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Past Articles What's New on the Rialto Helen Morgan: The Original Torch Singer and Ziegfeld's Last Star
by Christopher S. Connelly Book Review by Mark Dundas Wood
As Christopher S. Connelly shows in his impressive but sometimes frustrating new biography, Helen Morgan: The Original Torch Singer and Ziegfeld's Last Star, Morgan (1902-1941) was a complicated figure whose career spanned an ever-shifting era of popular entertainment. She worked in multiple showbiz arenas: vaudeville, the "legitimate" stage, cabaret, recorded music, film (both silents and talkies), radio, and even the very earliest days of television. Although her alcoholism was a dominant factor in her life and career–certainly contributing to her early death at age 41–it was only a part of her complex, hard-to-pin-down persona, which contained some striking paradoxes. Though famous for singing songs of romantic longing and desperation, she seemed, according to Connelly, to have been largely sunny much of the time in real life (although, ironically, she struggled early on to make the lighter, comedic moments in her stage work seem believable). Morgan enjoyed living the high life with its attendant baubles and furs, but she also felt a deep need to be altruistic. The author provides an appendix to his book that lists benefit performances Morgan participated in during her career, often in support of orphans or sick children. This list goes on and on. She seemingly could not (or would not) give "no" for an answer when it came to assisting the less fortunate. She was known to give a stranger the mink off her back. Literally. Morgan was born prematurely (weighing only three pounds) in Danville, Illinois, to farmer Frank Riggin and his young wife, the former Lulu Lang. Frank and Lulu's marriage didn't last, and Lulu would have many more marriages over the years (and would survive her daughter by more than three and a half decades). One of her marriages, to Thomas Morgan, provided Helen with her stage surname. Helen was lavishly devoted to Lulu throughout her life but, unfortunately, she repeated her mother's propensity for failed marriages. She was wed a total of four times, though all but the last marriage crashed and burned. Young Helen had sung in church as a girl, but her true career as an entertainer began as a toe dancer at the Marigold Garden in Chicago in 1919. Modeling work took her to Montreal and on to New York City. By 1923, she was in the touring company of Florenz Ziegfeld's Sally, which starred Marilyn Miller. Stage fright caused her voice to have a sobbing sound, which intrigued her audiences. She relied on alcohol to help battle the jitters. This, says Connelly, led to her habit of perching on pianos while singing: "Sitting on the piano kept Helen steady; it took a lot of alcohol to make her slur or forget lyrics. The Steinway stunt soon became a trademark, then a joke, and finally an ally." Connelly touches on many intriguing facets of Morgan's working and private lives. For instance, her true career dream was to be an opera singer: Despite limited training, she once sang the first act of Puccini's Manon Lescaut for impresario Otto Kahn, who offered her a contract (which she ultimately turned down). She was a dedicated animal lover who kept pet mice in her dressing rooms during the runs of Show Boat and Sweet Adeline. Her aquarium tanks were entered in at least one tropical-fish-fanciers competition. She once charmed Billy Rose's bilious, people-averse macaw by feeding it grapes. And she rescued baby chicks from a magician's shell-game act, absconding with them to presumed sanctuary at an upstate New York farm. She also loved children, and she longed to have some of her own. She supported financially and then temporarily adopted an unwed mother's daughter (nicknamed "Baby Helen") in 1928. Details about this short-term foster-parenting episode are sketchy, which may partly explain why Connelly spends only a few paragraphs relating it. He notes, however, that the story of the truncated adoption became a major plot point in the 1957 Playhouse 90 television drama "The Helen Morgan Story," starring Polly Bergen. (A feature film with the same title also released in 1957, with Ann Blyth as Morgan, was, Connelly notes, largely fabricated.) Considering the large amount of copy the author devotes to the legal proceedings against Morgan during Prohibition, connected with liquor sales in cabaret establishments that bore her name, the short shrift he gives the "Baby Helen" episode seems especially out of balance. In fact, the entire book tends to sprawl in some sections and contract in others. On occasion, Connelly will throw out a reference to something you expect he'll follow up on later in greater depth–for instance, an offhand remark about Morgan's "loyal gay following." But adequate further detail is not always forthcoming. On the other hand, he provides more information than we need at times, for instance about Ziegfeld's contract dispute with Marilyn Miller during the run of Sally–something tangential to Morgan's own story. This problem is understandable in part, considering that Connelly drew largely from periodical articles of the day. Matters in the public sphere–such as Helen's professional engagements and her legal difficulties–were, clearly, more fully documented in the press than were things like her foster parenting or her longest and most intense (though wavering) romantic affair, with married businessman Arthur Loew (of Loew's Inc. and MGM). Loew remains a fairly amorphous figure throughout the book, though he is presented as the love of Morgan's life. Connelly also consulted archives of motion picture studios and that of Oscar Hammerstein, and he was able to personally interview a few people who figured in Morgan's story (many of whom are now deceased), including actors Polly Bergen, Kitty Carlisle Hart, and Marian Seldes; Arthur Loew, Jr.; and music coordinator Walter Scharf, who was pianist for Morgan during some late-career engagements. But the scarcity of voices from those who could speak authoritatively about the star in the 21st century contributes to the sense that this book is more a chronological history of Morgan's career than a rounded biography of the woman, one that would sort out all her contradictions and provide a clear, vivid portrait. The book seems to have been meticulously researched and edited, without glaring errors. It's filled, blessedly, with scores of black-and-white photos, though none on glossy pages. In addition to providing that list of benefit appearances, the author includes other welcome appendices, including a stageography, a filmography, a radiography, and a discography. In his acknowledgments, Connelly notes that he learned much from Herbert G. Goldman, whose biographies of Al Jolson, Fanny Brice, and Eddie Cantor are stellar. He was fortunate to have had Goldman's example to follow. The author absolutely appreciates and honors Morgan's talents and achievements while acknowledging her struggles and shortcomings, as in this assessment from one of the book's concluding paragraphs: "Ultimately, that burning need for acceptance, even redemption, was the fuel that lit Helen Morgan's torch and filled her glass. What made her an artist kept the intuitive actor from reaching her full potential and, eventually, destroyed her." Whether or not you consider this the definitive biography of Helen Morgan, it's doubtful any future writer will unearth and compile more information on what she did and didn't accomplish in her career than has Christopher S. Connelly. Possibly, a future writer will somehow manage better to convey the essence of who she was as a human being–if enough future readers will still want to know.
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Helen Morgan: The Original Torch Singer and Ziegfeld's Last Star