Audition (5 page)

What to name his vision? Of course. The perfect name was right there in one of the songs in the film. He would call his nightclub the “Latin Quarter.”

Getting the money together to turn the church into Left Bank Parisian exotica was a scramble. “What if it fails?” my mother worried. “What then? With two young children to support?”

The bad thing about my father was that he was, by nature, a gambler. The good thing about my father was that he was, by nature, a gambler. He took whatever small amount of money he had saved and put it toward transforming the old church. But that money wasn’t nearly enough. No bank would give him a loan for a nightclub, so my father borrowed from everyone he knew, a little here, a little there. Perhaps these friends thought that backing a club would inject a little excitement into their own lives.

My mother’s family had no spare money to offer and besides, they were, like my mother, too cautious to be excited by the prospects of a club where my father would be responsible for everything. They passed. But that didn’t slow down my father. When the money he’d borrowed from his friends wasn’t enough, he bartered and promised and begged for credit.

For $250, and a promise of $500 more, he sweet-talked some local artists into painting wall murals of Parisian café scenes and “girls with watching eyes,” as my father described them—“black haired, slit-skirted, French prostitute looking.” He bought discarded tables and chairs from the Salvation Army, had tablecloths made of cheap red-and-white gingham, and weeks before the opening began melting candles around the necks of empty wine bottles to give the club the feel of a French café.

My father knew everyone in town by that time. He was well liked, and after calling his old patron and friend Joe Tumulty, Boston’s police commissioner, who in turn called his close friend Governor James Michael Curley, my father got a liquor license. He also managed to hire a headwaiter who had a following, and a club manager, a very bright young man with red hair named Eddie Risman, who would stay with my father for the next twenty-five years. And so it came to pass that on October 1, 1937, Lou Walters Latin Quarter opened.

My mother put on one of her few dressy dresses, had her hair done, called for Dotey to come and stay with Jackie and me, and with fear in her eyes but hope in her heart, she joined my father for the opening night of the brand-new, but old-looking nightclub. Just before the doors opened, the story goes, my father reached into his pocket, took out all the money he then had, sixty-three cents, and turning to a nearby waiter, handed him the change. “Here,” my father said. “Now I start from scratch.”

He needn’t have worried about his next sixty-three cents. Boston had never seen anything like it. The Latin Quarter was a smash from day one.

There were two shows a night, and even as little girls, Jackie and I went often on weekends. We would sit way in the back of the room at my father’s small table.

The acts—singers, acrobats, a comedian here and there—changed each week, but the big and constant attraction was what my father billed as “petite mamzelles.” This was a chorus line of fresh-faced young girls, recruited as in the old days, from local dance schools.

These shows were the forerunner of the big girly production numbers in Las Vegas decades later. The girls were all good dancers, and every show ended with their doing my father’s version of what he considered a French cancan. With whoops of “Ooh-la-la!” they danced and pranced around the stage, kicking in unison as they raised their multicolored ruffled skirts with their many petticoats. For the finale they would shout even louder, and drop, one by one, into a deep split, raising their skirts over their heads and showing their ruffled panties.

Cancan, indeed! If it wasn’t authentic, the Bostonians sure didn’t know the difference, and the dance became the trademark ending for almost all of my father’s future shows. Give me a glass or two of wine now and I’ll sing the theme song that opened every show. It began:

So this is gay Pa-ree! Come on along with me.

We’re stepping out to see—the Latin Quarter.

Put on your old beret. Let’s sing the Marseillaise

And put our wine away like water.

We were soon able to move to a much bigger apartment on a much more fashionable street. We even had a maid named Katherine, a funny young Irish girl who had a favorite saying when things got too much for her. “Someday,” she would say to my mother, “I’m going to wake up and find myself dead.” “Not today though, Katherine,” my mother would always reply.

These were much happier days for my parents. There was money to be spent, probably for the first time since I was born. My father’s success spilled over to other members of her family. My uncle Max was on the payroll full-time. He was a confirmed bachelor but now a successful much-desired confirmed bachelor. My father was definitely on another roll. The Latin Quarter grossed three-quarters of a million dollars in its first season, and he began looking for new venues.

The first, and to me now the most incomprehensible, was at a small resort in Falmouth, Massachusetts, called Old Silver Beach. Air-conditioning was a relatively new luxury in the late thirties, causing the Latin Quarter in Boston to close for the months of July and August. So my father followed the summer audience to this resort town on Cape Cod, where on Sunday afternoons and evenings he staged shows in a Howard Johnson’s–type restaurant right on the beach. One part of the building was the nightclub and the other a fast-food restaurant with a counter serving hamburgers, hot dogs, and ice-cream cones. My memories of those shows seem surreal: people in bathing suits eating hot dogs and watching the cancan dancers.

I missed Nantasket and the family summers there, but our cottage in Falmouth was right across the street from the club, so I had more time with my mother and I could hang out a bit with the chorus girls. My sister in particular loved being with the girls, who were very kind to her.

I also got to see more of my father during this weird period of the Latin Quarter by the sea. He still stayed out late dealing with the details of the club and planning the September reopening of the Latin Quarter in Boston, but I would see him midday when I was having lunch and he was having breakfast. His nocturnal rhythms became a family joke. My cousin Selig came to visit us and had been there several days when he chanced upon my father having breakfast at noon. “How nice to see you,” my father said to him. “When are you coming to stay with us?”

But staying anywhere for any length of time became an increasingly elusive quality for my family. My father’s vision for the Latin Quarter was not confined to Boston or to Falmouth. He had thoughts of Latin Quarters all over the country. I realize now that he was a true impresario, brimming with talent and creativity. But I certainly didn’t feel appreciative of his talents when, some months after we returned to Brookline and I was once more settled into the Lawrence School, my father announced that we were moving again. And not to yet another apartment or house or anywhere in Brookline. This time, in the middle of my fifth-grade year, we were heading to Miami.

The Pistachio Green House

O
N A COLD
November day we said good-bye to Brookline. We left my small public school and my teachers, who had known me since kindergarten. We left our pretty, cozy apartment. We hugged and kissed Grandma, Aunt Lena, Uncle Sidney, and my cousins Selig and Alvin, and off we went to Miami Beach to live in the hugest mansion I had ever seen in all of my young years. What’s more, the mansion was green. Pistachio green, just like the ice cream.

This humongous house was on five beautiful acres of hibiscus, bougainvillea, and palm trees. Fifteen rooms. Right on the water, with an honest-to-god swimming pool. I not only had my own bedroom, I had my own
playroom.
It was fantastic in the true sense of the word. The only thing was, it was in the middle of nowhere.

The pistachio house, you see, was on a tiny artificially made strip of land called Palm Island. It was guarded by a security gate and reachable only by a causeway that connected the two cities of Miami and Miami Beach. There were few other houses on Palm Island then, though now it’s jammed. One house was owned by Al Capone, the notorious gangster, who lived just down the street. There seemed to be no other kids on the island. At first I was very lonely. I missed Brookline. Who needed this huge, ice-cream-colored house?

The reason we were there was the even bigger, white shiny building across the street—the Palm Island Club. The building, which has since been demolished and the grounds turned into a public park, had housed a famous nightclub and casino until the late thirties, when gambling was outlawed and the casino/club went bankrupt.

Enter my father.

It was love at first sight. Not only did the dozen steps leading to the Palm Island Club’s marble entrance make it look like a nightclub movie set, the building came fully equipped with a state-of-the-art kitchen, cutlery, china, tables, chairs, everything except linens. There was seating for six hundred, three times the capacity of the Boston Latin Quarter, dormitories for the dancers, a ten-room house for the management staff, and, across the street, the pistachio mansion. “I was in love with the big, beautiful Palm Island Club,” my dad wrote later in his memoir. “I was in love with the adjoining 15-room mansion.”

In short order my father leased the club for $7,500 a year for ten years from a mortgage company in Baltimore. Even better, the mortgage company told him, he could lease the house across the street for just $2,500 more. It was a steal. Then came the hitch.

The hitch was named Bill Dwyer. My childhood memories are of a big, distinguished-looking man with rimless glasses, whom I called Mr. Dwyer, and who inexplicably lived with us in the pistachio house. As did his chauffeur or bodyguard, I never quite knew which he was. And then there was Mrs. Speiler, middle aged, also distinguished looking, who, we were told, was the housekeeper. She, too, came with the house.

It was not until I read my father’s memoir years later that I learned the story of Bill Dwyer. His arrival in the house one December morning in 1939 had simply been announced by Mrs. Speiler. “Mr. Dwyer is here,” she said. And there he stood, in front of a pile of suitcases, with his bodyguard/chauffeur. My father had heard of Bill Dwyer. He had owned the Palm Island Club and Casino and was known locally as the “Fixer.” During Prohibition it was Mr. Dwyer who could arrange to have a shipload of rum land without trouble from the police, and who was the payoff man between the Mob and the law. “You took care of Bill, Bill took care of you,” my father wrote. And there was the “Fixer” in our living room, prepared to move in.

There was a rational explanation. Mr. Dwyer had mortgaged and lost the club across the street to the mortgage company in Baltimore and had no claim on that. My father owned it now. But Mr. Dwyer still thought he had a claim on the house, which he had been renting for years. His lease had run out the year before, but it was his understanding that the Baltimore company would not rerent it without informing him. He hadn’t heard from the company, so he had simply come home for the winter months.

“They say your life passes in front of you in a flash when you are drowning, that a drowning man clutches at straws,” my father wrote about this first encounter with Bill Dwyer. On the one hand, my father had an airtight lease on the house and the nightclub across the street, which was due to open in two days. He could have thrown him out. On the other hand, he did not know what Bill Dwyer was thinking behind his big smile or what role his henchman might play.

It seemed inconceivable to my father that he would allow a gangster to live in the house alongside his wife and two daughters. But then again, he knew that Mr. Dwyer was president of Tropical Park, a popular racetrack in Miami. He couldn’t be all bad. Nor, to the best of my father’s knowledge, had Mr. Dwyer murdered anyone or spent time in jail. The house had seven bedrooms, after all, of which we occupied only three. The prudent choice, my father decided, was to invite Mr. Dwyer to be his guest in the house until he had sorted it out with the mortgage company (which apparently took until April 1940, because that’s when Dwyer, the bodyguard, and Mrs. Speiler disappeared).

Welcoming Mr. Dwyer into the house was not the only gamble my father took. There was a risk in opening a Latin Quarter on an island that was accessible only via causeway by car while so many flashy nightclubs and hotels in Miami Beach were within walking distance of one another. But my father was never one to listen to naysayers, which, in this case, was wise. “Lou Walters Miami Beach Latin Quarter” opened on December 23, 1940, and even more sunshine entered our lives. The Latin Quarter was filled to capacity from the night it opened.

Later my father would hire stars like Milton Berle, Martha Raye, Joe E. Lewis, and Sophie Tucker. But in the beginning the attraction at the Latin Quarter was the show itself. It was big and lavish, lasting almost two hours, performed twice a night, and starring my father’s famous cancan girls and showgirls as well as acrobats, singers, and novelty acts never seen before in Miami. His popular “Apaches” (a French act correctly pronounced a-
pa
-shay) mimicked a brawl between a tough lower-class man and his women. At the end of the act one of the women shot the man. (In private life they were a happily married couple.)

The show was bright, happy, sexy, and glamorous. My father’s club quickly became the “in spot” for vacationers in what was rapidly becoming paradise by the sea. During the thirties a whole bunch of art deco hotels had sprung up like palm trees in Miami Beach. (Many of them, refurbished and repainted, exist today in what is now called South Beach.) Tourism was booming, fueled by the Depression-weary “snowbirds” from northern cities like Chicago, Boston, and New York—the winter population had grown from an estimated 60,000 in 1935 to around 75,000 in 1940.