Audition

by Barbara Walters

  One of the things I hope happens as a result of this book is that I somehow get answers to questions that have puzzled me for years. Like what became of Mr. Dwyer after he left our house? And who was the chauffeur/bodyguard who shared his bedroom? Is it possible that Mr. Dwyer was gay? In those days the only reference to “gay” I’d ever heard was in the Latin Quarter’s theme song, “So This Is Gay Paree.” But in retrospect it seems somewhat logical. I don’t remember my parents ever talking about him again after that year, and I haven’t really thought about Mr. Dwyer until now. But I’d love to know the truth about him.

  I did have one friend from school, Phyllis Fine, whose show business father, Larry Fine, was one of the now-legendary Three Stooges. They lived in a hotel in Miami Beach. Phyllis was pretty and blond, and like me, was alone a lot. She would sometimes come to visit me on Palm Island, and occasionally I would sleep over at the hotel with her, but those visits were rare. Again, we had to be picked up, waited for, and driven home.

  School was a whole new challenge. I entered three months into the school year. The curriculum was entirely foreign to me. I had teachers who didn’t know me from Adam, let alone Eve. They not only had to cope with me and what I knew or didn’t know, but with a whole bunch of other kids whose parents had come to Miami Beach just for the winter months.

  It was a public school, not too big, and coed, but I was a shy, introverted child and I felt I had to audition for a new role I didn’t know how to play. I coped by doing more homework than was probably necessary and hoping that this would be a day when Phyllis and I could play together.

  The dress code also bothered me. It was, after all, Florida, sunny and warm, and many of the girls in my class wore shorts. (We were in the dark ages before the universal wearing of jeans.) But I thought my legs were too skinny to be displayed, so shorts were not for me. I wore blouses and skirts. My mother and I went to Lincoln Road, the chic shopping street in Miami Beach, and we bought a whole new wardrobe. We packed away the heavy sweaters and mostly plaid wool skirts I had worn in Brookline, but we didn’t buy one pair of shorts.

  I don’t remember any sporting activities. You would think we would go to the beach and swim now and then, but we never did. It was okay with me not to have sports. I have never been particularly athletic. Overall the school was an all-right experience for me. Not great, not bad, not memorable.

  I adjusted pretty well. After doing my homework when I got home from school, I played with my dolls. I absolutely loved my doll’s house and could play for hours in happy solitude. I was also, then as now, a voracious reader and could easily get lost for hours in a book. Then, too, the island was one of the attractions on the sightseeing boat tours around Biscayne Bay, and I would often wander down to the dock and sit there, alone, waving at the passing tourists.

  A bigger adventure was to ride my bike past Al Capone’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of the infamous Public Enemy Number One, though I never did. Having spent the last eight years in jail for tax evasion, Capone had arrived back at his house on Palm Island in 1939 at about the same time we did. He was much more of a gangster than Mr. Dwyer. Al Capone had been a massive bootlegger, alleged murderer, and the Chicago gang leader who is thought to have masterminded the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which seven rival gang members were gunned down. By the time he returned to Palm Island, he was sick with late-stage syphilis and suffering from dementia, but I didn’t know anything about that. Nor, apparently, did my father, who wrote that Al Capone was an occasional visitor to the Latin Quarter, where he sat at the bar, sipped a club soda, and paid with a twenty-dollar bill out of the wad of new bills in his pocket. “He never interfered with anyone and believe me, no one wanted to interfere with him,” my father wrote. When Al Capone died in 1947 as peacefully as if he were “a buttonhole maker,” my father recalled, there was “just a bartender to mourn his passing.”

  As I write about my young life on Palm Island, it sounds rather like Eloise at the Plaza, except that Palm Island was no chic hotel. Nor did Eloise spend days at a racetrack and weekend evenings in a nightclub lighting booth.

  Unlike the Latin Quarter in Boston and later in New York, the club in Florida was not a place for family celebrations. The shows were sophisticated and not for children, so I hid away in the small lighting booth high above the dance floor, where the main electrician controlled the onstage lights. Crouched next to the technician, I watched the shows weekend after weekend until I could do practically all the numbers. My sister’s escape, when she finally came home, was to go backstage and sit in the dressing room with the chorus girls, who were very kind to her. I was uncomfortable doing that and preferred the lighting booth.

  As I said, in the first year of the Latin Quarter, my dad didn’t hire big stars. He wasn’t sure he could afford them. But the second year Jimmy Durante played the club. So did Sophie Tucker, known as the “Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” belting out her theme song, “You’re Gonna Miss Your Red Hot Mama Some of These Days.” Milton Berle played there, too. I saw his act so many times I can still do it practically in my sleep. Want to hear the opening lines? He would walk up to the standing microphone, touch it, then jump back as if in shock and say, “I’ve just been goosed by Westinghouse.”

  By the way, this early education has never come in particularly handy. And I never did learn how to maneuver those huge white feather fans that the scantily clad Sally Rand, a very well-known exotic dancer, swished back and forth in her famous peekaboo fan dance.

  One of my other favorite acts was not well known. His name was Emil Boreo. He spoke with a heavy accent and did an act that seems quite odd to me today. He wore a soft felt hat with a big brim and by changing the brim, said he could be anyone. Here, as I remember it more than sixty years later, is the opening of his act: “It’s not what I do, it’s not what I say, it’s the way I wear my hat. I can be most anyone with a twist of my brim like that.” Then he would turn that hat into a Frenchman’s beret or an Englishman’s bowler. (How come no one wants me to do his act today?)

  Then there was the brilliant Spanish ventriloquist who years later many readers will remember from the Ed Sullivan Show, Señor Wences. I can do his routine, too. He would make a fist and, with his thumb around his fingers, color his closed finger with lipstick for a mouth, make two “eyes” with black chalk, and create his so-called little friend named Johnny, or, as Señor Wences pronounced the name, “Yonnie.” Yonnie was fresh and funny, and he tormented the kind, dignified Señor Wences, who also had another talking companion, a head in a wooden box. Every time Señor Wences opened the box, Yonnie would say, “Close the box,” and the head would say, “Open the box.” I am not making this up. I guess I should also tell you that I managed to learn all this and still pass all my tests at school.

  But the real crowd-pleaser, as usual, was my father’s parade of gorgeous showgirls, who would walk around the stage wearing huge multicolored headdresses, and little else. Complete nudity was as illegal as gambling in Miami Beach, and these gorgeous Amazons wore tiny sequined “pasties” to hide their nipples and used feathers, sequins, and sometimes little fur muffs to cover their G-strings. One of the sensations at an early Palm Island Latin Quarter show was a Chinese girl who carried a real little black kitten in a fur-lined muff over her private parts. In my innocence I fixated on the kitten and wanted to take it home.

  I also loved the dancers or “ponies,” who would strut their stuff on the stage, whirling, high-kicking, doing my father’s version of the cancan before dropping to the floor in a split. I tried that routine at home once and practically dismembered myself.

  My father had three “golden rules” for his girls: (1) Do your best show even if it is only a rehearsal. (2) Don’t get tan (a rule inspired by Twinnie, one of the showgirls, who loved to sun herself on the roof of the Palm Island Club, which set her apart from her pale twin sister, Winnie, in the show’s “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers.” “Your father didn’t want to have a Chocolate Soldier a
nd a Vanilla Soldier,” Twinnie told me years later). Rule number three? Don’t get fat.

  I saw all this through the prism of a child’s eyes. It took me years to recognize that my father was a sorcerer of magic and fantasy, although the audiences got it from the beginning. What I did learn, at this young age, was that behind these fantasy figures were real people. They may have been glamorous onstage, but I saw them offstage without their costumes and makeup, and they had problems, just like everyone else. I knew that Sophie Tucker had a son she rarely saw, that Sally Rand was sick of her fan dance even though it had made her famous, that many of the chorus girls had families they were supporting. This gave me an understanding of celebrities that I never would have had. As a result I was not in awe, years and years later, when I began doing interviews with big-name stars.

  Those early years at the Latin Quarter also affected the way I later asked questions and listened to answers. I knew that the childhood years of most celebrities were their most poignant and could often explain their future choices as, of course, it has mine. I learned when to be quiet and just listen. And I knew what could bring tears. (Now, I have been so often accused of making celebrities cry that I go out of my way not to bring on the tears. “You cry on this program and I won’t run any of it!” I once warned Robin Williams as he pretended to weep.)

  You may think it odd that I am writing so much about my father and the Latin Quarter when this is my memoir, but that nightclub controlled our lives. Everything we did revolved around it. Everything we owned, every meal we ate, the shirts on our backs, so to speak, stemmed from the Latin Quarter. The Walters and the Latin Quarter were inseparable. The rest of the family, too, gravitated toward Palm Island. Aunt Lena often came to visit us. Uncle Max, my mother’s brother, was already working for my father so he was there, too. So, for six months, was another of her brothers, Uncle Dan Seletsky. He had had an operation just before the Latin Quarter’s second season, and my father not only gave him an apartment on the property to recuperate in, but gave his wife, Aunt Ann, a job: She became my father’s office manager.

  The success of the Palm Island Latin Quarter continued to grow, and with it my father’s reputation as a brilliant showman. He became such a darling of the local papers that nationally syndicated columnists started mentioning the Latin Quarter in their columns. One such all-important columnist and radio broadcaster was Walter Winchell, who practically invented the gossip column. The more my father appeared in print, the greater his reputation grew. The combination of the two led to a new offer.

  The way my father tells the story in his memoir, he was sitting alone in the Palm Island Latin Quarter on New Year’s Day 1941, when a press agent named Irving Zussman approached him. “How’d you like to run a nightclub on Broadway? In Times Square. The best location in the world. And you won’t have to put up a cent.” The space was available for a ten-year lease, Zussman told him. And there was a backer who wanted to get into the nightclub business, a millionaire named E. M. Loew, who owned a circuit of movie houses. My father had known Loew for twenty-five years. (He had booked vaudeville acts into some of Loew’s theaters.) Loew would put up all the money; my father would produce the shows. They would be partners.

  My mother was skeptical—another risk. Why not let well enough alone? But my father’s eyes were dancing. He had seen the building which had been a fancy Chinese restaurant called the Palais d’Or, then the post-Harlem Cotton Club, then the Gay White Way. None of those nightclubs succeeded, but it could seat between six and seven hundred people, and my optimistic father felt he had the magic touch. So, without further thought, my father made a deal with the tightfisted E. M. Loew, whom he would later deem “as fine a gentleman as ever hated to pay a bill.”

  So, for better or worse, we were on the move again. It was time to audition in a new city, at a new school, for new friends. This time we were off to New York.

  New York, New York

  I THINK THE PROBLEM was my “Cuban heels.” My entrée into New York did not go well as I started the eighth grade at Fieldston, my third school in as many years. Cuban heels had nothing to do with Havana or Miami. Mine were open-toed shoes with one-inch-high square heels that were the rage for young girls and were meant to be worn on dress-up evenings, with silk stockings with seams down the back. The shoes were usually brown or black. During the day one wore either brown loafers or laced-up saddle shoes. Saddle shoes were white with brown sides and with them, you wore ankle socks.

  Now, this digression about footwear is to tell you that I had the whole deal messed up. I guess I had heard about the Cuban heels, but coming from Miami, my mother and I bought the shoes in white. The Miami stores didn’t carry them in black. To make matters worse, I wore the open-toed shoes not with the prescribed silk stockings but with white ankle socks. So I arrived that first day particularly dressed up, not knowing a soul in the school and looking like some hick, which of course I was. I also, in those days, had a strong Boston accent. It was long before the Kennedys made the accent fashionable, and to the New Yorkers I sounded affected saying “cahn’t” and “auhnt” instead of “can’t” and “aunt.”

  Fieldston was then, and is now, a highly respected and difficult-to-get-into private school. I am amazed that my mother even knew about it and sent in an application. The main school is located in Riverdale, on the outskirts of the city. It also has an elementary school in Manhattan, and most of the kids had been going to the school since kindergarten or first grade. It was coed and full of cliques. This girl was best friends with that girl. This was the girl all the boys liked. This was the A group. This group didn’t matter. I was most definitely in the latter group.

  In the beginning the toughest part of the day was lunch in the school cafeteria. I would take my tray and slowly walk around the room hoping that one of the A group would look up and ask me to sit down. Whomever you sat with for lunch defined your social standing. But even after I dumped the white Cuban heels for saddle shoes, I never really made the A group. I was more or less a B or C-plus. But we social underlings could occasionally ask one of the A girls for a “date” on a Saturday afternoon. We actually made dates, real dates. You would ask a girl if she wanted to spend Saturday with you, and then, if she said yes, you would have lunch and usually go to the movies. In those days, New York had dozens of movie theaters all around Broadway with great big stage shows. Broadway was very safe. And there were so many other places a teenager could go.

  There was Radio City Music Hall, with its famed chorus line of high-kicking Rockettes. There were all the theaters hosting the big bands: Tommy Dorsey, Glenn Miller, Benny Goodman. Singing with Dorsey’s band was a skinny, hollow-cheeked, bow-tied fellow named Frank Sinatra, who looked as if a strong wind would blow him away, but he sang love songs like no one else and the young girls went wild. Sinatra’s adolescent fans, including me, were dubbed “bobby-sockers,” from obviously our short socks. When Sinatra appeared solo at the Paramount Theater in 1942, my mother, Jackie, and I stood in line to get tickets to see him. His appearance created such hysteria among young girls, including fits of swooning, that newspapers turned to psychiatrists for explanations. I didn’t swoon, but I loved his voice then and always.

  Two years later his return to the Paramount caused what became known as the “Columbus Day Riot.” On his opening day in October 1944, ten thousand bobby-sockers, jammed the ticket line and an estimated twenty thousand others piled into Times Square, breaking windows in the crush. Sinatra burst into the nation’s awareness in a way that would not be matched until the arrival of Elvis Presley in the fifties and then the Beatles in the sixties. By the way, several years later, when Sinatra had lost his popularity and before his legendary comeback, he played the Latin Quarter.

  But the point of all this is that a person, young or old, could go to a movie and watch the stage show and spend the whole day being entertained. And what a treat if you were going with one of the popular girls. To this day I remember the sort of adoring court tha
t formed around those girls. One A-group member was tiny and graceful with little hands and feet. Another, the class beauty, had long, blond hair to her waist and a perfect pompadour—the look back then—hair swept high off the face in a big roll. The really older boys—the fifteen-year-olds—thought she was divine. Years and years later I met her again. She didn’t look as great, and I was already on the Today show. Okay, so I’m bragging, but after all those years of pushing so hard, I’m entitled.

  It isn’t that I was a dog in those days, but I saw myself as too thin, and my pompadour never looked quite right. Slowly, though, I did make good friends and the B-list had some good kids. Also, slowly, I began to like my life in New York.

  My family started off living in a residential hotel called the Buckingham, located at Fifty-seventh Street and Sixth Avenue (since renamed the Avenue of the Americas, although I’ve never heard a New Yorker refer to it that way). It was in the heart of the city, one block from one of my favorite places, the Automat. The legendary brainchild of Horn & Hardart, the Automat had branches all over New York and was like a big cafeteria, only a lot of the food—the sandwiches, the salads, the pieces of pie—were behind little glass doors. You put your nickels into a slot and the door opened to present you with the dish of your choice. The Automat had a memorable slogan—Less Work for Mother—and was not only great fun but a brilliant forerunner of today’s fast-food chains.

  Some of the Automat’s patrons stayed all day, especially those with little money. They would eat the free saltines and ketchup that were on the tables, get a tea bag and some hot water, and hang around for hours. After a while we recognized these regulars. We would smile at them, and they would smile at us. The Automat was such a part of the New York scene that when Horn & Hardart finally closed its doors (the last one, on Forty-second Street and Third Avenue, closed in 1991) editorials were written and the old-timers actually grieved.