Happiness Quote by Florenz Ziegfeld

Ziegfeld is puncturing a fantasy he helped sell: that showgirls and performers exist only in the bright, buoyant instant when the curtain rises. The line turns on a neat reversal. Audiences assume the performance is the job; he insists it is the afterthought. That flip is doing moral work. It asks you to see labor where you were trained to see effortless charm, to recognize that “smiling and happy” is itself a demanded skill, not a mood.

The wording is managerial and oddly protective at once. “Plenty of hard work for them” sounds like a producer counting hours, but it also reads as a preemptive defense against the era’s easy contempt for stage women as decorative or unserious. Ziegfeld’s Follies traded in spectacle, and spectacle depends on invisibility: rehearsals, fittings, choreography drills, publicity sessions, dieting, injuries quietly endured, the constant maintenance of an image that must look spontaneous. By calling performance “the least of their worries,” he implies a backstage economy of anxiety the audience never pays to witness.

Context matters: early 20th-century Broadway was a factory dressed up as glamour, and Ziegfeld was its most famous foreman. This quote functions as both humanization and brand management. It elevates his performers as professionals while also elevating his product: if the visible magic is effortless, imagine the disciplined machinery required to manufacture it nightly. It’s empathy, yes, but it’s also a reminder that glamour is labor with the sweat edited out.