The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  One week later the Los Angeles County Public Welfare Commission labeled Bourbon an “undesirable performer,” granting sheriff’s deputies the authority to close the Melody Room for “presenting an indecent performance.” Overseeing the commission was Reverend Andrew F. Griffin, who categorized Bourbon as “obscene and profane.” On November 1956, he was convicted in municipal court and sentenced to thirty days in prison for impersonating a woman. With nightclubs unwilling to take a chance on him, Bourbon started his own record label and released twelve comedy records. One was titled Let Me Tell You About My Operation.

  Likewise, comedienne Belle Barth found records to be a good avenue for her risqué comedy. Barth was hounded by the authorities for decades. She based her act on another bawdy saloon singer named Annette Mitchum. According to author Lee Server, Mitchum “textured an act that mingled music with intimate conversation, verse, anecdote, some clever and charming lines with which to greet the crowd.” Mitchum’s brother wrote her material, and Barth hired him as well. “For ten or twenty dollars per piece, he would write a song, or satiric new lyrics to a hit tune,” said Server. “Much of it was risqué stuff, packed with off-color implications and double entendres, going as far as the law or a club’s management would allow.” The writer was future movie star Robert Mitchum.

  Barth established herself in 1940s Catskill roadhouses. They were stand-alone venues dotting the highway from Manhattan to the Catskill Mountains; places to get hammered, as opposed to the Catskill resorts, where people played tennis and ate latkes. By the early 1950s Barth was well known as a comic songstress who laced her lyrics with sexual innuendo. She was busted in 1953, 1954 and 1955 “for staging an obscene show.”

  The arrests furthered her legend, and her LPs moved solely based on reputation. Her first album—If I Embarrass You Tell Your Friends—was banned outright in New York City. Billboard, the trade journal devoted to record industry trends, wrote of Barth: “A curious anomaly in the disk business, she has sold close to 300,000 records on the After-Hours label but has yet to appear on any best-selling record chart. Her material is blue, and in many towns district attorneys or vice squads have raided her act or kept her records out of stores, or removed them from under the counter.”

  Her records were a boon to her nightclub business, but there was always the risk of overzealous law enforcement. Barth was playing a gig on the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles when sheriff’s deputies arrested her “on suspicion of performing a lewd show liberally sprinkled with four-letter words.” The charges were thrown out of court.

  Charges of obscenity and lewd performance were dismissed more often than not, the interpretation of the law being highly subjective. Authorities in Atlantic City threw a fit when Barth played Irv Kolker’s Le Bistro. The state’s Alcoholic Beverage Control chastised Kolker for permitting “lewdness and immoral activity and foul, filthy and obscene language.” A year later Barth was arrested in Buffalo for “disorderly performance.” She released a maudlin statement: “If it’s breaking the law to make people laugh, then I’m guilty.”

  It took a long time for social strictures to loosen. A pair of female schoolteachers watched Barth perform at Harry’s American Bar at the Eden Roc Miami Beach Hotel in 1964 and were so offended by Barth’s performance they sued her for $1.6 million, claiming the evening “corrupted them morally.”

  The church and the Mob held sway over subject matter, but the Catskill Mountains were insulated—and isolated—from such considerations. There were Mob-run roadhouses along the highway leading to the Catskills, but the Mountain resorts themselves were family operations. The demise of vaudeville allowed the area to gain traction as unemployed vaudevillians chased a paycheck. A solace from the Great Depression, with affordable prices and like-minded people, it earned the famous nickname “the Borscht Belt.” Jerry Lewis said it was because “you’d have borscht and dairy products at lunch and meat products at dinner.” Comedian Henny Youngman said it was “an area of maybe fifty square miles. And luckily for the entertainers, it was where a lot of squares came to have fun.” Lewis disputed the square mileage, but agreed about, and was grateful to, the squares. “The Borscht Belt was a community within thirty square miles of a hundred and thirty hotels. For fifty-five dollars you could have room and board for an entire week. Plain people could come up from New York and have a wonderful week’s vacation for very affordable prices. They had shows at night and they had three meals a day and beautiful accommodations. There was boating and swimming and golf. The food was magnificent. We had the opportunity of working a hotel at seven o’clock and driving to another hotel for an eight-thirty show, and another show at eleven . . . You’d get fifteen bucks for one of those shows, you do three of ’em you’ve got forty-five bucks. Pretty good for a fourteen-year-old kid.”

  Lewis was in the Mountains because of his parents. His father, Danny Lewis, was a longtime song-and-dance schlepper. “All he wanted to do was sing. He even showed up on vaccination lines. In those days the city hired entertainers to perform for the schoolchildren while they received smallpox shots.”

  The main attractions for most Catskill attendees were the food and finding a future spouse. Comedians were far down the list of enticements and, contrary to popular belief, Catskill crowds could be difficult. Sid Caesar started in the Catskills and found it difficult to fit in. “Every summer, as the comedians arrived at the hotels, they would open an old trunk and take out even older material. The shtick that was being used to entertain was familiar and tired. Catskill audiences were tough. Some of them didn’t laugh at anything.” Playing a resort called the Avon Lodge, Caesar worked with a marginal Catskill veteran named Jackie Michaels. A reporter from Collier’s said the material was so old it “originated in pre-caveman times.”

  Jackie Michaels: What do I have in my hand? An egg or a tomato?

  Sid Caesar: An egg.

  (Jackie Michaels smashes a tomato into Sid Caesar’s face)

  Jackie Michaels: Wrong, it’s a tomato!

  Determined to reject this “pre-caveman” comedy, Caesar was forced to create. “It was there, in an attempt to do something new, that I first started developing sketch comedy.”

  The Catskills were dominated by one major booking agency. “Charlie Rapp was the office that booked the Catskills,” says comedian Norm Crosby. “He was the boss. He was the king of the Mountains.” A booker for MCA in the 1930s, Rapp amassed a large network of showbiz connections and went independent in 1942. He circumvented war rationing by founding Rapp’s Farm, which supplied Mountain hotels with scarce supplies like gas and tires . . . and comedians.

  “He is the Ziegfeld of the Catskills,” reported Earl Wilson in 1949. “He sends his acts rushing from one hotel to another, and they may work five or six spots a night, being hustled around the circuit by auto.” Rapp brought his nephews into the family business, and Charles Rapp Enterprises monopolized the Mountains, booking talent for the largest and most important Catskill resorts—the Concord and Grossinger’s.

  Grossinger’s and the Concord conjure a specific lifestyle and time. “It was like you ‘made it’ if you headlined the Concord,” says comedienne Marilyn Michaels. “Big place. At the time they had these ‘knockers’ to applaud. They didn’t use their hands, they used these wooden sticks with wooden balls at the end of them. If they really liked you then they used their hands.” The Concord was a modest resort that grew larger and larger as the economy recovered during Roosevelt’s presidency. It became almost too big a room for a comedian to succeed in.

  “I did the Concord several times, and every time it was an ordeal,” says Jack Carter. “It used to be a cute little job when it was a couple hundred, but then it became a massive arena and it was really tough to handle. Thirty-five hundred seats. You had to have a powerful act to capture that group. They had big signs along the highway when someone was playing the Concord—always major stars, major names, and it paid big money.”

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nbsp; Many professional comedians who did well in the Catskills never bothered to leave. “Larry Best and Larry Alpert were two comedians whose prominence was only in the Catskill Mountains,” says Freddie Roman. “Ninety percent of their income was up there.” Comedian Jackie Wakefield remained in the Catskills out of fear. Comedy writer Marshall Brickman sold him jokes. “He never went on television. He just had his twenty minutes and did his Mountain circuit and never had to write anything new.” Comic Art Metrano rattles off Catskill names: “Jackie Miles, Jackie Winston, Mal Z. Lawrence. These guys never really made it, but always worked the Mountains.” Another in their group was Morty Storm. Comedian Pat Cooper said Storm “stood on stage and garbled a bunch of jokes that no one could understand. He wore big, thick-rimmed glasses. He had a hairpiece that sat on his head like a dead raccoon. Morty would wear the same suit for a week and never bathe. When he performed in the Catskills, there were certain maids who would not do his room.”

  The Catskills endured for several decades. Cerebral comedians in the early 1960s played the Mountains—even if they were out of place. “The summer I graduated from high school, I had a job in the Catskill Mountains at a small, reasonably dumpy resort called the Almanac Hotel and Country Club,” said comedian Robert Klein. “‘Country Club’ was an appellation frequently affixed to second-rate hotels in the area, to add the panache so lacking in the rickety buildings and the bumbling staff.” Klein was often astounded by veteran comedians. “At times they would throw in jokes with Yiddish punch lines, mystifying and confusing those of us who did not understand the language.”

  The Catskills endured as a phrase, a description and a put-down. If a comedian was referred to as a “Catskill guy,” it was a euphemism for old-fashioned and out of touch. Some say working in the Catskills was a way of life, but for most comedians it was just another job. The majority of comics didn’t stay there any longer than they had to. The cliché goes that the Catskills shaped modern comedy, but the majority of the stars who went through the Mountains actually made their mark in the bustling media capital of Manhattan more so than the Catskills.

  New York City remained the most important place for a comedian in the 1940s and 1950s. Hollywood was reserved for movies, while New York was the epicenter of radio and television. The mammoth presentation houses along Broadway gave important career boosts to Jack Carter, Jean Carroll, Myron Cohen, Phil Foster, Alan King, Jack E. Leonard, Jan Murray, Larry Storch and Henny Youngman. The venues brought comedians to the attention of influential newspaper columnists, radio advertisers and television executives. These comedians were too young to have done vaudeville, but not yet confident enough to write their own material. They were the bridge between old-fashioned vaudeville and the intellectual coffeehouse comics soon to emerge. Nearly all the comedians who populated television in the 1950s came out of Manhattan’s presentation house scene.

  Broadway presentation houses seated anywhere from one to five thousand people. The pay was good, performances were frequent and engagements were long. They showcased “band shows” with the likes of the Count Basie, Tommy Dorsey and Duke Ellington orchestras. Accompanied by a girl singer, a dance team and a comic, the live performance would run under an hour, followed by a new motion picture. Each presentation house was owned by—or had a deal with—a major film studio.

  The major New York presentation houses were the Capitol, the Music Hall, the Paramount, the Roxy, the Strand and Loew’s State. A comedian performed a set averaging twelve minutes anywhere from four to six times a day. Morning shows started at ten o’clock, attracting derelicts who needed rest after a night in the cold. For a quarter they could buy a ticket, sit down and snore through the show. “Sidney Piermont was the booker for the Capitol and Loew’s State, and he liked me,” says Jack Carter. “Loew’s State was kind of a bum theater. A lot of bums would come in and hang out. It was tawdry.”

  The mammoth Roxy presentation house seated 5,500 people; this could be deadly for a novice, but if you had a strong routine the sound of 5,500 laughs was exhilarating. Comedian Joe Frisco had a famous line about its vastness: “Don’t get lost on the Roxy stage without bread and water.” Comic Leo DeLyon says, “At the Roxy you did four shows a day. As a rule, the first show was pretty good reaction-wise. The second was a bit of a letdown, a little tougher and a little thinner. The best was always the evening show, the last one, when they were the most receptive.”

  According to New York columnist Earl Wilson, a celebrity headliner playing a presentation house could command an astounding fifty thousand dollars for a weeklong engagement, whereas a typical nightclub paid one-tenth that amount. Before Las Vegas, it was Broadway presentation houses that offered the comedian’s largest payday. Still, it was hard work for even competent veterans. “Those presentation houses became terrible grinds, even though the salaries were better than bigtime vaudeville,” said comic Benny Rubin. “There was nothing artistic about what you did, but it was a lot of money. We did four shows a day along with a movie. When you walked on the stage of a presentation house, there was always a band, usually set on the stage in full view of the audience. During the first show the band laughed at the jokes. The second time around, they’d heard the jokes and don’t laugh so much. Well, the audience is looking at them. The audience says, ‘If they’re not laughing, why should I laugh?’ By the third show one guy is cleaning his trumpet and the other is fixing the slide on his trombone and another guy’s writing a letter and by the fourth show they hated your guts.”

  Before the existence of comedy clubs, the presentation house was where an aspiring comic went to observe and learn. Jerry Lewis was a teenage usher at the Paramount. Woody Allen, Jack Carter, Pat Cooper and Will Jordan all attended presentation houses as children, absorbing the entertainment, dreaming of participating in it. “I saw Milton Berle as a kid at the Paramount,” says Carter. “My sisters would take me and I’d see him onstage and think, ‘Jesus, that’s amazing.’ I’d try to memorize every joke. I had no idea that he was doing the same jokes every night, all rehearsed.”

  The Paramount was arguably the most important of the houses, with its fifty-five-cent admission slightly higher than the others. Harry Kalcheim of William Morris booked the talent while Bob Weitman produced the shows from 1935 through the early 1950s. The Paramount was where Frank Sinatra became an idol to sexually inchoate bobby-soxers, solidifying its reputation as one of the most important venues in town.

  Singers were the primary draw on a band show; the comedians existed in their shadows. Comedian Don Sherman says, “It was tough because you came out and the audience was waiting for the singer. When I got my first job with Johnny Mathis they’d announce, ‘And now . . . bump-bada-bumm! Don Sherman!’ And a thousand people would groan. I mean actual groans. They groaned every place I went. I jumped on that groan, man. ‘You sons of bitches! What about me? I’m a human being!’”

  Jean Carroll was a prolific presentation house comic in the 1940s and the only female stand-up comic around. As a femme joke slinger, she predated Phyllis Diller and Joan Rivers, and unlike those who came before she wasn’t comical in appearance. She didn’t wear a funny costume or a frumpy hat, but took to the stage in an elegant dress and evening gloves. She was the first of a new breed.

  “There weren’t very many ‘comediennes’ in those days,” says 102-year-old Connie Sawyer, who did sketches and parodies in the late 1940s. “Jean Carroll was like Bob Hope. She did stand-up jokes. Jokes, jokes, jokes. As far as comediennes—that was it.”

  Jean Carroll worked with Marty May, a son-in-law of Olsen & Johnson’s Chic Johnson, during the dying days of vaudeville. Their billing was “Marty May Annoyed by Jean Carroll.” Their only historical distinction is giving Bob Hope his big break. Marty May was offered a starring role in the Broadway show Roberta, but since May and Carroll had contractual obligations with presentation houses, he turned it down. In his place producers cast the unknown Bob Hope, and it gave him his first
taste of stardom.

  Jean Carroll married dancer Buddy Howe, and he became her new straight man. Then came World War II and Howe enlisted, leaving Carroll to perform alone. Just as many women entered the traditional workplace during the war, taking occupations usually filled by men, Carroll took advantage of the vacant slots at presentation houses and got a lot of the stand-up work previously reserved for dudes.

  “Jean Carroll, petite and dark-haired miss, comes on cold, introduces herself as mistress-of-ceremonies,” read a review of a November 1943 engagement. “She tells some stories, does a good impression of various radio announcers delivering trite commercials.” Five months later at the Hippodrome in Baltimore, “Jean Carroll, a single this time, has the emcee assignment in addition to her own slot. Does a very credible job and shows considerable possibilities.” Three weeks later in Newark, “Jean Carroll gives a hint of stellar material. She needs better gags, but does remarkably well with what she has [and] the audience liked plenty.”

  She had those better gags by 1945, and over the next three years she played Loew’s State, the Capitol, the Palace, the Paramount and the Strand multiple times. No other comic played as many presentation houses. Unlike the few other comediennes, she did not do sketches, characters or song parodies, nor did she work as part of a team. She stood onstage alone and rattled off punch lines every twelve to fifteen seconds. She was a joke machine:

  Love! Does anybody know what love is? That’s a moot question. So I asked Moot. Moot was my first boyfriend. I was crazy about him. Our romance was one of those triangles. You see, he and I were both in love with him. Then there was Jack. Oh, let me tell you how I met Jack. I was standing on a corner—as usual. We went out and lemmee tell you something, he was a real sport. Money? Money meant nothing. Nothing! He didn’t have any. I shouldn’t make fun of him. After all, he’s so sweet. Nothing bothers him . . . He drinks. Well, he doesn’t drink because he likes it. He drinks to steady his nerves. The other night his nerves got so steady he couldn’t move at all.