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The Shows of Yesteryear. Between 1907 and 1927 the Follies had just about everybody: Mae Murray, Ina Claire, Nora Bayes, Ed Wynn, Ann Pennington, Marion Davies, Marilyn Miller, George White, Leon Errol, Raymond Hitchcock, the Dolly Sisters, Van & Schenck, Moran & Mack. Among the Follies song writers were Victor Herbert, Jerome Kern, Rudolf Friml, Irving Berlin. In one edition or another, Fanny Brice choked throats with My Man, Gilda Gray upped blood pressures with her shimmy, Bill Fields played his ludicrous game of pool, Gallagher & Shean hurled countrywide their most famous song.
On the New Amsterdam roof, after the show, Ziegfeld offered his Midnight Frolic, the most glamorous memory in Manhattan nightclub history. There John J. Pershing did some of his victory dancing and the jazz age got under its fanciest headway to the strains of the late Art Hickman's great band from California playing Avalon, Japanese Sandman and the Tishomingo Blues. There, after midnight, lemonades brought appalling Prohibition prices, the Follies chorus and principals entertained, and the most notable playboys of the postwar period started on their hair-losing ways.
But, above everything else, the Follies were—and were meant to be—girl shows. Though he had the greatest clowns of the era, Ziegfeld distrusted most of their turns, thought they detracted from the lure. His most famous show girl, beautiful, English-born Dolores, got a record $650 a week. Ziegfeld seldom issued a chorus call; he kept a "Book of Girls" and out of it came the most delectable, and probably the most wined-&-dined, chorines in the history of show business. A vast number married millionaires; asked, once, just how many, onetime Follies man Georgie White replied: "All the smart ones."