Eva Tanguay was a Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

-born singer and entertainer who billed herself as "the girl who made vaudeville

Vaudeville

Vaudeville was a theatrical genre of variety entertainment in the United States and Canada from the early 1880s until the early 1930s. Each performance was made up of a series of separate, unrelated acts grouped together on a common bill...

 famous".

Early life

Eva Tanguay was born in 1878 in Marbleton, Quebec. Her father was a doctor. Before she reached the age of six, her family moved from Quebec's Eastern Townships

Eastern Townships

The Eastern Townships is a tourist region and a former administrative region in south-eastern Quebec, lying between the former seigneuries south of the Saint Lawrence River and the United States border. Its northern boundary roughly followed Logan's Line, the geologic boundary between the flat,...

 to Holyoke, Massachusetts

Holyoke, Massachusetts

Holyoke is a city in Hampden County, Massachusetts, United States, between the western bank of the Connecticut River and the Mount Tom Range of mountains. As of the 2010 Census, the city had a population of 39,880...

. Her father died soon after. While still a child she developed an interest in the performing arts, making her first appearance on stage at the age of eight in Little Lord Fauntleroy

Little Lord Fauntleroy

Little Lord Fauntleroy is the first children's novel written by English playwright and author Frances Hodgson Burnett. It was originally published as a serial in the St. Nicholas Magazine between November 1885 and October 1886, then as a book by Scribner's in 1886...

. With her parents' assistance, she pursued a show business career, working her way through a variety of amateur contests that eventually landed her a spot with a comedy troupe before making her vaudeville debut in New York City

New York City

New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...

 in 1904. The 1904 show The Chaperones lead to her rise in popularity.

Career

Although she possessed only an average voice, the enthusiasm with which the robust Eva Tanguay performed her suggestive songs soon made her an audience favorite. She went on to have a long-lasting vaudeville career and eventually commanded one of the highest salaries of any performer of the day earning as much as $3,500 a week at the height of her fame around 1910. After seeing her perform, English

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 poet and sexual revolutionary Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley

Aleister Crowley , born Edward Alexander Crowley, and also known as both Frater Perdurabo and The Great Beast, was an influential English occultist, astrologer, mystic and ceremonial magician, responsible for founding the religious philosophy of Thelema. He was also successful in various other...

 called Tanguay America's equivalent to Europe's music hall

Music hall

Music Hall is a type of British theatrical entertainment which was popular between 1850 and 1960. The term can refer to:# A particular form of variety entertainment involving a mixture of popular song, comedy and speciality acts...

 greats, Marie Lloyd

Marie Lloyd

Matilda Alice Victoria Wood was an English music hall singer, best known as Marie Lloyd. Her ability to add lewdness to the most innocent of lyrics led to frequent clashes with the guardians of morality...

 of England and Yvette Guilbert

Yvette Guilbert

Yvette Guilbert was a French cabaret singer and actress of the Belle Époque.-Biography:...

 of France. "The American Genius," he wrote, "is unlike all others. The 'cultured' artist, in this country, is always a mediocrity. … The true American is, above all things, FREE; with all the advantages and disadvantages that that implies. His genius is a soul lonely, disolate, reaching to perfection in some unguessed direction. … Eva Tanguay is the perfect American artist. She is… starry chaste in her colossal corruption.

Eva Tanguay is remembered for brassy self-confident songs that symbolized the emancipated woman,` such as "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It", "I Want Someone to Go Wild With Me," "Go As Far As You Like", and "That's Why They Call Me Tabasco" In showbiz circles, she was nicknamed the "I Don't Care Girl", after her most famous song, "I Don't Care".

Tanguay spent lavishly on both publicity campaigns and costumes. One obituary notes that a "clever manager" told Tanguay early in her career that money made money, and she never forgot the lesson, buying huge ads at her own expense, and on one occasion allegedly spending twice her salary on publicity. She also got her name in the papers for allegedly being kidnapped, allegedly having her jewels stolen, and getting fined $50 in Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville, Kentucky

Louisville is the largest city in the U.S. state of Kentucky, and the county seat of Jefferson County. Since 2003, the city's borders have been coterminous with those of the county because of a city-county merger. The city's population at the 2010 census was 741,096...

 for throwing a stagehand down a flight of stairs.

Her costumes were as extravagant as her personality. In 1910, a year after the Lincoln penny

Penny

A penny is a coin or a type of currency used in several English-speaking countries. It is often the smallest denomination within a currency system.-Etymology:...

 was issued, Tanguay appeared on stage in a coat entirely covered in the new coins. Other costumes included a dress covered in coral which weighed forty-five pounds and cost $2000, and a costume made of dollar bills.

Tanguay only made one recording ("I Don't Care") in 1922 for Nordskog Records

Nordskog Records

Nordskog Records was a small record label based in California in the early 1920s that produced some interesting historic recordings.Nordskog Records was founded by Andrae Nordskog of Santa Monica, California in 1922. The label's recording studio and factory were located in Los Angeles, California...

. In addition to her singing career, she also starred in two film

Film

A film, also called a movie or motion picture, is a series of still or moving images. It is produced by recording photographic images with cameras, or by creating images using animation techniques or visual effects...

 comedies

Comedy

Comedy , as a popular meaning, is any humorous discourse or work generally intended to amuse by creating laughter, especially in television, film, and stand-up comedy. This must be carefully distinguished from its academic definition, namely the comic theatre, whose Western origins are found in...

 that, despite the limitations of silent film

Silent film

A silent film is a film with no synchronized recorded sound, especially with no spoken dialogue. In silent films for entertainment the dialogue is transmitted through muted gestures, pantomime and title cards...

, used the screen to capture her lusty stage vitality to its fullest. The first, titled Energetic Eva was made in 1916 and the following year she starred opposite Tom Moore

Thomas J. Moore

Thomas J. "Tom" Moore was an Irish-born American actor and director. He appeared in at least 186 motion pictures from 1908 to 1954...

 in The Wild Girl.

Tanguay was said to have lost more than $2 million in the Wall Street crash of 1929

Wall Street Crash of 1929

The Wall Street Crash of 1929 , also known as the Great Crash, and the Stock Market Crash of 1929, was the most devastating stock market crash in the history of the United States, taking into consideration the full extent and duration of its fallout...

. In the 1930s, Tanguay retired from show business. Cataracts caused her to lose her sight, but Sophie Tucker

Sophie Tucker

Sophie Tucker was a Russian/Ukrainian-born American singer and actress. Known for her stentorian delivery of comical and risqué songs, she was one of the most popular entertainers in America during the first half of the 20th century...

, a friend from vaudeville days, paid for the operation that restored her vision.

At the time of her death, Tanguay was working on her autobiography, to be titled "Up and Down the Ladder." Three excerpts from the autobiography were published in Hearst newspapers in 1946 and 1947.

Eva Tanguay died in 1947, aged 68, in Hollywood where she was interred in the Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, now Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Hollywood Forever Cemetery

Hollywood Forever Cemetery, originally called Hollywood Memorial Park Cemetery, is one of the oldest cemeteries in Los Angeles, California. It is located at 6000 Santa Monica Boulevard in the Hollywood...

. In 1953 Mitzi Gaynor

Mitzi Gaynor

-Life and career:Gaynor was born as Francesca Marlene de Czanyi von Gerber in Chicago, Illinois to Pauline Fisher, a dancer, and Henry von Gerber, a violinist, cellist, and music director. The family first moved to Detroit and when she was eleven to Hollywood, California.She trained as a ballerina...

 portrayed Eva Tanguay in a fictionalized version of her life in the Hollywood motion picture, The I Don't Care Girl.

Family

Eva Tanguay married three times. She divorced her first husband, a dancer named Tom Ford, in 1917. Her second marriage, to a vaudeville actor named Roscoe Ails, also ended in divorce. In 1927, when she was 48, Tanguay had her third marriage, to 23 year old pianist Alexander Booke, annulled on the grounds of fraud. Tanguay claimed that he had two other names which he used so frequently that she was not sure which one was real.

External links

• "I Don't Care": her sole recording, available on the Internet Archive
  Internet Archive
  The Internet Archive is a non-profit digital library with the stated mission of "universal access to all knowledge". It offers permanent storage and access to collections of digitized materials, including websites, music, moving images, and nearly 3 million public domain books. The Internet Archive...
  
  
• In search of Eva Tanguay, the first rock star, by Jody Rosen