Cecil Lean and His Two Wives

Cecil Lean (1878-1935) and his two wives (in succession, of course) were major stars of their day, headliners in vaudeville and musical comedy stars of Broadway and nationwide tours, yet one encounters few articles about them antedating their own time.

Cecil Lean (which I will never not hear as Sizzlean) was from Canada, and moved to the U.S. when his father founded a prep school in Detroit. Boyhood theatricals lead to a professional career in musical comedies at the La Salle Theatre in Chicago. In 1902 he met his professional partner Florence Holbrook, about whom little is known. (She is not the same person as the educator and suffragette by that name). They had a gimmick where they called each other “Lovey” (him) and “Dovey” (her). We know that she was musical because she composed the tunes for some songs he wrote the words for. They appeared together in The Soul Kiss (1907), produced by Flo Ziegfeld the year after he introduced the Follies. Ziegfeld would produce many of Lean’s vehicles going forward. (It’s likely they’d known each other since the Chicago days). Lean and Holbrook were also together in Bright Eyes (1910). They separated later that year and were legally divorced in 1913.

Meanwhile Lean had met the much younger Cleo Mayfield (Cleo Empey, 1898-1954) while acting together in a production of The Military Girl in Chicago in 1912 (he character was named “Miss Understood!”. Like most who got their start in Chicago theatre, Mayfield was a native midwestern, hailing from Hutchinson, Kansas. She and Lean were married in 1914, and this proved a much more felicitous pairing than the one with Holbrook. On Broadway they appeared together in The Man With Three Wives (1913), The Blue Paradise (1915), Miss 1917, Look Who’s Here (1920), The Blushing Bride (1922), and Innocent Eyes (1924). They played in a revival of No, No Nanette in 1925 on tour. They also toured big time vaudeville as a couple, sometimes in truncated versions of their hit musicals, and were popular guests on radio variety programs. They also starred in a MGM musical comedy short in 1929.

In 1931 Lean was in the Broadway comedy Everybody’s Welcome (1931) with Ann Pennington and Oscar Shaw. He joined Shaw again the following year in the national tour of Of Thee I Sing. In 1935 Lean died suddenly of a heart attack. He was only 57. Tragically he was crossing the street to meet Mayfield at the time, and she initially assumed it was a gag. Mayfield remained in the biz for several more years. Her last known credit is the Broadway play Right Next to Broadway (1944). Cancer took her a decade later.

For more on vaudeville and show biz history,please see my book No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous.