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The Seven Little Eatons was a family of young American stage performers in the early part of the twentieth century.
Although they were called The Seven Little Eatons, in fact only five of the siblings embarked on a career in showbiz.
The Eatons were born to Mary and Charles Eaton between 1894 and 1910 in Norfolk, Virginia, and began their careers in show business in 1911, when three of the children, Doris, Mary, and Pearl, were hired to appear in a production of Maurice Maeterlinck's fantasy play The Blue Bird at the Shubert Belasco Theatre in Washington.
After The Blue Bird closed, the sisters, younger brother Joe and cousin Avery, began appearing regularly in various plays and melodramas for the Poli stock company. Doris Eaton Travis, in her memoirs, noted that "the local stock managers at the Poli theatres knew that if you needed three or four or more children, you could call Mama Eaton and get them all in one place." The Eaton girls sometimes portrayed male roles; brother Joe sometimes portrayed female characters and was billed as "Josephine." They quickly gained reputations as professional, reliable and versatile actors, and were rarely out of work.
As their careers flourished, the Eatons moved to New York and, gradually, began performing in adult roles in musical theatre productions and silent films. They had a special connection to the Ziegfeld Follies : between 1918 and 1922, at least one Eaton was a member of the Follies cast.
In the 1930s, with the advent of talkies, the decline of the Follies and the advent of the Great Depression, the careers of the Eaton siblings declined. Several struggled with alcoholism and drug addiction; others went on to careers in the United States military and the Arthur Murray chain of dance schools.
Doris Eaton Travis, at an advanced age, still performed annually on Broadway in benefits for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. She wrote a memoir about her family, entitled The Days We Danced (2003) with her brother Charles, who died in 2004. Doris died on May 11, 2010, at the age of 106. [1]
Although the family was called the "Seven Little Eatons," in fact only five of the children were actively involved in show business.
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