Posted 6:48 PM by Gene

Playbill has run an incredibly long obit on Doris Eaton Travis, most likely one of the last of Florenz Ziegfeld's girls (or as SUPERNIKKI!!!!! would call him, "Zeigfield"), and while it may seem perhaps too long it isn't, for the reach of America's greatest showman will influence showbiz forever, though in this never-ending bad-taste age you might not know it, for he combined lavish spectacle with an extraordinary eye for female beauty, and tentpoles and PR0N are but the rotten permutations of his ethos; and though he was supposedly indifferent to music only he could have produced the masterpiece Show Boat, whose aura may seem nonexistent in this day of Branson East and its AudioAnimatronics but resounds in anyone who ever owned a cast album. Ziegfeld's girls seem to have come in two groups: those who married millionaires and those who didn't. Mrs. Travis was among the latter (though some of those who married millionaires didn't do too well either); whatever their marriages many vanished because they could do one thing and one thing only: be pretty. (Or two, like Ann Pennington.) But clearly Mrs. Travis maintained her looks well into old age, and she was smart and vigorous enough to have been a success in business and to have "graduated from the University of Oklahoma at the age of 88". Because the name Ziegfeld still exerts a spell (unlike Maxim, which emits a smell), so do his names, and his girls.

(First link via the usual AHTSJournal. We do note, by the way, that Will Rogers did call his discoverer and friend "Ziegfield", but then he wasn't a columnist who ran showbiz.)