Content Copyright 2006-2007 essentialiowa.com Privacy Policy
NOTABLE IOWANS:
Iowa's horribly famous Cherry Sisters
Addie, Effie and Lizzie Cherry, three of the Cherry Sisters who performed across the U.S.
More than a century after they first debuted their act on January 21, 1893, there is still widespread disagreement whether the Cherry Sisters, Vaudevillian-style performers from Marion, were America’s worst singers or its best actors.
The Cherry Sisters were Addie, Effie, Ella, Elizabeth and Jessie Cherry, who traveled the U.S. and Canada performing a musical show that was widely panned by critics everywhere.
"When the curtain went up... [t]he audience saw three creatures surpassing the witches in Macbeth in general hideousness,” Odebolt Chronicle editor William Hamilton wrote in a review in 1898 that resulted in a landmark libellawsuit. “... Their long, skinny arms, equipped with talons at the extremities, swung
mechanically, and anon were waved frantically at the suffering audience. The mouths of their rancid features opened like caverns, and sounds like the wailing of damned souls issued there from. They pranced around the stage...strange creatures with painted features and hideous mien. Effie is spavined, Addie is knock-kneed and string-halt, and Jessie, the only one who showed her stockings, has legs without calves, as classic in their outlines as the curves of a broom handle."
When the Des Moines Leader reprinted the review two weeks later, the sisters sued for libel and damages for $25 000. The suit was dismissed with the judge noting that The Judge had seen their act and stated, “Any performance to which the public is invited may be freely criticized. Also any editor may publish reasonable comments on that performance.” The sisters appealed the ruling and in 1901, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in the paper's favor. The case Cherry v. Des Moines Leader established "fair comment and criticism" as a vital principle of libel law and became a precedent that gave art critics the right to criticize acts to the point of ridicule.
No one is quite sure how or why the sisters got into show business. One popular theory goes that the sisters wanted to earn enough money to visit Chicago to see the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair. Effie Cherry, who was the leader of the group, rented Daniel’s Opera House in Marion. They designed a show and on January 21, 1893 the Cherry Sisters debuted to a full house of locals, friends and neighbors, who were apparently too polite to criticize the act.
From there, they performed in theaters across Iowa, enjoying a modicum of success as theater-goers came home from shows and told acquaintances, “You gotta see this.”
The show was named Something Good, Something Sad. Elizabeth played piano and Jessie bass drum when the other sisters sung. The show consisted of melodramatic morality plays, derivative ballads and recitations of poetry. Their repertoire also included songs like I'm Out Upon The Mash, Boys; Curfew Must Not Ring Tonight; Don't You Remember Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt and an operetta The Gypsy's Warning.
Press accounts say that audiences hurled both invectives and spoiled produce and anything they could find. At one stop, they were chased off the stage by the audience; in Creston, Addie took a shotgun on stage to protect her sisters. One promoter eventually decided to protect their act with a wire mesh.
The sisters took the audiences' response as the work of jealous rivals. In Cedar Rapids, members of the audience came equipped with tin horns that they blew to drown out the singing. But the sisters reportedly thought the bleating horns were a sign of approval, and were surprised to see a native review the next day in the Cedar Rapids Gazette. They filed what was their first libel suit, but after hearing the sisters perform on the stand couldn’t bring himself to ordering cash judgment and instead told the city editor to marry one of the Cherry’s.
Despite an apparent lack of talent, word of the sisters’ unique act spread across the country. In 1896, Oscar Hammerstein signed the sisters to perform at the Olympia Music Hall in New York City. Their opening night was on November 16. The audience, who had no knowledge of the sisters' act, sat stupefied at first and then begun to howl and whistle. The New York Times review of the following day was named "Four Freaks from Iowa" and was hardly favorable.
The next day's performance was accompanied with the usual barrage of thrown vegetables, instigated by the sons of Hammerstein. Hammerstein assured the sisters that it the work of jealous, rival stars. The sisters' show lasted for six weeks in the Olympia Music Hall and an additional two weeks at Proctor's 23rd Street Theater, and saved Hammerstein from bankruptcy. Newspapers claimed that local vegetable sellers could not meet the demand of their regular customers because the theater patrons bought the most.
Afterwards the sisters went on a seven-year U.S.-Canadian tour. Their reputation preceded them and in one case the promoter had to expressly ban ten-gauge guns in the performance. Audience response was predictably similar. Understandably the sisters went through six managers in those seven years.
The youngest sister Jessie died of typhoid in 1903 and the other sisters retired to their farm. They had earned about $200,000., but they spent the money in a short time (largely through litigiousness), lost the farm, and had to move to Cedar Rapids. There during the First World War they opened a bakery that specialized in cherry pies, Elizabeth doing the baking, Effie managing the business end, and Addie helping wherever she could. Effie ran unsuccessfully for mayor of Cedar Rapids in 1924 and 1926 (her platform included an 8 p.m. curfew for minors).
The sisters attempted comebacks in 1913 and 1935 but both failed.
Ella died in 1934 and when Elizabeth died in 1936 the two remaining sisters, Effie and Addie, were reduced to meager circumstances. They had been living in what was left of the Cherry estate, a basement, before being taken to the county nursing home in the winter of 1934. Addie and Effie struggled on into the 1940s moving from one location to another in Cedar Rapids. Addie was stricken with a cerebral hemorrhage in 1942 at the age of 83 and in 1944 Effie died of heart failure. Both were buried in Linwood Cemetery, Cedar Rapids.
 | ||||
IOWAHistory
HISTORYLinks
HISTORYLinks