The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis made their reputations at the Copa. Jerry’s shtick had him running through the aisles, knocking things from tables, shouting in the faces of patrons. As always, berating the audience was a dangerous approach. “An incident took place in the Copa lounge,” said Lewis. “I heard this gruff-sounding voice, ‘Why don’t you knock off that shit and be quiet?’ I halted in my tracks. I figured he was either kidding or too drunk to appreciate who I was.” Rather than lay off, Lewis upped his antagonism. The voice turned out to belong to Albert Anastasia, of Murder, Inc. “The bull slowly rose from his chair. Snorted, sauntered up and stuck his finger under my nose. ‘That’s not funny, you son of a bitch. If you open your mouth once more it’ll be without your teeth.’ Dean came between us, trying to calm him down.”

  It was rare for a comedian to deal with Anastasia or Costello at the Copa. It was the house manager, Jules Podell, who had the job of handling comics. Podell was a former speakeasy bouncer, a thickheaded hulk, loyal and gruff, with no criminal record: a perfect front man for the Mob. He was a replacement for the outgoing Jack Entratter, whom the Mob had sent to book shows in Las Vegas. “Podell worked for these guys and ran a very tight club,” says Bobby Ramsen. “People would come there and see—Jimmy Durante! Frank Sinatra! Rosemary Clooney! Louis Prima! The biggest stars in America. Most of the time you would find Podell in a high chair, sitting at the exit of the kitchen, looking at the plates of food that were going out to the customers. He once threw somebody out of the club because they sent a steak back. He said, ‘I serve only the finest food. It’s always done perfectly—leave and don’t ever come back.’”

  “When I played the Copa, I never said a word to Podell,” says comedian Don Sherman. “They told me, ‘Never talk to him!’ Finally after a week I got my check and I needed some money. I said, ‘Excuse me, Mr. Podell? I have this check and I would like to know if you could cash it.’ He said, ‘This look like a fucking bank? You see tellers here? This is a fucking nightclub! We take money! We don’t give money!’ Then he said to the bar, ‘Cash his check.’”

  Friar’s Club patriarch Freddie Roman remembers Podell. “He was an absolute tyrant. I did a joke opening night: Fella goes to the doctor. He says, ‘Doctor, I have a problem. I can’t pee anymore.’ Doctor says, ‘How old are you?’ ‘I’m ninety-four.’ Doctor says, ‘You’ve peed enough.’ After the show the maître d’ said, ‘Mr. Podell wants to see you.’ I walked over and he looked up and said, ‘Nobody pees at the Copacabana!’”

  “The Mob got you the right jobs,” says comedian Frank Man. “This guy said to me, ‘You come in here tomorrow and put five thousand dollars on this desk and you’ll be playing Vegas in a week.’ He was the head of AGVA—Jackie Bright.”

  The performers’ union AGVA—the American Guild of Variety Artists—represented nightclub comedians. Naturally, it was in the pocket of the Mob. “AGVA always was a garbage union,” says Jack Carter. “It was on the take.”

  Comedian Joey Adams worked up the AGVA hierarchy and headed the union when a congressional subcommittee looked into “the alleged link of AGVA personages with hoodlum-dominated niteries and stripperies.” Adams and his coexecutive, former comedian Bright, felt the heat. Variety editorialized: “The end-result is a black eye for the performers union and perhaps for show business. The image will remain negative, protestations by Joey Adams notwithstanding. Coercing AGVA members, chiefly femme, into ‘mixing,’ B-girl drink-hustling and suggestions of even more sordid avocational pursuits, have made the national headlines.”

  One of AGVA’s most vocal board members was Penny Singleton, the former Blondie Bumstead of the movies. She attacked the union’s Mob connections. “I have made considerable headway in correcting the union’s evils. The primary obstacle is Mr. Bright’s domination through the control given him by thirty members of the national board who are obligated to continue his policies.” She campaigned for reelection and a campaign advertisement said, “No one wants to or should be pushed around! I am voting for Penny Singleton because Penny Singleton is Racket-Free! Because Penny Singleton has no ‘STRINGS’ attached to her and therefore isn’t afraid to speak the truth!”

  Controlling both nightclubs and the union, it made sense for the Mob to have contacts within the major agencies. The Mob had an inside man at William Morris. Agent George Wood was the liaison between organized crime and legitimate showbiz. Wood handled comedians Marty Allen, Danny Thomas and Ed Wynn. John Bonomi of the New York District Attorney’s Office said, “You could identify any entertainer as Mob-controlled by virtue of the fact that Wood was his agent.” Frequently this meant that Wood’s clients had to be at the Mob’s beck and call. In the case of Joey Bishop, he had no choice when he was asked to emcee the wedding of Sam Giancana’s daughter.

  Bernie Brillstein got his start in the business working as Wood’s secretary. “By the time I joined the agency Wood had been there for almost fifteen years, booking nightclub acts like Berle, Durante, Sinatra, Joe E. Lewis and Sophie Tucker at Mob joints all over the country.” The day mobster Albert Anastasia was knocked off, Brillstein ran into Wood’s office to tell him. Wood calmly looked at his watch and said, “That’s right.”

  Comedy writer Sol Weinstein wrote for three Mob-connected comedians—Joe E. Lewis, Allan Drake and Jackie Kannon. “Allan Drake married a woman who was a Miss New Jersey. She ended up being murdered. I wrote for Allan Drake for quite a few years and I had to cut my relationship with him. A lot of things that he did were scary and immoral.” Miami Beach comic Lou Marsh knew Drake. Now in his late eighties, Marsh is still too nervous to speak about him. “Allan Drake was just a comic and . . . I’d rather not talk about the rest.”

  Journeymen comedians like Dick Curtis spent half their careers working the smaller Mob clubs. “I worked a strip joint in Baltimore called Eddie Leonard’s Spa. Eddie Leonard was an ex-boxer. When he retired from the ring, the Mob owned him. They gave him a nightclub and some slot machines around town as his retirement. I opened at Eddie Leonard’s Spa in Baltimore on Christmas Eve. Can you imagine who would go to a Baltimore strip joint on Christmas Eve in 1952?”

  Howard Storm was a comic playing the low-level rooms. “There was always danger. I worked a club in Johnston, Rhode Island, on the outskirts of Providence. The owners were brothers and they were evil guys. They didn’t want to pay me the full week. There was a dispute and the guy, Gino, said to me, ‘Okay, you stay the week. But every night when you go out to your car—you better look over your shoulder.’”

  Some grew fond of the mobsters. Comic Orson Bean says, “I spent a lot of time with them when I was breaking in. I found the Mafia guys to be interesting and pleasant. If you crossed them you’d wind up with your feet in cement, but if you didn’t cross them they were generous.”

  Small-time comedian Artie Dann saw his wife lured away by a mobster who made a play for her while he was onstage at the Roosevelt in New Orleans. After his show the mobster came backstage: “Great set, kid. And . . . your wife . . . she’s leaving you. Give her a divorce.”

  “You’re crazy, I’m in love with that girl.”

  “If you want to work again, you get a divorce.”

  Artie Dann got divorced.

  Milton Berle said Dann encountered the mobster again years later. “The hoodlum burst into his dressing room . . . ‘I’m gonna kill you, the hoodlum threatened. Kill you and dump you into Lake Pont­chartrain. Son of a bitch, why didn’t you tell me she was a nympho!’”

  Comedian Sammy Shore was almost killed in Danville, Illinois. “It was $125 a week—Dan’s Supper Club—with a stripper. I’m working and all of a sudden in the middle of the show these guys get in an argument at the ringside table. Mob guys. Guy takes out a gun and shoots the other guy in the head. People were screaming and running out. I started singing, ‘Oh when the saints! Come marching in! When the saints come marching in!’ I played the trumpet and finally the cops came. The o
wner came over to me and said, ‘Sammy, I’m holding you over for another two weeks.’ There were things like that happening wherever I worked. You knew they were the Mob. And they were just the greatest guys in the world.”

  To be a comedian in the 1930s, 1940s or 1950s was to be an employee of organized crime. Henny Youngman said, “If they like you they’ll take anything. If not, you’d get your head broken somewhere. I heard them plan kidnappings, but I kept my mouth shut and minded my own business. Yeah, they weren’t bad fellas—although they were murderers and thieves.”

  Estes Kefauver did not end Mob rule, but he stymied it. William Morris complained that Kefauver inflicted suffering on the clubs it booked with his “excess law enforcement.” Clubs that ran clandestine gambling were increasingly busted, and this process became known as “Kefauverization.”

  Many of those shut down during Kefauverization found solace in an emerging new city in Nevada. Dick Curtis says, “The Outfit figured, ‘Oh, let’s stop fighting this. Let’s take our money to Vegas.’ And they did. They built the bottom floor of what is there now.”

  Moralists often outdid Senator Kefauver when it came to harassing nightclubs. They often attacked supper clubs for the “immoral” comedians they presented. While Lenny Bruce was the famous ­martyr, several other comedians were arrested before he came along.

  Burlesque comic Jimmy Savo was arrested by plainclothesmen in 1942 after an organization called the Catholic Theatre Movement complained about his performance at the New York Ambassador Theater. The summons said “the show violates the penal law prohibiting indecency on the stage.” Comedians Mickey Diamond and Jack High were arrested for obscenity in 1946 in Philadelphia. They were removed from the stage at the Silver Fleet Inn and held on bail. The same year comedian Marty Wayne had problems with a Philadelphia judge who said “nightclub operators should compel comedians to submit scripts before allowing them to go on.” An arresting officer read portions of Wayne’s act and Judge Harry S. McDevitt called the material “an affront to public morals.” The details of that have yet to surface, but for the charge of “lewd entertainment,” Wayne served six months in prison.

  In 1949 comedian Lenny Ross was arrested in Atlantic City on charges of being “smutty.” The State Department demanded Ross be “dismissed and barred from working,” based on a previous conviction “for using blue material and obscene language in his act, for which he served a prison term.” Ross told the judge, “I resort to smut only because patrons demand it.” He started billing himself as “The Most Shocking Act in Show Business.”

  The definition of lewdness was completely arbitrary. The offending material was never quoted in the newspaper, so it’s hard to determine what was actually said. Knowing the restrictions of the time, it’s unlikely it would be considered offensive today. Variety pointed out at the time, “Under the present attitude, any routine except tap dancing is eligible for the tag ‘lewd entertainment.’ The local police, with a series of hit-and-miss raids, have been clamping down. The arrests in almost every instance have been promptly tossed out of court.”

  A club owner in Oakland was sentenced to five days in jail in December 1956 for staging an indecent show. The comedians playing his club—Charles Castle and Will Maso—were fined three hundred dollars and put on probation. Comedian Tom Melody was arrested in a Waikiki nightclub in 1957 after people complained that the “jokes, and actions, in his nitery routine are immoral.” A warrant was issued and Melody was charged “with lewd conversation and lascivious conduct.” On April 14, 1961, at the Jester’s Club in Stanton, California, an audience member objected to the language of comedian George Hopkins and placed him under citizen’s arrest. Police followed up and arrested Hopkins officially.

  The most famous of the so-called lewd comics was B. S. Pully, a creature of Miami Beach strip clubs and Catskill roadhouses often billed as The Comic Who May Make You Laugh. “B. S. Pully—boy, was he tough,” says comic Jackie Curtiss. “You ever hear about his penis-in-the-cigar-box bit?”

  Pully was a kindred spirit of Joe E. Lewis. Both hard-drinking horse bettors, they became fast friends. If Lewis was offered a gig he couldn’t accept, he recommended Pully for the job. Lewis elevated him from his strip club habitat, but Pully’s subject matter imposed limitations on his career. Milton Berle called him “a legend in the annals of raw filth.” When Rodney Dangerfield was starting out he shared the stage with Pully. “I’d heard plenty about B. S. Pully before I met him. People said he was a low-class, filthy, dirty maniac. When I met Pully, I learned that they had all been too nice.” Peter Marshall says, “B.S. would come out onstage. ‘My name is B. S. Pully. B.S. don’t stand for Boy Scout. It stands for bullshit.’ That was his opening. In those days you couldn’t say ‘damn’ in a club, but B.S. sure did.”

  Pully stood onstage with diminutive straight man H. S. Gump, whom he abused and knocked about. “Gump was a cute little nebbish,” says Jack Carter. “Pully used to slap him around: ‘Bleed, Gump, bleed!’” Occasionally they performed with a third partner named One Ball Barney. “Those two guys were really off-color,” says Sammy Shore. “In those days you didn’t work off-color, but because they were so damn funny they got away with it. They were incredible characters. They’d say ‘shit’ or ‘fuck’ and they’d do dirty things on stage with props and stuff.”

  Pully was arrested at the Frolics in Greenwich Village in 1942 and jailed for indecency. He and the club operator were detained until someone arrived with the five-hundred-dollar bail. In October 1946, Pully was again arrested in New York. He was put on trial for obscenity, but a grand jury refused to indict him.

  Pully’s act wasn’t limited to verbiage. He often got laughs by being physically offensive. “I saw him do something horrendous one night,” says comedian Freddie Roman. “There was a young girl singer, one of her first jobs. He walked up behind her and started grabbing her breasts while she was singing. The audience was laughing. The girl burst into tears and ran off the stage.” Pully did things that would be considered bad taste even today. Lou Alexander says, “As a joke he used to walk around with a cigar box down by his crotch. He’d say, ‘Hey, lady, would you like a cigar?’ His dick would be in there with the cigars!”

  Miami Beach was a sanctuary for the dirty comics. “‘Dirty’ was the thing after midnight in Florida,” says comedian Rip Taylor. “They booked ’em specifically for those people that stayed up late, and they did more than ‘hell’ and ‘damn’ jokes.” Pully’s home base in Miami Beach was a strip club called Place Pigalle, where dirty comedienne Pearl Williams also played. Trumpet player Chris LaBarbera says, “You would walk in and Pearl Williams would be by the door insulting everybody. If a fat guy came in she’d say, ‘How long has it been since you’ve seen your dick?’” Williams sat at a piano and delivered sex-related commentary and suggestive songs. She had been shut down in New Jersey for “lewd, indecent and immoral entertainment.” The head of the New Jersey Alcoholic Beverage Control wrote a seventeen-page report in which he chided her “obscene and vulgar references to sex and sexual behavior, geared to a pornographic level with dirt for dirt’s sake.”

  Comedian Ray Bourbon was arrested many times. He was safe in Miami Beach, but elsewhere he was customarily raided, civic authorities unplugging his microphone mid-performance. Bourbon was what the era called a “swish” performer. Objections to his act came from clerical voices, activating vice squads to action. Los Angeles police raided a gig of his way back in 1936. He was put on trial “in municipal court for allegedly putting on an indecent performance.” The charges against Bourbon did not stem from dirty words, but from his onstage admission that he was homosexual. “There was a place he worked in Miami called the Jewel Box—what they called in those days a queer nightclub,” says Woody Woodbury. “I guess it was a stigma if you were seen going to it, but we showbiz people, we used to go watch him.”

  Plagued by various levels of harassment, Bourbon invested his bank
account in a one-man show at the Ivar Theatre in Hollywood in the early 1950s. The show was a failure, a victim of snide reviews panning its “obnoxious results” and “smutty allusions.” Bourbon owed creditors and teetered on the verge of bankruptcy. In 1956, out of financial desperation, he initiated a publicity stunt. Inspired by the famous sex change operation of Christine Jorgensen, Bourbon visited surgeon “Emerick Szekely,” or claimed he did, and returned to Hollywood in a blitz of triumphant sex change publicity. Stories about the procedure generated new interest in his act. Booked into the Melody Room on Sunset Boulevard for a one-man/one-woman show, it got the attention of the aggressive Los Angeles vice squad.

  “The age old showbiz injunction to change your act led Ray Bourbon into court yesterday,” wrote one news report. “Bourbon underwent a sex change operation in Mexico some months ago and announced that henceforth the act would be Miss Rae Bourbon. Under that billing the performer was booked into the Melody Room. Seated at ringside Monday night for the first show were three uproarious gentlemen. And when the act was over, they followed (Miss) Bourbon into (his . . . her . . . check one) dressing room and flashed their buzzers. Sheriff’s deputies. The charge—­impersonating a woman.”

  Bourbon was outraged by his arrest. He shouted from the courthouse steps, “I am a woman!” He was held at the county jail, where deputies spent an hour conferring on whether to detain him in the male or female wing. While the details were hashed out, Bourbon sulked on a bench in a velvet gown before being released on bond. Melody Room proprietor Jack Gordon honored the remainder of his engagement, but adhering to the bizarre law, Bourbon was henceforth obligated to wear pants.