Kahn and Ziegfeld: Glorifying the American Girl
Otto Kahn is something of an eminence grise in the Goetz story; a shadowy moneybags who flits in an out of view as I dig further into the personality and zeitgeist of theater entrepreneur Leon Goetz. A self-professed shaper of American culture in the 1890s-1930s, Kahn made a point of patronizing artists who spoke to his political vision. We know from Kahn’s correspondence that Ziegfeld’s Follies were a phenomenon close to his heart, and Kahn even made a cameo appearance in “Glorifying the American Girl” (1929), a Ziegfeld-produced film celebrating his Follies and “glorifying” the sexual commodification of the women who worked for him.
The first half of this film is the story (written by Alaskan author Rex Beach) of a salesgirl who gets picked up by an exploitative manager as part of a traveling dance act, thereby missing an opportunity to marry a good man. The salesgirl must humor the sexual advances of her manager until she is picked up by a Ziegfeld talent scout and becomes a “star”, whereby she is “glorified” as the key attraction in a Ziegfeld variety show, but looses her chance at marriage (happiness) forever.
The second half of the film is simply a Ziegfeld stage show, the one in which the salesgirl is “glorified”, and contains acts by a chorus line, Ziegfeld-comedian Eddie Cantor and singer Helen Morgan. The pre-performance scene was used to showcase cameos from Ziegfeld himself, Otto Kahn, Adolf Zukor (whose Paramount worked with Ziegfeld to make the film), and then-NYC mayor Jimmy Walker, among other celebrities. A Columbia radio broadcaster tells us what to think of each dignitary as they arrive, for instance:
[Columbia broadcaster]: “There he is! There he is! Florenz Ziegfeld— Get a good look. He’s with his wife Billie Burke. [2nd man] Ah Ziegfeld’s stage looks just like a [indistinct], radio and everything! [Columbia broadcaster] And Everything!
[Columbia broadcaster]: “Oh here comes a big shot, here comes a big shot— banker, philanthropist, art patron, [indistinct]— Otto Kahn!”
You can watch this pre-performance spectacle yourself below, it only lasts a few minutes. Otto Kahn is the dark, shiny, short man who zips right to left across the screen at 1:02:41. Unlike later depictions of Ziegfeld which sought to downplay his ethnic heritage, Glorifying the American Girl (which was only released in December 2019 by Kino Lorber) takes pride in Ziegfeld’s audience, with one employee stating: “The crowd’s a great one, all my relatives are there and even some gentiles.”
The Ziegfeld Follies portion of the film is what I’m going to focus on now, because it has a very definite message about the Follies and consequently has a message about Otto Kahn’s preoccupation with Ziegfeld’s stage-shows, too. After a few minutes of crotch-flashing from the chorus line, we get to the meat of the presentation with a tableau vivant. This tableau is untitled, but it is staged as one would expect a masterful oil painting to be staged, and the focus is on a mermaid caught by fishermen in a net. The tableau is filmed close up in the following clip:
Two thirds of the tableau (center and RHS) focus on nubile, mostly naked fishermen, the mermaid and female companions. The LHS, the remaining third, is filled with people in Catholic Church-related uniforms— there’s a representative of the Pope, a cardinal, nuns. I probably don’t need to remind readers that the LHS in a painting, from the perspective of the principal figure, is traditionally the disfavored side, (e.g. an heir apparent will usually appear to the RHS of a king from his perspective, not the perspective of a viewer, while less important family members to his left side.) The mermaid has her back turned toward the “favored” side, and gazes on the naked bodies to her left. Behind the standing bishop is a regal lady seated on a throne, behind her a uniformed soldier— clearly representing the power of a Christian head of state, given her relation to the Catholic figures. One senses the ghost of Maria Theresa.
Glorifying the American Girl is strangely preoccupied with taking everyday girls out of their work, out of their domestic roles, out of church pews, and putting them in risque costumes on stage. The opening segment of the film, which I find quite eerie, shows shade-like figures marching across a cartoon-map of the USA in long, solemn lines to New York City— quite similar to common artistic depictions of souls marching to judgement. Images of girls washing dishes, doing their hair, frying pancakes, and praying in church melt away to show the same girl decked out on stage in a revealing costume. One gets the impression that Ziegfeld and Kahn were on a conscious mission of debauchery more than glorification— an exercise of will projecting Kahn’s vision of the future.
A God-fearing American Girl surrounded by Madonna Lilies is…
….Transformed into a Ziegfeld model on the stage. Images courtesy IMDb.
Hordes of faceless peons march in line toward the Empire City. Still from the beginning of Glorifying the American Girl, courtesy IMDb
As I mentioned previously, Kahn was very conscious of his role shaping culture in New York City, from his biography by Theresa M. Collins:
Whatever the successes or failures Kahn experienced in the banking world, he always looked upon the world of art as a realm where he could find fulfillment, respect and appreciation. Art brought him nearer to realizing an internationalist vision that Kahn articulated in 1916, when he warned of art’s vulnerabilities in the postbellum era if it were forced to compete with the vast material concerns of reconstruction. Granting that he had not expected the vacuum in postwar leadership, he had identified a “privilege and duty” for America— and himself— “to become a militant force in the cause and service of art, to be foremost in helping to create and spread that which beautifies and enriches life.” Seeing the world’s financial center shift indecisively between London and New York, and New York’s German houses lose authority over the international financial decisions affecting the German-speaking peoples of Europe, Kahn held tightly to the goal of being “a business man who has tried not to degenerate into a mere business machine,” and faithfully sought “to preserve that degree of ‘all around Bildung’” that he brought with him when he first arrived in America thirty years earlier.
Art was “the truest League of Nations,” Kahn also like to say. It could at once “rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it might satisfy the spirit,” while at the same time reconstruct the good in humankind, in this “sadly out of gear” world. Kahn looked for art to accomplish what statesmen could not— to correct the “aberration of the human spirit” that lingered from the war. When all was said and done, his idealism about art and patronage gave Otto Kahn a specific ongoing role of international importance. Neither a dollar-a-year man during the war, nor an industrial statesman after, he became the preeminent, cosmopolitan patron of an aesthetic crowd with indisputable force, flash, and wit, if not entirely new ideas, setting the values of cafe society.
So how did Kahn wish to breath that new spirit into people demoralized by war? Among Kahn’s business contacts through his firm Kuhn, Loeb & Co. were the Warburg family and it is inconceivable that Kahn was not aware of Aby Warburg’s work “animating images” through his Menemosyne Atlas. The driving idea behind Warburg’s work was that ancient ways of thinking could be reincarnated through contemporary human recollection/contemplation— I would compare this to Jack Parson’s occult “Babylon Working” or the ancient tales of animating golem. The relevance of Aby’s occult thinking would not have been lost on film-savvy Kahn, and the mermaid tableau bears interpretation as a film version of a Warburg Menemosyne picture-grouping.
But what does the image being animated mean? In the context of fin de siècle European culture, mermaids and fishermen have a very clear meaning, which was eloquently expressed in The Fisherman and the Syren by Sir Frederic Leighton, who was in turn inspired by Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s poem “The Fisherman”.
The Fisherman and the Syren by Sir Frederic Leighton, (1856/58). Courtesy of artuk.org. The fisherman’s arms and legs are arranged in a fashion like Christ’s on the Cross, he wears a red skullcap reminiscent of an ecclesiastical zucchetto. Readers will note the similarities between the siren’s hairstyle, the fisherman’s costume and the styling of the models in Glorifying the American Girl.
Here is Goethe’s 1779 poem, translated by Edgar A. Bowring in 1853. I’ve highlighted words that are a bit misleading according to the original German version:
The Fisherman by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The waters rush'd, the waters rose,
A fisherman sat by,
While on his line in calm repose
He cast his patient eye.
And as he sat, and hearken'd there,
The flood was cleft in twain,
And, lo! a dripping mermaid fair
Sprang from the troubled main.
She sang to him, and spake the while:
"Why lurest thou my brood,
With human wit and human guile
From out their native flood?
Oh, couldst thou know how gladly dart
The fish across the sea,
Thou wouldst descend, e'en as thou art,
And truly happy be!
"Do not the sun and moon with grace
Their forms in ocean lave?
Shines not with twofold charms their face,
When rising from the wave?
The deep, deep heavens, then lure thee not,-
The moist yet radiant blue,-
Not thine own form, - to tempt thy lot
'Midst this eternal dew?"
The waters rush'd, the waters rose,
Wetting his naked feet;
As if his true love's words were those,
His heart with longing beat.
She sang to him, to him spake she,
His doom was fix'd, I ween;
Half drew she him, and half sank he,
And ne'er again was seen.
In the original German, “mermaid” is “Weib” which means “a woman” and her mythological origin is only implied, though I think Goethe is clearly drawing on the story of Ulysses and the Sirens. “Human wit and human guile” is “Menschenwitz und Menschenlist”, which means something more like “human cleverness in imagining and executing” and “human cunning” in a destructive sense— Goethe is commenting on Enlightenment ideals here. The third phrase is a reference to the Narcissus story, because “form” is actually “Angesicht” which is more properly “face”, i.e. the reflection of the fisherman’s face in the water will seal his fate. The ‘mermaid’ will use her material body and appeal to the fisherman’s narcissism to destroy him.
Mermaids as mythical figures are actually quite modern and took on a new significance in Europe as international trade took on greater importance— mermaids inhabited a world “between myth and commerce”. In his book “Imaginary Animals”, Boria Sax says the following:
Until the late Middle Ages, Leviathan and his relations ruled the depth of the seas, but that beast was dethroned by the mermaid... the mermaid, who does not emerge in the culture of mariners until about the fifteenth century, obtained a very distinct identity from the maritime culture that produced her. With the expansion of trade at the end of the Middle Ages, seamanship became a more popular profession. Apart from the nearly complete exclusion of women, it was uniquely cosmopolitan, since it drew adventurers from every corner of the globe.
Why a mermaid rather than a merman? The mermaid was a male fantasy, if a rather complex one... men on board ships often portrayed the mermaid in ways that... bordered on the pornographic. She would be shown emerging from the waves showing her bare breasts and smiling enticingly. She represented the seduction of the sea, to which these sailors had already at least partially succumbed... The mermaid soon acquired a significance that went beyond the confines of ships and ports. She was not only the ruler of the waves but also the goddess of an emerging commercial culture. Her smile was the enticement that manufacturers of all sorts placed in service of their wares.
What Otto Kahn and Ziegfeld were “animating” was the mermaid as the destroyer of rational, problem-solving, masculine mankind by exploiting his greed, narcissism and sexual impulse as he turns from the Catholic church and allied authority figures. While Kahn/Ziegfeld’s world-view may seem curious to twenty-first century eyes, it was a powerful part of the Zeitgeist Kahn contributed to and echoed observations by contemporary social commentators and reformers.
I’ll end this post with one more insight into what Ziegfeld’s Follies were about. The colorized copy of Glorifying the American Girl shows the subtle coloring of the model’s costumes, which were designed to make them look naked. Glorifying was a “Pre-Code” American film, and its explicit sexuality coupled with male and female nudity indicate why so many people were dissatisfied with the film industry, associated it with pornography and sought its regulation.
