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.

The Ziegfeld Follies was one hundred years old in 2007. The Follies was famous for its beautiful and dazzling Ziegfeld Girls. One of the most famous of the all in  the 1920′s was Louise Brooks, a.k.a. Lulu, who promoted herself as a sexual vamp during the height of the Jazz Age.
Louise was a truly eyebrow raising choice by Ziegfeld to star in the Follies considering the bondage placed on women during the Victorian Era hadn’t been broken for all that long.
When Brooks hit the brightly lit stage in the Ziegfeld Follies on Broadway and released her white light persona, the crowd roared its approval and the world for women changed forever.

“Brooks was the stereotypical “bad girl” (she was a Ziegfeld girl in 1925) and was the first to dance the Charleston in London. She had numerous relationships (including one with Charlie Chaplin) and married twice. She accumulated and lost fortunes.

“Louise Brooks is remembered still for her independent spirit, remarkable beauty, and trademark hair style (the Dutch bob).” Pandorasbox.com.

One of the men who contributed greatly to making Lulu famous was Ziegfeld Follies photographer Alfred Cheney Johnston.
Johnston is America’s lost photographer. Unlike Louise Brooks, who he photographed so beautifully during several photo sessions, “Cheney,” as his friends called him, was forgotten by history. Strange, in light of the fact that during the Jazz Age he was as famous as his infamous model.
They even shared a treacherous sense of humor. One of Johnston’s most animated portraits of Louise Brooks captured her (and his) comedic personality to the hilt. He posed her in a feathery bird costume with her hands in the air, the look of being cornered on her face, as if she had just been caught in a crime, and the “copper’s” had yelled out to her “Hands Up Lulu!” Infact, this amusing photograph graced the front cover of the December 13,1924 issue of the Police Gazette.

Producer Richard Streeter met Louise Brooks late in her life and they became friends.

Richard Streeter: “I had the pleasure of being a friend to Louise Brooks the last five years before she died. She was quite a character. She was stubborn, ornery, and cranky and had nothing good to say about anyone, except for her old friend W. C. Fields. In fact, she was writing a book about Fields and had almost completed it. When I visited her one afternoon she said she had thrown it down the trash chute. ‘Nobody is interested in that old fart and even less about who I am and what I would write about him. “She neighter had nothing good to say about Ziegfeld .”

“She (Louise Brooks) presented me with several original photographs taken by Alfred Cheney Johnston, which she signed. One is signed ‘to my teddy bear.’”

As Louise Brooks aged and her beauty began to fade she lived a life of obscurity and financial impoverishment. To make her way in the world she began writing. From the 1950′s to the 70′s she wrote essays for film magazines. But people who are enthralled with Louise Brooks today don’t think of her as a wise, sage woman. No, she is forever locked into their mind’s eye as the outrageous flapper vampire captured in the stunning and captivating Alfred Cheney Johnston portraits of her.

Her unending allure from the grave continues to fuel websites and blogs on the internet, with fans analyzing her brief film career or quoting her daring words. MySpace members place her name on their Favorites list. Women of all ages still  stroll into beauty shops asking for the Louise Brook’s bob.

If only while still alive Lulu had some clue to the legacy she would be leaving behind after her death. If she had she might have thought twice about tossing that book about W.C. Fields and herself down the trash chute.
So, thanks in no small part to those Alfred Cheney Johnston images of Louise Brooks along with the movies she starred in, she has turned into something akin to Marilyn Monroe, a Twentieth Century icon.
Contemporary collectors are intrigued and fascinated by Louise Brooks, continually mesmerized by her stunning beauty captured on the glass negatives of Alfred Cheney Johnston.
Louise Brooks admirers never fail to say, “She’s just so timeless…”