‘Helen Morgan: The Original Torch Singer and Ziegfeld’s Last Star’
—Cathy Ritchie
Helen Morgan: The Original Torch Singer and Ziegfeld’s Last Star
by Christopher S. Connelly (University Press of Kentucky, 2024)
By all accounts, she was mesmerizing in live performance, be the locale a smoky dive, a lavish nightclub with a shiver of Mob presence, a Broadway stage, or (most memorably) the black and shining top of a piano. By those same accounts, she was unceasingly generous to colleagues or anyone in need. Few stars shone as brightly during the 1920s and 1930s as Helen Morgan (1900-1941), whose story embraced everything from musical triumph to personal heartbreak and back again.
As a biography nerd, I’ve always wanted to learn more about the woman who was a performing icon to so many; I was happy to have the chance to read Christopher S. Connelly’s commendably thorough biography of Helen Morgan.
Her life was a rags-to-riches tale: a troubled childhood complete with broken family; a truncated education; early career struggles; Prohibition-related legal tussles; and finally, stardom—thanks to an unforgettable role in a landmark Broadway musical.
But wait, there was more, and Connelly gives readers the full panorama.
Morgan fought to find (and be cast in) other vehicles equal to her abilities; battled a nearly lifelong alcohol addiction; kept going as her audience shrank with the coming of a new entertainment era; and survived four unsuccessful marriages, though none of them to her one true love.
Connelly gives readers the full panorama of Morgan’s life and artistic creativity. “Helen Morgan did not invent the torch song,” he said, “but it meshed perfectly with her unique vocal stylings. In an age when singers pushed out, she drew people in.”
Morgan was born in Danville, Illinois. By age 20, she was an extra in films, and worked in speakeasies and other venues in the Chicago area. On one fateful, excessively crowded night at Billy Rose’s Backstage Club, Morgan climbed up on her accompanist’s piano in order to be adequately heard and seen—and a trademark was born.
When showman Florenz Ziegfeld spotted Morgan dancing in one of his 1920s productions, he immediately sensed her star potential. Their professional bond, bolstered by Morgan’s frequent appearances in his Follies and other shows, would last well into the 1930s.
Morgan’s single greatest theatrical achievement was her portrayalof the mixed-race singer Julie LaVerne in the original 1927 cast of the groundbreaking Show Boat. Her two solos, “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” and “Bill,” established her as a performing legend, and she would revive the role in multiple stage productions and film versions over an 11-year-span. Her later Broadway productions were less successful than her original triumph, but her devoted audiences likely minded not.
Morgan’s habit of performing a few wee-hours nightclub sets after the Broadway theatres called it a night became a problem in the late 1920s, when she fronted a club that became known as Chez Morgan. For violating Prohibition-era liquor laws, the singer was arrested several times—and though Morgan was never jailed, her legal situation became complicated, as Connelly describes thoroughly.
While Helen Morgan delighted audiences everywhere, personal shadows abounded. She never married the love of her life, Arthur Loew of MGM fame, though their affair lasted for years and Morgan wed four other men along the way. Despite her infertility, she longed to be a mother and briefly was able to adopt a baby, an arrangement that ended prematurely. While Morgan was a charitable soul to others, long-lasting personal happiness seemed to elude her.
Morgan’s prospects sadly dimmed as the 1930s progressed. As Connelly puts it: “In truth, her career decline began when the stock market crashed. Projects she undertook in the 1920s had led to something bigger and better, but most of what she did in the 1930s failed to live up to what preceded it.”
Helen Morgan drank. At first, her addiction never interfered with her live performances, but as years passed, signs of her debility became more obvious onstage: physical unsteadiness, forgotten lyrics and, at rare times, fainting in mid-performance. Helen Morgan died of cirrhosis of the liver at age 41.
This book, though well written, is loaded (perhaps overloaded) with detai. Yet Connelly’s witty commentary helps keep the text from becoming too scholarly, and he also manages to eloquently summarize Helen Morgan’s all-too-brief and blazing life:
“Others sang as well as she, but Helen, with no formal training, lived her songs. Every singer who acts a song as a little monologue reignites the Morgan touch. Every time a character in a musical sits on a convenient shelf and confesses a dream—Eliza Doolittle for a more ‘loverly’ existence, Audrey for somewhere that’s green—Helen lives. Her art has become part of our theatrical DNA.”
Helen Morgan footage is available on YouTube, and her penultimate 1936 portrayal of Show Boat’s Julie lives on DVD. Her blazing artistic comet inspires us still.
