ella shields: a quartet
by Douglas Messerli
Born in Baltimore, Maryland in 1879 and educated in South Bend, Indiana,
Ella Catherine Buscher (her birth name), Ella Shields began her career in 1898
singing vaudeville song-and-dance numbers with her sisters. In 1906 she married
songwriter William Joseph Hargreaves in Lambeth, London, and by 1910 was
already appearing at the London Palladium as a male impersonator.
Legend has it that attending a party in which several musical halls
performers were asked to perform, half a two-man act was out sick, Shields
standing in for the second trouser. After that performance she rarely wore a
dress on stage again.
In 1915 Hargreaves wrote the comic ditty about a penniless Londoner who
effects the manner of a well-heeled gentlemen, “Burlington Bertie from Bow,”
which quickly became Shield’s signature song. She performed it until her death,
including with a very young Julie Andrews in 1940, who has suggested it may
later have been an influence on her performance in Victor/Victoria. Indeed,
the septuagenarian Shields died while performing the number in August 1952.
Already by 1916 Shields had separated from her husband, Hargreaves,
divorcing him in 1923. By that time, she was well known primarily as a male
impersonator, her songs filled with lesbian references and double-entendres.
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