Eddie Vogt: Spotlight on a Middling Vaudevillian

Some fragments this morning on vaudeville performer and early screen actor Eddie Vogt (1889-1960), a minor figure to be sure, and our telling is not as complete as it might be, but we post here (as we frequently do) in part in hopes that someone (else) with the time to undertake it will plunge in and fill it out some more. Vogt was actually quite successful — he just didn’t get over that last little hump that might have made him a star of Broadway or Hollywood. Bad health (chronic TB) probably hampered him in getting there.

What we know is that Vogt is a German surname, and Eddie was born in New York City. His first known credits are several silent comedies made with Ithaca based Wharton Studios in 1917 and 1918. In 1918 he starred in a musical comedy called The Bride Shop at the Pantages Theatre in Oakland, CA.

Starting in the early 1920s, Vogt was paired in vaudeville with a partner named Frank Hurst, who sang and was the straight man to Vogt’s comedy. Hurst had also performed with Lucille Cavanagh and El Brendel (in The Mimic World of 1921). One of the sketches Vogt and Hurst performed was called “Profiteering in Fun”, and in 1929 they appeared in a Vitaphone short called Before the Bar.

By the ’30s vaudeville was breaking up, but we still know of a couple of credits for Vogt during that period. He’s the announcer in another Vitaphone short starring Isham Jones and His Orchestra (1934), and he’s a walk-on in Bring On the Girls (1937) with Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy, also a Vitaphone.

That same year of 1937 was a pivotal one in Vogt’s life. Now 48 years old, he went up to the National Vaudeville Artists Home in Saranac Lake to recuperate from TB. (The facility later became Will Rogers Memorial Hospital). Vogt liked the area so much that he decided to remain there. I mean, vaudeville was dead, he was unwell and getting on in years, and the Depression was still on. Who wouldn’t? Vogt literally stayed in the hospital — but as an employee, as a lab assistant and an x-ray tech. He never quite retired from show business, though he choose to pursue it locally. He had at least two local radio shows (one on which he played records and another which he delivered live from a hotel called Durgan’s). He wrote a weekly column in the local paper the Adirondack Daily Enterprise (with “contributions” from his dog Clarabelle). And he kept a hand in the theatre by directing amateur variety shows to benefit the local Rotary Club, which opened the annual Winter Carnival at the Pontiac Theatre.

The TB finally took his life when he was 71 — with a little help from his cigar habit, no doubt.

More details on Eddie Vogt’s later years, and great photos from his silent movie days are here.

For more on the history of vaudeville, where Eddie Vogt got his start,consult No Applause, Just Throw Money: The Book That Made Vaudeville Famous; and for more on silent comedy please check out my book: Chain of Fools: Silent Comedy and Its Legacies from Nickelodeons to Youtube.