A post this morning on an important but forgotten figure from vaudeville, Broadway and Hollywood history Jack McGowan (John Wesley McGowan, 1894-1977)
While I’ve long known about some of the shows and movies that McGowan wrote, he first came to my attention either through this recent mention in my piece on Emma Haig, and/or the similarity of his name to that of the great Irish actor Jack MacGowran, about whom I’ve been planning a post for some time. But today’s subject merits his own attention to be sure. Given his credits, it’s a little surprising his internet presence is not greater. This is one of those posts I’ve had to cobble together from many sources, making it your best one-stop destination for Jack McGowan information, all you Jack McGowan freaks!
McGowan was from Muskegan, Michigan. His full name (John Wesley McGowan) offers the clues that his family was both Irish and Methodist. Doris Eaton Travis, who knew him from his Hollywood days, described him as a “red headed Irishman with big blue eyes”. (Google turns up no photos of him, hence the sheet music we share above). McGowan ran away from home as a young teenager and made his way to Chicago where he sang illustrated songs in nickelodeons. This led to his participation in two-acts and tab shows in vaudeville, where he not only performed as a song and dance man, but wrote his first songs and jokes. This website speculates that he may have worked with Big Joe Roberts and Lillian Stuart around 1914 in an act called “On the Road”, which I find more than plausible. During the early years he also worked in burlesque, toured in musical comedy, and performed in out-of-town Ziegfeld shows. Following his service in World War One, he made his way to Broadway, where he made his debut in the Will B. Johnstone show Take it From Me (1919). Next came The Little Blue Devil (1919) starring Lillian Lorraine.
With Mary (1920-21) McGowan finally got to work for George M. Cohan, whom he had first met in 1914, when he had been considered for a part in one of his shows. Cohan was to manage and mentor McGowan for four years, during which time he appeared in several more major shows, and continued to work on his writing. As a performer he also appeared in The Rose of Stamboul (1922), George White’s Scandals (1922), and The Rise of Rosie O’Reilly (1923-24) while continuing to appear in Big Time Vaudeville. His sketch “Two Brides and a Groom” played the Keith and Orpheum circuits, and was adapted into the full length play Mama Loves Papa, which premiered on Broadway in 1926. (This clearly shows the guiding hand of Cohan — that was precisely the method whereby Cohan had transition from vaud to Broadway, expanding a playlet into a play).
Fifteen addition Broadway credits accrued for McGowan. In addition to writing for revues like John Murray Anderson’s Almanac (1929) and Earl Carroll’s Vanities (1932), he also wrote the books to several well remembered musicals. He collaborated with Henderson, Brown, and DeSylva on two Bert Lahr shows, Hold Everything (1928), later made into a 1930 film with Joe E. Brown; and Flying High (1930), later made into a 1931 film. With the Gershwins and Guy Bolton he wrote Girl Crazy (1930) starring Willie Howard, which became a 1932 movie vehicle for Wheeler and Woolsey, and was remade in 1943 starring Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland. He also worked on the all-star, all-black show Singin’ the Blues (1931), and Strike Me Pink (1932) with Jimmy Durante, the basis of the 1936 Eddie Cantor movie.
The all-star comedy Sitting Pretty (1933) was the first original screenplay McGowan worked on, along with S.J. Perelman and others. His other credits included the Broadway Melody pictures of 1936, 1938 and 1940; Born to Dance (1936); Babes in Arms (1939); the 1940 adaptation of Cohan’s Little Nellie Kelly (1940); the 1942 screen adaptation of Panama Hattie; Broadway Rhythm (1944); Ziegfeld Follies (1945); The Stork Club (1945); and It Happened in Brooklyn (1947). You can see from these titles that McGowan did a lot to help keep the memory of vaudeville and classic show biz alive.
In 1938 he married model Elizabeth Calvin a.k.a. Betty Wyman a.k.a. The Lucky Strike Girl (one of many), who was in the movies Vogues on 1938, which counterintuitively, McGowan did NOT write. As we wrote in that earlier post, his name was also romantically linked with that of Emma Haig.
More on this interesting fellow can be found in the John Wesley McGowan Papers, which are kept in the University of Wisconsin Archives.
For more on the history of vaudeville, where Jack McGowan got his start, please consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.