Houdini and Eva Tanguay in Rochester

Here's a terrific ad for the Cook Opera House in Rochester, New York, showing Houdini and Eva Tanguay on the same bill. (If you don't know who Tanguay was, check out this post.) This is the week Houdini did his famous jump from the Weighlock Bridge. It's wild to know that Eva was on the same bill. Did she see the jump?

Want more? I recently shared a collection of Houdini-related Rochester clippings with my Scholar-level patrons below.

Related:

• The girl who beat Houdini
• Houdini's Rochester bridge jump
• News 10 on Houdini's Rochester bridge jump

The girl who beat Houdini

Houdini was a superstar in American vaudeville and even once held the distinction of being its highest paid performer. But vaudeville had other superstars who drew crowds and salaries that sometimes matched Houdini. One of these performers was Eva Tanguay.

Today Eva Tanguay is largely forgotten. But if you were around in Houdini's time, you would have certainly known who she was. By many accounts, Tanguay could neither sing nor dance. But that didn't dampen her enormous appeal. A profile of her at the New England Historical Society (Eva Tanguay, The Lady Gaga of Vaudeville) says:

Her celebrity was no accident, but a well-planned assault on stuffy Victorian convention. She provoked reaction, singing songs with titles like Go As Far As You Like and wearing bizarre costumes like a dress made out of pennies. The tabloids ate up stories about her love life, which included a romance with the African-American vaudeville star George Walker. You couldn’t escape her from 1904 to the early 1920s.

Like Houdini, Tanguay was a headliner on the big time Keith vaudeville circuit, thus they played many of the same theaters. This invited direct comparison. Such was the case in Boston in January 1911 as you can read below:

Boston Sunday Post, Jan. 15, 1911.

Not only was Eva beating Houdini's attendance records, but she was also surpassing his salary, making as much as $3500 per week. By 1912 Houdini had to put a spin on his claims of being Vaudeville's highest paid performer. Check out the below ad from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in which he now calls himself "the highest salaried male performer in the world."

Courier Sun, Feb. 25, 1912. 

After losing her fortune in the Wall Street crash of 1929, Eva Tanguay retired in 1930 and slipped into obscurity. She died on January 11, 1947 at age 68. In another Houdini parallel, in 1953 a highly fictionalized biopic was made of Eva's life, The I Don't Care Girl, starring Mitzi Gaynor. This was the same year as the Houdini biopic with Tony Curtis.

If you'd like to learn more about Eva Tanguay check out the book Queen of Vaudeville: The Story of Eva Tanguay by Andrew L. Erdman. Below is the only known recording of Eva made in 1922.

UPDATE: Today I went to the 94th Rudolph Valentino Memorial Service at Hollywood Forever cemetery (Rudy being the other big celebrity death of 1926), and I paid a visit to Ms. Tanguay.

Related:

• ...also Houdini
• Harry Ransom Center presents Vaudeville!