REVIEW: Marina Endicott's The Little Shadows

The Little Shadows takes place in the little-known world of polite vaudeville as it developed in Western Canada in the period from 1912 to 1917. The story follows three sisters — Aurora, Clover and Bella, who perform together as the Belle Auroras —who are struggling with poverty after the death of their father. Flora, the girls’ mother, is flighty and somewhat inept at whatever she does, but she manages to get her daughters onto the stage, drawing on old contacts from her own days as a performer. Their voyage from the rough Death Circuit of the American West to the heights of the Pantages stage is a raw experience for girls still in their teens. But it is enlivened by the vivid characters that made up the many talents of vaudeville.

Edmonton-based writer Marina Endicott was an actor and dramaturgist in Toronto in the 1970s and her love of theatre shows through. She has created a range of vital secondary characters that dance around the three girls. Nando, the boy who tours in a physical comedy act with his father and mother and who breaks Bella’s heart, is a ringer for Buster Keaton. Comedy duo East & Verrall are in the same vein as Laurel and Hardy. Dashing drinker Kavanagh gives dramatic readings.  Victor, the one-of-a-kind actor who falls for Clover, is modeled on Tomas Kubinek. Vaudeville is the forerunner of the Ed Sullivan Show or Dancing with the Stars – it has provided us with a dozen show business tropes, from Charlie Chaplin to Carol Burnett. Every character has a sheen of familiarity to modern consumers of entertainment, but the setting of the novel is both more exotic and a tad tawdry.

Starting at a tender age

The Belle Auroras are aged 13 to 16 and barely make enough to eat when they begin their career with folk tunes such as Buffalo Gals. They work up an act that shows off Aurora’s beauty, Clover’s skill at harmony and Bella’s playfulness, but there are other sister acts on the circuit and they often have to choose between spending money on costumes and having a second meal every day. With the help of Gentry Fox, an aging director playing out his final days on the Death Circuit, they become professional enough to move onto theatres in Edmonton and Calgary. As they learn to gauge how an audience reacts and make their own contacts in the business, they are able to choose songs that are solely their own, ensuring they will continue to get bookings. How each of the girls reacts to the demands of supporting themselves, and dealing with the men all around them, is the heart of Endicott’s story.

"I wanted to think about girls before feminism. They’re working and taking care of themselves, but they have no vocabulary to talk about how they are treated," Endicott said in an interview with CBC News in Toronto. Not only did women often make less money than men, they were subject to a range of sexual approaches, particularly from powerful men such as  Alexander Pantages, the real theatre magnate who makes a brief appearance as Bella’s lover. Bella begins as a little sprite, and is totally susceptible to vaudeville’s charm. She becomes the biggest success of the sisters, but her personal life is a sad commentary on the vulnerability of girls in a  profession that was not regarded as respectable.

The beautiful Aurora has had responsibility thrust upon her too early in life, managing the money and looking after her sisters when her mother cannot cope. She also has lost her father to suicide, which may account for her cool approach to love. She agrees to marry the vaudeville entrepreneur Mayhew, who is at least 30 years her senior, because of the promise of financial stability. When Mayhew has to flee his creditors, she is left to carry the burden of her ailing mother and a baby on her own. Yet in her sojourn in the Saskatchewan town of Fort Qu’Appelle, she finds herself cut off from a more conventional life and yearning for the stage.

Western Canadian circuit

Clover’s story takes her to London, England, with the world convulsed by the First World War. She has followed Victor, who has enlisted. Victor’s family is wholly unconventional – they are Fabians and followers of a spiritual guru – a strange new world that many will be surprised to associate with the early 20th century. Clover learns to live with war and its effects as she further develops as an artist. While the sisters lives take different directions, the connection among them remains, a thread that binds this somewhat sprawling novel together.  And they each seem destined to return to the stage, despite the difficulties of vaudeville life.

Endicott has woven a rich tapestry out of the Western Canadian circuit. She describes the Edmonton theatre that splits in half during a performance, the rain or snow that makes getting to the next appearance an epic event, the back-stage shenanigans and the vagaries of life in rented rooms.  Amazingly, much of it is based on real life. Endicott turned up photos and letters of old vaudevillians in the archives of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum. She even unearthed a collection of postcards and pictures bequeathed to the museum by the owner of a former vaudeville boarding house. And she knows her theatre history. "Even 15 years before Flora’s time they were doing shows in butcher shops and stables," Endicott says. American businessman B.F. Keith had discovered that if you built theatres in little towns, and went to the trouble of cleaning the floors regularly, people would keep coming back. So a chain of halls was built across the West, each looking for a comedy duo, a monologuist, a diva, a theatre sketch and of course, a sister act.

A hard life

It  was clearly a hard life. The aging Gentry is shipped off to a brother who doesn’t like him, another aging actor dies on the circuit. A different sister act, less talented and less wary of showing skin, ends up doing burlesque. Though there was potential to make a lot of money, it was necessary to continually spend on new costumes and songs, and to stay ahead of a fickle public. The author’s fascination with this world comes through, in her detailed descriptions of each act, and her effort to round out the stories of even minor characters.

Endicott’s previous novel Good to a Fault, about a middle-aged woman who takes on a troubled family after a car accident, was nominated for the Giller Prize. The Little Shadows made the long list for this year's Giller, but not the short list. Instead it is in the running for a Governor General’s Literary Award, with the winner  to be named Nov. 15. Like Good to a Fault, The Little Shadows hones in on the domestic details that make up day to day life. But the story plays out on a much bigger canvas – the vaudeville circuit from Butte, Montana to Winnipeg’s Pantages Theatre — among young women trying to make their way on nothing but talent.