitation piece like the “sex comedies” that
had become popular since the late 1910s such as The Woman In
Room Thirteen, Up In Mabel’s Room, She Walked In Her Sleep, even
the salacious-sounding Twin Beds.
Nevertheless, an openly lesbian character was dangerous stuff in
1926, for the authorities had an extra irritation to deal with in the
person of Mae West, actress, playwright, director, and arguably one
of the most influential figures in opening the culture to information
that fascists of all kinds want kept secret. Remember, as Auntie
Mame says, “Knowledge is power.”
West was promulgating the avatar of the New Woman:
independent, entrepreneurial, and sexual. West’s characters—all
versions of West herself—were living autonomously rather than
within traditional social constructions. In other words, she was no
man’s woman. She knew this would outrage the authorities; she
meant to, in fact.
Moreover, she habitually concocted stories that combined the
outlaw world with Society, showing grandees getting involved with
crooks. This threatened to destabilize Americans’ respect for the
elite, especially those whores the professional politicians.
No wonder West insisted on writing her own lines when she got
to Hollywood, in 1932: she couldn’t trust anyone else to endow the
West Woman with the appropriate worldview. Try this snippet of
Paramount’s Goin’ To Town (1935), in which West tries to crash High
Socì:

MAE: For a long time, I was ashamed of the way I lived.

MAN: You mean to say you reformed?
MAE: No, I got over bein’ ashamed.

But we’re here to discuss West’s Broadway work; oddly, her

twenties plays, credited to “Jane Mast,” are just this side of
barfulous, because she hasn’t yet developed the persona she was to
immortalize in her talkies, somewhat modeled on Bert Savoy—again,
his “You mussst come over!” turned into West’s “Come up and see
me.” Still, these Mast concoctions are historical, for West placed the
gay male, his campy lines, and even a drag ball right on stage for
the first time.
Sex (1926), which West appeared in as well as wrote, dealt with a
more or less goodhearted prostitute mixed up with fancy folk, one
Margie LaMont (another reference to Bert Savoy’s routine). Sex ran a
year despite the critics’ irritation (“a nasty red-light district show”
should have been a pull quote), partly because of the title’s promise
of sinful doings but mainly because the public was fascinated with
West’s unique performing style, with the cockeyed strut, the hand on
hip, and the murmured umms and oohs, the pillow talk of the
Magdalene.
West didn’t appear in her more controversial shows, The Drag
(1927) and The Pleasure Man (1928), but there the show-off parts
were gay men, indulging in minty repartee. One of the parish met “a
handsome brute of a taxi driver” and “he’s been following me ever
since.” It was the Broadway Brevities come to life, the real thing.
The Drag folded on its tryout, as West was strongly discouraged
from bringing it in. The District Attorney for New York County, a
transplanted Texan named Joab H. Banton, was a crusader, against
real crime but also against tolerance of what the Brevities liked to
call “the Third Sex.” With the sympathy of many city fathers behind
him, Banton decided to close some “offending” Broadway shows and
prosecute those involved, including the actors. Interestingly, he
waited till the Mayor, James J. Walker, was out of town.
Banton didn’t have to wait long, as Walker was notorious for his
countless vacations. Nevertheless, for all the corruption of his
administration, Walker was a live-and-let-live kind of guy, and he had
many friends in what was then called “the show business.” So
Banton was not only a bigot, but a sneak.
And with Walker off at the beach somewhere during a cold
February in 1927, Banton struck. It was not unprecedented, be it
said, for city officials to persecute the stage. Earlier in the 1920s,
they closed and indicted participants in the production of Sholem
Asch’s The God Of Vengeance (1922), an off-Broadway show that
had moved to The Street. Written in Yiddish, the play had swept the
Western world because of its melodramatic blending of sex and
religion, personified in its high-strung protagonist** who is both
Jewish zealot and bordello keeper.
Shocking for the day, the action is set for two of its three acts in
the brothel, and Asch even includes a lesbian scene, quite delicately
written, in which one of the prostitutes befriends the brothel
keeper’s daughter. It was perhaps this notion that sex workers might
have tender and even spiritual instincts that offended the
professional Grievance Committee that is always with us in one form
or another. Those aggrieved even counted a conservative Jewish
influencer, a prominent rabbi who was enraged by the depiction of
his co-religionists working in a whorehouse.
So The God Of Vengeance was shuttered by force, right in the
middle of a successful run. Yet this example of how the state can
decide what theatregoers can and cannot see did not startle the
theatregoing community as much as one might think, for the play
was an exotic—European in origin, composed (though translated, by
Isaac Goldberg) in a language spoken only by obscure immigrants,
and played by actors no one had ever heard of. This even though
Rudolph Schildkraut, the show’s protagonist and director, was the
father of Joseph Schildkraut, who had just broken into fame in the
title role of Ferenc Molnar’s Liliom (the source of the musical
Carousel) and would maintain an important career for thirty years,
finally creating Otto Frank, the heroine’s father, in The Diary Of Anne
Frank (1955).
Then, too, Broadway was in an expansive mood in the 1920s, and
some two hundred productions opened every year. So it was easy to
overlook even a controversial title like The God Of Vengeance,
especially because the hatred of gay people kept theatre critics from
using the word “lesbian,” dancing around it with euphemisms. The
closest the Morning Telegraph got to it was “There are some themes
that have no place on the stage,” and many of the dailies refused to
cover the show’s obscenity trial.
However, in the four years between The God Of Vengeance and
The Captive, lesbians no longer terrified the press. Now they were a
novelty: the critics discussed Bourdet’s play as if it marked the first
depiction of gay women on Broadway. True, The Captive was talky
and suave, which made it easier to tolerate than the melodramatic
God Of Vengeance, a play living in a state of rage. The Captive was
middle class, while The God Of Vengeance was sheer outlawry.
Still, The Captive was a show that the Joab Bantons of the world
were born to close down—better, to punish. Arrest the producer, the
playwright, the actors! Planning his raids, Banton created a bucket
list that included many of Broadway’s most interesting productions;
that was their problem. Banton believed in a theatre that
entertained, not in one that stimulated or inspired. Or, worse,
informed. One of the shows Banton was after was An American
Tragedy (1926), Patrick Kearney’s adaptation of Theodore Dreiser’s
novel. It was critical of American society and therefore a major
addition to Banton’s list. But common sense warned him that
overreach might outrage the public and sabotage his purification
campaign.
So he settled on just three titles for his raids: The Captive; a sex
comedy called The Virgin Man; and Mae West’s Sex. And, make no
mistake, West was the real reason for the legal blitzkrieg, for West
was dangerous. Her worldview challenged the status quo—about
sex, yes, but also about everything. In a way, she was a hetero
version of your gay uncle, a bank of information about the world
that was far more intriguing than anything you heard from your
parents. West was a forerunner of Auntie Mame, telling you to stop
conforming and live, live, live!
Banton wasn’t the only official who heard fighting words in the
concept of a free and outspoken theatre. Directly after the Banton
raids, New York State Senator B. Roger Wales successfully
introduced a law threatening prosecution of those putting on plays
treating “sex degeneracy, or sex perversion”—indeed, any play that
could be called immoral. Haters of the probing liberalism of art
thrilled at the very vagueness of “immoral”; that could be anything
they didn’t like—Alice In Wonderland, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,
floor wax. Note, too, that if prosecution led to conviction, the theatre
owner could find his house padlocked for a year. The genius of the
law lay in its grandeur: it was so encompassing that it would never
have to be applied, as thespians would censor themselves out of
sheer self-defense. This so-called Wales Padlock Law remained a
potent threat through the 1940s. Ultimately enfeebled through
disuse, it nevertheless remained on the books until 1967.
The Banton raids had a comic side, though, for the assault on
Mae West’s Sex gave its author (as she herself admitted) the kind of
PR money can’t buy. The press was filled with her escapades during
her week’s imprisonment (with two days off for good behavior).
Reporters told how she wore her own silk underwear rather than the
city’s standard issue, dined in state with the warden, and, on
release, was greeted like an opera diva who had closed the season
with a superb Carmen.
And West wasn’t giving up yet. As I’ve said, The Drag was too
controversial to resuscitate, so West wrote The Pleasure Man to
utilize The Drag’s outstanding elements. One was a murder plot: the
protagonist, a closeted gay man with a secret male lover, kills him
out of jealousy. A second element was the drag ball itself, with not
only fantastical costumes and queens ripping each other apart
verbally but also an onstage band and musical numbers: the works.
So The Drag had become a musical. Formerly set in New York
amid West’s beloved Society, it was now a backstager laid in “a small
midwestern town” and concerned with stage performers, whose
lifestyle is arguably only a step or two from a drag ball, anyway. The
protagonist was a straight man of the caddish sort who is castrated
(to death) by the brother of a woman he has wronged.
West may have thought she had made The Drag less risky in its
new form as The Pleasure Man. But it was still too flashy for
Banton’s taste, and the law came after this one, too. raid mae west
play, The New York Times reported. seize 56 at opening. But Mae
fought for her show with an injunction, and everyone piled back into
the theatre for the second performance, a sold-out matinee. Partway
through, the cops busted the show again, making The Pleasure Man
possibly the only Broadway title to have played 1½ performances.
West continued to work on Broadway on and off even after
launching her Hollywood career, in 1932, but she no longer tried to
bring gays out of darkness into Broadway neon. Yes, there was a
sensationalist aspect to her use, in The Drag and The Pleasure Man,
of cross-dressing parties and in-crowd repartee. It’s arguably
exploitative. And, sadly, at other times in her life, West would make
bigoted assessments of the world of gay men.
Yet consider this exchange in The Drag between a judge and a
doctor:

GAY-HATING JUDGE:People like that should be herded together on some

desert isle—
FAIR-MINDED DOCTOR: Why?
JUDGE: For the good of the rest of humanity.
DOCTOR: You’d need a large island, Judge. And again, why? What
have they done? Their crime isn’t of commission or omission. . .
. A man is what he is born to be.

The doctor also reminds us that many prominent persons have been
gay, forever and everywhere: “Kings, princes, statesmen, scholars,
fools!”
Truly, was anyone else—in or out of the arts—expressing so
cogent an argument for tolerance in The Drag’s 1927? True, you
could say that West simply had an affinity for outlaws, whether
crooks or the oppressed. Still, whatever her motivation, Mae West
was the first Broadway star to make a case for homophile
acceptance, which makes her unique among the innovators in this
chapter—Bert Savoy and his hissy campapalooza, Cole Porter and his
impish innuendo, Sophie Treadwell and the blunt naturalism of her
queen and his pick-up in Machinal, and even the people who put on
The Captive. Brave they must have been, yet its leading lady, the
aforementioned Helen Menken, declared after the show was raided
that she wouldn’t return to the production even if its impresario
successfully defended it in court.
Perhaps she realized that, after giving gay a bit of leeway as a
curiosity of the carnival side-show kind, the authorities were going to
lower the iron curtain. Typically, Julian Eltinge found himself all but
fired from show business, as “female impersonation” was now
illegal. Bert Savoy’s fate was harder yet: three years before the
Banton raids, in 1924, Savoy was struck by lightning while walking
along the sands at Jones Beach. One might almost see in it a
portent of things to come.

* “Gay,” when the word exploded nationally in its current meaning (as opposed
to its older denotation of “chic and carefree”) after the Stonewall Rebellion of
1969, referred to men and women alike. Over time, popular usage broke the
category into gay men and lesbians, perhaps in recognizing differences in the two
subcultures. I’m using “gay” in its 1969 sense, denoting males and females
generally.
†
Mr. Wix also gave the then unknown Jerome Kern his first substantial credit,
for Rice heavily revised the British score and Kern composed about half of the new
music.
‡ Seating nine hundred with a small orchestra and two balconies, the house still

stands today, albeit at a different address: the entire two-hundred-thousand-ton

structure was moved down the block and turned into a cineplex.
§
Frohman became a common noun like Kleenex or Frigidaire. When actor met
actor and one reported that he was up for the new Fitch or O’Neill, his colleague
would ask, “Yeah, but who’s the Frohman?”
** By the rules of the ancient Greeks, who invented Western theatre, there can

be only one protagonist per work. Other principals are the deuteragonist and the
tritagonist, but the protagonist is the one the story is about—Oedipus, Molière’s
Dom Juan, Dolly Levi. We’ll be observing that usage in this book.
 2
The 1930s
The Gays Who Came To Dinner

If the previous chapter was something of a prologue, our tour more

truly starts now, and Eva Le Gallienne is an ideal first stop, as she
was one of the most remarkable gays of the twentieth century:
uncloseted, visionary, and the very last of the great actor-managers.
This now-forgotten occupation denoted an individual solely in
charge of an acting company, as producer, director, and star: an
auteur, to borrow a term from film. As an idealist, Le Gallienne
instituted the revolving-repertory model—an expensive one, because
you had to pay actors who didn’t necessarily play every night,
expanding the salary calendar. And repertory was tricky to sell to the
average theatregoer, who had to check the schedule to find which
day of the week they were giving the particular show he or she
wanted to see. Worse yet, the manager (again, simply the old term
for “producer”) couldn’t assemble a troupe of seasoned actors,
because the established names wanted to freelance.
On Broadway. That’s where the fame and money were. Repertory
gave you training and experience, especially in The Classics. But a
sound career profile meant working on The Street, which Le
Gallienne avidly loathed. Broadway was a land of play boutiques, she
thought. It catered to the whims of a dilletante public rather than
enlightening devotees with work of real content, from Molière to
Ibsen to Chekhof, as Le Gallienne did in her Civic Repertory Theatre,
which lasted from 1926 to 1933. Put simply, Le Gallienne embodied
art, not commerce. Theatre was a temple; the profit motive
profaned it. Broadway was a place of money–changers, while
repertory ennobled all who took part in it.
Now, what was Le Gallienne like personally? Tireless, resourceful,
and very strong-willed. I’d call her the ultimate lesbian butch,
because she was a born leader, and, in her romances, she had the
ownership—the living quarters (including a house in the wilds of
Connecticut), the money, the schedule, and (because she partnered
with actresses) the theatre. She was a tough ringmaster, yet also
protective of her charges. Le Gallienne’s biographer, Helen Sheehy,
interviewed actress Rose Hobart, who recalled how another player
outed Le Gallienne to Hobart and said it was assumed that the boss
had taken Hobart to bed.
Hobart told Sheehy that Le Gallienne “taught me everything. . . .
She was my instructor on . . . what kind of human being you should
be.” Yet the lesbian thing was a shock. When Hobart went to Le
Gallienne, the latter “took one look at me, and said, ‘You’ve heard.’ ”
But was there a problem? “Have I ever done anything to hurt you?”
Le Gallienne asked. She hadn’t, of course. Le Gallienne was a
fascinating creature—not unlike the unseen charmer of The Captive,
perhaps. But she never exploited her appeal to ensnare anyone.*
Finally, Le Gallienne told Hobart, “I’m looking for beauty in my way,
and it’s not everybody’s way.”
Key words! Le Gallienne looked for beauty in great playwrighting,
dedicated actors, even determined audiences who would find their
way to the Civic, in a long-disused house down on Fourteenth Street
and Sixth Avenue, far south of the theatre district. And location was
crucial back then, for day-of-performance walk-in business sold far
more tickets than advance sales. When a box office opened each
morning, the house could be nearly empty yet reach Standing Room
Only by curtain time—because of that walk-in business, which is why
Broadway’s playhouses were neighbors. Customers would roam from
theatre to theatre, inspecting the photographs and signboards (“100
Performances!” or “ ‘Comedy Hit!’—Daily News”) and weighing their
purchase. But nobody “walked in” twenty-five blocks away on
Fourteenth Street. You had to need to see Le Gallienne’s shows
(though she did maintain a box office uptown to make it easier for
her audience).
It really seems a bit hopeless, despite a theatre structure so large
(it ran through the block from Fourteenth to Fifteenth Street) that
the stage could be thrown open to the rear wall for a spectacular
effect impossible in most of the uptown houses. However, Le
Gallienne had wealthy angels, and she featured ensemble casts
anticipating the Stanislafskyan naturalism of the Group Theatre,
launched about five years after the Civic. In the end, Le Gallienne
was so successful that, in the 1928–1929 season—a commercial
disaster theat because Broadway had built too many theatres and
outstripped its public, leaving even good fare starving for support—
the Civic sustained an astonishing 94 percent capacity.
True, this was partly because Alla Nazimova had joined the Civic.
The infamous Russian beauty, recently a Hollywood movie star who
had wrecked her career with a little too much infamy (such as
filming Salome with a reputedly all-gay cast in designs that could
have come from the Mad Hatter), was all the same a compelling
artist. Le Gallienne saw the women stars of Broadway as personality
merchants, such as Helen Hayes and her mannerisms, signing her
portrayals as if distributing autographs. Nazimova, however, was an
actress—and, be it said, one of the girls in the band.
As for Le Gallienne’s own acting style, she worked an expansive
technique that enabled her to disappear into her characters, from
the White Queen in an adaptation of Alice In Wonderland † to Peter
Pan to Camille. Look at photographs of Le Gallienne in costume:
she’s different in every shot, somebody else forever.
She was the opposite, then, of her colleagues. They were always
themselves; she had no self. She was her roles. This is getting
famous the hard way—yet President Roosevelt wanted to give the
Federal Theatre to Le Gallienne as its chief.
This was one of the programs the New Deal’s Works Progress
Administration designed for artists, writers, and thespians, simply to
keep our arts foundation alive during the blitz of the Depression. But
note that even as the Wales Padlock Law still forbade even the
representation of homosexuals on Broadway, the government
wanted to give control of a national theatre system to a woman who
was somewhat known to be gay. This wasn’t just an honor: this was
history.
But Le Gallienne saw a “federal theatre” as an expansion of the
Civic Rep, while the Roosevelt administration saw it as a social safety
net—at that, one to address a national audience with a miscellany
ranging from children’s shows and old-time melodrama to all-black
Shakespeare and experimental agitprop. A lot of it would be
amateurish populism, not the high-maestro playwrighting that Le
Gallienne worshiped. She and the regime could not come to terms,
and Roosevelt hired Hallie Flanagan to run the shop; an adept of
experimental theatre.
This was in the mid-1930s, after the Civic finally had to close.
Ever after, Le Gallienne kept trying to return to repertory, but—to
repeat—the model is cumbersome. Her last hurrah found her as an
actor-for-hire playing what she really was, a grand old relic who lived
to act and acted to live, in Kaufman and Ferber’s The Royal Family
(revival, 1975). Still full of spit and vinegar, Le Gallienne tied herself
in knots commuting to the Helen Hayes Theatre on Forty-Sixth
Street (now demolished) while averting her eyes from its façade,
where gigantic lettering bore the two words Le Gallienne hated the
most in the English language . . . “Helen Hayes.”
And all this occurred without faking a “lavender marriage.” The
Lunts did, Katharine Cornell and Guthrie McClintic did, Charles
Laughton did. Even Mercedes de Acosta, a writer of everything but
mainly the lover of every prominent lesbian of the early twentieth
century, faked one. De Acosta’s list of conquests took in such as
Nazimova, Marlene Dietrich, our own Eva Le Gallienne, and, top of
the line, Greta Garbo. Cecil Beaton was treated as a fatuous
sycophant in television’s The Crown (as the royal photographer), but
he knew everybody and got into everything, and he paid de Acosta
quite some compliment in his journal: “She was one of the most
rebellious and brazen of Lesbians,” partly because she would leave
her New York apartment dressed as a kind of Baroque troubadour
and with a white-painted face and hair moussed in midnight black.
Tallulah Bankhead called Mercedes the Countess Dracula.
Perhaps the most cynical of the hetero-married gays was Cole
Porter. After all, whatever love life the Lunts had and with whom was
as clandestine as a state secret, and though Katharine Cornell’s
husband was as fey as a buttered popover, only theatre people knew
him. But Porter positively radiated gay: he was smart and playful,
extremely aware of (and friendly with) the boldface names of the
day, and an admirer of fabulous women, the saucy and glamorous
personalities that make show biz go. All this is the urban gay style—
as was Porter’s sexual worldview, favoring men who were neither
saucy nor fabulous: trade.
Trade comes in many forms, from bordello employees to shady
street characters to “real” citizens, such as the young technician at
the Liberty Music Shop who went on house calls to repair your
phonograph. Porter would rip out wires in the playing arm, then set
up an appointment, though the fellow would know there is no way a
record player can sustain an “accident” like that. Still, he’d go about
his work, and Porter would offer him a cocktail. But all he wanted
was beer; that’s trade for you.
Why did Porter marry? Because he was strictly comme il faut, and
style was his ethic, from the buttonholed carnation in his lapel to the
swank drollery of his shows—Gay Divorce (1932) with fashionable
Fred Astaire or Anything Goes (1934) on the power of celebrity.
Porter’s wife, the former Linda Lee, was something of a drip, though
the usual word for her was “socialite.” It’s a vague term, though,
denoting virtually any married woman who knows how to dress. It
was Linda’s dream that Porter would, one, go classical and, two,
stop dating toothsome riffraff. A hypochondriac, Linda may have
weaponized her ailments to sex-shame Porter, and his friends always
knew when she had caught him in flagrante again, as she would hop
back into her iron lung.
Porter had studied classical technique and once composed a
ballet, but he stayed with pop, and we wonder how Linda felt about
all the gay material Porter would slip into his lyrics. His music is
superbly crafted, with many a rhythmic or harmonic surprise, and his
words are perhaps the wittiest Broadway knew till after World War
II. Still, Porter’s worldview is subversive, though much of it is
conveyed in in-jokes for the cognoscenti. He speaks especially to his
fellow gays of the ecstasy and horror of love at its hottest, of its
power to affirm the ego but also of its destructive impulses, its
restive contradictions. “I Hate You, Darling,” the Porter heroine
pleads, or “Get Out Of Town [before it’s too late, my love],” because
love is so absolute it swallows one’s very identity.
The sentimental love ballad is basic equipment in the thirties
musical—think of “As Time Goes By” ‡ or “There’s a Small Hotel.” But
Porter’s ballads are often obsessed or fatalistic. “Night and Day”
pounds with longing; “[It was] Just One Of Those Things” actually
celebrates the end of an affair. Other songwriters treat the romance
that never ends, but Porter’s sweethearts adopt the bumblebee
promiscuity for which gay men are famous, anticipating a popular
joke of the early Stonewall era:

Q: What do lesbians do on the second date?

A: Hire a U-Haul.
Q: And what do gay men do on the second date?
A: What second date?

Then, too, Porter constantly slips parish code words into his lyrics.
We’ve already heard him talk of “queens,” and in “I’m a Gigolo,” from
Wake Up and Dream (1929), the singer admits “Of lavender my
nature’s got just a dash in it.” There’s more than a dash in “Farming,”
from Let’s Face It! (1941), which warns us not to “inquire of Georgie
Raft why his cow has never calved.” Aren’t animals supposed to
mate? Yes, though it turns out that “Georgie’s bull is beautiful but
he’s gay!” The G word, no less! And note Porter’s use of the
venerable folk wisdom that all the pretty ones play for the team.
At that, in the essential thirties Porter show, Anything Goes, one
of the hit tunes the piece was studded with, “I Get a Kick Out Of
You,” is the torch number of the girl who can’t land the guy—almost
a counterpart to the gay guy with a crush on the straight guy, a very
basic situation in gay life that Porter would have been well aware of.
It’s a subtly lavish number, its refrain built out of quarter and half
notes constantly alternating with triplets (though few singers
observe Porter’s notation correctly), giving the melody the air of
flight soaring above earthly cares.
Ethel Merman introduced it in the show, because she loves
William Gaxton while he’s after Bettina Hall.§ Thus Merman was
trapped for a time in the “extra woman” category, available for
laughs and songs. They called this type a serio-comic, meaning she
has the talent but not the oo-la-la. Fanny Brice and Sophie Tucker
were others such; they tended to play vaudeville or revue rather
than story shows because they were too interesting not to star yet
weren’t right for the romance.
Merman was so interesting that she eventually got the guy, too.
Still, she didn’t turn soft, and in real life she was a phallic woman, a
tough New York broad with the filthiest mouth on Broadway. Sailors
ran blushing from the room. In fact, Merman exemplifies a diva type
that gay men have played courtier to since who knows when, and
Porter adored her, not least for her pinpoint diction, benison to
Porter’s lyricist side. At rehearsals, he would blow a whistle if a
performer wasn’t getting the words across; he never had to with
Merman.
Yet there was more to Porter’s admiration for this particular
performer—a love of the outsized, struck-by-lightning female talent
that gay men cultivate, as with Bette Davis, Mary Martin, Tallulah
Bankhead, Maria Callas, Carol Channing, Barbra Streisand, Bette
Midler. All marvelous one-of-a-kinds, they defy in various ways the
cautions of the culture. They don’t “look” right or they “overdo.” But
they give the public everything they have, and they can be just as
theatrical offstage as on.
Merman, for example, was blunter than a pawnbroker and
grander than Napoléon, very aware of whom she had to respect and
whom she could scold, and there was an excitement about her that
Porter seldom felt among the international café parasites he
hobnobbed with. In short, Merman was a Character. Whenever
someone mentioned Mary Martin, Merman would immediately pipe
up with “Dyke, ya know.” She was uneducated but fast and shrewd
in comeback. Long after her Porter years, during her brief and
stormy marriage to Ernest Borgnine, Merman (who was in her mid-
fifties at this point) returned from a TV taping so pleased with
herself that she had Borgnine snarling before she got through the
front door.
“What are you so happy about?” he caws.
“Well,” she explains, “they just loved my thirty-five-year-old face,
and my thirty-five-year-old figure, and my thirty-five-year-old voice.”
“Yeah? And what about your sixty-five-year-old cunt?” he
counters.
And she replies, “Nobody mentioned you at all.”
Merman epitomized a term I coined decades ago, the Big Lady,
but there was another gay performer type emerging in these inter-
war years, the Beautiful Male—and Porter’s next show after Anything
Goes, Jubilee (1935), offers one in Mark Plant. It was Jubilee’s
conceit—in Moss Hart’s book—that a royal family of vaguely British
hue would tralala off to romantic adventures. The King finds Elsa
Maxwell; the Queen hooks up with MGM’s Tarzan, Johnny
Weissmuller; the Prince gets a sort of Ginger Rogers; and the
Princess pairs off with Noël Coward. Plant played the Weissmuller
role as Mowgli, making a personal appearance at his latest film clad
in a bearskin that left most of Plant’s flesh open to view.**
The Hart and Porter Mowgli may have set the matrix for the
Beautiful Male as a dope. Plant’s entrance line is “Me Mowgli, me
save girl from elephants!,” and the formal speech that Hart wrote for
him is inane. “Well, folks, here we are,” it begins, going on to “I
guess we’re certainly all here, all right. Yessir, here we are,” and so
on. Then Porter steps in with “When Me, Mowgli, Love,” perhaps the
most bizarre song Porter ever wrote. The music tells of jungle drums
lightly pounding, palm trees swaying, and a lot of heavy sex, and the
lyrics report on Mowgli’s erotic prowess, as an audience of elephants
watch through opera glasses.
Keep in mind that the gym-expanded or even just well-toned
physique, de rigueur in leading men today, was all but unknown in
Another random document with
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Gazette, Edinburgh, newspaper commenced by Captain Donaldson,
212;
recommenced, 324.
Ged, William, invents stereotyping, 555;
his son James joins the rebellion, 557.
Gentleman, John Purdie pleads that he is not a, 352.
Gibson of Durie and his colliers, 249.
—— of Linkwood, imprisoned in Elgin tolbooth, and burns it, 239.
Gilmerton, subterranean house at, 502.
Gipsies of the province of Moray, 233.
Girded Tails, 448.
Glasgow, cruelty at to Quakers, 57;
rise of commercial wealth in, 125;
trades with colonies, 431;
deterioration of morals at, 486;
mercantile losses at, 337, 487, 565;
bankrupt pilloried, 487;
malt-tax riot at, 508;
making great advances, 515;
a mad merry-making at, 543;
afflicted with bugs, 542.
Glass for mirrors, art of polishing, by Leblanc, a French refugee, 154.
Glass-work at Leith, 23;
at Glasgow, 128;
at Aitchison’s Haven, 154;
of Lord Elcho, 155;
complaint about English bottles imported, 229.
Glenbucket, Gordon of, attempt to assassinate him, 488.
Glenbucket, Lady, dispute between her and her eldest son, 159.
Glencoe, massacre at, 2, 62;
French version of, 64.
Glenorchy, Episcopal minister of kept in at the Revolution, 7.
Gordon, Duchess of (Elizabeth Howard), meeting of Catholic
worshippers at her house in the Canongate, 466.
Gordon, Duchess of (Elizabeth Mordaunt), introduces agricultural
improvements, 419;
pensioned for Protestantising her husband’s family, 554.
Gordon, Duke of, holds out Edinburgh Castle for King James, 1;
has a meeting of Catholic worshippers in his house in Edinburgh,
204.
Gordon, second Duke of, his death, and its political importance,
554.
Gordon, Mr, his powers of clairvoyance, 490.
Gordon of Ellon’s two sons murdered, 422.
Gordon of Glenbucket, his attempted assassination, 488.
Gordons of Cardiness and M‘Cullochs of Myreton, 174.
Gordons of Gicht, 304.
Gow, the pirate, affair of at Orkney, 505.
Graham of Gartmore, his account of state of the Highlands, 615.
Grain, export and import acts, 137;
Kerr of Chatto’s appeal for custom on grain brought to Kelso, 138;
importation permitted (1697), 182;
forbidden to be exported (1699), 221.
Grange, Lord, visits a religious visionary, 430;
his troublesome wife, 578;
opposes abolition of the witchcraft laws in parliament, 579.
Grant of Monymusk’s improvements of land, 418.
Green, Captain, and his companions, unjustly tried and executed,
316.
Greenshields, Rev. James, Episcopal minister, persecutions of, 350.
Gregory, Professor, his machine for raising water, 237.
Grierson, Sir Robert, of Lagg, imprisoned as a ‘suspect person,’ 11,
68;
 accused of ‘clipping and coining,’ 145.
Gunpowder, explosion at Leith, 264.

Haddington, Thomas, Earl of, his improvements and plantations,

417.
Halden and Leslie, Covenanters, 378.
Hall, Lady Anne, her funeral, 212.
—— of Dunglass, desecration of a church by, 369.
Hall, Robert, of Inchinnan, his ‘pretty peculiar accident,’ 353.
Hamilton, keeper of Canongate tolbooth, asks Privy Council to
renew certain perquisites lately withdrawn, 80;
another petition by, 182.
Hamilton, Lord Basil, his death, 246.
——, William, of Bangour, in connection with the Dancing Assembly,
483.
Hamilton’s lottery, 88.
Hart, Rev. James, a noted clergyman of Edinburgh, 397, 429.
Harvest of 1699, thanksgiving for, 221.
Haunted houses, 169, 435.
Healing virtues ascribed to crystal, ivory, stones, glass, &c., 262;
Dow Loch, 263.
Healths, treasonable, 182.
Hell-fire clubs, 521.
Hepburn, John, persecuted for preaching without authority, 149.
Heraldry, Alexander Nisbet’s System of, published by aid from
Scottish parliament, 276.
Heriot’s Hospital boys taught useful arts at the suggestion of ‘Society
of Improvers,’ 530.
Hership of cattle on lands of Lord Rollo, 117.
Highlanders, predatory habits of the, 30, 31, 498, 612.
Highlands, resistance in, to taxation, 91;
ignorance in, 252.
Highway robberies, 83.
Historia Anglo-Scotica, a book, burned at the Cross of Edinburgh,
276.
Historical Society at Edinburgh, 487.
Holyrood Sanctuary, anecdotes of the, 349.
Home, Earl of, ordered into Edinburgh Castle as a dangerous person,
but allowed, on medical certificate, to remain at home, 117.
Home, Lady, of Renton, conduct at her husband’s funeral, 200.
Home of Renton writes about increase of witchcraft, 94;
affray with tenants of Sir James Hall of Dunglass, 345.
Hoops for ladies, fashionable in 1719, 448.
Hope of Rankeillor, an agricultural improver, 485.
Hopetoun, Charles Hope of, his arrangement for supplying victual
to his miners, 210;
his windmill at Leith, 290.
‘Horn Order,’ meeting called the, 482.
Hospital for sick first established in Edinburgh, 557.
Hospitality, great, in Scotland, 570.
Housebreaking, capitally punished by the Lord Provost of Edinburgh
in 1730; W. Muir’s execution, 568.
Houston, James, and Sir John Shaw of Greenock, assault between,
402.
Hume, David, circumstances connected with his birth, 56.
Hume, John of Ninewells, married to Lady Falconer, 55.
Hume of Marchmont, 1.
Hummum, a, or Turkish bath, set up at Perth in 1702, 260.
Hunter and Strahan hanged for forgery, 335.
Hunters’ ball at Holyrood, 590.
Hurricane in January 1739, 603.
Husbands ill-using wives, their punishment by the Stang, 589.

Ilay, Earl of, admitted as an extraordinary Lord of Session, 341;

curious anecdotes of in connection with the Post-office, 266.
Immorality and impiety ascribed to Scotland by General Assembly in
1691, 41;
efforts to restrain, 342.
Improvers [Agricultural] Society of, 484, 580.
Incestuous connections severely treated, 59, 354.
Inchbrakie, George Graham of, makes a riot, 24;
Patrick, the young laird, kills the Master of Rollo, 117.
Infanticide and concealed pregnancy, 26.
Infirmary at Edinburgh, its origin, 557.
Influenza in Scotland, 554.
Inoculation introduced into Scotland, 530.
Insurance against fire, 446.
Intelligence-office projected, 244.
Inventions and manufactures, various, 154.
Inverary petitions for ‘ease’ from the tax-roll, pleading ‘poverty and
want of trade,’ 51.
Invergarry House garrison, 304.
Inverlochy, fort planted at, 2.
Irish cattle imported, 153.
—— ——, laws against importation of, 242;
contraband Irish victual staved in Clyde, 137, 241.
Irvine of Drum, of weak intellect, arrangements regarding, 22;
 anecdote of his widow, 144.
Irvine of Murtle’s conduct towards Lady of Drum, 144.
Irvine, Robert, murders his two pupils, 423.
——, Robert, of Corinhaugh—slow travelling, 222.

Jacobite party formed, 2;

Jacobites in Perthshire make a riot, 24;
persecuted under apprehension of a French invasion, 66;
the Jacobite clans unsubmissive, 60;
Jacobite lairds of Fife, 84;
Jacobite gentlemen troubled for drinking treasonable toasts, 182;
their plot in 1704, 295;
proceedings of the party in 1715, 389;
their estates forfeited, 408;
subscription for prisoners (1716), 411;
gentlemen in exile, 524.
Jamati, Joseph, Baculator of Damascus, in Edinburgh, 581.
James VII., death of, 107.
Jedburgh, incident at proclamation of King William at, 7.
Johnstone, James, a very wretched prisoner, 14.
Johnstone, Margaret, widow of Johnstone younger of Lockerby,
forcibly asserts her rights, 35.
Jubilation in Edinburgh on reconciliation between king and Prince of
Wales, 453.
Judges, severity of, in cases of Rutherford and Gray, 371;
salaries of, 303.
Justiciary, commissioners of, their salaries, 302.

Kellie, John, a corporal, fights a duel, 404.

Kennedy, James and David, under prosecution as paramours of one
woman, 59.
Kennedy of Auchtyfardel kills Houston, W.S., on streets of
Edinburgh, 321.
Keppoch, Macdonalds of, a wild race, 15;
fight with Laird of Mackintosh at Inverroy, 16;
Coll Macdonald of, 192.
Ker, Robert, his censure of Girded Tails, 448.
Kilravock, Laird of, amounts paid for his daughter’s education, 57.
Kilsyth church, body of Lady Kilsyth preserved in, 98.
Kincaid, Mrs, of Gogar Mains, murder of, 473.
Kincardine, Earl of, his death, 319.
Kinnaries, Fraser of, a Catholic, placed in restraint, 25.
Kintore, Earl of, his concern in preservation of the Regalia disputed,
264.
Kircher’s Disfigured Pictures, an optical curiosity, 101.
Kirkcaldy, &c., nearly ruined by the debts of a regiment quartered
there, 45.
Kirkcudbright, stewartry of, riot in, on account of the Sheriff’s Mart,
362.
Kirk-treasurer’s Man, a bugbear to men of gaiety, 343.
Konigsberg, church at, built by a Scottish collection, 134.

Ladies, Scottish, in 1718, described by a traveller, 433.

Lagg, Sir Robert Grierson of, confined at the Revolution, 11;
suffers from confinement, 68;
charged with coining, 145.
Lanark, assisted on account of poverty, in building a bridge, 134.
Land Mint, essay published on, 320.
——, price of, 103.
Langton, Laird of, his wards and their allowances, 56.
Lantern, Magical, in 1694, 100.
Lauder, Bailie, of Haddington, imprisoned, 33.
Leas, John, of Croshlachie’s maltreatment, 157.
Leblanc, French refugee, mirrors made by, 154.
Leith, glass-work at, 23, 229;
gunpowder explosion at, 264;
duel at, 566.
Levellers of Galloway, 492.
Leven, Earl of, assaulted by Boswell of Balmouto, 84;
by revellers, 312;
carries Excise money to London, 340.
Libraries, presbyterial, in the Highlands projected, 250;
partly realised, 253.
Licentiousness, 41, 320;
proclamations regarding, 342.
Lindsay, Patrick, upholsterer, connected with nobility, 547.
Linen manufacture, 85, 541.
Linlithgow, remarkable disappearance of a gentleman at, 239.
Livingstone, William, of Kilsyth, a Jacobite, temporary leniency
shewn to, 66;
liberated on condition of exile, 97;
romantic story of his marriage to Dundee’s widow, ibid.
Lockerby, Johnstone of, troubles in family of, 34.
Locks, ingenious, invented, 99.
Logan, Robert, makes wooden kettles to ‘abide the strongest fire,’
214.
Lothian, John, imprisoned after the Revolution, 14.
Lothian, Marquis of, letter from, regarding slave colliers, 249.
Lottery proposed by Alexander Hamilton, 88;
one by Roderick Mackenzie, 310.
Lovat, Hugh Lord, confined at the Revolution, 11.
Lovat, Simon Lord, his violences in Inverness-shire, 186, 254;
has a command in the Black Watch, 498;
his account of the Highlands (1725), 498;
puffing letters of, 552;
alludes to depredations in the Highlands, 614.
Love, John, charged with brewing on Sunday, 582.
Loyalty a paradoxical feeling, 415.

Mabie, Catherine Herries of, forcibly dispossesses a tenant, 36.

M‘Culloch, Sir Godfrey, murder by, 174.
Macdonald of Glengarry exhibits a strange trait of Highland feeling,
18;
a garrison at his house, 304.
MacDonell of Barrisdale, 616.
M‘Ewen, Elspeth, accused of witchcraft, 193.
M‘Ewen, James, starts a newspaper, 439.
M‘Fadyen, a drover, robbed, 83.
M‘Farlane, Mrs, murders Captain Cayley, 412.
M‘Gill, Mr, minister of Kinross, his house haunted, 435.
Macgregor, Robert (Rob Roy), see Rob Roy.
Macgregor of Glengyle levies black-mail, 612.
Machrie, William, a fencing-master, 267.
Mackay, General, his cheap dinner, 46.
Mackenzie, Roderick, of Prestonhall, his petition for transporting
victual from Forfarshire to Midlothian, 211.
Mackenzie, Sir George, warrant granted to print his works, 220.
Mackie, Andrew, his house haunted, 109.
Mackintosh, Laird of, kept out of his property in Glenroy, 15;
 made prisoner, 16;
obtains letters of fire and sword against Keppoch, 192;
his expensive funeral, 307.
M‘Lachlan, John, sentenced to be whipped and banished for
tampering with recruits, 79.
Maclaurin, Professor Colin, election of, 512.
Macpherson, James, the robber, 234;
his execution, 236.
Macpherson of Invernahaven charged with stealing cattle from
Grant of Conygass, 142.
Macqueen of Pall-a’-chrocain kills the last wolf in Scotland, 609.
Macrae, James, a Quaker, pressed as a soldier, 59.
Macrae’s, Governor, return to Scotland, 585.
Magazine, Scots, established, 603.
Malicious Society of Undertakers, 578.
Malt, Patrick Smith’s plan for drying, 303.
—— tax riots at Glasgow, 508.
Manners, general change of (1730), 568;
levity of, censured, 520.
Man-stealing, a case of, 44;
edict against, 211.
Manufactures set up, 85, 126, 154.
Mar, Earl of, hoists standard of rebellion in Aberdeenshire, 389;
letter to Robertson of Struan, 526.
Marriages, forbidden, 353.
Marriages in high life, ceremonies at, 240.
Marrow Controversy, 441.
Martin’s description of Western Isles, 278.
Martyrs’ tomb in Greyfriars’ Churchyard, 533.
Maxwell, John, of Munshes, his account of agriculture in his early
days, 494.
Maxwell, Robert, a noted early writer on agriculture, 485.
Maxwell of Dargavel and Hamilton of Orbieston, dispute between,
69.
Maxwell of Orchardton, a Catholic, his case, 295.
Mechanical inventions, curious, 99.
Medical practice, popular, as exhibited in Tippermalloch’s Receipts,
53;
fees, 22, 117.
Mein family connected with Post-office in Edinburgh, 514, 593.
Menzies, Major, kills town-clerk of Glasgow, 103.
Menzies, Professor John, characteristic letter by, 524.
Mercantile enterprise in Scotland takes its rise, 121;
increased after the Union, 336.
Merchandising Spiritualised, a book printed in Glasgow in 1699,
220.
Merchant Company of Edinburgh, their treatment of Mary Flaikfield,
76.
Metrical elegies, 140.
Miller, George, a boy, trepanned as a soldier, 43.
Miller, Hugh, quoted regarding sand-hills of Culbin, 110.
Miln, Sir Robert, his reduced circumstances, 208.
Miners’ provisions, mode of obtaining from distant towns, 210, 211.
Mint in Scotland, 330.
Mitchell, the ‘Tinklarian Doctor,’ 358;
his visit to Calder, 450.
Mitchell, William, his ear nailed to the Tron for insolency, 23.
Mock Senator, a satire by Pennecuik, 473.
Money in Scotland at the Union, 330.
Monteath, Robert, advertises for epitaphs, &c., for his Theater of
Mortality, 382.
Montgomery of Skelmorley, plot of, 3.
Moray, Earl of, small debt-case, 77.
Morer’s Account of Scotland, 269.
Mortality in Edinburgh (1743), 610.
Moss Nook, a Scottish serf living in 1820, 250.
Mowat, Ensign, concerned in a murder at Leith, 48.
Muir, David, surgeon at Stirling, charge for drugs used by him to
wounded of Killiecrankie, 47.
Munro of Foulis, his funeral, 560.
Murchison, Donald, defends the Seaforth estates against
government troops, 459, 468;
his death, 471.
Mure, Elizabeth, her account of Scottish manners in eighteenth
century, 571.
Mure of Caldwell’s journey from Edinburgh to Ross-shire, 406.
Murray, a tavern-keeper, in trouble on account of a false news-
letter, 71, 144.
Murray, Clara, her violent letter to Lord Alexander Hay, 275.
Murray, Lady, of Stanhope, assault on, 478.
Murray, Sir Alexander, of Stanhope, his projects, 474;
Strontian mines, 476;
Ardnamurchan scheme, 474.
Mushet, Nichol, murders his wife, 454;
he is executed, 455.
Music, concerts of, in Edinburgh, 89, 139;
rising taste for in Scotland, 432;
Orpheus Caledonius, 434.
Musical instruments, curious advertisement of, 325.
Musselburgh, riding of marches at, 622.

Nasmyth, a builder, at Inversnaid fort, 374.

Navigation of rivers, Henry Neville Payne’s petition, 217.
Negro slave, runaway, advertisement in Courant regarding, 453.
News, false, punishment for, 71.
—— -letters, 71;
Murray, a tavern-keeper, sued for a false news-letter, ibid.
Newspapers, notices of early, 212, 313, 324, 414, 438.
Nicholson, Daniel, his case of adultery with Mrs Pringle, 60.
Nicol, William, of High School of Edinburgh, anecdote of, 223.
Nisbet, Alexander, his System of Heraldry patronised, 276.
Nithsdale, Earl of, troubled on return from France, 216.
Noblemen, imprisonments of, 68.
Norvill, Dame Mary, petitions Privy Council in behalf of her
children, 55.

Officers of the army, their accounts at hotels, 45.

Ogilvie, Patrick, of Cairns, employed to guard the coasts against
Irish importations, 243.
Ogilvy of Forglen, his death and last injunctions, 533.
Orkney, a pirate taken in, 505.
Ormiston, Alexander, imprisoned, 14.

Painting in oil, early notices of in Scotland, 563.

Paper-manufacturing, 87.
Paragraphs from old newspapers, Appendix.
Paraphernalia of women, decided by Court of Session, 166.
Parochial schools, establishment of, in Scotland, 151.
Parsons, Anthony, a quack medicine-vender, 261.
Paterson, Archbishop of Glasgow, imprisoned, 12;
permitted to live at certain places, 167.
Paterson, William, promotes commerce and founds African
Company, 121;
his liberal ideas, 124;
opposition to Bank of Scotland, 131.
Pates of Court of Session, 291.
Payne, Henry Neville, tortured and imprisoned for ten years, 39;
proposes an improvement in river navigation, 218.
Pease-meal, nutritiousness of, 472.
Peebles, infanticide at, 19;
prison not strong enough to secure a female culprit, 20;
vested with a peculiar privilege, 51.
Perpetual motion, scheme of, by David Ross, 102.
Perth, ‘Duke’ of, his baptism, 383.
——, Earl of, taken prisoner at the Revolution, 11, 12;
liberated, 66;
again imprisoned, 67.
Perth, tumult at, on account of a picture, 565.
Peterhead as a harbour of refuge for vessels pursued by French
privateers, 120.
Petrie’s Rules of Good Deportment, &c., 455.
Piper of Musselburgh, trepanned as a recruit, 44.
Pirates hanged at Leith, 458.
—— under Henry Evory seize a man-of-war, 150;
a pirate in Orkney, 505.
Pitcairn, Dr Archibald, introduces dissection in Edinburgh, 105;
anecdotes concerning, 223;
 brought before the Council for leasing-making, 224;
raises an action for defamation against Rev. James Webster, 378;
his death, 383;
his writings, 384.
Pittenweem, treatment of witches there in 1704, 299.
Plantations, criminals and degraded persons transported to, without
trial, 115, 211.
Planting first attempted in Scotland, 417.
Poiret, Elias, murdered at Leith, 48.
Poor, vagrant, multitude of, 218;
regulations for, proposed, 219.
Pope, the, tried and burned in effigy in Edinburgh, 3.
Porpoises thrown ashore at Cramond, 23.
Porteous, Captain John, plays a match at golf with Hon. Alexander
Elphinstone, 566;
his unpopularity, 594;
condemned for murder, 595;
executed by the mob, 596.
Porteous riot, unpopular witnesses regarding, 600.
Post-office, general arrangements in 1689, 20;
the post sometimes robbed and tampered with, 21, 74;
post-boy robbed by Jacobite gentlemen, 32;
act for establishing General Post-office, 125;
violation of letters at Post-office, 265;
affairs of, in 1710, 327, 357;
improvements of, by Mr James Anderson, 400;
accidents to postbags, 513;
improvements of, 514.
Potato culture, 604.
Poverty of Scotland, traits of the extreme character of, 45.
Prayers, equivocating, 78;
meetings for, 228.
Preaching in open air, 606.
Pregnancy, concealment of, act against, 26.
Presbyterian form of worship, innovation on, punished, 350.
Press, restrictions on the, 181.
Priests in trouble. See Catholics.
Pringle of Clifton, fights a duel with Scott of Raeburn, 330.
Printing, art of, in Scotland (1712), 363.
Prisoners’ aliment, 208.
Prisoners detained, from inability to pay prison dues, 34.
Prisoners of Canongate Tolbooth, take possession of it, 71.
Prisons crammed with disaffected persons in 1689, 11.
Privy Council deals with Episcopal clergymen, 78.
Profaneness, proclamations against, 342.
Prussian grenadiers, recruiting for, in Edinburgh, 490.
Purdie, John, pleads he is not a gentleman, 352.

Quack medicines vended, 260.

Quakers, persecuted at Glasgow, 57;
persecuted at Edinburgh, 178;
appear at Cross of Edinburgh, 467;
build a meeting-house there, 621;
one sets up a manufactory, 620.

Racing in Scotland, 454.

Raffle of Indian screens by Roderick Mackenzie, 310.
Railway, an early, at Prestonpans, 472.
Ramsay, Allan, Scottish poet, satirises metrical elegies, 140;
his reference to Sir Richard Steele, 427, 429;
reference to musical entertainments in Edinburgh, 432;
 to the dancing assembly, 483;
concern in theatrical entertainments, 518;
lends plays, 544;
erects a theatre, 598;
his Gentle Shepherd acted, 624.
Rattray, John, a poor man, imprisoned at the Revolution, 14.
Rebel prisoners removed from Edinburgh to Carlisle for trial, by
virtue of ‘treason-law,’ 411.
Rebellion of 1715, 389;
of 1745, 535.
Recruiting, unscrupulous system of, 43.
Recruits kept in jails, 79, 182, 601.
Regalia, controversy about its preservation, 264.
Reicudan Dhu, or Black Watch, 498.
Repentance Tower, subject of a rustic bon mot, 429.
‘Rerrick Spirit,’ strange story of the, 169.
Restoration of Charles II., celebrated by one Jackson, 371.
Restrictions regarding victual, troubles from, 210.
Revenue laws disrelished and resisted, 508, 589, 594.
Review of Highland Companies at Ruthven, 581.
Revolver, the, anticipated, 101.
Ritchie, Charles, a minister, in trouble about an irregular marriage,
190.
Roads made in the Highlands, 526, 561.
Rob Roy, first public reference to, 373;
seizes Graham of Killearn, 420;
is taken prisoner by the Duke of Montrose, but escapes, 421;
forfeiture of his estate, 422;
taken by Duke of Athole at Logierait, and escapes, 425;
Rob’s bad excuse to General Wade, 500;
his death, 624.
Robberies, great number of in 1693, 83;
increase in Highlands from withdrawal of ‘Black Watch,’ 610.
Robertson, Alexander, of Struan, 523.
—— ——, Duncan, dispossesses his mother, Lady Struan, of her
property, 233.
Roderick, the St Kilda Impostor, 179.
Rollo, Lady, her charge against her husband, 143.
Rollo, Lord, tries to repress cattle lifting, 31;
prosecuted by his lady, 143.
Rollo, Master of, killed, 117.
Rope-performers, Italian, 582.
—— -work established, 87.
Rose, Bishop of Edinburgh, his death, 452.
Roseberry, Earl of, pranks of, 604.
Ross-shire, election for, on a Saturday, 341.
Row, Captain, raises sunk treasure, 551.
Royal Bank of Scotland, started, 537;
rivalry of banks, 537.
Royal burghs, convention of, curious details concerning, 51.
Ruddiman, Thomas, his connection with Dr Pitcairn, 385;
improves the classical learning of Edinburgh, 438.
Rum, sale of forbidden, and subsequently permitted, 277.
Rutherglen, Earl of, ‘bangstrie’ upon his property, 158.

Saddle, Elastic Pacing, invented, 101.

St Cecilia, feast of, celebrated in 1695, 139.
St Cecilia’s Day, celebrated in Edinburgh with a concert, 139.
St Kilda, account of, 168.
—— —— islanders acquire a minister, 178;
curious peculiarity attending the inhabitants, 181.
St Luke, School of, institution of at Edinburgh, 564.
Salaries of judges of Justiciary and Court of Session, 303.
Salmon-fishery in Scotland (1709), 353.
Salt proposed to be made in a new manner, 154.
Salters and miners considered as slaves or necessary servants, 248.
Salton and Murray, Lords, seized by Master of Lovat, 185.
Sanctuary (Holyrood Abbey), taken advantage of by Patrick
Haliburton, &c., 349.
Sandilands, Hon. Patrick, a boy, bewitched, 449.
Savery’s engine for raising water, 237.
Scavengering of Edinburgh, 593.
Schools, parochial, establishment of, in Scotland, 151;
plays acted at, 584.
Scots Magazine established, 603.
Scott of Raeburn killed in a duel, 330.
——, Walter, of Kelso, his marriage, and letter describing it, 39;
funeral of his father-in-law at Glasgow, 387.
Scriptures, a multitude of copies of, distributed in the Highlands in
1690, 39.
Seaforth, Earl of, in rebellion of 1715, 391, 393;
again in rebellion in 1719;
his forfeited estates kept for his use by Donald Murchison, 459,
468;
his ingratitude to Murchison, 471.
Secession, The, a schism in the kirk, 588, 625.
Second-sight, described by Martin, with instances, 278.
Servants, register-office for, proposed in 1700, 244.
Session, Court of, new judges appointed for, 10;
 its purity under suspicion, 291;
tyranny of, 293;
severity of judges of, 371;
salaries of judges, 303.
Seton, Hon. James, accused of robbing a post-boy, 32.
Settlement, an inharmonious, 580.
Sharps, a trial at designed, 209.
Shaw, Christian, of Bargarran, her case, 167;
thread spun by her, 510.
Shaw, Sir John, of Greenock, his marriage, 240;
kills Mr Houston, 402.
Short’s telescopes, 567.
Sibbald, Sir R., claims a share in Adair’s maps of Scotland, 42;
his concern in originating a botanic garden, 81;
his death, 619.
‘Siller,’ origin of term in Scotland, 212.
Silver-mine at Alva, 247.
Simson, Professor John, teaches Arminianism, 441.
Skye, Isle of, Second-sight in, 280.
Slaughters—town-clerk of Glasgow by Major Menzies, 103;
Master of Rollo by Graham of Inchbrakie, 117;
Houston, Writer to the Signet, by Kennedy of Auchtyfardel, 321;
Cowpar of Lochblair by Ogilvie of Cluny, 322;
Robert Oswald by Baird of Sauchtonhall, 322;
by Master of Burleigh, 326;
of Mrs Kincaid by her husband, 473;
of Campbell of Lawers, 473;
a boy Cairns killed, 547.
Slave (or ‘perpetual servant’), man adjudged to be for theft, and
handed over to Sir John Areskine of Alva, 246.
Slave, negro, advertisement of a stolen one found, 453.
Slavery of salters and miners till 1775, 249.