Libby Holman

Elizabeth Lloyd Holman, born Elizabeth Lloyd Holzman on May 23, 1904, in Cincinnati, Ohio, was an American actress, singer, socialite, and activist whose Broadway career spanned from 1925 to 1954. Her father, Alfred Holzman, worked as a lawyer and stockbroker, and the family had been prosperous until 1904, when Holman's uncle Ross Holzman embezzled nearly one million dollars from the family's brokerage business. The financial collapse forced the family to leave their Walnut Hills home and relocate to a rental apartment in the Avondale neighborhood. Holman carried shame about this period throughout her life, and during a later visit to Cincinnati with friend Paul Bowles, she refused to let him see the house where she had grown up. During World War I, anti-German sentiment prompted the family to change their surname from Holzman to Holman, a transition documented in Hughes High School yearbooks, where her sister Marion still appears under the original name in 1917 while Holman herself is listed as Holman by 1919.

Holman graduated from Hughes High School in the spring of 1920 and enrolled at the University of Cincinnati that fall, earning a Bachelor of Arts degree early in 1923. School yearbooks document her participation in numerous theatrical productions during those years, and a classmate later recalled her performing impressions of torch singer Helen Morgan. After graduating, she moved to New York City to pursue an acting career while also taking classes at Columbia University. She initially lived in an all-women's dormitory at a YWCA. Her first theatrical work in New York came in a road company production of The Fool in 1925, written by Channing Pollock, in which she played a streetwalker. Her Broadway debut followed that same year in the play The Sapphire Ring at the Selwyn Theatre.

In 1926, Holman appeared in the chorus of The Garrick Gaieties, credited under the name Elsbeth Holman. The production was mounted by the Theatre Guild's junior organization and marked an early success for the Rodgers and Hart songwriting partnership. She also toured with a company of the 1926 Greenwich Village Follies. Her friend Leonard Sillman helped her secure a role in the musical Merry-Go-Round in 1927, in which she performed a solo torch song called Hogan's Alley. The production marked the first time critics singled her out for praise. Friends observed that she began drinking and partying heavily around this period.

Holman's ascent to stardom came with her lead role in The Little Show, which opened at the Music Box Theatre on April 30, 1929. The production was conceived by producers Tom Weatherly, James Pond, and Dwight Deere Wiman as an intimate revue, unconventionally small in cast size and deliberately distinct from the lavish spectacles associated with Florenz Ziegfeld or Earl Carroll. The show included comedy sketches alongside songs and dances, and featured Fred Allen performing the George S. Kaufman sketch The Still Alarm. The final number of the show was the blues song Moanin' Low, with lyrics by Ralph Rainger, staged within an expressionist Jo Mielziner set depicting a Harlem tenement bedroom. Holman played a mulatta prostitute opposite Clifton Webb, who appeared in blackface as her pimp. The scene culminated in Holman's character lamenting at the door of the apartment while singing the ballad. On opening night, the performance earned Holman a dozen curtain calls and established Moanin' Low as her signature song. Critic Walter Winchell described her as the torch singer par excellence, calling her the best of those female troubadours with voices of smoke and tears. The Little Show ran for 321 performances.

The same core cast of Holman, Webb, and Fred Allen reunited under producer Max Gordon for the revue Three's a Crowd, which opened on October 15, 1930, and ran for 272 performances. Music for the show was again provided by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. Holman introduced the Dietz-Schwartz standard Something to Remember You By in the production. Her principal number, Body and Soul, proved difficult to stage during tryouts in Philadelphia, where various arrangements and staging approaches failed before Ralph Rainger, who had written the lyrics for Moanin' Low, was brought in to salvage it. Actress Gloria Swanson later recalled that Three's a Crowd was the one musical she had been determined to see during a visit to New York in 1931.

Holman's Broadway career also included the musicals Revenge with Music and You Never Know, as well as the productions Blues, Ballads and Sin-Songs and the revue The Little Show, with her stage work continuing through 1954. Throughout her life she subtracted two years from her age, claiming 1906 as her birth year, the date she provided to the Social Security Administration. She died on June 18, 1971.