Audition (6 page)

The chauffeured cars pulling up to the marble Latin Quarter entrance disgorged such well-known people as Howard Hughes, the superrich oilman, movie producer, and aviation tycoon, and Joseph Kennedy, the patriarch of the Kennedy family. In fact Joe Kennedy became a frequent visitor to the club, driving down from his large home in Palm Beach. He knew my dad from the days of the Latin Quarter in Falmouth, which was a short distance from the Kennedy compound in Hyannis. Mr. Kennedy also used to go to the Latin Quarter in Boston with his political cronies Governor Curley and Commissioner Tumulty, so it was not surprising that his patronage of the Latin Quarter continued in Florida. He became such a regular that years later, when I went to see him after he’d had a stroke (I was interviewing Rose Kennedy for the
Today
show), I introduced myself not as Barbara Walters from the
Today
show, but as Barbara Walters, Lou Walters’s daughter. Only then did I get a glimmer of recognition.

Once I adapted to the big green house and Mr. Dwyer and Mrs. Speiler, that first winter in Miami Beach turned out to be one of the happier times of my young life. I am still pained to remember that much of it had to do with the absence of Jackie. My parents had been trying for years to find a place where my sister could be with children who were more or less like her. If I was a somewhat lonely child, you can imagine how lonely life was for Jackie. My parents also hoped that she could get some kind of an education, have some kind of a life. So, after much investigation, they sent her to a boarding school for special-needs children in Pennsylvania. This meant that I had my parents all to myself, which was wonderful for me but agonizing for Jackie. It turned out that she was not retarded enough for the school. She also missed my mother desperately. Jackie came home six months after she’d left, and my parents never sent her away again.

Even with my sister’s return, those were happy days for me. Because the Latin Quarter was right across the street from the house, just as our cottage had been in Falmouth, when I got home from school my mother and often my father were around. I remember my parents dressing to go to the Latin Quarter for dinner and the shows, both of them looking so spiffy. I have memories, too, of leaving for school early in the morning and meeting my parents just coming home. They would kiss me hello or good-bye or both and then go off to bed. None of this seemed unusual to me.

If there is one thing that distinguishes that early time in Florida, it is my parents’ joy. Especially my mother’s. I had never seen her so happy, and that, of course, made me happy. My father gave her a beautiful lynx coat to wear on chilly evenings, and she treasured it. I can still picture her in that fluffy coat, looking radiant.

It was extremely hard for my mother to live on Palm Island and not be able to drive. She had to be chauffeured everywhere. Just as I was driven to elementary school in Miami Beach every morning by the gardener and then picked up every day after school, my mother, if she wanted to buy even a pair of stockings or go to the market, had to be dropped off and picked up again. So, without telling my father, my mother tried to overcome her fears and took driving lessons.

I wore braces on my teeth in those days, the ones with elastic bands on each end (I hated them, of course), and my orthodontist was located in Miami, so my mother practiced her driving by taking me to and from the dentist. He had a parking lot, so she didn’t have to worry too much about parallel parking, which was not her strength. Then came the big day when my father was returning from a trip to Boston. My mother and I surprised him at the airport, and my mother drove us home. My father was thrilled.

My mother drove for a short time after that, but she never really lost her fear; when the city became more crowded she gave it up. In case you don’t believe in parental influence, to this day I don’t drive. It’s a real pain in the neck. I did drive shortly after graduating from college. My father even bought me an Oldsmobile convertible, but my mother’s fear was deep in me and I stopped, never to start again. I was always afraid of hitting another car and am still a nervous backseat passenger.

Now remember, when I talk about this driving business, that my little friends from school also couldn’t drive and their parents thought it a nuisance to drive them to and from Palm Island, so the girlfriends I made at school rarely came home to play with me. Guess who became my “new best friend”? Mr. Dwyer.

What can I say? He took a shine to me. He went to his racetrack every day and often took me with him on weekends. I wasn’t allowed inside the track because I was too young, but we parked where I could see the horses. I would give Mr. Dwyer the few dollars my father had given me, and Mr. Dwyer would make bets for me. Magically I always won.

One of the things I hope happens as a result of this book is that I somehow get answers to questions that have puzzled me for years. Like what became of Mr. Dwyer after he left our house? And who was the chauffeur/bodyguard who shared his bedroom? Is it possible that Mr. Dwyer was gay? In those days the only reference to “gay” I’d ever heard was in the Latin Quarter’s theme song, “So This Is Gay Paree.” But in retrospect it seems somewhat logical. I don’t remember my parents ever talking about him again after that year, and I haven’t really thought about Mr. Dwyer until now. But I’d love to know the truth about him.

I did have one friend from school, Phyllis Fine, whose show business father, Larry Fine, was one of the now-legendary Three Stooges. They lived in a hotel in Miami Beach. Phyllis was pretty and blond, and like me, was alone a lot. She would sometimes come to visit me on Palm Island, and occasionally I would sleep over at the hotel with her, but those visits were rare. Again, we had to be picked up, waited for, and driven home.

School was a whole new challenge. I entered three months into the school year. The curriculum was entirely foreign to me. I had teachers who didn’t know me from Adam, let alone Eve. They not only had to cope with me and what I knew or didn’t know, but with a whole bunch of other kids whose parents had come to Miami Beach just for the winter months.

It was a public school, not too big, and coed, but I was a shy, introverted child and I felt I had to audition for a new role I didn’t know how to play. I coped by doing more homework than was probably necessary and hoping that this would be a day when Phyllis and I could play together.

The dress code also bothered me. It was, after all, Florida, sunny and warm, and many of the girls in my class wore shorts. (We were in the dark ages before the universal wearing of jeans.) But I thought my legs were too skinny to be displayed, so shorts were not for me. I wore blouses and skirts. My mother and I went to Lincoln Road, the chic shopping street in Miami Beach, and we bought a whole new wardrobe. We packed away the heavy sweaters and mostly plaid wool skirts I had worn in Brookline, but we didn’t buy one pair of shorts.

I don’t remember any sporting activities. You would think we would go to the beach and swim now and then, but we never did. It was okay with me not to have sports. I have never been particularly athletic. Overall the school was an all-right experience for me. Not great, not bad, not memorable.

I adjusted pretty well. After doing my homework when I got home from school, I played with my dolls. I absolutely loved my doll’s house and could play for hours in happy solitude. I was also, then as now, a voracious reader and could easily get lost for hours in a book. Then, too, the island was one of the attractions on the sightseeing boat tours around Biscayne Bay, and I would often wander down to the dock and sit there, alone, waving at the passing tourists.

A bigger adventure was to ride my bike past Al Capone’s house, hoping to catch a glimpse of the infamous Public Enemy Number One, though I never did. Having spent the last eight years in jail for tax evasion, Capone had arrived back at his house on Palm Island in 1939 at about the same time we did. He was much more of a gangster than Mr. Dwyer. Al Capone had been a massive bootlegger, alleged murderer, and the Chicago gang leader who is thought to have masterminded the 1929 St. Valentine’s Day massacre, in which seven rival gang members were gunned down. By the time he returned to Palm Island, he was sick with late-stage syphilis and suffering from dementia, but I didn’t know anything about that. Nor, apparently, did my father, who wrote that Al Capone was an occasional visitor to the Latin Quarter, where he sat at the bar, sipped a club soda, and paid with a twenty-dollar bill out of the wad of new bills in his pocket. “He never interfered with anyone and believe me, no one wanted to interfere with him,” my father wrote. When Al Capone died in 1947 as peacefully as if he were “a buttonhole maker,” my father recalled, there was “just a bartender to mourn his passing.”

As I write about my young life on Palm Island, it sounds rather like Eloise at the Plaza, except that Palm Island was no chic hotel. Nor did Eloise spend days at a racetrack and weekend evenings in a nightclub lighting booth.

Unlike the Latin Quarter in Boston and later in New York, the club in Florida was not a place for family celebrations. The shows were sophisticated and not for children, so I hid away in the small lighting booth high above the dance floor, where the main electrician controlled the onstage lights. Crouched next to the technician, I watched the shows weekend after weekend until I could do practically all the numbers. My sister’s escape, when she finally came home, was to go backstage and sit in the dressing room with the chorus girls, who were very kind to her. I was uncomfortable doing that and preferred the lighting booth.

As I said, in the first year of the Latin Quarter, my dad didn’t hire big stars. He wasn’t sure he could afford them. But the second year Jimmy Durante played the club. So did Sophie Tucker, known as the “Last of the Red Hot Mamas,” belting out her theme song, “You’re Gonna Miss Your Red Hot Mama Some of These Days.” Milton Berle played there, too. I saw his act so many times I can still do it practically in my sleep. Want to hear the opening lines? He would walk up to the standing microphone, touch it, then jump back as if in shock and say, “I’ve just been goosed by Westinghouse.”

By the way, this early education has never come in particularly handy. And I never did learn how to maneuver those huge white feather fans that the scantily clad Sally Rand, a very well-known exotic dancer, swished back and forth in her famous peekaboo fan dance.

One of my other favorite acts was not well known. His name was Emil Boreo. He spoke with a heavy accent and did an act that seems quite odd to me today. He wore a soft felt hat with a big brim and by changing the brim, said he could be anyone. Here, as I remember it more than sixty years later, is the opening of his act: “It’s not what I do, it’s not what I say, it’s the way I wear my hat. I can be most anyone with a twist of my brim like that.” Then he would turn that hat into a Frenchman’s beret or an Englishman’s bowler. (How come no one wants me to do his act today?)

Then there was the brilliant Spanish ventriloquist who years later many readers will remember from the
Ed Sullivan Show
, Señor Wences. I can do his routine, too. He would make a fist and, with his thumb around his fingers, color his closed finger with lipstick for a mouth, make two “eyes” with black chalk, and create his so-called little friend named Johnny, or, as Señor Wences pronounced the name, “Yonnie.” Yonnie was fresh and funny, and he tormented the kind, dignified Señor Wences, who also had another talking companion, a head in a wooden box. Every time Señor Wences opened the box, Yonnie would say, “Close the box,” and the head would say, “Open the box.” I am not making this up. I guess I should also tell you that I managed to learn all this and still pass all my tests at school.

But the real crowd-pleaser, as usual, was my father’s parade of gorgeous showgirls, who would walk around the stage wearing huge multicolored headdresses, and little else. Complete nudity was as illegal as gambling in Miami Beach, and these gorgeous Amazons wore tiny sequined “pasties” to hide their nipples and used feathers, sequins, and sometimes little fur muffs to cover their G-strings. One of the sensations at an early Palm Island Latin Quarter show was a Chinese girl who carried a real little black kitten in a fur-lined muff over her private parts. In my innocence I fixated on the kitten and wanted to take it home.

I also loved the dancers or “ponies,” who would strut their stuff on the stage, whirling, high-kicking, doing my father’s version of the cancan before dropping to the floor in a split. I tried that routine at home once and practically dismembered myself.

My father had three “golden rules” for his girls: (1) Do your best show even if it is only a rehearsal. (2) Don’t get tan (a rule inspired by Twinnie, one of the showgirls, who loved to sun herself on the roof of the Palm Island Club, which set her apart from her pale twin sister, Winnie, in the show’s “Parade of the Wooden Soldiers.” “Your father didn’t want to have a Chocolate Soldier and a Vanilla Soldier,” Twinnie told me years later). Rule number three? Don’t get fat.

I saw all this through the prism of a child’s eyes. It took me years to recognize that my father was a sorcerer of magic and fantasy, although the audiences got it from the beginning. What I did learn, at this young age, was that behind these fantasy figures were real people. They may have been glamorous onstage, but I saw them offstage without their costumes and makeup, and they had problems, just like everyone else. I knew that Sophie Tucker had a son she rarely saw, that Sally Rand was sick of her fan dance even though it had made her famous, that many of the chorus girls had families they were supporting. This gave me an understanding of celebrities that I never would have had. As a result I was not in awe, years and years later, when I began doing interviews with big-name stars.

Those early years at the Latin Quarter also affected the way I later asked questions and listened to answers. I knew that the childhood years of most celebrities were their most poignant and could often explain their future choices as, of course, it has mine. I learned when to be quiet and just listen. And I knew what could bring tears. (Now, I have been so often accused of making celebrities cry that I go out of my way
not
to bring on the tears. “You cry on this program and I won’t run any of it!” I once warned Robin Williams as he pretended to weep.)