On a quiet Sunday morning in March of 1998 in New York City, Broadway’s elegant but somewhat faded Empire Theatre, weighing 7.4 million pounds, was floated on tracks from its location on 42nd Street near Seventh Avenue to its new home, closer to Eighth. The Beaux Arts landmark, designed by architect Thomas A. Lamb in 1912, became the centerpiece of the new AMC Movie Complex, opened in 2000, part of the much bally-hooed redevelopment of Times Square. (In fact, only the lobby and entrance were relocated, the auditorium was razed.) The Empire’s peculiar migration, a unique attempt to preserve the theater district’s heritage while accommodating today’s audiences, gave the media occasion to wax nostalgic for the bygone days of the Great White Way.

Nearly ignored amid the hype was the fact that the Empire had originally been named The Eltinge, after Julian Eltinge, the legendary female impersonator who reigned over Broadway in the 1910s and ’20s. Given the widespread celebration of Disney’s new family-friendly Times Square, it was an ironic oversight, for the Eltinge is a vestige of 42nd Street’s risque roots — in 1942, when it was a burlesque house, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia shut down the Eltinge on morals charges — and a symbol of what one gifted actor, rather than a phalanx of corporations could achieve. “It’s amazing that one of the only theaters still standing on 42nd Street was built by a drag queen,” says Charles Busch, of all of today’s gender illusionists the likeliest heir to Julian Eltinge’s legacy.

Not since Edward Kynaston charmed Elizabethan audiences playing Shakespearean heroines had a man in feminine finery created such a sensation. Jerome Kern composed tunes for Eltinge. Erte designed his sets. King Edward VII of England, after inviting the star for a command performance at Windsor Castle, presented him with a white pit bull as a gift. On the silver screen, too, Eltinge scored in comic silent hits, introducing the joys of cross-dressing to the masses.

In his day, Eltinge was an enormously popular star with a profound impact on show business for decades to come. Long before the Tony Award-winning shows Torch Song Trilogy and La Cage aux Folles set tongues wagging, Eltinge revolutionized the theater with The Fascinating Widow and The Crinoline Girl, the first musical farces to bring “glamour drag” onto the legitimate stage. Eltinge’s more flamboyant vaudeville skits, where he literally let his hair down, had folks from coast to coast rolling in the aisles. Draped in silk from bejeweled head to painted toe, Eltinge spoofed dancer Ruth St. Denis in his exotic “goddess of incense” skit. Dashing across the stage, he would transform himself with lightning speed into a busty jungle queen, a rapturous nun, a spicy Creole, a nimble suffragette, or a brazen Salome. His sinuous Cobra Dance left gentlemen gasping. But Eltinge’s most popular send-up spoofed the venerable Gibson Girl, flooring fashionable ladies with the star’s exquisite refinement and poise.

Not content merely to promenade in lady’s attire, Eltinge also sang and danced, penning lyrics to novelty songs with coy titles such as “Two Heads Are Better Than One,” or “Don’t Trust Those Big Gray Eyes.” Sometimes he was even known to play a blushing young girl in a revealing bathing suit, warbling “Mother, May I Go Out to Swim?” (an act considered too racy for some venues). But whether he was flouncing about in marabou feathers, surrounded by a flock of his scantily dressed chorus girls, the Vampettes, or standing in a spotlight at the proscenium’s edge, blanketed in lace as a bride, it was nearly impossible to tell that Julian Eltinge was a man.

And what a man he was: At 5 feet 8 inches and 180 pounds, Eltinge was far from dainty. But the star’s small hands and feet made the illusion work. So did the lethal corsets that his Japanese dresser, Shima, would help him shimmy into, reducing a 40-inch waist to a 25. Eltinge also knew how to use makeup to his advantage, softening his chin and tapering his robust neck. At the end of each show, lest the audience be taken in by his masquerade, he would doff his wig to remove any lingering doubt.

Extremely popular with female audiences, who in the 1910s were for the first time venturing out to the theater on their own, Eltinge published his own magazine of beauty and fashion tips, Julian Eltinge Magazine. Inside, the genteel modiste posed in full wig, makeup, and gowns for ads selling everything from wardrobe trunks and cold cream to cough drops and girdles. Apparently women of the day found nothing bizarre in taking their cues from a transvestite. “Eltinge represented the perfect girl’s guide of how to behave,” says Leonard Finger, a New York-based casting director and collector of theatrical ephemera. “Onstage, he moved like a dream, his lily white arms covered in rice powder. He was the girl next door, the kind you’d want to bring home to mother. But he was also a gay man’s wish of what a feminine role model would be.” Indeed, some of his tips to male fans can be read as veiled asides to men confused about their sexuality. “When you’re accused of being peculiar, don’t consider it in the light of a slap,” Eltinge advised, oozing subtext. “It’s really the peculiar man — the different man — who wins out.”

Who was this “Gay Deceiver,” as the New York Times dubbed him early on? It’s hard to say, for much of Eltinge’s life is shrouded in mystery. Eltinge’s managers generated reams of copy filled with fanciful half truths about him, and like many dissemblers, Eltinge himself spun stories whenever they suited his needs. By most accounts, he was born William Julian Dalton to Irish-American parents in Newtonville, Massachusetts. But several other sources list his hometown as Butte, Montana (hence his signature stage tune, “The Cute Little Beaut from Butte.”) He adopted the name Julian Eltinge when he debuted in drag, according to one source, so as not to offend his family.

Scholars don’t even agree on the pronunciation of his name. Does it rhyme with fling or fringe? The answer can be found at the opening of the film The Band Wagon starring Fred Astaire. In a scene on 42nd Street, just before the famous “Shoe Shine” number Astaire mentions twice “the Eltinge Theatre.” He clearly pronounces it to rhyme with tinge. And if Fred Astaire didn’t know how to pronounce Julian’s last name, none of us do.

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The Muse Is Heard
(Note: this piece was written in 2001, shortly after the events of 9/11. The article never ran.)

F. Scott Fitzgerald, who knew a thing or two about stardom, once famously said that there are no second acts in American celebrity, but he obviously never envisioned a talent as versatile and resourceful as Suzanne Farrell, former “etoile” of the New York City Ballet. Her extraordinary beauty as an artist went far beyond mere style and form. She exuded an ethereal grace, an other-worldliness of vulnerability and strength. And burned with a passion that defied physical boundaries. Even taking into account her above average height (for a ballerina) and elegantly elongated features, she was larger than life. The dazzling aura she gave off radiated from the stage straight into the audience. It was impossible not to be swept up by the sheer force of her energy.

As her former dance partner Jacques d’Amboise recalls: “Her talent was a combination of extreme intelligence and dedicated work. She had a love for and a natural gift for dance. She had a fire in her that I first noticed when I was the Prince in Swan Lake and she was just a 17 year old girl dancing the part of one of the swans. I’d watch her from behind the curtain before making my entrance. She was the furthest from the center, closest to the wings, but she danced as if every spotlight were on her, giving it everything she’s got.”

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(For some reason over the last few weeks, I have not been able to get Sarah Pettit out of my mind. Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that I’ve been perusing old articles of mine to post here on the website, some of which I wrote for her as my editor at Out Magazine. But I think it also has to do with the fact that I miss being able to talk to her about all the incomprehensible things that are going on in the world at present. I would love to hear her comments about the eerie death of Kenneth Lay at Enron, the recent loss of singer Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, the very welcome defeat of George W. Bush’s Guantanamo policies in the Supreme Court, the inanity of the media blitz over the new, totally superfluous, Superman movie. Sarah always had an original and acerbic point of view, but one that was grounded in compassion and a genuine respect for the higher truths. So today, because I feel like it, I am posting a eulogy that my friend Daniel Mendelsohn wrote about Sarah which was read at her memorial. I was, unfortunately, not there to hear it live, which is why I have a copy of it in the first place. Thank you Daniel for writing it and helping me to remember Sarah a little bit better.)

Sarah Pettit (1966-2003)

Sarah’s Eulogy by Daniel Mendelsohn

A note about friendship and literature.

On the morning Sarah died, I had a deadline for an essay about Virginia Woolf and “Mrs Dalloway”—a novel, as so many more people know now than ever knew before, that attempts to give the sense of the entirety of a woman’s life in the course of a single day. I thought a great deal about that novel when I was thinking about what I might say today. Under any circumstances, you realize, it’s extraordinarily difficult it is to give a sense of who someone is, particularly a person you’ve known well, over a long time; but I think it’s fair to say that the task is particularly daunting in the case of someone like Sarah.

If, indeed, I were a book critic reviewing a novel whose main character was Sarah, I’d be inclined to raise a skeptical eyebrow. The daughter of considerable privilege who felt such a genuine alliance with, and commitment to, those who had no privilege at all; the product of exclusive boarding schools and universities (as she was sometimes pleased to remind you) who loved nothing better than to take to the streets, or to sit at Joe Jr’s schmoozing with the Greek counter guy; an outsider, in other words, who was at once profoundly an insider; a person who, her elaborate disquisitions on the virtues of Mariah Carey or Whitney Houston notwithstanding, knew her way so well around the opera or ballet, who navigated between J-Lo and Lincoln Kirstein with equal aplomb; a hardboiled editor who—very famously now—could tell a writer who’d tried to get an extension on a deadline—his lover had AIDS, he’d had a shunt put in his brain, or something horrible, was in the emergency room—that “that excuse may fly in Boston, but not in New York City”—this hardboiled person who, as anyone who ever walked down a New York City street knows, could not pass by a small dog without dropping to her knees and slobbering over it; who loved children and wanted one desperately. (For a long time, on and off, she and I talked about having a child together. “Well,” she said one day after we’d met at a restaurant to discuss the idea, “it’ll have very blue eyes and very high therapy bills.” The most devastating aspect of her illness to her, at the very beginning, was the possibility of not being able to get pregnant.)

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