Happy Saturday. We just had an episode about Barbette, the female impersonator who became a sensation in the nineteen twenties, particularly in Paris, and in part because he revealed that he was a man as one of the final portions of the act. But female impersonation was certainly not new. We mentioned that in the episode. It certainly was not new as a popular entertainment in New York on the vaudeville stage. Julian Elting was making a name for himself on that vaudeville stage when vander Barbette was still just a small child. Yeah, Julian Elting later became known as the greatest of impersonators of women, and we covered him on the show in twenty eighteen. We are bringing that episode out us today's Saturday Classics, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class A production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcasts. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today were going to talk about one of the highest paid and most famous actors of the early twentieth century. I know we've been on kind of an entertainment kick lately. That was al yep, so this particular actor acted alongside Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Rudolph Valentino, who was friends with Charlie Chaplin. He had a Broadway theater named after him, and he was one of the first movie stars to build his own mansion in Los Angeles. But his name is not nearly as familiar today as all those other stars that I just mentioned, because what made him famous was his skill at female impersonation, which fell increasingly out of favor later on in his career. He is Julian Elting and in nineteen fifty, almost a decade after his death, he was still being described as the greatest of all impersonators of women. And a one note that I do want to make about how to say his name. There are new were as print sources from when he lived that insists that it was pronounced elting like with a hard G. But there is a lot of old footage floating around, as well as more recent footage of people talking about him where people say it Eltinge. And apparently he picked a stage name on purpose because of the potential for mispronouncing it, thinking that it would quote serve to fix it more firmly with the public. Uh so, just we're just gonna go with Elting. I mean, I understand, for example, my name gets mispronounced all the time, but to me it's fun because my maiden name was very boring and know it. Ever, so I'll answer to Frey fry Free. Any of those work fine well. And I definitely never saw any footage of everybody of anybody saying welcome Julian eltingeing, Like, that's not how you say that. I want to say Eltin's just reading it because there's an E on the end, right, But no, So for today it's Elting and Julian Elting was born William Julian Dalton, known as Billy, on May fourteenth to eighteen eighty one. Some sources report it as eighteen eighty three, though, so just know that if you go looking. He was born to Michael and Julia Baker Dalton in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Today Newtonville is one of the villages that makes up the city of newton Four days after his birth, he was baptized at Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church. From there, Elting's story about how he got into show business immediately gets fuzzy just from moment one. According to some sources, the family moved west in pursuit of the gold rush not long after he was born. They headed to California first, and then they backtracked to Butte, Montana. So eighteen eighty one would have been well after the peak of the gold rush in California, but Butte was in its mining heyday right around then, so that might make a little bit of sense when he failed to make it as a prospector, though Michael Dalton started working as a barber. In this version of the story, Julia Dalton encouraged the young Billy to dress up and entertain patrons at nearby saloons, but when his father caught him dancing in a dress, he beat him his punishment and then sent him back to Boston to live with an aunt. The other most common version of Billy's early life is that at the age of ten, he got a part in the Cadet theatricals, and these were all male performances that were staged by the First Corps of Cadets. The First Corps of Cadets was a volunteer militia connected to Boston's upper class. A lot of its members were Harvard graduates with their own all male theater experience in the form of Harvard's Hasty Pudding theatricals. The Cadet theatricals were staged for fundraising purposes, in this case to pay for the construction of an armory that still stands today as the cast at Park Plaza in Boston. I found numerous references to the fact that the reason they needed to an armory is because they were afraid of an immigrant worker uprising, and I went looking for exactly what that was. I mean, other than just the tone of the time, was there a specific thing that prompted them to need to build a giant castle like armory because of the threat of immigrant worker uprisings. I did not go far enough down that rabbit hole to answer it while writing this podcast. But as the story goes, young Billy stole the show so thoroughly that the group started writing parts just for him. So regardless of which of those stories is closer to the truth, it does seem that by eighteen ninety five, at the age of fourteen, Billy Dalton was in Boston working at a dry goods store, and in nineteen hundred he definitely did have a role in the Cadet's Theatricals production of Lady and the Musketeer, which was a parody of the Three Musketeers. He had been taking dance classes with Lyla Vale's Wyman, who ran a dance school above Boston's Tremont Theater. She had reconed she had recommended him to Robert Barnett, who did everything from writing to producing with the Cadet Theatricals. I have a question, yep, it's there any possibility that these variant stories of his background were maybe seated by him, the person who also chose a name that could be pronounced differently to set himself in people's minds. That is likely, And there's I mean, there's also there's stuff that as I was researching this, there would be lines and papers that were like, you should take all of this media coverage with a grain of salt, because a lot of this, like entertainment reporters would just make up quotes from people nice. By this point, working with the Cadet Theatricals, Billy Dalton had already started going by the name Billy Elting, having borrowed the surname of a childhood friend. He wasn't a member of the First Corps of Cadets or a Harvard graduate, even though later publicity would claim that he had gone to Harvard. Nevertheless, he was cast as Mignonette, and this may be where the discrepancy in his birth year comes from. He was about to turn nineteen, but the rest of the cast thought he was more like fifteen or sixteen. Milady and the Musketeer raised twenty five thousand dollars to help pay off the mortgage on the First Corps of Cadets giant castle like Armory, and the show was generally praised. Elting's performance in particular, was very well reviewed, with some Boston papers saying that he was a better dancer than the man in the lead female role. The next year, Barnett was staging a show for the Bank Officers Association. Like the First Corps of Cadets, the Bank Officers Association staged all male reviews to raise money, in this case for a fund to help its members if they became ill or disabled. Miss Simplicity and Barnett wrote the role of Claire de Loinville for his rising star Billy Elting. Here is how the Boston Evening Transcript reviewed this performance quote, as in the Cadet theatricals, one had here fresh proof of how bewitchingly, intoxicatingly beautiful a young man can be in girls' clothes. Anything more unsettling than mister Elting's Claire de Loinville were hard to imagine. Even his veiled baritone voice had the perturbing, velvety charm of a rich, subdued contralto. There was not an item in his whole appearance, look, manner, and action that was not delusively feminine. Looking into a mirror, he might, like Narcissus, fall in love with himself. That reviewer seems almost angry at how good a female impersonator he is. Miss Simplicity brought in ten thousand dollars for the Bank Officers Association. In nineteen oh three, they put on Baron Humbug, described as a Hungarian musical play, with Elting cast in the role of Countess Sylvia. Although the show itself drew mixed reviews, Elting's performance was once again highly praised. The Sunday Harold called it a revelation, and its reviewer wrote, quote, one almost wondered if the Bank officers had not secured a remarkably attractive actress to play the role. At this point, Billy Elting was well known in Boston and to some extent outside of it, because some of the shows that he was in would sometimes go on tour after the end of their Boston run. But after his performance and Miss Simplicity, he got a chance to go on Broadway, and we will talk more about that after a sponsor break. After the Boston run of Miss Simplicity closed, composer and producer Edward E. Rice hired Julian Elting, who by now had dropped the name Billy, to appear on Broadway. The show was Mister Wicks of Wickham, and it opened at the Bijou Theater on September nineteenth, nineteen oh four, and his role of John Smith, Elting dressed as a woman and sang a song called not Like Other Girls. That's how many Times called the show quote catchy and refined, and called Elting's performance one of its two big hits, but The New York Times called it a poor show, poorly acted with no redeeming features. It's just like movie reviews today. In spite of those decidedly mixed reviews. This was a great time for Elting to make his way to New York. Theater in New York City goes way back before the nineteen hundreds, but the theater district we now know as Broadway was just getting started in nineteen oh four. The New Amsterdam and the Lyceum were two of the earliest Broadway theaters, and they were both built in nineteen oh three. In nineteen oh four, Long Acre Square was renamed Times Square after the New York Times opened its office tower at the intersection of forty second and Broadway. The Times Square subway stationed opened that year as well, and theaters started relocating from the Union Square and Madison Square Garden areas to this newly booming district. By nineteen ten, thanks to all the newly installed electric lighting, this stretch of Broadway would be called the Great White Way. Vaudeville was also thriving in New York at this time. Both vaudeville and American burlesque had roots in the menstrel shows that had been popular in the United States from the early nineteenth century through the years after the end of the Civil War. In minstrel shows, white actors in blackface put on acts that lampooned and stereotyped black people, sometimes lifting the work of black playwrights and songwriters to do it. Although women eventually became a bigger part of menstrual performance, especially in the earlier years, women's roles were usually played by men. Minstrel vaudeville, and burlesque shows all had some elements in common, but with a very different theme and tone. By the time that minstrel shows fell out of favor, female impersonation and male impersonation were both part of vaudeville and burlesque. Vaudeville impersonators were often very careful to frame their acts as wholesome family entertainment, while burlesque impersonators sometimes took a more satirical or titillating approach. Elting had made his vaudeville debut at BF Keef's Theater in Boston, and he continued his vaudeville performances as he was becoming more well known in New York. Female impersonators in general tended to be some of vaudeville's highest paid performers, and Elting was one of the highest paid among them. For his act, he put on a corset dresses, makeup, and wigs, and he wedged his feet into dainty little shoes to carry off the illusion that he was a beautiful woman on a stage. He also sang as a baritone, opting not to use a falsetto voice or to otherwise try to make his voice sound higher than it really was. Sometimes he'd take his wig off at the end of his performances to show the audience that he was a man. Here's how he described it quote. A man on the stage must make up differently than a woman. His idea is to give strong lines to his face, accent the masculine traits, and tone down whatever softer feminine lines nature has endowed him with. In my work, it is just the opposite. I must tone down the dominant masculine characteristics of my face and figure and seek to bring out those feminine lines that even the most masculine man has somewhere about him. A man does not have to worry much about the correct color of rouge or powder to go with his complexion, but with a woman's makeup. That is where you find true art. Whether it was on more traditional Broadway theater or whether it was in vaudeville Julian Elting and his female impersonation became enormously popular, especially among women. In the words of comedian and actor W. C. Fields quote, women went into ecstasies over him, men went into the smoking room, and as a side note our recent podcast subject Windsor mackay drew him as part of an act at the Orpheum Vaudeville Theater in Chicago. We did not mean for all of these things to Interlowe didn't. In fact, we had already I in my imagination that episode had already even come out to listeners when I discovered that. But that's not correct. We had recorded it, but it wasn't actually released as of when we are doing this right now in the studio. So in New York, Elting became friends with playwright and composer George M. Cohen, who wrote the song give My Regards to Broadway and, along with a lot of other big names in show business, Cohen was a Freemason and a member of Pacific Lodge number two thirty three. Elting eventually joined the Freemasons as well, and was able to make a lot of show business connections through the lodge. By nineteen oh seven, Elting was so famous that he was able to go on a European tour to Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London. In London, he gave a command performance for King Edward the Seventh that Windsor Castle. The King was so delighted that he gave Elting a white bulldog as a thank you gift. In nineteen ten, The Fascinating Widow debut in New Jersey with Elting as the star. Otto Harbach had written the play especially for him, and it featured Elting in male and female roles, with a lot of costume changes back and forth between them. The basic premise, Elting plays a man who gets into legal trouble after punching someone in the nose and disguises himself as the eponymous Fascinating Widow to make his escape. Because of the huge success of The Fascinating Widow, these quick changes between masculine and feminine clothing became a hallmark of Elting's performances. I wish I had a good grasp of the logistics of that. Yeah, I tried to figure out exactly like I tried to get a better play by play of how all this would go down. I am imagining there were stage hands and dressers and costumers helping with all of the quick changes. But I didn't find a lot of discussion of that. Like I mean, I've, you know, done enough theater that I know how a quick change of clothing works. But it's the makeup that makes me go hmmm. After we had just heard in his own words, how differently you had to do makeup for a performing as a woman versus performing as a man. It's just gives me curiosities. There was makeup and hair involved, and corsets. And also he was not a small person. He Like I saw one thing that said he was six feet tall and another that said that he was five nine. But the five nine was talking about when he was doing his teenage rolls, So like, he wasn't a petite person, So like he was wearing these custom made gowns that would would fit his rather large body and putting on corsets and on and on. It seems exhausting to me. I would watch that part of the show. Can I pay to sit backstage and watch that happen? But this same year that we're talking about, before we went on our divergence on quick changes nineteen ten, Elting became the highest paid mail actor in the country with a contract that guaranteed him three thousand dollars a week. Producer AH Woods also offered him a contract plus ten thousand dollars capital to start the Woods Elting and Bloom Theater Company. Construction on the Elting Theater on forty second Street started in nineteen eleven. The Fascinating Widow opened on Broadway that year as well, running for fifty two performances before going on tour. Fifty two doesn't sound like a lot in terms of to day's Broadway schedule, where shows will run for years and years and years and years, but at the time that was a more successful run. The Elting Theater opened in nineteen twelve after Julian had returned from touring with The Fascinating Widow, but by the time the theater was finished, he was drawing crowds that were just too big for the Elting Theater's eight hundred and eighty nine seats to handle. He never wound up performing at the theater that was named after him. He also eventually sold his share of the theater company back to A. H. Woods, saying that he liked being on stage a lot more than he likes trying to run things. Elting was at the height of his theatrical career, but the tone of his press coverage started to shift in the nineteen teens. In nineteen ten, most reviewers wrote about his flawlessly pulling off the illusion of femininity, the loveliness of his voice, and his skill at dancing. But over the next few years, more and more of his reviews were lacey through with the idea that female impersonators were suspicious and that Elting stood out in contrast to them. One review ran in The New York Evening World that said, quote, there are a host of female impersonators, and those who are not abominations are pests. Elting is the exception. This media coverage reflected shifting social views. Gender roles were starting to shift in the wake of World War One, and is, as so often happens when social norms are starting to change, people who lived outside of those norms in one way or another were seen as at best suspects. So female impersonation was being seen less as a suitable form of entertainment, especially for women, and more as some kind of hint that a performer might be deviant in some way. Elting worked continually to combat this suspicion. On stage. He refused to take flowers when they were offered to him from the footlights because that would be too feminine. He also only took parts where there was some need for his character to cross dress. The reasons for cross dressing weren't necessarily wholesome. Sometimes it was to escape after having committed a crime, but it's not portrayed as just for fun or because he enjoys it. His nineteen fifteen role in Cousin Lucy is a good example. Written by Charles Klin with music by Jerome Kern, Cousin Lucy's a three act musical farce about a man who fakes his own death and assumes the identity of his air that being Cousin Lucy. This play required Elting to make dozens of costume changes, with the costumes themselves being one of the most highly praised things about the show, But the reviews highlight what we've just been talking about. The October nineteen fifteen edition of The American Theater reads quote, A considerable number of persons resents the appearance on the stage of female impersonators, and the more capable they are in presentation of female charm, vagaries and foibles. The more deep rooted becomes the prejudice. On the other hand, there would seem to be a still greater number who fairly battened on such anomalous fair Julian Elting, the real leader in this curious form of art, has made a fortune imitating the fair sex. Off stage, Elting presented himself as abundantly masculine. He smoked cigars and boxed, including staging boxing matches for public display when he was on tour. There were also rumors that he started fights with anyone who dared to call him a sissy. This masculinity played a part in his marketing too. His publicity photos always included pictures of him in masculine attire as his quote real self, in addition to the pictures of him in feminine costume. Sometimes posters and programs for the shows included both pictures together in one frame. In interviews, he also talked about how this was just an act, that he didn't enjoy wearing dresses, and that if he could make his living without doing female impersonation, he certainly would. Even though female impersonation was starting to be viewed with increasing distrust. Elting's biggest career move was still to come, and we're going to talk about Elting in Hollywood after a sponsor break. Julian Elting had become famous on stage in New York City. His name was so synonymous with female impersonation that it became shorthand for stage roles that involved cross dressing, sort of like Timmy was cast in the Julian Elting role in the play. This made the research interesting. As I was reading archival newspaper articles, there were all these results for Julian Elting that were really about other people being described as being in the Julian Elting role. This work, though, was really taking its hole on him. Most of his Performz's required numerous high speed changes in and out of costumes, and his feminine costumes tended to involve corsets and layers and heavy gowns, and just doing that work under hot stage lights in theaters that didn't have air conditioning was exhausting. His most successful plays also went on tour after they closed their runs, making stops in cities large and small, and the travel itself was almost as physically demanding as the time on stage. So as films, started to grow in popularity. The idea of starring in them wasn't just about potentially becoming even wealthier and more famous. It was about working on a schedule that didn't require thirty five costume changes a night under hot lights. He wouldn't have to keep an entire show's worth of lines committed to memory, or take his work on the road. He could limit his work to studios and sets and actually have time to rest between pictures. If he was working in film, he'd also have more time to devote to some of his other pursuits. There was a Julian Elting cosmetic line, which included a particularly popular cold cream keeping up that masculine appearance. There was also Julian Elting's Cigars. He published magazines, including Julian Elting's Magazine of Beauty Hints and Tips. One of these tips was that women should take up boxing to help improve their confidence. Elting was also a supporter of the movement for women's suffrage and a proponent of the idea that you should just lay off what other women are wearing. In a nineteen twelve interview with The Boston Globe, he said, quote, let woman be happy in her own way. If she thinks she looks well with a barrel of false hair on her head, let her wear it. If she wants to powder, to paint, or to crowd a number two shoe on a six and a half foot let her do it if she can. When a reporter rebutted that this hypothetical person might be making a caricature of herself, Elting answered quote, possibly, but she doesn't know it. On the contrary, she believes she has asked to her personal adornment. I repeat, let her go on thinking so, since it makes her happy. Spending more time in front of a camera instead of on stage gave Elting more time and more energy for all of this stuff that we've been talking about. He made his film debut with a cameo in How Molly Malone Made Good in nineteen fifteen. In nineteen seventeen, he signed a three picture contract with Lasky Paramount Company, and all that touring that he had done with the stage performances really paid off. The huge audience that he had already established followed him directly to movie theaters, and for a time he was a bigger box office draw than Charlie Chaplin. His films included silent adaptations of some of his stage work, including The Fascinating Widow, and in many he had the starring role. He was Clifford Townsend, who disguised himself as the title adventuring woman in The Adventuress. In Made to Order, he disguised himself as a woman to infiltrate a gang of diamond smugglers. In Madame ba Have, he was Jack Mitchell, who disguised himself as the aforementioned madam when an important witness disappears during a court case. He also appeared in an all star production of patriotic episodes for the Second Liberty Loan with Mary Pickford, after which she nicknamed him Lady Bill. Combined with his stage work, Elting's work in film made him incredibly wealthy. After his death, the Associated Press reported that at his wealthiest, he'd been worth about three million dollars. It was also during his time in Hollywood that he built his Los Angeles mansion, a Spanish colonial revival full of antiques, called Villa Capistrano. This was one of several homes he owned on both coasts, and he lived there with his mother even at the height of his film popularity. He did do some work on stage, and he continued to be well received, especially when he went back to the city where he got his start. One review from Boston in nineteen eighteen read quote, although it is a corking good bill all the way through the program at Keith's this week, if deprived of all but the headline act, would fill the house for the headliner is Julian Elting, native Bostonians, sometime member of the Boston Cadets, and leading female impersonator in the world, who, after winning laurels on many stages at on the screen, is back for the brief space of a week on the stage where he made his professional debut. You wouldn't know it from that review, but the widespread suspicion of cross dressing and female impersonation was really growing. In the late nineteen teens. The public, the media, and law enforcement began to conflate the idea of cross dressing with the idea of homosexuality, which at the time was viewed as deviant. Homosexuality and cross dressing became more and more entwined in people's minds, and more and more cities and states passed laws to ban both homosexual behavior and cross dressing in California, where Elting was living, so called crimes against nature had been outlawed since in eighteen fifty. The law was updated to name specific sex acts in nineteen fifteen, and at the same time, police in California started rating and breaking up drag parties, balls, and other events where people, especially men, cross dressed, charging those arrested with quote social vagrancy. Elting managed to keep his stage and film career going in spite of all this social change. Through the nineteen twenties, his movies were a huge box office draw, and he was still performing to sell out crowds at theaters all over the country. But then in nineteen thirty he'd dropped from public view. The Motion Picture Production Code aka the Hays Code, was released that year. It was, more formally, quote, a code to maintain social and community values in the production of silence, synchronized and talking motion pictures. Under the heading of sex numbers or four was sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden, and that included female impersonation. Elting had spent his entire life trying to completely separate himself from anything that might make anyone think he was in the language of the time an invert. If he had ever done anything to make anyone think that he was having a relationship with another man, his career would have been over immediately. We just had an episode on James Whale, who was like totally contradictory to this idea. He was an openly gay man at the same time as this. But James Whale's career was not dependent upon him doing something that was already seen as suspicious in terms of gender. He was also not performing for the public like as a director. He was removed from the public eye. So Julian Elting never had a public relationship with anyone. He didn't even have close friendships with other men in his industry. When he died, hundreds of people came to his funeral, but everyone who spoke at it could only really talk about his career. No one could talk about him as a person because no one really knew him, and it's not completely clear what Elting's sexual orientation was. Harry Hay was co founder of the Mattachine Society, which was one of the first gay rights organizations in the United States back when the gay rights movement was known as the homophile movement. He told historian and author Daniel Hrowitz that Elting was involved with other men in a phone interview that he gave in nineteen ninety seven, But the creators of a documentary called Lady Bill The Julian Elting Story give a totally different read of his life. In their project description at the New York Foundation for the Arts, they say, quote, it has taken years to uncover the threads of Elting's private life, but we have finally located family and relatives of friends, many of whom retained both his possessions and letters. Every bit of evidence points to the fact that Julian Elting was not a homosexual. In fact, fear of public condemnation transformed Julian Elting into a man with a distinctly asexual personality who poured his soul into the perfection of his art, which, in the end, in spite of all his efforts to maintain its legitimacy, became the object of ridicule and hate. This makes his tragedy perhaps even greater. Regardless of the question of identity, same sex relationships were suspicious at best when Julian Elting lived, and he made a lifelong effort to give the world absolutely no cause for suspicion, but that couldn't protect him from a rising tide of homophobia, or from the perception that homosexuality and cross dressing were absolutely connected. It also couldn't protect him from laws that were passed because of this perception. In other words, the Hayes Code meant that Elting could not work in film. The increasing existence of laws against cross dressing meant that he could not work on stage either. All of this happened not long after the onset of the Great Depression, during which Elting lost most of his fortune, so he mostly disappeared for about a decade, during which time he struggled with alcohol abuse. In nineteen forty, Elting tried to make a comeback. He was supposed to appear at Hollywood's Cafe Rendezvous in January of that year, but the police wouldn't let him in. When they finally did let him perform, it wasn't as a female impersonator. Instead, he wore a tuxedo with one of his dresses next to him on a mannikin. He performed the songs that he was scheduled to sing, and in between them he described the dresses he would have had on if he had been allowed to do so. Back in New York, lyricist and producer Billy Rose had opened a nightclub called the Diamond Horseshoe and the Paramount Hotel in Times Square in nineteen thirty eight, and in nineteen forty one he invited Elting to perform there. Elting did go on, but he became ill during a performance, and he was found dead in his apartment on March seventh, nineteen forty one, at the age of fifty nine. The cause of his death is not clear, and although he continued to be known as the greatest of all impersonators of women for at least a decade after his death, his name mostly faded from public memory. So to end on a slightly happier note, the Elting Theater still exists today. It became a burlesque house during the Great Depression, and when obscenity laws put an end to burlesque performance, it was made into a movie theater. It closed for a time, and then on March second, nineteen ninety eight, it was moved a little more than one hundred and fifty feet down forty second Street from the seventh Avenue end of the block. Toward the eighth Avenue end, and there it became the lobby of AMC Empire twenty five. During this move and restoration, conservators pieced together a mural that had been part of the original Elting theater. It portrayed the three muses, and Conservatives' work involved reassembling the pieces of the mural, repairing some cuts and holes, and removing old paint. As they worked, they came to the conclusion that all three of the muses are Julian Elting, based on similarities to his appearance and demeanor and clothing and his publicity photos. So if you go to the AMC Empire twenty five in near Times Square, you can look up at the ceiling. That's probably Julian Elting looking back at you. That's so cool. Now I know what I'm gonna do next time I'm in New York. I kept flicking. I was like, that's the theater right by where we always stay whenever we are in New York for a thing. So also giant thanks to my friend Amy for loaning me the book Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics by Daniel Hurwitz, which inspired this episode. Like maybe a year ago, Amy, I promise I'm going to bring this book back to you the next time I see you. I have now had it for an embarrassingly long time. No one ever land me anything. I think we all fall victim to that, especially you know, in a job like ours, where we're doing lots of reading, it's easy for books to get shuffled around on the priority list at Sometimes things don't make it back up for a year. It happens. Well, I even I had read the book. I had thought I should do a podcast sometime on this Julian elting person. Uh, And then I brought the book with me to return it to her, and then left it behind by accident when we went to dinner. And that, Yeah, I'm not very responsible with other people's belongings apparently. So that's the story of Julian Eltingo. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old House Stuffworks email address no longer works. You can find us all over social media at Missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

Happy Saturday. We just had an episode about Barbette, the female impersonator who became a sensation in the nineteen twenties, particularly in Paris, and in part because he revealed that he was a man as one of the final portions of the act. But female impersonation was certainly not new. We mentioned that in the episode. It certainly was not new as a popular entertainment in New York on the vaudeville stage. Julian Elting was making a name for himself on that vaudeville stage when vander Barbette was still just a small child. Yeah, Julian Elting later became known as the greatest of impersonators of women, and we covered him on the show in twenty eighteen. We are bringing that episode out us today's Saturday Classics, So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you missed in History class A production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcasts. I'm Tracy B. Wilson and I'm Holly Frye. Today were going to talk about one of the highest paid and most famous actors of the early twentieth century. I know we've been on kind of an entertainment kick lately. That was al yep, so this particular actor acted alongside Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford, and Rudolph Valentino, who was friends with Charlie Chaplin. He had a Broadway theater named after him, and he was one of the first movie stars to build his own mansion in Los Angeles. But his name is not nearly as familiar today as all those other stars that I just mentioned, because what made him famous was his skill at female impersonation, which fell increasingly out of favor later on in his career. He is Julian Elting and in nineteen fifty, almost a decade after his death, he was still being described as the greatest of all impersonators of women. And a one note that I do want to make about how to say his name. There are new were as print sources from when he lived that insists that it was pronounced elting like with a hard G. But there is a lot of old footage floating around, as well as more recent footage of people talking about him where people say it Eltinge. And apparently he picked a stage name on purpose because of the potential for mispronouncing it, thinking that it would quote serve to fix it more firmly with the public. Uh so, just we're just gonna go with Elting. I mean, I understand, for example, my name gets mispronounced all the time, but to me it's fun because my maiden name was very boring and know it. Ever, so I'll answer to Frey fry Free. Any of those work fine well. And I definitely never saw any footage of everybody of anybody saying welcome Julian eltingeing, Like, that's not how you say that. I want to say Eltin's just reading it because there's an E on the end, right, But no, So for today it's Elting and Julian Elting was born William Julian Dalton, known as Billy, on May fourteenth to eighteen eighty one. Some sources report it as eighteen eighty three, though, so just know that if you go looking. He was born to Michael and Julia Baker Dalton in Newtonville, Massachusetts. Today Newtonville is one of the villages that makes up the city of newton Four days after his birth, he was baptized at Our Lady Help of Christians Catholic Church. From there, Elting's story about how he got into show business immediately gets fuzzy just from moment one. According to some sources, the family moved west in pursuit of the gold rush not long after he was born. They headed to California first, and then they backtracked to Butte, Montana. So eighteen eighty one would have been well after the peak of the gold rush in California, but Butte was in its mining heyday right around then, so that might make a little bit of sense when he failed to make it as a prospector, though Michael Dalton started working as a barber. In this version of the story, Julia Dalton encouraged the young Billy to dress up and entertain patrons at nearby saloons, but when his father caught him dancing in a dress, he beat him his punishment and then sent him back to Boston to live with an aunt. The other most common version of Billy's early life is that at the age of ten, he got a part in the Cadet theatricals, and these were all male performances that were staged by the First Corps of Cadets. The First Corps of Cadets was a volunteer militia connected to Boston's upper class. A lot of its members were Harvard graduates with their own all male theater experience in the form of Harvard's Hasty Pudding theatricals. The Cadet theatricals were staged for fundraising purposes, in this case to pay for the construction of an armory that still stands today as the cast at Park Plaza in Boston. I found numerous references to the fact that the reason they needed to an armory is because they were afraid of an immigrant worker uprising, and I went looking for exactly what that was. I mean, other than just the tone of the time, was there a specific thing that prompted them to need to build a giant castle like armory because of the threat of immigrant worker uprisings. I did not go far enough down that rabbit hole to answer it while writing this podcast. But as the story goes, young Billy stole the show so thoroughly that the group started writing parts just for him. So regardless of which of those stories is closer to the truth, it does seem that by eighteen ninety five, at the age of fourteen, Billy Dalton was in Boston working at a dry goods store, and in nineteen hundred he definitely did have a role in the Cadet's Theatricals production of Lady and the Musketeer, which was a parody of the Three Musketeers. He had been taking dance classes with Lyla Vale's Wyman, who ran a dance school above Boston's Tremont Theater. She had reconed she had recommended him to Robert Barnett, who did everything from writing to producing with the Cadet Theatricals. I have a question, yep, it's there any possibility that these variant stories of his background were maybe seated by him, the person who also chose a name that could be pronounced differently to set himself in people's minds. That is likely, And there's I mean, there's also there's stuff that as I was researching this, there would be lines and papers that were like, you should take all of this media coverage with a grain of salt, because a lot of this, like entertainment reporters would just make up quotes from people nice. By this point, working with the Cadet Theatricals, Billy Dalton had already started going by the name Billy Elting, having borrowed the surname of a childhood friend. He wasn't a member of the First Corps of Cadets or a Harvard graduate, even though later publicity would claim that he had gone to Harvard. Nevertheless, he was cast as Mignonette, and this may be where the discrepancy in his birth year comes from. He was about to turn nineteen, but the rest of the cast thought he was more like fifteen or sixteen. Milady and the Musketeer raised twenty five thousand dollars to help pay off the mortgage on the First Corps of Cadets giant castle like Armory, and the show was generally praised. Elting's performance in particular, was very well reviewed, with some Boston papers saying that he was a better dancer than the man in the lead female role. The next year, Barnett was staging a show for the Bank Officers Association. Like the First Corps of Cadets, the Bank Officers Association staged all male reviews to raise money, in this case for a fund to help its members if they became ill or disabled. Miss Simplicity and Barnett wrote the role of Claire de Loinville for his rising star Billy Elting. Here is how the Boston Evening Transcript reviewed this performance quote, as in the Cadet theatricals, one had here fresh proof of how bewitchingly, intoxicatingly beautiful a young man can be in girls' clothes. Anything more unsettling than mister Elting's Claire de Loinville were hard to imagine. Even his veiled baritone voice had the perturbing, velvety charm of a rich, subdued contralto. There was not an item in his whole appearance, look, manner, and action that was not delusively feminine. Looking into a mirror, he might, like Narcissus, fall in love with himself. That reviewer seems almost angry at how good a female impersonator he is. Miss Simplicity brought in ten thousand dollars for the Bank Officers Association. In nineteen oh three, they put on Baron Humbug, described as a Hungarian musical play, with Elting cast in the role of Countess Sylvia. Although the show itself drew mixed reviews, Elting's performance was once again highly praised. The Sunday Harold called it a revelation, and its reviewer wrote, quote, one almost wondered if the Bank officers had not secured a remarkably attractive actress to play the role. At this point, Billy Elting was well known in Boston and to some extent outside of it, because some of the shows that he was in would sometimes go on tour after the end of their Boston run. But after his performance and Miss Simplicity, he got a chance to go on Broadway, and we will talk more about that after a sponsor break. After the Boston run of Miss Simplicity closed, composer and producer Edward E. Rice hired Julian Elting, who by now had dropped the name Billy, to appear on Broadway. The show was Mister Wicks of Wickham, and it opened at the Bijou Theater on September nineteenth, nineteen oh four, and his role of John Smith, Elting dressed as a woman and sang a song called not Like Other Girls. That's how many Times called the show quote catchy and refined, and called Elting's performance one of its two big hits, but The New York Times called it a poor show, poorly acted with no redeeming features. It's just like movie reviews today. In spite of those decidedly mixed reviews. This was a great time for Elting to make his way to New York. Theater in New York City goes way back before the nineteen hundreds, but the theater district we now know as Broadway was just getting started in nineteen oh four. The New Amsterdam and the Lyceum were two of the earliest Broadway theaters, and they were both built in nineteen oh three. In nineteen oh four, Long Acre Square was renamed Times Square after the New York Times opened its office tower at the intersection of forty second and Broadway. The Times Square subway stationed opened that year as well, and theaters started relocating from the Union Square and Madison Square Garden areas to this newly booming district. By nineteen ten, thanks to all the newly installed electric lighting, this stretch of Broadway would be called the Great White Way. Vaudeville was also thriving in New York at this time. Both vaudeville and American burlesque had roots in the menstrel shows that had been popular in the United States from the early nineteenth century through the years after the end of the Civil War. In minstrel shows, white actors in blackface put on acts that lampooned and stereotyped black people, sometimes lifting the work of black playwrights and songwriters to do it. Although women eventually became a bigger part of menstrual performance, especially in the earlier years, women's roles were usually played by men. Minstrel vaudeville, and burlesque shows all had some elements in common, but with a very different theme and tone. By the time that minstrel shows fell out of favor, female impersonation and male impersonation were both part of vaudeville and burlesque. Vaudeville impersonators were often very careful to frame their acts as wholesome family entertainment, while burlesque impersonators sometimes took a more satirical or titillating approach. Elting had made his vaudeville debut at BF Keef's Theater in Boston, and he continued his vaudeville performances as he was becoming more well known in New York. Female impersonators in general tended to be some of vaudeville's highest paid performers, and Elting was one of the highest paid among them. For his act, he put on a corset dresses, makeup, and wigs, and he wedged his feet into dainty little shoes to carry off the illusion that he was a beautiful woman on a stage. He also sang as a baritone, opting not to use a falsetto voice or to otherwise try to make his voice sound higher than it really was. Sometimes he'd take his wig off at the end of his performances to show the audience that he was a man. Here's how he described it quote. A man on the stage must make up differently than a woman. His idea is to give strong lines to his face, accent the masculine traits, and tone down whatever softer feminine lines nature has endowed him with. In my work, it is just the opposite. I must tone down the dominant masculine characteristics of my face and figure and seek to bring out those feminine lines that even the most masculine man has somewhere about him. A man does not have to worry much about the correct color of rouge or powder to go with his complexion, but with a woman's makeup. That is where you find true art. Whether it was on more traditional Broadway theater or whether it was in vaudeville Julian Elting and his female impersonation became enormously popular, especially among women. In the words of comedian and actor W. C. Fields quote, women went into ecstasies over him, men went into the smoking room, and as a side note our recent podcast subject Windsor mackay drew him as part of an act at the Orpheum Vaudeville Theater in Chicago. We did not mean for all of these things to Interlowe didn't. In fact, we had already I in my imagination that episode had already even come out to listeners when I discovered that. But that's not correct. We had recorded it, but it wasn't actually released as of when we are doing this right now in the studio. So in New York, Elting became friends with playwright and composer George M. Cohen, who wrote the song give My Regards to Broadway and, along with a lot of other big names in show business, Cohen was a Freemason and a member of Pacific Lodge number two thirty three. Elting eventually joined the Freemasons as well, and was able to make a lot of show business connections through the lodge. By nineteen oh seven, Elting was so famous that he was able to go on a European tour to Vienna, Berlin, Paris and London. In London, he gave a command performance for King Edward the Seventh that Windsor Castle. The King was so delighted that he gave Elting a white bulldog as a thank you gift. In nineteen ten, The Fascinating Widow debut in New Jersey with Elting as the star. Otto Harbach had written the play especially for him, and it featured Elting in male and female roles, with a lot of costume changes back and forth between them. The basic premise, Elting plays a man who gets into legal trouble after punching someone in the nose and disguises himself as the eponymous Fascinating Widow to make his escape. Because of the huge success of The Fascinating Widow, these quick changes between masculine and feminine clothing became a hallmark of Elting's performances. I wish I had a good grasp of the logistics of that. Yeah, I tried to figure out exactly like I tried to get a better play by play of how all this would go down. I am imagining there were stage hands and dressers and costumers helping with all of the quick changes. But I didn't find a lot of discussion of that. Like I mean, I've, you know, done enough theater that I know how a quick change of clothing works. But it's the makeup that makes me go hmmm. After we had just heard in his own words, how differently you had to do makeup for a performing as a woman versus performing as a man. It's just gives me curiosities. There was makeup and hair involved, and corsets. And also he was not a small person. He Like I saw one thing that said he was six feet tall and another that said that he was five nine. But the five nine was talking about when he was doing his teenage rolls, So like, he wasn't a petite person, So like he was wearing these custom made gowns that would would fit his rather large body and putting on corsets and on and on. It seems exhausting to me. I would watch that part of the show. Can I pay to sit backstage and watch that happen? But this same year that we're talking about, before we went on our divergence on quick changes nineteen ten, Elting became the highest paid mail actor in the country with a contract that guaranteed him three thousand dollars a week. Producer AH Woods also offered him a contract plus ten thousand dollars capital to start the Woods Elting and Bloom Theater Company. Construction on the Elting Theater on forty second Street started in nineteen eleven. The Fascinating Widow opened on Broadway that year as well, running for fifty two performances before going on tour. Fifty two doesn't sound like a lot in terms of to day's Broadway schedule, where shows will run for years and years and years and years, but at the time that was a more successful run. The Elting Theater opened in nineteen twelve after Julian had returned from touring with The Fascinating Widow, but by the time the theater was finished, he was drawing crowds that were just too big for the Elting Theater's eight hundred and eighty nine seats to handle. He never wound up performing at the theater that was named after him. He also eventually sold his share of the theater company back to A. H. Woods, saying that he liked being on stage a lot more than he likes trying to run things. Elting was at the height of his theatrical career, but the tone of his press coverage started to shift in the nineteen teens. In nineteen ten, most reviewers wrote about his flawlessly pulling off the illusion of femininity, the loveliness of his voice, and his skill at dancing. But over the next few years, more and more of his reviews were lacey through with the idea that female impersonators were suspicious and that Elting stood out in contrast to them. One review ran in The New York Evening World that said, quote, there are a host of female impersonators, and those who are not abominations are pests. Elting is the exception. This media coverage reflected shifting social views. Gender roles were starting to shift in the wake of World War One, and is, as so often happens when social norms are starting to change, people who lived outside of those norms in one way or another were seen as at best suspects. So female impersonation was being seen less as a suitable form of entertainment, especially for women, and more as some kind of hint that a performer might be deviant in some way. Elting worked continually to combat this suspicion. On stage. He refused to take flowers when they were offered to him from the footlights because that would be too feminine. He also only took parts where there was some need for his character to cross dress. The reasons for cross dressing weren't necessarily wholesome. Sometimes it was to escape after having committed a crime, but it's not portrayed as just for fun or because he enjoys it. His nineteen fifteen role in Cousin Lucy is a good example. Written by Charles Klin with music by Jerome Kern, Cousin Lucy's a three act musical farce about a man who fakes his own death and assumes the identity of his air that being Cousin Lucy. This play required Elting to make dozens of costume changes, with the costumes themselves being one of the most highly praised things about the show, But the reviews highlight what we've just been talking about. The October nineteen fifteen edition of The American Theater reads quote, A considerable number of persons resents the appearance on the stage of female impersonators, and the more capable they are in presentation of female charm, vagaries and foibles. The more deep rooted becomes the prejudice. On the other hand, there would seem to be a still greater number who fairly battened on such anomalous fair Julian Elting, the real leader in this curious form of art, has made a fortune imitating the fair sex. Off stage, Elting presented himself as abundantly masculine. He smoked cigars and boxed, including staging boxing matches for public display when he was on tour. There were also rumors that he started fights with anyone who dared to call him a sissy. This masculinity played a part in his marketing too. His publicity photos always included pictures of him in masculine attire as his quote real self, in addition to the pictures of him in feminine costume. Sometimes posters and programs for the shows included both pictures together in one frame. In interviews, he also talked about how this was just an act, that he didn't enjoy wearing dresses, and that if he could make his living without doing female impersonation, he certainly would. Even though female impersonation was starting to be viewed with increasing distrust. Elting's biggest career move was still to come, and we're going to talk about Elting in Hollywood after a sponsor break. Julian Elting had become famous on stage in New York City. His name was so synonymous with female impersonation that it became shorthand for stage roles that involved cross dressing, sort of like Timmy was cast in the Julian Elting role in the play. This made the research interesting. As I was reading archival newspaper articles, there were all these results for Julian Elting that were really about other people being described as being in the Julian Elting role. This work, though, was really taking its hole on him. Most of his Performz's required numerous high speed changes in and out of costumes, and his feminine costumes tended to involve corsets and layers and heavy gowns, and just doing that work under hot stage lights in theaters that didn't have air conditioning was exhausting. His most successful plays also went on tour after they closed their runs, making stops in cities large and small, and the travel itself was almost as physically demanding as the time on stage. So as films, started to grow in popularity. The idea of starring in them wasn't just about potentially becoming even wealthier and more famous. It was about working on a schedule that didn't require thirty five costume changes a night under hot lights. He wouldn't have to keep an entire show's worth of lines committed to memory, or take his work on the road. He could limit his work to studios and sets and actually have time to rest between pictures. If he was working in film, he'd also have more time to devote to some of his other pursuits. There was a Julian Elting cosmetic line, which included a particularly popular cold cream keeping up that masculine appearance. There was also Julian Elting's Cigars. He published magazines, including Julian Elting's Magazine of Beauty Hints and Tips. One of these tips was that women should take up boxing to help improve their confidence. Elting was also a supporter of the movement for women's suffrage and a proponent of the idea that you should just lay off what other women are wearing. In a nineteen twelve interview with The Boston Globe, he said, quote, let woman be happy in her own way. If she thinks she looks well with a barrel of false hair on her head, let her wear it. If she wants to powder, to paint, or to crowd a number two shoe on a six and a half foot let her do it if she can. When a reporter rebutted that this hypothetical person might be making a caricature of herself, Elting answered quote, possibly, but she doesn't know it. On the contrary, she believes she has asked to her personal adornment. I repeat, let her go on thinking so, since it makes her happy. Spending more time in front of a camera instead of on stage gave Elting more time and more energy for all of this stuff that we've been talking about. He made his film debut with a cameo in How Molly Malone Made Good in nineteen fifteen. In nineteen seventeen, he signed a three picture contract with Lasky Paramount Company, and all that touring that he had done with the stage performances really paid off. The huge audience that he had already established followed him directly to movie theaters, and for a time he was a bigger box office draw than Charlie Chaplin. His films included silent adaptations of some of his stage work, including The Fascinating Widow, and in many he had the starring role. He was Clifford Townsend, who disguised himself as the title adventuring woman in The Adventuress. In Made to Order, he disguised himself as a woman to infiltrate a gang of diamond smugglers. In Madame ba Have, he was Jack Mitchell, who disguised himself as the aforementioned madam when an important witness disappears during a court case. He also appeared in an all star production of patriotic episodes for the Second Liberty Loan with Mary Pickford, after which she nicknamed him Lady Bill. Combined with his stage work, Elting's work in film made him incredibly wealthy. After his death, the Associated Press reported that at his wealthiest, he'd been worth about three million dollars. It was also during his time in Hollywood that he built his Los Angeles mansion, a Spanish colonial revival full of antiques, called Villa Capistrano. This was one of several homes he owned on both coasts, and he lived there with his mother even at the height of his film popularity. He did do some work on stage, and he continued to be well received, especially when he went back to the city where he got his start. One review from Boston in nineteen eighteen read quote, although it is a corking good bill all the way through the program at Keith's this week, if deprived of all but the headline act, would fill the house for the headliner is Julian Elting, native Bostonians, sometime member of the Boston Cadets, and leading female impersonator in the world, who, after winning laurels on many stages at on the screen, is back for the brief space of a week on the stage where he made his professional debut. You wouldn't know it from that review, but the widespread suspicion of cross dressing and female impersonation was really growing. In the late nineteen teens. The public, the media, and law enforcement began to conflate the idea of cross dressing with the idea of homosexuality, which at the time was viewed as deviant. Homosexuality and cross dressing became more and more entwined in people's minds, and more and more cities and states passed laws to ban both homosexual behavior and cross dressing in California, where Elting was living, so called crimes against nature had been outlawed since in eighteen fifty. The law was updated to name specific sex acts in nineteen fifteen, and at the same time, police in California started rating and breaking up drag parties, balls, and other events where people, especially men, cross dressed, charging those arrested with quote social vagrancy. Elting managed to keep his stage and film career going in spite of all this social change. Through the nineteen twenties, his movies were a huge box office draw, and he was still performing to sell out crowds at theaters all over the country. But then in nineteen thirty he'd dropped from public view. The Motion Picture Production Code aka the Hays Code, was released that year. It was, more formally, quote, a code to maintain social and community values in the production of silence, synchronized and talking motion pictures. Under the heading of sex numbers or four was sex perversion or any inference to it is forbidden, and that included female impersonation. Elting had spent his entire life trying to completely separate himself from anything that might make anyone think he was in the language of the time an invert. If he had ever done anything to make anyone think that he was having a relationship with another man, his career would have been over immediately. We just had an episode on James Whale, who was like totally contradictory to this idea. He was an openly gay man at the same time as this. But James Whale's career was not dependent upon him doing something that was already seen as suspicious in terms of gender. He was also not performing for the public like as a director. He was removed from the public eye. So Julian Elting never had a public relationship with anyone. He didn't even have close friendships with other men in his industry. When he died, hundreds of people came to his funeral, but everyone who spoke at it could only really talk about his career. No one could talk about him as a person because no one really knew him, and it's not completely clear what Elting's sexual orientation was. Harry Hay was co founder of the Mattachine Society, which was one of the first gay rights organizations in the United States back when the gay rights movement was known as the homophile movement. He told historian and author Daniel Hrowitz that Elting was involved with other men in a phone interview that he gave in nineteen ninety seven, But the creators of a documentary called Lady Bill The Julian Elting Story give a totally different read of his life. In their project description at the New York Foundation for the Arts, they say, quote, it has taken years to uncover the threads of Elting's private life, but we have finally located family and relatives of friends, many of whom retained both his possessions and letters. Every bit of evidence points to the fact that Julian Elting was not a homosexual. In fact, fear of public condemnation transformed Julian Elting into a man with a distinctly asexual personality who poured his soul into the perfection of his art, which, in the end, in spite of all his efforts to maintain its legitimacy, became the object of ridicule and hate. This makes his tragedy perhaps even greater. Regardless of the question of identity, same sex relationships were suspicious at best when Julian Elting lived, and he made a lifelong effort to give the world absolutely no cause for suspicion, but that couldn't protect him from a rising tide of homophobia, or from the perception that homosexuality and cross dressing were absolutely connected. It also couldn't protect him from laws that were passed because of this perception. In other words, the Hayes Code meant that Elting could not work in film. The increasing existence of laws against cross dressing meant that he could not work on stage either. All of this happened not long after the onset of the Great Depression, during which Elting lost most of his fortune, so he mostly disappeared for about a decade, during which time he struggled with alcohol abuse. In nineteen forty, Elting tried to make a comeback. He was supposed to appear at Hollywood's Cafe Rendezvous in January of that year, but the police wouldn't let him in. When they finally did let him perform, it wasn't as a female impersonator. Instead, he wore a tuxedo with one of his dresses next to him on a mannikin. He performed the songs that he was scheduled to sing, and in between them he described the dresses he would have had on if he had been allowed to do so. Back in New York, lyricist and producer Billy Rose had opened a nightclub called the Diamond Horseshoe and the Paramount Hotel in Times Square in nineteen thirty eight, and in nineteen forty one he invited Elting to perform there. Elting did go on, but he became ill during a performance, and he was found dead in his apartment on March seventh, nineteen forty one, at the age of fifty nine. The cause of his death is not clear, and although he continued to be known as the greatest of all impersonators of women for at least a decade after his death, his name mostly faded from public memory. So to end on a slightly happier note, the Elting Theater still exists today. It became a burlesque house during the Great Depression, and when obscenity laws put an end to burlesque performance, it was made into a movie theater. It closed for a time, and then on March second, nineteen ninety eight, it was moved a little more than one hundred and fifty feet down forty second Street from the seventh Avenue end of the block. Toward the eighth Avenue end, and there it became the lobby of AMC Empire twenty five. During this move and restoration, conservators pieced together a mural that had been part of the original Elting theater. It portrayed the three muses, and Conservatives' work involved reassembling the pieces of the mural, repairing some cuts and holes, and removing old paint. As they worked, they came to the conclusion that all three of the muses are Julian Elting, based on similarities to his appearance and demeanor and clothing and his publicity photos. So if you go to the AMC Empire twenty five in near Times Square, you can look up at the ceiling. That's probably Julian Elting looking back at you. That's so cool. Now I know what I'm gonna do next time I'm in New York. I kept flicking. I was like, that's the theater right by where we always stay whenever we are in New York for a thing. So also giant thanks to my friend Amy for loaning me the book Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics by Daniel Hurwitz, which inspired this episode. Like maybe a year ago, Amy, I promise I'm going to bring this book back to you the next time I see you. I have now had it for an embarrassingly long time. No one ever land me anything. I think we all fall victim to that, especially you know, in a job like ours, where we're doing lots of reading, it's easy for books to get shuffled around on the priority list at Sometimes things don't make it back up for a year. It happens. Well, I even I had read the book. I had thought I should do a podcast sometime on this Julian elting person. Uh, And then I brought the book with me to return it to her, and then left it behind by accident when we went to dinner. And that, Yeah, I'm not very responsible with other people's belongings apparently. So that's the story of Julian Eltingo. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. Since this episode is out of the archive, if you heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something similar over the course of the show, that could be obsolete. Now. Our current email address is History Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com. Our old House Stuffworks email address no longer works. You can find us all over social media at Missed in History and you can subscribe to our show on Apple podcasts, Google podcasts, the iHeartRadio app, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Stuff you Missed in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.