Doris Eaton Travis, the last surviving Ziegfeld girl has died:
“It was beauty, elegance, loveliness,†Mrs. Travis recalled in an interview with The New York Times in 2005, “beauty and elegance like a French painting of a woman’s body.â€
Mrs. Travis may have been the youngest Ziegfeld Girl ever, having lied about her age to begin dancing at 14. She was part of a celebrated family of American stage performers known as “the seven little Eatons.†George Gershwin played on her family’s piano, and Charles Lindbergh dropped by for “tea,†Prohibition cocktails.
After three years with the Ziegfeld troupe, Mrs. Travis went on to perform in stage productions and silent films. In 1938, in Detroit, she opened the first Arthur Murray dance studio outside New York. She eventually owned 18 Murray studios in Michigan.
Mrs. Travis never stopped performing. In 2008, at age 104, she danced at the Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS annual Easter benefit, something she started doing in 1998. But no spotlight was as bright as the one she basked in as an ingénue.
I posted about Mrs. Travis’s triumphant one-night return to Broadway back in 2005. Doris Eaton was a “pony dancer”, one of the shorter girls who did all the work dancing up front while the taller girls posed looking gorgeous behind them. A couple of my mom’s Flanagan great aunts were pony dancers (although not with Ziegfeld).
If you want to know what a Ziegfeld show was like, we still have some records in films. The Great Ziegfeld is largely a cleaned-up-for-the-film-audience Ziegfeld show, complete with real Ziegfeld headliners including the incomparable Fannie Brice and acts. The family favorite, The Wizard of Oz shows strong Ziegfeld influences including a real Ziegfeld headliner (Ray Bolger) and Flo’s real life wife, Billie Burke (Glinda the Good Witch).
But you can’t ask a Ziegfeld girl what a Ziegfeld show was like any more.
