Behind the Kaleidoscope: The Women Busby Berkeley Used and the Deaths He Walked Away From
- Jun 12
- 9 min read
In the overhead shot, they're perfect. Dozens of women arranged into flowers, spirals, and concentric rings, their faces and bodies reduced to components of an enormous human pattern. The camera swoops in from thirty feet above and the audience gasps. Nobody's watching any individual woman. That was rather the point.
Busby Berkeley is remembered as one of Hollywood's great visionaries, the man who turned the movie musical into something genuinely cinematic during the bleakest years of the Great Depression. The kaleidoscopic overhead shots, the waterfall sequences, the neon violins, the 56 white grand pianos: all of it is credited to his genius, and the credit is largely deserved.
But there's a version of the Busby Berkeley story that doesn't get told alongside the greatest hits reel. It's the story of the hundreds of women who made those numbers possible and were largely forgotten the moment the camera moved on. And it's the story of a night in 1935 when two of those women died, and Berkeley walked away from it.
A Choreographer Who Never Danced
William Berkeley Enos was born in Los Angeles in 1895 to a theatrical family. His father was an actor and director; his mother, Gertrude Berkeley, was an actress whose surname he later combined with that of a stage performer called Amy Busby to create his working name. He attended the Mohegan Lake Military Academy in New York, enrolled in the army in World War I, and was sent to France, where he organised military parades and drills for battalions of soldiers.
He never had a dance lesson in his life. When he arrived in Hollywood at the start of the sound era, the choreographic language he brought with him was the language of military formations: large groups moving in precise synchronisation, individuals subsumed into collective geometry, the overhead view that reveals patterns invisible from ground level. He didn't teach his dancers steps. He taught them positions. The camera did the dancing.
Warner Bros. were facing near-bankruptcy by the early 1930s, having lost millions in the Depression years after turning a $17 million profit in 1929. They needed something spectacular and cheap enough not to sink them. Berkeley gave them 42nd Street, Gold Diggers of 1933, and Footlight Parade, all in the same year, all featuring the same essential ingredient: hundreds of women moving as one.
How You Got the Job
Berkeley held open auditions that were, by any honest measure, closer to inspections. He was looking for specific physical proportions, specific facial symmetry, specific leg length. He wasn't especially interested in whether the women could dance, because his numbers didn't require dancing in any conventional sense. They required precision movement, the ability to hold a position, and the willingness to do whatever Berkeley asked in whatever costume he specified.
The costumes were frequently not much. Pre-Code Hollywood, operating before the Production Code was strictly enforced after 1934, allowed Berkeley considerable latitude. The opening of Gold Diggers of 1933 featured Ginger Rogers and a chorus of women dressed in nothing but strategically placed silver dollars. The "Pettin' in the Park" sequence from the same film ends with a chorus line of women in metal corsets, with a small person in a baby costume handing Dick Powell a can opener. Berkeley's sexual imagery was not subtle, and his chorus girls were its primary vehicle.
A 1942 Warner Bros. short film called Calling All Girls documented the actual process by which women were selected for chorus work in movie musicals of the era. The selection criteria it depicts are about physical appearance, not skill. Women walked, turned, and were assessed. Those who passed moved on. Those who didn't were thanked and shown out.
Berkeley developed a signature technique called the "Parade of Faces," in which the camera moved slowly along the line, pausing on each woman for a close-up. It was meant to individualise them, to give each performer a moment. In practice, it was an inventory. A catalogue of the faces he'd selected. The women he didn't select never made it into the frame at all. For more on the lives of women who built their identities around performance in this era, read about Josephine Baker, dancer, film star, spy and activist, and Audrey Munson, America's first supermodel, whose story ended in tragedy.
What They Were Paid and What They Were Worth
Chorus girls at Warner Bros. in the early 1930s earned roughly $25 to $75 a week for their work, depending on experience and the specific production. In Depression-era America, where millions were unemployed and breadlines stretched around city blocks, this was considered good money. It was also a fraction of what the studio was making from the films they appeared in.
The work itself was physically demanding in ways the finished product doesn't reveal. Berkeley was a perfectionist who shot and re-shot sequences until they met his exacting standards. The "By a Waterfall" sequence in Footlight Parade, in which dozens of women formed formations in and around a large pool, required the women to spend extended periods in the water on a soundstage. The pool was reportedly the largest ever built at that point. The shoot ran for days. Nobody was asking whether the women were cold.
Berkeley's numbers required the kind of mechanical precision that exhausted everyone involved. Getting 150 tappers to synchronise for the "Lullaby of Broadway" sequence in Gold Diggers of 1935 meant rehearsals that went on long past reasonable hours. Getting 56 women to manoeuvre 56 white grand pianos across a stage in geometric patterns meant doing it again and again until it looked effortless. Berkeley was not known for his patience when the patterns weren't right.
What the women got in return was a credit that most audiences ignored, wages that vanished quickly in Depression-era Los Angeles, and in the vast majority of cases, no lasting career. They were chosen for how they looked in aggregate, from above, as part of a pattern. When the pattern was complete, they were thanked and the next production began.
The Women Nobody Remembers
Of the hundreds of women who appeared in Berkeley's numbers at Warner Bros. between 1930 and 1939, a small handful are remembered by name. Ruby Keeler, who could tap dance and had married Al Jolson, became a star. Joan Blondell and Ginger Rogers had the wit and personality to make the narrative sections of the films as compelling as the numbers. Aline MacMahon brought genuine acting skill to roles that didn't always deserve it.
The rest are largely anonymous. The woman in the silver dollar costume next to Ginger Rogers in the opening of Gold Diggers of 1933. The woman whose legs Berkeley tracked through from ground level in 42nd Street. The woman forming the centre of the human flower in the overhead shot that everybody recognises. Their names aren't in the histories. Their faces, when you can see them at all, are one of dozens.
Berkeley's "Parade of Faces" technique, for all its apparent intimacy, captures this perfectly. Each face gets its moment. Then the camera moves on to the next one. Then the next. By the time you've seen fifteen of them, the individual has dissolved back into the pattern. That was what the pattern was for.
The films themselves were perfectly aware of this dynamic. The plot of 42nd Street is about a chorus girl who gets her big break when the star breaks her ankle. The entire backstage musical genre of the 1930s was built on the fantasy that talent and luck could lift a woman from the chorus line to the marquee. What it didn't examine was what happened to the hundreds who stayed in the chorus line, and the hundreds more who didn't make the cut at all.
The Night on Roosevelt Highway
On the evening of 8 September 1935, Berkeley attended a party at the Pacific Palisades home of Warner Bros. production chief William Koenig. He had a meeting scheduled with bandleader Gus Arnheim the following morning and left the party while still, according to multiple witnesses, heavily affected by alcohol.
Driving south on Roosevelt Highway (now Pacific Coast Highway), 400 yards north of Santa Monica Canyon, Berkeley crossed into oncoming traffic. His car struck a vehicle head-on and sideswiped a third. Two women died: Ada von Briesen and Peggy Daley. Five other people were seriously injured. Berkeley himself was badly cut and bruised.
When witnesses reached the crash site, several reported smelling alcohol on Berkeley's breath. One of them, a pest control worker named Alvin Hudson, who had been driving one of the other vehicles, later testified that Berkeley's headlights had appeared suddenly in front of him in the middle lane with no warning. Another witness, a student named William Hudson, told the coroner's jury he had smelled liquor on Berkeley when he spoke to him at the scene.
Berkeley was charged with second-degree murder. He was tried three times. The first two juries hung. In the third trial he was acquitted. He arrived at court on a stretcher, badly enough hurt from the crash that he couldn't walk in. Warner Bros., whose most commercially valuable choreographer was on trial for killing two people, hired the best legal defence available. Jerry Giesler, one of Hollywood's most celebrated criminal defence attorneys, represented him.
Ada von Briesen and Peggy Daley are not mentioned in histories of the Berkeley musical. Berkeley continued working at Warner Bros. until the late 1930s, then moved to MGM. He never served a day in prison.
The MGM Years and What They Cost
At MGM, Berkeley's excesses caught up with him in different ways. He was removed from directing Girl Crazy in 1943 after conflicts with Judy Garland, though the production number "I Got Rhythm" that he'd already directed remained in the film. His biographer Jeffrey Spivak and others who documented the period noted that Berkeley's on-set behaviour became increasingly erratic and verbally abusive as his career there continued. He clashed with studio brass repeatedly over budgets. His instability had consequences for the people who worked with him.
Outside of work, Berkeley's personal life was in similar disarray. He was married six times, a figure that tells its own story about his capacity for sustained relationships. He was the subject of an alienation of affections lawsuit involving a prominent actress. He attempted suicide more than once in the late 1940s and spent periods institutionalised.
By the mid-1950s he was considered a minor figure, his moment having passed. The integrated musical had replaced the spectacle number as Hollywood's preferred form, and his specific skill of organising large groups of women into geometric patterns had no obvious application in a genre now dominated by Fred Astaire's partnership with Cyd Charisse or Gene Kelly's emotional athleticism. Those were forms that required genuine dancing. Berkeley's numbers had always required something else.
What the Overhead Shot Means
In 1975, the French philosopher Michel Foucault published a book about power and the body, arguing that one of the defining gestures of modern institutions is the arrangement of bodies into visible, controllable formations. He was writing about prisons and schools, not Hollywood musicals, but the description applies. Berkeley's overhead shot turns the individual human being into a unit within a pattern, visible only as part of a larger design, indistinguishable from the units around her.
Berkeley himself would have found this analysis baffling. He said his only goals were to top himself and amaze the audience. "In an era of breadlines, depression and wars, I tried to help people get away from all the misery," he said. "I wanted to make people happy, if only for an hour." That's probably true, and it's not nothing. The escapism those films provided was real and genuinely valued by the people who queued to see them.
But the women in the patterns were real too. They had names. They came to auditions hoping to be chosen. They were paid wages that seemed good in 1933 and look rather different from this distance. They held positions in cold water on soundstages for hours while Berkeley decided if the angle was right. They were, by his own admission, chosen for their looks and their capacity to form attractive geometric shapes, not for anything they could individually do.
The overhead shot is brilliant. The films are genuinely extraordinary products of their time and place. And Ada von Briesen and Peggy Daley are still dead, and most of the women who made those numbers possible are still anonymous, and Berkeley still walked away from all of it with his reputation essentially intact. That's a story that sits right underneath the kaleidoscope, if you know where to look. For another account of a performance career that was exploited and forgotten, read about Evelyn Nesbit, the girl on the velvet swing and the Gilded Age scandal that consumed her.
SOURCES
1. Britannica: Busby Berkeley — https://www.britannica.com/biography/Busby-Berkeley
2. New World Encyclopedia: Busby Berkeley — https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Busby_Berkeley
3. UCLA Library Special Collections (Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive): Busby Berkeley manslaughter trial photographs, 1935 — https://calisphere.org/item/ark:/21198/zz00288461/
4. UCLA Library Special Collections: Alvin Hudson testimony, Busby Berkeley crash, 1935 — https://dl.library.ucla.edu/islandora/object/edu.ucla.library.specialCollections.latimes:7923
5. Pre-Code Misbehaving: Famous Pre-Code Trials: Busby Berkeley — http://www.precodemisbehaving.com/2012/12/famous-precode-trials-1-busby-berkeley.html
6. Paste Magazine: In 1933, Busby Berkeley Became Hollywood's Killer Choreographer — https://www.pastemagazine.com/movies/musicals/busby-berkeley-gold-diggers-of-1933
7. Dance Teacher Magazine: Busby Berkeley — https://dance-teacher.com/busby-berkeley/
8. Jeffrey Spivak: Buzz: The Life and Art of Busby Berkeley (University Press of Kentucky, 2010)
