Lydia the Tattooed Lady Revealed

This post, along with many others about the Marx Brothers, also appears in its entirety at my other blog, The Marx Brothers.

Image courtesy of the Yip Harburg Foundation

A lot of landmark events occurred in 1939. The New York World's Fair opened. Hitler invaded Poland. The movie The Wizard of Oz premiered, and the Marx Brothers movie At the Circus was released. Harold Arlen and lyricist E.Y. "Yip" Harburg wrote songs for both the Wizard of Oz and At the Circus. Groucho's performance of "Lydia the Tattooed Lady" is a classic.



As I pointed out in an earlier post about the song Cuban Pete, the internet is littered with inaccuracies. The World Wide Web abounds in multiple copies of a mistaken transcription of Groucho's introduction to "Lydia." What shows up in this transcription is:

My life was wrapped around the circus.
Her name was Lydia.
I met her at the World's Fair in 1900,
marked down from 1940.
Ah, Lydia.
She was the most glorious creature under the sun.
Guiess. Dubarry. Garbo.
Rolled into one.

If you watch the above clip from the movie, you'll see that when Groucho lists the three beauties that were all rolled into Lydia, the first one sounds like it rhymes with "vice". According to Nick Markovich, administrator/archivist of the Yip Harburg foundation, this was Thaïs, an Athenian courtesan who allegedly convinced Alexander the Great to burn the palace of Persepolis. Jules Massanet wrote an opera called Thaïs. The Scottish soprano Mary Garden made her American premiere in the title role. The other two women were Madame du Barry, mistress of Louis XV, and famed actress Greta Garbo. Interestingly, Yip Harburg also wrote lyrics for a song ("Salome") which was sung by Virginia O'Brien in the 1943 movie Du Barry Was a Lady.

Mary Garden as Thaïs

Madame du Barry

Greta Garbo

The joke about the World's Fairs in Groucho's intro refers to the Expositon Universelle in Paris in 1900, and the New York World's Fair, 1939-1940.

Exposition Universelle, Paris 1900

New York World's Fair, 1939

There are many historical and topical references in the song itself:

Battle of Waterloo - Napolean's final defeat by the Duke of Wellington


Wreck of the Hesperus - a poem by Longfellow, based on events that occurred during a blizzard off the east coast of the United States in 1839. In the poem, a sea captain's daughter is tied to the mast of a ship to keep her from being washed overboard during a storm, but both she and her father die.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Kankakee - a town in Illinois


Paree - the one in France. You've heard of it--it's been in all the papers

Lisa Fonssagrives on the Eiffel Tower, Paris 1939.
Photo by Erwin Blumenfeld

Washington Crossing the Delaware - the famous painting by Emanuel Leutze of the beginning of the surprise attack on the Hessians in Trenton, New Jersey, Decemeber 25, 1776


Andrew Jackson - colonel in the Tennessee militia in the War of 1812 and later President of the U.S.


mazurka - a Polish dance


Niagara - the Falls--you know, the big ones between New York and Canada


Alcatraz - the island in San Francisco Bay that used to be a prison


Buffalo Bill - William F. Cody, of Wild West Show fame


Just a little classic by Mendel Picasso - This is the most puzzling phrase in the song, and one for which I can't find an explanation. The abstract artist Picasso's given name was Pablo Diego José Francisco de Paula Juan Nepomuceno María de los Remedios Cipriano de la Santísima Trinidad Martyr Patricio Clito Ruiz y Picasso. That's quite a mouthful, but I don't find anything that looks like Mendel in there.

Captain Spaulding - Groucho's character in Animal Crackers


Godiva - the lady who, according to legend, argued with her husband, Lord Leofric, about the oppressive taxes he levied on the citizens of Coventry in the eleventh century. He challenged her to ride naked through town, and promised to lift the taxes if no one looked at her. She rode, no one looked, the peasants cheered, and the taxes were lifted, or so one version of the legend goes.

Lady Godiva by John Collier

Grover Whalen unveilin' the Trylon - a great turn of phrase. Whalen was President of the World's Fair Corporation, which planned and built the 1939 World's Fair on the site of what was up to that time an ash dump in Flushing Meadow. The symbols of the fair were the Trylon and Perisphere--a big pointy tower next to a big round building.


Treasure Island - another topical reference. Treasure Island is an artificial island in the San Francisco Bay. It is connected by a small isthmus to Yerba Buena Island. It was created out of fill dredged from the bay in 1936 and 1937 for the 1939-1940 Golden Gate International Exposition.


Nijinsky adoin' the rhumba - a Russian ballet dancer and choreographer doing "the dance of Latin romance" (see Cuban Pete).

Vaslav Nijinsky not doing the rhumba

In their book, Who Put the Rainbow in the Wizard of Oz: Yip Harburg, Lyricist, Harold Meyerson and Ernie Harburg point out a couple interesting facts about "Lydia." The song was censored and in order to get it into the movie, Yip Harburg had to add the last stanza:

Oh, Lydia, the champ of them all
She once swept an Admiral clear off his feet
The ships on her hips made his heart skip a beat
And now the old boy's in command of the fleet
For he went and married Lydia

I guess the censors could accept the rest of what they considered a risque song as long as Lydia became an "honest woman" and got married in the end.

Myerson and Harburg also point out that Yip tried his best to make "Lydia" sound like Gilbert and Sullivan, because Groucho was a big fan and would have parties at his house where he would play recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan operas and sing along with them.

As I close this post, I must note a spooky coincidence(?). The Muzak coming out of the speaker in the office at the MRI Center where I am finishing this up is "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" by Arlen and Harburg!

Franklin Pierce the Obscure

It probably has something to do with the fact that I am in my fourteenth hour of reading X-rays, CTs and ultrasounds on call today. I don't know how else to explain this post. I would do almost anything, read almost anything, Google almost anything to get away from the images of the huddled masses in the ERs and ICUs, yearning to have their brain hemorrhages, belly abscesses, and clotted veins diagnosed by yours truly. Actually, the afflicted have no idea who I am, nor will they ever, until they see my name on their bill, for radiologists labor for the most part in obscurity in front of computer monitors. So, for respite between cases, I have been surfing the web for material on the Marx brothers. They are cited as an area of interest in my Blogger profile, but I have not written about them yet. My search took me to David Holzel's zine The Jewish Angle, where he talks about being inspired by Groucho, and his plaster statue of Groucho, like the one I have.
In fact, I have plaster statues of Harpo and Chico as well. Harpo was a wedding present almost thirty-five years ago, and the other brothers were added soon after. From Holzel's site, I linked to The Franklin Pierce Pages, authored by Holzel, Benjamin Bratman, and Todd Leopold. Here, an unusual convergence of items from my recent posts occurred in Bratman's article "Wrested From the Jaws of Triviality." To wit:

Pierce had the peculiar distinction of having as vice president the only nationally elected American official ever to be sworn in on foreign soil. Pierce also had the peculiar distinction of having as vice president a man who never worked one day in the job. William Rufus de Vane King was terminally ill with tuberculosis when he was nominated and subsequently elected as vice president. (This begs the question, why was he selected?). He was sworn in in Cuba where he was seeking medical treatment. Less than a month later, he died, never having assumed his duties.

Ah ha! An example of the modern usage of "begs the question," which I had condemned in recent posts.

Also from Bratman's article:

Pierce’s salad days were clearly in college at Bowdoin College in Maine. There, he was a classmate of Nathaniel Hawthorne, who later became a writer and author of The Scarlet Letter, as well as one of Pierce’s closest friends and advisors.

Wow! Another of my newfound obsessions--Nathaniel Hawthorne! Bratman doesn't mention that Hawthorne wrote a campaign biography of his friend Franklin Pierce, and was rewarded with the American consulship to Liverpool after Pierce was elected. Hawthorne stayed at the post from 1853-57. Also of note, Hawthorne died on a trip to the White Mountains with Pierce in 1864.


Who knows, I may now become obsessed with Franklin Pierce. After all, writing about an obscure president (James Buchanan) paid off for John Updike in his play Buchanan Dying and his novel Memories of the Ford Administration.

Entering the blogosphere

After blogging in obscurity for some time, Cuban Pete may be my entree into the greater blogosphere. I received a nice review from Nelson Guirado at his Cubanocast blog for my posting on the history of Jose Norman and his song "Cuban Pete." The post was also cited at the Meevee.com site.

Cuban Pete

Readers who, like me, grew up in the good old days of the cold war and McCarthyism, the 1950s, will associate the song "Cuban Pete" with Desi Arnaz, the Cuban musician who married Lucille Ball and starred as Ricky Ricardo on the TV show, "I Love Lucy." You probably think Desi wrote the song. Wrong, senor!

"Cuban Pete" was written by an English bandleader named Jose Norman. Jose Norman? What kind of name is that for an English bandleader, and what's he doing writing a rumba about a Cuban? Well, that's not the half of it. It should come as no surprise that among the zillions of special interest groups populating the internet, there is a group of aficianados of English dance band music of the early to mid twentieth century. So, thanks to Google, I have been able to learn quite a bit about Jose Norman recently.

First, he was born in 1906 in Liverpool. According to Jose's son Manny, Jose's father, who may have been a Polish Jew, was named Sternberg. Jose's mother was Scottish, and her maiden name was Henderson. Jose was originally named Joseph Norman Sternberg. After the couple separated, the boy took his mother's maiden name. It gets more interesting. Then he was adopted by a Greek couple, who moved to France! The boy trained as a classical pianist, and used the name Norman Henderson for classical performances. He also took an interest in popular music, and led a Hawaiian band in the 1920s, using the name Joseph Norman.

So let's recap. We have the son of a (possibly) Polish Jewish father and a Scottish mother, born in England. He is adopted by a Greek couple, moves to France, learns classical piano, leads a Hawaiian band, and by his third decade of life, has used four names. Whew!

So, how does the whole Cuban thing enter in here? At some point, he moved back to Liverpool and became acquainted with the family of the Cuban Consul General in Liverpool. From them he learned about Cuban music, and then he introduced the rumba to England. In 1933, Norman married the daughter of the Cuban Consul and they moved to London. He started calling himself Jose, and his band became known as Jose Norman and His Rumbaleros.

In 1936, Jose wrote the song "Cuban Pete." Now, if you try to find the lyrics on any of the innumerable lyrics sites on the internet, you'll find a number of versions of the song, all of which are wrong, as far as I can tell. I happen to have a book called The Big Book of Latin American Songs which includes Jose's original version. In the interest of copyright protection, I won't reproduce it here, but I'll point out a few interesting facts. First, like a lot of standards, "Cuban Pete" has a verse which is rarely sung. Second, in the original version, Pete is referred to in the third person, instead of the first person as in Desi's version. Third, there are a couple of lines that are more or less universally screwed up on the internet. The correct versions of these lines are:

"The senoritas, they sing, and how they swing with this rumbero,"

and

"And to the meter they bring a happy ring, never a care-o."

Anyway, I'd recommend listening to Louis Armstong's version of the song recorded in 1937, and for information on other versions, check out the Cubanocast Blog for 8/22/07.

BTW, good old Jose Norman left us in 1990, God bless him.