Busby Berkeley Dreams

by Jillian Butler, Ampersandology

Editor's note: I'm presenting a paper on Busby Berkeley at a conference this week, so thought I'd shake this one off in his honour. Enjoy! 

Look, I know. But I can’t help but name it—I got a thing for the chorus girl.

It keeps popping up in my fiction, a stutter of a motif. It’s my own regrettable nostalgia, mostly wrapped up in what it conveyed rather than what it really was—the yesteryears of the enigmatic dancing girl, guileless in her power over men and brightly smiling under the stage lights. But it was never true, really. It's a hyperreal performance of womanhood, never the real thing. 

Have you seen these creatures? They’re unreal. Smiles glued to their lips, pushing their uniform bodies through space. They're girlish little women, or else womanly girls. Do they have an inner life, their own agency? You'd never guess.


Their kind echo throughout history—the swaying hips of the burlesque, the eternal girlchild of Victorian soap ads, the dazzling performance of femaleness of the Hollywood chorus girl. Eternally young and appropriately blank. 

But dancing girls exist only as a collective noun: who ever talks about one dancing girl? They only exist together; when dispersed, the effect evaporates. And so they travel in packs, trapped in the forgiving limitations of the evening show. Rather than stand alone, the dancing girls are the seams in the self-contained logic of their musical numbers.

From LIFE magazine, 1958. 

Dispel your misplaced notion that these women a) really want to be up there on stage and b) are just delighted to be dancing for you—yes, you!—as they kick, twirl, gesture and hoof in perfect uniformity, trained within an inch of their life to follow the next. Dancing until they die--or turn 35, whatever happens first.

*

Busby Berkeley’s girls, meanwhile, didn’t even need that much: “I never cared whether a girl knew her right foot from her left,” he once said, “so long as she was beautiful.”

Footlight Parade, 1933

Berkeley, a man made famous by his unmistakable configurations of the female form in abstract space, was alarmingly unsentimental when faced with the legions of pretty girls that built his legacy. He’s not the first, either: look to the 1884 Electric Girl Company, a business model that supplied young girls whose bodies were outfitted in electric lights and ornaments. They were used for parties or as waitresses for the crop of modernity-obsessed restaurants, the perfect melding of technology and the human (female) body.

Then followed the usual suspects: the Rockettes, in the 1920s; Earl Carroll’s vaudeville revue “Vanities”; circus peep shows; burlesque shows that slowly showed more and more skin.

There is something beyond surreal in these chorus lines—the faces of these pretty young women, rather than approach uniformity, disturb me in the ways they are dissimilar; in other words, I am perturbed by the idea that I’m supposed to blend them all together and marvel at their sameness, as if someone in the costuming department expected the matching wigs and thematic outfits would erase anything unique or special about everything contained therein.

Earl Carroll was the creator of vaudeville’s “Vanities”, a precursor to the Berkeley chorus girl by more than a few years, had his own philosophy on the Platonic nature of these chorus lines:

“The following points of beauty are given careful consideration: color and texture of hair, brilliancy and size of eyes, regularity of teeth, general coloring, texture of skin, formation of hands and feet, posture and personality...”

But not even these high standards could always be met, as Carroll went on to note:

“There are times (and this was particularly true during the war) when it was necessary to engage girls who do not have all the necessary qualifications. We replace them when it is possible.”

There exists, if you’re curious, a record of the measurements of the “ideal chorine.” Gals, break out your measuring tapes—or, you know, roll your eyes. So the ideal chorus girl has:

-a six-inch wrist

-a twelve inch neck

-a nineteen and a half thigh

-a nine inch ankle.

Not to mention the highest standard of personal grooming. Rather than be repulsed at the blatant sexism on display here, I'm kind of charmed. I mean, they must have had their reasons, right? You can't blame anyone for having standards, even if those standards codify the female form into the gender expectations of an ice cube tray. 

Oh, wait. Never mind. I just remembered Berkeley’s stated goal when casting new chorus girls: his hope was that all the girls would be of uniform size, talent and comeliness—“just like pearls.”

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