Audition (15 page)

The
Andrea Doria
experience was the first of many such situations I would face with people in genuine distress, and even though we celebrated the scoop, it was short-lived. Not long afterward
Good Morning!
folded. So did the subsequent writing project CBS assigned me to. It was a good concept, a series titled
The Day That…
We made two pilots, “The Day That FDR Died” and “The Day That a Plane Crashed into the Empire State Building.” (The accident, a chilling precursor to the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center fifty-six years later, took place in July 1945, when a B-25 bomber, lost in a dense fog, flew into the seventy-ninth floor of the then-tallest building in the world, killing fourteen people.) But neither documentary ever went on the air, and the project died, leaving me without a job.

It was later written that I went on welfare after I was let go, but that’s not true. I did, however, go on unemployment for the first and only time in my life and collected the benefits I was entitled to while I looked for another job.

I was also looking for a place to stay. My parents were living in Florida. Bob Katz and I had decided that our three-year marriage had died a natural death, and I wanted to move out of the apartment. Bob could afford the rent better than I could, so I moved in with a kind friend from my school days at Fieldston, Marilyn Landsberger. I went down to Alabama and got a divorce in one day. I felt empty and defeated. Oddly enough I also felt as if the marriage had never taken place. I didn’t miss anything about my relationship with Bob. As I look back now, I can barely remember it.

I never saw Bob again, except for one strange experience more than twenty-five years later. I was on my way to a dinner party in New York and my escort and I were entering the building just as a vaguely familiar-looking man was exiting. He said hello. I said hello. And he left. “My God,” I said to my escort. “That was my first husband!”

What I do remember vividly is that at the same time I was getting a divorce, another far more devastating “divorce” was taking place in the family, this one the business partnership between my father and E. M. Loew. I knew the blood had been bad between them for years. Loew continued to challenge every penny my father spent on costumes, on scenery, on talent, until my father couldn’t stand it anymore. So he walked away from the gold mine he had founded and sold his share in the Latin Quarter to the partner he had long detested.

My mother, when he told her, frantically tried to talk him out of it, but my father was adamant. She was beside herself with worry, as was I. The Latin Quarter had been the family’s life support system for more than twenty years and suddenly it was gone. “What’s going to happen?” I asked my father, barely masking my own long-standing fear that I would end up supporting the family. But he reassured me. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’m opening another nightclub that will be even more successful.”

That was my father’s dream—to have nightclubs all his own, with no business partner to rein him in. Even bigger, more lavish nightclubs than the Latin Quarter. First, one in Miami. Then another in New York. He’d call his new clubs the Café de Paris. As for the money it would take to open the clubs, well, that was no cause for concern. My father had sold his share of the Latin Quarter to E. M. Loew for $500,000. He could borrow whatever else he needed from friends, from his family. No problem.

The Café de Paris opened in Miami in the fall of 1957. It was struggling, but my father began making plans for the new club in New York. “The Café de Paris will be everything you can imagine,” he announced to the press. “We’ll take the audience on a tour of Paris, the Moulin Rouge, cancan girls. Stars from France, Italy, London, ice-skaters, and, best of all, a mermaid swimming in a huge supposedly champagne-filled crystal goblet.”

He rented the former Arcadia Ballroom on Broadway and Fifty-third Street, a huge space with seating for twelve hundred. He spent a fortune turning it into the largest nightclub in New York, with six stages, all done up, as he described the color scheme, in “shocking pink and golden white.”

My mother and Jackie moved up from Florida to a suite of rooms in a medium-priced hotel in New York, the Navarro on Central Park South. Every dollar was going into the new Café de Paris. If my father had any worries about the Miami club, he didn’t show them. He should have. Miami was having one of the worst winters ever—freezing cold, lots of rain—resulting in far fewer snowbirds. Not only was the season a disaster, so was the economy. The country, still reeling from a recession in the early fifties, was entering another. The result was that the Miami Café de Paris was forced to close at the end of its first season.

But neither the gloomy news from down south nor the downturn in the national economy bothered my optimistic father. He’d been there before. “Recession?” he scoffed. “I’ve never had any trouble with that before. Back in Boston in ’32, people were selling apples on the street. The week Roosevelt closed the banks was the biggest week I ever had at the old Cascade Roof.” To my father the recession was not a problem but a plus. “When things are tough people are likely to go out at night,” he said. “They need a first-class escape, and I’m going to give it to them.”

Missing from his thinking was the realization that television was taking over New York nights. The performers he presented to the public for a price could be seen on television for free. The era of the great nightclubs was ending.

He also didn’t anticipate the vitriol E. M. Loew was leveling at him for opening up rival nightclubs so close to both Latin Quarters. Loew went to court and won a temporary injunction prohibiting my father from using his own highly recognizable name, “Lou Walters,” on the marquee for the Café de Paris. Then came trouble with the unions, which many suspected Loew had a hand in—electricians, carpenters, painters, sound and light men began not to show up on schedule. Next the suppliers—linens, food, liquor—staged their own slowdown. Even the club’s liquor license was held up, until the very afternoon the Café de Paris was due to open. But open it did, on May 22, 1958. My mother, Jackie, and I were at my father’s table, as ever, when the extravaganza got going. The headliner was Betty Hutton, the exuberant blond singer/ actress who had soared to fame in the films
Annie Get Your Gun
and
The Greatest Show on Earth.
“Welcome to Lou Walters’s rent party,” Betty quipped to the packed house on opening night, a reference to the exorbitant rent my father was paying, supposedly the highest in New York.

Betty remained a terrific draw and filled the club for the duration of her weeklong contract, but even at that, the impressive $70,000 the Café de Paris took in was still $10,000 less than my father needed to meet expenses. And it went downhill from there.

First, Betty turned down a two-week extension of her contract, an extension my father had been counting on.

Second, my father’s frantic search for a new headliner to replace her ended with a complete loser: the controversial rock-and-roll singer Jerry Lee Lewis, best known for tearing up pianos and marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin. The café was practically empty on Lewis’s opening night. Lewis himself didn’t show up for his second night. And the “goblet” containing the swimming mermaid cracked and shattered, drenching some of the patrons and sending the mermaid to the hospital.

My father was by now desperate. He had the nightclub’s high rent to pay and a huge payroll to meet. He tried to borrow more money from his family in New Jersey, but they turned him down. I remember my father’s brother finally telling him: “Look, Lou, we’ll loan you money for yourself, but we’re not giving you any more money for your nightclub.”

The staff at the Café de Paris was more sympathetic. The maître d’ lent him money. So did the maître d’s wife and the waiters and the busboys and the cigarette girls. And so did I. I had a new job by then, in public relations, and I emptied my savings account and gave my father all I had, $3,000.

It wasn’t nearly enough.

It Gets Worse

I
N
J
UNE
1958 my father tried to kill himself.

It happened several weeks after I had moved in with Marilyn and her parents (two of the sweetest people I’ve ever met). Marilyn and I were having breakfast one morning when my mother telephoned from the Hotel Navarro. “I can’t wake your father up,” she said, her usual matter-of-fact voice sounding close to panic. “He just won’t wake up!”

I knew that the Café de Paris was in serious trouble, but the idea that my father would try to take his own life was not something I had ever imagined. Or had I? Was this the nightmare I had always dreaded? Everything over? Everything gone? I had no time to think. I grabbed a taxi and raced to the hotel to find my father, in bed, ashen and unresponsive. I tried to shake him. Nothing happened. I screamed, “Daddy, Daddy!” No response.

Somehow, despite my own panic, I called an ambulance. Paramedics arrived almost at once and took my father out of the hotel on a stretcher. I knew my sister shouldn’t come to the hospital; it would traumatize her. But she certainly couldn’t stay alone at the hotel. So my mother stayed with Jackie, and I went with my father in the ambulance. Please, dear God, I kept repeating to myself, don’t let him die.

I knew as we sped to the hospital that our lives would change drastically whether my father lived or died. But for the first time I had the most overwhelming feelings of love and compassion for him. I kept stroking his face and saying, “Daddy, Daddy, Daddy.” All my resentment was gone. My poor, miserable father. So in debt. His beloved new nightclub a failure. His heart so heavy that he didn’t want to live. Yet he had never discussed his grief with my mother, and I had been too involved with my own problems to explore his.

The ambulance took my father to Mount Sinai Hospital, where the doctors and nurses saved his life. He had taken a heavy overdose of sleeping pills, the kind he had been taking in far lesser amounts almost every night for years. They pumped his stomach and did whatever else they needed to do to bring him back from the brink. Eventually he was wheeled into a private room and put into a bed.

His room was on the first floor of the hospital. I learned that this was where the hospital put people who had attempted suicide. I guess they were afraid the patient might try to jump out the window. But when my father was conscious, he just lay in the bed, weak, pale, and mostly silent. By this time my sister understood what had happened, and both she and my mother were there with me. My father was out of danger and slept most of the time. We never left his side. We hovered around him, but he didn’t say a word to us about his suicide attempt. Not then, not ever.

Did he do it to spare himself the humiliation of his failure? Was it because he was so deeply in debt and hoped the insurance policy he always talked about would support my mother and Jackie? If this was his thinking, was it possible that he didn’t know there would be no money from insurance? My father, it turned out, had borrowed heavily on the policy. There was nothing left for the family. Whatever his reasons, we never asked why. We were just happy he was alive.

This is the first time I have ever revealed that my father tried to kill himself. It was a deeply personal matter, and I felt we had to protect his reputation. Not even his brothers or sisters were told what had happened. I knew the newspaper columnists would learn from the staff at the Café de Paris that my father was in the hospital. I had to reach them before that happened, so I called the most influential of them all, Walter Winchell, who, in addition to his column, had one of the most listened-to radio programs. If he didn’t like you, he could be a ferocious enemy, but from my father’s earliest days in New York, he had been kind. We even occasionally had dinner with him. I told Winchell that my father was suffering from exhaustion and had suffered a mild heart attack. I was giving him the story first, I said, an “exclusive.” Whether he believed me or not, that is what he reported, and that’s what was picked up in all the news stories and columns that followed. Looking back as I write this, I wonder how I had the wits to prevent the real story from coming out. But I did. My father’s honor and privacy were preserved.

My father stayed in the hospital for about a week.

While he was hospitalized his friends in the business and the staff at the Café de Paris made superhuman efforts to keep the club going. In an extraordinary gesture of support, some of the biggest stars of the moment offered to appear at union scale wages—$125 a week. Singer Dorothy Lamour, who had skyrocketed to fame in the
Road
movies with Bob Hope and Bing Crosby, performed for four days. Others played for one night, famous comedians like Henny Youngman and Joey Adams. Joey’s widow, Cindy Adams, is today a well-known columnist. She and I are good friends, and if people sometimes wonder why we’re so close, they should know how long my relationship with Cindy and her late husband goes back.

My father also got support from other columnists who always liked his soft-spoken manner. “Seems like everyone is pulling for the game little fellow lying on his back at Mount Sinai Hospital, suffering from exhaustion and a heart attack,” wrote Lee Mortimer, in the
Daily News.
Lee had a reputation for being a real SOB, but not where my father was concerned. My father, such a gentle man in such a rough business, was liked and respected by all the Broadway columnists.

For all the goodwill, however, the club could not regain any momentum, and barely a month after the Café de Paris opened, it closed. The vultures descended. Creditors appeared out of the woodwork, some demanding to be paid back the money they’d loaned my father, others demanding to be paid for outstanding bills. Everything at the club was up for grabs: the tables, the chairs, the fancy decor. I went down to the disaster scene and asked for only one memento—my father’s old typewriter.

The days of the penthouses were over. My parents could no longer afford the Navarro Hotel, and I realized I could no longer impose on my friend Marilyn. Living with my parents and Jackie was also out of the question. Not only did circumstances preclude it, I was a grown-up divorced woman. I couldn’t and wouldn’t retreat into my past. So I had to look for my own apartment, the first I would ever live in alone, and it had to be cheap.