by Sid Luft
Not so with my mother, who would circle in and out of my life until her death in 1972. Mother had an appetite for the good life. She’d introduced me to music, to dancing, to travel, to handmade clothing and a fine lifestyle. She was determined, and often wouldn’t budge in her points of view. By the late ’30s, with a war coming, her customers were no longer eager to spend $200 for a frock. They encouraged her to save her shop by selling ready-made dresses at affordable prices. But she was only interested in Madame Leonora’s as long as there were beaded dresses, ball gowns, furs, expensive perfume, and jewelry to sell. She didn’t want to run a practical, affordable shop. The irony was Leonora’s business had been a success for many years based on sheer ingenuity, but now it drove her into bankruptcy. She moved to New York City, where she took a job in a fashionable shop on Park Avenue. She met a man somewhere in Europe and he followed her to America. But she never remarried.
My sister, meanwhile, had a nervous breakdown. I was not close with Peri, but I was sympathetic; I knew she was suffering not only the stress of the family breakup but also her own loss of the guy she loved. It was her old crush on Dick Rossiter did her in, when he fell in love and married Peri’s friend Pinky Ward. Peri broke out in boils and had to be wrapped in cold sheets. She completely fell apart. She stayed at the Bloomingdale Clinic in Westchester County for one year. When I visited her, it was a desperate thing to witness. I wanted to rid my brain of the image, it was so painful: my gifted older sister restricted to an institution weaving little baskets.
Peri didn’t belong in a mental sanitarium. Uncle Israel understood that and arranged for Peri to live with his family in New York City, where she attended the Art Students League and developed her talent, as well as her emotional strengths. Very soon Peri met Lou Fleishman, a young doctor from Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, and they married and moved to Florida.
Unlike Peri, I had the ability to remove myself, have an adventure. I didn’t want to stay in one place and study. I had a lot of bravado, false ego. If I couldn’t handle it one way, I’d handle it another. I’d find a way to survive.
I tried to go back to school, but my grades were not good enough for the Wharton School of Business. So I got a job in the paper mill. I’d get up at six o’clock in the morning to go down to the factory and work with big corrugated columns, like giant rolls of toilet paper. My job was to first cut them, then stack the rolls in three-foot-long sections on top of each other, at least eight feet in the air. When I got tired I’d climb up, make a little place where I could sleep. I’d take off my white University of Pennsylvania sweater and roll it up into a pillow. One day a worker caught me. “You’re fired,” he said. I didn’t care. I went to pick up my check. Someone in payroll said, “You can’t fire this guy, he’s one of Fred Mann’s men.”
I said, “Give me my money.”
I went down to the garage where my car was up on blocks, took it out, and drove to Florida. I took my scrapbooks over to the University of Miami to show them to Irl Tubbs, the football coach. I thought I might qualify for a scholarship right away. But I got in a brawl in Miami with two guys. I got a cut on the eye, a blow to the mouth. I should have kept quiet, because they were going to kill me. I was screaming, “Southern motherfucker.” Coach Tubbs bailed me out of jail, and I was fined five dollars. I was looking for trouble, defiant, and filled with aggression. After I was out, I ran into a Mike and Joe Luft, unrelated, from Detroit. They’d read the piece in the Miami Herald, and they wanted to meet me because of the name.
Tubbs quickly found me a job working in construction in Coral Gables. I made thirty cents an hour, carrying a hod. I’d load the mortar up and carry about seventy pounds’ worth up a ladder. I enjoyed physical labor, but this felt more like a chain gang.
Every Sunday the hotel Miami Biltmore in Coral Gables had a pool show. Aquacades were popular fare, and there were two springboards and a big grandstand. For fun I auditioned and was hired. I would dive off a 10-meter platform for twenty dollars a day.
One of the other performers was an Indian who would wrestle a mean alligator that was lying in wait at the bottom of the pool with its mouth tied up. The Indian would jump in the pool and struggle to get the alligator over to the side. Once that was accomplished he’d free its mouth and put the rope around the body of the beast and continue to wrestle.
Bob Howard and his wife were the best trick divers off a 10-meter platform. The Howards would jump from one platform to another springboard, performing triples and quadruples. There was also a demeaning act featuring a $100 bill tied to the end of a greased pole suspended out over the pool. The idea was for us to get out there and grab the bill, but it was an impossible trick.
There were some other great divers: Pete Desjardins, who had won two gold medals at the 1928 Olympics, and Marshall Wayne, a huge man with big muscles, six feet tall, blond, who would go on to win at the upcoming Olympic Games in Berlin. He was also working as a lifeguard in Miami. Johnny Cawthray, another of the young men working with me, was the national Canadian diving champion. I was not a professional diver, but I was a good amateur. I wore a crazy bathing suit, yellow and red stripes with sleeves, like a clown.
It turned out that Johnny had a singing act as well. He had a good tenor voice, and he did impersonations. The one he did best was Walter Winchell. It was now late spring, and Johnny had ambitions to make the Canadian Olympic team, so he would practice during the day while I schlepped cement and played football, mostly scrimmaging in shorts. At night Johnny and I would hang out around Miami and meet girls. We became good friends.
I knew that Walter Winchell vacationed in Miami. And the Royal Palm Casino was a nightclub he frequented. I went to the casino’s bandleader, Joe Condolli, and persuaded him to hire Johnny. The entertainment was primarily a chorus line, but somehow I was able to book Johnny for a short singing and impersonation act in exchange for food. No money was involved. However, as a result of this act Winchell wrote Johnny up in his column. Winchell had also been to the pool show and was impressed by the fact that Johnny was a national Canadian diving champion.
9
JOE CONDOLLI WAS SLIGHT in build with thick black curly hair and eyes like a bullfrog. He was a good-looking mobster type with feminine hands. He played the fiddle and sang and spoke in a raspy, New York Italian kind of voice. His brother was also in the band and played the guitar.
Joe was constantly on the lookout to see who was eyeballing his girlfriend, Connie, and just who she might be looking at. Connie was a big, voluptuous girl with natural red hair and huge tits. I thought about women all the time, and she was a sexy number. I looked at her, and she didn’t reject the unspoken message. One night while Joe was at work Connie invited me up to her apartment and we began a torrid romance. She was about ten years older than I, and we both understood that Joe was on the watch. Although he was married, Connie was his chick on the road. He worked Florida’s sunny winter and then went to Cleveland for another gig before returning to New York. I felt so guilty fucking his old lady that I gave him one of my precious Italian silk scarves celebrating the Italian victory in Ethiopia.
One night Johnny Cawthray and I wound up at the Roney Plaza Hotel, where Walter Winchell was sitting at his special table with his pals. He spotted Johnny and invited us to join them. Winchell playfully referred to me as “Mr. Olympus.” I was all muscle and bravado at the pool show, but I was no champion. We were excited to sit with Walter Winchell. In fact, it was the biggest thrill we’d had. People kowtowed to us—we felt important. Johnny thought he might seriously try to make it as a performer. I decided I wouldn’t go back to college after all. I’d embark on a career in show business.
I was a nobody when Winchell sardonically referred to me as Mr. Olympus. However, I reminded myself, I was sitting with the famous, influential Walter Winchell, and Johnny had been the conduit to such power. Columnists were powerful people. Therefore, why not continue to manage my talent?
Around this time, Judy Garland was finally
getting her big break in an MGM two-reel short subject called Every Sunday. She appeared with Deanna Durbin, who sang light opera, while Judy sang “swing.” Walter was to become one of Judy’s most avid fans, and one day his exuberance over her talents would get in the way. I could never have dreamed that I would one day be calling Winchell up to reprimand him, and that he would have to accept Mr. Olympus’s admonitions.
Sometime in June 1936, Johnny and I drove to Canada to attend the Olympic Trials in Hamilton, Ontario. We stayed with his family in Ottawa. Johnny placed second in the three-meter springboard events and second in the ten-meter platform. Unfortunately, the Canadians did not have enough money to send two men to the Olympics. They chose a young fellow about sixteen years old who placed first in the platform diving, even though Johnny had amassed more points on the springboard.
I got the notion to raise money to ostensibly send Johnny to the Olympics. I wanted to produce a pool show like the one in Florida. I made an appointment with the mayor of Ottawa. “This is one of the best divers in the world,” I said. I suggested the mayor call whoever owned the Clearview Pool outside of Ottawa and see if he’d rent it to us, and His Honor agreed. I went to the local Ys to research swimmers. We were in luck. There were girls who performed in an aqua ballet. The Clearview didn’t have a 10-meter platform, but they had a premier springboard. I prevailed upon the manager of their professional hockey team to send out a thousand folding chairs so people could be seated around the pool. I went to the newspaper. They would give us eight hundred lines of free advertising if we sold X number of lines and persuaded local business people to take out ads. We had an entire page devoted to people who donated money to the cause, with such statements as “Sending Johnny Cawthray to the Olympics,” and “Good Luck to Johnny.”
The Boy Scouts policed the event and managed the traffic. We were to perform Saturday and Sunday in the afternoon. Saturday arrived, and the cars were stuck for miles down the road—people had to abandon their cars and walk along the road to get to the pool for the show. I’d organized a small band: piano, bass, trumpet, and guitar. Johnny, the star, appeared in a sweater, trousers, and gym shoes. He stood high on the platform and sang three popular tunes. He then impersonated Walter Winchell, imitating the sounds of the Morse code that preceded Winchell’s broadcasts. He finished with a rendition of “Trees”: “I think that I shall never see / A poem as lovely as a tree . . .” Johnny sang “Trees” while peeling off his clothes in preparation for his spectacular descent. It was during Johnny’s high-tenor presentation that I began to laugh and got a little hysterical. It seemed like he was still singing “Trees” underwater.
I knew Johnny would never win over someone like Marshall Wayne on the world stage. Furthermore, neither of us wanted to attend an Olympic Games in Nazi Germany, especially me. We rationalized that our pool show might be a scam, but everyone would be highly entertained. And they were. We charged $2.50 for adults and $1.00 for kids. We also took half the action from the guys selling hot dogs. In two days, we earned over $14,000, which we considered a fortune. I felt like a millionaire. We’d pulled it off! We collected some of the monies the first night. The pool owner observed me as we left the locker room with a big tin can filled with cash. Originally, he’d agreed the pool rental would cost nothing. After the last show, as we were leaving, he approached me. “I want $2,000.”
“Well, didn’t you agree this is money to send Johnny to the Olympics?”
He was a burly man, trying not to get angry. “But you’ve made enough money to send twenty guys to the Olympics. Besides, you left these chairs out overnight. Three hundred are warped. Who’s responsible for that?” It was true the Scouts did not collect all the chairs and some of them had buckled. He repeated, “Who’s gonna pay for these?”
He was pushing all the wrong buttons, so instead of offering him money, I said, “We’ll work it out with the hockey club, don’t worry about it.”
“Well,” he answered, “there’s three hundred seats, it’s $1.75 to change them, that’s another five hundred dollars.” Meanwhile, Mr. Cawthray, Johnny’s father, was waiting for us in my Hudson Terraplane. “I want the money right now,” the pool owner said. “You’ve got it, hand it over.”
“We’ll come back tomorrow for an estimate.”
His wife, who joined him by the pool where we were standing, decided to speak up. “Hon,” she said, “I think he’s an American gangster.” At which point I gently pushed both of them in the pool. Johnny and I made a beeline for the car.
Mr. Cawthray came with us as far as the US border, where Johnny and I caught a ferry to the States. When we got to New York, I traded the Hudson for a new model with the gearshift in the control column. It was a jazzy-looking car. We drove up to Westchester and stayed at my mother’s house for a few days before pressing on to Cleveland.
Cleveland was hosting the Great Lakes Exposition from 1936 to 1937, plus Joe Condolli was working for Pony Boy Cohen at his nightclub in the city. Pony Boy had a reputation around New York. A small guy with a glass eye, he was known to be “one tough little hombre.” Pony Boy was married to a big blonde two heads taller with a son, Harry, from a previous marriage. Harry looked like a greaseball heavy straight out of a gangster movie. Pony Boy’s club was an after-hours place featuring gambling, particularly a dice game, which used silver dollars as chips. One day Harry asked me to go with him to pick up a suitcase full of silver dollars. He came out of the office with a .38, the long barrel stuck on his belt. We went into a cigar store that fronted a huge, gymnasium-type space holding about thirty Vegas gambling tables. It was a casino catering to blacks. All craps shooters. I thought this was exciting, the real world.
The Great Lakes Exposition featured an aquacade produced by Billy Rose. We could work for the show and keep earning good money at Pony Boy’s club. Rose billed Johnny as the national Canadian diving champion, and I worked the twenty-meter platform. We wound up diving into Lake Erie way into November. We made fifty dollars a night, but I began to think, high up on that platform, freezing my ass off, that perhaps diving into cantaloupe rinds and banana peels was not the way to go. Johnny had a better experience: he sang on weekends backed by Joe Condolli’s violin and an eight-piece band. He wore a dinner jacket and his hair was longer; he looked like an entertainer. However, I was getting restless.
I returned to Miami and Coach Tubbs. Maybe it was time to finish college. The second day I was in town, I accidentally drove into the exit of the Miami Biltmore Hotel. A huge Rolls-Royce was coming out and we collided. Nobody was hurt. My car had a dent in the bumper, and the Rolls-Royce didn’t have a scratch. The driver, a rich entertainer and successful businessman, immediately filed a complaint against me. He was severe. I was arrested for reckless driving and thrown into jail for two nights. I was wearing a gabardine suit I was especially fond of—but not fond enough to stay in it for forty-eight hours. The guy in the cell next to mine was drunk as a skunk and he’d shout at me, “Hey you . . . gimme a cigarette.”
I’d foolishly reply, “Please, old buddy, behave like a human being.”
This only infuriated him. The drunkard was a little man filled with whiskey aggression. “Fuck you, when I get out of this fuckin’ cage I’m going to tear you to pieces.” He proceeded to put on an act: he pulled out his eye! I was dumbstruck until I realized it was a glass eye. I began to laugh and finally I said, “That’s impressive, old buddy,” and gave him a cigarette through the bars. He sobered up a bit. “Son, when we get out of here, give me a call.” He handed me a business card.
The warden invited me to walk the beat with him, but not before he had my word that I wasn’t “gonna make a run.” I assumed I’d be in the slammer until morning, but in the middle of the night the cops made a raid and brought in a lot of black men. I was transferred to a jail in south Miami next to a busy firehouse. There was a bare room with a broom and a bunch of tin plates. It was early morning. I’d not slept. I began to play golf with the broom and tin plates. I ob
sessively occupied myself in this fashion, using the tin plates for golf balls, scaling them against the bars. My fellow inmates yelled: “Quiet!” “Put that fuckin’ broom down!”
To which I’d answer, “Oh, go fuck yourself.”
I didn’t have a clue who I was talking to. The sheriff came in, and I quieted down. He offered me some food his wife had cooked up. I said, “I don’t eat grits,” and he admitted he didn’t either. I was angry at this point—there was no reason to be in jail. I began whacking more tin plates against the bar with the broom handle. It drove people crazy. Eventually a fireman, a sheriff, and a cop came in, nailed me up against the wall, and told me to calm down. They pushed me around a bit, and I sweated out my incarceration.
I knew now I was not going back to college. If I was so attracted to the world of entertainment, why not go to the source?
PART III
Lost in the Stars
10
ON THE ROAD TO HOLLYWOOD, I stopped to visit with a friend in Louisiana whose family was in the sugar business. As I slowly approached the plantation my head filled up with molasses: the air was permeated by an overpowering, sickly sweet smell. I knew I wouldn’t be visiting for long. The plantation-like atmosphere was novel and comfortable, but it rained most of the time and there was absolutely nothing to do. The weather and the suffocating smell forced me to leave earlier than planned.
I continued on to California. As yet, I didn’t know about Beverly Hills, Bel Air, or even Santa Monica. Coming off Route 66, I stopped in Glendale and checked into a motel. Thinking Glendale was the place, I soon rented an apartment. I decided to wait until I had my footing before calling Eleanor Powell, who was under contract to MGM. I didn’t want to appear totally green.