Elsie Janis

Biography

A spark from Columbus, Ohio, Elsie Janis leapt onto the boards while still in pinafores, trading schoolyards for spotlights as “Little Elsie,” the vaudeville prodigy who could sing a house to its feet before she lost a baby tooth. By 1914 she had helped found ASCAP on opening day and conquered London in the same breath, sailing home with Broadway already humming her tunes—The Vanderbilt Cup, The Hoyden, The Fair Co-ed, The Slim Princess, The Lady of the Slipper—each musical a new color in her ever-expanding palette. When the guns of 1917 sounded, she swapped satin slippers for army boots, becoming the first Yank to carry a song instead of a rifle to the Allied Expeditionary Forces. Her wartime revue, Elsie Janis and Her Gang, drafted real doughboys as her chorus line, turning foxholes into footlights. Between 1915 and 1919 she flickered across six silent screens, a modern muse for the camera’s new eye. Paris beckoned in 1921; by 1923 she was criss-crossing America with a suitcase of concerts, then slipped back into cinema’s embrace. Jerome Kern and Edmund Goulding traded melodies at her piano, spinning out standards that refused to fade: “Love, Your Magic Spell Is Everywhere,” “Any Time’s the Time to Fall in Love,” “I’m True to the Navy Now,” “Live and Love Today,” “Molly-O-Mine,” “From the Valley,” “Your Eyes,” “Some Sort of Somebody,” “Oh, Give Me Time for Tenderness,” and “A Little Love.” Actress, author, songwriter, production hand—Janis never met a stage she couldn’t light.