Elsie Janis

Biography

Elsie Janis could command a stage before she could reach the top of it without a box: billed as “Little Elsie,” she tap-danced and belted her way through vaudeville long before homework was a concern. Broadway soon beckoned, and she answered with a string of frothy hits—The Vanderbilt Cup, The Hoyden, The Fair Co-ed, The Slim Princess, and The Lady of the Slipper—each one a ticket-selling wink at early-1900s innocence. When ASCAP nailed up its first shingle in 1914, Janis’s name was already inked on the charter. That same year she crossed the Atlantic and conquered London before most travelers had figured out the boat-train schedule. War shattered Europe the following summer; Janis grabbed a battered upright piano, a trunk of songs, and became the first Yank to sing laughter back into the doughboys of the Allied Expeditionary Forces. Home again, she recruited veterans, wrote them a score, and turned the result into Elsie Janis and Her Gang, a musical that let ex-soldiers trade rifles for high kicks. Between 1915 and 1919 she faced a camera instead of footlights, headlining six silent features. After the last reel spun out, she slipped into a Paris gown and made the city’s opera-goers swoon in 1921, then barn-stormed American concert halls from 1923 to 1925 before Hollywood lured her back behind the klieg lights. Jerome Kern and Edmund Goulding parked at her piano while she spun melodies that refused to leave the public’s lips: “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, songwriter, producer, chronicler, and pied piper of the footlights—Elsie Janis simply never learned the art of standing still.