Audition (2 page)

On paper they seemed ideally suited for each other. Each was a member of what seems now to be a huge family—seven children. Each was a child of immigrant parents whose journey from persecution in the “old country” could be the history of thousands of Jewish refugees transforming their lives in America.

Both sets of my grandparents came from what was then part of the Russian empire and is now eastern Europe, my mother’s family from a village in Lithuania and my father’s family from Lodz, Poland. (This discovery would have startled some members of the family who firmly believed my father’s “superior” side of the family came from the scholarly and highly religious city of Vilnius, known as the Jerusalem of Lithuania.) I’m no genealogist—my cousin Shirley was the self-appointed historian of the Walters family until her death in 1997, and she always claimed their superior Vilnius connection—but the old records I found, while researching this memoir, show the 1868 birth of my paternal grandfather, Isaac Abrahams, in Lodz, and the birth of my maternal grandfather, Jacob Seletsky, at about the same time, in Russia.

Both the Seletskys and the Abrahamses are thought to have joined the flood of Jews fleeing anti-Semitism in imperial Russia. By the 1890s, my mother’s side of the family seems to have immigrated directly to America, where they settled in Boston. My father’s side of the family went to London.

My cousin Shirley loved to tell the fairy tale of how my paternal grandfather met, and subsequently married, my grandmother. In Shirley’s version, Isaac Abrahams, then around twenty-two, arrived in London orphaned, uneducated, and penniless. He somehow met a well-off family named Schwartz who had left eastern Europe some years before and by then owned several highly profitable knitting mills in England. Mr. and Mrs. Schwartz, impressed by Isaac’s intelligence, manners, and good looks, more or less adopted him, giving him a job as an apprentice in one of the knitting mills and educating him as well, starting with teaching him English.

Enter their daughter, Lillian.

Every fairy tale has to have a princess, and Lillian, their only daughter, more than filled the role. On holidays her parents sent her to the knitting mills with baskets of food—turkeys, geese, ducklings, bread and cakes—for all the apprentices. On the fateful day the princess first laid eyes on the handsome orphan, according to Shirley, Lillian was wearing a pale blue coat and a little white ermine muff and hat. It was love at first sight. Forbidden love. The best kind. The plucky princess followed her heart and, ignoring her family’s orders to give up this penniless suitor, eloped with Isaac.

The Schwartzes weren’t thrilled with this marriage, but they had trained Isaac well in the mills, and he became a prosperous custom tailor in London. And the princess became a mother—seven times: first Rose, my cousin Shirley’s mother; then my father, Lou; followed by Harry, Barnet, Rebecca, Belle, and Florence. (Don’t worry, there won’t be a quiz.)

While Lillian and my grandfather Isaac were begetting my father’s side of the family in London, my maternal grandparents were busy with their own begetting in Boston. My maternal grandfather, Jacob Seletsky, who started his life in the new country as a peddler, had gone into the shoe business with his brother, Joseph, when he met and married my grandmother Celia Sakowitz, in 1895. They, too, produced seven children: my mother, Dena; her sister, Lena (not much imagination in this family); and then a whole slew of sons—Edward, Samuel, Max, and twins, Daniel and Herman.

I never did know my maternal grandfather, but I remember my grandmother Celia very well. She was short and stout with thick glasses, like my mother. Everybody listened to her; she was evidently strong and tough. She spoke English with a heavy Yiddish accent, and the few Yiddish words I remember I learned from Grandma…like
nebbish
, meaning sweet but pathetic…or
mishugus
, meaning a whole lot of stuff going on…or
mishuga
, meaning crazy person…or
farbissener
, a sourpuss. There must be better spellings of these words, but you get the drift. Unfortunately my mother’s side of the family did not have a historian like Shirley, so if there are any colorful Seletsky stories, I don’t know them.

The Schwartzes had educated my grandfather well, and Isaac became an avid reader and writer. He passed that passion for reading on to my father, whom I picture always with a book. Isaac also passed his talent for writing on to his eldest son. As a schoolboy in London my father received a silver medal for academic excellence for an essay he’d written. Needless to say my father was declared brilliant by his family.

But Grandfather Isaac must have been having a difficult time in London. The clothing trade in the East End was notorious at the time for its abuse of immigrant Jewish laborers. The working conditions were beyond terrible, with low-paid employees, many of them children, jammed into hot, airless rooms with little or no sanitation, seven days a week. Such “sweated labour,” as it was referred to then, gave rise to the term “sweatshop”—and inevitably to social unrest and riots.

I don’t know if Isaac owned a sweatshop or worked in one, but it is believed that the bitterness and unrest in the clothing business, which spawned a strike in 1906, led him to pick up his family and relocate to Belfast, in Northern Ireland. Though there was a sizable and growing number of Jewish immigrants there, the family didn’t stay long. They immigrated to America in 1909. My grandfather Isaac and his three sons—my father, Harry, and Barnet—arrived in New York from Liverpool aboard the SS
Cedric
on August 28. According to the passenger manifest, they were detained overnight on Ellis Island because my father’s loss of an eye required a doctor to certify his ability to enter the country. When they were released they stayed with relatives, eventually moving to Rivington Street, in a community of Jewish immigrants on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. They were joined there seven months later by my grandmother and the four girls, who arrived on the SS
Columbia.
They, too, were detained overnight on Ellis Island until my grandfather came and picked them up. And my family’s American odyssey began.

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.”

M
Y 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

B
Y 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.