Goldwyn Girls
dance campaign
The Goldwyn Girls were a musical stock company of female dancers employed by Samuel Goldwyn. Famous actresses, dancers, and models whose career included a stint in the Goldwyn Girls include Lucille Ball, Virginia Bruce, Claire Dodd, Paulette Goddard, Betty Grable, Virginia Grey, June Kirby, Joi Lansing, Barbara Pepper, Marjorie Reynolds, Pat Sheehan, Gail Sheridan, Ann Sothern, Larri Thomas, Tyra Vaughn, Toby Wing, Vonne Lester, and Jane Wyman.
History
Samuel Goldwyn modeled his silver screen Goldwyn Girls after the stage sensation Ziegfeld Follies around 1929 when Ziegfeld came west to Hollywood to assist in the film production of his popular musical Whoopee!. Goldwyn learned much from Florenz Ziegfeld on creating an enchanting chorus line, which Ziegfeld called one of his secrets of success: "Women enjoyed looking at beautiful women in beautiful clothes, the glorification of their gender". To this standard, Goldwyn added his own guidelines, explaining to the press that a Goldwyn Girl must meet his standards of beauty, personality, talent, self-confidence, and ambition. He is quoted as requiring one more ethereal trait as well, "I have always insisted that every Goldwyn Girl look as though she had just stepped out of a bathtub. There must be a kind of a radiant scrubbed cleanliness about them which rules out all artificiality."
One use for the chorus line, the Goldwyn Girls, was to open Goldwyn's Cantor productions. The pictures, built on a stock formula, would inevitably open with a big production number of the Goldwyn Girls, then move to a blackface number, and end for the characters. Two such productions were Whoopee! and Palmy Days.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Goldwyn Girls” as dance campaign. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
Why this record matters
The subject matters to the history & society register because the source frames it as dance campaign. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
Contemporary correspondence, administrative files and participant testimony can test how later narratives organized the event or institution. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 6, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5580396. VIAF identifies the subject as 135027821. The Library of Congress control number is n95014864. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1929.
Later summaries often reconcile disputed chronology or motive more neatly than the contemporary record permits. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
How to read it
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Contemporary correspondence, government or organizational records, oral histories and cited historical scholarship.
Three-step research path
- Establish the record: confirm the title “Goldwyn Girls”, its source revision and the description used here.
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- Test the account: compare the strongest cited source with the responsible institution’s current record and note any disagreement.
Questions for further research
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This entry incorporates text from “Goldwyn Girls” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.