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A newspaper advertisement for James McIntyre and Thomas Heaths 1919 musical play Hello, Alexander! describes it as a "Gorgeous Musical
Extravaganza" featuring "50 Talented Singing and Dancing Broadway Beauties" The advertisement contains only one, hand-drawn image: a chorine performs a high kick, one lifted arm partially overlapping the name of "McIntyre" with the tip of her outstretched dancing shoe almost grazing the underside of the e. The chorine's costume exposes long, shapely legs, and apparently bare arms, shoulders, throat and decolletage, topped by diminutive facial features. (1) To look at this image and the descriptive text, one would think that the focal point of Hello, Alexander! was a collection of pretty white girls presenting the slightly risque leg show of early twentieth-century popular theater. This assumption is half correct, for the chorus girls strongly appealed to the predominantly white, male, middle-class audiences of vaudeville. McIntyre and Heath needed this appeal because the true centerpiece of their decades-old act--blackface minstrelsy--was losing popularity quickly. The "Alexander" of the play's title was the same blackface character who had first appeared, with his partner "Henry" during the 1870s.
McIntyre and Heaths introduction of white chorus girls to their blackface act was symptomatic of the decline of minstrelsy; it also provides an entry into an interrogation of the blackface duos career-long play on race and gender. McIntyre and Heaths long career began during the height of blackface minstrelsy, ran through the glory days of Tony Pastor's variety, and survived into the roaring 1920s environment of vaudeville and burlesque, requiring the duo to adapt to changing theatrical conventions. Although the delineations of Henry and Alexander remained the chief attraction of their act, McIntyre and Heath developed spectacular framing devices for these characters by incorporating supporting players and large female choruses. These dazzling elements layered new objects of humor and desire upon the established racial foundation of minstrelsy. (2)
Although their partnership was extremely productive, McIntyre and Heath have attracted little attention in recent scholarship. Their act is noted in such anecdotal histories as Douglas Gilbert's 1940 volume American Vaudeville, (3) but Henry and Alexander have not figured into theoretical analyses of blackface minstrelsy. In this essay, I will first describe the core elements of the Henry/Alexander stage relationship; then I will explore the addition of feminine elements to the act, and the reflections that gender make upon the central racial impersonations. The changing images of femininity in the work of McIntyre and Heath--from the grotesque blackface "gar" to the mechanized white sex object--create a link between the oldest blackface traditions and the commodification of race and sexuality in the twentieth century. In both blackface stereotypes and idealized white dancing choruses, white, male theatrical artists projected an illusion of knowledge, even intimacy, with the bodies of people-African Americans and white women--who held inferior social positions. McIntyre and Heath used this process to assert and confirm their performative authority, which translated into decades of ticket sales.
The Henry and Alexander characters were typical of blackface minstrelsy, representing the urban dandy and the dim-witted stable hand, respectively. The original dynamic between Henry and Alexander--before they began sharing the stage with chorus girls--demonstrates several of the qualities described by Eric Lott: African American masculinity is reduced to a blackface binary; plots revolve around bodily urges such as hunger and lust; much of the humor arises from punning malapropism; and the blackface world they live in also contains grotesque blackface females, who represent a monstrous, devouring sexual power. (4) There is also evidence of a strong homosocial bond between the two actors, which echoes the larger homosocial context Lott ascribes to blackface minstrelsy. I would argue that when the white chorus girls were added to this relationship, additional attractions and repulsions would have drawn new audiences for McIntyre and Heath, such as working women exerting choice in their leisure activities, who often took fashion and beauty cues from performers; and middle-class men, for whom the sexualized spectacles of the earlier concert saloon were now legitimized in mass-produced entertainment and enacted increasingly complex race, class, and gender relationships. (5) Some scholars contend that blackface minstrelsy could demonstrate transgressive, revolutionary potential by depicting sartorial, gestural, and linguistic images of African American power that challenged the dominant white position--as Eric Lott describes it, the "promised undoing of white male sexual sanctity." (6) In shows like Hello, Alexander! these risks were compounded by the presence of white, female sex objects: white, half-naked women shared the stage with "black" men, simultaneously suggesting the titillation and the threat of miscegenation. But risks were also mitigated by the relocation of minstrelsy from a working-class venue to the pleasure palaces of the growing industrial complex of American theater.
The contrast between the mythologized, nostalgic faux-Southern setting of McIntyre and Heaths earliest sketches and the glossy atmosphere of their later shows is extreme. Twentieth-century chorus girls were a mass-produced commodity. Ned Wayburn, in particular, who staged McIntyre and Heaths earliest Ham Tree Girls Chorus, was known for providing Florenz Ziegfeld with uniformly beautiful dancers who moved with mechanized regularity. Wayburn was a great collaborator for McIntyre and Heath, because he, too, had begun as a minstrel performer and was a pioneer in the expansion of minstrel shows into large spectacle. M. Alison Kibler observes that, "Although Wayburn did not invent the union of sexual spectacle with the minstrel show, his productions ... were part of the escalation of girl acts into vaudeville. These acts ... reveal the centrality of a particular type of chorus girl to the consumer culture that was gaining prominence." (7) Despite displaying their legs, the chorus girls presented a regimented sexuality that discouraged individuality or the equation of sex appeal with personality. Flanked by this chorus, the blackface characters seem sanitized, separated from their original racist, yet erotic, contexts. Audiences for these extravaganzas were invited to combine the representational negotiation of race and gender positions with the voyeuristic distance of the burlesque patron. McIntyre and Heaths depictions of black and white femininity not only complemented, but can be read as commenting upon, the black/white male binary at the core of their act.
Thomas K. Heath and James McIntyre were both solo blackface minstrels when they teamed up in 1874, during the early days of variety. They appeared for vaudeville producers Tony Pastor, Weber and Fields, and Lew Dockstader and shared one of the longest-running stage partnerships in...
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