Publisher's Synopsis
The granddaughter and great-grandson of vaudeville, burlesque, and Hollywood entertainer Joe Devlin retrace the adventurous life and career of the ancestor they barely knew. Born in an unheated New York City tenement in the winter of 1894, Christopher Devlin left home as a teenager and traveled the vaudeville circuits using an assumed name to throw someone off his trail - his disillusioned young bride or the WWI draft board - and found acceptance as a trouper in the exciting world of traveling show business.
From a stage door encounter with a 17-year-old fan that began a secret family to an immoral burlesque performance that led him to jail, the man who lived to make people laugh experienced heartbreaking setbacks offstage, including the daughter who died too young and the brother savagely murdered on orders from 1920s crime boss "Legs" Diamond. Undeterred, Devlin dragged his trunk from opening to opening until vaudeville waned, the government banned burlesque, and Hollywood threw him a lifeline. In their fascinating, exquisitely researched story-a captivating glimpse into the lost world of live entertainment in the 1910s, 1920s, and 1930s-Colleen and Greg Wilczek trace the highlights and lowlights of an entertainer who left behind a trail of ephemera now digitized and date-stamped, allowing them to discover family secrets buried for decades, including the truth behind whispered lore Greg overheard as a child. The man family knew variously as Christopher Devlin, Joseph Mathews, and numerous other names, was a man of many talents, many surprises, and many heartbreaks, and his complicated story is told here for the first time. It is, simply, Call Me Joe.
