A one-of-a-kind working archive of Johnnie La Vier, the American vaudeville comedian billed professionally as Jack La Vier or Jack LaVier. More than forty scrapbook scans preserve his clippings, programs and photographs, and the accompanying period portrait is inscribed by La Vier himself. This is the “flying monologist” whose comic trapeze act reached the Palace and the 1937 Royal Variety Performance before King George VI and Queen Elizabeth.
The seller’s identification and the objects now fit the historical record: Johnnie La Vier is the performer whose professional billing appears as Jack La Vier, Jack LaVier and Jack Lavier. The portrait reverse is written “Jack La Vier,” while the scrapbook preserves the private career behind the public name.
The Billboard called La Vier a “flying monologist” in 1917 and later praised the rare combination of acrobat and comedian who could gather laughs while working on a trapeze. Newspaper coverage followed him through major American vaudeville houses, and he continued appearing with Ruthie Morgan as a comedy trapeze act into the 1940s.
La Vier appeared at the London Palladium Royal Variety Performance on November 15, 1937. Contemporary coverage described him tangling himself in the trapeze while delivering jokes for King George VI and Queen Elizabeth; trade coverage identified La Vier and Ruthie Morgan as the only American act chosen for the bill.
The scrapbook’s photographs, programs, clippings and working ephemera make this far more than a single autograph. The sequence documents the touring life of a performer whose career is scattered across period newspapers and trade journals, so keeping the archive intact preserves relationships that individual pages would lose.
The scrapbook is a heavily used original archive with brittle and toned paper, edge tears, detached or lifting material, old adhesive staining and general page wear. The signed portrait has creasing, surface and edge wear; its reverse has substantial old mounting residue, paper disturbance and dark adhesive spots. A second green-ink sentiment appears at the lower right of the portrait and is shown clearly, but this listing’s signer identification rests on Jack/Johnnie La Vier. Because a Seller Hub report row accepts only 12 image URLs, the upload uses representative scrapbook pages, both portrait scans and the ACOA image; 32 additional normalized item images remain available for manual addition.
Important image note: images depicting the autographed item sometimes appear different in tone from each other. Some were manually photographed as contorted closeups to make the handwriting as clear and legible as possible. Otherwise, all images are scanned at 600dpi.
I've never believed in collecting for it's own sake. Collectors items should be shared and circulated. I grew up among my entertainment heroes of the Golden Age of Hollywood, and am now selling-off some of the treasures I accumulated as a fortunate young man in 1970s Tinsel Town.
The autographs I'm selling here have never been on the market before.
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