Poor Butterfly

John L. Golden (1874–1955); Raymond Hubbell (1879–1954)

The Hippodrome was the biggest theatre in New York. It had a stage twelve times larger than the stages in any other Broadway house, capable of holding as many as a thousand performers at a time or a full-sized circus with elephants and horses, which could be housed in built-in stalls beneath the stage. 

g e .i a.Raymond Hubbell became musical director of the Hippodrome in 1915 and wrote the music for a number of its productions. He was one of the nine founding members of ASCAP, and his last Broadway score was for the 1928 musical Three Cheers, starring Will Rogers.

In the summer of 1916, Hubbell and John Golden were at the Hippodrome—in the days before air-conditioning—when they were asked to create a “Japanese-style” song. They went down to the elephant pens in the basement, where it was cool. Despite the smell and the company of elephants, they wrote “Poor Butterfly.” To some degree, the song was inspired by Puccini’s opera, Madame Butterfly, and includes a brief musical quote from the opera’s second act. It became a standard and has been recorded by everyone from Frank Sinatra, to Julie Andrews, to Yusef Lateef.

Golden went on to great success, first as a composer, then stage producer, then filmmaker and theatre owner. He made a fortune and gave most of it away, buying train tickets for service personnel in World Wars I and II. He founded the Stage Door Canteen, a series of free dance clubs for the armed forces. In 1919, he arranged a meeting of Broadway producers; he was a bit priggish and wanted to standardize moral codes. He also wanted the producers, among other things, to quit poaching each other’s performers. Out of this meeting came the Producing Manager’s Association. And not long after, upon seeing the value of collaboration, Actor’s Equity was formed. A month-long strike resulted in Equity’s being recognized, along with better working conditions for the actors. (This is the same strike mentioned above in the 1906 section on Bert Williams.) 

Golden left his fifteen-room, twenty-acre Bayside, Queens property to New York City, which made it into John Golden Park in 1965.