Eva Tanguay

Eva Tanguay (August 1, 1878 – January 11, 1947) was a Canadian singer and stage entertainer born in Marbleton, Quebec, who built one of the most prominent careers in American vaudeville and appeared on Broadway between 1895 and 1909. Known as "The Queen of Vaudeville," she billed herself as "the girl who made vaudeville famous" and is credited as the first performer to achieve national mass-media celebrity, with publicists and newspapers tracking her tours coast to coast. Edward Bernays, widely regarded as the father of public relations, described her as "our first symbol of emergence from the Victorian age."

Tanguay's father, a doctor, moved the family from Quebec's Eastern Townships to Holyoke, Massachusetts before she turned six, and he died shortly after the relocation. She made her first stage appearance around 1886, at approximately age eight, at an amateur night in Holyoke. A neighbor, Paul C. Winkelmann, a sixteen-year-old multi-instrumentalist who ran a small theater company, used his influence to stage a testimonial benefit show for her at the Holyoke Opera House. By around age ten she was touring professionally in a stage adaptation of Frances Hodgson Burnett's novel Little Lord Fauntleroy.

Her Broadway career took shape in the early twentieth century. She appeared in the musical The Chaperons in 1904, a production that contributed to her rising popularity. That same year and into 1905, she starred in the musical The Sambo Girl, which introduced the song "I Don't Care," composed specifically for her. Melville Collins played Raphael Rubens, her romantic interest in the show, and the production launched a long professional partnership between the two. Collins served as her vaudeville accompanist for more than a decade and at times acted as her manager. He was reported to be the central romantic figure of her life, though he did not return her feelings and in 1914 married her niece, Lillian M. Skelding. Collins died in 1924, and when Tanguay was buried in 1947, an urn containing his ashes was placed in her casket.

In 1909, Tanguay appeared in the Ziegfeld Follies of 1909, having been brought in to replace the husband-and-wife team of Jack Norworth and Nora Bayes, who were engaged in a salary and personal dispute with Florenz Ziegfeld. During that production, Tanguay requested that the number "Moving Day in Jungle Town" be reassigned to her from Sophie Tucker, though the two women later became close friends. Tucker would eventually pay for an eye operation that helped restore some of Tanguay's vision after cataracts caused her to lose her sight in later years. Tanguay's other Broadway credits included The Office and the musical My Lady, in which she appeared in 1901.

At the height of her fame around 1910, Tanguay commanded a salary of as much as $3,500 per week, surpassing contemporaries including Enrico Caruso and Harry Houdini in earnings at certain points. English poet Aleister Crowley, after seeing her perform, called her America's equivalent to music hall figures Marie Lloyd of England and Yvette Guilbert of France. She became closely identified with brassy, self-assertive songs that projected the image of an emancipated woman, among them "It's All Been Done Before but Not the Way I Do It," "I Want Someone to Go Wild with Me," "Go as Far as You Like," and "That's Why They Call Me Tabasco." In showbusiness circles she was nicknamed the "I Don't Care Girl" after her signature song.

Tanguay invested heavily in her own publicity, on at least one occasion reportedly spending twice her weekly salary on promotional campaigns. She also generated press coverage through her behavior, including a 1907 affair with married entertainment journalist C. F. Zittel that made headlines after his wife hired detectives to expose the relationship, and separate incidents involving an alleged kidnapping, an alleged jewel theft, and a $50 fine in Louisville, Kentucky, for throwing a stagehand down a flight of stairs. Her stage costumes were equally attention-grabbing; in 1910, the year after the Lincoln penny was first issued, she performed in a coat covered entirely in the new coins.

Beyond the stage, Tanguay appeared in two film comedies. Energetic Eva was made in 1916, and the following year she starred alongside Tom Moore in The Wild Girl. Her sole known audio recording, a version of "I Don't Care," was made in 1922 for Nordskog Records.

Her personal life included two marriages. She wed dancer John Ford in 1913, and they divorced four years later. In 1927, at age forty-nine, she married her twenty-five-year-old piano accompanist Al Parado, but had the marriage annulled on grounds of fraud, claiming Parado used multiple names and that the union had been intended as a publicity arrangement. She was also publicly engaged in 1908 to cross-dressing performer Julian Eltinge, with Eltinge playing the bride and Tanguay wearing traditional male formal attire; they exchanged rings but never legally married.

The Wall Street crash of 1929 was reported to have cost Tanguay more than two million dollars, and she retired from show business in the 1930s. At the time of her death she was working on an autobiography titled Up and Down the Ladder, three excerpts of which were published in Hearst newspapers in 1946 and 1947. Tanguay died on January 11, 1947, in Hollywood at age sixty-eight and was interred at Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, now known as Hollywood Forever Cemetery. In 1953, actress Mitzi Gaynor portrayed her in the fictionalized film The I Don't Care Girl.