In search of the Sons of Barnum goes to New York

Day 8 Joe Flynn seems to have been one of the most fertile press agents around the turn of the century. He spun the Salome vogue, the phoniest craze of all to hit the stage. It was all based around the then provocative Salome dance. When New York went Salome-mad the rest of the nation followed unable to detect the hand of Flynn. The gifted publicist was given the task of working up the first incarnation of Maude Allen’s famous London routine, portrayed in the US by Gertrude Hoffman. She was vaudeville’s leading female star and her initial success was astounding. Flynn was clever enough to build up a huge amount of protest for the benefit of the box office. He employed a fake preacher, who spent a week, outside the theatre, on a prayer vigil in an attempt to save the soul of the lost woman. Flynn even engineered the arrest of Hoffman for performing the “explicit routine” which culminated in 150 managers from Virginia to Ohio forbidding the dance to be performed in any of their venues in the summer of 1908. This was later overturned and the craze continued to generate big box office returns until it fizzled out