Cherry Sisters
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The Cherry Sisters were Addie, Effie, Ella, Elizabeth and Jessie Cherry from Marion, Iowa who toured in the U.S. and Canada with their rather folksy show. Contemporaries did not really appreciate their form of "art" and the sisters instead became popular as musical performers reputed to be comically inept and unable to realize it.
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[edit] Background
The sisters' brother Nathan had disappeared to Chicago in 1885, and after the death of their parents they were forced to turn to show business to earn a living. According to later accounts, the Cherry Sisters decided to try to perform to earn money to go to the 1893 Chicago World's Fair. Other tales claim that they intended to go there to look for their missing brother.
Effie, who quickly became the leader of the group, rented Daniel’s Opera House in Marion. They designed a show of sorts 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 and/or had limited theatrical standards. Encouraged by this, the sisters took their show on the road and toured the neighboring towns.
[edit] Career
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.
The audience usually answered with not only catcalls, but with a barrage of hurled produce of some decomposition, in addition to miscellaneous items like an old tin wash boiler. Sometimes they chased the women off the stage. At Creston, Iowa, Addie took a shotgun to 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.
When an audience in Cedar Rapids, Iowa blew tin horns, the sisters took it as approval and were horrified to see an unfavorable review in the next day's Cedar Rapids Gazette. When they sued the paper, the judge and jury ruled in the sisters' favor and the judge told the editor to marry one of the sisters. That particular sentence was not enforced.
In 1895 New York impresario Oscar Hammerstein I contracted them for his Olympia Music Hall in New York City. By that point Ella had retired. 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. Other contemporary reviews were also uniformly unfavorable.
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 was, yet again, the work of 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. The sisters became small-time celebrities and were showered with invitations to parties, which they declined. 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.
[edit] Legal Precedent
The Odebolt Chronicle wrote in 1899: "The mouths of their rancid features opened like caverns and sounds like the wailings of damned souls issued therefrom" amongst other highly uncompliamentary phrases. 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 but the sisters took it to higher court. In 1901, the Iowa Supreme Court ruled in the paper's favor. The case Cherry v. Des Moines Leader became a precedent that gave art critics the right to criticize acts to the point of ridicule.
[edit] Retirement
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).
When the sisters attempted comeback in 1913, the most profit came in the form of thrown vegetables. Another comeback attempt in New York in 1935 also 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.
