Elizabeth Lloyd Holman (née Holzman; May 23, 1904 – June 18, 1971) was an American socialite, actress, singer, and activist.
Early life Elizabeth Lloyd Holzman was born on May 23, 1904, in Cincinnati, Ohio, the daughter of a lawyer and stockbroker, Alfred Holzman, and his wife, Rachel Florence Workum Holzman. She had an older sister, Marion (1901–1963), and a younger brother, Alfred Jr. (1909–1992). Later in life, Holman subtracted two years from her age, insisting she was born in 1906, the year she gave the Social Security Administration as the year of her birth.Social Security Death Index: SSN 073-14-3155 under the name "Elizabeth Schanker", Ssdi.rootsweb.ancestry.com; accessed December 23, 2015.
In 1905, Alfred Holzman discovered that his Brother Ross had embezzled almost all the assets held by their stock brokerage business to cover Ross's gambling debts. Holzman & Co. ended up with liabilities of $250,000 and lost trading access to the New York Stock Exchange and the New York Cotton Exchange, leaving the Alfred Holzman family bankrupt. The family sold their Walnut Hills neighborhood home and for a year lived in the apartment of Alfred's younger brother Wallace, before moving into the dilapidated Cumberland Apartments in the Avondale neighborhood. Libby Holman would view this period of her life with shame and, during a visit to Cincinnati later in life with friend Paul Bowles, would refuse to allow him to see the home she'd grown up in.
Due to anti-German sentiment during World War I, the family name was changed from Holzman to Holman. Libby's sister Marion is named as Marion Holzman in the 1917 Hughes High School yearbook, but Libby is a Holman in the 1919 issue.
Holman graduated from Hughes High School in the spring of 1920, entering the University of Cincinnati in the fall. Yearbooks credit Holman in numerous school theatrical productions. A classmate would later remember her for doing impressions of torch singer Helen Morgan. She graduated early in 1923 with a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Early career Holman left her hometown in the fall of 1924 to pursue acting in New York City. She first lived at an all-women's dormitory at a YWCA and took classes at Columbia University. She began working for brothel keeper Polly Adler in the winter when her savings ran low, according to historian Debby Applegate: "Every afternoon she would arrive after her classes, carrying her schoolbooks, wearing the short skirts, oxfords and beret that were the thing among coeds, and settle down to work..." She was "pleasant, smiling, and matter-of-fact about her method of earning a living, and no matter what amount of money was offered her after her deadline of eleven o'clock [the curfew of the YWCA], her answer was always 'No.'"
Her first theatre job in New York was in the role of a streetwalker in a road company of The Fool (1925), written by Channing Pollock. Her Broadway debut was in the play The Sapphire Ring (1925) at the Selwyn Theatre.
Holman was in the chorus of the first edition of The Garrick Gaieties (1925), credited under "Elsbeth Holman," and was featured for the song "Black and White." The Gaieties contained the first successful music for the Rodgers and Hart songwriting team, and was one of the first revue-style revues that departed from the extravagant style of shows like the Ziegfeld Follies, Greenwich Village Follies, and Earl Carroll Vanities. By contrast, Gaieties was more minimalist and satirical, and didn't heavily rely on the showgirls and costumes that were at the heart of Ziegfeld-style revues. The biggest shows of Holman's career, The Little Show (1929) and Three's a Crowd (1930), were likewise in this newer style of revue, and they featured commissioned scores largely composed by a single lyricist-composer team (in the previous examples, Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz).
Holman was in a touring company of the 1926 Greenwich Village Follies, and was hired for the second Broadway run of the show from Fall 1926 to January 1927. Though Holman lived in straightened financial circumstances during her early years in New York, she patronized trendy nightspots including the Cotton Club, Texas Guinan's El Fey club, and restaurants Sardi's and Ye Old English Tea Room. Holman's friend Leonard Sillman helped her get signed to the musical Merry-Go-Round (1927) in which she sang the torch song Hogan's Alley solo. Merry-Go-Round marked the first time Holman was noticed and praised by critics in the press. Friends noticed Holman beginning to drink and party heavily at this point in her life. She also engaged in frequent crash diets.
Holman was catapulted into stardom with her lead role in The Little Show (1929). The Little Show originated with Sunday night variety shows held at the Selwynn Theatre by producers Tom Weatherly and James Pond that featured witty skits and songs that "were almost collegiate in their offhandedness and their cheerful violation of all the Broadway rules." Weatherly teamed up with producer Dwight Deere Wiman to produce a bigger show in the same style. It was imagined by Wiman and Weatherly “a revue, but not in any respect like the rhinestone creations with huge staircases of Flo Ziegfeld or Earl Carroll … It was to be topical and artistic, a witty travesty in the leitmotif, if possible.” The Little Show's eventual success would usher in the golden age of the Broadway revue. It was billed as an "intimate revue" due to its unconventionally small cast for Broadway production. In addition to song and dance routines, comedy sketches were included in the revue. Fred Allen debuted the famous George S. Kaufman sketch "The Still Alarm" in the show.
The Little Show's debuted at the Music Box Theatre on April 30, 1929. Its last act finished with the blues number "Moanin' Low" (music by Ralph Rainger). The song was accompanied by a self-contained sketch: the Jo Mielziner set was an expressionist rendition of a grungy Harlem tenement bedroom. Holman plays a mulatta prostitute who the audience sees hiding her earnings in her stockings. A black pimp, played by Clifton Webb in blackface, dances with her and makes love to her, until he discovers the hidden money after feeling up the girl's leg. Webb's character then throws her to the floor and chokes her and, beginning the song, does an erotic Earl "Snake Hips" Tucker dance. The pimp saunters out of the apartment and Holman's character throws herself to the door, beating it with her fists, then lamenting with the Moanin' Low ballad. The opening night performance earned Holman a dozen curtain calls, drew raves from the critics and became her signature song.New York Times: Jack Cavanaugh, "Treetops: An Aura of Glamour, a Trail of Tragedies," May 18, 1997, accessed January 7, 2011 The Little Show became a smash hit, ultimately running for 321 performances. Walter Winchell reviewed Holman as "the torch singer par excellence—the best of those female troubadours with voices of smoke and tears, who moan and keen love's labors lost to the rhythm and boom of the Roaring Twenties." Holman's Brunswick recording of "Moanin' Low" became one of her best-selling records.
The success of The Little Show lead to the producer Max Gordon joining the same core cast of Holman, Webb, and Allen for the revue Three's a Crowd (1930), with music again by Howard Dietz and Arthur Schwartz. The show opened October 15, 1930, and ran for 272 performances. During Gloria Swanson's visit to New York in 1931, she later remembered “The only musical I was dying to see was Three’s a Crowd, which starred Libby Holman, Fred Allen, and my outrageous darling Clifton Webb.”
Production was troubled on Three's a Crowd; Holman's main number "Body and Soul" was difficult to get right. Ralph Rainger, composer for Moanin' Low, was eventually brought on to provide a new orchestral arrangement. Holman later related: “In Philadelphia, I first did ‘Body and Soul’ on my knees. On a pulley. The stage was totally dark. I sang ‘I’m lost in the dark…’ Boom! A spot hit my face. I sang the next line, ‘Where is the spark for my love?...’ The pulley jerked me forward. They turned on the tiny footlights. I sang the next line. Another jerk! It was awful. The damn thing was making such a racket nobody could hear me. I really got sick over it. They tried putting the song in different places in the show. They got Johnny Green to arrange and conduct it. Nothing worked. I even hung up a sign on my dressing room door, ‘TWO’S COMPANY—ONE GOT SICK.’”
Holman introduced the Dietz-Schwartz standard "Something to Remember You By" in Three's a Crowd. During this number, Holman sang towards a departing sailor character waiting for the whistle of his ship, played by Fred MacMurray, who stood with his back to her and her ballad. Holman also sang a rendition of Body and Soul that would be recorded as one of the biggest 1930s radio hits.
Holman was typecast in her early career as a white woman who played mixed-race characters. These characters were often "tragic mulattas" or sexualized hard-boiled types; for example, her role in Rainbow (1928) was a cigar-smoking prostitute. Holman, a white Jewish woman with a tan skin tone, was often viewed by others to be racially ambiguous; she once recounted an incident to an interviewer where she'd been harassed by New York police while taking a walk with a white man, as the police assumed they were an interracial couple. She was also offered a part in Rang Tang in 1927 under the assumption she would pass as black. Holman would claim she got her first career break because she "passed as black passing as white." The media would label her a torch singer due to her unique sound within these roles, described in terms like "bottled blue smoke" or a "grunting style."
Recording career Holman was a Brunswick Records recording artist by 1927, and released at least 10 78 rpm singles for the label under her own name. Additionally, the label recorded Holman with studio pickup bands including The Cotton Pickers for the 1929 single "He's A Good Man To Have Around" (Brunswick 4447) and The Colonial Club Orchestra for the 1929 single "I'm Doing What I'm Doing For Love" (Brunswick 4453). She occasionally recorded for other labels during the late 1920s and early 1930s, including with another pickup band named "The Knickerbockers," with whom she recorded Rodgers & Hart's "My Man Is On The Make" (Columbia 2067-D) in 1929. Holman's Brunswick recordings frequently featured torch songs that later became standards in traditional pop and jazz, including "Am I Blue?," "Moanin' Low," "Can't We Be Friends?," "Body and Soul," "Love for Sale," and "More Than You Know." Though there were not commercial music charts like the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s, the book Joel Whitburn’s Pop Memories (1890–1954) uses phonograph record sales data and radio performance reports to show that five of Holman's singles were among the top 10 most popular recordings in the country at specific times between 1929 and 1931, and another 4 singles were in the equivalent of the top 20.
In 1942, Holman shifted her focus to blues and American folk music, recording a six-song album (consisting of three 78 rpm records) titled Blues Till Dawn (Decca A-316). On this album, she recorded songs by or associated with Clarence Ashley, Ma Rainey, Leroy Carr and other folk and blues artists, accompanied by Josh White on guitar. In 1954, she self-released a similar album titled Sings Blues, Ballads & Sin Songs to promote a one-woman show of the same title at the Bijou Theater on Broadway.