It is not clear when—or why—the Abrahams family dropped Abrahams and renamed themselves Walters. But many immigrants at the time adopted English-sounding names to blend into the American melting pot. Two of my mother’s brothers in Boston, for example, had already exchanged Seletsky for Selette. So my grandfather Isaac Abrahams became Abraham Walters, his princess wife became Lillian Walters, and their oldest son became Louis Edward Walters.
Cousin Shirley, who, along with her divorced mother, lived for a while with my grandparents, would regale me later with stories about my very grand grandmother. Lillian took a nap every day after lunch, slathered her face with Pond’s Dry Skin cream, and put cold cucumber slices on her eyes. (When I was older I remember Shirley telling me, before a date, to lie down and put cucumber slices on my eyes. They dripped on the pillow.) Lillian also took milk baths and erased any rough skin on her elbows with lemons.
Although they were happily in the “new world,” my paternal grandparents remained British to the core. Sunday breakfast consisted of kippers and eggs and onions, and every afternoon my grandmother presided over a high tea with crustless watercress and cucumber sandwiches. So rooted were they in their British backgrounds that years later, the 1936 abdication of King Edward VIII to marry the twice-divorced American, Wallis Simpson, sent the whole family into paroxysms of grief. According to Shirley, my grandparents sobbed while listening to Edward’s famous speech on the radio giving up his throne for the woman he loved. (Many years later, in some sort of divine family justice, my father would present a command performance of one of his shows to the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in the Bahamas and he and my mother would join them for dinner.)
I never knew my father’s parents. I was born around the time my grandfather Abraham died of a heart attack in 1931, at the age of fifty-six. Lillian followed five years later. On the morning of the day she died, my princess grandmother asked Shirley to do her nails. “A lady should never live like this,” she said to Shirley. “How could she die like this?” Then she proclaimed herself a virgin, to which Shirley naturally responded, “How could you be, Grandma? You have seven children.” But my grandmother had the last word. “I know,” she said. “But I never participated.”
MY FATHER WAS FIFTEEN when he arrived on these shores and almost immediately started looking for a job. He wrote about that search much later, when he was seventy, in his unpublished treasure of a memoir, “It’s a Long Walk.” He makes no mention of going to school in New York, which is sad, but then again, there was a newly arrived family of nine to help support, and there were many more boys his age seeking jobs than there were openings.
Every morning around 8:00 a.m., he wrote, he would begin that long three-mile walk from Rivington Street in Lower Manhattan to Times Square. The want ads of the day, which he read “every morning for months,” were posted in the windows of a building at the corner of Broadway and Forty-second Street. My father would rush over to the nearest address on the list, but he never seemed to get there first. Often there were twenty or thirty boys ahead of him, and soon another twenty or thirty behind him. When it was announced that the position was filled, he’d race over to the next nearest address, where by then there would be forty boys ahead of him. “It was hopeless,” he wrote.
It took him seven months to land a job—and inadvertently start his life’s work. “Office boy wanted. Independent Booking Offices. 1440 Broadway. Apply after 2:00 p.m.,” one of the want ads in the window read on the morning of April 5, 1910. My father had no idea what a booking office did, but a job was a job, and after standing fruitlessly in line for several other openings, he wandered over to the office in the Knickerbocker Theater Building on the corner of Thirty-eighth Street and Broadway. It was only noon. He knew he was early, but the months of frustration led him to inform the desk clerk that he had come to apply for the job. To his amazement he was ushered in to see the boss, a Mr. Stermdorf. It paid only six dollars a week. Had he worked anywhere before? No. Could he type? No. And hadn’t he read the “after 2:00 p.m.” for job applicants? That was at least a yes, with my father’s explanation that he was afraid of once again finding a long line and the job being filled before he got the chance for an interview. Mr. Stermdorf sent him packing and told him to come back at the designated time.
My father was back at five minutes to two. The reception room was jammed with people, all of whom he assumed were looking for the office job but actually were entertainers looking for work. And then the ax fell. “Sorry, the job’s been filled,” the desk clerk informed him. My discouraged father was halfway down the stairs when he realized the job couldn’t have been filled before two, so he went back. “Oh, you’re Lou Walters, the one who came early,” the desk clerk said. “Come in.”
Why did he get the job? Mr. Stermdorf, it turned out, was also British, and my father attributed his good fortune to their shared English accents. Personally I think it was because my father showed such gumption, applying for the job not once but twice and making sure he was the first boy in line.
He evidently learned the trade very quickly, submitting daily lists of the agency’s clients to the bookers for chains of theaters and vaudeville halls. And so, for better or worse, he began his lifelong career in show business.
It started off “for better.” One of the owners of the agency he worked for opened a branch office in Boston and my father went along, as did his parents and all his younger siblings. It was in Boston that the Seletskys, my mother’s side of the family, and the Walters, my father’s side, began to converge. The Seletskys owned two shoe stores and were well established, and my paternal grandfather, Abraham, seems to have done okay there as a custom tailor. But for some reason he decided Boston wasn’t for him and, leaving my father behind, he moved the rest of the family to New Jersey, where some of the Walters family live to this day.
My father did very well in Boston, and before too long left to open his own booking agency, aptly named Lou Walters Booking Agency. He traveled to vaudeville halls in the smallest of towns—all towns had vaudeville halls in those pre-TV, silent-movie days—and found new acts, made contacts, traveled some more, found more acts.
He discovered the comedian Fred Allen, then a juggler, who went on to have his own hugely successful radio and television shows. He also discovered Jack Haley, another comedian, who later starred as the Tin Man in the classic film The Wizard of Oz. By the time my father met my mother, he had become the definition of a “good catch.”
My father bought my mother a mink stole, and they moved into a fourteen-room mansion in Newton, a prosperous Boston suburb. My sister was born while they lived there. Two years after my parents married, my mother’s father died of heart failure, leaving my grandmother Celia with five children still at home to raise. My father immediately invited the entire family, including my mother’s sister, Lena, to live with them. When Lena married, she moved her new husband, Sidney, into the house. The house was large enough for everyone to live in comfortably, and they were able to get around in style. My father owned four luxury cars—two Cadillacs, a Pierce-Arrow, and a Packard.
I never saw any of it.
My Childhood
BY THE TIME I was born in Boston (I am now in my seventies and that is as specific as I will get), my father had lost his first fortune. The financial roller coaster of his business life would have an enormous impact on me.
Throughout my life my father made and lost several fortunes in show business. When I was growing up most of the kids I knew had fathers who were in rather prosaic, safer businesses. My uncles sold shoes. My mother’s brother-in-law sold cheap dresses. A big deal was to be a dentist, and the height of it all was to be able to brag about “my husband, the doctor.” Not a lot of people could brag about “my husband, the booking agent.” Certainly my mother didn’t, especially after their lives were turned upside down.
It wasn’t his fault. First of all there was the stock market crash of 1929, which brought the Roaring Twenties, with all its luxury
and indulgences, to an abrupt end. This was followed by the decade-long Great Depression. But what really doomed my father’s business was an actor named Al Jolson.
The Jazz Singer, starring Jolson, was released in 1927 and was a show business miracle. The pioneer “talkie” revolutionized the motion picture business. Not only did the era of silent films end almost overnight, but also, more gradually, did the market for live shows. As more and more vaudeville halls were converted into movie theaters, my father’s once-flourishing business sputtered. Therefore I didn’t go home from the hospital in Boston wrapped in my mother’s fur stole, which by then had been sold, nor did I travel in one of the four cars, all of which were gone, nor was I ensconced in a crib in the big house in Newton. Instead I was brought to a modest two-family house in Brookline, also a suburb of Boston, but not nearly as grand as Newton.
Still, it wasn’t a bad place in which to grow up. Brookline, when I was a child, still had some fields where you could even see a horse or two. It had a small shopping center called, then and now, Coolidge Corner, with a bakery, I remember still, named Dorothy Muriel’s, where you could buy yummy cupcakes. It also had one movie theater and, when I was older, I could walk there. The first time I went to the movies alone, I saw Daphne du Maurier’s classic, Rebecca, in which the formidable housekeeper Mrs. Danvers burned down the ancestral home known as Manderley. I was scared to death and loved it.
My father, meanwhile, had to close his agency in Boston because he couldn’t pay the rent. He was reduced to selling acts or small shows to out-of-town theaters which hadn’t yet switched over full-time to movies. He also began to book banal industrial shows put on by organizations like the Massachusetts Shoe Manufacturing Association. Not very glamorous, but it helped pay the bills.
When I was five or six my father had another miniroll of financial success. Though vaudeville was dead, the era of nightclubs had risen from the ashes, and he became an instant and talented nightclub producer. His first show, staged for a Boston club called the Lido Venice, featured a female impersonator from New York and what my father promoted as “a Chorus of Lovely Debutantes.” Actually they were young girls he’d recruited from local dancing schools. The first two-week run was a smash. The second was over the top.
My father persuaded Evelyn Nesbit to appear at the Lido. She was the ravishing young woman whose affair some years before with the famous architect Stanford White had led her millionaire husband, Harry Thaw, to shoot White dead on the roof of Madison Square Garden. Nesbit had only two accomplishments going for her, my father wrote later in his memoir. One was that her picture had been on the front page of the Police Gazette as well as every newspaper in the country. The other was an ability to draw crowds. And draw them she did, reciting “The Persian Kitten,” a popular parody of the time, onstage to virtually every Bostonian, including the mayor and the chief of police.
When my father was producing and directing these shows, he would often take Jackie and me to the rehearsals, where the performers would make a big fuss over us. The dancers would sometimes twirl me around until I got dizzy with pleasure. Then my father would take us for hot dogs on buns, which he loved and so did we.
But the good times didn’t last. The Lido was sold, and though my father went on to produce a show at the Cascades Room in the Bradford Hotel, the ripple effect of the Great Depression caught up with him. The hotel chain that owned the Bradford went out of business. So, once again, did my father.
He soon began, as they say, to “take to the road.” In search of business, he toured all over the eastern seaboard, with a traveling road company of some twenty performers and musicians jammed into four cars. On the main car there was a big sign that read “Stop. Look. And Listen.” At one point he went hundreds of miles north with this moving caravan to Toronto, and then to Nova Scotia, to try to find a paying audience. Sometimes we wouldn’t see him for weeks. As a result, when I was a child I barely knew my father. I have a vague memory of him coming back from one of these northern trips carrying matching white coats with hoods for Jackie and me. They didn’t fit, and my mother scolded him for wasting the money.
My parents were by now an oddly matched couple. My mother was practical and somewhat depressed. She had a lot to be depressed about. Not only were there financial worries, but she had a child who was already being diagnosed as backward. Furthermore, four years before my sister’s birth, my parents had lost a son. His name was Burton, and I was evidently named after him as both of our names started with a “B.” He died from pneumonia at the age of fourteen months. I never heard my parents talk about him, but I remember when my grandmother died, I went with my mother to visit her grave. Next to it was a tiny gravestone that read “Burton Walters.” My mother knelt and cried.
So there were my mother and father, married with two young daughters. My mother, greatly loving to her daughters, but a practical woman without time for a lot of fantasy in her life. My father, just the opposite—a kind of poet who read all the time, seemed to live in his own head, and had a hard time showing affection. I don’t remember ever trying to hug him, even after he came home from a long trip.
My father’s only escape, throughout his life, was playing cards. Mostly he played pinochle and gin rummy. He played for money and usually lost, in part because a lot of his cardplaying friends were in on the secret of his half blindness and, it was said, would often discard to his fake eye to confuse him. But he was compulsive about playing cards. To keep him home at least one night a week, my mother agreed to have his cardplaying sessions at the apartment, usually on Friday nights. His friends would come over, and the house would smell of cigar smoke for days.
My mother, who never liked to play games, would nag him about his gambling and complain that he was risking much-needed money. I understood her insecurity and apprehension. I, myself, never liked to gamble. But it would take me years to appreciate my sensitive and gifted father and the extraordinary effort he made, in spite of the gambling, to support us during those hard times, only to be met at home with criticism.
I do have some sporadic memories of my father taking my sister and me out and giving my mother some well-earned time off. Besides those wonderful rehearsals at the Lido Venice, he sometimes took us into Boston to ride on the Swan Boats in the Public Garden. And to Boston’s Chinatown for chicken chow mein. But those are rare recollections. I was very much my mother’s daughter. She was so soft and loving to me. I used to tell her that when I grew up, I would buy her a beautiful house right next to mine. I never did. I can’t tell you how much I wish I had.
How did my mother truly feel about my father? I just don’t know. She took good care of him and cooked all his favorite foods when he came home—steak, french fried potatoes, made, of course, in those days from scratch, frankfurters and baked beans. She always gave my father the tenderest part of the steak. She brewed the tea he drank. She never used a tea bag.
I know my father admired my mother’s dignity and elegance. He often said so. She must have realized that his admiration meant he was sensitive and intelligent. He had not even graduated from high school, but he had read many of the classics, could quote from Shakespeare, and when he was home, read me to sleep with stories about Greek gods. To this day I have a library of my father’s books. They are almost all first or limited editions.
But did they love each other? I can’t remember my parents ever kissing in front of us, or hugging or even having a laugh. Would they have stayed married today? I don’t know. I only know they stayed married for nearly sixty years, until death parted them.
If my mother was judgmental about my father (he often said she saw the seams and not the satin), to Jackie and me she was unfailingly kind and patient. If she and my father went out with friends, which was rare, she made sure we had the same sitter—an elderly, wiry woman, nicknamed “Dotey,” who brought us soggy cookies she had made and herself smelled of cookie dough. Other than with Dotey, my mother never left us. She dressed both of us beautifully, so
metimes alike (which I hated), put big taffeta bows, the fashion of the time, on our carefully brushed hair, cooked every meal herself, washed and ironed every day. In her spare time she made wonderful hats for herself. I remember her sewing bright red cherries on a big black straw hat. She modeled it for us. I tried it on, too, and it came down over my eyes. I was delighted.
To be with my mother was my greatest pleasure, even though I was the recipient of her complaints, usually about my father. She didn’t have many friends, mostly because she didn’t play cards or the later rage, mah-jongg, and she was afraid to drive. Her closest companion was her sister, Lena, but Lena lived in another suburb, Dorchester, and had two young sons. She couldn’t come to Brookline very often, although some Sundays she would drive over and pick us up to visit with her and my grandmother, who lived with her.
But most nights after she had cooked dinner my mother, Jackie, and I sat at the kitchen table. My sister would sit silently, lost in her own thoughts, as I talked about my day at school. My mother, after listening and kissing me, would then often discuss my father, the lack of money, and his absence when she needed him. It did not seem odd to me that I was her confidante, but looking back now, I realize I was never young.
We moved a lot in those days, usually down. At one point we lived next to a funeral home. Another move took us to an apartment where, because my father was usually not there to help, my mother had to stoke the furnace in the basement. This hurt her back. My mother was sure things were going to get worse, and for a long time they did.
Audition Page 2