Tag Archives: Florenz Ziegfeld

Personalities

Miss Florence

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Miss Florence

The stunningly beautiful and dark haired ‘Miss Florence’ startled Parisian audiences as a member of the Gertrude Hoffman troupe in 1924 when she came on stage on an elephant as the Queen of Sheba. She became a popular celebrity in her own right, before teaming with Julio Avarez in a dancing partnership that proved highly successful mainly in New York and Miami cabarets in the 1930s.

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Venues

The French Casino

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The French Casino

In December 1934, the refurbished Earl Carroll Theatre located on the south-east corner of 7th Ave and 50th Street, New York City, opened as the French Casino. This glittering supper club was described by Fortune magazine as ‘a vast scarlet and silver restaurant which, in terraced rows of tables, seats fifteen hundred people without any crowding.’ For a short three year period it became the unrivalled premier nightspot in New York.

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Dancing Duos

Moss and Fontana

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Moss and Fontana

Marjorie Moss and Georges Fontana were the most graceful and sought after British dancing duo in the Jazz Age. They secured high praise in London and Paris in the 1920s before conquering New York in the late 1920s and were regarded by some as ‘the greatest pair of dancers since the Vernon Castles.’

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Personalities

Bee Jackson and the Charleston

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Bee Jackson and ‘Hey! Hey! Charleston’

The blond and vivacious Bee Jackson was described as the Charleston Queen and was certainly one of the more prominent advocates of the dance in America and Europe but did not ‘invent’ the dance itself. In the midst of a brilliant, international career she died tragically in her mid twenties.

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Fads

The Fascination of Mah Jong

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The Fascination of Mah Jong

One of the more curious fads that took America and then Europe by storm in the Jazz Age was the Chinese game of Mah Jong – the result of a long history of the West’s cultural assimilation of many aspects of Chinese culture.

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Theatre

Edmund Sayag

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Edmund Sayag’s Extravaganza’s

Variously described as the ‘liveliest man in show business’, ‘showman par excellence’ and ‘the Florenz Ziegfeld of Europe,’ Edmund Sayag arose to prominence in the mid 1920s owning or managing several prestigious European venues. He was hailed for putting Ostend back on the map and making Les Amabassadeur café-restaurant in Paris, the world’s most famous night-time rendezvous for the rich and famous.

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