Michael Kantor: Describe the first show you remember seeing on Broadway, who was in it, what was it like to go to it, and what happened.
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: I went to Sally was my first show I saw. I was about, I guess, five or six years old. And I went on a matinee, of course. And Marilyn Miller was in it, and Leon Errol. And I remember sitting in the prize seats, the two on the aisle. And it was fun. And I don’t really remember too much of it, actually. I remember Marilyn Miller dancing. And then she sang a pretty little song in it that I always remembered. And of course, Look for the Silver Lining was the hit song of the day. And she was a lovely dancer, light.
Michael Kantor: What would she like off the stage?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: She wasn’t so light and feathery off the stage. I remember my father took me up to meet her afterwards, which of course everybody wants to do, even at five years old. And we went up to her dressing room, and daddy knocked on the door. And she said, come in. And we we went in, and my father started to introduce me. And with that, she just let fly every swear word Is known in the English language, saying, do you think I’m going to wear this goddamn, what can I say, dress? It’s so heavy, and I can’t move in it, and you’re the biggest louse in the world. And with that, my father turned on his heel and took me out really fast. And it was a little disillusioning to see somebody that glamorous in this gorgeous dress. And we’d probably cost a small fortune even in those days. So my father was a little abashed at that. He just couldn’t get me out of there fast enough. Of course, I think the theater in New York is something special. The theaters smell differently. You go into a theater, and there’s a kind of wonderful aura about them. Now, I haven’t been in too many of the really new theaters. But there aren’t too many really new theaters, I guess, actually, are there? The new Amsterdam, of course, is new. I haven’t seen that yet. But the older theaters have a, I don’t know what it is, it’s a wonderful ambiance of, you feel you’re really in a theater. And the seats are usually comfortable and you can hear everything. Nothing is. Nowadays, where the microphone is the thing and they’re plastered all over everybody’s heads and out of their ears, it’s kind of weird. But I think the New York theater is, there’s something very special about it.
Michael Kantor: Tell me about what it was like to attend the Follies.
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: Oh dear. Well, let’s see.
Michael Kantor: You come in.
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: Yes, you’d come in and you would sit down, hopefully, in good seats, which I had privy to. And there was a great beauty about them. My father had a marvelous sense of color and… I remember that one Follies I went to, they had a butterfly number, and he had, I don’t know how many, looked like acres of blue chiffon, was the main curtain. And somehow with lights, I guess, they started fluttering little shadows of butterflies across the curtain. And then it opened, and then the girls started… Walking on the stage in their Siegfeld walk. Delores was in that show then, and she was the white, pristine, beautiful butterfly.
Michael Kantor: What about, uh, who was Gilda Gray? What did she do?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: Gilda Gray was a dancer, and she was a shimmy. She did the shimmi. And she did the shimmer like nobody else could shimme. In fact, I haven’t seen anybody do that recently in anything. Maybe I haven’t seen everything, of course, but it seems to be a dance of the past. They do all kinds of different. Wiggles and things, but she always usually wore some kind of a spangly dress or Fringe fringe was wonderful for the shimmy
Michael Kantor: And shimmy’s just served.
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: You just kind of shake your whole body all at once. I don’t know how she does it or did it. But yes, you just shake all over. You get going like this.
Michael Kantor: Let’s talk about your father for a second. What kind of man was he?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: Of course, to me, he was a… My father was a simple man. He didn’t seem at all complicated. And I think basically he probably was because he had all kinds of ideas churning in him all the time. He was always thinking of something new to do, some new talent to find. And he was a very quiet man most of the time And he talked rather softly, unless he was angry, which he could become very quickly if something didn’t please him. But he had a gentleness about him, and yet he was firm. If he said something, you really didn’t want to buck him on it. He had a way of saying it, that you just didn’t wanna. Do anything that would rile him further. But he had a marvelous sense of humor. So many people think he didn’t like comedians and he was sort of a sour puss on them, but he really loved comedians. And I think somebody, maybe an adversary, decided they would just plant a little story like that. And of course something like that just… Grows and keeps going.
Michael Kantor: We clearly loved composers.
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: Yes.
Michael Kantor: Do you think that had to do with his own upbringing his who was who was his father?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: My grandfather, Florence Ziegfeld, Sr., opened the Chicago Musical College. And he was a pianist and a teacher. And he, of course, wanted my father to take over the school. But my father had other ideas. And I think it probably was grandfather’s fault, to an extent, because when daddy was young, old enough to travel by himself, grandfather sent him to Europe to look for new talent and people to come to the school and musical bands and all kinds of instruments. So I think my father got a taste of it.
Michael Kantor: What’s the story in terms of Buffalo Bill Cody in the Wild West show? Was he attracted to that?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: My father was really quite an outdoorsman, as well as being a theater man. And when he was in his teens, he decided he would go off to Wyoming and see what was out there. And he was a good huntsman and a wonderful shot. And somehow, he hooked up with Buffalo Bill. And he went around with him for a while. And then grandfather discovered where he was and said, Daddy had a wonderful knack of finding a beautiful girl, but they were not always, uh, in those days, of course, makeup wasn’t the big thing. Now you have to take off the makeup to see if the girl is pretty underneath. But he would take a girl who was very simple looking. She had to have pretty eyes. Lovely color eyes. She had to have a more or less. In proportion or have some wonderful mouth or sort of cut of the jib that was appealing. Yes, well, now the dancing girls were usually short, the little pony girls. And their legs had to be equally as good. If a girl had developed too much muscle, he didn’t like that either. They had to have a smooth. Contour and of course girls were not as tall by any means as they are now the Show girls were only in stocking feet probably five six maybe Five six five seven and then of course in high heels they went up and of the high heels Made a tremendous difference in their legs nowadays these girls wear all these boxes on their feet And it does nothing for their legs, but a small French high heel does. And then they have to learn, of course, to walk in them. Oh, it took a lot. A great deal. Simplicity, for starters. He would pick a girl that you would think was pretty. And by the time she got on the stage, she was suddenly beautiful. He would pay a great deal of attention to her hair. And of course, makeup then was not the sticky stuff it is today. There was very little makeup. But he knew the right colors. To use, the amount of lipstick, whether she needed a lot more eyeshadow than the next fellow, and the colors, that they were not all splattered with green eyelids and they were done according to their, what their need was. And they were wholesome girls. He didn’t pick emaciated, overly busted. They were all different. He didn’t like anything heavy of her. You know, some people have bigger waist than others. They weren’t all little pin waist. They were natural looking. And I think that was part of the charm. They just weren’t a carte blanche, beautiful girl. And of course, the showgirls, they were something else again. They were somewhat taller and more statuesque, of course than the dancers. And they were lovely girls. And a girl who had just a little bit of a not a tick in her eye, but Gladys Glad had one eye that wandered around. And he thought that was very fascinating. They had a cast, I guess you call it. And quite a few, I don’t know now whether you can detect any of them, but quite a few of them had. Twitch in their eye that made them alluring.
Michael Kantor: And in the 20s, they were very sought after, weren’t they? How were they treated by society?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: Oh, yes, well, the stage door Johnnys were lined up for blocks, and many of them made very good marriages, and they were wined and dined and socially in.
Michael Kantor: What do you think your father meant with his slogan glorifying the American girl? What was he trying to do?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: Well, I think he was trying to, I think my father was when he’s, well, let’s go all over again here. Glorifying the American girl, of course, was his. Well, am not doing this right at all.
Michael Kantor: It’s not a slogan, what is it?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: It’s not it’s it’s um Well, the saying, glorifying the American girl, I imagine my father thought it up himself. And I think he meant to glorify the American girl was to build her up to a peak that she was the best girl on earth. And she was wholesome, number one. Beautiful. And fun to be with.
Michael Kantor: What do you think is your father’s greatest accomplishment? What should we remember him for?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: Let’s see here. I hope you can cut all this. My father’s main contribution to the world, I think, are to the musical. Was beauty and His color sense was wonderful. And his main shows, of course, I suppose Showboat would be the main thing. Of course, the Follies went on for so many years that they were sort of a foregone conclusion. But the Showboat was really a step for him that was terrifying. And he loved doing it. To begin with, it was rather a sad story. And he said, we cannot do this musical with all this sadness. So they added comedy and comedy songs in good taste, of course. But I think had it been done strictly from the book, it would have been a little sad. And he was so afraid that people would what he was doing, because it wasn’t, they expected a folly. They expected laughter and ha-ha and beautiful girls. And Showboat had all of that. And the sets were magnificent. But when it opened and the curtain went down, there was absolute silence. And he was, he said, well. Now I’ve really done it. And he always stood in the back of the theater and watched. He never sat in the seat. And then after about two minutes, everybody stood up and just yelled and screamed and hurrahed. And he said, well, maybe nobody’s going to come and see it. Well, the next day, the line was around the block at the Ziegfeld Theater. Daddy had a knack of finding the right person for the right job. He could find people like Joseph Urban for sets, Jack Harkrider for costumes, and Ned Webern was the big dance man then. He just could find, find people. And come to him necessarily, although I think probably some of them did. But he’d hear about somebody, and he’d think, hmm, maybe that’s the one for the job. And the same with all his actors and actresses. He just had that special feel for it. Poser I ever met was Irving Berlin. He lived right above us in Hastings, beyond him. I think, and we went up one day, and he really didn’t play the piano too well, and I remember he had written, I think it was… Picked it out on the piano with one finger. And he said, I think this is going to be a hit. My father said, yeah, I you’ve got something there. He was a very shy person, but he was a dear man. He was great talent. And then there was Rodgers and Hammerstein. Well, no, it wasn’t Hammerstein in those days, but Richard Rodgers, and Jerome Kern, of course. Rudolph Rimmel was another one. And he was fun. He used to come up to camp and visit us. He was just crazy. But he had a piano that he used to practice on that was silent. It was just a little keyboard. And he would play this by the hour, not a sound coming out of it. I used to think, how can he do that without hearing anything? It was hard enough for me to practice with hearing it. Maybe I’d have done better with his. And Victor Herbert, of course, was one that… Started before I was born. I guess that was
Michael Kantor: So your father really was always surrounded by these different sort of.
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: He was always, my father was surrounded himself with talented people. He really didn’t, cotton it sounds a little snobbish, but he liked interesting people. My mother and father were quite a pair. My father married my mother, who was a star in her own right, Billy Burke. And they met on New Year’s Eve at the. 60S club. My father had been in a costume. He always wore a hobo costume and all kinds of hair on his face and looked very sloppy, but he had changed because he was into his tails. And he was at the bottom of the stairs and mother came in with Somerset Mom and a couple of other people. And he took a look at her and I guess said, that’s for me. I don’t think she had paid too much attention to him because she was coming down the stairs in all her glory. And then he got his friend that was running the Paul Jones to stop whenever he was in front of her. And so they did this four or five times. And Mother had no idea who he was. She thought he was some Italian of some kind of title. And then some gal went by and said, hi, Flo. And she said, oh, my lord. I’m dancing with Florence Siegfeld. And immediately panicked. She’d heard he was such a ladies’ man and really didn’t want to have anything to do with him. But they romanced for three months, and then they were married. Mother and daddy were really an unusual pair. They were both very spoiled. He was used to having what he wanted, and she was used to. Having what she wanted. So it was really, I think, unusual that they hit it off as well as they did. Probably that was why. But Mother gave in to him a lot, but she knew what made him happy. She knew that he had had a fast and rather loose life, and he was now ready to settle down. He was in his 40s, and she was 30. There was a vast age difference. And she knew how to handle him. And he, by the same token, knew how to handle her, and of course, all through their life, they had their moments. But to them, home and family was the most important thing.
Michael Kantor: Describe, you know, what was it like to be the daughter of these two very rich, successful people? You know, no doubt you didn’t want for anything, what were the kind of, describe your upbringing.
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: And of course, as a child, I had a grand time. I could do almost anything I wanted. But they were terribly strict. If I showed any signs of being the least bit spoiled, and heaven knows I was. And it was a sort of thing. You know, we had two Rolls Royces. We had a large estate. But then I guess I felt, didn’t everybody? I just went along with it, but I had to learn everything. I learned to play golf, tennis, swim, shoot, fish. My father was a great outdoorsman. People think he just lived in his office and produced shows. Well, every year we went hunting and fishing, and he really enjoyed being outdoors.
Michael Kantor: And didn’t you have a big dollhouse or something in Hastings? And I don’t remember from that other documentary. I saw a home movie, what? There was a home of you in front of an old dollhouse, no?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: I, of course, had all kinds of presents and animals. And Marion Davies was making a movie in New York, and they had the replica of Mount Vernon as one of the sets. So daddy had that set up to Hastings, and they put a back on it. And I had a huge little house. You could live in it. It was really very comfortable, even had a little kitchen. So it was, um, It was a fun childhood. I loved every minute of it. But they knocked any, they were always at me for, you know, if I said anything tooty tooty, you know, I’d be knocked right down.
Michael Kantor: What happened at the crash, how did that change everything?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: Our life changed dramatically, of course, in the late 20s, when the crash came, because my father lived on the edge of the stock market in those days with buying on margin. And the horrible part was that he had sent a telegram down to sell everything when a friend of his came up and said, oh my god, Fleur, you’re not going to do that. And he sent his speedboat after the little slow boat and tore up the telegram. And of course… We lost everything. Mother, fortunately, had made a lot of money, and she had bought some bonds. And so she had a little bit, but nothing compared to what he lost. And so that’s how we ended up in California.
Michael Kantor: And did he ever really sort of, I read, I think in the book that you wrote the foreword to, that he wasn’t the same man after the crash, was he?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: The crash did something really dreadful to him, I think. And he was getting to an age where he had fought so long for so much. And then when he lost everything without the thought of being able to recoup it, I think he felt the market was maybe gone and he didn’t have the money to do it. And his friends had lost all their money, too. Some of them had committed suicide. And it was just a bad time. And I think he maybe could have made it in movies. He did do Whoopi with Sam Goldwyn. But there, that was a whole new world that he would have to learn. And I don’t think he was up to it. I think you just kind of gave up, which I think maybe that happens to people like that. I think it happened. Also to my mother when she couldn’t work as much. And voiceovers hadn’t come in in advertising and television. The whole world was changing.
Michael Kantor: How would you describe his feelings about women and their role?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: Daddy liked women and he enjoyed their company. Of course, in his day, women were not trying to take over everything like they’re trying to do now. You can tell I’m not a woman’s liber. I think he admired women. He felt they were intelligent and pretty to look at. And after all, they were his bread and butter, too. But I think he basically enjoyed women. Not as against men. He liked men too. But I mean, that was his role in life, was to make women as beautiful as they could be. And he could find them anywhere and everywhere. It was a, well, it was his life’s work, let’s face it. Wow. But you mentioned you were born. Yes, well I was born, of course, overlooking Broadway in the Ansonia Hotel. And Broadway has always really been a part of my life. And although I didn’t realize it when I wasborn that it was going to be a part my life, It was always glamorous, and I think it was even more glamorous back then when there wasn’t neon lights. I can remember when the first neon lights came into New York, and it was on the Burlesque Theater. I think they had the first… Neon light. Sign. And, but I remember all of the electric lights and they were far more glamorous and rich and they had almost a wholesomeness to it. And they were very impressive. And everybody, of course, tried to outdo the next fellow which they’re still trying to do and probably succeeding. But they were much richer.
Michael Kantor: Did it feel like theater and the musical theater was at the center of the world at that point in time?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: The musical theater to me of course is my very favorite and I think it has always maybe taken priority to stage plays. Maybe now the stage plays are, of course they’ve always been there and I’m sure I would get a lot of flack on saying that the musical theater outdid them. But there was something very glamorous about musical theaters. There was lovely music to start with, and singers and dancers. There was a whole ambiance of the theater that was great fun to me. And now, of course, they’ve taken it to such enormous proportions, with all the new technologies and everything that… You know, the sky’s the limit. My father was Florin Ziegfeld, and I really don’t think he could produce a show in today’s times. Number one, I don’t thing he could afford it. The unions are above and beyond anything he could cope with. And I think the ticket prices are absolutely unreal. He used to have a flap when they would raise them from, I remember when they went up from $5.50 to $6.60. Then they went to $7.70. And he threw up his hands and said, they’ll never come. Nobody’s going to pay $770 to see a musical show. And of course now, it’s unbelievable. And I think… The musicians’ unions, all the unions, would have put him in an absolute flap. And building scenery and doing all the things that he loved to do and the quality of what he had in his shows. The girls all wore silk stockings because he said they made them feel better and he wanted them, they felt good, they’d look good. And their costumes, of course, in those days cost a great deal. What they would cause now would be astronomical. And of course, they are astronomical for most of the musicals now, I’m sure. But I think he would just throw up his hands and say, there’s no way I can do this. And that would be very unlike him, because he always thought he could do it all. My father made a lot of money through the years. And I remember when, after Showboat was running, he made his first million dollars. Of course, a million dollars a day is like saying he made two cents. But it was a great thing in those days. And he had a friend of his say, now, Flo, let’s incorporate you. Well, he took one, listened to that, and thought. I will be bound by a corporation, and I won’t be able to do all I want to do.” And he wouldn’t do it. And probably it would have been to his advantage, but that wasn’t the way he worked. He was not a corporate man.
Michael Kantor: Do you think for him the shows he did on Broadway, were they business or were they art?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: I think they were half and half. I think there were half business and half art. Well, they would start out as art, but then they had to pay off. The Ziegfeld Theater was a beautiful building, and my father had always wanted a theater. And I think it gave him pleasure to look up and see on the building, the Ziegfel Theater. And Joseph Urban had designed it, and it was a wonderful building. I was sorry they had torn it down, but that’s life. And I thinking it gave them a confidence. If he needed the confidence, and I think at that time in his life he did need the confidence of having a theater.
Michael Kantor: In light of his background, how did he feel about taking on Shobo?
Patricia Ziegfeld Stephenson: My father was very interested in doing Showboat. And mother was a little bit instrumental in that. She thought it was a wonderful book and would make a marvelous play, a musical. And then when he got the script from Oscar Hammerstein, he was a bit leery that it was going to be too somber. And he felt that he was known for rather light things. And this was his first serious thing. And he didn’t really want it to be too serious. And I think he was perfectly right, because I think it would have been. Somber, and this way it made a perfect, well-rounded musical. New York is really the city of our country, I believe. And, uh… Music and everything goes into New York. And I think it’s where everybody wants to go to see the best of everything. So I think that’s why perhaps all the shows centered there rather than in Chicago or Kansas City or New Orleans or someplace like that, because eventually, most everybody goes through New York, and of course, the first thing they want to see is a Broadway show. And usually a musical, because they’ve heard of it all their lives, and they’re the best produced. And I think that it’s just a wonderful thrill to be able to go to New York and say, I walked down Broadway, I’ve seen the lights, and they are just thrilling. It’s really, it still is to me. I don’t think there’s any place in the world like it.
