Tableau vivant

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  • Tableau Vivant - A scene presented on stage by costumed actors who remain silent and motionless as if in a picture.


Known as "Daddy" and "Peaches," the Brownings had been darlings of the tabloids since their courtship, and their courtroom testimony apparently hid few details of their married life. The (New York Evening) Graphic created composographs of incidents in the testimony, adding word-balloons to the pictures, ...was this caption:

When Peaches refused to parade Nude! Frances Heenan Browning wept on the stand when she described the scene pictured in the composite photograph above. Daddy Browning stormed and raged, she said, when she refused to prance naked before him in the bed-chamber. Even the African honking gander which the millionaire insisted on having around the house became temperamental. E&P later described this composograph in detail, but did not reproduce it:

The first-page pictures carried daily by the Graphic and the (New York Daily) Mirror's headlines were the most daring that have ever been seen in New York Journalism.

On January 26 the Graphic produced what was supposed to represent the bedroom scene of the Browning honeymoon. Browning's head was pasted on to the pajama-clad body of some male model and he was shown raging around the room, a balloon to the mouth carrying the words "Woof! Woof! Don't be a goof." Facing him in an attitude of shrinking revulsion was the half clad figure of a woman, with Mrs. Browning's head pasted onto the body. An elaborate four-poster bed, raised on a dais, was in the background and walking across the coverlet of the bed was a gander, with a balloon uttering, "Honk! Honk! It's the bonk!"


Reproduced from AEJMC Archives -

"Photographic innovation at the Evening Graphic (1924-1932)"

http://list.msu.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind9709c&L=aejmc&P=1494