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Female Impersonator Julian Eltinge Gets His Start in Boston’s Gay ’90s

The rise of female impersonator Julian Eltinge was a twist on the old story of instant stardom. In it, an agent/producer spots an ingénue from an amateur play in the provinces and rockets her (or him) to fame on Broadway.

Eltinge started out in the drag shows popular in Boston around the turn of the 20^th century. They took him to Broadway, to European tours and to the vaudeville circuit as a star of George M. Cohan’s troupe.

He became one of the highest paid stars on stage, appearing in a string of hit Broadway musicals. He published three Julian Eltinge magazines, including Julian Eltinge’s Magazine of Beauty Hints and Tips, which promoted his own line of women’s cosmetics, corsets and shoes. A Broadway theater was named after him. He starred in early silent films, hobnobbed with Hollywood stars and built a lavish villa where he lived with his mother.

Offstage he cultivated a manly image, smoking cigars, cursing, riding horses, breaking engagements with women and staging fights in bars. He began to decline in his early 40s and died mysteriously on May 7, 1941.

1^st Corps of Cadets

It all started with a fundraiser to build what is now The Castle at Park Plaza in Boston’s Back Bay. Also known as the Armory of the 1st Corps of Cadets, it used to be the headquarters for Massachusetts’ elite militia unit. Now a steak can be ordered in the gun room, as it is home to a Smith & Wollensky restaurant.

The 1st Corps of Cadets was organized in 1741 as a company of young gentlemen like John Hancock, who had the time and money to serve as the ceremonial honor guard for the royal governors.

The Armory of the First Corps of Cadets

The 1st Corps mission evolved over the years. By 1890, members decided they needed a place to meet, train and store their weapons. They commissioned William Gibbons Preston to design a granite, castlelike structure that could withstand crowd violence. Preston included a six-story tower. To pay for the building, the 1st Corps raised money through public subscription and annual comic operettas. Known as the Cadet Theatricals, members of the all-male cast played both men and women at the Tremont Theatre (now the site of a Loew’s Multiplex).

The Evolution of Julian Eltinge

Many details of the life of Julian Eltinge are unclear. He revealed little about his personal life because he wanted to quell rumors that he was gay. “I am not gay, I just like pearls,” he often said.

His birthday has been given on various dates, but a researcher finally nailed it down. He was born William Julian Dalton on May 14, 1881, in Newton, Mass., the son of Julia Baker Dalton and Michael Dalton. His father, a failed gold prospector, later opened a barbershop in Butte, Mont.

According to one version of the story, he played a girl in the Cadet Theatricals at the age of 10. His performance inspired the next year’s show to be written around him.

But his biographer, Martin Litvin, writes that Billy Dalton was encouraged by his mother to dress in skirts and entertain men in the saloons of Butte. When his father found out he beat him severely. At 17, he went to live with an aunt in Boston, where he worked in a dry goods store.

Fame

Another biographer picks up the thread. In Extravaganza King: Robert Barnet and Boston Musical Theatre, Anne Alison Barnet writes that Billy Dalton was then studying dance and taken the name Julian Eltinge (rhymes with sing). His dance instructor recommended him to Barnet, the Cadet Theatricals producer, because he had beautiful legs and was a joy to work with. He played the part of a soubrette named Mignonette in Miladi and the Musketeer.

The next year another amateur theatrical group asked him to perform — the Bank Officers Association, a benevolent society for bankers. The cadets had decided not to produce a show that year, but to spend more time drilling. Rumor had it that the military brass frowned on drag performances as unseemly.

And so the BOA took center stage, and Julian Eltinge stole the 1901 show as Claire de Loinville in Miss Simplicity. Two years later he dazzled the audience in Baron Humbug. A prominent producer named E.E. Rice then took him to Broadway.

The rest is history.

With thanks to the Julian Eltinge Project.

Images: By Tom™5 – Armory of the First Corps of Cadets, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=4793014. This story was updated in 2023.

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Maine’s Mildred Gillars Wanted Fame and She Got It in WWII

Mildred Gillars paid a price for the fame she craved so desperately. She became one of the most hated women in America for her radio propaganda broadcasts on behalf of Germany during World War II.

Mildred Gillars, “Axis Sally,” seated on cot, smoking cigarette, in U.S. Counter Intelligence Headquarters, Berlin, Germany in 1946 (Library of Congress)

Gillars’ childhood started out inauspiciously. She was born in Portland, Maine, in 1900 to Vincent Sisk, a railroad man, and his wife Mae. Both had Canadian roots. But after seven tumultuous years together — Vincent suffered from alcoholism — her parents divorced.

Through friends, Mae met her second husband, Robert Gillars, a dentist. Robert applied for a license to practice in Maine, but couldn’t get one. The family then moved through the Midwest and Canada, returning to Maine when Mildred turned 16. Finally they left for good for Ohio.

By the time she reached adulthood, she had taken on a stepfather’s name — becoming Mildred Gillars — and developed a powerful appetite for fame. She got it.

Mildred Gillars, Actress

Mildred Gillars briefly attended Ohio Wesleyan College, but there the acting bug bit her. So she made her way to New York. In the city, she won small roles in stage plays and in vaudeville shows, but could not get a big break.

In 1928, in a bid to ignite her career, she pulled a stunt. Pretending to be a woman abandoned by her child’s father, she placed an ad in the Camden, N.J., newspaper looking for him. The ad and the news coverage it generated eventually blew up when it was exposed as a publicity plot for a movie about fatherless children.

The fame did little to help Mildred’s career, and in 1929 she traveled to France and on to Algiers, popular destinations for young Americans looking for adventure. She made her way by modeling and teaching English.

In 1933, Mae — whose second husband had turned out to be as big an alcoholic as the first — wrote and told Mildred she would be visiting Hungary, and she invited her daughter to join her.

For the next six years, the two lived in Hungary and later Berlin, Mildred always close to the theater and filmmaking scene. She earned her living, though, as a translator, English teacher and personal assistant.

War Breaks Out

By 1939, however, Hitler’s rule in Germany was growing increasingly autocratic and openly anti-Semitic. Meanwhile, Germany’s war machine was gearing up for all-out conflict. The U.S. State Department was urging U.S. citizens to return home.

Mae returned to the states, but she could not persuade Mildred to join her. In 1940, the war underway, Mildred took a job with the German state radio division, Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, which was then broadcasting on AM frequencies and short-wave.

At Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, Mildred was reunited with her former college professor at Hunter College, Otto Koischwitz. Mildred had several affairs with married men during her life, and she and Koischwitz had had an affair in her New York days. They rekindled their romance in Germany.

With his position as a leader in Reichs-Rundfunk-Gesellschaft, Koischwitz encouraged Mildred to use her talents on behalf of the Third Reich, as a propaganda broadcaster.

In 1943, Mildred took to the airwaves as “Midge at the mic,” broadcasting English-language shows aimed at Americans. U.S. soldiers nicknamed her “Axis Sally,” a moniker that would stick with her forever.

For close to three years, Mildred Gillars broadcast shows aimed at undermining American morale. Sometimes she would make direct appeals to soldiers to give up the fight. Other times she would suggest they were risking life and limb while the “4-Fs” back home were taking their jobs and their women. Most famously, she would visit U.S. soldiers in hospitals and POW camps to record them giving greetings to their families back home, assuring family and friends of their safety. She would intersperse their recordings with subtle and not-so-subtle jabs at U.S. military prospects.

Listener Bait

The updates from the soldiers were “listener bait,” and the real message was what Mildred Gillars wrapped around those updates about U.S. servicemen. Some examples of her messaging:

“Mothers and dads in America, you’ve no idea what hell your boys have been through. And to thank, they’ve got Franklin D. Roosevelt who promised you American mothers that no American boy would be sacrificed on foreign battlefields. I only wish you could get a little glimpse of the conflict going on in Normandy. Well, Roosevelt asked you to do it for him and you did. Wait until some of these human wrecks get back home once again. You won’t be able to recognize some of them. Believe me, I’ve seen them. Well, this is Midge signing off . . . Good night, America!”

“It’s a disgrace to the American public that they don’t wake up to the fact of what Franklin D. Roosevelt is doing to the gentiles or your country and my country . . . This is a Jewish war and I refuse to participate in it and insist on fighting against it.”

Mildred Gillars mugshot

At the end of the war, Mildred tried to melt back into German society and struggled, with the rest of the country, to move past the trauma of the war. But she knew the U.S. military was still looking for her. In 1946, Mildred Gillars was placed under arrest.

Guilty

In 1949, Mildred was brought to trial in the United States. Armed with transcripts of her broadcasts and eyewitness accounts of soldiers she had interviewed, prosecutors initially charged her with 10 counts of aiding the enemy.

Mildred fought back. She was forced to sign a loyalty oath to Germany out of fear of imprisonment or even death, she said. She claimed Otto Koischwitz held such influence over her that she was virtually hypnotized and helpless to resist when doing her broadcasts.

In the end, the jury found Mildred guilty on just one count of treason – involving a radio play that dramatized an American invasion of Germany, resulting in huge losses. The purpose was to undermine U.S. confidence in the D-Day mission.

Prison

Mildred appealed, claiming freedom of speech protected her, but the appeals court ruled against her. The result was a 10- to 30-year prison sentence for Axis Sally.

Mildred Gillars would spend 13 years in prison in West Virginia before she won parole. She passed up her first chance at parole, apparently unprepared to face the public. When she was finally released in 1961, camera crews awaited her at the prison gate, asking for her thoughts and plans as she made ready to leave with her half-sister.

For once, however, the sultry voice that floated over the airwaves for countless hours during the war had been quieted.

“After 15 years, you don’t feel like having much to say,” she politely explained.

Mildred Gillars would return to Ohio, earn her degree from Ohio Wesleyan and spend some time teaching before finally shutting herself away in a convent, where she died in 1988.

This story was updated in 2022.

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S. Z. Poli, New Haven’s Italian P.T. Barnum

Twenty-one-year-old S. Z. Poli came to America in 1881 with little more than the ability to carve lifelike figures from wax. He parlayed that skill into a theatrical empire and prestige in his adopted home of New Haven.

S. Z. Poli

Players like Houdini, Sophie Tucker and George M. Cohan performed for working-class immigrants in his magnificent theaters throughout the Northeast.

New England’s Yankee elite never quite accepted the Italian immigrant who put on vaudeville shows. He probably didn’t care. He liked and understood the working-class immigrants who came to the United States to work in its burgeoning factories. They were the ones who filled his theatres in such blue-collar cities as Worcester, Bridgeport, Waterbury, Springfield and Hartford.

“I have remained always a showman,” he said. “I have sought neither diversion nor profit outside the theatrical field.”

People often compared him to P.T. Barnum, another Connecticut showman.

Wax Anarchists

Sylvester Zefferino Poli was born at 10 p.m., on New Year’s Eve 1859 in Piano di Coreglia, Tuscany. He liked to joke, “I was a year old, two hours after I was born.”

His father was a church organist, his mother a baker. As a boy he showed promise as an artist. During the Franco-Prussian War, the family gave refuge to a noted sculptor, M. Dublex. Sylvester Poli then went to Paris with Dublex as his apprentice.

After he finished his military obligation in Italy, he returned to Paris to work at the Musee Grevin, a wax museum. He modeled in wax historical figures such as kings, queens, presidents, inventors, murderers and Jesus Christ.

Then he immigrated to the New York City in 1881 and took a job with the Eden Musee, which displayed ‘The Wonders of the World in Wax.’ In 1885 he married Rosa Leverone, and they had five children.

Poli’s Palace Theater in Waterbury

S. Z. Poli’s big break came with the death sentence of seven anarchists for the Haymarket riot in Chicago. The men were railroaded by the court, and the trial created an international sensation. While the anarchists awaited death, Poli got permission to reproduce them in wax with their real clothes. He exhibited the figures in a storefront, then took them on the road. In 1888, he formed a partnership and opened dime museums in Toronto, Rochester, N.Y., and Staten Island.

New Haven

He then moved to New Haven in 1892 and built the Poli Eden Musee, another wax museum. The next year he opened Poli’s Wonderland Theatre in New Haven and staged ‘high-class’ vaudeville shows that ran as long as 12 hours. The shows were aimed at a working- and middle-class audience. The Yankee old guard viewed them as lowbrow, a sign of cultural decline.

Vaudeville had emerged from minstrel shows, burlesque, circus acts and dime museums, which P.T. Barnum took to their highest level. Early vaudeville was often bawdy and crude, the audience fueled by liquor.

S. Z. Poli, like his rival Benjamin Franklin Keith, insisted on elevating the tone of vaudeville. “Always, and at all times, I have been a strong believer in morality,” he said. “I have insisted always on clean shows, and have never tolerated anything that could be fairly regarded as unfit for public presentation.”

Poli hired now-legendary entertainers: Harry Houdini, Shirley Booth, Bert Lahr, Mae West, George Burns and Gracie Allen, Jack Benny, Edgar Bergen, Ray Bolger, Bill “Bo Jangles” Robinson, Will Rogers, Eva Tanguay, Theda Bara, Fred Allen and Baby Rose Marie (who later appeared on The Dick Van Dyke Show). He showed the first motion picture ever seen in New Haven in a theater he bought to show it in.

Architectural Gems

From his first museum in New Haven, S. Z. Poli went on to build and remodel magnificent, heavily embellished theaters. Some fell to the wrecking ball. Others reopened and are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. Some are haunted wrecks.

By 1916 he was the world’s largest individual theater owner.

Poli’s Theater in Springfield

Ultimately he owned 28 theaters, 18 in Connecticut. (Click here for a complete list.) When he retired at age 69 he also owned three hotels, 500 offices and two building sites.

S. Z. Poli remodeled or built magnificent showplaces. The Poli Palace in Bridgeport, now abandoned and said to be haunted, was designed in the Beaux Arts style by Thomas Lamb and was the largest theater in Connecticut.

When he bought the Franklin Square Theatre in Worcester, he renamed it the Grand and hired Lamb to double its seating capacity and transform it into a glittering palace. It is now the Hanover Theatre for the Performing Arts and run as a nonprofit.

In Waterbury, Conn., the opulent Palace Theater reopened as a performing arts center. Thomas Lamb designed it with grand lobby spaces and ornate dome ceilings.

The Palace Theater in Waterbuy.

Friends in High Places

George M. Cohan described S.Z. Poli as a shrewd businessman and a warm friend. As a member of the Four Cohans, he once haggled with Poli over their pay. Poli stubbornly refused to give them a raise. Cohan and his sister then performed, their parents in the audience celebrating their 25^th wedding anniversary. After the show, the house lights went on, and ushers marched down the aisle carrying an ornate silver serving set that they presented to Mr. and Mrs. Cohan, with the Polis’ compliments. So George asked S.Z. why he’d resisted giving them a raise when the gift cost far more than the difference in their wages. Poli then replied, “George, the salary was business, the gift is friendship.”

For his own anniversary celebration, S.Z. and Rosa Poli hosted a gala celebration at their home in New Haven. The local newspaper called it one of the handsomest entertainments ever given in the city. Their lawn was turned into enchanted gardens with hundreds of Japanese lanterns and an orchestra played until the early morning hours. Mayor Frank Rice was there, along with lawyers, corporate heads, garage owners, carpenters and clerks.

He never lost touch with his working-class roots, staying involved with the Italian community and helping the working poor. During World War I he helped organize a National Guard Company of Italian soldiers to demonstrate their patriotism to the United States.

Interior of the Hanover Theatre in Worcester

Legacy of S.Z. Poli

Poli retired in 1929, having sold an interest in his theaters to Fox New England Theaters. After the stock market crash, Fox went into bankruptcy and Poli retained control. He then sold the remaining theaters to Loew’s in 1934. He died three years later in his home in Woodmont, Conn., on May 31, 1937. Poli left an estate worth $30 million.

Poli’s New Haven theater under the wrecking ball. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

He is credited with helping to transform the variety show into the vaudeville show.

Brett Page in 1915 described the transformation:

From the old variety show, made up of a singer of topical songs, an acrobatic couple, a tight-rope walker, a sidewalk “patter” pair, and perhaps a very rough comedy sketch, there has developed a performance that sometimes includes as many as ten or twelve acts, each one presented by an artist whose name is known around the world. One of the laments of the old vaudeville performers is that they have a place in vaudeville no more. The most famous grand opera singers and the greatest accost and actresses appear in their room. The most renowned dramatists write some of its playlets. The finest composers cut down their best-known works to fit its stage.

This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Palace Theater By Koskenart – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=51408720.

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Remembering Martin Bergen, From Beaneaters Star to Murder-Suicide

In the summer of 1934, three very different lives converged in North Brookfield, Mass.: song-and-dance man George M. Cohan; Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack; and Martin Bergen, a Boston Beaneater who murdered his family and killed himself 34 years previously.

George M. Cohan takes an at-bat as Connie Mack catches, July 10, 1934. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

North Brookfield

All three had grown up in or near North Brookfield. Cohan, born in 1878, spent summers in North Brookfield at his grandmother’s house when he wasn’t traveling on the vaudeville circuit with his family. He loved the town. His musical Fifty Miles From Boston was inspired by North Brookfield and includes the song Harrigan.

In 1934, Cohan told a reporter, “I’ve knocked around everywhere, but there’s no place like North Brookfield.”

Geoge M. Cohan on Broadway

Cornelius McGillicuddy, better known as Connie Mack, was born Dec. 22, 1862 in East Brookfield, Mass., to a large Irish family. He quit school at 16 to work in a shoe factory and help support his family. He played baseball, or what was then called town ball, any chance he could get.

In 1886 he began his 10-year career as a light-hitting catcher in the National League. Then he went on to manage, and become part owner, of the Philadelphia Athletics for 50 seasons. He won, lost and managed more games than anyone in baseball history, and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1937.

Martin Bergen

Martin Bergen. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library.

Martin Bergen was also a catcher, and some said he was the best defensive catcher ever to play the game. He was born on a farm in 1871 in North Brookfield.

From 1896 to 1899, he played for the Boston Beaneaters (later the Braves), growing increasingly erratic. Sometimes he would disappear for days. Once he suddenly slapped a teammate without provocation. He claimed people were trying to poison him and he began to walk sideways so he could detect his potential assassins.

His teammates mistook his behavior for alcoholism, but Martin Bergen suffered from mental illness.

When his three-year-old son died in the summer of 1899, Martin Bergen complained his teammates kept reminding him of his son’s death. Some of the Beaneaters, on the other hand, said they wouldn’t play the next year if he were still on the team.

Boston Beaneaters in 1897

On Jan. 19, 1900, Martin took an axe and bludgeoned to death his wife and two small children. He then slashed his own throat so savagely his head was nearly severed. Doctors concluded he had schizophrenia and possibly manic depression.

Cohan and Mack knew Martin Bergen. Mack had played baseball with him. Mack and Cohan had become friends, and in 1934 they helped collect enough money to establish a granite monument to Martin Bergen at his gravesite in St. Joseph Cemetery.

Connie Mack Day

The Brookfield Chamber of Commerce planned July 10, 1934 as a special day to dedicate the monument. George M. Cohan agreed to play master of ceremonies. He asked Connie Mack if his Philadelphia Athletics, on pace for a losing season, would play a top town team, the Armortreds.

Ironically, the day to honor Martin Bergen became Connie Mack Day. The town bedecked itself in patriotic bunting and American flags. The 181^st Infantry Band serenaded a crowd of 6,000 with tunes. NBC broadcast the game, with Cohan doing the play-by-play when he wasn’t umpiring or sitting next to Connie Mack, eating hot dogs or signing autographs.

Connie Mack, 1911

After the Athletics lost 9-5, Connie Mack spoke to the crowd:

I cannot begin to tell you the pleasure it has given me to come back to North Brookfield today. It was 51 years ago on the Fourth of July that I played my last ball game on this common … And I lost that one too. I don’t know if I have set foot on this field since.

Mack had returned to North Brookfield 34 years earlier to attend Martin Bergen’s funeral. Only two others had joined him for the sad ceremony: his brother Bill Bergen and his teammate Billy Hamilton.

The inscription on the monument read, “In memory of Martin Bergen, 1871–1900. Member of the Boston National League Club. Erected in appreciation of his contribution to American’s national game.”

With thanks to Connie Mack: A Life in Baseball By Ted Davis. This story about Martin Bergen was updated in 2022.

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Molly Spotted Elk, a Penobscot Scholar Who Also Danced on Stage

In the fall of 1931, 27-year-old Molly Spotted Elk was far from home and unsure about marrying her French journalist lover. She didn’t know if two people from such different worlds could work it out.

Molly Spotted Elk

Molly Spotted Elk was the stage name for Mary Alice Nelson, a Penobscot Indian who won acclaim for her dancing in Paris. Shortly after she arrived in France, she met Jean Archambaud, a reporter for Paris Soir newspaper. Soon he was writing passionate love letters to her.

She decided to say ‘yes’ after she remembered the true story of a 17^th century French nobleman who came to Acadia, married an Indian princess and became a leader of her tribe.

Throughout her life, Molly Spotted Elk felt ambivalent about her role in the dominant culture. She acted out the stereotype of the sexy savage to meet the racist expectations of white people. At the same time she strove for their acclaim as an entertainer, as a writer and as an anthropologist.

Molly Dellis

Mary Alice (Molly Dellis in Penobscot) Nelson was born Nov. 17, 1903 on Indian Island in Old Town, Maine. Her father, Horace Nelson, was the first Penobscot to attend Dartmouth College. He studied there for a year and became a governor of the tribe. Her mother, Philomena, made some of the best sweetgrass baskets in Maine.

Molly was the oldest of eight children. The family lived in a tiny white house with two windows. The children helped the family survive by selling Philomene’s baskets from tents in tourist towns. Molly learned traditional Penobscot dances and danced for tourists who stayed at the big hotels.

She took jobs cleaning houses to pay for ballet lessons in Bangor, even as she badgered tribal elders about Penobscot legends.

At 13, Molly Dellis Nelson graduated from Old Town Junior High School and went to live with the family of Frank Speck, a University of Pennsylvania anthropologist. She attended Swarthmore Preparatory School and for two years audited classes at Penn. Molly Spotted Elk contributed to Speck’s classic study of her tribe, Penobscot Man.

She needed money, though, and left school to dance on the vaudeville circuit and in Wild West shows.

No More Baskets

In 1926, Molly moved to New York seeking fame and fortune. “Once I become famous, Mama will not have to make any more Indian baskets,” she told a newspaper reporter back home.

In New York, she described herself as ‘alone, friendless, a hungry innocent Injun girl.’ Her first job was as a nude model for Greenwich Village artists. She tried to save money for school, gave dance lessons, modeled footwear, sent money home for her mother and wrote and read: Flaubert, H.G. Wells, Proust and Joyce.

She won a role in the chorus line of the Foster Girls, who, like the Rockettes, shared a stage with a motion picture. The Foster Girls traveled to San Antonio for an eight-month performance at the Aztec, which screened the Westerns of the era.

Out west, Molly earned cameo spots as ‘Princess Spotted Elk’ and pursued a writing career when she wasn’t dancing. She carried her typewriter into dressing rooms and between shows wrote poetry and adventure stories, literary fiction and traditional Penobscot tales.

When the engagement at the Aztec ended, she returned to New York and found work with Lucy Nicolar, a Penobscot entertainer 20 years her senior. Lucy, known as Princess Watawaso, led an all-Indian troupe that performed on the Keith-Albee vaudeville circuit.

Eventually, Molly Spotted Elk went off on her own performing Indian dances along with the Charleston and the Black Bottom. In one New York cabaret, she appeared in a floor-length Indian headdress and little else. She described her show business life as a ‘heartbreaking one full of promises, trouble, glamor and rush.’

In 1930, she appeared in the film documentary The Silent Enemy, playing the lead role as Neewa. Though it wasn’t a success, it has been restored as a classic.

Molly Spotted Elk in Paris

Molly Spotted Elk left for Paris in 1931 in the ballet corps of the International Colonial Exposition. When the troupe returned to the United States, she stayed behind. She found European audiences appreciated her authentic Native American dances, unlike the Americans who preferred racist Indian stereotypes. She also worked with anthropologists and attended lectures at the Sorbonne.

Journalist Jean Archambaud asked her for an interview for Paris Soir, the city’s biggest daily newspaper. They met at a sidewalk café. He asked how she liked Paris. She said, “It is too loud, I prefer the woods.”

He was charmed. Jean liked the woods too. He also liked art, literature, history and nature – as did she. He was fascinated by her stories of her tribal culture. Within a month he wrote her a love letter:

You are the guide, a delicious guide for my clumsy footsteps.

He wanted to marry her, but she was reluctant. Then she recalled the story of Jean-Vincent d’Abbadie de Saint-Castin. He was a French military officer who came to New France around 1765 at the age of 13. He learned about the Penobscot Indians and married the daughter of tribal chief Madockawando. Her nickname was also Molly. He was adopted into the tribe and became its leader.

Married Life

They married, and for a while life seemed good. They had a daughter, Jean Alice, and Molly achieved modest success dancing.

By 1933 the Depression crushed France. Molly had few opportunities to dance and Jean was fired from the newspaper. He freelanced, she took menial jobs.

Molly returned to the United States in 1934, where she danced and found bit parts in movies. She was pregnant, and gave birth to their daughter Jean Alice. In 1938, they went back to Paris to be reunited with Jean Archambaud. She worked on a book of Penobscot stories and found a publisher willing to bring it out.

Then the Nazis invaded. Molly and her daughter were separated from Jean. They never saw him again.

Mother and daughter fled Paris on foot over the Pyrenees Mountains into Portugal as German fighter planes whined overhead. Sometimes they hitched a ride on a horse-drawn cart, an ambulance or a relief truck. Molly claimed they once got a ride from journalist Howard K. Smith.

Old Moccasins

Back in the United States, Molly floated between Indian Island and New York, where she took increasingly menial jobs.

Indian Island

She finally returned for good to Indian Island. It was, wrote her biographer Bunny NcBride,

…like an old pair of moccasins that one dreamed of during years of high-heeled city life—only to find, upon slipping into them, that they felt less comfortable than remembered because the shape of one’s feet had changed.

Molly Spotted Elk deteriorated mentally, pounding away at her typewriter until late at night and spending some time in a mental institution. She wrote children’s stories and made traditional dolls, two of which are in the Smithsonian collection.

She died on Indian Island on Feb. 21, 1977 at the age of 73.

In 1986, Molly Spotted Elk became a charter member of the Native American Hall of Honor in Page, Ariz. Her real legacy, though, is a book of traditional Penobscot stories in English and a dictionary of the Penobscot language:

Katahdin: Wigwam’s Tales of the Abnaki Tribe and a Dictionary of Penobscot and Passamaquoddy Words with French and English Translations.

With thanks to Molly Spotted Elk: A Penobscot Indian in Paris by Bunny McBride. This story about Molly Spotted Elk was updated in 2023.

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John L. Sullivan, America’s First Superstar Athlete

“My name’s John L. Sullivan and I can lick any son-of-a-bitch alive!” If you heard those words shouted out in the 1880s, the smartest course of action was to stay seated.

Sullivan, aka the Boston Strong Boy, would shout out this challenge dozens of times over the course of his life, and for the most part he was correct.

John L. Sullivan would claim to have fought more than 450 times in his career, some professionally in both exhibits and prize fights, and others the byproduct of barroom scuffles.

Like many of his stories, the truth isn’t always clear. Few people, however, attempted to correct his memory for it is safe to say that Sullivan fought a lot and was very good at it. In fact, he was what amounted to a boxing superstar in his day, harnessing his fame to earn (and spend) more than $1 million.

John L. Sullivan

John L. Sullivan was born Oct. 15, 1858 in Roxbury, Mass. His Irish immigrant parents wanted him to enter the priesthood, and he did well academically. He even attended Boston College for a few months, but dropped out to play professional baseball.

Sullivan’s career as a boxer officially began in 1878. He stepped on stage at the age of 19 to accept a challenge from a prize fighter who offered to take on any man from the audience. In such events, the fighting was typically staged with actors planted in the audience who stepped forward to take a convincing fall. Or else the actor entertained the crowd with his antics.

John L. Sullivan, however, stepped up for real and knocked the professional out. His career was under way.

Sullivan was not highly regarded for his boxing skills, but he was undoubtedly a very hard puncher. At 5’10”, his fighting weight was just under 200 pounds.

Paddy Ryan (left) and John L. Sullivan shake hands before their bout.

John L. Sullivan really made his name in 1882 with a fight against Paddy Ryan. Ryan claimed the world heavyweight championships. Any such claim to that title would raise the eyebrows of purists. In those days, most boxing in the United States involved bare knuckle fighting for as many rounds as it took for one man to get beaten until he couldn’t fight anymore.

The Paddy Ryan Fight

While the Marquess of Queensberry rules were starting to take hold, they hadn’t broadly caught on in the United States. Nor did strong organizations exist to regulate the sport. Nevertheless, Paddy Ryan was a big name and Sullivan chased him for a fight for years. In 1882, Ryan finally obliged.

The match moved several times. Its final location along the Gulf Coast in Mississippi was kept secret until shortly before it started to prevent police from intervening. In the end, it was not much of a contest. After nine rounds (some say eight), Ryan couldn’t continue and Sullivan had won.

The victory catapulted John L. Sullivan to broader fame, and in 1884 he set out to take on the world – literally. He went on a “grand tour” of 28 states in eight months. At each stop, his crew of ‘Sullivan’s Sluggers’ would warm up the crowd with a series of boxing exhibitions. Then the real action would begin.

Sullivan would enter the ring and put up a purse, usually $50 though he raised it as high as $1,000 at times He would give it to any man who would step forward and stay on his feet for three rounds with him in the ring.

He claimed no one ever made it. Every time John L. Sullivan rolled in to a new town, a newspaper man’s dream came true. The carousing Sullivan would be the talk of the town as he drank his way up to the fight, buying booze and raising a ruckus. Trips to the local magistrate to answer charges of drunkenness were not unheard of.

All of it served as great publicity to pack the house on the night of the fights. Returning to Boston, the John L. Sullivan legend grew. In total, more than 100,000 people had come to see Sullivan, and he said he took in more than $140,000 from the tour. He was the most famous person in America.

The Greatest Fight

In July of 1889, Sullivan fought probably his greatest fight, against a fighter named Jake Kilrain. Again, the two men met in Mississippi and 3,000 people went to watch the match. It was another bare-knuckle fight for the world championship. It lasted an amazing 75 rounds. Sullivan scored the first knockdown and Kilrain drew the first blood.

Poster promoting the Kilrain-Sullivan fight

The two were very evenly matched, but the reporters who wrote about the fight noted that about round 30, Sullivan began to get the upper hand, and Kilrain’s trainer took him out of the fight at 75.

John L. Sullivan would defend his title once more in 1892 against “Gentleman Jim” Corbett. Corbett was eight years younger than Sullivan, and much more of a boxer. He relied on footwork and speed and less on punching power. Sullivan, meanwhile, hadn’t trained as hard as he had for Kilrain. The bout was fought with gloves, and in 21 rounds Sullivan was out. It was his last significant fight, though he would manage exhibitions and a minor comeback or two. Corbett would later say that seeing how the crowd had cheered Sullivan at the start of the fight and then turned on him when he was down gave him a look into his own future, and the future of all fighters.

Career Continues

John L. Sullivan made his name as a fighter, but he made most of his money as a self-promoter. When he wasn’t fighting, he was coming up with new schemes to make money. His appearances were never ending. He pitched and umpired at minor league baseball games, appeared in plays, put on boxing exhibitions, s0ld whiskey. If there was money to be made, John L. would show up.

The scandals persisted, however. His wife had accused him of abusing her (which he probably did) when he was drunk. They split and eventually divorced. He was also a straight-out racist, refusing any offers to fight black boxers.

However, after his retirement, his fame seemed to grow. He worked the political campaign trail for his friend Teddy Roosevelt and later James Michael Curley. And his fame inspired the expression: “I’d like to shake the hand that shook the hand of John L. Sullivan.”

The phrase originated from the play The Rag Baby by New Hampshire playwright Charles Hoyt. The farcical play featured a sports fan so enamored of Sullivan that he was thrilled just to shake the hand of someone who had met the fighter. The phrase would later be turned into a song by Monroe Rosenfeld (lyrics) and Alfred Williams (music). People often used the expression for decades.

Finally, Temperance

John L. Sullivan worked steadily through the 1890s, most often entertaining crowds on the vaudeville circuit with a monologue of stories than delighted his fans. He also continued his drinking ways, appearing in court from time to time to face charges that he assaulted someone or was drunk and disorderly.

Still the crowds loved him. John L. Sullivan finally quit drinking around 1908 and went on to marry his second wife, Katherine – a girl he knew from childhood. The two settled on her farm in Abington, Mass.

John L. Sullivan with Jimmie Collins.

John L. Sullivan soon became a sought-after speaker in the temperance movement. He freely acknowledged how much alcohol had cost him, both financially and personally.

Gentleman Jim Corbett didn’t beat him for the title, he said, whiskey did. John L. Sullivan died in 1918, telling stories and entertaining his fans until the very end.

This story about John L. Sullivan was updated in 2023.

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