My problem, as ever, was Jackie. First of all Jackie and I had to share a bedroom, but a larger problem was that she had nothing to do. During the week I went to school, and whatever my mother did or wherever my mother went, Jackie went, too. By now she was a teenager. My mother, her heart aching at the loneliness of my sister, would often look at me pleadingly when I had one of my coveted Saturday afternoon “dates” and ask me to take Jackie along. I can still hear my mother’s voice: “Can’t you take your sister? It would mean so much to her.” My mother probably shouldn’t have done it, but she loved both of her daughters and one of them was so alone.
Me, I was just ashamed. Intolerant and ashamed. When Jackie stuttered, trying to get a word out, or didn’t seem able to join in the conversation, my friends would look uncomfortable. “What school does she go to?” they would question me. The next day they would ask me, shyly, if Jackie could dress herself. What did it mean to be “slow” or “retarded”? Did that mean she was crazy?
Today it’s hard to understand how much ignorance there was, but subjects like this were not discussed. If you had a child like my sister, you did what my parents did: protect her and hope no one would notice.
It must have been so difficult for my sister. She would have great spells of crying, tantrums of frustration, and, especially in later years, scream at my mother, but she never turned her anger on me.
I can’t say the same for myself. I could be short or angry with her, and to this day I regret every harsh word I said to her. Why didn’t I take my sister to the movies on a Saturday afternoon? There I was, her younger sister, with everything. And there was Jackie—with so little. The phone rang for me, but never for her. Friends came to see me, but not her. I even got her clothes. As Jackie and I grew older, she grew plumper, and if the new clothes my mother bought for her didn’t fit, I got them. Why didn’t she hate me? I don’t know. But she never did.
If conditions at home were difficult, conditions on Broadway and Forty-eighth street were not. The New York Latin Quarter opened on April 22, 1942, four months after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and we entered World War II. The government started rationing gas, and we were issued ration cards for food. We even had blackout nights when we pulled down our shades and turned down the lights in case an enemy plane flew over the city. That would seem to have been an inauspicious time to launch a nightclub, but the reality was quite the opposite. The opulent fantasy world my father had created—red-velvet-lined walls, a thickly quilted pink ceiling, fountains spouting colored water, mirrors on the staircase, and indirect lighting seeping through ostrich feathers—turned out to be the perfect antidote to the harsh, wartime world outside the club’s mauve double doors. In its first year, the standing-room-only club grossed $1.6 million, a huge number in those days.
The Saturday Evening Post noted the phenomenon a year after the Latin Quarter opened: “It became one of the most amazing operations in Broadway history and no one could figure out how Walters had done it.” My father knew, of course. And he didn’t hesitate to share his formula in one magazine article after another.
“Everything in a nightclub should be a little bit better than you can afford,” he said, describing the club’s opulent decor. As for the customers: “Fill them full of food and take their breath away. Don’t let them relax and feel normal for a minute. The man who goes to a nightclub goes in the spirit of splurging, and you’ve got to splurge right along with him.”
What made the Latin Quarter’s success a true phenomenon was its success in the face of great competition. In this pre-TV era of nightclubs, the Latin Quarter was just one of many famous clubs in New York. There was, first and foremost, the Copacabana, owned, it was said, by the Mob. (The Mafia had nothing to do with the Latin Quarter. The Mob was very active in Las Vegas, but my father, remember, had come from Boston and started as a small-time booking agent. Their paths had not crossed. He had no dealings with these men and barely knew them when he opened his nightclubs. I used to joke, sometimes, that I wish he had known them because we would have been a lot richer.) The Copa was in the basement of a hotel just off Fifth Avenue and always hazy from cigarette smoke. But it had the most beautiful line of girls, the celebrated “Copa girls.” They could barely dance, but they didn’t have to. They just smiled and walked slowly and looked gorgeous. The Copa would later be the nightclub where a hilarious young comedy team, Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, played season after season to packed houses.
Then there was the ever-so-chic Stork Club—no dancing girls, but nearly impossible to get into. The much-feared gossip columnist who had first noticed and written about my father, Walter Winchell, had his own table there every night. There was also the exclusive, high-society El Morocco, with its signature zebra-patterned banquettes and its powerful maître d’ who kept customers waiting for hours behind a velvet rope while he let in celebrities like Errol Flynn and Humphrey Bogart. El Morocco had dancing but no show; the famous patrons were the show. Billy Rose’s famous Diamond Horseshoe was my father’s main competition because it, too, had a big show and chorus girls.
What set the Latin Quarter apart was the modest price—a two-dollar minimum and an average dinner tab of eight dollars a person, which could include shrimp cocktail, salad, steak, and dessert. And while most of the other clubs were definitely for adults only, the New York Latin Quarter (unlike the Palm Island Latin Quarter) welcomed families. It became the club of choice for high school seniors after their proms and for their grandmothers’ birthdays. Servicemen on leave, many of whom over the years have sent me their old Latin Quarter photos, also flocked to the club. My father didn’t charge them.
The Latin Quarter was such an important fixture in the cultural history of New York that more than sixty years later, Mayor Michael Bloomberg—after a vote by the city council—changed the name of Forty-eighth Street and Broadway, where the Latin Quarter reigned for two decades, to “Lou Walters Way.” I went to the unveiling ceremony, presided over by the mayor, on a beautiful spring morning in April 2006.
When my father died, we never had a memorial. In a way this was it. I found out who among my father’s chorus girls was still alive (they were in their seventies and eighties) and I invited them. Twelve of them came, including the still beautiful movie actress Arlene Dahl (who had been in the chorus when she was eighteen), and the irrepressible former cancan dancers, the identical twins Twinnie and Winnie, now octogenarians, who stood on either side of the mayor and, in front of the photographers, kicked a leg straight up over their heads, revealing their lacy underwear. The mayor turned red and burst out laughing, as did we all on that happy occasion. Two of the showgirls wore their old costumes, at least parts of them, and showed up in their headdresses and feather boas. They brought treasures, like old photographs of themselves as much younger showgirls at the Latin Quarter, and had many fond memories of my father. I took them to lunch after the ceremony, and one after another told me that my father was the kindest and gentlest of bosses. They adored him, which is why, even now, six decades and counting after the Latin Quarter closed, the chorus girls still have annual reunions and reminisce about what they describe as the best years of their lives. When I can, I join them.
When I was a kid, however, I didn’t feel the pride for my father that I would later with Mayor Bloomberg. The Latin Quarter may have been a special treat for everybody and his uncle, but not for me. I was old enough to recognize how other families lived, and they were not like mine. The fathers came home every night to have dinner with the stay-at-home mothers and the children. Cousins, aunts, and uncles gathered in their dining rooms for Thanksgiving and Christmas. Other kids had birthday parties at home and invited all their friends. We did none of that. We celebrated every Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all our birthdays at the Latin Quarter. My father coming home for dinner once a week, on Fridays, was almost the only time I saw him. Other nights he came home long after I was asleep and he himself slept late into the morning.
My f
ather, I realize now, did try to include us in his life. Although the featured acts might change every two weeks, the big, elaborate productions usually changed just twice a year. When that happened my mother, Jackie, and I went with him on opening night. We sat at his table nearest the door, and he would spend most of the show talking over an intercom on the table to the lighting technicians or to Madame Kamerova, his longtime production director and choreographer. For the most part I just sat there quietly, and only roused myself, with my mother, to critique each new show. We usually forgot to tell my father how great it was and, God knows, I myself know today how much one wants to hear praise after a performance. Instead, more often than not, we told him only what was wrong.
On some level I guess I was punishing him for not being the father-next-door. I even refused to pay much attention to the influential Broadway columnists who stopped by our table—Ed Sullivan, Leonard Lyons, Earl Wilson, Louis Sobol, sometimes even Walter Winchell. My silence must have hurt my father, who, in turn, hurt me. “Your problem is that you have an inferiority complex,” he told me on one of those evenings. “That’s why you never want to talk to anybody.”
Jackie, on the other hand, loved the Latin Quarter. It became her home away from home, and she would spend whatever time she was allowed to backstage with the chorus girls. They were wonderfully kind to her as, in years to come, were many of the big stars my father hired, particularly Frank Sinatra, Carol Channing, and the singer Johnnie Ray. Johnnie Ray was famous for his song “The Little White Cloud That Cried,” and Jackie developed a serious crush on him. He, in turn, reciprocated by calling her “Jackie darling” and sending her birthday cards and autographed pictures from wherever he was on tour.
Perhaps it was because he, too, had a childhood disability—he was partially deaf and wore a hearing aid. Jackie felt that Johnnie Ray was as in love with her as she was with him. Years after her death I read her diary. Jackie could write, not well, but certainly legibly. The diary was laced with references to him, such as: “Johnnie is working in Chicago. Hope he calls me.” “Johnnie is in Dallas. Someday I will marry him.” So touching was that diary that I could barely look through it. Even today reading it for this book brought me to tears.
When Jackie wasn’t at the Latin Quarter, she was at the movies with my mother. Any movie. Night after night. Just the two of them. The empty days and nights must have seemed endless to both of them. Around this time my parents tried hiring companions for Jackie, but they disagreed about what kind of companion to hire. My father wanted someone more like Jackie, perhaps a bit slow herself. My mother wanted someone who would be more responsible and teach Jackie to read or write better. Neither type worked out.
If the companion was bright, as several were, the “friend-for-hire” had nothing in common with Jackie, leaving my sister just as isolated. But the few borderline companions were also failures. They were apt to forget about Jackie for their own pleasures. I remember one time Jackie and a companion went to the skating rink at Rockefeller Center. They skated around a bit and then the companion picked up some guy skating alone and left Jackie for hours on her own. When Jackie finally came home, she told my parents, and that was that. So, after a while, my parents gave up this experiment and again kept Jackie to themselves. Only once do I remember my parents ever having a holiday without her. They left Jackie with a chorus girl named Baby Lake, an adorable person whom we all liked, and went off to the Bahamas. But my parents telephoned home three times a day.
All this naturally put a great strain on their marriage. In Florida the close proximity of the Palm Island Club to our pistachio house afforded them time to be together, but that was not the case in New York.
After our first few months at the Buckingham, we moved into a magnificent penthouse on Central Park West. We would live in a series of penthouses over the years, but my mother rarely saw my father. He spent his nights at the Latin Quarter, his mornings asleep in the apartment, and his afternoons playing cards at the Friars Club, the renowned hangout for men in show business.
Money became an issue again between my parents. For all that the New York Latin Quarter was a runaway success, the productions were very expensive—each cost $75,000 to $80,000, a huge amount in those days—and the profit margin slim. My father was very generous—he never put my mother on an allowance as some husbands did—but she was always afraid that something would happen to the club or that my father would lose too heavily at cards, and they’d wind up broke again.
This fear was communicated to me from an early age. I became consumed with the same worry. What would we do when the money ran out? I can remember my parents arguing about putting some money into savings, about buying insurance, about making secure investments. My father’s response? He went off and produced a series of very expensive musical revues on Broadway. He wanted to be an even bigger success.
His first Broadway extravaganza at the Winter Garden Theater was the Ziegfeld Follies of 1943, a revival of the hugely successful musical revues that the great showman Florenz Ziegfeld had produced annually from 1907 to 1931. My father’s version was very similar to the show at the Latin Quarter, except even more extravagant. I went with my parents on opening night, and the next morning we held our breath, hoping the reviews would be good. They weren’t, but the wartime audiences loved it and kept it running for an impressive 523 performances.
That experience convinced my father to go after more projects on the Great White Way. In short order he wrote, produced, and directed Artists and Models, an updated vaudeville revue from the 1920s. The show opened at the Broadway Theater on November 5, 1943, and starred a then-famous singer named Jane Froman, who had lost the use of her legs in a plane accident. She was wheeled onto the stage in a specially built wheelchair. Artists and Models also starred a young comedian named Jackie Gleason. But despite the best efforts of its stars, and a very funny Gleason, it closed three weeks later. My father lost a lot of money, but that didn’t deter him. Less than three months later he revived and produced another early revue, Take a Bow. Even its star, Chico Marx of the famed Marx Brothers, couldn’t save it. The show closed after fourteen performances. Thousands more dollars of my father’s money were lost.
So here is how we were: my father, a gambler and a dreamer. My mother, a realist whom my father considered a pessimist. Me? I was a worrier whom both parents considered to be too serious for a very young girl.
It all came to a head one afternoon when I returned from school to find my mother in tears. “Daddy has left us,” she told me. “You go talk to him. Tell him to come back.” Being their go-between was not an unfamiliar role for me. My mother often used me to convey whatever grievance she had. “You talk to Daddy,” she would say, and I would try to get to him on those Friday nights when he was home. Most often everything turned out all right, but this seemed far more serious than usual. My mother asked me to take my sister, perhaps to create more sympathy. So I took Jackie’s hand and off we went to the Latin Quarter.
I remember very clearly sitting with my father at his table in that darkened, empty nightclub, crying and begging him not to leave us. Jackie, too, was crying, although she was not completely sure what was going on. I learned many years later that my father was said to be having an affair with one of his showgirls. If true, I certainly can’t judge him too harshly. Let’s face it, it would have made sense. Most people in show business were, and are, romantically involved with other people in show business. My father was surrounded by the most beautiful young women, and he was married to an ordinary, middle-aged woman. For her part my mother would probably have been happier married to a man who worked in the dress business, who brought home a paycheck every week and lived a stable life. But we didn’t know anything about a showgirl then.
My father didn’t say anything during my plea. He kissed Jackie and me and simply said he had to go back to work. I didn’t know what to do. I definitely didn’t know what to tell my mother. So I took Jackie to a movie with a stage show playing n
earby. I dreaded returning home, and we sat in the theater for hours. But when we did go home, my mother was smiling. She told me my father had changed his mind and decided not to leave. My anguish was over.
I didn’t understand then what had made the difference, but I do today. For all his gambling and extravagance, my father was a principled and decent man. He also loved his introverted, shy younger daughter and his touching and sweet older daughter. How could he just walk out and leave us? It is also possible that in his own way he loved his wife. He certainly respected her. The crisis passed.
I FINISHED THAT FIRST YEAR at Fieldston in pretty good shape. I got As and Bs in most of my subjects, but I was lousy at gym. I envied the girls with their hockey sticks running across the field madly chasing after the ball. They were a breed apart. (I always thought, not especially kindly, of this particular kind of girl, confident and athletic, as a “hockey player.”) I wished then that I, too, were an athlete. It would have given me some sort of positive identity as a newcomer to the school. But there it was and is. I have never been good at any sport, be it basketball, volleyball, soccer, you name it. I never learned to play tennis. I was bored when I tried golf. I won’t drown in the water, but don’t ask me to do a backflip into the pool.
That lack of athletic expertise followed me to sleepaway camp. The summer of my first year in New York, I went off to the Poconos with my New Jersey cousin, Helen. She was a terrific girl and I liked her a lot. So, obviously, did everyone else. At the end of the six weeks we were away, Helen was voted not only “Best Athlete” but “Best All-Around Camper.” This was the kind of camp that felt every child should go home with some award to show her parents. Therefore, I was voted “Most Improved Athlete.” Need I say more?
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