Gilda Gray – Southside Milwaukee Girl Makes It To The Big Time

The legend of Gilda Gray begins in a Cudahy, WI bar.

One evening in 1919, the teenage immigrant from Poland to Milwaukee’s meat-packing suburb was singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in a tavern. To hide her embarrassment at muffing the lyrics, Gray nervously shook her shoulders and hips. Gray later recalled that when a customer asked what she was doing, “I said shaking my ‘chemise,’ only I pronounced it ‘shimmy,’” with her heavy Polish accent. From that one misspoken word, both a Roaring Twenties dance craze and a vaudeville and movie star were born.

Wisconsin author Robert Hudovernik’s new book, Jazz Age Beauties, illuminates anew this Milwaukee star, offering beautiful portraits of Gray. It also returns to the spotlight another forgotten icon: official Ziegfeld Follies photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston.
“I stumbled upon my first Johnston portrait by accident on the Internet,” says Hudovernik. “It reminded me of a Rembrandt painting. I knew I had to find out more about this amazing photographer.”

A photographer himself and a Milwaukee native who studied at the old Layton School of Art and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Hudovernik began searching for information on Johnston. “[What] I found was minimal and sketchy,” says Hudovernik. “But slowly I started piecing together the story of his golden career.”

Seven years later, his research has culminated in a visually sumptuous book chronicling a master photographer’s work. In all, Johnston shot more than 25,000 showgirls and celebrities, including F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Mary Pickford, Theda Bara, Fannie Brice, sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish, Claudette Colbert, Barbara Stanwyck, John Barrymore and members of the Roosevelt family.
Hudovernik also discovered a plethora of fine-art nudes and magazine advertisements done by Johnston, including some featuring Gray. The book concentrates on images of showgirls like Gray.
Johnston first worked with Gray after she was cast as a singer and dancer in the Ziegfeld Follies, and he continued to photograph Gray throughout her career, says Hudovernik, noting, “He liked portraying Gilda Gray’s ‘type.’” Pursuing her stage dreams in New York City, Gray (born Marianna Winchalaska) caught the eye of famous Broadway producer Flo Ziegfeld, who hired her to dance her now-famous shimmy in his 1922 Follies.
Gray’s career skyrocketed from there. In 1924, she starred in the silent film Aloma of the South Seas, essentially a South Seas version of the Follies, with Gray as the alluring Aloma, a native vamp. The year’s top-grossing movie, Aloma made $3 million in the first three months and brought Gray back to Milwaukee for its opening at the Wisconsin Theatre. In the wake of Aloma’s success – which inspired many more South Seas-themed films starring Gray – the actress toured Europe and then settled in Hollywood.
Eventually Johnston and Gray both slipped into obscurity which perplexed Hudovernik, given their one-time glory. He wondered what happened.
It turns out the 1929 stock market crash was ruinous for both Johnston and Gray. “When the crash sent Ziegfeld into bankruptcy, Johnston lost his primary benefactor, while Gilda, at one time reported to be the world’s highest-paid entertainer, lost a life’s fortune,” explains Hudovernik.
Unknown to most, Hudovernik notes Johnston’s impact on today’s modeling and advertising industries: “He was one of the pioneers of the beauty culture we know today. Look up at any billboard featuring a supermodel, and it has roots in Johnston’s photography.”
As for Gray, she personified the glamour and glitz of the Jazz Age itself, helping to create a cultural shift for women. “For the first time, teenage girls emulated what they saw in films,” Hudovernik writes. Rejecting the dowdy, old-fashioned styles of their mothers, young girls looked instead to the glittering figures of the silver screen – “the clarion call,” the author says, “of their revolution.”
This article was originally published in Milwaukee Magazine.