Artist Models
Lorado Taft was so prominent in Chicago affairs that he was the go-to guy for the Tribune to get a quote on any clickbait controversy remotely connected to art. So when Florenze Ziegfeld, Jr. said the Venus de Milo would not make the cut as a dancer in the Ziegfeld follies, the newspaper of course asked Taft for his opinion.
Ziegfeld said that her shoulders were too narrow, her hips were too broad, her ankles a disgrace, her feet too big. Taft was shown photos of Ziegfeld girls.
His reaction was that they were in atrocious “Oriental” costumes. Was he against belly dancer outfits? Or was he shown a full-blown Ziegfeld costume? They could be extravagant.
Taft pointed out that the ideal chorus girl is “a creature of lithesomeness, of abandoned merriment, a feminine athlete” while the Greeks were celebrating the idea of the mother.1 He thought if Ziegfeld compared the chorine with a statue of Diana, goddess of the hunt he might find a successful candidate among the Greeks. One of the women he was shown was Avonne Taylor, who later went to Hollywood. She did look like she could be a good Diana.
The Tribune was pretty sure Taft would have an opinion about an ancient Venus. In 1907, when he said that the plaster cast of the Venus de Medici’s foot was the only perfect foot in Chicago, the Tribune went to town. They ran a contest—instead of a glass slipper the winner would get a slipper of gold. Women were asked to send in measurements of their feet. Taft’s point was that women crammed their feet into small shoes. The Venus had perfect feet because they modeled a foot that had developed bare.
A couple years later the Tribune took another Taft comment and ran with it. He said that he couldn’t find the perfect model. “One woman may be the ideal in all but the limb or ankle, while another may have a perfect limb and ankle but an imperfect arm and neck. Therefore the only resource is to use more than one model.” Again, he thought modern clothes, which still included corsets after all, had altered their shapes, which was after all true. However, he also didn’t like muscles. “American girls have good limbs from exercise, but lose soft rounded curves.”2
So the Tribune went out looking for the perfect body parts, finding, among other body parts, the most perfect hips
And the most perfect neck in Chicago.
A model who had some body parts that did pass muster was a young Swedish-American girl who often visited with her aunt in the Swedish enclave in Hyde Park. She picked up a few bucks at Lorado Taft’s Midway Studios.
Later, she picked up a few more bucks working for the Essanay Studios on the north side. Apparently, she’s the hard-working secretary in the background of this Charlie Chaplin movie, showing the craziness of the early silents made in Chicago.
For some reason, she thought this life was more attractive than posing for Lorado Taft. She later shortened her name to Gloria Swanson and moved to Hollywood.
Could Gloria Swanson be one of the Great Lakes? The timing might be right.
Chicago Movie Tours
I learned about Gloria Swanson at Midway Studios from Kelli Marshall who runs Chicago Movie Tours. I took her Movies on the Midway tour and thoroughly enjoyed it. I highly recommend checking out her well-researched, entertaining tours:
https://www.chicagomovietours.com/
Talk tomorrow!
And I hope to see some of you via zoom tomorrow for my talk on Urban Renewal in Hyde Park and how the heck the neighborhood ended up looking the way it does now.
https://chpv.org/content.aspx?page_id=4002&club_id=339585&item_id=2241681
Tribune 4/20/1923
Tribune 11/26/1911