Background
Earl Carroll was born on September 16, 1893 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States; the son of James Carroll and Elizabeth (Wills) Carroll. He is believed to have had two brothers and one sister. His father was a tavernkeeper.
Earl Carroll was born on September 16, 1893 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States; the son of James Carroll and Elizabeth (Wills) Carroll. He is believed to have had two brothers and one sister. His father was a tavernkeeper.
Carroll's education apparently stopped at the grammar school level.
Carroll's early precocity in showmanship often brought him attention. At ten he was staging penny shows in his parent's basement and, shortly after, he began earning pocket money as a program boy at the Alvin Theatre in downtown Pittsburgh. In 1910 he became assistant treasurer of a leading theater, the Nixon, where he managed the box office. His work permitted him to mingle with the celebrities of the era, among them Sarah Bernhardt, Richard Mansfield, and Enrico Caruso. Evidently touched with wanderlust in his late adolescence, he traveled through the Orient for nearly a year. He next settled briefly in New York, but returned to Pittsburgh to become treasurer of the Nixon Theatre. In 1912 he wrote a play, Lady of the Night, which he submitted to A. H. Wood, a New York producer. Upon receiving a favorable response from Wood, Carroll quickly returned to New York. When plans for the play's production dissolved, he took a job in the music publishing house of Leo Feist, clipping news items for the company scrapbooks. Under Feist's direction, he rose rapidly in the firm, meanwhile writing song lyrics on his own. Among his more than four hundred lyrics were some notable successes, especially "Dreams of Long Ago, " composed for Caruso. Carroll's music and lyrics for The Pretty Mrs. Smith were seized upon by Oliver Morosco as a popular vehicle for his fast-rising young protegee, Fritzi Scheff. Others to take his songs to the Broadway stage were Charlotte Greenwood, who popularized "So Long, Letty, " and Eddie Cantor, who included "Canary Cottage" in one of his shows. Carroll had developed a keen sense of the demands of the musical theater, and he admittedly followed the successful formula of David Belasco, using lavish costuming and stage sets. After World War I, in which he served as a lieutenant in the Army Aviation Corps, he began producing his own shows on Broadway, among them two ephemeral entertainments called Lady of the Lamp (1920) and Daddy Dumplings (1921). In 1923, however, the first of The Earl Carroll Vanities, which he wrote, composed, directed, and produced, caught the imagination of the "Roaring Twenties. " Profitable beyond all expectations, the Vanities spun off road companies to carry its gaudy message across the country. For thirteen successive seasons Carroll reworked this formula of girls, music, and pageantry into new "editions. " Convinced that full control of a theater was essential to his style of showmanship, he constructed the first Earl Carroll Theatre in 1923, and a second in 1931. Not all of New York City shared Carroll's sensuous appreciation of womanhood, however, and he was once jailed for four days in the Tombs prison before being cleared of a charge that he had displayed indecent posters in the lobby of his theater. But it was a predawn party at the height of the prohibition era that caused the most serious reversal of his life. A nude show girl was alleged to have taken a bath in champagne during a private party on center stage. Rather than involve prominent friends in a scandal, Carroll lied ("like a gentleman, " it was said) under oath, was subsequently convicted of perjury, and eventually served four months of a one-year sentence in the federal penitentiary in Atlanta, Ga. Throughout his career, Carroll was responsible for over sixty theatrical productions. Among the best known were White Cargo (1924), Sketchbook (1935), and Black Waters. In 1936 he shifted the focus of his business activities from Broadway to Hollywood and soon built an Earl Carroll Theatre there, in which revues flourished for the next twelve years. Over the doorway of this theater he inscribed the proclamation, "Through these portals pass the most beautiful girls in the world. " A self-proclaimed authority on feminine beauty, he ballyhooed his searches and auditions for chorus girls, and for many years served as a judge at the Atlantic City beauty pageants. During his years in Hollywood, Carroll produced about a dozen motion pictures, mostly adaptations of the Vanities, among them Murder at the Vanities (1934) and A Night at Earl Carroll's (1940). Carroll was an active member of the show business fraternities, the Lambs, the Friars, and the Lotus Club. A founder of ASCAP, he eventually fell out with the powerful union leader, James Petrillo, and spent several years in bitter contention with him over union matters.
He was killed in a commercial airline crash between San Diego and New York. Following separate funeral services Carroll's an ornate affair with displays of floral statues representing life-size chorus girls the ashes of Earl Carroll and Beryl Wallace were placed together in a niche of the Forest Lawn Mausoleum, Beverly Hills, Calif. At the time of his death, Earl Carroll had come to stand for that gaudy showmanship of the 1920's that was as much as a patriotic salute to American affluence as it was a shrewdly commercial enterprise.
Shortly before World War I, on October 25, 1916, Carroll married Marcelle Hontabat. After his wife's death in 1936, Carroll did not remarry. His companion was Beryl Wallace, one of the stars of his revues.