Mlle. Gaby Deslys is today a footnote in the history of the commercial theatre--both in Europe and the U.S.A. She was certainly a big star. The Messrs. Shubert reportedly paid Mlle. Deslys $4,000 a week when they first brought her to this country in 1911. That may be the top mark made by anyone before 1928--if, of course, we put the Divine Sarah Bernhardt into a category all her own. Madame Sarah was purportedly paid $10,000 a week by Lee Shubert when he sent her out to tour the country with a circus tent in 1910.
Gaby was attractive, a strawberry blonde in a day before Hollywood blondes. She sang, cavorted in a sort of "naughty" way, and danced. The latter was her specialty. Gaby became the most famous musical comedy star in Europe when she began a love affair with King Manuel II of Portugal in 1909. Manuel (or, at least, a man who looked like him) once occupied a box seat and threw roses at Gaby during her performance. Gaby's star rose continually in 1910, and the Messrs. Shubert brought her to the U.S. the following yer.
Gaby was not a big hit with American audiences in her first show--The Revue of Revues. She fared little better, despite her improved English, in Vera Violetta, in which Al Jolson, in the part of a waiter named "Claude," stole the show. Gaby returned to Europe, came back to the U.S.. and opened in a tour of Vera Violetta (sans Jolson) in Trenton, N.J. on November 16, 1912. It was a disaster. J.J. Shubert, in attendance, closed the show summarily and sent the entire chorus--and almost all the principals--back to New York that same night. Gaby and her leading man, dancing partner, and off-stage paramour, Harry Pilcer, were sent to Baltimore, and that is where the facts become more interesting than most of the fiction.
J.J. also sent a wire to the company manager of "The Whirl of Society with Al Jolson," telling him to bypass Washington and have his company report to Baltimore's Auditorium Theatre on Monday morning. J.J. also had a Shubert staff librettist combine the scripts of Vera Violetta and The Whirl of Society, making them, effectively, one show. An all-day rehearsal in Baltimore was followed by the very first performance of the new hybrid show. It was, at least, a qualified success. The cast was allowed to rest the next day (although Fanny Brice, just twenty-one years old, elected to accept an invitation to the races, where she met, for the first time, Nick Arnstein), gave three additional performances, and moved to Washington, D.C. for the last half of the week.
The show played into January, with Gaby, Jolson, and several other principals rehearsing for their next Shubert show on the days in which there were no matinees. This next show, The Honeymoon Express, a musical version of The Turtle, opened at the Winter Garden on February 6. The American public, however, remained rather cool to Gaby. Jolson, once more, dominated the proceedings. Gaby was replaced by Grace LaRue on April 28.
The Shuberts tried again with Gaby the following season, giving her a starring tour in The Little Parisienne--a comparatively modest show for that day, with nine principals and a chorus of fifteen--which played everywhere from Pittsburgh to the Pacific Coast. The idea was to make her known in almost every part of the U.S. The Belle of Bond Street, which opened on Broadway in March, 1914, was nonetheless her last show for the Shuberts.
Stop! Look! Listen!, produced by Charles B. Dillingham, saw Gaby "On the Beach at Waikiki," in which she stripped while singing Irving Berlin's "Take Off a Little Bit." This has been cited as the first "striptease" on the American stage, the various women who had done versions of Salome's "Dance of the Seven Veils" notwithstanding.
Gaby returned to Paris in the spring of 1916, and reputedly became a spy for France in World War I--the Allies' version of Mata Hari. In 1919, Gaby continued to suffer from the effects of the Spanish Influenza--which had killed over twenty million people in the latter stages of the war. Several operations failed to restore her health; Gaby reputedly intimidated surgeons by insisting they not scar her neck. She died, aged thirty-eight, in Paris, on February 11, 1920.
Gaby Deslys is known today only to students of the popular musical theatre prior to World War I. What was her talent? She was attractive and a capable dancer, Songs like "The Gaby Glide" were written for her. Her very few recordings capture some of her stage charm. ("Oh . . . Naughty boy!") One could stretch a point and call her the first sex goddess of the theatre.
Gaby was a legend in an era quite remote from ours. She made a few silent pictures, none of which appear to have survived. A motion picture based on her life was once considered as a vehicle for Judy Garland; it was never made. Could such a film be made today, restoring Gaby's fame? Well, stranger things have happened.
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