The Comedians

by Kliph Nesteroff

  Carroll became the first female stand-up to headline major nightclubs like the Latin Quarter and the Copacabana. CBS starred her in an early sitcom with Art Carney. In a way she was a poster child for the independent working woman, but when her husband was named head of the massive talent agency General Amusement Corporation, she retreated. In typical 1950s fashion, after several appearances on The Ed Sullivan Show, she abandoned her trade and became a housewife. Carroll was forgotten in her lifetime, but she should be noted for her influence on Phyllis Diller, Minnie Pearl and Joan Rivers. As a child Lily Tomlin played dress-up and pretended she was Jean Carroll.

  The biggest comedy act to come out of the Manhattan presentation house world was Martin & Lewis. Just as young girls had shrieked for Sinatra, the fervor surrounding Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis at the Paramount was enormous.

  Lewis started in clubs with a “record act,” a common convention used by amateur comedians with no material. A popular song was played offstage on a record player while a comic mugged expressions and gestures in time to the track. British-born actor Reginald Gardiner was said to have originated the idea. One tally had it that by 1940 there were more than two hundred such acts in the biz. Comedy writer Philip Rapp recalled seeing the early Jerry Lewis: “It was in a downstairs café somewhere on Broadway and business was brisk. He had a mop on his head and was going through the motions of conducting an orchestra while a phonograph record played in the background. He also walked on his insteps and imitated a spastic. I was not impressed.”

  Dean Martin was a struggling crooner with a massive schnoz. The Jersey native was connected to comedians from the start. His roommate in the early days was a struggling Alan King, who also did a record act. One of Martin’s early boosters was Lou Costello of Abbott & Costello. “I even advanced him enough to have his nose bobbed,” said Costello. “He hasn’t even bothered so much as to call me.”

  Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis were occasionally booked on the same shows. They had a nice chemistry and their interactions turned to shtick. Suddenly they were a team, accelerating at an incredible pace, scoring choice bookings at Bill Miller’s Riviera in Fort Lee, New Jersey, and Slapsy Maxie’s in Los Angeles. Martin was calm, cool and suave while Lewis was gawky, obnoxious and animated. Martin would sing a song and Lewis would run through the crowd knocking over dishes and chairs. Club-goers ate it up.

  Their spell at the Paramount established them as stars. Life magazine encapsulated it with a classic photo spread. Accompanying newsreel footage showed the duo being swarmed by fans and hounded by screaming girls tearing at their shirts, the closest thing to Beatlemania comedy has ever had. Frequent collaborator Norman Taurog said, “The response was almost orgiastic.”

  They became so big so fast that veteran comedians complained bitterly. “They’re using all my best bits,” complained ­Milton Berle. Comedian Jack E. Leonard said, “This is a nothing act. What Martin & Lewis do isn’t basically funny, but nobody else has the gall to do it in a sophisticated café where they’re paying you twenty grand a week. When you figure other comics have struggled all their lives to perfect an act, it burns you up that here’s a couple of characters that come out and do nothing but tell some old chestnuts and the customers are crazy for them.”

  They were a smash in Hollywood and Manhattan, but outside the big cities people had to take the word of syndicated newspaper columnists. It wasn’t until NBC hired them for The Colgate Comedy Hour, a primitive television variety show, that the country understood the fuss.

  The Colgate Comedy Hour had a rotation of hosts. A sentimental Eddie Cantor emceed the debut episode on September 10, 1950. Martin & Lewis hosted the second episode. Poor Fred Allen had the misfortune of following them on week three. Beside Martin & Lewis, everyone else looked like they were moving in slow motion.

  Future names like director Arthur Penn and writers Ed Simmons and Norman Lear worked on The Colgate Comedy Hour. They had difficulty with the twenty-four-year-old Lewis, who, as one of the biggest stars in comedy at such a young age, had an enormous ego. “We were rehearsing our first show,” said Lear. “Jerry, who was supposed to be the ‘funny one,’ couldn’t stand it if Dean got any laughs. Dean could be insanely funny with a line. Any morning that Dean would start being funny, Jerry would wind up in a corner on the floor someplace with a bellyache. And a doctor would have to come. Whenever Dean was very funny, strange physical things happened to Jerry.” They worked together well, but jealousy was always an issue. “Dean would come up with these great lines in rehearsal,” said comedy writer Bud Yorkin. “Then Jerry would do them on the air as if they were ad-libbed and get an ovation. It was down and dirty for a while.” When TV Guide called Simmons and Lear “the brains behind the success of Dean and Jerry,” Lewis had an immediate response. He fired them.

  It is unlikely Lewis would have experienced such enormous success at such a young age if not for the New York presentation house scene. Manhattan was the place to be if you were ambitious. Midtown was dense with show business. Not only were there the presentation houses, but there were a number of small clubs to try out new material, like Leon and Eddie’s on 52nd Street.

  Leon and Eddie’s hosted a popular “Celebrity Night” on Sunday evenings, where baby-faced comics stood at their tables and lost themselves in improvised routines. The nights were a way around Manhattan’s “blue laws,” which prohibited performances on Sundays. Singer Eddie Fisher said, “The greatest performers in show business would stand up right in the audience and sing and tell some jokes. Even after the blue laws were modified these celebrity nights remained a show-business tradition.”

  Co-owner Eddie Davis was a vaudeville veteran who did song parodies. Like many venues of the time, it was a former speakeasy. Forgotten today, it was one of the top comedy venues of the late 1940s. “I don’t know whether it was planned that way to get a lot of free talent, but every Sunday there used to be a sort of happening at Leon and Eddie’s,” said Henny Youngman. “Everybody would drop in to show off their stuff and catch the competition. With guys like Alan King, Jack E. Leonard, Jerry Lewis, Joey Adams, Milton Berle, all hanging around looking for a spot to zap in a yock, you can imagine the heckling that went on.” Ed Sullivan and writer Robert Benchley were Leon and Eddie’s regulars. Marlon Brando and fellow actor Wally Cox were too, until Brando was barred for defying the dress code.

  Leon and Eddie’s inspired another freewheeling room, this one run by comedian Morey Amsterdam. “It was called the Play­goers Club,” says comic Bobby Ramsen. “It was on Sixth Avenue and it was downstairs. It was the subbasement of the building. Morey always said, ‘I get most of my customers because people think this is the subway.’” Jack Carter says, “That was my hangout. Morey would get up and do an hour and a half. I’d either heckle him or I’d get up and do something with him. Art Carney would get up at the club too. Carney did the funniest routine of President Roosevelt taking a crap, squeezing it out and trying to talk at the same time.”

  Morey Amsterdam was one of the few comedians of his generation to write his own material. He was prolific and could rattle off jokes—of varying quality—at will. “He was a joke machine,” says comedy writer Bill Persky. “No taste. He wasn’t necessarily vulgar, but he made up jokes that didn’t have any substance.” It didn’t matter, because Amsterdam had a lot of time to fill. He had his own marathon radio show called The Gloom Dodgers, described in trade-speak as “a marathon ad-lib stanza.” It was loose comedy, from 1 to 5 P.M., five days a week. “Morey was on for four hours—everything off the top of his head,” says Ramsen. “He would kid around with the orchestra leader and he would kid around with people in the studio. Morey would ask the audience for subjects and he would tell a joke on any: carpenters, maids, landlords—he had a joke for every one of them.”

  Another comic fronting a Manhattan nightclub in the late 1940s was Milton Berle. Rookie impresario Nicky Blair, a Broadway associate of showman Billy Rose, ran
a club called the Carnival. The room, at 53rd and 8th, opened its doors two months after the war. It was enormous, seating nearly eight hundred people. America was experiencing prosperity, and Blair was able to pay Berle ten thousand dollars a week. Berle had been a success in vaudeville, a failure on Broadway, a triumph in nightclubs and a mediocrity in radio. Joey Adams’ 1946 book From Gags to Riches dismissed him as “the poor man’s Bob Hope.” At the Carnival he honed the emcee tricks he used for the rest of his career.

  Milton Berle at the Carnival Club, Morey Amsterdam at the Playgoers Club, everyone else at Leon and Eddie’s: These venues, along with the presentation houses, laid the foundation for early television comedy and were where future comedy stars found their way. And beyond them there were the New York delicatessens like Lindy’s and drugstore counters like Hanson’s, which were perhaps the most important meeting grounds of all.

  New York comedy had a class system. Your stature in the business determined where you hung out. If your career was lower than low you spent your time at the B-G Coffee Shop, the Horn & Hardart automat, Hector’s Cafeteria or Kellogg’s Cafeteria. You cooked up a grotesque tomato soup by mixing hot water with a free paper cup of ketchup. You sat down with Sam Newgold, the agent who exclusively represented losers and used the automat as his office. “During the day at the Theatrical Pharmacy he books the acts,” said comedian Joey Adams. “At night in Kellogg’s he waits for his commission. Sam claims he is the biggest booking agent of the best comedians in the low-priced field.”

  The hierarchy of Lindy’s, the Stage Delicatessen, the Carnegie Delicatessen and Hanson’s Drugstore still has meaning for an old-timer. “Hanson’s was for the nothing comics,” bristles Jack Carter. “The third-raters! I would never step foot in Hanson’s! Never. It was Lindy’s for me.”

  Lindy’s was king. Mentioned in countless magazine profiles of the time, it permeated the pages of Collier’s, Esquire and TV Guide. It was mentioned in the radio jokes of Fred Allen and the wry comments of Oscar Levant. If chronicler Richard Gehman was writing a profile of a top comic, Lindy’s was where they met. If Abe Lastfogel wanted to inform a client about a deal William Morris had closed, he did so over the matzo ball soup at Lindy’s. When a columnist was on a deadline with nothing to say, inevitably the atmosphere of Lindy’s itself became the story.

  In 1914 Leo Lindemann was waiting tables next door to the Palace Theatre. His affection for showbiz types blossomed at the Palace Café. He absorbed their tastes, nuances and idiosyncratic aspirations, and incorporated all of it when he opened his own spot seven years later.

  There were two locations. The first opened in 1921 at Broadway and 49th. “The old Lindy’s was where the songwriters, music publishers, horseplayers, bookies, hoodlums, hustlers and high rollers used to hang out,” said writer Maurice Zolotow. “It was where [gangster] Arnold Rothstein was wont to transact his business and it was at the old Lindy’s that he got the mysterious phone call which summoned him to a rendezvous with death.”

  The second location was the larger and more famous. It opened in 1929 at Broadway and 51st. “Songwriters, song pluggers, show folks and even eminents like the late Bernard Baruch and J. Edgar Hoover were frequent diners,” wrote columnist Louis Sobol. Song-and-dance man Sonny King, a sidekick to Jimmy Durante, had his wedding at Lindy’s. It was at the Lindy’s entrance that mobster Abraham Telvi threw acid in the eyes of journalist Victor Riesel, blinding him for life.

  More than anything else, Lindy’s was known for its comedians, who’d crowd in around midnight after their final shows. To sit at the center front table meant you were at the top of the comedy world. Those with a modicum of success were seated closer to the revolving door. If you were a bum by Lindy’s standards—someone who performed at Leon and Eddie’s but never the Copa—you were stuck way in the back, out of view, a reminder of your insignificance. Milton Berle was the leader. “One seldom sees him at Lindy’s without a retinue of assorted hangers-on who laugh every time he utters a syllable,” wrote columnist Ben Gross. A classic Al Hirschfeld drawing gave a sense of the atmosphere, rendering Berle, Fred Allen, Morey Amsterdam, Ben Blue, Red Buttons, Phil Foster, Jack E. Leonard, Joe E. Lewis, Red Skelton, Arnold Stang and Henny Youngman.

  The newspaper columnists hung out at Lindy’s in hope of snagging an entertaining quip. With circulation at an all-time high, newspapers were often vital to a comedian’s career. It was great publicity for an up-and-comer to get a mention from Frank Farrell, Hy Gardner, Leonard Lyons, Louis Sobol, Ed Sullivan, Walter Winchell or Earl Wilson. “There were so many columns then, and you had to feed them,” says Jack Carter. “In New York there were millions of them.” Comedians hired press agents whose sole job was to get the comics’ names in the columns. Bobby Ramsen says, “Press agents used to get a client and place something like, ‘Gene Baylos was at Jack Dempsey’s last night. He said the crowd at Madison Square Garden must be dressed in Saks Fifth Avenue . . .’ That press agent would have Gene Baylos as a client, Jack Dempsey as a client, Madison Square Garden as a client, Saks as a client.”

  Writers like Maurice Zolotow loved Lindy’s. “Lindy’s was where we went after midnight. There was a talented, a frantic, a hedonistic, a beautiful generation of show people. The clinking and clattering of silverware and dishes reverberated and the babble of conversation became amplified so much it was deafening. At Lindy’s the service would completely break down during such crises and it was then that the waiters became arrogant, nasty, insulting. Many out-of-town diners seemed to enjoy being browbeaten by one, especially if he spoke ungrammatically and with a rough New York accent.”

  Lindy’s had a famous waiter named Jaegger, a snide bastard who thought nothing of insulting the biggest stars in the business. “Milton Berle popularized him,” says Jack Carter. “He was a waiter who was snotty with Milton and treated him like garbage. ‘Vot do you vant, you low-class comic?’”

  One rung down from Lindy’s was the Stage Delicatessen, which was smaller in stature, smaller in size and inhabited by comedians with smaller careers. Tonight Show host Jack Paar said, “It’s a small place so crowded that dining there is not only an adventure in eating, but in self-defense. The place seats just seventy people or, as Max puts it, with mink coats—thirty.” The Max in question was owner Max Asnas. Comedians ridiculed the bald, squat proprietor. He was famed for his broken English and malaprop-filled philosophy. Fred Allen dubbed him Broadway’s Corned Beef Confucius. Jack Carter says, “He had a lot of Max Asnas–isms. He thought anything he said was memorable and he thought he was a great wit, but nothing he said made sense. He’d say things like, ‘You know, a man is like salami: Once you eat it—you don’t want it.’ ‘Life is like a boiled potato. If you don’t eat it—you never got it.’” Fred Allen was so taken with the Asnas malapropisms that he integrated them into a character on The Fred Allen Show. He switched the gender, but kept the character Jewish, naming her Mrs. Nussbaum. Fred Allen would greet her, “Why, Mrs. Nussbaum!” She would respond with a Yiddish inflection, “You were expecting Cecil B. Schlemiel?” Jack Paar joked, “Max is a man of many words. All of them hard to understand.”

  The Stage entered popular culture. An episode of The Joey Bishop Show took place in the deli and Asnas played himself. Noted showbiz manager Jack Rollins proposed a television series about the Stage. It never came to be, but the Woody Allen film Broadway Danny Rose, which Rollins produced, had a similar theme.

  The Stage gave birth to a delicatessen gimmick that exists to this day. Sandwiches had titles like “the Milton Berle,” “the Henny Youngman” and “the Jack Paar.” The delicatessen was named in the routines of several comics. When Youngman appeared on The Merv Griffin Show he was introduced, “Direct from the Stage Delicatessen!” The atmosphere radiated Broadway excitement. Bobby Ramsen says, “When you walked into the Stage Delicatessen at ten or eleven o’clock at night—you could feel it.”

  Hanson’s Drugstore was near the bottom
of the class system, but it hosted the most comedians of all. A narrow rectangle of a pharmacy with a long lunch counter, wooden telephone booths and a small loft, it smelled of general desperation. Beside the old Wintergarden Theatre, across from the Roxy, it was where comedy’s unemployed spent their afternoons. Comic Stan Irwin called it “the poor man’s Friars Club.”

  “It was the oldest show business building in New York—1650 Broadway, at 51st and Seventh,” says Don Sherman, a comic who schlepped through immortal obscurity. “All the offices above it—fourteen stories—were agents.” Hanson’s back entrance took you to the 1650 lobby, the agency directory and an elevator. “There were phone booths at the back of Hanson’s that were constantly busy,” says comedy writer Ron Clark. “Comics stood there waiting for their agents to call them.” Jerry Lewis hung out at Hanson’s before his success. “Jerry Lewis was still in his teens, wasn’t married,” says Will Jordan. “He wasn’t even that successful yet, but he would get girls in that loft and he’d make it right in Hanson’s.”

  “We were working two days a week,” says comedian Lou Alexander. “If we got a job on Friday or Saturday it was a big deal. We’d get fifty dollars for the two days. I hung around Hanson’s from 1952 through 1953. It was enough to pay our rent, enough to pay our phone, enough to pay our food. Fifty dollars a weekend—we lived on it. And enough to hang around Hanson’s all day long.”

  Comedians too poor to afford the signature cheesecake at ­Lindy’s could settle for Hanson’s not-so-famous grilled cheese and loiter all day. “The guy who ran it, Hanson, was Danish,” says Will Jordan. “When Victor Borge came to town he let Borge get behind the cash register. Hans Hanson had this expression, ‘All yuh comedians, kvit hangin round!’ We’d clutter up the store and no one ever bought anything. Then he sees me on The Ed Sullivan Show and says, ‘Vas dat you last night?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ He says, ‘You can hang round.’”